________________________________________________________________
* People have believed for hundreds of years that newts in a well mean that the water’s fresh and drinkable, and in all that time never asked themselves whether the newts got out to go to the lavatory.
She frowned. ‘I’m not saying young Simnel’s a bad lad, but are you sure he’ll do it? It’s asking a lot of a man like him to destroy something like that.’
I HAD NO CHOICE. THE LITTLE FURNACE HERE ISN’T GOOD ?TOUGH?.
‘It’s a wicked sharp scythe.’
I FEAR IT MAY NOT BE SHARP ENOUGH.
‘And no-one ever tried this on you?’
THERE IS A SAYING: YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU?
‘Yes.’
HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE SERIOUSLY BELIEVED IT?
‘I remember reading once,’ said Miss Flitworth.‘about these heathen kings in the desert somewhere who build huge pyramids and put all sorts of stuff in them. Even boats. ?~en? gels in transparent trousers and a couple of saucepan lids. You can’t tell me that’s right.’
I’VE NEVER BEEN VERY SURE ABOUT WHAT IS RIGHT, said Bill Door. I AM NOT SURE ?WHERE? IS SUCH A THING AS RIGHT. OR WRONG. JUST PLACES TO STAND.
‘No, right’s right and wrong’s wrong,’ said Miss FIitworth. ‘I was brought up to tell the difference.’
BY A CONTRABANDISTOR.
‘A what?’
A MOVER OF CONTRABAND.
‘There’s nothing wrong with smuggling!’
I MERELY POINT OUT THAT SOME PEOPLE THINK OTHERWISE.
‘They don’t count!’
BUT –
Lightning struck, somewhere on the hill. The thunder-clap rocked the house; a few bricks from the chimney rattled into the grate. Then the windows shook to a fierce ?~unding?.
Bill Door strode across the room and threw open the door.
Hailstones the size of hens’ eggs bounced off the doorstep and into the kitchen.
OH. DRAMA.
‘Oh. hell!’
Miss Flitworth ducked under his arm.
‘And where’s the wind come from?’
THE SKY? said Bill Door, surprised at the sudden excitement.
‘Come on!’ She whirled back into the kitchen and scrabbled on the dresser for a candle lantern and some matches.
BUT YOU SAID IT WOULD DRY.
‘In a normal storm, yes. In this lot? It’s going to be ruined! We’ll find it spread all over the hill in the morning!’
She fumbled the candle alight and ran back again.
Bill Door looked out into the storm. Straws whirred past, tumbling on the gale.
RUINED? MY HARVEST? He straightened up. BUGGER THAT.
The hail rumbled on the roof of the smithy.
Ned Simnel pumped the furnace bellows until the heart of the coals was white with the merest hint of yellow.
It had been a good day. The Combination Harvester had worked better than he’d dared to hope; old Peedbury had insisted on keeping it to do another field tomorrow, so it had been left out with a tarpaulin over it, securely tied down. Tomorrow he could teach one of the men to use it, and start work on a new improved model. Success was assured. The future definitely lay ahead.
Then there was the matter of the scythe. He went to the wall where it had been hung. A bit of a mystery, that. Here was the most superb instrument of its kind he’d ever seen. You couldn’t even blunt it. Its sharpness extended well beyond its actual edge. And yet he was supposed to destroy it. Where was the sense in that? Ned Simnel was a great believer in sense, of a certain specialised kind.
Maybe Bill Door just wanted to be rid of it. and that was understandable, because even now when it hung innocuously enough from the wall it seemed to radiate sharpness. There was a faint violet corona around the blade, caused by the draughts in the room driving luckless air molecules to their severed death.
Ned Simnel picked it up with great care.
Weird fellow, Bill Door. He’d said he wanted to be sure it was absolutely dead. As if you could kill a thing.
Anyway, how could anyone destroy it? Oh, the handle would burn and the metal would calcine and, if he worked hard enough, eventually there’d be nothing more than a little heap of dust and ashes. That was what the customer wanted.
