Last Continent (16 page)

In short, Rincewind had the feeling he wasn't looking at animals at all. He took another sip of the beer.

He couldn't raise the subject with Crocodile Dongo. There was a philosophical wrongness about drawing a crocodile's attention to the fact that there were a couple of kangaroos in the bar.

‘Youse wanta nother beer?' said Dongo.

‘Yeah, right,' said Rincewind.

He looked at the sign on the beer pump. It was a picture of a grinning kangaroo. The label said: Roo Beer.

He raised his eyes to a torn poster on the wall. It also advertised Roo Beer. There was the same kangaroo, holding a pint of said beer and wearing the same knowing grin.

It looked familiar, for some reason.

‘I can't help nossisting . . .' He tried again. ‘I can't help
noticing
', he said, ‘that some people in this barrardifferentshap from other p'ple.'

‘Well, old Hollowlog Joe over there'f put on a bit of weight lately,' said Dongo, polishing a glass.

Rincewind looked down at his legs. ‘Whose legsare dese?'

‘You okay, mifter?'

‘Prob'ly been bitten by so'thing,' said Rincewind. A sudden urgent need gripped him.

‘It'f out the back,' said Dongo.

‘Out back in the outback,' said Rincewind, staggering forward. ‘Hahahaha—'

He walked into an iron pillar, which picked him up in a fist and held him at arm's length. He looked along the arm to a large angry face and an expression that said a lot of beer was looking for a fight and the rest of the body was happy to go along with it.

Rincewind was muzzily aware that in his case a lot of beer wanted to run away. And at a time like this, it's always the beer talking.

‘I bin
lisnin
' to you. Where're you from, mister?' said the giant's beer.

‘Ankh-M'pork . . .' At a time like this, why lie?

The bar went quiet.

‘An' you're gonna come here and make a lot of cracks about us all drinkin' beer and fightin' and talkin' funny, right?'

Some of Rincewind's beer said, ‘No worries.'

His captor pulled him so they were face to face. Rincewind had never seen such a huge nose.

‘An' I expect you don't even know that we happen to produce some partic'ly fine wines, our Chardonnays bein' 'specially worthy of attention and compet'tively priced, not to mention the rich, firmly structur'd Rusted Dunny Valley Semillons, which are a tangily refreshin' discovery for the connesewer . . .
yew bastard?
'

‘Jolly good, I'll have a pint of Chardonnay, please.'

‘You takin' the piss?'

‘No, I'd like to leave it here—'

‘How about you putting my mate down?' said a voice.

Mad was in the doorway. There was a general scuffle to get out of the way.

‘Oh, you looking for a fight too, stubby?' Rincewind was dropped as the huge creature turned to face the dwarf, fists clenching.

‘I don't look for them. I just walk into pubs and there they are,' said Mad, pulling out a knife. ‘Now, you going to leave him alone, Wally?'

‘You call
that
a knife?' The giant unsheathed one that'd be called a sword if it had been held in a normal-sized hand. ‘
This
is what
I
call a knife!'

Mad looked at it. Then he reached his hand around behind his back, and it came back holding something.

‘Really? No worries.
This
', he said, ‘is what I call a crossbow.'

‘It's a log,' said Ridcully, inspecting the boat-building committee's work to date.

‘Rather more than a log—' the Dean began.

‘Oh, you've made a mast and tied the Bursar's bathrobe to it, I can see that. It's a log, Dean. There's roots on one end and bits of branch at the other. You haven't even hollowed it out. It's a log.'

‘It took us all
hours
,' said the Senior Wrangler.

‘And it
does
float,' the Dean pointed out.

‘I think the term is more like wallows,' said Ridcully. ‘And we'd all get on it, would we?'

‘This is the one-man version,' said the Dean. ‘We thought we'd test it out and then try it with a lot of them together . . .'

‘Like a raft, you mean?'

‘I suppose so,' said the Dean, with considerable reluctance. He would have preferred a more dynamic name for it. ‘Obviously these things take time.'

