Interesting Times (12 page)

There was a lectern at the end of the room and, on it, a pile of papers sealed with string and wax.

Rincewind felt the atmosphere was familiar. He’d breathed it before, even if it had been a world away. It was full of those cold sweaty odours created by the sudden realization that it was probably too late to do that revision you’d kept on putting off. Rincewind had faced many horrors in his time, but none held quite the same place in the lexicon of dread as those few seconds after someone said, “Turn over your papers
now
.”

The candidates were watching him.

There was shouting somewhere outside.

He hurried up to the lectern, tore at the string and distributed the papers as fast as he could. Then he dived back to the safety of the lectern, removed his hat, and was bent low when the door opened slowly.

“Go away!” he screamed. “Examination in progress!”

The unseen figure behind the door murmured something to someone else. The door was closed again.

The candidates were still staring at him.

“Er. Very well. Turn over your papers.”

There was a rustle, a few moments of that dreadful silence, and then much activity with brushes.

Competitive examinations. Oh, yes. That was another thing people knew about the Empire. They were the only way to get any kind of public post and the security that brought. People had said that this must be a very good system, because it opened up opportunities for people of merit.

Rincewind picked up a spare paper and read it.

It was headed: Examination for the post of Assistant Night-Soil Operative for the District of W’ung.

He read question one. It required candidates to write a sixteen-line poem on evening mist over the reed beds.

Question two seemed to be about the use of metaphor in some book Rincewind had never heard of.

Then there was a question about music…

Rincewind turned the paper over a couple of times. There didn’t seem to be any mention, anywhere, of words like “compost” or “bucket” or “wheelbarrow.” But presumably all this produced a better class of person than the Ankh-Morpork system, which asked just one question: “Got your own shovel, have you?”

The shouting outside seemed to have died away; Rincewind risked poking his head out of the door. There was a commotion near the road but it no longer seemed Rincewind-orientated.

He ran for it.

The students got on with their examination. One of the more enterprising, however, rolled up his trouser leg and copied down a poem about mist he’d composed, at great effort, some time previously. After a while you got to know what kind of questions the examiners asked.

Rincewind trotted onwards, trying to keep to ditches wherever these weren’t knee deep in sucking mud. It wasn’t a landscape built for concealment. The Agateans grew crops on any piece of ground the seeds wouldn’t roll off. Apart from the occasional rocky outcrop there was a distinct lack of places in which to lurk.

No one paid him much attention once he’d left the village far behind. The occasional water buffalo operative would turn to watch him until he was out of sight, but displayed no special curiosity; it was merely that Rincewind was marginally more interesting than watching a water buffalo defecate.

He kept the road just in sight and, by evening, reached a crossroads.

There was an inn.

Rincewind hadn’t eaten since the leopard. The inn meant food, but food meant money. He was hungry, and he had no money.

He chided himself for this kind of negative thinking. That was not the right approach. What he should do was go in and order a large, nourishing meal. Then instead of being hungry with no money he’d be well fed with no money, a net gain on his current position. Of course, the world was likely to raise some objections, but in Rincewind’s experience there were few problems that couldn’t be solved with a scream and a good ten yards’ start. And, of course, he would just have had a strengthening meal.

Besides, he liked Hunghungese food. A few refugees had opened restaurants in Ankh-Morpork and Rincewind considered himself something of an expert on the dishes.
^*

The one huge room was thick with smoke and, insofar as this could be determined through the swirls and coils, quite busy. A couple of old men were sitting in front of a complicated pile of ivory tiles, playing
Shibo Yangcong-san
. He wasn’t sure what they were smoking but, by the looks on their faces, they were happy they’d chosen it.

Rincewind made his way to the fireplace, where a skinny man was tending a cauldron.

He gave him a cheery smile. “Good morning! Can I partake of your famous delicacy ‘Meal A for two People with extra Prawn Cracker’?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Um. Then…could I see a painful ear…a croak of a frog…a menu?”

