Interesting Times (Discworld, #17; Rincewind, #5)

by Terry Pratchett

There is a curse. They say: May You Live in Interesting Times.

“The Hongs, the Sungs, the Tangs, the McSweeneys and the Fangs.” “Them? I didn’t know they were noble,” said Io. “They’re all very rich and have had millions of people butchered or tortured to death merely for reasons of expediency and pride,” said the Lady. The watching gods nodded solemnly. That was certainly noble behavior. That was exactly what they would have done. “McFweeneyf?” said Offler. “Very old established family,” said Fate. “Oh.”

This is the Discworld, which goes through space on the back of a giant turtle. Most worlds do, at some time in their perception. It’s a cosmological view the human brain seems pre-programmed to take. On veldt and plain, in cloud jungle and silent red desert, in swamp and reed marsh, in fact in any place where something goes “plop” off a floating log as you approach, variations on the following take place at a crucial early point in the development of the tribal mythology . . . “You see dat?” “What?” “It just went plop off dat log.” “Yeah? Well?” “I reckon . . . I reckon . . . like, I reckon der world is carried on der back of one of dem.” A moment of silence while this astrophysical hypothesis is considered, and then . . . “The whole world?” “Of course, when I say one of dem, I mean a big one of dem.” “It’d have to be, yeah.” “Like . . . really big.” “’S funny, but . . . I see what you mean.” “Makes sense, right?” “Makes sense, yeah. Thing is . . .” “What?” “I just hope it never goes plop.”

wonder if you could tell me: who is the Great Wizard?” Ridcully considered this. “The Dean, possibly,” he said. “He must be all of twenty stone.” “Somehow I feel that is not perhaps the right answer,” said Lord Vetinari. “I suspect from context that ‘great’ means superior.” “Not the Dean, then,” said Ridcully.

“Isn’t that a Pointless Albatross?” said Ridcully. “Indeed,” said Lord Vetinari. “And a highly trained one. It will return this evening. Six thousand miles on one jar of anchovies and a bottle of fish paste my clerk Drumknott found in the kitchens. Amazing.” “I’m sorry?” said Ridcully. “Return to where?” Lord Vetinari turned to face him. “Not, let me make it clear, to the Counterweight Continent,” he said. “This is not one of those birds the Agatean Empire uses for its message services. It is a well-known fact that we have no contact with that mysterious land. And this bird is not the first to arrive here for many years, and it did not bring a strange and puzzling message. Do I make myself clear?” “No.” “Good.” “This is not an albatross?” The Patrician smiled. “Ah, I can see you’re getting the hang of it.” Mustrum Ridcully, though possessed of a large and efficient brain, was not at home with duplicity. He looked at the long vicious beak. “Looks like a bloody albatross to me,” he said. “And you just said it was. I said, isn’t that a—” The Patrician waved a hand irritably. “Leaving aside our ornithological studies,” he said, “the point is that this bird had, in its message pouch, the following piece of paper—” “You mean did not have the following piece of paper?” said Ridcully, struggling for a grip. “Ah, yes. Of course, that is what I mean. And this isn’t it. Observe.”

And he had risen to the leadership of one of the most influential families in the Empire by relentless application, total focusing of his mental powers, and six well-executed deaths. The last one had been that of his father, who’d died happy in the knowledge that his son was maintaining an old family tradition. The senior families venerated their ancestors, and saw no harm in prematurely adding to their number.

Magic isn’t like maths. Like the Discworld itself, it follows common sense rather than logic.

“Oh, dear me, I didn’t start out a barbarian. I used to be a school teacher. That’s why they call me Teach.” “What did you teach?” “Geography. And I was very interested in Auriental* studies. But I decided to give it up and make a living by the sword.” “After being a teacher all your life?” “It did mean a change of perspective, yes.” “But . . . well . . . surely . . . the privation, the terrible hazards, the daily risk of death . . .” Mr. Saveloy brightened up. “Oh, you’ve been a teacher, have you?”

“We are a traveling theater,” she said. “It is convenient. Noh actors are allowed to move around.” “Aren’t they?” said Rincewind. “You do not understand. We are Noh actors.” “Oh, you weren’t too bad.”

“Where you from, shogun?” he asked, and his voice suddenly had the little barbed edge of suspicion. “Bes Pelargic,” said Rincewind quickly. “That explains my strange accent and mannerisms that might otherwise lead people to think I was some sort of foreigner,” he added.

At the moment the garden was occupied by Two Little Wang, the Master of Protocol, who came there because he felt it was good for his nerves. Perhaps it was the number two, he’d always told himself. It was an unlucky birth number. Being called Little Wang was merely a lack-of-courtesy detail, a sort of minor seagull dropping after the great heap of buffalo excrement that Heaven had pasted into his very horoscope.

“What’s the penalty for entering the Forbidden City again, Teach?” “I believe it’s a punishment similar to hanging, drawing, and quartering. So, you see, it would be a good idea if—” There was a very faint splashing. “How’re you drawn, then?” “I think your innards are cut out and shown to you.” “What for?” “I don’t really know. To see if you recognize them, I suppose.” “What . . . like, ‘Yep, that’s my kidneys, yep, that’s my breakfast’?” “How’re you quartered? Is that, like, they give you somewhere to stay?” “I think not, from context.” For a while there was no sound but the splash of six pairs of feet and the squeak-squeak of what sounded like a wheel. “Well, how’re you hung?” “Excuse me?” “Hur, hur, hur . . . sorry, sorry.”

