Teppic wandered along the table to where Pthagonal was sitting in unrelieved misery, and currently peering suspiciously over the crust of a pie.
Teppic looked over his shoulder.
“I think I saw something moving in there,” he said.
“Ah,” said the geometrician, taking the cork out of an amphora with his teeth. “The mysterious young man in black from the lost kingdom.”
“I was hoping you could help me find it again?” said Teppic. “I heard that you have some very unusual ideas in Ephebe.”
“It had to happen,” said Pthagonal. He pulled a pair of dividers from the folds of his robe and measured the pie thoughtfully. “Is it a constant, do you think? It’s a depressing concept.”
“Sorry?” said Teppic.
“The diameter divides into the circumference, you know. It ought to be three times. You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But does it? No. Three point one four one and lots of other figures. There’s no end to the buggers. Do you know how pissed off that makes me?”
“I expect it makes you extremely pissed off,” said Teppic politely.
“Right. It tells me that the Creator used the wrong kind of circles. It’s not even a proper number! I mean, three point five, you could respect. Or three point three. That’d look
right
.” He stared morosely at the pie.
“Excuse me, you said something about it had to happen?”
“What?” said Pthagonal, from the depths of his gloom. “Pie!” he added.
“What had to happen?” Teppic prompted.
“You can’t mess with geometry, friend. Pyramids? Dangerous things. Asking for trouble. I mean,” Pthagonal reached unsteadily for his wine cup, “how long did they think they could go on building bigger and bigger pyramids for? I mean, where did they think power comes from? I mean,” he hiccuped, “you’ve been in that place, haven’t you? Ever noticed how slow it all seems to be?”
“Oh, yes,” said Teppic flatly.
“That’s because the time is sucked up, see? Pyramids. So they have to flare it off. Flarelight, they call it. They think it looks pretty! It’s their
time
they’re burning off!”
“All I know is the air feels as though it’s been boiled in a sock,” said Teppic. “And nothing actually changes, even if it doesn’t stay the same.”
“Right,” said Pthagonal. “The reason being, it’s past time. They use up past time, over and over again. The pyramids take all the new time. And if you don’t let the pyramids flare, the power build up’ll—” he paused. “I suppose,” he went on, “that it’d escape along a wossname, a fracture. In space.”
“I was there before the kingdom, er, went,” said Teppic. “I thought I saw the big pyramid move.”
“There you are then. It’s probably moved the dimensions around by ninety degrees,” said Pthagonal, with the assurance of the truly drunk.
“You mean, so length is height and height is width?”
Pthagonal shook an unsteady finger.
“Nonono,” he said. “So that length is height and height is breadth and breadth is width and width is—” he burped—“time. S’nother dimessnon, see? Four of the bastards. Time’s one of them. Ninety thingys to the other three. Degrees is what I mean. Only, only, it can’t exist in
this
world like that, so the place had to sort of pop outside for a bit, see? Otherwise you’d have people getting older by walking sideways.” He looked sadly into the depths of his cup. “And every birthday you’d age another mile,” he added.
Teppic looked at him aghast.
“That’s time and space for you,” Pthagonal went on. “You can twist them all over the place if you’re not careful. Three point one four one. What sort of a number d’you call that?”
“It sounds horrible,” said Teppic.
“Damn right. Somewhere,” Pthagonal was beginning to sway on his bench, “somewhere someone built a universe with a decent, respectable value of, of,” he peered blankly at the table, “of pie. Not some damn number that never comes to an end, what kind of—”
“I meant, people getting older just by walking along!”
“I dunno, though. You could have a stroll back to where you were eighteen. Or wander up and see what you are going to look like when you’re seventy. Traveling in width, though, that’d be the
real
trick.”
Pthagonal smiled vacantly and then, very slowly, keeled over into his dinner, some of which moved out of the way.
*
Teppic became aware that the philosophic din around him had subsided a bit. He stared along the line until he spotted Ibid.
“It won’t work,” said Ibid. “The Tyrant won’t listen to us. Nor will the people. Anyway—” he glanced at Antiphon—“we’re not all of one mind on the subject.”
