The wizards looked at one another and shrugged.
‘Get out,’ said the Archchancellor. They trooped out.
Ridcully followed them. He paused at the door and waved a finger at Windle.
‘This uncooperative attitude, Windle, is not doing you any good,’ he said, and slammed the door behind him.
After a few seconds the four screws holding the door handle very slowly unscrewed themselves. They rose up and orbited near the ceiling for a while, and then fell.
Windle thought about this for a while.
Memories. He had lots of them. One hundred and thirty years of memories. When he was alive he hadn’t been able to remember one-hundredth of the things he knew but now he was dead, his mind uncluttered with everything except the single silver thread of his thoughts, he could feel them all there. Everything he’d ever read, everything he’d ever seen, everything he’d ever heard. All there, ranged in ranks. Nothing forgotten. Everything in its place.
Three inexplicable phenomena in one day. Four, if you included the fact of his continued existence. That was really inexplicable.
It needed explicating.
Well, that was someone else’s problem. Everything was someone else’s problem now.
The wizards crouched outside the door of Windle’s room.
‘Got everything?’ said Ridcully.
‘Why can’t we get some of the servants to do it?’ muttered the Senior Wrangler.‘It’s undignified.’
‘Because I want it done properly and with dignity,’ snapped she Archchancellor. ‘If anyone’s going to
bury a wizard at a crossroads with a stake hammered through him, then wizards ought to do it. After all, we’re his friends.’
‘What is this thing, anyway?’ said the Dean, inspecting the implement in his hands.
‘It’s called a shovel, ‘ said the Senior Wrangler.‘I’ve seen the gardeners use them. You stick the sharp end in the ground. Then it gets a bit technical.’
Ridcully squinted through the keyhole.
‘He’s lying down again,’ he said. He got up, brushing the dust off his knees, and grasped the door handle.‘Right,’ he said.‘Take your time from me.
One…two…’
Modo the gardener was trundling a barrow load of hedge trimmings to a bonfire behind the new High Energy Magic research building when about half a dozen wizards went past at, for wizards, high speed.
Windle Poons was being borne aloft between them.
Modo heard him to say, ‘Really, Archchancellor, are you quite sure this one will work -?’
‘We’ve got your best interests at heart,’ said Ridcully.
‘I’m sure, but -‘
‘We’ll soon have you feeling your old self again,’ said the Bursar.
‘No, we won’t,’ hissed the Dean.‘That’s the whole point!’
‘We’ll soon have you not feeling your old self again, that’s the whole point,’ stuttered the Bursar, as they rounded the corner.
Modo picked up the handles of the barrow again and pushed it thoughtfully towards the secluded area where he kept his bonfire, his compost heaps, his leaf-mould pile, and the little shed he sat in when it rained.
He used to be assistant gardener at the palace, but this job was a lot more interesting. You really got to see life.
Ankh-Morpork society is street society. There is always something interesting going on. At the moment, the driver of a two-horse fruit wagon was holding the Dean six inches in the air by the scruff of the Dean’s robe and was threatening to push the Dean’s face through the back of the Dean’s head.
‘It’s peaches, right?’ he kept bellowing.‘You know what happens to peaches what lies around too long?
They get bruised. Lots of things round here are going to get bruised.’
‘I am a wizard, you know, ‘ said the Dean, his pointy shoes dangling.‘If it wasn’t for the fact that it would be against the rules for me to use magic in anything except a purely defensive manner, you would definitely be in a lot of trouble.’
‘What you doing, anyway?’ said the driver, lowering the Dean so he could look suspiciously over his shoulder.
‘Yeah,’ said a man trying to control the team pulling a lumber wagon, ‘what’s going on? There’s people here being paid by the hour, you know!’
‘Move along at the front there!’
The lumber driver turned in his seat and addressed the queue of carts behind him.‘I’m trying to, ‘ he said.
‘It’s not my fault, is it? There’s a load of wizards digging up the godsdamn street!’
The Archchancellor’s muddy face peered over the edge of the hole.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dean, ‘ he said, ‘I told you to sort things out!’
‘Yes, I was just asking this gentleman to back up and go another way,’ said the Dean, who was afraid he was beginning to choke.
