Wednesday, with any luck: hot, flies. Dinner: either bush raisins or kangaroo droppings. Chased by hunters, don’t know why. Fell into waterhole.
Thursday (could be): hot, flies. Dinner: blue-tongued lizard. Savaged by blue-tongued lizard. Chased by different hunters. Fell off cliff, bounced into tree, pissed on by small grey incontinent teddy bear, landed in a waterhole.
Friday: hot, flies. Dinner: some kind of roots which tasted like sick. This saved time.
Saturday: hotter than yesterday, extra flies. V. thirsty.
Sunday: hot. Delirious with thirst and flies. Nothing but nothing as far as the eye can see, with bushes in it. Decided to die, collapsed, fell down sand dune into waterhole.
He wrote very carefully and as small as possible: ‘Monday: hot, flies. Dinner: moth grubs.’ He stared at the writing. It said it all, really.
Why didn’t people here like him? He’d meet some small tribe, everything’d be friendly, he’d pick up a few tips, get to know a few names, he’d build up a vocabulary, enough to chat about ordinary everyday things like the weather — and then suddenly they’d be chasing him away. After all, everyone talked about the weather, didn’t they?
Rincewind had always been happy to think of himself as a racist. The One Hundred Metres, the Mile, the Marathon — he’d run them all. Later, when he’d learned with some surprise what the word actually meant, he’d been equally certain he wasn’t one. He was a person who divided the world quite simply into people who were trying to kill him and people who weren’t. That didn’t leave much room for fine details like what colour anyone was. But he’d be sitting by the campfire, trying out a simple conversation, and suddenly people would get upset over nothing at all and drive him off. You didn’t expect people to get nasty just because you’d said something like, ‘My word, when did it last rain here?’ did you?
Rincewind sighed, picked up his stick, beat the hell out of a patch of ground, lay down and went to sleep.
Occasionally he screamed under his breath and his legs made running motions, which just showed that he was dreaming.
The waterhole rippled. It wasn’t large, a mere puddle deep in a bush-filled gully between some rocks, and the liquid it contained could only be called water because geographers refuse to countenance words like ‘souphole’.
Nevertheless it rippled, as though something had dropped into the centre. And what was odd about the ripples was that they didn’t stop when they reached the edge of the water but continued outwards over the land as expanding circles of dim white light.{18} When they reached Rincewind they broke up and flowed around him, so that now he was the centre of concentric lines of white dots, like strings of pearls.
The waterhole erupted. Something climbed up into the air and sped away across the night.
It zigzagged from rock to mountain to waterhole. And as the eye of observation rises, the travelling streak briefly illuminates other dim lines, hanging above the ground like smoke, so from above the whole land appears to have a circulatory system, or nerves …
A thousand miles from the sleeping wizard the line struck ground again, emerged in a cave, and passed across the walls like a searchlight.
It hovered in front of a huge, pointed rock for a moment and then, as if reaching a decision, shot up again into the sky.
The continent rolled below it as it returned. The light hit the waterhole without a splash but, once again, three or four ripples in something spread out across the turbid water and the surrounding sand.
Night rolled in again. But there was a distant thumping under the ground. Bushes trembled. In the trees, birds awoke and flew away.
After a while, on a rock face near the waterhole, pale white lines began to form a picture.
Rincewind had attracted the attention of at least one other watcher apart from whatever it was that dwelt in the waterhole.
Death had taken to keeping Rincewind’s lifetimer on a special shelf in his study, in much the way that a zoologist would want to keep an eye on a particularly intriguing specimen.
The lifetimers of most people were the classic shape that Death thought was right and proper for the task. They appeared to be large eggtimers, although, since the sands they measured were the living seconds of someone’s life, all the eggs were in one basket.
Rincewind’s hourglass looked like something created by a glassblower who’d had the hiccups in a time machine. According to the amount of actual sand it contained — and Death was pretty good at making this kind of estimate — he should have died long ago. But strange curves and bends and extrusions of glass had developed over the years, and quite often the sand was flowing backwards, or diagonally. Clearly, Rincewind had been hit by so much magic, had been thrust reluctantly through time and space so often that he’d nearly bumped into himself coming the other way, that the precise end of his life was now as hard to find as the starting point on a roll of really sticky transparent tape.
Death was familiar with the concept of the eternal, ever-renewed hero, the champion with a thousand faces. He’d refrained from commenting. He met heroes frequently, generally surrounded by, and this was important, the dead bodies of very nearly all their enemies and saying, ‘Vot the hell shust happened?’ Whether there was some arrangement that allowed them to come back again afterwards was not something he would be drawn on.
But he pondered whether, if this creature did exist, it was somehow balanced by the eternal coward. The hero with a thousand retreating backs, perhaps. Many cultures had a legend of an undying hero who would one day rise again, so perhaps the balance of nature called for one who wouldn’t.
Whatever the ultimate truth of the matter, the fact now was that Death did not have the slightest idea of when Rincewind was going to die. This was very vexing to a creature who prided himself on his punctuality.
Death glided across the velvet emptiness of his study until he reached the model of the Discworld, if indeed it was a model.
Eyeless sockets looked down.
SHOW, he said.
The precious metals and stones faded. Death saw ocean currents, deserts, forests, drifting cloudscapes like albino buffalo herds …
SHOW.
The eye of observation curved and dived into the living map, and a reddish splash grew in an expanse of turbulent sea. Ancient mountain ranges slipped past, deserts of rock and sand glided away.
SHOW.
Death watched the sleeping figure of Rincewind. Occasionally its legs would jerk.
HMM.
Death felt something crawling up the back of his robe, pause for a minute on his shoulder, and leap. A small rodent skeleton in a black robe landed in the middle of the image and started flailing madly at it with his tiny scythe, squeaking excitedly.
Death picked up the Death of Rats by his cowl and held him up for inspection.
NO, WE DON’T DO IT THAT WAY.
The Death of Rats struggled madly. SQUEAK?
BECAUSE IT’S AGAINST THE RULES, said Death. NATURE MUST TAKE ITS COURSE.
He glanced down at the image again as if a thought had struck him, and lowered the Death of Rats to the floor. Then he went to the wall and pulled a cord. Far away, a bell tolled.
After a while an elderly man entered, carrying a tray.
‘Sorry about that, master. I was cleaning the bath.’
I BEG YOUR PARDON, ALBERT?
‘I mean, that’s why I was late with your tea, sir,’ said Albert.