Interesting Times - Terry Pratchett [51]
“Ho, fat merchant, give me all your…one apple…and I will give you…this coin…”
He looked around. Mr. Saveloy had his thumb up.
“You want an apple, is that it?” said the apple merchant.
“Yes!”
The apple merchant selected one. Cohen’s sword had been hidden in the wheelchair again but the merchant, in response to some buried acknowledgement, made sure it was a good apple. Then he took the coin. This proved a little difficult, since his customer seemed loath to let go of it.
“Come on, hand it over, venerable one,” he said.
Seven crowded seconds passed.
Then, when they were safely around the corner, Mr. Saveloy said, “Now, everyone: who can tell me what Ghenghiz did wrong?”
“Didn’t say please?”
“Whut?”
“No.”
“Didn’t say thank you?”
“Whut?”
“No.”
“Hit the man over the head with a melon and thumped him into the strawberries and kicked him in the nuts and set fire to his stall and stole all the money?”
“Whut?”
“Correct!” Mr. Saveloy sighed. “Ghenghiz, you were doing so well up to then.”
“He didn’t ort to have called me what he did!”
“But ‘venerable’ means old and wise, Ghenghiz.”
“Oh. Does it?”
“Yes.”
“We-ell…I did leave him the money for the apple.”
“Yes, but, you see, I do believe you took all his other money.”
“But I paid for the apple,” said Cohen, rather testily.
Mr. Saveloy sighed. “Ghenghiz, I do rather get the impression that several thousand years of the patient development of fiscal propriety have somewhat passed you by.”
“Come again?”
“It is possible sometimes for money to legitimately belong to other people,” said Mr. Saveloy patiently.
The Horde paused to wrap their minds around this, too. It was, of course, something they knew to be true in theory. Merchants always had money. But it seemed wrong to think of it as belonging to them; it belonged to whoever took it off them. Merchants didn’t actually own it, they were just looking after it until it was needed.
“Now, there is an elderly lady over there selling ducks,” said Mr. Saveloy. “I think the next stage—Mr. Willie, I am not over there, I am sure whatever you are looking at is very interesting, but please pay attention—is to practice our grasp of social intercourse.”
“Hur, hur, hur,” said Caleb the Ripper.
“I mean, Mr. Ripper, that you should go and enquire how much it would be for a duck,” said Mr. Saveloy.
“Hur, hur, hur—What?”
“And you are not to rip all her clothes off. That’s not civilized.”
Caleb scratched his head. Flakes fell out.
“Well, what else am I supposed to do?”
“Er…engage her in conversation.”
“Eh? What’s there to talk about with a woman?”
Mr. Saveloy hesitated again. To some extent this was unknown territory to him as well. His experience with women at his last school had been limited to an occasional chat with the housekeeper, and on one occasion the matron had let him put his hand on her knee. He had been forty before he found out that oral sex didn’t mean talking about it. Women had always been to him strange and distant and wonderful creatures rather than, as the Horde to a man believed, something to do. He was struggling a little.
“The weather?” he hazarded. His memory threw in vague recollections of the staple conversation of the maiden aunt who had brought him up. “Her health? The trouble with young people today?”
“And then I rip her clothes off?”
“Possibly. Eventually. If she wants you to. I might draw your attention to the discussion we had the other day about taking regular baths”—or even a bath, he added to himself—“and attention to fingernails and hair and changing your clothes more often.”
“This is leather,” said Caleb. “You don’t have to change it, it don’t rot for years.”
Once again Mr. Saveloy readjusted his sights. He’d thought that Civilization could be overlaid on the Horde like a veneer. He had been mistaken.
But the funny thing—he mused, as the Horde watched Caleb’s painful attempts at conversation with a representative of half the world’s humanity—was that although they were as far away as possible from the kind of people he normally mixed with in staffrooms, or