She took the path through to the orchard again.
And when I was born Mum and Dad were so afraid that I felt at home here they brought me up to be . . . welt . . . a Susan. What kind of name is that for Death’s granddaughter? A girl like that should have better cheekbones, straight hair and a name with Vs and Xs in it.
And there, once again, was the thing he’d made for her. All by himself. Working it all out from first principles . . .
A swing. A simple swing.
It was already burning hot in the desert between Klatch and Hersheba.
The air shimmied, and then there was a pop. Albert appeared on a sand-dune. There was a clay-brick fort on the horizon.
‘The Klatchian Foreign Legion,’ he muttered, as sand began its inexorable progress into his boots.
Albert trudged towards it with the Death of Rats sitting on his shoulder.
He knocked on the door, which had a number of arrows in it. After a while a small hatch slid back.
‘What do you want, offendi?’ said a voice from somewhere behind it.
Albert held up a card.
‘Have you seen someone who didn’t look like this?’ he demanded.
There was silence.
‘Then let’s say: have you seen some mysterious stranger who didn’t talk about his past?’ said Albert.
‘This is the Klatchian Foreign Legion, offendi. People don’t talk about their past. They join up to . . . to…
It dawned on Albert as the pause lengthened that it was up to him to get the conversation going again.
‘Forget?’
‘Right. Forget. Yes.’
‘So have you had any recent recruits who were a little, shall we say, odd?’
‘Might have done,’ said the voice slowly. ‘Can’t remember.’
The hatchway slammed shut.
Albert hammered on it again. The hatchway opened. ‘Yes, what is it?’
‘Are you sure you can’t remember?’
‘Remember what?’
Albert took a deep breath.
‘I demand to see your commanding officer!’
The hatch shut. The hatch opened.
‘Sorry. It appears that I am the commanding officer. You’re not a D’reg or a Hershebian, are you?’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘I’m . . . pretty sure I must have done. Once. You know how it is . . . head like . . . thing, you know . . . With holes in . . . You drain lettuce in it . . . er . . .’
There was the sound of bolts being pulled back, and a wicket door opened in the gateway.
The possible officer was a sergeant, in so far as Albert was at all familiar with Klatchian ranks. He had the look about him of someone who, among the things he couldn’t remember, would include a good night’s sleep. If he could remember to.
There were a few other Klatchian soldiers inside the fort, sitting or, just barely, standing. Many were bandaged. And there was a rather greater number of soldiers slumped or lying on the packed sand who’d never need a night’s sleep ever again.
‘What’s been happening here?’ said Albert. His tone was so authoritative that the sergeant found himself saluting.
‘We were attacked by Dregs, sir,’ he said, swaying slightly. ‘Hundreds of them! They outnumbered us . . . er . . . what’s the number after nine? Got a one in it.’
‘Ten.’
‘Ten to one, sir.’
‘I see you survived, though,’ said Albert.
‘Ah,’ said the sergeant. ‘Yes. Er. Yes. That’s where it all gets a bit complicated, in fact. Er. Corporal? That’s you. No, you just next to him. The one with the two stripes?’
‘Me?’ said a small fat soldier.
‘Yes. Tell him what happened.’
‘Oh. Right. Er. Well, the bastards had shot us full of arrows, right? An’ it looked like it was all up with us. Then someone suggested sticking bodies up on the battlements with their spears and crossbows and everything so’s the bastards’d think we was still up to strength-‘
‘It’s not an original idea, mind you,’ said the sergeant. ‘Been done dozens of times.’
‘Yeah,’ said the corporal awkwardly. ‘That’s what they must’ve thought. And then . . . and then . . . when they was galloping down the sand-dunes . . . when they was almost on us, laughing and everything, saying stuff like “that old trick again” . . . someone shouted “Fire!” and they did.’
‘The dead men-?’
‘I joined the Legion to . . . er . . . you know, with your mind . . .’ the corporal began.