“Damn Tsorteans need teaching a lesson,” said Antiphon sternly. “Not room for two major powers on this continent. Damn bad sports, anyway, just because we stole their queen. Youthful high spirits, love will have its way—”
Copolymer woke up.
“You’ve got it wrong,” he said mildly. “The great war, that was because they stole
our
queen. What was her name now, face that launched a thousand camels, began with an A or a T or—”
“Did they?” shouted Antiphon. “The bastards!”
“I’m reasonably certain,” said Copolymer.
Teppic sagged, and turned to Endos the Listener. He was still eating his dinner, with the air of one who is determined to preserve his digestion.
“Endos?”
The Listener laid his knife and fork carefully on either side of his plate.
“Yes?”
“They’re really all mad, aren’t they?” said Teppic wearily.
“That’s extremely interesting,” said Endos. “Do go on.” He reached shyly into his toga and brought forth a scrap of parchment, which he pushed gently toward Teppic.
“What’s this?”
“My bill,” said Endos. “Five minutes Attentive Listening. Most of my gentlemen have monthly accounts, but I understand you’ll be leaving in the morning?”
Teppic gave up. He wandered away from the table and into the cold garden surrounding the citadel of Ephebe. White marble statues of ancient Ephebians doing heroic things with no clothes on protruded through the greenery and, here and there, there were statues of Ephebian gods. It was hard to tell the difference. Teppic knew that Dios had hard words to say about the Ephebians for having gods that looked just like people. If the gods looked just like everyone else, he used to say, how would people know how to treat them?
Teppic had rather liked the idea. According to legend the Ephebians’ gods
were
just like humans, except that they used their godhood to get up to things humans didn’t have the nerve to do. A favorite trick of Ephebian gods, he recalled, was turning into some animal in order to gain the favors of highly-placed Ephebian women. And one of them had reputedly turned himself into a golden shower in pursuit of his intended. All this raised interesting questions about everyday night life in sophisticated Ephebe.
He found Ptraci sitting on the grass under a poplar tree, feeding the tortoise. He gave it a suspicious look, in case it was a god trying it on. It did not look like a god. If it was a god, it was putting on an incredibly good act.
She was feeding it a lettuce leaf.
“Dear little ptortoise,” she said, and then looked up. “Oh, it’s you,” she said flatly.
“You didn’t miss much,” said Teppic, sagging onto the grass. “They’re a bunch of maniacs. When I left they were smashing the plates.”
“That’s ptraditional at the end of an Ephebian meal,” said Ptraci.
Teppic thought about this. “Why not before?” he said.
“And then they probably dance to the sound of the bourzuki,” Ptraci added. “I think it’s a sort of dog.”
Teppic sat with his head in his hands.
“I must say you speak Ephebian well,” he said.
“Pthank you.”
“Just a trace of an accent, though.”
“Languages is part of the training,” she said. “And my grandmother told me that a ptrace of foreign accent is more fascinating.”
“We learned the same thing,” said Teppic. “An assassin should always be slightly foreign, no matter where he is. I’m
good
at that part,” he added bitterly.
She began to massage his neck.
“I went down to the harbor,” she said. “There’s those things like big rafts, you know, camels of the sea—”
“Ships,” said Teppic.
“And they go everywhere. We could go anywhere we want. The world is our pthing with pearls in it, if we like.”
Teppic told her about Pthagonal’s theory. She didn’t seem surprised.
“Like an old pond where no new water comes in,” she observed. “So everyone goes around and around in the same old puddle. All the ptime you live has been lived already. It must be like other people’s bathwater.”
“I’m going to go back.”
Her fingers stopped their skilled kneading of his muscles.
“We could go anywhere,” she repeated. “We’ve got ptrades, we could sell that camel. You could show me that Ankh-Morpork place. It sounds interesting.”
Teppic wondered what effect Ankh-Morpork would have on the girl. Then he wondered what effect she would have on the city. She was definitely—flowering. Back in the Old Kingdom she’d never apparently had any original thoughts beyond the choice of the next grape to peel, but since she was outside she seemed to have changed. Her jaw hadn’t changed, it was still quite small and, he had to admit, very pretty. But somehow it was more noticeable. She used to look at the ground when she spoke to him. She still didn’t always look at him when she spoke to him, but now it was because she was thinking about something else.
