Pyramids

Terry Pratchett

Summary

Being a teenage god wasn't all it was cracked up to be. But training as an assassin had been great fun for Teppic -- at least until he was actually expected to kill someone.

Teppic's real worries began when his father, the Pharaoh, went to his untimely mummyhood, and he was made king of all the realm. Suddenly he was expected to make the sun rise every day without the benefit of on-the-job training. Pyramid power was getting way out of control. A certain voluptuous young handmaiden was interested in peeling other things than grapes. And every god his subjects had ever worshipped started to claim the land...

Quotes

...as the world tumbles lazily, it is revealed as the Discworld -- flat, circular, and carried through space on the back of four elephants who stand on the back of Great A'tuin, the only turtle ever to feature on the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram...

What our ancestors would really be thinking, if they were alive today, is: "Why is it so dark in here?"

All assassins had a full-length mirror in their rooms, because it would be a terrible insult to anyone to kill them when you were badly dressed.

There was not a lot that could be done to make Morpork a worse place. A direct hit by a meteorite, for example, would count as gentrification.

Fairly solid classroom rumour said that if he inhumed his examiner before the test, that was an automatic pass. He slipped a Number Three throwing knife from its thigh sheath and hefted it thoughtfully. Of course, any attempt, any overt move which missed would attract immediate failure and loss of privileges. [Footnote: Breathing, for a start.]

"But... assassination... he's so young, and he's never shown the least inclination..." She dabbed at her eyes. "It's not from our side of the family," she added accusingly. "That brother-in-law of yours-- Going all over the world killing people!"

"I don't believe they use that word," said his father. "I think they prefer words like conclude, or annul. Or inhume, I understand."

"Inhume?"

"I think it's like exhume, O flooding of the waters, only it's before they bury you."

...while assassination was probably worse than debate it was better than war, which some people tended to think of as the same thing only louder.

His majesty had also heard that only one student in fifteen actually became an assassin. He wasn't entirely certain what happened to the other fourteen, but he was pretty sure that if you were a poor student in a school for assassins they did a bit more than throw the chalk at you, and that the school dinners had an extra dimension of uncertainty.

Pyramids had bankrupted the country, drained it drier than ever the river did. The only curse the could afford to put on a tomb these days was "Bugger Off."

All self-respecting river kingdoms have vast supernatural plagues, but the best the Old Kingdom had been able to achieve in the last hundred years was the Plague of Frog. [Footnote: It was quite a big frog, however, and got into the air ducts and kept everyone awake for weeks.]

It is a well-known fact that when one is about to die the sense immediately become excruciatingly sharp, and it has always been believed that this is to enable their owner to detect any possible exit from his predicament other than the obvious one.

This is not true. The phenomenon is a classical example of displacement activity. The senses are desperately concentrating on anything apart from the immediate problem ... in the hope that it will go away.

The Assassins didn't have a very strenuous entrance examination; the school was easy to get into, easy to get out of (the trick was to get out upright).

Teppic knew that it was traditional in river kingdoms to approve of cats, but he suspected that usually the animals in question were graceful stately creatures; his mother's cats were small, spitting, flat-headed, yellow-eyed maniacs.

Teppic hadn't been educated. Education had just settled on him, like dandruff.

Apart from the colours, their clothes were cut off the edge of the latest fashion, which was currently inclining towards wide hats, padded shoulders, narrow waists and pointed shoes and gave its followers the appearance of being very well-dressed nails.

I'm going to be like them, he told himself.

Although probably better dressed, he added.

"The important thing is not how many people you inhume, it's how many fail to inhume you."

Chidder: "What's your name, kiddo?"
Teppic: "Kiddo? I'll have you know the blood of pharaohs runs in my veins!"
Chidder: "Would you like it to stay there?"

"You carry it yourself," said Chidder. "That's the rule around here."

Teppic looked at the trunk. It was an intriguing notion. "At home we've people who do that," he said. "Eunuchs and so on."

"You should of brought one with you."

"They don't travel well," said Teppic.

Teppic: "No, my father's a pharaoh. My mother was a concubine, I think."
Chidder: "I thought that was some sort of vegetable."
Teppic: "I don't think so. We've never really discussed it. Anyway, she died when I was young."
Chidder: "How dreadful."
Teppic: "She went for a moonlight swim in what turned out to be a crocodile."

Chidder: "My father's in commerce."
Teppic: "That's fascinating. I've never been to Commerce, but I understand they're very fine people."

[The dormitory] was long enough to accomodate all eighteen boys in Viper House, and draughty enough to accomodate the great outdoors. Its designer may have had comfort in mind, but only so that he could avoid it wherever possible; he had contrived a room that could actually be colder than the weather outside.

"But -- but all the runes have been scuffed," said Arthur. "It's all too late now! And that means the Great Orm will come in the night and wind out my entrails on a stick!"

"Does it?"

"And suck out my eyes, my mother said!"

"Gosh!" said Teppic, fascinated. "Really?" He was quite glad his bed was opposite Arthur's, and would offer an unrivalled view.

Arthur: "My god can hear me anywhere."
Teppic: "Well, mine has difficulty if you're on the other side of the room."

...[Teppic] knew his father made the sun come up and the river flood and so on... [yet] He'd never seen his father do anything much about making the sun rise, he had to admit. You'd expect at least a grunt of effort round about the dawn. His father never got up until after breakfast. The sun came up just the same.

On Thursday a small war broke out between those who worshipped the Mother Goddess in her aspect of the Moon and those who worshipped her in her aspect as a huge fat woman with enormous buttocks.

-- How religious wars get started

It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was, of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free.

Bloat is extracted from the deep sea blowfish, Singularis minutia gigantica, which protects itself from enemies by inflating itself to many times its normal size. If taken by humans the effect is to make every cell in the body instantaneously try to swell some 2,000 times. This is invariably fatal, and very loud.

[Teppic] envied his fellow students who believed in gods that were intangible and lived a long way away on top of some mountain. A fellow could really believe in gods like that. But it was extremely hard to believe in a god when you saw him at breakfast every day.

