Pyramids - Terry Pratchett [85]
He found he kept wanting to say, politely, without stressing it in any way, just as a very gentle reminder, that he was king. But he had a feeling that she’d say she hadn’t heard, and would he please repeat it, and if she looked at him he’d never be able to say it twice.
“You could go,” he said. “You’d get on well. I could give you a few names and addresses.”
“And what would you do?”
“I dread to think what’s going on back home,” said Teppic. “I ought to do something.”
“You can’t. Why ptry? Even if you didn’t want to be an assassin there’s lots of pthings you could do. And you said the man said it’s not a place people could get into anymore. I hate pyramids.”
“Surely there’s people there you care about?”
Ptraci shrugged. “If they’re dead there’s nothing I can do about it,” she said. “And if they’re alive, there’s nothing I can do about it. So I shan’t.”
Teppic stared at her in a species of horrified admiration. It was a beautiful summary of things as they were. He just couldn’t bring himself to think that way. His body had been away for seven years but his blood had been in the kingdom for a thousand times longer. Certainly he’d wanted to leave it behind, but that was the whole point. It would have been there. Even if he’d avoided it for the rest of his life, it would have still been a sort of anchor.
“I feel so wretched about it,” he repeated. “I’m sorry. That’s all there is to it. Even to go back for five minutes, just to say, well, that I’m not coming back. That’d be enough. It’s probably all my fault.”
“But there isn’t a way back! You’ll just hang around sadly, like those deposed kings you ptold me about. You know, with pthreadbare cloaks and always begging for their food in a high-class way. There’s nothing more useless than a king without a kingdom, you said. Just think about it.”
They wandered through the sunset streets of the city, and toward the harbor. All streets in the city led toward the harbor.
Someone was just putting a torch to the lighthouse, which was one of the More Than Seven Wonders of the World and had been built to a design by Pthagonal using the Golden Rule and the Five Aesthetic Principles. Unfortunately it had then been built in the wrong place because putting it in the right place would have spoiled the look of the harbor, but it was generally agreed by mariners to be a very beautiful lighthouse and something to look at while they were waiting to be towed off the rocks.
The harbor below it was thronged with ships. Teppic and Ptraci picked their way past crates and bundles until they reached the long curved guard wall, harbor calm on one side, choppy with waves on the other. Above them the lighthouse flared and sparked.
Those boats would be going to places he’d only ever heard of, he knew. The Ephebians were great traders. He could go back to Ankh and get his diploma, and then the world would indeed be the mollusc of his choice and he had any amount of knives to open it with.
Ptraci put her hand in his.
And there’d be none of this marrying relatives business. The months in Djelibeybi already seemed like a dream, one of those circular dreams that you never quite seem able to shake off and which make insomnia an attractive prospect. Whereas here was a future, unrolling in front of him like a carpet.
What a chap needed at a time like this was a sign, some sort of book of instructions. The trouble with life was that you didn’t get a chance to practice before doing it for real. You only—
“Good grief? It’s Teppic, isn’t it?”
The voice was addressing him from ankle height. A head