Mad was in the doorway. There was a general scuffle to get out of the way.
‘Oh, you looking for a fight too, stubby?’ Rincewind was dropped as the huge creature turned to face the dwarf, fists clenching.
‘I don’t look for them. I just walk into pubs and there they are,’ said Mad, pulling out a knife. ‘Now, you going to leave him alone, Wally?’
‘You call that a knife?’ The giant unsheathed one that’d be called a sword if it had been held in a normal-sized hand. ‘This is what I call a knife!’
Mad looked at it. Then he reached his hand around behind his back, and it came back holding something.
‘Really? No worries. This’, he said, ‘is what I call a crossbow.’
‘It’s a log,’ said Ridcully, inspecting the boat-building committee’s work to date.
‘Rather more than a log—’ the Dean began.
‘Oh, you’ve made a mast and tied the Bursar’s bathrobe to it, I can see that. It’s a log, Dean. There’s roots on one end and bits of branch at the other. You haven’t even hollowed it out. It’s a log.’
‘It took us all hours,’ said the Senior Wrangler.
‘And it does float,’ the Dean pointed out.
‘I think the term is more like wallows,’ said Ridcully. ‘And we’d all get on it, would we?’
‘This is the one-man version,’ said the Dean. ‘We thought we’d test it out and then try it with a lot of them together . . .’
‘Like a raft, you mean?’
‘I suppose so,’ said the Dean, with considerable reluctance. He would have preferred a more dynamic name for it. ‘Obviously these things take time.’
The Archchancellor nodded. He was impressed, in a strange way. The wizards had succeeded in recapitulating, in a mere day, a technological development that had probably taken mankind several hundred years. They might be up to coracles by Tuesday.
‘Which of you is going to test it?’ he said.
‘We thought perhaps the Bursar could assist at this point in the development programme.’
‘Volunteered, has he?’
‘We’re sure he will.’
In fact the Bursar was some distance away, wandering aimlessly but happily through the beetle-filled jungle.
The Bursar was, as he would probably be the first to admit, not the most mentally stable of people. He would probably be the first to admit that he was a tea-strainer.
But he was, as it were, only insane on the outside. He’d never been very interested in magic as a boy, but he had been good at numbers, and even somewhere like Unseen University needed someone who could add up. And he had indeed survived many otherwise exciting years by locking himself in a room somewhere and conscientiously adding up, while some very serious division and subtraction was going on outside.
Those were still the days when magical assassination was still a preferred and legal route to high office, but he’d been quite safe because no one had wanted to be a bursar.
Then Mustrum Ridcully had been appointed, and he’d put a stop to the whole business by being unkillable and had been, in his own strange way, a modernizer. And the senior wizards had gone along with him because he tended to shout at them if they didn’t and it was, after some exhilarating times in the University’s history, something of a relief to enjoy your dinner without having to watch someone else eat a bit of it first or having to check your shape the moment you got out of bed.
But it was hell for the Bursar. Everything about Mustrum Ridcully rasped across his nerves. If people were food, the Bursar would have been one of life’s lightly poached eggs, but Mustrum Ridcully was a rich suet pudding with garlic gravy. He spoke as loudly as most people shouted. He stamped instead of walking. He roared around the place, and lost important bits of paper which he then denied he’d ever seen, and shot his crossbow at the wall when he was bored. He was aggressively cheerful. Never sick himself, he tended to the belief that sickness in other people was caused by sloppy thinking. And he had no sense of humour. And he told jokes.
It was odd that this affected the Bursar so much, since he did not have a sense of humour either. He was proud of it. He was not the kind of man to laugh. But he did know, in a mechanical sort of way, how jokes were supposed to go. Ridcully told jokes like a bullfrog did accountancy. They never added up.
So the Bursar found it much more satisfying to live inside his own head, where he didn’t have to listen and where there were clouds and flowers. Even so, something must have filtered in from the world outside, because occasionally he’d jump up and down on an ant, just in case he was supposed to. Part of him rather hoped that one of the ants was, in some unimaginably distant way, related to Mustrum Ridcully.
It was while he was thus engaged in changing the future that he noticed what looked like a very thick green hosepipe on the ground.
‘Hmm?’
It was slightly transparent and seemed to be pulsating rhythmically. When he put his ear to it he heard a sound like gloop.
Mildly deranged though he was, the Bursar had the true wizard’s instinct to amble aimlessly into dangerous places, so he followed the throbbing stem.
Rincewind awoke, because sleep was so hard with someone kicking him in the ribs.
‘Wzt?’
‘You want I should pour a bucket of water on yez?’
Rincewind recognized the chatty tones. His eyes unglued. ‘Oh, not you! You’re a figment of my imagination!’
‘I should kick you in the ribs again, then?’ said Scrappy.
Rincewind pulled himself upright. It was dawn, and he was lying in some bushes out behind the pub.
Memory played its silent movie across the tattered sheets of his eyelids.
‘There was a fight . . . Mad shot that . . . that . . . shot him with a crossbow!’
‘Only through the foot so’s he’d stand still to be hit. Wombats can’t hold their drink, that’s their trouble.’
More recollections flickered across the smoky darkness of Rincewind’s brain. ‘That’s right, there were animals drinking in there!’
‘Yes and no,’ said the kangaroo. ‘I tried to explain . . .’
‘I’m all ears,’ said Rincewind. His eyes glazed for a moment. ‘No, I’m not, I’m all bladder. Back in a minute.’
The buzz of flies and a sort of universal smell drew Rincewind into a nearby hut. Some people would have liked to think of it as ‘the bathroom’, although not after going inside.
He came out again, hopping up and down urgently. ‘Er . . . there’s a great big spider on the toilet seat . . .’
‘What’re you gonna do, wait till it’s finished? Fan it with yer hat!’
It was odd, Rincewind thought as he shooed the spider out, that a human being would, er, use the bathroom behind a bush in the middle of a thousand miles of howling wilderness but would fight for a dunny if there was one available.
‘And stay out,’ he muttered, when he was confident the spider was out of earshot.
But the human brain often feels incapable of concentrating on the job in hand, and Rincewind found his gaze wandering. And here, as in private places everywhere, men had found the urge to draw on the walls.
Perhaps it was the way the light hit the ancient woodwork, but under the usual minutiae from people who needed people, and drawings done from overheated hope rather than memory, was a deeply scored drawing of men in pointy hats.
He sidled out thoughtfully and edged away through the bushes.
‘No worries,’ said the kangaroo, so close to his ear that Rincewind was quite pleased that he’d already relieved himself.
‘I don’t believe it!’
‘You’ll see them everywhere. They’re built in. They find their way into people’s thoughts. You can’t outrun your destiny, mate.’
Rincewind didn’t even bother to argue.
‘You’re going to have to sort this out,’ said Scrappy. ‘You’re the cause.’
‘I’m not! Things happen to me, not the other way around!’
‘I could disembowel you with a kick, you know. Would you like to see?’
‘Er . . . no.’
‘Haven’t you noticed that by running away you end up in more trouble?’
‘Yes, but, you see, you can run away from that, too,’ said Rincewind. ‘That’s the beauty of the system. Dead is only for once, but running away is for ever.’
‘Ah, but it is said that a coward dies a thousand deaths, while a hero dies only one.’
‘Yes, but it’s the important one.’
‘Aren’t you ashamed?’
‘No. I’m going home. I’m going to find this city called Bugarup, find a boat, and go home.’
‘Bugarup?’
‘Don’t tell me the place doesn’t exist.’
‘Oh, no. It’s a big place. And that’s where you’re going?’