...[Chidder] explained carefully that Terminate with Extreme Prejudice did not simply require that the victim was inhumed, preferably in an extremely thorough way, but that his associates and employees were also intimately involved, along with the business premises, the building, and a large part of the surrounding neighborhood, so that everyone involved would know that the man had been unwise enough to make the kind of enemies who could get very angry and indiscriminate.

Chidder: "Very bad, that sort of thing. Upsets the business community."
Teppic: "All the business community, or just that part of it floating face down in the river?"

"We do not execute. We do not massacre. We never, you may be certain, we never torture. We have no truck with crimes of passion or hatred or pointless gain. ...

"No, we do it for the money.

"And, because we above all must know the value of a human life, we do it for a great deal of money."

-- The Assassin's credo

"Look into the face of a man who will kill you for a belief and your nostrils will snuff up the scent of abomination. Hear a speech declaring a holy war and, I assure you, your ears should catch the clink of evil's scales and the dragging of its monstrous tail over the purity of the language."

The gates of the Assassin's Guild were never shut. This was said to be because Death was open for business all the time, but it was really because the hinges had rusted centuries before and no-one had got around to doing anything about it.

[The pharoah] needed something to distract himself. He could send for Ptraci, his favourite handmaiden. She was special. Her singing always cheered him up. Life seemed so much brighter when she stopped.

No-one had ever explained to him how one made the sun come up and the river flood and the corn grow. How could they? He was the god, after all. He should know. But he didn't, so he'd just gone through life hoping like hell that it would all work properly, and that seemed to have done the trick. The trouble was, though, that if it didn't work, he wouldn't know why not.

...it was true that any freelance and unlicensed thief caught by the Thieves' Guild would soon find himself remanded in custody by social inquiry reports plus having his knees nailed together. [Footnote: When the Thieves' Guild declared a General Strike in the Year of the Engaging Sloth, the actual level of crime doubled.]

The gods are great believers in justice, at least as far as it extends to humans, and have been known to dispense it so enthusiastically that people miles away are turned into a cruet.

...the three even now lurching across the deserted planks of the Brass Bridge were dead drunk assassins and the men behind them were bent on inserting the significant comma.

One of the two legends about the founding of Ankh-Morpork relates that the two orphaned brothers who built the city were in fact found and suckled by a hippopotamus ... Eight heraldic hippos line the bridge, facing out to sea. It is said that if danger ever threatens the city, they will run away.

The other legend ... is that at an even earlier time a group of wise men survived a flood sent by the gods by building a huge boat, and on this boat they took two of every type of animal then existing on the Disc. After some weeks the combined manure was beginning to weigh the boat low in the water so -- the story runs -- they tipped it over the side, and called it Ankh-Morpork.

...by the time [the Ankh river] had passed through Ankh-Morpork, pop. One million, it could only be called a liquid because it moved faster than the land around it; actually being sick in it would probably make it, on average, marginally cleaner.

Teppicymon: "Hallo. You'd be--"
Death: DEATH.
Teppicymon: "I understood that Death came as a three-headed giant scarab beetle."
Death: WELL. NOW YOU KNOW.

Death sighed. He was not a creature of Time, and therefore past and future were all one to him, but there had been a period when he'd made an effort to appear in whatever form the client expected. This foundered because it was usually impossible to know what the client was expecting until after they were dead. And then he'd decided that, since no-one ever really expected to die anyway, he might as well please himself and he'd henceforth stuck to the familiar black coweled robe, which was neat and very familiar and acceptable everywhere, like the best credit cards.

...the pharaoh reached the conclusion that he was dead very quickly. The sight of his mangled body on the sand below him played a major part in this.

Now that he didn't have a body to importune him with its insistent demands the world seemed full of astonishments, but unfortunately among the first of them was the fact that much of what you thought was true now seemed as solid and reliable as marsh gas. And also that, just as he was fully equipped to enjoy the world, he was going to be buried inside a pyramid.

Servant 1: "Are you all right, O jewelled master of the sun?"
Teppicymon: "No, I'm not. I'm by way of being dead just at the moment. Amazing, isn't it."
Servant 2: "Can you hear us, O divine bringer of the morning?"
Teppicymon: "I've just fallen off a hundred foot wall on to my head, what do you think?"

Dios, First Minister and high priest among high priests, wasn't a naturally religious man. It wasn't a desirable quality in a high priest, it affected your judgement, made you unsound. Start believing in things and the whole business became a farce.

It was a solid gold, head-enveloping mask, to be worn by the current ruler on all public occassions; its expression, to the sacreligious, was one of good-natured constipation.

Arthur: "He's not himself, you can see that."
Chidder: "Who is he, then?"

Doctor: "Fairly straightforward. A case of mortis portalis tackulatum with complications."
Chidder: "What's that mean?"
Doctor: "In laymen's terms, he's as dead as a doornail."
Chidder: "What are the complications?"
Doctor: "He's still breathing."

Medicine was a new art on the Disc, and wasn't going to get anywhere if people could understand it.

Doctor: "He's dead. All the medical tests prove it. So, er... bury him, keep him nice and cool, and tell him to come and see me next week. In daylight, for preference."
Arthur: "But he's still breathing!"
Doctor: "These are just reflex actions that might easily confuse the layman."

In fact the pharoah was sitting on a spare slab in the ceremonial preparation room watching his own soft bits being carefully removed from his body and put into the special canopic jars.

This is not a sight often seen by people -- at least, not by people in a position to take a thoughtful interest.

Seven thousand years ago Khuft had led his people ...and had prayed in the desert and the gods of the place had shown him the Old Kingdom. And he had entered, yea, and taken possession thereof, that it should ever be the dwelling place of his seed. Something like that, anyway. There were probably more yeas and a few verilys, with added milk and honey.