The Archchancellor nodded. He was impressed, in a strange way. The wizards had succeeded in recapitulating, in a mere day, a technological development that had probably taken mankind several hundred years. They might be up to coracles by Tuesday.

‘Which of you is going to test it?' he said.

‘We thought perhaps the Bursar could assist at this point in the development programme.'

‘Volunteered, has he?'

‘We're sure he will.'

In fact the Bursar was some distance away, wandering aimlessly but happily through the beetle-filled jungle.

The Bursar was, as he would probably be the first to admit, not the most mentally stable of people. He would probably be the first to admit that he was a tea-strainer.

But he was, as it were, only insane on the outside. He'd never been very interested in magic as a boy, but he had been good at numbers, and even somewhere like Unseen University needed someone who could add up. And he had indeed
survived many otherwise exciting years by locking himself in a room somewhere and conscientiously adding up, while some very serious division and subtraction was going on outside.

Those were still the days when magical assassination was still a preferred and legal route to high office, but he'd been quite safe because no one had wanted to be a bursar.

Then Mustrum Ridcully had been appointed, and he'd put a stop to the whole business by being unkillable and had been, in his own strange way, a modernizer. And the senior wizards had gone along with him because he tended to shout at them if they didn't and it was, after some exhilarating times in the University's history, something of a relief to enjoy your dinner without having to watch someone else eat a bit of it first or having to check your shape the moment you got out of bed.

But it was hell for the Bursar. Everything about Mustrum Ridcully rasped across his nerves. If people were food, the Bursar would have been one of life's lightly poached eggs, but Mustrum Ridcully was a rich suet pudding with garlic gravy. He spoke as loudly as most people shouted. He stamped instead of walking. He roared around the place, and lost important bits of paper which he then denied he'd ever seen, and shot his crossbow at the wall when he was bored. He was aggressively cheerful. Never sick himself, he tended to the belief that sickness in other people was caused by sloppy thinking. And he had no sense of humour. And he told jokes.

It was odd that this affected the Bursar so much, since he did not have a sense of humour either. He was proud of it. He was not the kind of man to laugh. But he did know, in a mechanical sort of way, how jokes were supposed to go. Ridcully told jokes like a bullfrog did accountancy. They never added up.

So the Bursar found it much more satisfying to live inside his own head, where he didn't have to listen and where there were clouds and flowers. Even so, something must have filtered in from the world outside, because occasionally he'd jump up and down on an ant, just in case he was supposed to. Part of him rather hoped that one of the ants was, in some unimaginably distant way, related to Mustrum Ridcully.

It was while he was thus engaged in changing the future that he noticed what looked like a very thick green hosepipe on the ground.

‘Hmm?'

It was slightly transparent and seemed to be pulsating rhythmically. When he put his ear to it he heard a sound like
gloop
.

Mildly deranged though he was, the Bursar had the true wizard's instinct to amble aimlessly into dangerous places, so he followed the throbbing stem.

Rincewind awoke, because sleep was so hard with someone kicking him in the ribs.

‘Wzt?'

‘You want I should pour a bucket of water on yez?'

Rincewind recognized the chatty tones. His eyes unglued. ‘Oh, not you! You're a figment of my imagination!'

‘I should kick you in the ribs again, then?' said Scrappy.

Rincewind pulled himself upright. It was dawn, and he was lying in some bushes out behind the pub.

Memory played its silent movie across the tattered sheets of his eyelids.

‘There was a fight . . . Mad shot that . . . that . . . shot him with a
crossbow
!'

‘Only through the foot so's he'd stand still to be hit. Wombats can't hold their drink, that's their trouble.'

More recollections flickered across the smoky darkness of Rincewind's brain. ‘That's right, there were
animals
drinking in there!'

‘Yes and no,' said the kangaroo. ‘I
tried
to explain . . .'

‘I'm all ears,' said Rincewind. His eyes glazed for a moment. ‘No, I'm not, I'm all bladder. Back in a minute.'

