Here Be Dragons (23 page)

The plot of
Pyramids
turns on this dual nature of time.
⁹³
Time must be understood as both power
and
dimension for the events that lead to the end of the Djelibeybi polder to be clear. The Great Pyramid that Teppic is tricked into having built stores time-as-power because it exists as a four-dimensional object (one of the dimensions being time-as-dimension). The great potential that this buildup causes results in a shift of the four dimensions, time-as-dimension included. That shift, in turn, causes events that ultimately destroy the pyramids and end Dios's rule. It also brings the polder's boundaries and maintenance into view.

Unlike Lothlórien and Ryhope Wood, the Djelibeybi polder is not introduced to the reader by its boundaries, even though they are implied by more than just the dimensional shift; instead, Dios's attempts to maintain the kingdom as an anachronism define much of the story, as do the protagonist's transgressions of the polder boundaries. A polder requires boundaries that protect it from the hostile reality around it, protection that Djelibeybi initially appears to be without. The clearest sign that the country's boundaries are more than political constructions is the Great Pyramid's shifting of the four dimensions. When this happens,
Djelibeybi is removed from the Discworld universe. The very fabric of the physical reality changes, but only within the boundaries of the polder. As a footnote explains, “Nature abhors dimensional abnormalities, and seals them neatly away so that they don't upset people” (204n). The country is sealed away along its political boundaries, demonstrating that the effect is limited to, but includes all of, Djelibeybi. This removal, or sealing away, of the polder also emphasizes its separate pantheon: once the polder is no longer in contact with the rest of the Discworld, the force of the people's belief is enough to change a number of other natural laws: their gods appear, their mummified ancestors are brought back to life, their ruler is fully responsible for making the sun rise, and so on.

Even before this shift takes place, the Djelibeybi gods as well as the destroyed time indicate that Djelibeybi is separated from the rest of Discworld. “The valley of the Djel had its own private gods,” Teppic muses, “gods which had nothing to do with the world outside” (32). In the Discworld, gods exist because people believe in them (179–80) (an idea that Pratchett develops in greater detail in
Small Gods
); but Teppic clearly distinguishes between the Djelibeybi gods and the pantheon of other Discworld gods, just as he sees the world as divided into Djelibeybi and “the world outside.” The kingdom is set apart not only politically but also, as suggested before, pantheonically and temporally. The pyramids' burning of time is limited to the polder, providing a basis for its anachronism. Whereas a tradition is connected to its specific society, the lack of new time is a phenomenon that, theoretically, would concern an entire world. The boundaries of the kingdom are also the boundaries for the temporal destruction, however. This localized effect on the time flow becomes particularly evident from the way various characters experience time in the country. Teppic, for instance, reflects on how time might pass everywhere else but not in Djelibeybi (104), and how this makes the air feel “as though it's been boiled in a sock” (203). The lack of time, or at least the absence of change caused by it, is noticeable not only intuitively but as a physical sensation. It is also restricted to the kingdom.

With pantheon, temporal destruction, and dimensional shift all confined to the kingdom, there are obviously boundaries that do the confining, but the plot turns on high priest Dios's attempts to maintain the separate reality of Djelibeybi rather than its boundaries. Recalling Clute's definition of a polder from earlier in this chapter, polder boundaries must be maintained, often by a “significant figure”; it is the defense that protects the polder's separate reality.
⁹⁴
Whereas Dios is certainly
significant, it is not the
boundaries
that he actively maintains; his efforts are aimed directly at protecting the reality in the polder. Instead of preventing the wrong time of the outside world from trickling in, Dios actively opposes change in the kingdom by incessantly manning the bilge pumps, as it were. The death of Teppic's foreign mother is relevant in this context: what little is mentioned about her suggests that she attempted to effect change. For instance, she disliked pyramids, a position that in Djelibeybi is “like disliking breathing” (17). The veiled threat in the simile is carried out: she is eaten by crocodiles when swimming in the river (17). Throwing someone to the crocodiles proves to be the priesthood's favorite way of getting rid of people (this is how Ptraci is meant to be sacrificed [119] and how two blasphemous priests are dispatched [182–83]), so while Teppic's absentminded father supposes that his wife had simply forgotten about the crocodiles, it is far more likely that she was killed by Dios or at least at his command. The late queen is the first crack in Dios's bulwark against change, and he fails to deal with this crack expediently enough; it is because of a promise extracted by the queen before her death that Teppic is actually sent abroad to study, a departure (or “going forth”) that sets in motion the chain of events that leads to Dios's undoing.