Teppic: "Sorry, I didn't hear you say I should marry my aunt, did I?"
Dios: "You did, sire. Interfamilial marriage is a proud tradition of our lineage."
Teppic: "But my aunt is my aunt!"
Dios: "Yes, sire. Of course. And she is also your uncle, your cousin and your father."
Teppic: "Hold on. My father--"
Dios: "A technicality. Your great-great-grandmother once declared she is king as a matter of political expediency and I don't believe the edict is ever rescinded."

"It must make you feel really proud," said Gern. "...our mam says the king goes on living, sort of thing, after all this stuffing and stitching. Sort of in the Netherworld. With your stitching in him."

And several sacks of straw and a couple of buckets of pitch, thought the shade of the king sadly. And the wrapping off Gern's lunch, although he didn't blame the lad, who'd just forgotten where he'd put it. All eternity with someone's lunch wrapping as part of your vital organs. There had been half a sausage left, too.

Dios: "Cats are sacred."
Teppic: "Long-legged cats with silver fur and disdainful expressions are, maybe. I don't know about this sort. I'm sure sacred cats don't leave dead ibises under the bed. And I'm certain that sacred cats that live surrounded by endless sand don't come indoors and do it in the king's sandals, Dios."

Dios: "I am afraid that we will find that our father has changed somewhat since we last saw him."
Teppic: "Well, yes. He's dead, isn't he?"

It wasn't that Dios was particularly cruel or uncaring, it was simply that death was a mere irritating transition in the eternal business of existence. The fact that people died was just an inconvenience, like them being out when you called.

They seem to think that being dead is like being deaf, you just have to speak up a bit.

"Think it's fun, do you, spending the rest of your death under a million tons of rock, watching yourself crumble to bits? Is that your idea of a good epoch?"

Ptaclusp: "Then that will be the standard model, shall we say, O water in the desert?"
Teppic: "I think something larger."
Ptaclusp: "That's the Executive. Very exclusive, O base of the eternal column. Last you a perpetuality. Also our special offer this aeon is various measurements of paracosmic significance built into the very fabric at no extra cost."

Ptaclusp: "What?"
Dios: "You are talking to the 1,398th monarch."
Ptaclusp: "I'm sorry. I mean, what?, O great king."

Teppic had noticed that Dios had at least fifty finely-tuned ways of bowing, each one conveying subtle shades of meaning. This one looked like No.3, I Am Your Humble Servant.

Dios was maximum high priest to a national religion that had fermented and accreted and bubbled for more than seven thousand years and never threw a god away in case it turned out to be useful. He know that a great many mutually-contradictory things were all true.

-- A requisite of any religion, yes?

"You don't expect real royalty to pay its way. That's one of the signs of real royalty, not having any money."

The gods had seen fit to give him one son who charged you for the amount of breath expended in saying "Good morning," and another one who worshipped geometry and stayed up all night designing aqueducts. You scrimped and saved to send them to the best schools, and then they went and paid you back by getting educated.

"It'd be a whole quantum leap in bankruptcy," said IIa. "They'd have to invent a new word for that too."

"It'd be worth it as a loss leader," said IIb.

"Sure enough. When it comes to making a loss, we'll be in the lead," said IIa sourly.

It'd been a small business when father passed it on to him -- just a yard full of blocks and various sphinxes, needles, steles and other stock items, and a thick stack of unpaid bills, most of them addressed to the palace and respectfully pointing out that our esteemed account presented nine hundred years ago appeared to have been overlooked and prompt settlement would oblige.

It was on the floor and it had a pillow at one end. it had to be a bed.

It seemed that people only had respect for the dead when they thought the dead were listening.

Why couldn't kings order people around like in the old days? You knew where you were then, they didn't go round being charming and treating you as some sort of equal, as if you could make the sun rise too.

Teppic: "And perhaps we can find him some light job around the palace?"
Dios: "As a one-handed stonemason, sire?"
Teppic: "As whatever, Dios."
Dios: "Certainly, sire. As you wish. I will undertake to see if we are currently short-handed in any department."

Dunnikindiver: a builder and cleaner of cesspits. A particularly busy profession in Ankh-Morpork, where the water table is generally at ground level, and one which attracts considerable respect. At least, everyone passes by on the other side of the street when a dunnikindiver walks by.

[Teppic] hadn't quite come to terms with the handmaidens yet. Presumably Dios chose them, as he seemed to oversee everything in the palace, and he had shown surprisingly good taste in the matter of, for example, olive skins, bosoms and legs.

The clothing these two wore would between them have covered a small saucer.

"What are you telling me now?" he demanded, in a camel whisper. [Footnote: Hoarse whispers are not suitable for a desert environment.]

Ptaclusp hesitated. This all seemed very familiar. He'd had this feeling before. An overwhelming sensation of reja vu. [Footnote: Lit: "I am going to be here again."]

For more than a thousand years the kings along the Djel had, with extreme diplomacy, exquisite manners and the footwork of a centipede on adrenaline, kept the peace along the whole widdershins side of the continent.

"They believe the world is run by geometry, sire. All lines and angles and numbers. That sort of thing, sire--" Dios frowned-- "can lead to some very unsound ideas."

"Ah," said Teppic, resolving to learn more about unsound ideas as soon as possible.

Teppic: "Hallo."
Dios: "His Greatness the King Teppicymon XXVII, Lord of the Heavens, Charioteer of the Wagon of the Sun, Steersman of the Barque of the Sun, Guardian of the Secret Knowledge, Lord of the Horizon, Keeper of the Way, the Flail of Mercy, the High-Born One, the Never-Dying King, bids you welcome and commands you to take wine with him."
Teppic: "Oh, yes. Do sit down, won't you?"
Dios: "His Greatness the King Teppicymon XXVII, Lord of the Heavens, Charioteer of the Wagon of the Sun, Steersman of the Barque of the Sun, Guardian of the Secret Knowledge, Lord of the Horizon, Keeper of the Way, the Flail of Mercy, the High-Born One, the Never-Dying King, commands you to be seated."

-- Traditions...

