Interesting Times - Terry Pratchett [66]
“What did he say?”
“He said he’d call for the guards.”
“Ooo, yes. Please let him call for the guards!”
“No, we don’t want that yet. Act normally.”
“You mean cut his throat?”
“I meant a more normal kind of normally.”
“It’s what I call normal.”
One of the old men faced the speechless official and gave him a big grin.
“Excuse us, your supreme…oh dear, what’s the word?…pushcart sail?…immense rock?…ah, yes…venerableness, but we seem to be a little lost.”
A couple of the old men shuffled around behind Six Beneficent Winds and started to read, or at least try to read, what he’d been working on. A sheet of paper was snatched from his hand.
“What’s this say, Teach?”
“Let me see…‘The first wind of autumn shakes the lotus flower. Seven Lucky Logs to pay one pig and three [looks like a four-armed man waving a flag] of rice on pain of having his [rather a stylized thing here, can’t quite make it out] struck with many blows. By order of Six Beneficent Winds, Collector of Revenues, Langtang.’”
There was a subtle change among the old men. Now they were all grinning, but not in a way that gave him any comfort. One of them, with teeth like diamonds, leaned towards him and said, in bad Agatean:
“You are a tax collector, Mr. Knob on Your Hat?”
Six Beneficent Winds wondered if he’d be able to summon the guard. There was something terrible about these old men. They weren’t venerable at all. They were horribly menacing and, although he couldn’t see any obvious weapons, he knew for a cold frozen fact that he wouldn’t be able to get out more than the first syllable before he’d be killed. Besides, his throat had gone dry and his pants had gone wet.
“Nothing wrong with being a tax collector…” he croaked.
“We never said that,” said Diamond Teeth. “We always like to meet tax collectors.”
“Some of our most favoritest people, tax collectors,” said another old man.
“Saves a lot of trouble,” said Diamond Teeth.
“Yeah,” said a third old man. “Like, it means you don’t have to go from house to house killin’ everyone for their valuables, you just wait and kill the—”
“Gentlemen, can I have a word?”
The speaker was the slightly goat-faced one that didn’t seem quite so unpleasant as the others. The terrible men clustered around him and Six Beneficent Winds heard the strange syllables of a coarse foreign tongue:
“What? But he’s a tax collector! That’s what they’re for!”
“Whut?”
“A firm tax base is the foundation of sound governance, gentlemen. Please trust me.”
“I understood all of that up to ‘A firm tax’.”
“Nevertheless, no useful purpose will be served by killing this hardworking tax gatherer.”
“He’d be dead. I call that useful.”
There was some more of the same. Six Beneficent Winds jumped when the group broke up and the goat-faced man gave him a smile.
“My humble friends are overawed by your…variety of plum…small knife for cutting seaweed…presence, noble sir,” he said, his every word slandered by Truckle’s vigorous gesticulations behind his back.
“How about if we just cut a bit off?”
“Whut?”
“How did you get in here?” said Six Beneficent Winds. “There are many strong guards.”
“I knew we missed something,” said Diamond Teeth.
“We would like you to show us around the Forbidden City,” said Goat Face. “My name is…Mr. Stuffed Tube, I think you would call it. Yes. Stuffed Tube, I’m pretty sure—”
Six Beneficent Winds glanced hopefully towards the door.
“—and we are here to learn more about your wonderful…mountain…variety of bamboo…sound of running water at evening…drat…civilization.”
Behind him, Truckle was energetically demonstrating to the rest of the Horde what he and Bruce the Hoon’s Skeletal Riders once did to a tax gatherer. The sweeping arm movements in particular occupied Six Beneficent Winds’ attention. He couldn’t understand the words but, somehow, you didn’t need to.
“Why are you talking to him like that?”
“Ghenghiz, I’m lost. There are no maps of the Forbidden City. We need a guide.”
Goat Face turned back to the taxman.