Interesting Times - Terry Pratchett [33]
WHAT I DID ON MY HOLIDAYS, said the title. It was in bad handwriting or, rather, bad painting—the Agateans wrote with paintbrushes, assembling little word pictures out of handy components. One picture wasn’t just worth a thousand words, it was a thousand words.
Rincewind wasn’t much good at reading the language. There were very few Agatean books even in the Unseen University Library. And this one looked as though whoever had written it had been trying to make sense of something unfamiliar.
He turned over a couple of pages. It was a story about a Great City, containing magnificent things—“beer strong like an ox,” it said, and “pies containing many many parts of pig.” Everyone in the city seemed to be wise, kind, strong, or all three, especially some character called the Great Wizard who seemed to feature largely in the text.
And there were mystifying little comments, as in, “I saw a man tread upon the toes of a City Guard who said to him ‘Your wife is a big hippo!’ to which the man responded ‘Place it where the sun does not shed daylight, enormous person,’ upon which the Guard [this bit was in red ink and the handwriting was shaky, as if the writer was quite excited] did not remove the man’s head according to ancient custom.” The statement was followed by a pictogram of a dog passing water, which was for some obscure reason the Agatean equivalent of an exclamation mark. There were five of these.
Rincewind flicked through the pages. They were filled with the same dull stuff, sentences stating the blindingly obvious but often followed by several incontinent dogs. Such as: “The innkeeper said the City had demanded tax but he did not intend to pay, and when I asked if he was not afraid he vouch-safed: ‘[Complicated pictogram] them all except one and he can [complicated pictogram] himself’ [urinating dog, urinating dog]. He went on to say, ‘The [pictogram indicating Supreme Ruler] is a [another pictogram which, after some thought and holding up the picture at various angles, Rincewind decided meant “a horse’s bottom”] and you can tell him I said so,’ at which point a Guard in the tavern did not disembowel him [urinating dog, urinating dog] but said, ‘Tell him from me also’ [urinating dog, urinating dog, urinating dog, urinating dog, urinating dog].”
What was so odd about that? People talked like that in Ankh-Morpork all the time, or at least expressed those sentiments. Apart from the dog.
Mind you, a country that’d wipe out a whole city to teach the other cities a lesson was a mad place. Perhaps this was a book of jokes and he just hadn’t seen the point. Perhaps comedians here got big laughs with lines like: “I say, I say, I say, I met a man on the way to the theater and he didn’t chop my legs off, urinating dog, urinating dog—”
He had been aware of the jingle of harness on the road, but hadn’t paid it any attention. He hadn’t even looked up at the sound of someone approaching. By the time he did think of looking up it was too late, because someone had their boot on his neck.
“Oh, urinating dog,” he said, before passing out.
There was a puff of air and the Luggage appeared, dropping heavily into a snowdrift.
There was a meat cleaver sticking into its lid.
It remained motionless for some time and then, its legs moving in a complicated little dance, it turned around 360 degrees.
The Luggage did not think. It had nothing to think with. Whatever processes went on inside it probably had more to do with the way a tree reacts to sun and rain and sudden storms, but speeded up very fast.
After a while it seemed to get its bearings and ambled off across the melting snow.
The Luggage did not feel, either. It had nothing to feel with. But it reacted, in the same way that a tree reacts to the changing of the seasons.
Its pace quickened.
It was close to home.
Rincewind had to concede that the shouting man was right. Not, that is, about Rincewind’s father being the diseased liver of a type of mountain panda and his mother being a bucket of turtle slime;