Mort (6 page)

‘I don’t think so.’

G
ENERALLY
I’
M ONLY EXPECTED TO MAKE AN ACTUAL APPEARANCE ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS
.

‘Like a king, I suppose,’ said Mort. ‘I mean, a king is reigning even when he’s doing something else or asleep, even. Is that it, sir?’

I
T’LL DO
, said Death, rolling up the maps. A
ND NOW, BOY, IF YOU’VE FINISHED THE STABLE YOU CAN GO AND SEE IF ALBERT HAS ANY JOBS HE WANTS DOING
.
IF YOU LIKE, YOU CAN COME OUT ON THE ROUND WITH ME THIS EVENING
.

Mort nodded. Death went back to his big leather book, took up a pen, stared at it for a moment, and then looked up at Mort with his skull on one side.

H
AVE YOU MET MY DAUGHTER
? he said.

‘Er. Yes, sir,’ said Mort, his hand on the doorknob.

S
HE IS A VERY PLEASANT GIRL
, said Death,
BUT
I
THINK SHE QUITE LIKES HAVING SOMEONE OF HER OWN AGE AROUND TO TALK TO
.

‘Sir?’

A
ND, OF COURSE
,
ONE DAY ALL THIS WILL BELONG TO HER
.

Something like a small blue supernova flared for a moment in the depths of his eyesockets. It dawned on Mort that, with some embarrassment and complete lack of expertise, Death was trying to wink.

In a landscape that owed nothing to time and space, which appeared on no map, which existed only in those far reaches of the multiplexed cosmos known to the few astrophysicists who have taken really bad acid, Mort spent the afternoon helping Albert plant out broccoli. It was black, tinted with purple.

‘He tries, see,’ said Albert, flourishing the dibber. ‘It’s just that when it comes to colour, he hasn’t got much imagination.’

‘I’m not sure I understand all this,’ said Mort. ‘Did you say he
made
all this?’

Beyond the garden wall the ground dropped towards a deep valley and then rose into dark moorland that marched all the way to distant mountains, jagged as cats’ teeth.

‘Yeah,’ said Albert. ‘Mind what you’re doing with that watering can.’

‘What was here before?’

‘I dunno,’ said Albert, starting a fresh row. ‘Firmament, I suppose. That’s the fancy name for raw nothing. It’s not a very good job of work, to tell the truth. I mean, the garden’s okay, but the mountains are downright shoddy. They’re all fuzzy when you get up close. I went and had a look once.’

Mort squinted hard at the trees nearest him. They seemed commendably solid.

‘What’d he do it all for?’ he said.

Albert grunted. ‘Do you know what happens to lads who ask too many questions?’

Mort thought for a moment.

‘No,’ he said eventually, ‘what?’

There was silence.

Then Albert straightened up and said, ‘Damned if I know. Probably they get answers, and serve ’em right.’

‘He said I could go out with him tonight,’ said Mort.

‘You’re a lucky boy then, aren’t you,’ said Albert vaguely, heading back for the cottage.

‘Did he
really
make all this?’ said Mort, tagging along after him.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I suppose he wanted somewhere where he could feel at home.’

‘Are you dead, Albert?’

‘Me? Do I look dead?’ The old man snorted when Mort started to give him a slow, critical look. ‘And you can stop that. I’m as alive as you are. Probably more.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Right.’ Albert pushed open the back door, and turned to regard Mort as kindly as he could manage.

‘It’s best not to ask all these questions,’ he said, ‘it upsets people. Now, how about a nice fry-up?’

The bell rang while they were playing dominoes. Mort sat to attention.

‘He’ll want the horse made ready,’ said Albert. ‘Come on.’

They went out to the stable in the gathering dusk, and Mort watched the old man saddle up Death’s horse.

‘His name’s Binky,’ said Albert, fastening the girth. ‘It just goes to show, you never can tell.’

Binky tried to eat his scarf in an affectionate way.

Mort remembered the woodcut in his grandmother’s almanack, between the page on planting times and the phases of the moon section, showing Dethe thee Great Levyller Comes To Alle Menne. He’d stared at it hundreds of times when learning his letters. It wouldn’t have been half so impressive if it had been generally known that the flame-breathing horse the spectre rode was called Binky.

‘I would have thought something like Fang or Sabre or Ebony,’ Albert continued, ‘but the master will have his little fancies, you know. Looking forward to it, are you?’

