Pyramids

Page 36

'That's a shame,' said Gern.
'True enough,' said the king, and sighed. They stood in gloomy silence.
'So perhaps we could ask one of the dead ones?' said Gern.
'Er. Gern,' said Dil, backing away.
The king slapped the apprentice on the back, pitching him forward.
'Damn clever idea!' he said. 'We'll just go and get one of the real early ancestors. Oh.' He sagged. 'That's no good. No-one will be able to understand them-'
'Gern!' said Dil, his eyes growing wider.
'No, it's all right, king,' said Gern, enjoying the new-found freedom of thought, 'because, the reason being, everyone understands someone, all we have to do is sort them out.'
'Bright lad. Bright lad,' said the king.
'Gern!'
They both looked at him in astonishment.
'You all right, master?' said Gern. 'You've gone all white.'
'The t-' stuttered Dil, rigid with terror.
'The what, master?'
'The t- look at the t-'
'He ought to have a lie down,' said the king. 'I know his sort. The artistic type. Highly strung.'
Dil took a deep breath.
'Look at the sodding torch, Gern!' he shouted.
They looked.
Without any fuss, turning its black ashes into dry straw, the torch was burning backwards.
The Old Kingdom lay stretched out before Teppic, and it was unreal.
He looked at You Bastard, who had stuck his muzzle in a wayside spring and was making a noise like the last drop in the milkshake glass.[30] You Bastard looked real enough. There's nothing like a camel for looking really solid. But the landscape had an uncertain quality, as if it hadn't quite made up its mind to be there or not.
Except for the Great Pyramid. It squatted in the middle distance as real as the pin that nails a butterfly to a board. It was contriving to look extremely solid, as though it was sucking all the solidity out of the landscape into itself.
Well, he was here. Wherever here was.
How did you kill a pyramid?
And what would happen if you did?
He was working on the hypothesis that everything would snap back into place. Into the Old Kingdom's pool of recirculated time.
He watched the gods for a while, wondering what the hell they were, and how it didn't seem to matter. They looked no more real than the land over which they strode, about incomprehensible errands of their own. The world was no more than a dream. Teppic felt incapable of surprise. If seven fat cows had wandered by, he wouldn't have given them a second glance.
He remounted You Bastard and rode him, sloshing gently, down the road. The fields on either side had a devastated look.
The sun was finally sinking; the gods of night and evening were prevailing over the daylight gods, but it had been a long struggle and, when you thought about all the things that would happen to it now - eaten by goddesses, carried on boats under the world, and so on - it was an odds-on chance that it wouldn't be seen again.
No-one was visible as he rode into the stable yard. You Bastard padded sedately to his stall and pulled delicately at a wisp of hay. He'd thought of something interesting about bivariant distributions.
Teppic patted him on the flank, raising another cloud, and walked up the wide steps that led to the palace proper. Still there were no guards, no servants. No living soul.
He slipped into his own palace like a thief in the day, and found his way to Dil's workshop. It was empty, and looked as though a robber with very peculiar tastes had recently been at work in there. The throne room smelled like a kitchen, and by the looks of it the cooks had fled in a hurry.
The gold mask of the kings of Djelibeybi, slightly buckled out of shape, had rolled into a corner. He picked it up and, on a suspicion, scratched it with one of his knives. The gold peeled away, exposing a silver-grey gleam.
He'd suspected that. There simply wasn't that much gold around. The mask felt as heavy as lead because, well, it was lead. He wondered if it had ever been all gold, and which ancestor had done it, and how many pyramids it had paid for. It was probably very symbolic of something or other. Perhaps not even symbolic of anything. Just symbolic, all by itself.
One of the sacred cats was hiding under the throne. It flattened its ears and spat at Teppic as he reached down to pat it. That much hadn't changed, at least.
Still no people. He padded across to the balcony.
And there the people were, a great silent mass, staring across the river in the fading, leaden light. As Teppic watched a flotilla of boats and ferries set out from the near bank.
We ought to have been building bridges, he thought. But we said that would be shackling the river.
He dropped lightly over the balustrade on to the packed earth and walked down to the crowd.
And the full force of its belief scythed into him.
The people of Djelibeybi might have had conflicting ideas about their gods, but their belief in their kings had been unswerving for thousands of years. To Teppic it was like walking into a vat of alcohol. He felt it pouring into him until his fingertips crackled, rising up through his body until it gushed into his brain, bringing not omnipotence but the feeling of omnipotence, the very strong sensation that while he didn't actually know everything, he would do soon and had done once.
It had been like this back in Ankh, when the divinity had hooked him. But that had been just a flicker. Now it had the solid power of real belief behind it.
He looked down at a rustling below him, and saw green shoots springing out of the dry sand around his feet.
Bloody hell, he thought. I really am a god.
This could be very embarrassing.
He shouldered his way through the press of people until he reached the riverbank and stood there in a thickening clump of corn. As the crowd caught on, those nearest fell to their knees, and a circle of reverentially collapsing people spread out from Teppic like ripples.