Younger assassins, who are usually very poor, have very clear ideas about the morality of wealth until they become older assassins, who are usually very rich, when they begin to take the view that injustice has its good points.

Teppic: "What exactly has she done wrong, then?"
Dios: "She has refused to take the potion, sire."
Teppic: "Sorry. I thought you said it wasn't compulsory, Dios."
Dios: "Yes, sire. It is not, sire. It is entirely voluntary. It is an act of free will. And she has refused it, sire."
Teppic: "Ah. One of those situations."

Dios: "Therefore I will have dinner sent in. It will be roast chicken."
Teppic: "I hate chicken."
Dios: "No sire. On wednesdays the King always enjoys chicken, sire."

We're really good at it, Teppic thought. Mere animals couldn't possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human to be really stupid.

Ptraci: "I think I ought to go back to my cell. It's wrong even to think of disobeying the king."
Teppic: "Oh? What happens to you, then?"
Ptraci: "Something bad."
Teppic: "You mean, worse than being thrown to the crocodiles or having your soul taken by the Soul Eater?"
Ptraci: "That's an interesting point."

Caltrips didn't kill anyone, they just slowed them down a bit. One or two of them in the sole of the foot induced extreme slowness and caution in all except the terminally enthusiastic.

Teppic: "Er, what exactly did you have to do? As a handmaiden, I mean?"
Ptraci: "Talk to [the pharoah], mainly. Or just listen. He could really talk, but he always said no-one ever really listened to what he said."
Teppic: "Yes. And that was all, was it?"
Ptraci: "Oh, that? No, he was very kind. I wouldn't of minded, you understand. I had all the proper training. Bit of a disappointment, really. The women of my family have served under the kings for centuries, you know."

-- Blink and you'll miss the pun...

"The old king told me once that the gods gave people a sense of humour to make up for giving them sex. I think he was a bit upset at the time."

[The crocodiles] looked like large, sodden logs, the main difference being that logs don't open at one end and bite your legs off.

The sacred crocodiles of the Djel were the kingdom's garbage disposal, river patrol and occasional morgue.

It's a fact as immutable as the Third Law of Sod that there is no such thing as a good Grand Vizier. A predilection to cackle and plot is apparently part of the job spec.

Throughout the history of the Disc most high priests have been serious, pious and conscientious men who have done their best to interpret the wishes of the gods, sometimes disembowelling or flaying alive hundreds of people in a day in order to make sure they're getting it absolutely right.

The late king had many fine attributes, but doing mighty deeds wasn't among them. The score was: Number of enemies ground as dust under his chariot wheels = 0. Number of thrones crushed beneath his sandalled feet = 0. Number of times world bestrode like colossus = 0. On the other hand: Reigns of terror = 0. Number of times own throne crushed beneath enemy sandals = 0. Faces of poor ground = 0. Expensive crusades embarked upon = 0. His life had, basically, been a no-score win.

Two of the IIas sat back and steepled their fingers, always a bad sign in anyone having anything to do with money.

"The problem is," one of them continued, "that after the initial enthusiasm a lot of the workers looped themselves unofficially so that they could stay at home and send themselves out to work."

"But that's ridiculous," Ptaclusp protested weakly. "They're not different people, they're just doing it to themselves."

"That's never stopped anyone, father," said IIa. "How many men have stopped drinking themselves stupid at the age of twenty to save a stranger dying of liver failure at forty?"

One coin vanished.

"They're all the same coin, aren't they," said one of his brothers.

"Well, yes," said the [accountant], very embarrassed, because interfering with the divine flow of money was alien to his personal religion.

After a few aeons people forgot this and thought you could achieve [immortality] by a) ritual b) pickling people and c) storing their soft inner bits in jars.

This seldom works.

By the way, contrary to popular opinion pyramids don't sharpen razor blades. They just take them back to when they weren't blunt.

...the last thing the priesthood wanted was enthusiastic soldiers. Enthusiastic soldiers with no fighting to do soon get bored and start thinking dangerous thoughts, like how much better they could run the country.

[The Djelibeybi army] attracted big, solid men, the kind of men who could stand stock still for hours at a time without getting bored, men with the build of an ox and the mental processes to match. Excellent bladder control was also desirable.

Teppic had learned how not to move stealthily. Millions of years of being eaten by creatures that know how to move stealthily has made humanity very good at spotting stealthy movement.

It occurred to Teppic that the landless peasants down on the delta had more freedom than he did, although the seditious and non-kingly side of him said, yes, freedom to catch any disease of their choice, starve as much as they wanted, and die of whatever dreadful ague took their fancy. But freedom, of a sort.

...[the necropolis] was the only city anywhere on the Disc where an assassin couldn't find employment.

[Ptraci] didn't talk, she chattered. She didn't seem to be able to hold a simple thought in her head for more than about ten seconds... Nevertheless, he found he desperately wanted to find her. The sheer undemandingness of her was like a drug. The memory of her bosom was quite beside the point.

Teppic hesitated. Neither his tutors nor Dios had prepared him for this. He knew at least seventy different ways of killing a sleeping person, but none to wake them up first.

Teppic: "Look, could you take your bangles off?"
Ptraci: "Why?"
Teppic: "They make such a noise when you walk."
Ptraci: "I don't want to. I'd feel naked without them."
Teppic: "You're nearly naked with them."

Ptaclusp IIb: "Can you hear something?"
Ptaclusp IIa: "What, you mean the fabric of time and space being put through the wringer?"
Ptaclusp IIb: "No, not that."
Ptaclusp IIa: "Well, the sound of the very air itself being subjected to horrible tortures?"
Ptaclusp IIb: "Not that, either."

The camel looked along its nose at Teppic. Its expression made it clear that of all the riders in all the world it would least like to ride it, he was right at the top of the list. However, camels look like that at everyone.

Camels have a very democratic approach to the human race. They hate every member of it, without making any distinctions for rank or creed.

Three of [the guards] were holding the heavy Djel bows, which could propel an arrow through a door or turn a charging hippo into three tons of mobile kebab. The guards had never had to fire them at a fellow human, but looked as though they were prepared to entertain the idea.

