There was a lot of shouting but the comforting thing, the important thing, was that it was all behind him. It would soon try to catch him up but that was a problem for the future. He could also consider where he was running to as well, but an experienced coward never bothered with the to when the from held such fascination.
A less practised runner would have risked a glance behind, but Rincewind instinctively knew all about wind drag and the tendency of inconvenient rocks to position themselves under the unwary foot. Besides, why look behind? He was already running as fast as he could. Nothing he could see would make him run any faster.
There was a large shapeless village ahead, a construction apparently of mud and dung. In the fields in front of it a dozen peasants looked up from their toil at the accelerating wizard.
Perhaps it was Rincewind’s imagination, but as he passed them he could have sworn that he heard the cry:
‘Necessarily Extended Duration To The Red Army! Regrettable Decease Without Undue Suffering To The Forces of Oppression!’
Rincewind dived through the huts as the soldiers charged at the peasants.
Cohen had been right. There seemed to be a revolution. But the Empire had been in unchanged existence for thousands of years, courtesy and a respect for protocol were part of its very fabric, and by the sound of it the revolutionaries had yet to master the art of impolite slogans.
Rincewind preferred running to hiding. Hiding was all very well, but if you were found then you were stuck. But the village was the only cover for miles around, and some of the soldiers had horses. A man might be faster than a horse over a short distance, but over this panorama of flat, open fields a horse had a running man bang to rights.
So he ducked into a building at random and pushed aside the first door he came to.
It had, pasted on it, the words: Examination. Silence!
Forty expectant and slightly worried faces looked up at him from their writing stools. They weren’t children, but full-grown adults.
There was a lectern at the end of the room and, on it, a pile of papers sealed with string and wax.
Rincewind felt the atmosphere was familiar. He’d breathed it before, even if it had been a world away. It was full of those cold sweaty odours created by the sudden realization that it was probably too late to do that revision you’d kept on putting off. Rincewind had faced many horrors in his time, but none held quite the same place in the lexicon of dread as those few seconds after someone said, ‘Turn over your papers now.’
The candidates were watching him.
There was shouting somewhere outside.
He hurried up to the lectern, tore at the string and distributed the papers as fast as he could. Then he dived back to the safety of the lectern, removed his hat, and was bent low when the door opened slowly.
‘Go away!’ he screamed. ‘Examination in progress!’
The unseen figure behind the door murmured something to someone else. The door was closed again.
The candidates were still staring at him.
‘Er. Very well. Turn over your papers.’
There was a rustle, a few moments of that dreadful silence, and then much activity with brushes.
Competitive examinations. Oh, yes. That was another thing people knew about the Empire. They were the only way to get any kind of public post and the security that brought. People had said that this must be a very good system, because it opened up opportunities for people of merit.
Rincewind picked up a spare paper and read it.
It was headed: Examination for the post of Assistant Night-Soil Operative for the District of W’ung.
He read question one. It required candidates to write a sixteen-line poem on evening mist over the reed beds.
Question two seemed to be about the use of metaphor in some book Rincewind had never heard of.
Then there was a question about music . . .
Rincewind turned the paper over a couple of times. There didn’t seem to be any mention, anywhere, of words like ‘compost’ or ‘bucket’ or ‘wheelbarrow’. But presumably all this produced a better class of person than the Ankh-Morpork system, which asked just one question: ‘Got your own shovel, have you?’
The shouting outside seemed to have died away; Rincewind risked poking his head out of the door. There was a commotion near the road but it no longer seemed Rincewind-orientated.
He ran for it.
The students got on with their examination. One of the more enterprising, however, rolled up his trouser leg and copied down a poem about mist he’d composed, at great effort, some time previously. After a while you got to know what kind of questions the examiners asked.
Rincewind trotted onwards, trying to keep to ditches wherever these weren’t knee deep in sucking mud. It wasn’t a landscape built for concealment. The Agateans grew crops on any piece of ground the seeds wouldn’t roll off. Apart from the occasional rocky outcrop there was a distinct lack of places in which to lurk.
No-one paid him much attention once he’d left the village far behind. The occasional water buffalo operative would turn to watch him until he was out of sight, but displayed no special curiosity; it was merely that Rincewind was marginally more interesting than watching a water buffalo defecate.
He kept the road just in sight and, by evening, reached a crossroads.
There was an inn.
Rincewind hadn’t eaten since the leopard. The inn meant food, but food meant money. He was hungry, and he had no money.
He chided himself for this kind of negative thinking. That was not the right approach. What he should do was go in and order a large, nourishing meal. Then instead of being hungry with no money he’d be well fed with no money, a net gain on his current position. Of course, the world was likely to raise some objections, but in Rincewind’s experience there were few problems that couldn’t be solved with a scream and a good ten yards’ start. And, of course, he would just have had a strengthening meal.
Besides, he liked Hunghungese food. A few refugees had opened restaurants in Ankh-Morpork and Rincewind considered himself something of an expert on the dishes.[17]
The one huge room was thick with smoke and, insofar as this could be determined through the swirls and coils, quite busy. A couple of old men were sitting in front of a complicated pile of ivory tiles, playing Shibo Yangcong-san. He wasn’t sure what they were smoking but, by the looks on their faces, they were happy they’d chosen it.
Rincewind made his way to the fireplace, where a skinny man was tending a cauldron.
He gave him a cheery smile. ‘Good morning! Can I partake of your famous delicacy “Meal A for two People with extra Prawn Cracker”?’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Um. Then . . . could I see a painful ear . . . a croak of a frog . . . a menu?’
‘What’s a menu, friend?’
Rincewind nodded. He knew what it meant when a stranger called you ‘friend’ like that. No-one who called someone else ‘friend’ was feeling very kindly disposed.
‘What is there to eat, I meant.’
‘Noodles, boiled cabbage and pork whiskers.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Pork whiskers don’t grow on trees, san.’
‘I’ve been seeing water buffalo all day,’ Rincewind said. ‘Don’t you people ever eat beef?’
The ladle splashed into the cauldron. Somewhere behind him a shibo tile dropped on to the floor. The back of Rincewind’s head prickled under the stares.
‘We don’t serve rebels in this place,’ said the landlord loudly.
Probably too meaty, Rincewind thought. But it seemed to him that the words had been addressed to the world in general rather than to him.
‘Glad to hear it,’ he said, ‘because—’
‘Yes indeed,’ said the landlord, a little louder. ‘No rebels welcome here.’
‘That’s fine by me, because—’
‘If I knew of any rebels I would be certain to alert the authorities,’ the landlord bellowed.
‘I’m not a rebel, I’m just hungry,’ said Rincewind. ‘I’d, er, like a bowlful, please.’
A bowl was filled. Rainbow patterns shimmered on its oily surface.
‘That’ll be half a rhinu,’ said the landlord.
‘You mean you want me to pay before I eat it?’ said Rincewind.
‘You might not want to afterwards, friend.’
A rhinu was more gold than Rincewind had ever owned. He patted his pockets theatrically.
‘In fact, it seems that—’ he began. There was a small thump beside him. What I Did On My Holidays had fallen on to the floor.
‘Yes, thank you, that will do nicely,’ said the landlord to the room at large. He pushed the bowl into Rincewind’s hand and, in one movement, scooped up the booklet and crammed it back into the wizard’s pocket.