‘Oh, no, mister,’ said Remorse. He reached into a shirt pocket, pulled out a bundle of notes and licked his thumb to count off twenty. ‘I always pays me debts. You want to stay with us a while first? We could use another rider and it’s tough going on the road by yourself. There’s bush rangers about.’
Rincewind rubbed his head again. Now that his various bodily organs had wobbled their way back into their approximate positions he could get back to general low-key generalized dread.
They won’t have to worry about me,’ he mumbled. ‘I promise not to light fires or feed the animals. Well, I say promise – most of the time they’re trying to feed off me.’
Remorse shrugged.
‘Just so long as there’s no more of those damn dropping bears,’ said Rincewind.
The men laughed.
‘Drop-bears? Who’s been feedin’ you a line about drop-bears?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s no such thing as drop-bears! Someone must’ve seen you coming, mate!’
‘Huh? They’ve got . . . they went,’ Rincewind waved his arm, ‘boing . . . all over the place . . . great big teeth . . .’
‘I reckon he madder’n Morgan’s mule, mate!’ said Clancy.
The group went silent.
‘How mad is that, then?’ said Rincewind.
Clancy leaned on his saddle and looked nervously at the other men. He licked his lips. ‘Well, it’s . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, it’s . . . it’s . . .’ His face twisted up. ‘It’s . . .’
‘Ver’. . .?’ Rincewind hinted.
‘Ver’ . . .’ Clancy mumbled, clutching the syllable like a lifeline.
‘Hmm?’
‘Ver . . . ry . . .’
‘Keep going, keep going . . .’
‘Ver . . . ry . . . mad?’ said Clancy.
‘Well done! See? So much easier,’ said Rincewind. ‘Someone mentioned something about food?’
Remorse nodded to one of the men, who handed Rincewind a sack.
‘There’s beer and veggies and stuff and, ‘cos you’re a good sport, we’re giving you a tin of jam, too.’
‘Gooseberry?’
‘Yep.’
‘And I’m wondering about your hat,’ said Remorse. ‘Why’s there all corks round it?’
‘Knocks the flies out,’ said Rincewind.
‘That works, does it?’
‘Course not,’ said Clancy. ‘If’n it does, some-one’d have thought of it by now.’
‘Yes. Me,’ said Rincewind. ‘No worries.’
‘Makes you look a bit of a drongo, mate,’ said Clancy.
‘Oh, good,’ said Rincewind. ‘Which way’s Bugarup?’
‘Just turn left at the bottom of the canyon, mate.’
‘That’s all?’
‘You can ask again when you meet the bush rangers.’
‘They’ve got some sort of cabin or station, have they?’
‘They’ve . . . Well, just remember they’ll find you if you get lost.’
‘Really? Oh, well, I suppose that’s part of their job. Good day to you.’
‘G’day.’
‘No worries.’
The men watched Rincewind until he was out of sight.
‘Didn’t seem very bothered, did he?’
‘He’s a bit gujeroo, if you ask me.’
‘Clancy?’
‘Yes, boss?’
‘You made that one up, didn’t you . . .?’
‘Well . . .’
‘You bloody did, Clancy.’
Clancy looked embarrassed, but then rallied.
‘All right, then,’ he said hotly. ‘What about that one you used yesterday, “as busy as a one-armed carpenter in Smackaroo”?’
‘What about it?’
‘I looked it up in the atlas and there’s no such place, boss.’
‘There damn well is!’
There isn’t. Anyway, no one’d employ a one-armed carpenter, would they? So he wouldn’t be busy, would he?’
‘Listen, Clancy—’
‘He’d go fishing or something, wouldn’t he?’
‘Clancy, we’re supposed to be carving a new language out of the wilderness here—’
‘Probably’d need someone to help him bait the line, but—’
‘Clancy, will you shut up and go and get the horses?’
It took twenty minutes to roll enough of the rocks away, and five minutes after that Clancy reported back.
‘Can’t find the little bastard, boss. And we looked underneath all the others.’