Teppic: "You could let us go. I suspect that's what you want, isn't it? For me to go away and never come back? That suits me fine."
Dios: You're supposed to say 'And let the girl go'."
Teppic: "Oh, yes. And that, too."

"It helps if you shut your eyes," said Ptraci.

Teppic tried it. It worked. A stretch of courtyard that his eyes told him was a quivering rectangle whose sides twanged like bowstrings became, well, just a courtyard under his feet.

"Gosh, that was clever," he said. "How did you think of that?"

"I always shut my eyes when I'm frightened," said Ptraci.

"How do you make a camel kneel, did you say? I've got any amount of sharp things."

The camel, who had a very adequate grasp of human language as it applied to threats, knelt down graciously.

It's not for nothing that advanced mathematics tends to be invented in hot countries. It's because of the morphic resonance of all the camels, who have that disdainful expression and famous curled lip as a natural result of an ability to do quadratic equations.

The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins. They are so much brighter that they soon realised that the most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendants not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships or being patronised rigid by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don't find out about it.

Never trust a species that grins all the time. It's up to something.

Ptraci bounced up and down on [the camel's] neck and kicked hard with her heels, an action which would have caused any anthropoid male to howl and bang his head against the wall.

The gob of cud had commendable lift and spin and hit with a sound like, a sound like half a pound of semi-digested grass hitting someone in the face. There was nothing else it could sound like.

Teppic had saddled the camel but neglected the harness. Ptraci had handfuls of camel hair to hang on to. All he had was handfuls of Ptraci.

[Ptraci's] long hair whipped his face and smelled beguilingly of rare perfume. [Footnote: An effect achieved by distilling the testicles of a small tree-dwelling species of bear with the vomit of a whale, and adding a handful of rose petals. Teppic probably would have felt no better for knowing this.]

Camels gallop by throwing their feet as far away from them as possible and then running to keep up.

...the Great Pyramid screamed, lifted itself off its base and, its bulk swishing through the air as unstoppably as something completely unstoppable, ground around precisely ninety degrees and did something perverted to the fabric of time and space.

Dil: "Tell me what you can see!"
Gern: "I can see the stars, master."
Dil: "What are they on, boy?"
Gern: "That's easy, master. Everyone knows the stars are on the body of the goddess Nept who arches herself from ... oh, bloody hell."
Dil: "You can see her, too?"

He was a religious man. It was a great comfort knowing that the gods were there. It was knowing they were here that was the terrible part.

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.

Teppic: "Don't you think it was a bit, well, odd? A whole country just more or less vanishing? It's something you don't bloody well see every day, for gods' sake!"
Ptraci: "How should I know? I've never been out of the valley before. I don't know what it's supposed to look like from outside."

"You don't look like the king," said Ptraci.

"Why not?"

"He had a golden mask on."

Ptraci: "Anyway, if you were the king, you'd be a god too. You aren't acting very god-like at the moment."
Teppic: "Yes? Well. Er. I'm basically good at making the sun rise. I don't know how, though. And rivers. You want any rivers flooding, I'm your man. God, I mean."

The conversation of human beings seldom interested [You Bastard], but it crossed his mind that the males and females always got along best when neither actually listened fully to what the other one was saying.

Lack of fingers was another big spur to the development of camel intellect. Human mathematical development had always been held back by everyone's instinctive tendency, when faced with something really complex in the way of triform polynomials or parametric differentials, to count fingers. Camels started from the word go by counting numbers.

As far as camels were concerned, the way to mighty intellectual development was to have nothing much to do and nothing to do it with.

Teppic: "One man, one vet."
Ptraci: "That's for the electing, then?"
Teppic: "The point is, though, that everyone can do it. They're very proud of it. Everyone has the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilisation."

-- Democracy explained

Ptaclusp IIb: "I think he's dimensionally maladjusted, dad. Time and space has got a bit mixed up for him. That's why he's moving sideways all the time."
Ptaclusp: "He always used to move sideways."
Ptaclusp IIb: "Yes, dad. But that was just normal. All accountants move like that."

"It's logically impossible for the arrow to hit them!" The fat man threw up his hands. "It shouldn't do it! You must be giving me the wrong type of tortoise," he added accusingly. "We ough to try again with faster tortoises."

"Or slower arrows?"

"Possibly, possibly."

-- Axiom testing

Teppic: "You stay here. I'll whistle if it's safe to follow me."
Ptraci: "What will you do if it isn't safe?"
Teppic: "Scream."

Fast was a word particularly associated with tortoises because they were not it.

...the fastest animal on the Disc is the extremely neurotic Ambiguous Puzuma, which moves so fast that it can actually achieve near light-speed in the Disc's magical field. This means that if you can see a puzuma, it isn't there. Most male puzumas die young of acute ankle failure caused by running very fast after females which aren't there... The puzuma is rumoured to be about the size of a leopard with a rather unique black and white check coat, although those specimens discovered by the Disc's sages and philosophers have inclined them to declare that in its natural state the puzuma is flat, very thin, and dead.

"Take no notice of him, boy," he said. "He's just covering himself because of the accident last week."

"The tortoise did beat the hare," said Xeno sulkily.

"The hare was dead, Xeno," said the tall man patiently.

...the people of the Old Kingdom were learning that, for example, Vut the Dog-Headed God of the Evening looks a lot better painted on a pot than he does when all seventy feet of him, growling and stinking, is lurching down the street outside.

No-one is more worried by the actual physical manifestation of a god than his priests; it's like having the auditors in unexpectedly.

"It would appear that Thrrp has fumbled [the sun] and has fallen to a surprise tackle from Jeht, Boatman of the Solar Orb.

"But here comes Scrab again... yes, he's gaining height... Jeht hasn't seen him yet, he's progressing confidently towards the meridian, and here comes Sessifet, Goddess of the Afternoon! This is a surprise! What a surprise this is! A young goddess, yet to make her mark, but my word, what a lot of promise there, this is an astonishing bid, eunuchs and gentlemen, and... yes... Scrab has fumbled it! He's fumbled it!..."