The failure to maintain the boundaries leads to the end of the polder by allowing Teppic to go forth as well as come back; each transgression constitutes an important turning point in the plot. The novel and its first part both bear the title
The Book of Going Forth
(a title that, as Langford points out, refers to the literal title of the ancient Egyptian guide to the afterlife, “The Book of Coming Forth by Day”
⁹⁵
), and Teppic's crossing of the polder's boundaries is what makes us aware of those boundaries. Their presence is made obvious by the fact that they are transgressed, rather than by the process of transgression. For both Tolkien's and Holdstock's polders, the entering of the polder is an essential part of how the polder is presented. Djelibeybi, on the other hand, is entered and exited as a matter of course. Teppic crosses the kingdom's border on five occasions in the story (leaving three times, returning twice), and not until Djelibeybi is removed from the Discworld does he encounter any difficulties. Examined in terms of change, Teppic's boundary transgressions—his departures and returns—turn out to be linked to pivotal points in the struggle to reform the kingdom (and thus end the polder).

The first of Teppic's departures gives him the education he needs to oppose Dios's regime of changelessness. When the prince is sent to spend
his formative years in Ankh-Morpork, future change is inevitable. As this departure is the main “forth-going” in the first part of the novel, “The Book of Going Forth,” the scene becomes further charged with import (obscured but not diminished by the somewhat befuddled focus character of the scene, Teppic's father). At the end of part 1, Teppic returns to Djelibeybi, loaded, as it were, with potential for change and set up as Dios's main opponent. As he wades ashore, illuminated by the flarelights, he feels ready to rule. He considers the traditional care for the dead and the founding of the country, seven millennia previously (66–67). Unbeknownst to Teppic, this is what his return will ultimately put an end to: the burning of time, the tyranny of tradition, and the ancestor worship, all introduced by Dios when Djelibeybi was founded.

Teppic's second departure comes at the end of book 2, when he and Ptraci escape from Djelibeybi just as the kingdom leaves the Discworld. Teppic seems to have lost the struggle against Dios; the kingdom disappears and becomes a world of its own, with a reality governed by the beliefs that Dios has instilled in the Djelibeybi population over the millennia. The realization of those beliefs, including the appearance of the kingdom's (mutually exclusive and therefore rather irascible) gods and the return of some fourteen hundred mummified ex-rulers, is a greater change than Dios can initially handle, however. Tradition cannot help him deal with Djelibeybi's profoundly different reality: “[Dios] did not know what to do. For him, this was a new experience. This was Change. […] All he could think of, all that was pressing forward in his mind, were the words of the Ritual of the Third Hour” (187). In fact, Dios is at a loss for what to do throughout Teppic's absence (book 3). Not until faced with the prospect of further change, when the old king informs the high priest that the dead intend to destroy the pyramids, does Dios resume control.

Teppic's second return to Djelibeybi, at the end of book 3 and beginning of book 4, is the only time when crossing the boundary is in any way complicated. Since the boundary now separates not only two domains but two worlds, Teppic requires the assistance of his mathematically gifted camel and also has to outwit the sphinx that guards the boundary between the worlds. His goal is to return the country to the world outside by flaring off the stored time in the Great Pyramid, an effort Dios means to stop but never has a chance to deal with. Teppic's success causes not only Djelibeybi's return and the consequent banishment of the gods but also the destruction of the pyramids and restoration of a proper temporal
flow, as well as the blasting of Dios back to the time of Djelibeybi's founding.