‘It couldn’t have got past us!’
‘Yes it could, boss. You saw it goin’ up those cliffs. Probably miles away by now. You want I should go after that bloke?’
Remorse thought about it, and spat. ‘No, we got the colt back. That’s worth the money.’ He stared reflectively down the canyon.
‘You all right, boss?’
‘Clancy, after we get back to the station, go on into town and call in at the Pastoral Hotel and bring back as many corks as they’ve got, willya?’ Think it’ll work, boss? He was as weird as . . .’
Clancy was pulled up by the look in his boss’s eye.
‘He was pretty weird,’ he said. ‘Weird, yeah. But smart, too. No flies on him.’ Behind them, ifi the jumble of rocks and bushes at the end of the canyon, a drawing of a small horse became a drawing of a kangaroo and then faded into the stone.
The worst thing about losing your temper with Mustrum Ridcully was that he never noticed when you did.
Wizards, when faced with danger, would immediately stop and argue amongst themselves about exactly what kind of danger it was. By the time everyone in the party understood, either it had become the sort of danger where your options are so very, very clear that you instantly take one of them or die, or it had got bored and gone away. Even danger has its pride.
When he was a boy, Ponder Stibbons had imagined that wizards would be powerful demi-gods able to change the whole world at the flick of a finger, and then he’d grown up and found that they were tiresome old men who worried about the state of their feet and, in harm’s way, would even bicker about the origin of the phrase ‘in harm’s way’.
It had never struck him that evolution works in all kinds of ways. There were still quite deep scars in old buildings that showed what happened when you had the other kind of wizard.
His footsteps took him, almost without his being aware, along the gently winding path up the mountain. Strange creatures peered at him from the undergrowth on either side. Some of them looked like—
Wizards think in terms of books, and, now, one crept out from the shelves of Ponder’s memory. It had been given to him when he was small. In fact, he’d still got it somewhere, filed away in a cardboard box.[17]
It had consisted of lots of small pages on a central spiral. Each one showed the head, body or tail of some bird, fish or animal. It was possible for the sufficiently bored to shuffle and turn them so that you got, say, a creature with the head of a horse, the body of a beetle and the tail of a fish. The cover promised ‘hours of fun’ although, after the first three minutes, you couldn’t help wondering what kind of person could make that kind of fun last for hours, and whether suffocating him as kindly as possible now would save the Serial Crimes Squad a lot of trouble in years to come. Ponder, however, had hours of fun.
Some of the creat— things in the undergrowth looked like the pages of that book. There were birds with beaks as long as their bodies. There were spiders the size of hands. Here and there the air shimmered like water. It resisted very gently as Ponder tried to walk through it, and then let him pass, but the birds and insects didn’t seem inclined to follow him.
There were beetles everywhere.
Eventually, by easy stages, the winding path reached the top of the mountain. There was a tiny valley there, just below the peak. At the far end was a large cave mouth, lit by a blue glow within.
A large beetle sang past Ponder’s ear.
The cave mouth opened into a cavern, filled with misty blue fog. There was a suggestion of complex shadows. And there were sounds -whistles, little zipping noises, the occasional thud or clang that suggested work going on somewhere in the mist.
Ponder brushed aside a beetle that had landed on his cheek and stared at the shape right in front of him.
It was the front half of an elephant.
The other half of the elephant, balancing against all probability on the two legs at the rear end, stood a few yards away. In between was . . . the rest of the elephant.
Ponder Stibbons told himself that if you cut an elephant in half and scooped out the middle, what you would get would be . . . well, mess. There wasn’t much mess here. Pink and purple tubes had uncoiled neatly on to a workbench. A small stepladder led up into another complexity of tubes and bulky organs. There was a general feel of methodical work in progress. This wasn’t the horror of an elephant in an explosive death. This was an elephant under construction.
Little clouds of white light spiralled in from all corners of the cavern, spun for a moment, and became the god of evolution, who was standing on the stepladder.