Well, that’s the end of sailing, Esk told herself. He’s not quite sure but he’s going to be watching me now and before I know what’s happening the staff will be taken away and there’ll be all sorts of trouble. Why does everyone get so upset about magic?
She gave a philosophical sigh and set about exploring the possibilities of the town.
There was the question of the staff, though. Esk had rammed it deep among the fleeces, which were not going to be unloaded yet. If she went back for it people would start asking questions, and she didn’t know the answers.
She found a convenient alleyway and scuttled down it until a deep doorway gave her the privacy she required.
If going back was out of the question then only one thing remained. She held out a hand and closed her eyes.
She knew exactly what she wanted to do — it lay in front of her eyes. The staff mustn’t come flying through the air, wrecking the barge and drawing attention to itself. All she wanted, she told herself, was for there to be a slight change in the way the world was organized. It shouldn’t be a world where the staff was in the fleeces, it should be a world where it was in her hand. A tiny change, an infinitesimal alteration to the Way Things Were.
If Esk had been properly trained in wizardry she would have known that this was impossible. All wizards knew how to move things about, starting with protons and working upwards, but the important thing about moving something from A to Z, according to basic physics, was that at some point it should pass through the rest of the alphabet. The only way one could cause something to vanish at A and appear at Z would be to shuffle the whole of Reality sideways. The problems this would cause didn’t bear thinking about.
Esk, of course, had not been trained, and it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a half-brick in the path of the bicycle of history.
As Esk tried to work out how to move the staff the ripples spread out in the magical ether, changing the Discworld in thousands of tiny ways. Most went entirely unnoticed. Perhaps a few grains of sand lay on their beaches in a slightly different position, or the occasional leaf hung on its tree in a marginally different way. But then the wavefront of probability struck the edge of Reality and rebounded like the slosh off the side of the pond which, meeting the laggard ripples coming the other way, caused small but important whirlpools in the very fabric of existence. You can have whirlpools in the fabric of existence, because it is a very strange fabric.
Esk was completely ignorant of all this, of course, but was quite satisfied when the staff dropped out of thin air into her hand.
It felt warm.
She looked at it for some time. She felt that she ought to do something about it; it was too big, too distinctive, too inconvenient. It attracted attention.
‘If I’m taking you to Ankh-Morpork,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘you’ve got to go in disguise.’
A few late flickers of magic played around the staff, and then it went dark.
Eventually Esk solved the immediate problem by finding a stall in the main Zemphis market place that sold broomsticks, buying the largest, carrying it back to her doorway, removing the handle and ramming the staff deep into the birch twigs. It didn’t seem right to treat a noble object in this way, and she silently apologized to it.
It made a difference, anyway. No-one looked twice at a small girl carrying a broom.
She bought a spice pasty to eat while exploring (the stall-holder carelessly shortchanged her, and only realized later that he had inexplicably handed over two silver pieces; also, rats mysteriously got in and ate all his stock during the night, and his grandmother was struck by lightning).
The town was smaller than Ohulan, and very different because it lay on the junction of three trade routes quite apart from the river itself. It was built around one enormous square which was a cross between a permanent exotic traffic jam and a tent village. Camels kicked mules, mules kicked horses, horses kicked camels and they all kicked humans; there was a riot of colours, a din of noise, a nasal orchestration of smells and the steady, heady sound of hundreds of people working hard at making money.
One reason for the bustle was that over large parts of the continent other people preferred to make money without working at all, and since the Disc had yet to develop a music recording industry they were forced to fall back on older, more traditional forms of banditry.
Strangely enough these often involved considerable effort. Rolling heavy rocks to the top of cliffs for a decent ambush, cutting down trees to block the road, and digging a pit lined with spikes while still keeping a wicked edge on a dagger probably involved a much greater expenditure of thought and muscle than more socially-acceptable professions but, nevertheless, there were still people misguided enough to endure all this, plus long nights in uncomfortable surroundings, merely to get their hands on perfectly ordinary large boxes of jewels.
So a town like Zemphis was the place where caravans split, mingled and came together again, as dozens of merchants and travellers banded together for protection against the socially disadvantaged on the trails ahead. Esk, wandering unregarded amidst the bustle, learned all this by the simple method of finding someone who looked important and tugging on the hem of his coat.
This particular man was counting bales of tobacco and would have succeeded but for the interruption.
‘What?’
‘I said, what’s happening here?’
The man meant to say: ‘Push off and bother someone else.’ He meant to give her a light cuff about the head. So he was astonished to find himself bending down and talking seriously to a small, grubby-faced child holding a large broomstick (which also, it seemed to him later, was in some indefinable way paying attention).
He explained about the caravans. The child nodded.
‘People all get together to travel?’
‘Precisely.’
‘Where to?’
‘All sorts of places. Sto Lat, Pseudopolis … AnkhMorpork, of course …’
‘But the river goes there,’ said Esk, reasonably. ‘Barges. The Zoons.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said the merchant, ‘but they charge high prices and they can’t carry everything and, anyway, no one trusts them much.’
‘But they’re very honest!’
‘Huh, yes,’ he said. ‘But you know what they say: never trust an honest man.’ He smiled knowingly.
‘Who says that?’
‘They do. You know. People,’ he said, a certain uneasiness entering his voice.
‘Oh,’ said Esk. She thought about it. ‘They must be very silly,’ she said primly. ‘Thank you, anyway.’
He watched her wander off and got back to his counting. A moment later there was another tug at his coat.
‘Fiftysevenfiftysevenfiftysevenwell?’ he said, trying not to lose his place.
‘Sorry to bother you again,’ said Esk, ‘but those bale things …’
‘What about them fiftysevenfiftysevenfiftyseven?’
‘Well, are they supposed to have little white worm things in them?’
‘Fiftysev — what?’ The merchant lowered his slate and stared at Esk. ‘What little worms?’
‘Wriggly ones. White,’ added Esk, helpfully. ‘All sort of burrowing about in the middle of the bales.’
‘You mean tobacco threadworm?’ He looked wildeyed at the stack of bales being unloaded by, now he came to think about it, a vendor with the nervous look of a midnight sprite who wants to get away before you find out what fairy gold turns into in the morning. ‘But he told me these had been well stored and — how do you know, anyway?’
The child had disappeared among the crowds. The merchant looked hard at the spot where she had been. He looked hard at the vendor, who was grinning nervously. He looked hard at the sky. Then took his sampling knife out of his pocket, stared at it for a moment, appeared to reach a decision, and sidled towards the nearest bale.