But I never wanted this! I just wanted to help people live more happily, with plumbing. I wanted something done about rundown inner-city areas. I just wanted to put them at their ease, and ask them how they enjoyed their lives. I thought schools might be a good idea, so they wouldn't fall down and worship someone just because he's got green feet.
And I wanted to do something about the architecture... As the light drained from the sky like steel going cold the pyramid was somehow even bigger than before. If you had to design something to give the very distinct impression of mass, the pyramid was It. There was a crowd of figures around it, unidentifiable in the grey light.
Teppic looked around the prostrate crowd until he saw someone in the uniform of the palace guard.
'You, man, on your feet,' he commanded.
The man gave him a look of dread, but did stagger sheepishly upright.
'What's going on here?'
'O king, who is the lord of-'
'I don't think we have time,' said Teppic. 'I know who I am, I want to know what's happening.'
'O king, we saw the dead walking! The priests have gone to talk to them.'
'The dead walking?'
'Yes, O king.'
'We're talking about not-alive people here, are we?'
'Yes, O king.'
'Oh. Well, thank you. That was very succinct. Not informative, but succinct. Are there any boats around?'
'The priests took them all, O king.'
Teppic could see that this was true. The jetties near the palace were usually thronged with boats, and now they were all empty. As he stared at the water it grew two eyes and a long snout, to remind him that swimming the Djel was as feasible as nailing fog to the wall.
He stared at the crowd. Every person was watching him expectantly, convinced that he would know what to do next.
He turned back to the river, extended his hands in front of him, pressed them together and then opened them gently. There was a damp sucking noise, and the waters of the Djel parted in front of him. There was a sigh from the crowd, but their astonishment was nothing to the surprise of a dozen or so crocodiles, who were left trying to swim in ten feet of air.
Teppic ran down the bank and over the heavy mud, dodging to avoid the tails that slashed wildly at him as the reptiles dropped heavily on to the riverbed.
The Djel loomed up as two khaki walls, so that he was running along a damp and shadowy alley. Here and there were fragments of bones, old shields, bits of spear, the ribs of boats. He leapt and jinked around the debris of centuries.
Ahead of him a big bull crocodile propelled itself dreamily out of the wall of water, flailed madly in mid-air, and flopped into the ooze. Teppic trod heavily on its snout and plunged on.
Behind him a few of the quicker citizens, seeing the dazed creatures below them, began to look for stones. The crocodiles had been undisputed masters of the river since primordial times, but if it was possible to do a little catching-up in the space of a few minutes, it was certainly worth a try.
The sound of the monsters of the river beginning the long journey to handbaghood broke out behind Teppic as he sloshed up the far bank.
A line of ancestors stretched across the chamber, down the dark passageway, and out into the sand. It was filled with whispers going in both directions, a dry sound, like the wind blowing through old paper.
Dil lay on the sand, with Gern flapping a cloth in his face.
'Wha' they doing?' he murmured.
'Reading the inscription,' said Gern. 'You ought to see it, master! The one doing the reading, he's practically a-'
'Yes, yes, all right,' said Dil, struggling up.
'He's more than six thousand years old! And his grandson's listening to him, and telling his grandson, and he's telling his gra-'
'Yes, yes, all-'
'“And Khuft-too-said-Unto-the-First, What-may-We-Give-Unto-You, Who-Has-Taught-Us-the-Right-Ways”,' said Teppicymon[31], who was at the end of the line. '“And-the-First-Spake, and-This-He-Spake, Build-for-Me-a-Pyramid, That-I-May-Rest, and-Build-it-of-These-Dimensions, That-it-Be-Proper. And-Thus-It-Was-Done, and-The-Name-of-the-First-was . . .”'
But there was no name. It was just a babble of raised voices, arguments, ancient cursewords, spreading along the line of desiccated ancestors like a spark along a powder trail. Until it reached Teppicymon, who exploded.
The Ephebian sergeant, quietly perspiring in the shade, saw what he had been half expecting and wholly dreading. There was a column of dust on the opposite horizon. The Tsorteans' main force was getting there first.
He stood up, nodded professionally to his counterpart across the way, and looked at the double handful of men under his command.
'I need a messenger to take, er, a message back to the city,' he said. A forest of hands shot up. The sergeant sighed, and selected young Autocue, who he knew was missing his mum.
'Run like the wind,' he said. 'Although I expect you won't need telling, will you? And then . . . and then . .
He stood with his lips moving silently, while the sun scoured the rocks of the hot, narrow pass and a few insects buzzed in the scrub bushes. His education hadn't included a course in Famous Last Words.
He raised his eyes in the direction of home.
'Go, tell the Ephebians-' he began.
The soldiers waited.
'What?' said Autocue after a while. 'Go and tell them what?'
The sergeant relaxed, like air being let out of a balloon.
'Go and tell them, what kept you?' he said. On the near horizon another column of dust was advancing.
This was more like it. If there was going to be a massacre, then it ought to be shared by both sides.
The city of the dead lay before Teppic. After Ankh-Morpork, which was almost its direct opposite (in Ankh, even the bedding was alive) it was probably the biggest city on the Disc; its streets were the finest, its architecture the most majestic and awe-inspiring.