Rincewind lumbered to his feet and ran into a few trees while he tried, with both hands on the brim, to lift his hat off his head. He managed it at last, stared in horror at the bear and its peculiarly confused expression, and shook it off and into the bushes. There were thumps around him as more bears, disoriented by this turn of events, hit the ground and bounced wildly.
In the trees the budgerigars woke up and, the simple message by now having had time to work its way into their brain cells, shrieked, ‘Who’s a pri’y boy, den?’ A madly tumbling bear whirled past Rincewind’s face.
Rincewind turned and ran towards Snowy, landing astride the horse’s back, or where its back would have been had it been taller. Snowy obediently broke into his arrhythmical trot and headed into the darkness.
Rincewind looked down, swore and ran after his horse.
He held on tight as Snowy ran on like some small engine, leaving the bouncing bears behind, and didn’t slow down until he was well away along the track and among bushes that were shorter than he was. Then he slid off.
What a bloody country!
There was a flurry of wings in the night and suddenly the bush was full of little birds.
‘Wh’sa pri’ boyden?’
Rincewind waved his hat at them and screamed a little, just to relieve his feelings. It didn’t work. The budgerigars thought this was some sort of entertainment.
‘Bug’roff!’ they twittered.
Rincewind gave up, stamped on the ground a few times, and tried to sleep.
When he awoke, it was to a sound very much like a donkey being sawn in half. It was a kind of rhythmic scream of pain, anguished and forlorn, setting the teeth of the world on edge.
Rincewind raised his head cautiously over the scrub.
A windmill was spinning in the breeze, turning this way and that as stray gusts batted its tail fin.
Rincewind was seeing more of these, dotted across the landscape, and thought: If all the water’s underground, that’s a good idea . . .
There was a mob of sheep hanging around the base of this one. They didn’t back off, but watched him carefully as he approached. He saw why. The trough below the pump was empty. The fan was spinning, grinding out its mournful squeak, but no water was coming out of the pipe.
The thirsty sheep looked up at him.
‘Er . . . don’t look at me,’ he mumbled. I’m a wizard. We’re not supposed to be good at machinery.’
No, but we are supposed to be good at magic, said an accusing voice in his head.
‘Maybe I can see if something’s come loose, though. Or something,’ he muttered.
Impelled by the vaguely accusing woolly stares, he clambered up the rickety tower and tried to look efficient. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong, except that the metallic groaning was getting louder.
‘Can’t see any—’
Something that had finally been tortured beyond endurance broke, somewhere down in the tower. It shook, and the windmill spun free, dragging a broken rod which smashed heavily on the windmill’s casing with every revolution.
Rincewind half fell, half slid back down to the ground.
‘Seems to be a bit of a technical fault,’ he mumbled. A lump of cast iron smashed into the sand by his feet. ‘Probably needs to be seen to by a qualified artificer. Probably invalidates the warranty if I mess around—’
A cracking noise from overhead made him dive for cover, which in this case was a rather surprised sheep. When the racket had died away the windmill’s fan was bowling over through the scrub. As for the rest of it, if there had ever been any user-serviceable parts inside they very clearly weren’t in there any more.
Rincewind took off his hat to mop his brow, but he wasn’t quick enough. A pink tongue rasped across his forehead like damp sandpaper.
‘Ow! Good grief! You lot really are thirsty, aren’t you . . .?’ He pulled the hat back on, right down to his ears just to be on the safe side. 1 could do with a drink myself, to tell the truth . . .’
He managed, after pushing a few sheep aside, to find a piece of broken windmill.
Wading with some difficulty through the press of silent bodies, he made his way to an area that was a little lower than the surrounding scrub, and contained a couple of trees whose leaves looked slightly fresher than the rest.
‘Ow! G’d gr’f!’ chattered the birds around him.
Two or three feet should do it, he thought as he shovelled the red soil aside. Amazing, really, all this water underground when it never rained at all. The whole place must be floating on water.
At three feet down the soil was barely damp. He sighed, and kept going.
He was more than chest deep before a trickle oozed out between his toes. The sheep fought for the damp soil as he threw it up to the surface. As he watched, the puddle sank into the ground.
‘Hey, comeback!’
‘H’y, c’m bik!’ screamed the birds in the bushes.
‘Shut up!’
‘Sh’tupl Wh’spr’boyden?’
He flailed at the ground with his makeshift shovel in an effort to catch up, and overtook the descending water after another few inches. He splashed on until he was knee deep, dragged his hat through the muddy liquid, pulled himself out of the hole and ran, water dribbling over his feet, until he could tip it into the trough.
The sheep clustered around it, struggling silently to get at the film of moisture.
Rincewind got two more hatfuls before the water sank out of sight.
He wrenched the ladder off the stricken windmill, threw it down the hole and jumped in after it. Damp soil fountained out as he dug, and each dripping lump attracted a mass of flies and small birds as soon as it hit the ground.
He managed another dozen or so hatfuls before the hole was deeper than the ladder. By now some cattle had lumbered up to the trough as well, and it was impossible to see the water for heads. The sound was that of a straw investigating the suds of the biggest milkshake in the world.
Rincewind took a final look down the hole, and as he did so the last drop of water winked out of sight.
‘Weird country,’ he muttered.
He wandered over to where Snowy was standing patiently in the sparse shade of a bush.
‘You’re not thirsty?’ he said.
Snowy snorted and shook his mane.
‘Oh, well. Maybe you’ve got a bit of camel in you. You certainly can’t be all horse, I know that.’
Snowy moved aimlessly sideways and trod on Rincewind’s foot.
By noon the track crossed another one, which was much wider. Hoofprints and wheel ruts suggested that it got a lot of traffic. Rincewind brightened up, and followed it through thickening trees, glad of the shade.
He passed another groaning windmill surrounded by a cluster of patiently waiting cattle.
There were more bushes and the land was rising into ancient, crumbling hills of orange rock. At least it gets the wind up here, he thought. Ye gods, is a drop of rain too much to ask? You can’t never have any rain. Everywhere gets rained on sometimes. It has to drop out of the sky in order to get underground in the first place, doesn’t it?
He stopped when he heard the sound of many hoofbeats on the track behind him.
A mob of riderless horses appeared round the bend at full gallop. As they swept past Rincewind he saw one horse out in front of the others, built on the sleekest lines he’d ever seen, a horse that moved as though it had a special arrangement with gravity. The pack divided and flowed around Rincewind as if he were a rock in a stream. Then they were just a disappearing noise in a cloud of red dust.
Snowy’s nostrils flared, and the jolting increased as he speeded up.
‘Oh, yes?’ said Rincewind. ‘Not a chance, mate. You can’t play with the big boys. No worries.’
The cloud of dust had barely settled before there were more hoofbeats and a bunch of horsemen came around the curve. They galloped past without taking any notice of Rincewind, but a rider at the rear slowed down.
‘You seen a mob of horses go by, mate?’
‘Yes, mate. No worries, no worries, no worries.’
‘A big brown colt leadin’ ’em?’
‘Yes, mate. No worries, no worries.’
‘Old Remorse says he’ll give a hundred squids to the man who catches him! No chance of that, it’s canyon country ahead!’
‘No worries?’
‘What’s that you’re riding, an ironing board?’
‘Er, excuse me,’ Rincewind began, as the man set off in pursuit, ‘but is this the right road to Bugar—?’
The dust swirled across the road.