King Teppicymon XXVII nodded gloomily, and went by himself to wave goodbye to his son. He was less certain than his sister about the unpleasantness of assassination; he’d been reluctantly in politics for a long time, and felt that while assassination was probably worse than debate it was certainly better than war, which some people tended to think of as the same thing only louder. And there was no doubt that young Vyrt always had plenty of money, and used to turn up at the palace with expensive gifts, exotic suntans and thrilling tales of the interesting people he’d met in foreign parts, in most cases quite briefly.
He wished Vyrt was around to advise. 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.
But everyone agreed that the assassins’ school offered the best all-round education in the world. A qualified assassin should be at home in any company, and able to play at least one musical instrument. Anyone inhumed by a graduate of the Guild school could go to his rest satisfied that he had been annulled by someone of taste and discretion.
And, after all, what was there for him at home? A kingdom two miles wide and one hundred and fifty miles long, which was almost entirely under water during the flood season, and threatened on either side by stronger neighbours who tolerated its existence only because they’d be constantly at war if it wasn’t there.
Oh, Djelibeybi[3] had been great once, when upstarts like Tsort and Ephebe were just a bunch of nomads with their towels on their heads. All that remained of those great days was the ruinously-expensive palace, a few dusty ruins in the desert and – the pharaoh sighed – the pyramids. Always the pyramids.
His ancestors had been keen on pyramids. The pharaoh wasn’t. Pyramids had bankrupted the country, drained it drier than ever the river did. The only curse they could afford to put on a tomb these days was ‘Bugger Off’.
The only pyramids he felt comfortable about were the very small ones at the bottom of the garden, built every time one of the cats died.
He’d promised the boy’s mother.
He missed Artela. There’d been a terrible row about taking a wife from outside the Kingdom, and some of her foreign ways had puzzled and fascinated even him. Maybe it was from her he’d got the strange dislike of pyramids; in Djelibeybi that was like disliking breathing. But he’d promised that Pteppic could go to school outside the kingdom. She’d been insistent about that. ‘People never learn anything in this place,’ she’d said. ‘They only remember things.’
If only she’d remembered about not swimming in the river .
He watched two of the servants load Teppic’s trunk on to the back of the coach, and for the first time either of them could remember laid a paternal hand on his son’s shoulder.
In fact he was at a loss for something to say. We’ve never really had time to get to know one another, he thought. There’s so much I could have given him. A few bloody good hidings wouldn’t have come amiss.
‘Urn,’ he said. ‘Well, my boy.’
‘Yes, father?’
‘This is, er, the first time you’ve been away from home by yourself’
‘No, father. I spent last summer with Lord Fhem-pta-hem, you remember.’
‘Oh, did you?’ The pharaoh recalled the palace had seemed quieter at the time. He’d put it down to the new tapestries.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘you’re a young man, nearly thirteen-‘
‘Twelve, father,’ said Teppic patiently.
‘Are you sure?’
‘It was my birthday last month, father. You bought me a warming pan.’
‘Did I? How singular. Did I say why?’
‘No, father.’ Teppic looked up at his father’s mild, puzzled features. ‘It was a very good warming pan,’ he added reassuringly. ‘I like it a lot.’
‘Oh. Good. Er.’ His majesty patted his son’s shoulder again, in a vague way, like a man drumming his fingers on his desk while trying to think. An idea appeared to occur to him.
The servants had finished strapping the trunk on to the roof of the coach and the driver was patiently holding open the door.
‘When a young man sets out in the world,’ said his majesty uncertainly, ‘there are, well, it’s very important that he remembers . . . The point is, that it is a very big world after all, with all sorts. . . And of course, especially so in the city, where there are many additional . . . ‘ He paused, waving one hand vaguely in the air.
Teppic took it gently.
‘It’s quite all right, father,’ he said. ‘Dios the high priest explained to me about taking regular baths, and not going blind.’
His father blinked at him.
‘You’re not going blind?’ he said.
‘Apparently not, father.’
‘Oh. Well. Jolly good,’ said the king. ‘Jolly, jolly good. That is good news.’
‘I think I had better be going, father. Otherwise I shall miss the tide.’
His majesty nodded, and patted his pockets.
‘There was something. . . ‘he muttered, and then tracked it down, and slipped a small leather bag into Teppic’s pocket. He tried the shoulder routine again.
‘A little something,’ he murmured. ‘Don’t tell your aunt. Oh, you can’t, anyway. She’s gone for a lie-down. It’s all been rather too much for her.’
All that remained then was for Teppic to go and sacrifice a chicken at the statue of Khuft, the founder of Djelibeybi, so that his ancestor’s guiding hand would steer his footsteps in the world. It was only a small chicken, though, and when Khuft had finished with it the king had it for lunch.
Djelibeybi really was a small, self-centred kingdom. Even its plagues were half-hearted. 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[4].
That evening, when they were well outside the delta of the Djel and heading across the Circle Sea to Ankh-Morpork, Teppic remembered the bag and examined its contents. With love, but also with his normal approach to things, his father had presented him with a cork, half a tin of saddlesoap, a small bronze coin of uncertain denomination, and an extremely elderly sardine.
It is a well-known fact that when one is about to die the senses 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 – which in Teppic’s case consisted of a broad expanse of cobblestones some eighty feet away and closing – in the hope that it will go away.
The trouble is that it soon will.
Whatever the reason, Teppic was suddenly acutely aware of things around him. The way the moonlight glowed on the rooftops. The smell of fresh bread wafting from a nearby bakery. The whirring of a cockchafer as it barrelled past his ear, upwards. The sound of a baby crying, in the distance, and the bark of a dog. The gentle rush of the air, with particular reference to its thinness and lack of handholds.
There had been more than seventy of them enrolling that year. 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). The courtyard in the centre of the Guild buildings was thronged with boys who all had two things in common – overlarge trunks, which they were sitting on, and clothes that had been selected for them to grow into, and which they were more or less sitting in. Some optimists had brought weapons with them, which were confiscated and sent home over the next few weeks.
Teppic watched them carefully. There were distinct advantages to being the only child of parents too preoccupied with their own affairs to worry much about him, or indeed register his existence for days at a time.
His mother, as far as he could remember, had been a pleasant woman and as self-centred as a gyroscope. She’d liked cats. She didn’t just venerate them – everyone in the kingdom did that – but she actually liked them, too. 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.