‘There you are, then. Anyway, if you were the king, you’d be a god, too. You aren’t acting very god-like at the moment.’
‘Yes? Well. Er.’ Teppic hesitated again. Ptraci’s literal-mindedness meant that innocent sentences had to be carefully examined before being sent out into the world.
‘I’m basically good at making the sun rise,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how, though. And rivers. You want any rivers flooding, I’m your man. God, I mean.’
He lapsed into silence as a thought struck him.
‘I wonder what’s happening in there without me?’ he said.
Ptraci stood up and set off down to the gorge.
‘Where are you going?’
She turned. ‘Well, Mr King or God or assassin, or whatever, can you make water?’
‘What, here?’
‘I mean to drink. There may be a river hidden in that crack or there may not, but we can’t get at it, can we? So we have to go somewhere where we can. It’s so simple I should think even kings could understand it.’
He hurried after her, down the scree to where You Bastard was lying with his head and neck flat on the ground, flickering his ears in the heat and idly applying You Vicious Brute’s Theory of Transient Integrals to a succession of promising cissoid numbers. Ptraci kicked him irritably.
‘Do you know where there is water, then?’ said Teppic.
… e/27. Eleven miles …
Ptraci glared at him from kohl-ringed eyes. ‘You mean you don’t know? You were going to take me into the desert and you don’t know where the water is?’
‘Well, I rather expected I was going to be able to take some with me!’
‘You didn’t even think about it!’
‘Listen, you can’t talk to me like that! I’m a king!’ Teppic stopped.
‘You’re absolutely right,’ he said. ‘I never thought about it. Where I come from it rains nearly every day. I’m sorry.’
Ptraci’s brow furrowed. ‘Who reigns nearly every day?’ she said.
‘No, I mean rain. You know. Very thin water coming out of the sky?’
‘What a silly idea. Where do you come from?’
Teppic looked miserable. ‘Where I come from is Ankh-Morpork. Where I started from is here.’ He stared down the track. From here, if you knew what you were looking for, you could just see a faint crack running across the rocks. It climbed the cliffs on either side, a new vertical fault the thickness of a line that just happened to contain a complete river kingdom and 7,000 years of history.
He’d hated every minute of his time there. And now it had shut him out. And now, because he couldn’t, he wanted to go back.
He wandered down to it and put his hand over one eye. If you jerked your head just right …
It flashed past his vision briefly, and was gone. He tried a few times more, and couldn’t see it again.
If I hacked the rocks away? No, he thought, that’s silly. It’s a line. You can’t get into a line. A line has no thickness. Well-known fact of geometry.
He heard Ptraci come up behind him, and the next moment her hands were on his neck. For a second he wondered how she knew the Catharti Death Grip, and then her fingers were gently massaging his muscles, stresses melting under their expert caress like fat under a hot knife. He shivered as the tension relaxed.
‘That’s nice,’ he said.
‘We’re trained for it. Your tendons are knotted up like ping-pong balls on a string,’ said Ptraci.
Teppic gratefully subsided on to one of the boulders that littered the base of the cliff and let the rhythm of her fingers unwind the problems of the night.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he murmured. ‘That feels good.’
‘It’s not all peeling grapes, being a handmaiden,’ said Ptraci. ‘The first lesson we learn is, when the master has had a long hard day it is not the best time to suggest the Congress of the Fox and the Persimmon. Who says you have to do anything?’
‘I feel responsible.’ Teppic shifted position like a cat.
‘If you know where there is a dulcimer I could play you something soothing,’ said Ptraci. ‘I’ve got as far as “Goblins Picnic” in Book I.’{33}
‘I mean, a king shouldn’t let his kingdom just vanish like that.’
‘All the other girls can do chords and everything,’ said Ptraci wistfully, massaging his shoulders. ‘But the old king always said he’d rather hear me. He said it used to cheer him up.’
‘I mean, it’ll be called the Lost Kingdom,’ said Teppic drowsily. ‘How will I feel then, I ask you?’
‘He said he liked my singing, too. Everyone else said it sounded like a flock of vultures who’ve just found a dead donkey.’
‘I mean, king of a Lost Kingdom. It’d be dreadful. I’ve got to get it back.’
You Bastard slowly turned his massive head to follow the flight of an errant blowfly; deep in his brain little columns of red numbers flickered, detailing vectors and speed and elevation. The conversation of human beings seldom interested him, but it crossed his mind that the males and females always got along best when neither actually listened fully to what the other one was saying. It was much simpler with camels.
Teppic stared at the line in the rock. Geometry. That was it.
‘We’ll go to Ephebe,’ he said. ‘They know all about geometry and they have some very unsound ideas. Unsound ideas are what I could do with right now.’
‘Why do you carry all these knives and things? I mean, really?’
‘Hmm? Sorry?’
‘All these knives. Why?’
Teppic thought about it. ‘I suppose I don’t feel properly dressed without them,’ he said.
‘Oh.’
Ptraci dutifully cast around for a new topic of conversation. Introducing Topics of Amusing Discourse was also part of a handmaiden’s duties. She’d never been particularly good at it. The other girls had come up with an astonishing assortment: everything from the mating habits of crocodiles to speculation about life in the Netherworld. She’d found it heavy going after talking about the weather.
‘So,’ she said. ‘You’ve killed a lot of people, I expect.’
‘Mm?’
‘As an assassin, I mean. You get paid to kill people. Have you killed lots? Do you know you tense your back muscles a lot?’
‘I don’t think I ought to talk about it,’ he said.
‘I ought to know. If we’ve got to cross the desert together and everything. More than a hundred?’
‘Good heavens, no.’
‘Well, less than fifty?’
Teppic rolled over.
‘Look, even the most famous assassins never killed more than thirty people in all their lives,’ he said.
‘Less than twenty, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘Less than ten?’
‘I think,’ said Teppic, ‘it would be best to say a number between zero and ten.’
‘Just so long as I know. These things are important.’
They strolled back to You Bastard. But now it was Teppic who seemed to have something on his mind.
‘All this senate …’ he said.
‘Congress,’ corrected Ptraci.
‘You … er … more than fifty people?’
‘There’s a different name for that sort of woman,’ said Ptraci, but without rancour.
‘Sorry. Less than ten?’
‘Let’s say,’ said Ptraci, ‘a number between zero and ten.’
You Bastard spat. Twenty feet away the blowfly was picked cleanly out of the air and glued to the rock behind it.
‘Amazing how they do it, isn’t it,’ said Teppic. ‘Animal instinct, I suppose.’
You Bastard gave him a haughty glare from under his sweep-the-desert eyelashes and thought: