‘Ow!’
‘Hmm. So you’re really real,’ she said. ‘What’s your name, boy?’
‘Mortimer. They call me Mort,’ he said, rubbing his elbow. ‘What did you do that for?’
‘I shall call you Boy,’ she said. ‘And I don’t really have to explain myself, you understand, but if you must know I thought you were dead. You
look
dead.’
Mort said nothing.
‘Lost your tongue?’
Mort was, in fact, counting to ten.
‘I’m not dead,’ he said eventually. ‘At least, I don’t think so. It’s a little hard to tell. Who are you?’
‘You may call me Miss Ysabell,’ she said haughtily. ‘Father told me you must have something to eat. Follow me.’
She swept away towards one of the other doors. Mort trailed behind her at just the right distance to have it swing back and hit his other elbow.
There was a kitchen on the other side of the door – long, low and warm, with copper pans hanging from the ceiling and a vast black iron stove occupying the whole of one long wall. An old man was standing in front of it, frying eggs and bacon and whistling between his teeth.
The smell attracted Mort’s taste buds from across the room, hinting that if they got together they could really enjoy themselves. He found himself moving forward without even consulting his legs.
‘Albert,’ snapped Ysabell, ‘another one for breakfast.’
The man turned his head slowly and nodded at her without saying a word. She turned back to Mort.
‘I must say,’ she said, ‘that with the whole Disc to choose from, I should think Father could have done rather better than you. I suppose you’ll just have to do.’
She swept out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
‘Have to do what?’ said Mort, to no one in particular.
The room was silent, except for the sizzle of the frying pan and the crumbling of coals in the molten heart of the stove. Mort saw that it had the words ‘The Little Moloch (Ptntd)’ embossed on its oven door.
The cook didn’t seem to notice him, so Mort pulled up a chair and sat down at the white scrubbed table.
‘Mushrooms?’ said the old man, without looking around.
‘Hmm? What?’
‘I said, do you want mushrooms?’
‘Oh. Sorry. No, thank you,’ said Mort.
‘Right you are, young sir.’
He turned around and set out for the table.
Even after he got used to it, Mort always held his breath when he watched Albert walking. Death’s manservant was one of those stick-thin, raw-nosed old men who always look as though they are wearing gloves with the fingers cut out – even when they’re not – and his walking involved a complicated sequence of movements. Albert leaned forward and his left arm started to swing, slowly at first, but soon evolving into a wild jerking movement that finally and suddenly, at about the time when a watcher would have expected the arm to fly off at the elbow, transferred itself down the length of his body to his legs and propelled him forward like a high-speed stilt walker. The frying pan followed a series of intricate curves in the air and was brought to a halt just over Mort’s plate.
Albert did indeed have exactly the right type of half-moon spectacles to peer over the top of.
‘There could be some porridge to follow,’ he said, and winked, apparently to include Mort in the world porridge conspiracy.
‘Excuse me’, said Mort, ‘but where am I, exactly?’
‘Don’t you know? This is the house of Death, lad. He brought you here last night.’
‘I – sort of remember. Only . . .’
‘Hmm?’
‘Well. The bacon and eggs,’ said Mort, vaguely. ‘It doesn’t seem, well, appropriate.’
‘I’ve got some black pudding somewhere,’ said Albert.
‘No, I mean . . .’ Mort hesitated. ‘It’s just that I can’t see
him
sitting down to a couple of rashers and a fried slice.’
Albert grinned. ‘Oh, he doesn’t, lad. Not as a regular thing, no. Very easy to cater for, the master. I just cook for me and –’ he paused – ‘the young lady, of course.’
Mort nodded. ‘Your daughter,’ he said.
‘Mine? Ha,’ said Albert. ‘You’re wrong there. She’s his.’
Mort stared down at his fried eggs. They stared back from their lake of fat. Albert had heard of nutritional values, and didn’t hold with them.
‘Are we talking about the same person?’ he said at last. ‘Tall, wears black, he’s a bit . . . skinny . . .’
‘Adopted,’ said Albert, kindly. ‘It’s rather a long story—’
A bell jangled by his head.
‘—which will have to wait. He wants to see you in his study. I should run along if I were you. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Understandable, really. Up the steps and first on the left. You can’t miss it—’
‘It’s got skulls and bones around the door?’ said Mort, pushing back his chair.
‘They all have, most of them,’ sighed Albert. ‘It’s only his fancy. He doesn’t mean anything by it.’
Leaving his breakfast to congeal, Mort hurried up the steps, along the corridor and paused in front of the first door. He raised his hand to knock.
E
NTER
.
The handle turned of its own accord. The door swung inward.
Death was seated behind a desk, peering intently into a vast leather book almost bigger than the desk itself. He looked up as Mort came in, keeping one calcareous finger marking his place, and grinned. There wasn’t much of an alternative.
A
H
, he said, and then paused. Then he scratched his chin, with a noise like a fingernail being pulled across a comb.
W
HO ARE YOU, BOY
?
‘Mort, sir,’ said Mort. ‘Your apprentice. You remember?’
Death stared at him for some time. Then the pinpoint blue eyes turned back at the book.
O
H YES
, he said, M
ORT
. W
ELL, BOY, DO YOU SINCERELY WISH TO LEARN THE UTTERMOST SECRETS OF TIME AND SPACE
?
‘Yes, sir. I think so, sir.’
G
OOD
. T
HE STABLES ARE AROUND THE BACK
. T
HE SHOVEL HANGS JUST INSIDE THE DOOR
.
He looked down. He looked up. Mort hadn’t moved.
I
S IT BY ANY CHANCE POSSIBLE THAT YOU FAIL TO UNDERSTAND ME
?
‘Not fully, sir,’ said Mort.
D
UNG, BOY
. D
UNG
. A
LBERT HAS A COMPOST HEAP IN THE GARDEN
. I
IMAGINE THERE’S A WHEELBARROW SOMEWHERE ON THE PREMISES
. G
ET ON WITH IT
.
Mort nodded mournfully. ‘Yes, sir. I see, sir. Sir?’
Y
ES
?
‘Sir, I don’t see what this has to do with the secrets of time and space.’
Death did not look up from his book.
T
HAT
, he said,
IS BECAUSE YOU ARE HERE TO LEARN
.
It is a fact that although the Death of the Discworld is, in his own words, an
ANTHROPOMORPHIC
PERSONIFICATION
, he long ago gave up using the traditional skeletal horses, because of the bother of having to stop all the time to wire bits back on. Now his horses were always flesh-and-blood beasts, from the finest stock.
And, Mort learned, very well fed.
Some jobs offer increments. This one offered – well, quite the reverse, but at least it was in the warm and fairly easy to get the hang of. After a while he got into the rhythm of it, and started playing the private little quantity-surveying game that everyone plays in these circumstances. Let’s see, he thought, I’ve done nearly a quarter, let’s call it a third, so when I’ve done
that
corner by the hayrack it’ll be more than half, call it five-eighths, which means three more wheelbarrow loads . . . It doesn’t prove anything very much except that the awesome splendour of the universe is much easier to deal with if you think of it as a series of small chunks.
The horse watched him from its stall, occasionally trying to eat his hair in a friendly sort of way.
After a while he became aware that someone else was watching him. The girl Ysabell was leaning on the half-door, her chin in her hands.
‘Are you a servant?’ she said.
Mort straightened up.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m an apprentice.’
‘That’s silly. Albert said you can’t be an apprentice.’
Mort concentrated on hefting a shovelful into the wheelbarrow. Two more shovelfuls, call it three if it’s well pressed down, and that means four more barrows, all right, call it five, before I’ve done halfway to the . . .
‘He says,’ said Ysabell in a louder voice, ‘that apprentices become masters, and you can’t have more than one Death. So you’re just a servant and you have to do what I say.’
. . . and then eight more barrows means it’s all done all the way to the door, which is nearly two-thirds of the whole thing, which means . . .
‘Did you hear what I said, boy?’
Mort nodded. And then it’ll be fourteen more barrows, only call it fifteen because I haven’t swept up properly in the corner, and . . .
‘Have you lost your tongue?’
‘Mort,’ said Mort mildly.
She looked at him furiously. ‘What?’
‘My name is Mort,’ said Mort. ‘Or Mortimer. Most people call me Mort. Did you want to talk to me about something?’
She was speechless for a moment, staring from his face to the shovel and back again.
‘Only I’ve been told to get on with this,’ said Mort.
She exploded.
‘Why are you here? Why did Father bring you here?’
‘He hired me at the hiring fair,’ said Mort. ‘All the boys got hired. And me.’
‘And you want to be hired?’ she snapped. ‘He’s Death, you know. The Grim Reaper. He’s very important. He’s not something you
become
, he’s something you
are
.’
Mort gestured vaguely at the wheelbarrow.
‘I expect it’ll turn out for the best,’ he said. ‘My father always says things generally do.’
He picked up the shovel and turned away, and grinned at the horse’s backside as he heard Ysabell snort and walk away.
Mort worked steadily through the sixteenths, eighths, quarters and thirds, wheeling the wheelbarrow out through the yard to the heap by the apple tree.
Death’s garden was big, neat and well-tended. It was also very, very black. The grass was black. The flowers were black. Black apples gleamed among the black leaves of a black apple tree. Even the air looked inky.
After a while Mort thought he could see – no, he couldn’t possibly imagine he could see . . . different colours of black.
That’s to say, not simply very dark tones of red and green and whatever, but real shades of black. A whole spectrum of colours, all different and all – well, black. He tipped out the last load, put the barrow away, and went back to the house.
E
NTER
.
Death was standing behind a lectern, poring over a map. He looked at Mort as if he wasn’t entirely there.
Y
OU HAVEN’T HEARD OF THE BAY OF MANTE, HAVE YOU
? he said.
‘No, sir,’ said Mort.
F
AMOUS SHIPWRECK THERE
.
‘Was there?’
T
HERE WILL BE
, said Death,
IF
I
CAN FIND THE DAMN PLACE
.
Mort walked around the lectern and peered at the map.
‘You’re going to sink the ship?’ he said.
Death looked horrified.
C
ERTAINLY NOT
. T
HERE WILL BE A COMBINATION OF BAD SEAMANSHIP, SHALLOW WATER AND A CONTRARY WIND
.
‘That’s horrible,’ said Mort. ‘Will there be many drowned?’
T
HAT’S UP TO FATE
, said Death, turning to the bookcase behind him and pulling out a heavy gazetteer. T
HERE’S NOTHING
I
CAN DO ABOUT IT
. W
HAT IS THAT SMELL
?
‘Me,’ said Mort, simply.
A
H
. T
HE STABLES
. Death paused, his hand on the spine of the book. A
ND WHY DO YOU THINK
I
DIRECTED YOU TO THE STABLES
? T
HINK CAREFULLY, NOW
.
Mort hesitated. He
had
been thinking carefully, in between counting wheelbarrows. He’d wondered if it had been to coordinate his hand and eye, or teach him the habit of obedience, or bring home to him the importance, on the human scale, of small tasks, or make him realize that even great men must start at the bottom. None of these explanations seemed exactly right.
‘I think . . .’ he began.
Y
ES
?
‘Well, I think it was because you were up to your knees in horseshit, to tell you the truth.’
Death looked at him for a long time. Mort shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.
A
BSOLUTELY CORRECT
, snapped Death. C
LARITY OF THOUGHT
. R
EALISTIC APPROACH
. V
ERY IMPORTANT IN A JOB LIKE OURS
.
‘Yes, sir. Sir?’
H
MM
? Death was struggling with the index.
‘People die all the time, sir, don’t they? Millions. You must be very busy. But—’
Death gave Mort the look he was coming to be familiar with. It started off as blank surprise, flickered briefly towards annoyance, called in for a drink at recognition and settled finally on vague forbearance.
B
UT
?
‘I’d have thought you’d have been, well, out and about a bit more. You know. Stalking the streets. My granny’s almanack’s got a picture of you with a scythe and stuff.’
I
SEE
. I
AM AFRAID IT IS HARD TO EXPLAIN UNLESS YOU KNOW ABOUT POINT INCARNATION AND NODE FOCUSING
. I
DON’T EXPECT YOU DO
?