The sun was about to rise on the far rim and made a line of fire that glittered around half the circumference. A long slow dawn was just beginning its sweep across the dark, massive landscape.
Below, harshly lit in the arid vacuum of space, Great A’Tuin the world turtle toiled under the weight of Creation. On his — or her, the matter had never really been resolved — carapace the four giant elephants strained to support the Disc itself.
There might have been more efficient ways to build a world. You might start with a ball of molten iron and then coat it with successive layers of rock, like an old-fashioned gobstopper. And you’d have a very efficient planet, but it wouldn’t look so nice. Besides, things would drop off the bottom.
“Pretty good,” said the parrot. “Polly want a continent.”
“It’s so big,” breathed Eric.
“Yes,” said Rincewind flatly.
He felt that something more was expected of him.
“Don’t break it,” he added.
He had a nagging doubt about all this. If he was for the sake of argument a demon, and so many things had happened to him recently he was prepared to concede that he might have died and not noticed it in the confusion[7], then he still didn’t quite see how the world was his to give away. He was pretty sure that it had owners who felt the same way.
Also, he was sure that a demon had to get something in writing.
“I think you have to sign for it,” he said. “In blood.”
“Whose?” said Eric.
“Yours, I think,” said Rincewind. “Or bird blood will do, at a pinch.” He glared meaningfully at the parrot, which growled at him.
“Aren’t I allowed to try it out first?”
“What?”
“Well, supposing it doesn’t work? I’m not signing for it until I’ve seen it work.”
Rincewind stared at the boy. Then he looked down at the broad panorama of the kingdoms of the world. I wonder if I was like him at his age? he thought. I wonder how I survived?
“It’s the world,” he said patiently. “Of course it will bloody well work. I mean, look at it. Hurricanes, continental drift, rainfall cycle — it’s all there. All ticking over like a bloody watch. It’ll last you a lifetime, a world like that. Used carefully.”
Eric gave the world a critical examination. He wore the expression of someone who knows that all the best gifts in life seem to require the psychic equivalent of two U2 batteries and the shops won’t be open until after the holidays.
“There’s got to be tribute,” he said flatly.
“You what?”
“The kings of the world,” said Eric. “They’ve got to pay me tribute.”
“You’ve really been studying this, haven’t you,” said Rincewind sarcastically. “Just tribute? You don’t fancy the moon while we’re up here? This week’s special offer, one free satellite with every world dominated?”
“Are there any useful minerals?”
“What?”
Eric gave a sigh of long-suffering patience.
“Minerals,” he said. “Ores. You know.”
Rincewind coloured. “I don’t think a lad your age should be thinking of—”
“I mean metal and things. It’s no use to me if it’s just a load of rock.”
Rincewind looked down. The Discworld’s tiny moonlet was just rising over the far edge, and shed a pale radiance across the jigsaw pattern of land and sea.
“Oh, I don’t know. It looks quite nice,” he volunteered. “Look, it’s dark now. Perhaps everyone can pay you tribute in the morning?”
“I want some tribute now.”
“I thought you might.”
Rincewind gave his fingers a careful examination. It wasn’t as if he’d ever been particularly good at snapping them.
He gave it another try.
When he opened his eyes again he was standing up to his ankles in mud.
Pre-eminent amongst Rincewind’s talents was his skill in running away, which over the years he had elevated to the status of a genuinely pure science; it didn’t matter if you were fleeing from or to, so long as you were fleeing. It was flight alone that counted. I run, therefore I am; more correctly, I run, therefore with any luck I’ll still be.
But he was also skilled in languages and in practical geography. He could shout ‘help!’ in fourteen languages and scream for mercy in a further twelve. He had passed through many of the countries on the Disc, some of them at high speed, and during the long, lovely, boring hours when he’d worked in the Library he’d whiled away the time by reading up on all the exotic and faraway places he’d never visited. He remembered that at the time he’d sighed with relief that he’d never have to visit them.
And, now, here he was.
Jungle surrounded him. It wasn’t nice, interesting, open jungle, such as leopard-skin-clad heroes might swing through, but serious, real jungle, jungle that towered up like solid slabs of greenness, thorned and barbed, jungle in which every representative of the vegetable kingdom had really rolled up its bark and got down to the strenuous business of outgrowing all competitors. The soil was hardly soil at all, but dead plants on the way to composthood; water dripped from leaf to leaf, insects whined in the humid, spore-laden air, and there was the terrible breathless silence made by the motors of photosynthesis running flat out. Any yodelling hero who tried to swing through that lot might just as well take his chances with a bean-slicer.
“How do you do that?” said Eric.
“It’s probably a knack,” said Rincewind.
Eric subjected the wonders of Nature to a cursory and disdainful glance.
“This doesn’t look like a kingdom,” he complained. “You said we could go to a kingdom. Do you call this a kingdom?”
“This is probably the rain forests of Klatch,” said Rincewind. “They’re stuffed full of lost kingdoms.”
“You mean mysterious ancient races of Amazonian princesses who subject all male prisoners to strange and exhausting progenitative rites?” said Eric, his glasses beginning to fog.
“Haha,” said Rincewind stonily. “What an imagination the child has.”
“Wossname, wossname, wossname!” shrieked the parrot.
“I’ve read about them,” said Eric, peering into the greenery. “Of course, I own those kingdoms as well.” He stared at some private inner vision. “Gosh,” he said, hungrily.
“I should concentrate on the tribute if I was you,” said Rincewind, setting off down what was possibly a path.
The brightly-coloured blooms on a tree nearby turned to watch him go.
In the jungles of central Klatch there are, indeed, lost kingdoms of mysterious Amazonian princesses who capture male explorers for specifically masculine duties. These are indeed rigorous and exhausting and the luckless victims do not last long.[8]
There are also hidden plateaux where the reptilian monsters of a bygone epoch romp and play, as well as elephants’ graveyards, lost diamond mines, and strange ruins decorated with hieroglyphs the very sight of which can freeze the most valiant heart. On any reasonable map of the area there’s barely room for the trees.
The few explorers who have returned have passed on a number of handy hints to those who follow after, such as: 1) avoid if possible any hanging-down creepers with beady eyes and a forked tongue at one end; 2) don’t pick up any orange-and-black-striped creepers that are apparently lying across the path, twitching, because there is often a tiger on the other end; and 3) don’t go.
If I’m a demon, Rincewind thought hazily, why is everything stinging me and trying to trip me up? I mean, surely I can only be harmed by a wooden dagger through my heart? Or do I mean garlic?
7
Rincewind had been told that death was just like going into another room. The difference is, when you shout, “Where’s my clean socks?”, no-one answers.
8
This is because wiring plugs, putting up shelves, sorting out the funny noise in attics and mowing lawns can eventually reduce even the strongest constitution.