‘Forget?’ said Albert.
‘That’s right. Forget. And I’ve been getting good at it. But I’m not going to forget my old mate Nudger Malik stuck full of arrows and still giving the enemy what for,’ said the corporal. ‘Not for a long time. I’m going to give it a try, mind you.’
Albert looked up at the battlements. They were empty.
‘Someone formed ’em up in formation and they all marched out, afterwards,’ said the corporal. ‘And I went out to look just now and there was just graves. They must have dug them for one another . . .’
‘Tell me,’ said Albert, ‘who is this “someone” to whom you keep referring?’
The soldiers looked at one another.
‘We’ve just been talking about that,’ said the sergeant. ‘We’ve been trying to remember. He was in . . . the Pit . . . when it started . . .’
‘Tall, was he?’ said Albert.
‘Could have been tall, could have been tall,’ nodded the corporal. ‘He had a tall voice, certainly.’ He looked puzzled at the words coming out of his own mouth.
‘What did he look like?’
‘Well, he had a . . . with . . . and he was about . . . more or less a . . .’
‘Did he look . . . loud and deep?’ said Albert.
The corporal grinned with relief. ‘That’s him,’ he said. ‘Private . . . Private . . . Beau . . . Beau . . . can’t quite remember his name . . .’
‘I know that when he walked out of the . . .’ the sergeant began, and began to snap his fingers irritably, ‘. . . thing you open and shut. Made of wood. Hinges and bolts on it. Thank you. Gate. That’s right . . . gate. When he went out of the gate he said . . . what was it he said, corporal?’
‘He said, “EVERY LAST DETAIL”, Sir.’
Albert looked around the fort.
‘So he’s gone.’
‘Who?’
‘The man you were just telling me about.’
‘Oh. Yes. Er. Have you any idea who he was, offendi? I mean, it was amazing . . . talk about morale . . .’
‘Esprit de corpse?’ said Albert, who could be nasty at times. ‘I suppose he didn’t say where he was going next?’
‘Where who was going next?’ said the sergeant, wrinkling his forehead in honest enquiry.
‘Forget I asked,’ said Albert.
He took a last look round the little fort. It probably didn’t matter much in the history of the world whether it survived or not, whether the dotted line on the map went one way or the other. Just like the Master to tinker with things . . .
Sometimes he tries to be human, too, he thought. And he makes a pig’s ear out of it.
‘Carry on, sergeant,’ he said, and wandered back into the desert.
The legionnaires watched him disappear over the dunes, and then got on with the job of tidying up the fort.
‘Who d’you think he was?’
‘Who?’
‘The person you just mentioned.’
‘Did I?’
‘Did you what?’
Albert crested a dune. From here the dotted line was just visible, winding treacherously across the sand.
SQUEAK.
‘You and me both,’ said Albert.
He removed an extremely grubby handkerchief from a pocket, knotted it in all four corners, and put it on his head.
‘Right,’ he said, but there was a trace of uncertainty in his voice. ‘Seems to me we’re not being logical about this.’
SQUEAK.
‘I mean, we could be chasing him all over the place.’
SQUEAK.
‘So maybe we ought to think about this.’
SQUEAK.
‘Now . . . if you were on the Disc, definitely feeling a bit strange, and could go absolutely anywhere, anywhere at all . . . where would you go?’
SQUEAK?
‘Anywhere at all. But somewhere where no-one remembers your name.’
The Death of Rats looked around at the endless, featureless and above all dry desert.
SQUEAK.
‘You know, I think you’re right.’
It was in an apple tree.
He built me a swing, Susan remembered.
She sat and stared at the thing.
It was quite complicated. In so far as the thinking behind it could be inferred from the resulting construction, it had run like this:
Clearly a swing should be hung from the stoutest branch.
In fact – safety being paramount – it would be better to hang it from the two stoutest branches, one to each rope.