‘I think so,’ said Mort uncertainly. ‘I’ve never seen Death actually at work.’

‘Not many have,’ said Albert. ‘Not twice, at any rate.’

Mort took a deep breath.

‘About this daughter of his—’ he began.

A
H
. G
OOD EVENING
, A
LBERT
,
BOY
.

‘Mort,’ said Mort automatically.

Death strode into the stable, stooping a little to clear the ceiling. Albert nodded, not in any subservient way, Mort noticed, but simply out of form. Mort had met one or two servants, on the rare occasions he’d been taken into town, and Albert wasn’t like any of them. He seemed to act as though the house really belonged to him and its owner was just a passing guest, something to be tolerated like peeling paintwork or spiders in the lavatory. Death put up with it too, as though he and Albert had said everything that needed to be said a long time ago and were simply content, now, to get on with their jobs with the minimum of inconvenience all round. To Mort it was rather like going for a walk after a really bad thunderstorm – everything was quite fresh, nothing was particularly unpleasant, but there was the sense of vast energies just expended.

Finding out about Albert tagged itself on to the end of his list of things to do.

H
OLD THIS
, said Death, and pushed a scythe into his hand while he swung himself up on to Binky. The scythe looked normal enough, except for the blade: it was so thin that Mort could see through it, a pale blue shimmer in the air that could slice flame and chop sound. He held it very carefully.

R
IGHT, BOY
, said Death. C
OME ON UP
. A
LBERT
. D
ON’T WAIT UP
.

The horse trotted out of the courtyard and into the sky.

There should have been a flash or rush of stars. The air should have spiralled and turned into speeding sparks such as normally happens in the common, everyday trans-dimensional hyperjumps. But this was Death, who has mastered the art of going everywhere without ostentation and could slide between dimensions as easily as he could slip through a locked door, and they moved at an easy gallop through cloud canyons, past great billowing mountains of cumulus, until the wisps parted in front of them and the Disc lay below, basking in sunlight.

T
HAT’S BECAUSE TIME IS ADJUSTABLE
, said Death, when Mort pointed this out. I
T’S NOT REALLY IMPORTANT
.

‘I always thought it was.’

P
EOPLE THINK IT IS IMPORTANT ONLY BECAUSE THEY INVENTED IT
, said Death sombrely. Mort considered this rather trite, but decided not to argue.

‘What are we going to do now?’ he said.

T
HERE’S A PROMISING WAR IN
K
LATCHISTAN
, said Death. S
EVERAL PLAGUE OUTBREAKS
. O
NE RATHER IMPORTANT ASSASSINATION, IF YOU’D PREFER
.

‘What, a murder?’

A
YE, A KING
.

‘Oh, kings,’ said Mort dismissively. He knew about kings. Once a year a band of strolling players, or at any rate ambling ones, came to Sheepridge and the plays they performed were invariably about kings. Kings were always killing one another, or being killed. The plots were quite complicated, involving mistaken identity, poisons, battles, long-lost sons, ghosts, witches and, usually, lots of daggers. Since it was clear that being a king was no picnic it was amazing that half the cast were apparently trying to become one. Mort’s idea of palace life was a little hazy, but he imagined that no one got much sleep.

‘I’d quite like to see a real king,’ he said. ‘They wear crowns all the time, my granny said. Even when they go to the lavatory.’

Death considered this carefully.

T
HERE’S NO TECHNICAL REASON WHY NOT
, he conceded. I
N MY EXPERIENCE, HOWEVER, IT IS GENERALLY NOT THE CASE
.

The horse wheeled, and the vast flat checkerboard of the Sto plain sped underneath them at lightning speed. This was rich country, full of silt and rolling cabbage fields and neat little kingdoms whose boundaries wriggled like snakes as small, formal wars, marriage pacts, complex alliances and the occasional bit of sloppy cartography changed the political shape of the land.

‘This king,’ said Mort, as a forest zipped beneath them, ‘is he good or bad?’

I
NEVER CONCERN MYSELF WITH SUCH THINGS
, said Death. H
E’S NO WORSE THAN ANY OTHER KING
, I
IMAGINE
.

‘Does he have people put to death?’ said Mort, and remembering who he was talking to added, ‘Saving y’honour’s presence, of course.’

S
OMETIMES
. T
HERE ARE SOME THINGS YOU HAVE TO DO, WHEN YOU’RE A KING
.

