Interesting Times - Terry Pratchett [100]
“You always survived,” said Twoflower. “We had amazing adventures and you always survived.”
“That was just coincidence.”
“You kept on surviving.”
“And you got us safely out of prison,” said Lotus Blossom.
“There were just a lot of coinci—Will you go away!”
A butterfly skittered away from his flailing hand.
“Damn things,” he mumbled. And added: “Well, that’s it. I’m off. I can’t watch. I’ve got things to do. Besides, afterwards I think nasty people are going to be looking for me.”
And then he realized there were tears in Lotus Blossom’s eyes.
“We…we thought you would do something,” she said.
“Me? I can’t do anything! Especially not magic! I’m famous for it! Don’t go around believing that Great Wizards solve all your problems, because there aren’t any and they don’t and I should know because I’m not one!”
He backed away. “This is always happening to me! I’m just minding my own business and everything goes wrong and suddenly everyone’s relying on me and saying, ‘Oh, Rincewind, what are you going to do about it?’ Well, what Mrs. Rincewind’s little boy, if she was a Mrs. Rincewind of course, what he’s going to do about it is nothing, right? You have to sort it all out yourselves! No mysterious magical armies are going to—Will you stop looking at me like that? I don’t see why it’s my fault! I’ve got other things to do! It’s not my business!”
And then he turned and ran.
The crowds didn’t take much notice of him.
The streets were deserted by Hunghung standards, which meant you could quite often see the cobbles. Rincewind pushed and shoved his way along the alleys nearest the Wall, looking for another gateway with guards too busy to ask questions.
There were footsteps behind him.
“Look,” he said, spinning round, “I told you, you can all—”
It was the Luggage. It contrived to look a little ashamed of itself.
“Oh, turned up at last, have we?” said Rincewind savagely. “What happened to the following-master-everywhere thing?”
The Luggage shuffled its feet. From out of an alleyway came a slightly larger and far more ornate version of itself. Its lid was inset with decorative wood and, it seemed to Rincewind, its feet were rather more dainty than the horny-nailed, calloused ones of the Luggage. Besides, the toenails had been painted.
“Oh,” he said. “Well. Good grief. Fair enough, I suppose. Really? I mean…yes. Well. Come on, then.”
He reached the end of the alley and turned round. The Luggage was gently bumping the larger chest, urging it to follow him.
Rincewind’s own sexual experiences were not excessive although he had seen diagrams. He hadn’t the faintest idea about how it applied to travel accessories. Did they say things like “What a chest!” or “Get a load of the hinges on that one!”?
If it came to that, he had no real reason for considering that the Luggage was male. Admittedly it had a homicidal nature, but so had a lot of the women that Rincewind had met, and they had often become a little more homicidal as a result of meeting him. Capacity for violence, Rincewind had heard, was unisexual. He wasn’t certain what unisex was, but expected that it was what he normally experienced.
There was a small gate ahead. It seemed to be unguarded.
Despite his fear he walked through it, and refrained from running. Authority always noticed a running man. The time to start running was around about the “e” in “Hey, you!”
No one paid him any attention. The attention of the people along the Wall was all on the armies.
“Look at them,” he said bitterly, to the generality of the universe. “Stupid. If it was seven against seventy, everyone’d know who’d lose. Just because it’s seven against 700,000, everyone’s not sure. As though suddenly numbers don’t mean anything any more. Huh! Why should I do anything?