Interesting Times - Terry Pratchett [118]
“Okay.”
Cohen stood up and nodded cheerfully at the terracotta giant.
“’Morning,” he said. “Nice bit of work out there. You and the rest of your lads can have the day off to plant geraniums in yourselves or whatever you do. Er. You got a Number One giant I ought to speak to?”
The terracotta warrior creaked as it raised one finger.
Then it pressed two fingers against one forearm, then raised a finger again.
Everyone in the crowd started talking at once.
The giant tugged one vestigial ear with two fingers.
“What can this mean?” said Six Beneficent Winds.
“I find this a little hard to credit,” said Mr. Saveloy, “but it is an ancient method of communication used in the land of blood-sucking vampire ghosts.”
“You can understand it?”
“Oh, yes. I think so. You have to try to guess the word or phrase. It’s trying to tell us…er…one word, two syllables. First syllable sounds like…”
The giant cupped one hand and made circular, handle-turning motions with the other alongside it.
“Turning,” said Mr. Saveloy. “Winding? Reeling? Revolve? Grind? Grind? Chop? Mince—”
The giant tapped its nose hurriedly and did a very heavy, noisy dance, bits of terracotta armor clanking.
“Sounds like mince,” said Mr. Saveloy. “First syllable sounds like mince.”
“Er…”
A ragged figure pushed its way through the crowd. It wore glasses, one lens of which was cracked.
“Er,” it said, “I’ve got an idea about that…”
Lord Fang and some of his more trusted warriors had clustered on the side of the hill. A good general always knows when to leave the battlefield, and as far as Lord Fang was concerned, it was when he saw the enemy coming towards him.
The men were shaken. They hadn’t tried to face the Red Army. Those who had were dead.
“We…regroup,” panted Lord Fang. “And then we’ll wait until nightfall and—What’s that?”
There was a rhythmic noise coming from the bushes further up the slope, where sliding earth had left another bush-filled ravine.
“Sounds like a carpenter, m’lord,” said one of the soldiers.
“Up here? In the middle of a war? Go and see what it is!”
The man scrambled away. After a while there was a pause in the sawing noise. Then it started again.
Lord Fang had been trying to work out a fresh battle plan according to the Nine Useful Principles. He threw down his map.
“Why is that still going on? Where is Captain Nong?”
“Hasn’t come back, m’lord.”
“Then go and see what has happened to him!”
Lord Fang tried to remember if the great military sage had ever had anything to say about fighting giant invulnerable statues. He—
The sawing paused. Then it was replaced by the sound of hammering.
Lord Fang looked around.
“Can I have an order obeyed around here?” he bellowed.
He picked up his sword and scrambled up the muddy slope. The bushes parted ahead of him. There was a clearing. There was a rushing shape, on hundreds of little le—
There was a snap.
The rain was coming down so fast that the drops were having to queue.
The red earth was hundreds of feet deep in places. It produced two or three crops a year. It was rich. It was fecund. It was, when wet, extremely sticky.
The surviving armies had squelched from the field of battle, as red from head to toe as the terracotta men. Not counting those merely trodden on, the Red Army had not in fact killed very many people. Terror had done most of their work. Rather more soldiers had been killed in the brief inter-army battles and, in the scramble to escape, by their own sides.*
The terracotta army had the field to itself. It was celebrating victory in various ways. Many guards were walking around in circles, wading through the clinging mud as if it was so much dirty air. A number were digging a trench, the sides of which were washing in on them in the thundering rain. A few were trying to climb walls that weren’t there. Several, possibly as a result of the exertion following centuries of zero maintenance, had spontaneously exploded in a shower of blue sparks, the red-hot clay shrapnel being a major factor in the opposition’s death count.
And all the time