"...and... what's this? The elder gods are, there's no other word for it, they're co-operating against these brash newcomers! But plucky young Sessifet is hanging in there, she's exploiting the weakness... she's in! ...and pulling away now, pulling away, Gil and Scrab appear to be fighting, she's got a clear sky and, yes, yes... yes!... it's noon! It's noon! It's noon!"

Suddenly, Djeibeybi was no place for honest doubt. Honest doubt could get you seriously picked up and your arms and legs torn off.

"Brethen!" he cried.

"Excuse me," said the priestess of Sarduk.

"And sistren--"

"Thank you."

If you couldn't depend on kings and gods, you could always rely on ond Dios. There wasn't one of them that wouldn't prefer the uncertain wrath of the gods to a rebuke from Dios. Dios terrified them in a very positive, human way that no supernatural entity ever could.

He was turning over in his mind an interesting new concept in Thau-dimensional physics which unified time, space, magnetism, gravity and, for some reason, broccoli.

These men were philosophers, [Teppic] thought. They had told him so. So their brains must be so big that they have room for ideas that no-one else would consider for five seconds.

There was always someone back home who wanted to be certain that deposed monarchs stayed that way. It was usually a case of heir today, gone tomorrow.

"The chap you need is Pthagonal. A very acute man with an angle."

Ibid: "If we don't attack them, they'll attack us first."
Xeno: "'S'right. So we'd better retaliate before they have a chance to strike."
Ibid: "On the other hand, war makes it very difficult to think straight."
Xeno: "There is that. Especially for dead people."

He turned around, and realised that he was not alone. Dil and Gern were watching him. To squeeze any further into the far corner of the room, they would have needed triangular backbones.

No-one else in the [embalmers'] Guild had ever been congratulated on their work by a recipient.

...he'd always understood that the common peoplehad their own netherworld, where they would be more at ease and could mingle with their own kind and wouldn't feel awkward and socially out of place.

Dil: "...young Gern thinks it's all his fault. I've told him over and over again that the gods wouldn't go to all this trouble just because of one growing lad with urges, if you catch my drift. They wouldn't, would they?"
Teppicymon: "Shouldn't think so for one minute. We'd never see the back of them, otherwise."

Teppicymon: "What are the priests doing about this?"
Dil: "I saw them throwing one another into the river, sir."
Teppicymon: "That sounds about right. They've come to their senses at last."

Teppicymon: "What's my son got to say about all this?"
Dil: "Don't know how to tell you this, sir."
Teppicymon: "Out with it, man."
Dil: "Sir, they say he's dead, sir. They say he killed himself and ran away."
Teppicymon: "Killed himself?"
Dil: "Sorry, sir."
Teppicymon: "And ran away afterwards?"
Dil: "On a camel, they say."
Teppicymon: "We lead an active afterlife in our family, don't we?"

Dil coughed. It was the ominous cough. The Spanish use an upside-down question mark to tell you what you're about to hear is a question; this was the kind of cough that tells you what you're about to hear is a dirge.

"I know you're a good man with a needle, Dil," he said. "Tell me -- how are you with a sledgehammer?"

Teppic had added another iota to his store of new knowledge. "Symposium" meant a knife-and-fork tea.

Teppic looked around at the bald heads and long white beards, which seemed to be a badge of office. If you had a bald head and a long white beard, they seemed to indicate, whatever between them must be bursting with wisdom.

The Ephebians made wine out of anything they could put in a bucket, and ate anything that couldn't climb out of one.

He pushed the food around on his plate. Some of it pushed back.

[Iesope] started a long fable about a fox, a turkey, a goose and a wolf, who had a wager to see who could stay longest underwater with heavy weights tied to their feet.

"Endos the Listener, I'm known as."

"That's fascinating," said Teppic automatically. "What does that involve?"

"Listening."

"Just listening?"

"That's what they pay me for," said Endos. "Sometimes I nod. Or smile. Or nod and smile at the same time. Encouragingly, you know. They like that."

...most people don't listen. They use the time when someone else is speaking to think of what they're going to say next. True Listeners have always been revered among oral cultures, and prized for their rarity value; bards and poets are ten a cow, but a good Listener is hard to find, or at least hard to find twice.

Pthagonal: "Is it a constant, do you think? It's a depressing concept."
Teppic: "Sorry?"
Pthagonal: "The diameter divides into the circumference, you know. It ought to be three times. You'd think so, wouldn't you? But does it? No. Three point one four one and lots of other figures. There's no end to the buggers. Do you know how pissed off that makes me?"

Nature abhors dimensional abnormalities, and seals them neatly away so that they don't upset people. Nature, in fact, abhors a lot of things, including vacuums, ships called the Marie Celeste, and the chuck keys for electric drills.

A favourite trick of Ephebian gods, he recalled, was turning into some animal in order to gain the favours of highly placed Ephebian women. And one of them had reputedly turned himself into a golden shower in pursuit of his intended. All this raised interesting questions about everyday night life in sophisticated Ephebe.

Someone was just putting a torch to the lighthouse, which was one of the More Than Seven Wonders of the World and had been built to a design by Pthagonal using the Golden Rule and the Five Aesthetic Principles. Unfortunately it had then been built in the wrong place because putting it in the right place would have spoiled the look of the harbour, but it was generally agreed by mariners to be a very beautiful lighthouse and something to look at while they were waiting to be towed off the rocks.

The trouble with life was that you didn't get a chance to practise before doing it for real.

At first [Ptaclusp had] viewed them with a certain amount of equanimity. Gods would be good customers, they always wanted temples and statues, he could deal directly, cut out the middle man.

And then it had occurred to him that a god, when he was unhappy about the product, as it might be, maybe the plasterwork wasn't exactly as per spec, or perhaps a corner of the temple was a bit low on account of unexpected quicksand, a god didn't just come around demanding in a loud voice to see the manager.

