The Last Continent - Terry Pratchett [77]
He walked unsteadily over to have a look. There was a circular depression in the ground that looked as though it might have been some sort of pond once, and there was the usual cluster of slightly healthier than usual trees which you got in such places, but there was no sign of any water and he was too tired to dig.
Then another insight struck him at the speed of beer. Beer! It was only water, really, with stuff in it. Wasn’t it? And most of what was in it was yeast, which was practically a medicine and definitely a food. In fact, when you thought about it, beer was only a kind of runny bread, in fact, it’d be better to use some of the beer in the soup! Beer soup! A few brain cells registered their doubt, but the rest of them grabbed them by the collar and said hoarsely, people cooked chicken in wine, didn’t they?
It took him some time to hack one end off a tin, but eventually he had it standing in the fire with the chopped-up vegetables floating in the froth. A few more doubts assailed him at this point, but they were elbowed aside, especially when the smell that floated up made his mouth water and he’d opened another tin of beer as a pre-prandial appetizer.
After a while he poked the vegetables with a stick. They were still pretty hard, even though a lot of the beer seemed to have boiled away. Was there something else he hadn’t done?
Salt! Yes, that was it! Salt, marvelous stuff. He’d read where you went totally up the pole if you didn’t have any salt for a couple of weeks. That was probably why he was feeling so odd at the moment. He fumbled for the salt box and dropped a pinch in the tin.
It was a medicinal herb, salt. Good for wounds, wasn’t it? And back in the really old days, hadn’t soldiers been paid in salt? Wasn’t that where the word salary came from? Must’ve been good, then. You went on a forced march all week, building your road as you went, then you fought the maddened blue-painted tribesmen of the Vexatii, and you force-marched all the way back home, and on Friday the centurion would turn up with a big sack and say, “Well done, lads! Here’s some salt!”
It was amazing how well his mind was working.
He peered at the salt box again, shrugged, and tipped it all in. When you thought about it like that, salt must really be an amazing food. And he hadn’t had any for weeks, so that was probably why his eyesight was acting up and he couldn’t feel his legs.
He topped up the beer, too.
He lay back with his head on a rock. Keep out of trouble and don’t get involved, that was the important thing. Look at those stars up there, with nothing to do all the time but sit there and shine. No one ever told them what to do, the lucky bastards…
He woke up shivering. Something horrible had crawled into his mouth, and it was no great relief to find out that it was his tongue. It was chilly, and the horizon suggested dawn.
There was also a pathetic sucking noise.
Some sheep had invaded his camp during the night. One of them was trying to get its mouth around an empty beer tin. It stopped when it saw that he had woken up, and backed away a bit, but not too far, while fixing him with the penetrating gaze of a domesticated animal reminding its domesticator that they had a deal.
His head ached.
There had to be some water somewhere. He lurched to his feet and blinked at the horizon. There were…windmills and things, weren’t there? He remembered the stricken windmills from yesterday. Well, there was bound to be some water around, no matter what anyone said. Ye gods, he was thirsty.
His gummed-up gaze fell upon last night’s magnificent experiment in cookery. Yeasty vegetable soup, what a wonderful idea. Exactly the sort of idea that sounds really good around one o’clock in the morning when you’ve had too much to drink.
Now he remembered, with a shudder, some of the great wheezes he’d had on similar occasions. Spaghetti and custard, that’d been a good one. Deep-fried peas, that’d been another triumph. And