Reaper Man - Terry Pratchett [96]
oh, all right.
“Why are you called One—”
is that all? I thought you could work that one out, a clever man like you. in my tribe we’re traditionally named after the first thing the mother sees when she looks out of the teepee after the birth. it’s short for One-Man-Pouring-a-Bucket-of-Water-over-Two-Dogs.
“That’s pretty unfortunate,” said Windle.
it’s not too bad, said One-Man-Bucket. it was my twin brother you had to feel sorry for. she looked out ten seconds before me to give him his name.
Windle Poons thought about it.
“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” he said. “Two-Dogs-Fighting?”
Two-Dogs-Fighting? Two-Dogs Fighting? said One-Man-Bucket. wow, he’d have given his right arm to be called Two-Dogs-Fighting.
It was later that the story of Windle Poons really came to an end, if “story” means all that he did and caused and set in motion. In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away—until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.
As he walked through the foggy city to an appointment he had been awaiting ever since he was born, Windle felt that he could predict that final end.
It would be in a few weeks’ time, when the moon was full again. A sort of codicil or addendum to the life of Windle Poons—born in the year of the Significant Triangle in the Century of the Three Lice (he’d always preferred the old calendar with its ancient names to all this new-fangled numbering they did today) and died in the year of the Notional Serpent in the Century of the Fruitbat, more or less.
There’d be two figures running across the high moorland under the moon. Not entirely wolves, not entirely human. With any luck, they’d have best of both worlds. Not just feeling…but knowing.
Always best to have both worlds.
Death sat in his chair in his dark study, his hands steepled in front of his face.
Occasionally he’d swivel the chair backward and forward.
Albert brought him in a cup of tea and exited with diplomatic soundlessness.
There was one lifetimer left on Death’s desk. He stared at it.
Swivel, swivel. Swivel, swivel.
In the hall outside, the great clock ticked on, killing time.
Death drummed his skeletal fingers on the desk’s scarred woodwork. In front of him, stacked up with impromptu bookmarks in their pages, were the lives of some of the Discworld’s great lovers.* Their fairly repetitive experiences hadn’t been any help at all.
He got up and stalked to a window and stared out at his dark domain, his hands clenching and unclenching behind his back.
Then he snatched up the lifetimer and strode out of the room.
Binky was waiting in the warm fug of the stables. Death saddled him quickly and led him out into the courtyard, and then rode up into the night, toward the distant glittering jewel of the Discworld.
He touched down silently in the farmyard, at sunset.
He drifted through a wall.
He reached the foot of the stairs.
He raised the hourglass and watched the draining of Time.
And then he paused. There was something he had to know. Bill Door had been curious about things, and he could remember everything about being Bill Door. He could look at emotions laid out like trapped butterflies, pinned on cork, under glass.
Bill Door was dead, or at least had ceased his brief existence. But—what was it?—someone’s actual life was only the core of their real existence? Bill Door had gone, but he had left echoes. The memory of Bill Door was owed something.
Death had always wondered why people put flowers on graves. It made no sense to him. The dead had gone beyond the scent of roses, after all. But now…it wasn’t that he felt he understood, but at least he felt that there was something there capable of understanding.
In the curtained blackness of Miss Flitworth’s parlor a darker shape moved through the darkness, heading toward