Rincewind crept back towards the city, rounded a tent in the shadows, and collided with a horse, which trod heavily on his foot. “Your wife is a big hippo!” SORRY. Rincewind froze, both hands clutching his aching foot. He knew only one person with a voice like a cemetery in midwinter. He tried to hop backwards, and collided with another horse. RINCEWIND, ISN’T IT? said Death. YES. GOOD EVENING. I DON’T BELIEVE YOU HAVE MET WAR. RINCEWIND, WAR. WAR, RINCEWIND. War touched his helmet in salute. “Pleasure’s all mine,” he said. He indicated the other three riders. “Like to introduce you to m’sons, Terror and Panic. And m’daughter, Clancy.” The children chorused a “hello.” Clancy was scowling, looked about seven years old and was wearing a hard hat and a Pony Club badge.

War pulled a large paper-wrapped package out of his saddlebag. “We’ve got . . . let’s see now . . . Egg and Cress, Chicken Tikka, and Mature Cheese with Crunchy Pickle, I think.” THEY DO SUCH MARVELOUS THINGS WITH SANDWICHES THESE DAYS. “Oh . . . and Bacon Surprise.” REALLY? WHAT IS SO SURPRISING ABOUT BACON? “I don’t know. I suppose it comes as something of a shock to the pig.”

“When seven men go out to fight an army 100,000 times bigger there’s only one way it can end,” said Twoflower. “Right. I’m glad you see sense.” “They’ll win,” said Twoflower. “They’ve got to. Otherwise the world’s just not working properly.”

If it came to that, he had no real reason for considering that the Luggage was male. Admittedly it had a homicidal nature, but so had a lot of the women that Rincewind had met, and they had often become a little more homicidal as a result of meeting him. Capacity for violence, Rincewind had heard, was unisexual. He wasn’t certain what unisex was, but expected that it was what he normally experienced.

There were a large number of ranks in the armies of the Empire, and many of them were untranslatable. Three Pink Pig and Five White Fang were, loosely speaking, privates, and not just because they were pale, vulnerable, and inclined to curl up and hide when danger threatened.

“Heheh, we never let archers stop us at the Battle of Koom Valley!” cackled the antique barbarian. Boy Willie sighed. “That was between dwarfs and trolls, Hamish,” he said. “And you ain’t either. So whose side were you on?” “Whut?” “I said WHOSE SIDE WERE YOU ON?” “I were on the side of being paid money to fight,” said Hamish. “Best side there is.”

Ah. So . . . magic armor. Perfectly normal magic armor. It had never been very popular in Ankh-Morpork. Of course, it was light. You could make it as thin as cloth. But it tended to lose its magic without warning. Many an ancient lord’s last words had been, “You can’t kill me because I’ve got magic aaargh.”

Rincewind looked at the boots, with suspicious recollection of the trouble there had been with the University’s prototype Seven League Boots. Footwear which tried to make you take steps twenty-one miles long imposed unfortunate groinal strains; they’d got the things off the student just in time, but he’d still had to wear a special device for several months, and ate standing up.

Life was, he had heard, like a bird which flies out of the darkness and across a crowded hall and then through another window into the endless night again. In Rincewind’s case it had managed to do something incontinent in his dinner.

Twoflower looked around with some interest. “I don’t know why you think your life has been so bad,” he said. “We had a lot of fun when we were younger. Hey, do you remember the time when we went over the edge of the world?” “Often,” said Rincewind. “Usually around 3 A.M.” “And that time we were on a dragon and it disappeared in midair?” “You know,” said Rincewind, “sometimes a whole hour will go by when I don’t remember that.” “And that time we were attacked by those people who wanted to kill us?” “Which of those one hundred and forty-nine occasions are you referring to?” “Character building, that sort of thing,” said Twoflower, happily. “Made me what I am today.”

“Where is this?” THE DESERT. It was brilliantly lit, and yet the sky was midnight-black. He stared at the horizon. “How big is it?” FOR SOME, VERY BIG. FOR LORD HONG, FOR INSTANCE, IT CONTAINS A LOT OF IMPATIENT GHOSTS. “I thought Lord Hong didn’t believe in ghosts.” HE MAY DO SO NOW. A LOT OF GHOSTS BELIEVE IN LORD HONG.

There were three reasons why Rincewind was no racist. He’d ended up in too many places too suddenly to develop that kind of mind. Besides, if he’d thought about it much, most of the really dreadful things that had happened to him had been done by quite pale people with big wardrobes. Those were two of the reasons. The third was that these men, who were just rising from a half-crouching position, were all holding spears pointing at Rincewind and there is something about the sight of four spears aimed at your throat that causes no end of respect and the word “sir” to arise spontaneously in the mind.

People are always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles. When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances, they say that’s a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events—the oil spilled just there, the safety fence broken just there—that must also be a miracle. Just because it’s not nice doesn’t mean it’s not miraculous.