“What’s a menu, friend?”

Rincewind nodded. He knew what it meant when a stranger called you “friend” like that. No one who called someone else “friend” was feeling very kindly disposed.

“What is there to eat, I meant.”

“Noodles, boiled cabbage, and pork whiskers.”

“Is that
all?
”

“Pork whiskers don’t grow on trees, san.”

“I’ve been seeing water buffalo all day,” Rincewind said. “Don’t you people ever eat beef?”

The ladle splashed into the cauldron. Somewhere behind him a
shibo
tile dropped on to the floor. The back of Rincewind’s head prickled under the stares.

“We don’t serve rebels in this place,” said the landlord loudly.

Probably too meaty, Rincewind thought. But it seemed to him that the words had been addressed to the world in general rather than to him.

“Glad to hear it,” he said, “because—”

“Yes indeed,” said the landlord, a little louder. “No rebels welcome here.”

“That’s fine by me, because—”

“If I knew of any rebels I would be certain to alert the authorities,” the landlord bellowed.

“I’m not a rebel, I’m just hungry,” said Rincewind. “I’d, er, like a bowlful, please.”

A bowl was filled. Rainbow patterns shimmered on its oily surface.

“That’ll be half a
rhinu
,” said the landlord.

“You mean you want me to pay before I eat it?” said Rincewind.

“You might not want to afterwards, friend.”

A
rhinu
was more gold than Rincewind had ever owned. He patted his pockets theatrically.

“In fact, it seems that—” he began. There was a small thump beside him.
What I Did On My Holidays
had fallen on to the floor.

“Yes, thank you, that will do nicely,” said the landlord to the room at large. He pushed the bowl into Rincewind’s hand and, in one movement, scooped up the booklet and crammed it back into the wizard’s pocket.

“Go and sit down in the corner!” he hissed. “And you’ll be told what to do!”

“But I’m sure I
know
what to do. Dip spoon in bowl, raise spoon to mouth—”

“Sit down!”

Rincewind found the darkest corner and sat down. People were still watching him.

To avoid the group gaze he pulled out
What I Did
and opened it at random, in an effort to find out why it had a magical effect on the landlord.

“…sold me a bun containing what was called a [complicated pictogram] made
entirely of the inside of pigs
[urinating dog]” he read. “And such as these could be bought for small coin at any time, and so replete were the citizens that hardly any bought these [complicated pictogram] from the stall of [complicated pictogram, but it seemed to involve a razor]-san.”

Sausages filled with pig parts, thought Rincewind. Well, perhaps they
might
be amazing if, up until then, a bowl of dishwater with something congealing on the top of it had been your idea of a hearty meal.

Hah! Mister What-I-Did-On-My-Holidays should try coming to Ankh-Morpork next time, and see how much he liked one of old…Dibbler’s sausages…full of genuine…pig product…

The spoon splashed into the bowl.

Rincewind turned the pages hurriedly.

“…peaceful streets, along which I walked, were quite free of crime and brigandage…”

“Of course they were, you four-eyed little git!” shouted Rincewind. “That was because it was all happening to me!”

“…a city where all men are free…”

“Free?
Free?
Well, yes, free to starve, get robbed by the Thieves’ Guild…” said Rincewind to the book.

He fumbled through to another page.

“…my companion was the Great Wizard [complicated pictogram, but now that Rincewind studied it he realized with a plummeting heart it had a few lines that looked like the Agatean for “wind”], the most prominent and powerful wizard in the entire country…”

“I never said that! I—” Rincewind stopped. Memory treacherously dredged up a few phrases, such as
Oh, the Archchancellor listens to everything I say
and
That place would just fall down without me around
. But that was just the sort of thing you said after a few beers, surely no one would be so gullible as to write…

A picture focused itself in Rincewind’s memory. It was of a happy, smiling little man with huge spectacles and a trusting, innocent approach to life which brought terror and destruction everywhere he wandered. Twoflower had been quite unable to believe that the world was a bad place and that was largely because, to him, it wasn’t. It saved it all up for Rincewind.