He found he kept wanting to say, politely, without stressing it in any way, just as a very gentle reminder, that he was king. But he had a feeling that she’d say she hadn’t heard, and would he please repeat it, and if she looked at him he’d never be able to say it twice.
“You could go,” he said. “You’d get on well. I could give you a few names and addresses.”
“And what would you do?”
“I dread to think what’s going on back home,” said Teppic. “I ought to do something.”
“You can’t. Why ptry? Even if you didn’t want to be an assassin there’s lots of pthings you could do. And you said the man said it’s not a place people could get into anymore. I hate pyramids.”
“Surely there’s people there you care about?”
Ptraci shrugged. “If they’re dead there’s nothing I can do about it,” she said. “And if they’re alive, there’s nothing I can do about it. So I shan’t.”
Teppic stared at her in a species of horrified admiration. It was a beautiful summary of things as they were. He just couldn’t bring himself to think that way. His body had been away for seven years but his blood had been in the kingdom for a thousand times longer. Certainly he’d wanted to
leave
it behind, but that was the whole point. It would have been there. Even if he’d avoided it for the rest of his life, it would have still been a sort of anchor.
“I feel so wretched about it,” he repeated. “I’m sorry. That’s all there is to it. Even to go back for five minutes, just to say, well, that I’m not coming back. That’d be enough. It’s probably all my fault.”
“But there isn’t a way back! You’ll just hang around sadly, like those deposed kings you ptold me about. You know, with pthreadbare cloaks and always begging for their food in a high-class way. There’s nothing more useless than a king without a kingdom, you said. Just think about it.”
They wandered through the sunset streets of the city, and toward the harbor. All streets in the city led toward the harbor.
Someone was just putting a torch to the lighthouse, which was one of the More Than Seven Wonders of the World and had been built to a design by Pthagonal using the Golden Rule and the Five Aesthetic Principles. Unfortunately it had then been built in the wrong place because putting it in the right place would have spoiled the look of the harbor, but it was generally agreed by mariners to be a very beautiful lighthouse and something to look at while they were waiting to be towed off the rocks.
The harbor below it was thronged with ships. Teppic and Ptraci picked their way past crates and bundles until they reached the long curved guard wall, harbor calm on one side, choppy with waves on the other. Above them the lighthouse flared and sparked.
Those boats would be going to places he’d only ever heard of, he knew. The Ephebians were great traders. He could go back to Ankh and get his diploma, and then the world would indeed be the mollusc of his choice and he had any amount of knives to open it with.
Ptraci put her hand in his.
And there’d be none of this marrying relatives business. The months in Djelibeybi already seemed like a dream, one of those circular dreams that you never quite seem able to shake off and which make insomnia an attractive prospect. Whereas here was a future, unrolling in front of him like a carpet.
What a chap needed at a time like this was a sign, some sort of book of instructions. The trouble with life was that you didn’t get a chance to practice before doing it for real. You only—
“Good grief? It’s Teppic, isn’t it?”
The voice was addressing him from ankle height. A head appeared over the stone of the jetty, quickly followed by its body. An extremely richly dressed body, one on which no expense had been spared in the way of gems, furs, silks and laces, provided that all of them, every single one, was black.
It was Chidder.
“What’s it doing now?” said Ptaclusp.
His son poked his head cautiously over the ruins of a pillar and watched Hat, the Vulture-Headed God.
“It’s sniffing around,” he said. “I think it likes the statue. Honestly, dad, why did you have to go and buy a thing like that?”
“It was in a job lot,” said Ptaclusp. “Anyway, I thought it would be a popular line.”
“With who?”
“Well,
he
likes it.”
Ptaclusp IIb risked another squint at the angular monstrosity that was still hopping around the ruins.
“Tell him he can have it if he goes away,” he suggested. “Tell him he can have it at cost.”
Ptaclusp winced. “At a
discount
,” he said. “A special cut rate for our supernatural customers.”
He stared up at the sky. From their hiding place in the ruins of the construction camp, with the Great Pyramid still humming like a powerhouse behind them, they’d had an excellent view of the arrival of the gods. At first he’d viewed them with a certain amount of equanimity. Gods would be good customers, they always wanted temples and statues, he could deal directly, cut out the middle man.