Its designer had a gilt complex, and had tried every trick with gold paint, curly pillars and expensive drapes to make it look less like a ship and more like a boudoir that had collided with a highly suspicious type of theatre.

Chidder: "It's all show, really."
Teppic: "Yes. I can see that."
Chidder: "I mean, we're poor traders."
Teppic: "The usual phrase is 'poor but honest traders'."
Chidder: "Oh, I think we'll stick on 'poor' at the moment."

Teppic: "Look, Chiddy, you're not a pirate, are you?"
Chidder: "Is that what's been worrying you? No, we're not. We just prefer to, er, avoid paperwork wherever possible. You know? We don't like people to have all the worry of having to know everything we do."

"We get attacked by pirates a fair amount. That's why father had the Unnamed built. It always surprises them. And the whole thing is morally sound. We get their ship, their booty, and any prisoners they may have get rescued and given a ride home at competitive rates."

Teppic: "Never felt more valueless than right now."
Chidder: "But you're a king!"
Teppic: "Well, yes, but--"
Chidder: "Of a country which technically still exists, but isn't actually reachable by mortal man? ...And you can pass laws about, well, currency and taxation, yes?"
Teppic: "I suppose so, but--"
Chidder: "And you don't think you're valuable? Good grief, Tep, our accountants can probably think up fifty different ways to... well, my hands go damp just to think about it."

So that was it. You lost your kingdom, and then it was worth more because it was a tax haven, and you took a seat on the board, whatever that was, and that made it all right.

Ptraci: "The Congress of the Friendly Dog and the Two Small Biscuits! You hardly ever see that these days. Isn't it well done? You can even make out the yoghurt. What's the one on your other arm?"
Alfonz: "'S'not really suitable for ladies..."
Ptraci: "Oh, I know that one. That's out of 130 Days of Pseudopolis. It's physically impossible."

-- Critiquing obscene tattoos

Ptraci didn't just derail the train of thought, she ripped up the rails, burned the stations and melted the bridges for scrap.

"We're all that's left," said Teppic to his wine glass. "Out of the whole kingdom. Me, her, and a camel that smells like an old carpet. An ancient kingdom, lost."

"Good job it wasn't a new one," said Chidder. "At least people got some wear out of it."

Khuft: "I was being persecuted for my beliefs."
Teppic: "That's terrible."
Khuft: "Damn right. I believed people would not notice I'd sold them camels with plaster teeth until I was well out of town."

"You're a criminal?" said Teppic.

"Well, criminal's a dirty word, know what I mean?" said the little ancestor. 'I'd prefer entrepreneur.

You Bastard kicked him. You Bastard had very concise ideas about people putting their hands in his mouth. Besides, he'd seen the bricks, and every camel knew what two bricks added up to.

"Is thys the netherworld?"

"It would appear not," said the queen.

"Thys is all?"

"Hardly worth the trouble of dying, was it?"

Teppicymon: "I hate pyramids."
Ashk-ur-men-tep: "You do not."
Teppicymon: "Excuse me, but I do."
Ashk-ur-men-tep: "But you do not. What you feel nowe is myld dislike. When you have lain in one for a thousand years, then you will begin to know the meaning of hate."

Gern led the way, his face a picture, possibly one painted late at night by an artist who got his inspiration on prescription.

It was another nice day in the high desert. It was always a nice day, if by nice you meant an air temperature like an oven and sand you could roast chestnuts on.

Battle elephants were the fashion lately. They weren't much good for anything except trampling on their own troops when they inevitably panicked, so the military minds on both sides had responded by breeding bigger elephants.

A camel in distress isn't a shy creature. It doesn't hang around in bars, nursing a solitary drink. It doesn't phone up old friends and sob at them. It doesn't mope, or write long soulful poems about Life and how dreadful it is when seen from a bedsitter. It doesn't know what angst is.

All a camel has got is a pair of industrial-strength lungs and a voice like a herd of donkeys being chainsawed.

"I need a stick!" shouted Teppic, as he was whirled past the sergeant. "They never understand anything unless you hit them with a stick, it's like punctuation to a camel!"

It is now known to science that there are many more dimensions than the classical four. Scientists say that they don't normally impinge on the world because the extra dimensions are very small and curve in on themselves, and that since reality is fractal most of it is tucked inside itself. This means either the universe is more full of wonders than we can hope to understand or, more probably, that scientists make things up as they go along.

The Sphinx is an unreal creature. It exists solely because it has been imagined. It is well-known that in an infinite universe everything that can be imagined must exist somewhere, and since many of them are not things that ought to exist in a well-ordered space-time frame they get shoved into a side dimension. This may go some way to explaining the Sphinx's chronic bad temper, although any creature created with the body of a lion, bosom of a woman and wings of an eagle has a serious identity crisis and doesn't need much to make it angry.

Teppic: "You're a sphinx."
Sphinx: "The Sphinx."
Teppic: "Gosh. We've got any amount of statues to you at home. I thought you'd be smaller."
Sphinx: "Cower, mortal, for thou art in the presence of the wise and the terrible. Any good, these statues?"
Teppic: "They don't do you justice."
Sphinx: "Do you really think so? People often get the nose wrong."

"Before you can pass me, O mortal," it said, "you must answer my riddle."

"Why?" said Teppic.

"What?" The Sphinx blinked at him. It hadn't been designed for this sort of thing.

Teppic stared at the claws. This isn't really a fighting animal, he told himself reassuringly, it's definitely overendowed. Besides, its bosom will get in the way, even if its brain doesn't.

"Okay," said the Sphinx, in the uncertain tones of someone who has let the salesman in and is now regretfully contemplating a future in which they are undoubtedly going to buy life insurance.

Teppic: "Let's just see where we've got to, shall we? What, metaphorically speaking, walks on four legs just after midnight, on two legs for most of the day--"
Sphinx: "--barring accidents."
Teppic: "Fine, on two legs barring accidents, until least suppertime, when it walks with three legs--"
Sphinx: "I've known people use two walking sticks."
Teppic: "Okay. How about: when it continues to walk on two legs or with any prosthetic aids of its choice?"

