In short, Mort was one of those people who are more dangerous than a bag full of rattlesnakes. He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe.
Which was going to be hard, because there wasn’t one. The Creator had a lot of remarkably good ideas when he put the world together, but making it understandable hadn’t been one of them.
Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it’s the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals.
His father was yelling at him, as usual. Mort threw the rock at a pigeon, which was almost too full to lurch out of the way, and wandered back across the field.
And that was why Mort and his father walked down through the mountains into Sheepridge on Hogswatch Eve, with Mort’s rather sparse possessions in a sack on the back of a donkey. The town wasn’t much more than four sides to a cobbled square, lined with shops that provided all the service industry of the farming community.
After five minutes Mort came out of the tailors wearing a loose fitting brown garment of imprecise function, which had been understandably unclaimed by a previous owner and had plenty of room for him to grow, on the assumption that he would grow into a nineteen-legged elephant.
His father regarded him critically.
“Very nice,” he said, “for the money.”
“It itches,” said Mort. “I think there’s things in here with me.”
“There’s thousands of lads in the world’d be very thankful for a nice warm—” Lezek paused, and gave up—“garment like that, my lad.”
“I could share it with them?” Mort said hopefully.
“You’ve got to look smart,” said Lezek severely. “You’ve got to make an impression, stand out in the crowd.”
There was no doubt about it. He would. They set out among the throng crowding the square, each listening to his own thoughts. Usually Mort enjoyed visiting the town, with its cosmopolitan atmosphere and strange dialects from villages as far away as five, even ten miles, but this time he felt unpleasantly apprehensive, as if he could remember something that hadn’t happened yet.
The fair seemed to work like this: men looking for work stood in ragged lines in the centre of the square. Many of them sported little symbols in their hats to tell the world the kind of work they were trained in—shepherds wore a wisp of wool, carters a hank of horsehair, interior decorators a strip of rather interesting hessian wallcovering, and so on.
The boys seeking apprenticeships were clustered on the Hub side of the square.
“You just go and stand there, and someone comes and offers you an apprenticeship,” said Lezek, his voice trimmed with uncertainty. “If they like the look of you, that is.”
“How do they do that?” said Mort.
“Well,” said Lezek, and paused. Hamesh hadn’t explained about this bit. He drew on his limited knowledge of the marketplace, which was restricted to livestock sales, and ventured, “I suppose they count your teeth and that. And make sure you don’t wheeze and your feet are all right. I shouldn’t let on about the reading, it unsettles people.”
“And then what?” said Mort.
“Then you go and learn a trade,” said Lezek.
“What trade in particular?”
“Well… carpentry is a good one,” Lezek hazarded. “Or thievery. Someone’s got to do it.”
Mort looked at his feet. He was a dutiful son, when he remembered, and if being an apprentice was what was expected of him then he was determined to be a good one. Carpentry didn’t sound very promising, though—wood had a stubborn life of its own, and a tendency to split. And official thieves were rare in the Ramtops, where people weren’t rich enough to afford them.
“All right,” he said eventually, “I’ll go and give it a try. But what happens if I don’t get prenticed?”
Lezek scratched his head.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I expect you just wait until the end of the fair. At midnight. I suppose.”
And now midnight approached.
A light frost began to crisp the cobblestones. In the ornamental clock tower that overlooked the square a couple of delicately-carved little automatons whirred out of trapdoors in the clockface and struck the quarter hour.
Fifteen minutes to midnight. Mort shivered, but the crimson fires of shame and stubbornness flared up inside him, hotter than the slopes of Hell. He blew on his fingers for something to do and stared up at the freezing sky, trying to avoid the stares of the few stragglers among what remained of the fair.
Most of the stallkeepers had packed up and gone. Even the hot meat pie man had stopped crying his wares and, with no regard for personal safety, was eating one.
The last of Mort’s fellow hopefuls had vanished hours ago. He was a wall-eyed young man with a stoop and a running nose, and Sheepridge’s one licensed beggar had pronounced him to be ideal material. The lad on the other side of Mort had gone off to be a toymaker. One by one they had trooped off—the masons, the farriers, the assassins, the mercers, coopers, hoodwinkers and ploughmen. In a few minutes it would be the new year and a hundred boys would be starting out hopefully on their careers, new worthwhile lives of useful service rolling out in front of them.
Mort wondered miserably why he hadn’t been picked. He’d tried to look respectable, and had looked all prospective masters squarely in the eye to impress them with his excellent nature and extremely likeable qualities. This didn’t seem to have the right effect.
“Would you like a hot meat pie?” said his father.
“No.”
“He’s selling them cheap.”
“No. Thank you.”
“Oh.”
Lezek hesitated.
“I could ask the man if he wants an apprentice,” he said, helpfully. “Very reliable, the catering trade.”
“I don’t think he does,” said Mort.
“No, probably not,” said Lezek. “Bit of a one-man business, I expect. He’s gone now, anyway. Tell you what, I’ll save you a bit of mine.”
“I don’t actually feel very hungry, dad.”
“There’s hardly any gristle.”
“No. But thanks all the same.”
“Oh.” Lezek deflated a little. He danced about a bit to stamp some life back into his feet, and whistled a few tuneless bars between his teeth. He felt he ought to say something, to offer some kind of advice, to point out that life had its ups and downs, to put his arm around his son’s shoulder and talk expansively about the problems of growing up, to indicate—in short—that the world is a funny old place where one should never, metaphorically speaking, be so proud as to turn down the offer of a perfectly good hot meat pie.
They were alone now. The frost, the last one of the year, tightened its grip on the stones.
High in the tower above them a cogged wheel went clonk, tripped a lever, released a ratchet and let a heavy lead weight drop down. There was a dreadful metallic wheezing noise and the trapdoors in the clock face slid open, releasing the clockwork men. Swinging their hammers jerkily, as if they were afflicted with robotic arthritis, they began to ring in the new day.
“Well, that’s it,” said Lezek, hopefully. They’d have to find somewhere to sleep—Hogswatch-night was no time to be walking in the mountains. Perhaps there was a stable somewhere…
“It’s not midnight until the last stroke,” said Mort, distantly.
Lezek shrugged. The sheer strength of Mort’s obstinacy was defeating him.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll wait, then.”
And then they heard the clip-clop of hooves, which boomed rather more loudly around the chilly square than common acoustics should really allow. In fact clip-clop was an astonishingly inaccurate word for the kind of noise which rattled around Mort’s head; clip-clop suggested a rather jolly little pony, quite possibly wearing a straw hat with holes cut out for its ears. An edge to this sound made it very clear that straw hats weren’t an option.