Rincewind’s life had been quite uneventful before he’d met Twoflower. Since then, as far as he could remember, it had contained events in huge amounts.

And the little man had gone back home, hadn’t he? To Bes Pelargic—the Empire’s only proper seaport.

Surely no one would be so gullible as to write this sort of thing?

Surely no one apart from one person would be so gullible.

Rincewind was not politically minded but there were some things he could work out not because they were to do with politics but because they had a lot to do with human nature. Nasty images moved into place like bad scenery.

The Empire had a wall around it. If you lived in the Empire then you learned how to make soup out of pig squeals and swallow spit because that’s how it was done, and you were bullied by soldiers all the time because that was how the world worked.

But if someone wrote a cheerful little book about…

…what I did on my holidays…

…in a place where the world worked quite differently…

…then however fossilized the society there would always be
some
people who asked themselves dangerous questions like “Where’s the pork?”

Rincewind stared glumly at the wall. Peasants of the Empire, Rebel! You have nothing to lose but your heads and hands and feet and there’s this thing they do with a wire waistcoat and a cheesegrater…

He turned the book over. There was no author’s name. There was simply a little message: Increased Luck! Make Copies! Extended Duration And Happiness To The Endeavor!

Ankh-Morpork had had the occasional rebellion, too, over the years. But no one went around
organizing
things. They just grabbed themselves a weapon and took to the streets. No one bothered with a formal battlecry, relying instead on the well-tried “There ’e goes! Get ’im! Got ’im? Now
kick
’im inna fork!”

The point was…whatever
caused
that sort of thing wasn’t usually the
reason
for it. When Mad Lord Snapcase had been hung up by his figgin
^*
it hadn’t
really
been because he’d made poor old Spooner Boggis eat his own nose, it had been because years of inventive nastiness had piled on one another until the grievances reached—

There was a terrible scream from the far side of the room. Rincewind was half out of his seat before he noticed the little stage, and the actors.

A trio of musicians had squatted down on the floor. The inn’s customers turned to watch.

It was, in a way, quite enjoyable. Rincewind didn’t quite follow the plot, but it went something like: man gets girl, man loses girl to other man, man cuts couple in half, man falls on own sword, all come up front for a bow to what might be the Agatean equivalent of “Happy Days Are Here Again.” It was a little hard to make out the fine detail because the actors shouted “Hoorrrrrraa!” a lot and spent much of their time talking to the audience and their masks all looked the same to Rincewind. The musicians were in a world of their own or, by the sound of it, three different worlds.

“Fortune cookie?”

“Huh?”

Rincewind re-emerged from the thickets of thespianism to see the landlord beside him.

A dish of vaguely bivalvular biscuits was thrust under his nose.

“Fortune cookie?”

Rincewind reached out. Just as his fingers were about to close on one, the plate was jerked sideways an inch or two, bringing another under his hand.

Oh, well. He took it.

The thing was—his thoughts resumed, as the play screamed on—at least in Ankh-Morpork you
could
lay your hands on real weapons.

Poor devils. It took more than well-turned slogans and a lot of enthusiasm to run a good rebellion. You needed well-trained fighters and, above all, a good leader. He hoped they found one when he was well away.

He unrolled the fortune and read it idly, oblivious to the landlord walking around behind him.

Instead of the usual “You have just enjoyed an inferior meal” it was quite a complicated pictogram.

Rincewind’s fingers traced the brush strokes.

“‘Many…many…apologies…’ What kind—”

The musician with the cymbals clashed them together sharply.

The wooden cosh bounced off Rincewind’s head.

The old men playing
shibo
nodded happily to themselves and turned back to their game.

It was a fine morning. The hideout echoed to the sounds of the Silver Horde getting up, groaning, adjusting various homemade surgical supports, complaining that they couldn’t find their spectacles, and mistakenly gumming one another’s dentures.