On the other hand, presumably you could destroy it just by taking the blade off the handle … After all, it wouldn’t be a scythe if you did that. It’d just be, well … bits. Certainly, you could make a scythe out of them, but you could probably do that with the dust and ashes if you knew how to do it.
Ned Simnel was quite pleased with this line of argument.
And, after all. Bill Door hadn’t even asked for proof that the thing had been. er, killed.
He took sight carefully and then used the scythe to chop the end off the anvil. Uncanny. Total sharpness.
He gave in. It was unfair. You couldn’t ask someone like him to destroy something like this. It was a work of art.
It was better than that. It was a work of craft.
He walked across the room to a stack of timber and thrust the scythe well out of the way behind the heap. There was a brief, punctured squeak.
Anyway, it would be all right. He’d give Bill his farthing back in the morning.
The Death of Rats materialised behind the heap in the forge, and trudged to the sad little heap of fur that had been a rat that got in the way of the scythe.
Its ghost was standing beside it, looking apprehensive. It didn’t seem very pleased to see him.
‘Squeak? Squeak?’
SQUEAK. the Death of Rats explained.
‘Squeak?’
SQUEAK, the Death of Rats confirmed.
‘[Preen whiskers] [twitch nose]?’
The Death of Rats shook its head.
SQUEAK.
The rat was crestfallen. The Death of Rats laid a bony but not entirely unkind paw on its shoulder.
Squeak.
Tile rat nodded sadly. It had been a good life in the forge. Ned’s housekeeping was almost non-existent, and he was probably the world champion absent-minded-leaver of unfinished sandwiches. It shrugged, and trooped after the small robed figure. It wasn’t as if it had any choice.
People were streaming through the streets. Most of them were chasing trolleys. Most of the trolleys were full of whatever people had found a trolley useful to carry – firewood, children, shopping.
And they were no longer dodging, but moving blindly, all in the same direction.
You could stop a trolley by turning it over, when its wheels spun madly and uselessly. The wizards saw a number of enthusiastic individuals trying to smash them, but the trolleys were practically indestructible – they bent but didn’t break, and if they had even one wheel left they’d make a valiant attempt to keep going.
‘Look at that one!’ said the Archchancellor. ‘It’s got my laundry in it! My actual laundry! Darn that for a lark!’
He pushed his way through the crowds and rammed his staff into the trolley’s wheels, toppling it over.
‘We can’t get a clear shot at anything with all these civilians around,’ complained the Dean.
‘There’s hundreds of trolleys!’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘It’s just like vermine! * Get away from me, you – you basket!’
________________________________________________________________
* Vermine are small black-and-white rodents found in the Ramtop Mountains. They are ancestors of the lemming, which as is well known throws itself over cliffs and drowns in lakes on a regular basis. Vermine used to do that, too. The point is, though, that dead animals don’t breed, and over the
He flailed at an importunate trolley with his staff.
The tide of wheeled baskets was flowing out of the city. The struggling humans gradually dropped out or fell under the wobbling wheels. Only the wizards stayed in the flowing tide, shouting at one another and attacking the silvery swarm with their staves. It wasn’t that magic didn’t work. It worked quite well.
A good zap could turn a trolley into a thousand intricate little wire puzzles. But what good did that do? A moment later two others would trundle over their stricken sibling.
Around the Dean trolleys were being splashed into metal droplets.
‘He’s really getting the hang of it, isn’t he?’ said the Senior Wrangler, as he and the Bursar levered yet another basket on to its back.
‘He’s certainly saying Yo a lot, ‘ said the Bursar.
The Dean himself didn’t know when he’d been happier. For sixty years he’d been obeying all the self-regulating rules of wizardry, and suddenly he was having the time of his life. He’d never realised that, deep down inside, what he really wanted to do was make things go splat.
Fire leapt from the tip of his staff. Handles and bits of wire and pathetically spinning wheels tinkled down around him. And what made it even better was that there was no end to the targets. A second wave of trolleys, crammed into a tighter space, was trying to advance over the tops of those still in actual contact with the ground. It wasn’t working, but they were trying anyway. And trying desperately, because a