-- Rewriting the riddle

It took great skill to persuade a Djelibeybi god to obey you, and the priests had to be fast on their toes. For example, if you pushed a rock off a cliff, then a quick request to the gods that it should fall down was certain to be answered. In the same way, the gods ensured that the sun set and the stars came out. Any petition to the gods to see to it that palm trees grew with their roots in the ground and their leaves on top was certain to be graciously accepted.

It was the ritual that was important, not the gods. The gods were there to do the duties of a megaphone, because who else would people listen to?

"It happened many times in the past," said the priestess, on-cue. "When a kingdom was threatened or the river did not rise, the king went to intercede with the gods. Was sent to intercede with the gods."

The edge of satisfaction in her voice made it clear that it was a one-way trip.

Bloody hell, he thought. I really am a god.

This could be very embarassing.

There was a damp sucking noise, and the waters of the Djel parted in front of him. There was a sigh from the crowd, but their astonishment was nothing to the surprise of a dozen or so crocodiles, who were left trying to swim in ten feet of air.

In population terms the necropolis outstripped the other cities of the Old Kingdom, but its people didn't get out much and there was nothing to do on Saturday nights.

Ptaclusp IIb: "Are they dead?"
Ptaclusp: "If they're not, some of them are awfully ill."

"People always come back from the dead in such a bad temper."

...the gods of the Disc have always been fascinated by humanity's incredible ability to say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Teppicymon: "How old are you?"
Dios: "I think ... seven thousand years. But sometimes it seems much longer."
Teppicymon: "Really seven thousand years?"
Dios: "Yes."
Teppicymon: "How could any man stand it?"
Dios: "Seven thousand years is just one day at a time."

That's how we survive infinity -- we kill it by breaking it up into small bits.

...connoisseurs of mankind's tendency to put his pedal extremity where his tongue should be are agreed that when the judges' envelopes are opened then Hoot Koomi's fine performance in "Begone from this place, foul shades" will be a contender for all-time bloody stupid greeting.

When you've been dead for hundreds of years, you're not inclined to feel generous to those people who assured you that you were going to have a lovely time.

The trouble with gods is that after enough people start believing in them, they begin to exist.

[The Great Pyramid flared] in absolute silence to begin with, sending up a spire of eye-torturing flame that turned the whole kingdom into a criss-cross of black shadow and white light, a flame that might have turned any watchers not just into a pillar of salt but into a complete condiment set of their choice.

What he wanted, he decided, was a priest. They had to be useful for something, and this seemed the sort of time one might need one. For solace, or possibly, he felt obscurely, to beat their head in with a rock.

Dil: "Are we dead?"
Ptaclusp IIb: "I shouldn't think so. You're walking and talking, after all."
Dil: "That's no guideline, take it from me."

Man was never intended to understand things he meddled with.

"Look, soldier," he said, "anyone bloody stupid enough to think we're going to drag a lot of horses full of soldiers back to our city is certainly daft enough to drag ours all the way back to theirs. QED."

A few rather puzzled seabirds wheeled over the necropolis, where the wind scurried among the fallen masonry and covered with sand the memorials to ancient kings, and the birds said more with a simple bowel movement than Ozymandias ever managed to say.

"Nice place," [Chidder] said, wrapping up thousands of years of architectural accumulation in a mere two syllables.

Ptraci: "I could have died in there! Lots of other things have, by the smell! And the heat!"
Chidder: "You said it worked for Queen wossname, Ram-Jam-Hurrah, or whoever. Don't blame me, at home a necklace or something is usually the thing."
Ptraci: "I bet she had a decent carpet."

Aunt Cleph-ptah-re was not, on reflection, the kind of monarch a new kingdom needed if it was going to make a fresh start. She had a number of stoutly-held views on a variety of subjects, but most of them involved the flaying alive of people she disapproved of. This meant most people under the age of thirty-five, to start with.

The Mistress of the Women had found out that, in addition to the tattoos on his forearms, his back was a veritable illustrated history of exotic practices, and had brought the girls out to be educated. He winced occasionally as her pointer stabbed at items of particular interest, and stuffed his fingers firmly in his great, scarred ears to shut out the giggles.

Teppic: "I'm not going to be king."
Ptraci: "You are the king. You can't change things."
Teppic: "I can. I can abdicate. It's very simple. If I'm not really the king, then I can go whenever I please. If I am the king, then the king's word is final and I can abdicate."

Ptclusp: "The k-- the queen won't like that. The royal family's always been against chaining the holy river with dams and weirs and suchlike."
Ptclusp IIb: "She suggested it. And she graciously went on to say, could we see to it there's places for people to stand and drop rocks on the crocodiles."
Ptclusp: "She said that?"
Ptclusp IIb: "Large pointy rocks, she said."

You Bastard felt ill-used and hard done by. There was nothing particularly unusual about this, however, since this is the normal state of mind for a camel.

It's a mistake trying to cheer up camels. You might as well drop meringues into a black hole.

Ptraci: "But you don't have to go! I need you!"
Teppic: "You've got advisers."
Ptraci: "I didn't mean that. Anyway, there's only Koomi, and he's no good."
Teppic: "You're lucky. I had Dios, and he was good. Koomi will be much better; you can learn a lot by not listening to what he has to say."

"I knew the two of you would get along like a house on fire." Screams, flames, people running for safety...

Ptraci: "And you're going back to be an Assassin, are you?"
Teppic: "I don't think so. I've inhumed a pyramid, a pantheon and the entire old kingdom. It may be worth trying something else."

...time unrolled in glorious uneventfulness for Dios until an alien noise took the silence and did the equivalent of cutting it into small pieces with a rusty breadknife.

It was a noise, in fact, like a donkey being chainsawed. As sounds went, it was to melody what a boxful of dates is to high-performance motocross.