The fruiterer turned him around 90 that he could see along the crowded streets.‘Ever tried to back up sixty carts all at once?’ he demanded.‘It’s not easy. Especially when everyone can’t move because you guys have got it so’s the carts are backed up all round
the block and no-one can move because everyone’s in someone else’s way, right?’
The Dean tried to nod. He had wondered himself about the wisdom of digging the hole at the junction of the Street of Small Gods and Broad Way, two of the busiest streets in Ankh-Morpork. It had seemed logical at the time. Even the most persistent undead ought to stay decently buried under that amount of traffic. The only problem was that no-one had thought seriously about the difficulty of digging up a couple of main streets during the busy time of day.
‘All right, all right, what’s going on here?’
The crowd of spectators opened to admit the bulky figure of Sergeant Colon of the Watch. He moved through the people unstoppably, his stomach leading the way. When he saw the wizards, waist deep in a hole in the middle of the road, his huge red face brightened up.
‘What’s this, then?’ he said. ‘A gang of international crossroads thieves?’
He was overjoyed. His long-term policing strategy was paying off!
The Archchancellor tipped a shovelful of Ankh-Morpork loam over his boots.
‘Don’t be stupid, man,’ he snapped.‘This is vitally important.’
‘Oh, yes. That’s what they all say,’ said Sergeant Colon, not a man to be easily steered from a particular course of thought once he’d got up to mental speed. ‘I bet there’s hundreds of villages in heathen places like Klatch that’d pay good money for a nice prestigious crossroads like this, eh?’
Ridcully looked up at him with his mouth open.
‘What are you gabbling about, officer?’ he said. He pointed irritably to his pointy hat.‘Didn’t you hear me? We’re wizards. This is wizard business. So if you could just sort of direct the traffic around us, there’s a good chance -‘
‘- these peaches bruise as soon as you even look at ‘em -‘ said a voice behind Sergeant Colon.
‘The old idiots have been holding us up for half an hour,’ said a cattle drover who had long ago lost control of forty steers now wandering aimlessly around the nearby streets.‘I wants ‘em arrested.’
It dawned on the sergeant that he had inadvertently placed himself centre stage in a drama involving hundreds of people, some of them wizards and all of them angry.
‘What are you doing, then?’ he said weakly.
‘We’re burying our colleague. What does it look like?’ said Ridcully.
Colon’s eyes swivelled to an open coffin by the side of the road. Windle Poons gave him a little wave.
‘But … he’s not dead … is he?’ he said, his forehead wrinkling as he tried to get ahead of the situation.
‘Appearances ,,Can be deceptive, ‘ said the Archchancellor.
‘But he just waved to me,’ said the sergeant, desperately.
‘So?’
‘Well, it’s not normal for -‘
‘It’s all right, sergeant, ‘ said Windle.
Sergeant Colon sidled closer to the coffin.
‘Didn’t I see you throw yourself into the river last night?’ he said, out of the corner of his mouth.
‘Yes. You were very helpful, ‘ said Windle.
‘And then you threw yourself sort of out again,’ said the sergeant.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘But you were down there for ages.’
‘Well, it was very dark, you see. I couldn’t find the steps.’
Sergeant Colon had to concede the logic of this.
‘Well, I suppose you must be dead, then,’ he said. ‘No-one could stay down there who wasn’t dead.’
‘This is it,’ Windle agreed.
‘Only why are you waving and talking?’ said Colon.
The Senior Wrangler poked his head out of the hole.
‘It’s not unknown for a dead body to move and make noises after death, Sergeant,’ he volunteered.‘It’s all down to involuntary muscular spasms.’
‘Actually, Senior Wrangler is right,’ said WindlePoons.‘I read that somewhere.’
‘Oh.’ Sergeant Colon looked around.‘Right, ‘ he said, uncertainly.‘Well … fair enough, I suppose …’
‘OK, we’re done,’ said the Archchancellor, scrambling out of the hole, ‘it’s deep enough. Come on, Windle, down you go.’
‘I really am very touched, you know,’ said Windle, lying back in the coffin. It was quite a good one, from the mortuary in Elm Street. The Archchancellor had let him choose it himself.