He was sitting cross-legged against the dawn. He was black. Not brown, or blue-black, but black as space. This place baked people.
Rincewind pulled himself up and thought about reaching for his stick. And then he thought again. The man had a couple of spears stuck in the ground, and people here were good at spears, because if you didn’t get efficient at hitting the things that moved fast you had to eat the things that moved slowly. He was also holding a boomerang, and it wasn’t one of those toy ones that came back. This was one of the big, heavy, gently curved sort that didn’t come back because it was sticking in something’s ribcage. You could laugh at the idea of wooden weapons until you saw the kind of wood that grew here.
It had been painted with stripes of all colours, but it still looked like a business item.
Rincewind tried to seem harmless. It required little in the way of acting.
The watcher regarded him in that sucking silence that you just have to fill. And Rincewind came from a culture where, if there was nothing to say, you said something.
‘Er . . .’ said Rincewind. ‘Me . . . big-fella . . . fella . . . belong . . . damn, what’s the—’ He gave up, and glanced at the blue sky. ‘Turned out nice again,’ he said.
The man seemed to sigh, stuck the boomerang into the strip of animal skin that was his belt and, in fact, the whole of his wardrobe, and stood up. Then he picked up a leathery sack, slung it over one shoulder, took the spears and, without a backward glance, ambled off around a rock.
This might have struck anyone else as rude, but Rincewind was always happy to see any heavily armed person walking away. He rubbed his eyes and contemplated the dismal task of subduing breakfast.
‘You want some grub?’ The voice was almost a whisper.
Rincewind looked around. A little way off was the hole from which last night’s supper had been dug. Apart from that, there was nothing all the way to the infinite horizon but scrubby bushes and hot red rocks.
‘I think I dug up most of them,’ he said, weakly.
‘Nah, mate. I got to tell you the secret of findin’ tucker in the bush. There’s always a beaut feed if you know where to look, mate.’
‘How come you’re speaking my language, mystery voice?’ said Rincewind.
‘I ain’t,’ said the voice. ‘You’re listenin’ to mine. Got to feed you up proper. Gonna sing you into a real bush-tucker finder, true.’
‘Lovely grub,’ said Rincewind.
‘Just you stand there and don’t move.’
It sounded as though the unseen voice then began to chant very quietly through an unseen nose.
Rincewind was, after all, a wizard. Not a good one, but he was sensitive to magic. And the chant was doing strange things.
The hairs on the back of his hands tried to crawl up his arms, and the back of his neck began to sweat. His ears popped and, very gently, the landscape began to spin around him.
He looked down at the ground. There were his feet. Almost certainly his feet. And they were standing on the red earth and not moving at all. Things were moving round him. He wasn’t dizzy but, by the look of it, the landscape was.
The chanting stopped. There was a sort of echo, which seemed to happen inside his head, as if the words had been merely the shadow of something more important.
Rincewind shut his eyes for a while, and then opened them again.
‘Er . . . fine,’ he said. ‘Very . . . catchy.’
He couldn’t see the speaker, so he spoke with that careful politeness you reserve for someone armed who is probably standing behind you.
He turned. ‘I expect you . . . er . . . had to go somewhere, did you?’ he said, to the empty air.
‘Er . . . hello?’
Even the insects had gone quiet.
‘Er . . . you haven’t noticed a box walking around on legs, have you? By any chance?’
He tried to see if anyone could possibly be hiding behind a bush.
It’s not important, it’s just that it’s got my clean underwear in it.’
The boundless silence made an eloquent statement about the universe’s views on clean underwear.
‘So . . . er . . . I’m going to know how to find food in the bush, right?’ he ventured. He glared at the nearest trees. They didn’t look any more fruitful than before. He shrugged.
‘What a strange person.’
He edged over to a flat stone and, with a stick raised in case of resistance from anything below, pulled it up.
There was a chicken sandwich underneath.
It tasted rather like chicken.
A little way away, behind the rocks near the waterhole, a drawing faded into the stone.
This was another desert, elsewhere. No matter where you were, this place would always be elsewhere. It was one of those places further than any conceivable journey, but possibly as close as the far side of a mirror, or just a breath away. There was no sun in the sky here, unless the whole sky was sun – it glowed yellow. The desert underfoot was still red sand, but hot enough to burn.
A crude drawing of a man appeared on a rock. Gradually, layer by layer, it got more complex, as if the unseen hand was trying to draw bones and organs and a nervous system and a soul.
And he stepped on to the sand and put down his bag which, here, seemed a lot heavier. He stretched his arms and cracked his knuckles.
At least here he could talk normally. He daren’t raise his voice down there in the shadow world, lest he raise mountains as well.
He said a word which, on the other side of the rock, would have shaken trees and created meadows. It meant, in the true language of things which the old man spoke, something like: Trickster. A creature like him appears in many belief systems, although the jolly name can be misleading. Tricksters have that robust sense of humour that puts a landmine under a seat cushion for a bit of a laugh.
A black and white bird appeared, and perched on his head.
‘You know what to do,’ said the old man.
‘Him? What a wonga,’ said the bird. ‘I’ve been lookin’ at him. He’s not even heroic. He’s just in the right place at the right time.’
The old man indicated that this was maybe the definition of a hero.
‘All right, but why not go and get the thing yerself?’ said the bird.
‘You’ve gotta have heroes,’ said the old man.
‘And I suppose I’ll have to help,’ said the bird. It sniffed, which is quite hard to do through a beak.
‘Yep. Off you go.’
The bird shrugged, which is easy to do if you have wings, and flew down off the old man’s head. It didn’t land on the rock but flew into it; for a moment there was a drawing of a bird, and then it faded.
Creators aren’t gods. They make places, which is quite hard. It’s men that make gods. This explains a lot.
The old man sat down and waited.
Confront a wizard with the concept of a bathing suit and he’ll start to get nervous. Why does it have to be so skimpy? he’ll ask. Where can I put the gold embroidery? How can you have any kind of costume without at least forty useful pockets? And occult symbols made out of sequins? There appears to be no place for them. And where, when you get right down to it, are the lapels?
There is also the concept of acreage. It is vitally important that as large an amount of wizard as possible is covered, so that timid people and horses are not frightened. There may be strapping young wizards with copper-coloured skins and muscles as solid as a plank, but not after sixty years of UU dinners. It gives senior wizards what they think is called gravitas but is more accurately called gravity.
Also, it takes heavy machinery to part a wizard from his pointy hat.
The Chair of Indefinite Studies looked sidelong at the Dean. They both wore a variety of garments, in which red and white stripes predominated.
‘Last one into the water’s a man standing all by himself on the beach!’ he shouted.[10]
Out on a point of rock, surf washing over his bare feet, Mustrum Ridcully lit his pipe and cast a line on the end of which was such a fearsome array of spinners and weights that any fish it didn’t hook it might successfully bludgeon.
The change of scenery seemed to be working on the Librarian. Within a few minutes of being laid in the sunlight he’d sneezed himself back into his old shape, and he now sat on the beach with a blanket around him and a fern leaf on his head.