The Last Continent - Terry Pratchett [106]
“Eek!” it said.
Ridcully coughed. “Well, at least he’s the right shape,” he said. “And, er, you, Mrs. Whitlow? How do you feel?”
“Mwaa…” said the Senior Wrangler.
“Very well indeed, thank you,” said Mrs. Whitlow. “This country agrees with me. I don’t know whether it was the swim, but Ai haven’t felt quate so buoyant in years. But Ai looked around and there was this dear little ape just sitting there.”
“Ponder, would you mind just throwing the Senior Wrangler in the sea for a moment?” said Ridcully. “Nowhere too deep. Don’t worry if it steams.” He took Mrs. Whitlow’s spare hand.
“I don’t want to worry you, dear Mrs. Whitlow,” he said, “but I think something is shortly going to come as a big shock to you. First of all, and please don’t misunderstand me, it might be a good idea to loosen your clothing.” He swallowed. “Slightly.”
The Bursar had experienced some changes of age as he wandered through the wet but barren land, but to a man capable of being a vase of flowers for an entire afternoon this was barely a mild distraction.
What had caught his eye was a fire. It was burning bits of driftwood, and the flames were edged with blue from the salt.
Close to it was a sack made of some sort of animal skins.
The damp earth beside the Bursar stirred and a tree erupted, growing so fast that the rain steamed off the unfolding leaves. This did not surprise him. Few things did. Besides, he’d never seen a tree growing before, so he did not know how fast it was supposed to go.
Then several more trees exploded around him. One grew so fast that it went all the way from sapling to half-rotten trunk in a few seconds.
And it seemed to the Bursar that there were other people here. He couldn’t see them or hear them, but something in his bones sensed them. However, the Bursar was also quite accustomed to the presence of people who couldn’t be seen or heard by anyone else, and had spent many a pleasant hour in conversation with historical figures and, sometimes, the wall.
All in all the Bursar was, depending on your outlook, the most or least suitable person to encounter deity on a first-hand basis.
An old man walked around a rock and was halfway to the fire before he noticed the wizard.
Like Rincewind, the Bursar had no room in his head for racism. As a skin color black came as quite a relief compared to some of the colors he’d seen, although he’d never seen anyone quite so black as the man now staring at him. At least, the Bursar assumed he was staring. The eyes were so deep set that he couldn’t be sure.
The Bursar, who had been properly brought up, said, “Hooray, there’s a rosebush?”
The old man gave him a rather puzzled nod. He walked over to the dead tree and pulled off a branch, which he pushed into the fire. Then he sat down and watched it as though watching wood char was the most engrossing thing in the world.
The Bursar sat down on a rock and waited. If the game was patience, then two could play at it.
The old man kept glancing up at him. The Bursar kept smiling. Once or twice he gave the man a little wave.
Finally the burning branch was pulled out of the fire. The old man picked up the leather sack in his other hand and walked off among the rocks. The Bursar followed him.
There was an overhang here under a small cliff, shielding a stretch of vertical rock from the rain. It was the kind of tempting surface that would, in Ankh-Morpork, have already been covered so thickly with so many posters, signs and graffiti that if you’d removed the wall the general accretion would still have stood up.
Someone had drawn a tree. It was the simplest drawing of a tree the Bursar had ever seen since he’d been old enough to read books that weren’t mainly pictures, but it was also in some strange way the most accurate. It was simple because something complex had been rolled up small; as if someone had drawn trees, and started with the normal green cloud on a stick, and refined it, and refined it some more,