The buzz of flies and a sort of universal smell drew Rincewind into a nearby hut. Some people would have liked to think of it as ‘the bathroom', although not after going inside.

He came out again, hopping up and down urgently. ‘Er . . . there's a great big spider on the toilet seat . . .'

‘What're you gonna do, wait till it's finished? Fan it with yer hat!'

It was odd, Rincewind thought as he shooed the
spider out, that a human being would, er, use the bathroom behind a bush in the middle of a thousand miles of howling wilderness but would fight for a dunny if there was one available.

‘And stay out,' he muttered, when he was confident the spider was out of earshot.

But the human brain often feels incapable of concentrating on the job in hand, and Rincewind found his gaze wandering. And here, as in private places everywhere, men had found the urge to draw on the walls.

Perhaps it was the way the light hit the ancient woodwork, but under the usual minutiae from people who needed people, and drawings done from overheated hope rather than memory, was a deeply scored drawing of men in pointy hats.

He sidled out thoughtfully and edged away through the bushes.

‘No worries,' said the kangaroo, so close to his ear that Rincewind was quite pleased that he'd already relieved himself.

‘I don't believe it!'

‘You'll see them everywhere. They're built in. They find their way into people's thoughts. You can't outrun your destiny, mate.'

Rincewind didn't even bother to argue.

‘You're going to have to sort this out,' said Scrappy. ‘You're the cause.'

‘I'm not! Things happen to
me
, not the other way around!'

‘I could disembowel you with a kick, you know. Would you like to see?'

‘Er . . . no.'

‘Haven't you noticed that by running away you end up in more trouble?'

‘Yes, but, you see, you can run away from
that
, too,' said Rincewind. ‘That's the beauty of the system. Dead is only for once, but running away is for ever.'

‘Ah, but it is said that a coward dies a thousand deaths, while a hero dies only one.'

‘Yes, but it's the
important
one.'

‘Aren't you ashamed?'

‘No. I'm going home. I'm going to find this city called Bugarup, find a boat, and go home.'

‘Bugarup?'

‘Don't tell me the place doesn't exist.'

‘Oh, no. It's a big place. And that's where you're going?'

‘And don't try to stop me!'

‘I can see you've made up your mind,' said Scrappy.

‘Read my lips!'

‘Your moustache is in the way.'

‘Read my beard, then!'

The kangaroo shrugged. ‘In that case, I've got no choice but to carry on helping you, I suppose.'

Rincewind drew himself up. ‘I'll find my own way,' he said.

‘You don't
know
the way.'

‘I'll ask someone!'

‘What about food? You'll starve.'

‘Ahah, that's where you're wrong!' Rincewind snapped. ‘I've got this amazing power. Watch!'

He lifted up a nearby stone, extracted what was underneath, and flourished it.

‘See? Impressed, eh?'

‘Very.'

‘Ahah!'

Scrappy nodded. ‘I've never seen anyone do that with a scorpion before.'

The god was sitting high up in a tree working on a particularly promising beetle when the Bursar ambled past far below.

Well, at
last
. One of them had found it!

The god had spent some time watching the wizards' attempts at boat-building, although he had been unable to fathom out what it was they were trying to do. As far as he could tell, they were showing some interest in the fact that wood floated. Well, it did float, didn't it?

He threw the beetle into the air. It hummed into life at the top of the arc and flew away, a smear of iridescence among the treetops.

The god drifted out of his tree and followed the Bursar.

The god hadn't made up his mind about these creatures yet, but the island was, unfortunately and against all his careful planning, throwing up all sorts of odd things. These were obviously social creatures, with some of the individuals designed for specific tasks. The hairy red one was designed for climbing trees, and the dreamy ant-stamping one for walking into them. Possibly the reasons for this would become apparent.

‘Ah, Bursar!' said the Dean heartily. ‘How would you like a brief trip around the lagoon?'

The Bursar looked at the soaking log and sought for words. Sometimes, when he really needed to, it was possible to get Mr Brain and Mr Mouth all lined up together.

‘I had a boat once,' he said.

‘Well done! And here's another one, just for—'