A city slid below them, clustered around a castle built on a rock outcrop that poked up out of the plain like a geological pimple. It was one huge rock from the distant Ramtops, Death said, left there by the retreating ice in the legendary days when the Ice Giants waged war on the gods and rode their glaciers across the land in an attempt to freeze the whole world. They’d given up in the end, however, and driven their great glitter flocks back to their hidden lands among the razor-backed mountains near the Hub. No one on the plains knew why they had done this; it was generally considered by the younger generation in the city of Sto Lat, the city around the rock, that it was because the place was dead boring.

Binky trotted down over nothingness and touched down on the flagstones of the castle’s topmost tower. Death dismounted and told Mort to sort out the nosebag.

‘Won’t people notice there’s a horse up here?’ he said, as they strolled to a stairwell.

Death shook his head.

W
OULD YOU BELIEVE THERE COULD BE A HORSE AT THE TOP OF THIS TOWER
? he said.

‘No. You couldn’t get one up these stairs,’ said Mort.

W
ELL, THEN
?

‘Oh. I see. People don’t want to see what can’t possibly exist.’

W
ELL DONE
.

Now they were walking along a wide corridor hung with tapestries. Death reached into his robe and pulled out an hourglass, peering closely at it in the dim light.

It was a particularly fine one, its glass cut into intricate facets and imprisoned in an ornate framework of wood and brass. The words ‘King Olerve the Bastard’ were engraved deeply into it.

The sand inside sparkled oddly. There wasn’t a lot left.

Death hummed to himself and stowed the glass away in whatever mysterious recess it had occupied.

They turned a corner and hit a wall of sound. There was a hall full of people there, under a cloud of smoke and chatter that rose all the way up into the banner-haunted shadows in the roof. Up in a gallery a trio of minstrels were doing their best to be heard and not succeeding.

The appearance of Death didn’t cause much of a stir. A footman by the door turned to him, opened his mouth and then frowned in a distracted way and thought of something else. A few courtiers glanced in their direction, their eyes instantly unfocusing as common sense overruled the other five.

W
E
’
VE GOT A FEW MINUTES
, said Death, taking a drink from a passing tray. L
ET’S
MINGLE
.

‘They can’t see me either!’ said Mort. ‘But I’m real!’

R
EALITY IS NOT ALWAYS WHAT IT SEEMS
, said Death. A
NYWAY
,
IF THEY DON’T
WANT TO SEE ME
,
THEY CERTAINLY DON’T
WANT TO SEE YOU
. T
HESE
A
RE ARISTOCRATS, BOY
. T
HEY’RE
GOOD
AT NOT SEEING THINGS
. W
HY IS THERE A CHERRY ON A STICK IN THIS DRINK
?

‘Mort,’ said Mort automatically.

I
T’S NOT AS IF IT DOES ANYTHING FOR THE FLAVOUR
. W
HY DOES ANYONE TAKE A PERFECTLY GOOD DRINK AND THEN PUT IN A CHERRY ON A POLE
?

‘What’s going to happen next?’ said Mort. An elderly earl bumped into his elbow, looked everywhere but directly at him, shrugged and walked away.

T
AKE THESE THINGS, NOW
, said Death, fingering a passing canapé. I
MEAN, MUSHROOMS YES, CHICKEN YES, CREAM YES
, I’
VE NOTHING AGAINST ANY OF THEM, BUT WHY IN THE NAME OF SANITY MINCE THEM ALL UP AND PUT THEM IN LITTLE PASTRY CASES
?

‘Pardon?’ said Mort.

T
HAT’S MORTALS FOR YOU
, Death continued. T
HEY’VE ONLY GOT A FEW YEARS IN THIS WORLD AND THEY SPEND THEM ALL IN MAKING THINGS COMPLICATED FOR THEMSELVES
. F
ASCINATING
. H
AVE A GHERKIN
.

‘Where’s the king?’ said Mort, craning to look over the heads of the court.

C
HAP WITH THE GOLDEN BEARD
, said Death. He tapped a flunky on the shoulder, and as the man turned and looked around in puzzlement deftly piloted another drink from his tray.

Mort cast around until he saw the figure standing in a little group in the centre of the crowd, leaning over slightly the better to hear what a rather short courtier was saying to him. He was a tall, heavily-built man with the kind of stolid, patient face that one would confidently buy a used horse from.