Reaper Man - Terry Pratchett [8]
“And plagues.”
The Archchancellor stroked his beard thoughtfully.
“Hmmm,” he said.
Alone of all the creatures in the world, trolls believe that all living things go through Time backward. If the past is visible and the future is hidden, they say, then it means you must be facing the wrong way. Everything alive is going through life back to front. And this is a very interesting idea, considering it was invented by a race who spend most of their time hitting one another on the head with rocks.
Whichever way around it is, Time is something that living creatures possess.
Death galloped down through towering black clouds.
And now he had Time, too.
The time of his life.
Windle Poons peered into the darkness.
“Hallo?” he said. “Hallo. Anyone there? What ho?”
There was a distant, forlorn soughing, as of wind at the end of a tunnel.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” said Windle, his voice trembling with mad cheerfulness. “Don’t worry. I’m quite looking forward to it, to tell the truth.”
He clapped his hands, spiritual hands, and rubbed them together with forced enthusiasm.
“Get a move on. Some of us have got new lives to go to,” he said.
The darkness remained inert. There was no shape, no sound. It was void, without form. The spirit of Windle Poons moved on the face of the darkness.
It shook its head. “Blow this for a lark,” it muttered. “This isn’t right at all.”
It hung around for a while and then, because there didn’t seem anything else for it, headed for the only home it had ever known.
It was a home he’d occupied for one hundred and thirty years. It wasn’t expecting him back and put up a lot of resistance. You either had to be very determined or very powerful to overcome that sort of thing, but Windle Poons had been a wizard for more than a century. Besides, it was like breaking into your own house, the old familiar property that you’d lived in for years. You knew where the metaphorical window was that didn’t shut properly.
In short, Windle Poons went back to Windle Poons.
Wizards don’t believe in gods in the same way that most people don’t find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they’re there, they know they’re there for a purpose, they’d probably agree that they have a place in a well-organized universe, but they wouldn’t see the point of believing, of going around saying, “O great table, without whom we are as naught.” Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.
Nevertheless, there is a small chapel off the University’s Great Hall, because while the wizards stand right behind the philosophy as outlined above, you don’t become a successful wizard by getting up gods’ noses even if those noses only exist in an ethereal or metaphorical sense. Because while wizards don’t believe in gods they know for a fact that gods believe in gods.
And in this chapel lay the body of Windle Poons. The University had instituted twenty-four hours’ lying-in-state ever since the embarrassing affair thirty years previously with the late Prissal “Merry Prankster” Teatar.
The body of Windle Poons opened its eyes. Two coins jingled onto the stone floor.
The hands, crossed over the chest, unclenched.
Windle raised his head. Some idiot had stuck a lily on his stomach.
His eyes swiveled sideways. There was a candle on either side of his head.
He raised his head some more.
There were two more candles down there, too.
Thank goodness for old Teatar, he thought. Otherwise I’d already be looking at the underside of a rather cheap pine lid.
Funny thing, he thought. I’m thinking. Clearly.
Wow.
Windle lay back, feeling his spirit refilling his body like gleaming molten metal running through a mold. White-hot thoughts seared across the darkness of his brain, fired sluggish neurones into action.
It was never like this when I was alive.
But I’m not dead.
Not alive and not dead.
Sort of non-alive.
Or un-dead.
Oh dear