At the very end of the novel, Teppic goes forth a final time, leaving Ptraci to rule the country. The former handmaiden's escape and short stay in the world outside has changed her enough to suggest that the kingdom is facing a serious modernization scheme. Like that of Teppic, Ptraci's going forth starts a process that allows her to break free from tradition and set about changing the kingdom (see 207). Unlike him, she does not have to work within the polder: she is not opposed by the shrewd Dios but by the “incompetent” Koomi (282), and she has new time to work with—two facts that allow change to actually take place.

It is worth noting how the anachronistic polder is brought to an end by outside education, not only in the main conflict between Dios and Teppic but also in the subplot, which concerns the building of the Great Pyramid. Teppic's going forth to train at the Assassins' Guild in Ankh-Morpork brings skills and ideas almost beyond Dios's control into the country, but only
almost
. In fact, Teppic escapes the high priest's clutches only because of the dimensional shift caused by the Great Pyramid. The “paracosmic” architect behind the pyramid, Ptaclusp IIb, has been sent to the best schools and returned with “an education” (91). The fact that Ptaclusp IIb “worships geometry” and designs aqueducts hints at his having been educated in Ephebe (the Discworld version of ancient Greece), where the people “believe the world is run by geometry” (110; see also 69). Teppic and Ptaclusp IIb are made agents of change by virtue not only of their foreign education but because they have been educated at all—in Teppic's view, an opposition exists between schools and mindless worship (248). In combination, their respective educations eventually result in the destruction of the pyramids and the return of a normal time flow to Djelibeybi.

When time returns to a normal flow after seven millennia, this does not mean the destruction of the polder. As the Great Pyramid explodes, Dios is thrown backward in the time dimension, to find himself, concussed and with memory lapses, at the moment when the valley is brought into existence (at least as a part of the Discworld) by a flock of thirsty camels (284–85). That the high priest is destined to go through another round of Djelibeybi history is obvious: the thought that compels him to pick up his staff of office is that he must “explain about gods and why pyramids were so important” to Djelibeybi's founder-to-be (285). The staff,
decorated with snakes that are biting their own tails (284), is a symbol of the never-ending. Dios is destined to create Djelibeybi as a changeless polder, maintain it, and finally see it destroyed over and over again. He more than maintains the polder's anachronistic nature; he becomes the center around which the polder exists. The polder's boundary is not so much spatial as temporal; the polder is a seven-thousand-year-long bubble in time within which Dios is forever trapped. Teppic never destroys the polder, he just ends it, sending Dios back to its beginning. From this perspective,
Pyramids
is very much about transgressing polder boundaries; Teppic's struggle is the process of leaving the temporal polder, of truly going forth.

Turning Geography into History

Unlike its actual-world namesake, the fantasy polder is not so much an area protected from the inimical world around it as the remnant of an era kept safe from the wrong time outside. “They are falling rather behind the world in there,” is Treebeard's verdict on the elves of Lothlórien (TT, III, iv, 456), and this assessment is equally true of the other polders. The Elder Days continue on in the diffuse time of the elven realm; ancient myths come to life in Ryhope Woods; and Djelibeybi is kept changelessly stuck in its own past. These are bubbles of long-past days that have been kept in isolation while time has gone by outside.

A polder is not so much a protected area as a protected era. If we revisit Clute's polder definition, we find that the boundaries surround “enclaves of toughened reality” and “
active
microcosm[s],” which certainly implies that polders are spatially defined—enclaves and microcosms tend to be places, after all—but also that they are “anachronism[s]
consciously
opposed to wrong time.”
⁹⁶
Lothlórien, Ryhope Wood, and Djelibeybi have borne out this assertion, that time is an aspect central to polders. In all three cases, a past is protected from the ravages of time in the world. To varying extents, this past is situated sufficiently long ago to cause a time abyss to open for the characters who enter, as well as for the reader. To cross the boundary is to travel in time rather than in space.
⁹⁷
The experience is one of history rather than of geography.