Equal Rites

“If I’m taking you to Ankh-Morpork,” she said thoughtfully, “You’ve got to go in disguise.”

A few late flickers of magic played around the staff, and then it went dark.

Eventually Esk solved the immediate problem by finding a stall in the main Zemphis marketplace that sold broomsticks, buying the largest, carrying it back to her doorway, removing the handle and ramming the staff deep into the birch twigs. It didn’t seem right to treat a noble object in this way, and she silently apologised to it.

It made a difference, anyway. No one looked twice at a small girl carrying a broom.

She bought a spice pasty to eat while exploring (the stallholder carelessly shortchanged her, and only realised later that he had inexplicably handed over two silver pieces; also, rats mysteriously got in and ate all his stock during the night, and his grandmother was struck by lightning).

The town was smaller than Ohulan, and very different because it lay on the junction of three trade routes quite apart from the river itself. It was built around one enormous square which was a cross between a permanent exotic traffic jam and a tent village. Camels kicked mules, mules kicked horses, horses kicked camels and they all kicked humans; there was a riot of colours, a din of noise, a nasal orchestration of smells and the steady, heady sound of hundreds of people working hard at making money.

One reason for the bustle was that over large parts of the continent other people preferred to make money without working at all, and since the Disc had yet to develop a music recording industry they were forced to fall back on older, more traditional forms of banditry.

Strangely enough these often involved considerable effort. Rolling heavy rocks to the top of cliffs for a decent ambush, cutting down trees to block the road, and digging a pit lined with spikes while still keeping a wicked edge on a dagger probably involved a much greater expenditure of thought and muscle than more socially-acceptable professions but, nevertheless, there were still people misguided enough to endure all this, plus long nights in uncomfortable surroundings, merely to get their hands on perfectly ordinary large boxes of jewels.

So a town like Zemphis was the place where caravans split, mingled and came together again, as dozens of merchants and travellers banded together for protection against the socially disadvantaged on the trails ahead. Esk, wandering unregarded amidst the bustle, learned all this by the simple method of finding someone who looked important and tugging on the hem of his coat.

This particular man was counting bales of tobacco and would have succeeded but for the interruption.

“What?”

“I said, what happening here?”

The man meant to say: “Push off and bother someone else.” He meant to give her a light cuff about the head. So he was astonished to find himself bending down and talking seriously to a small, grubby-faced child holding a large broomstick (which also, it seemed to him later, was in some indefinable way paying attention).

He explained about the caravans. The child nodded.

“People all get together to travel?”

“Precisely.”

“Where to?”

“All sorts of places. Sto Lat, Pseudopolis . . . Ankh-Morpork, of course . . . .”

“But the river goes there,” said Esk, reasonably. “Barges. The Zoons.”

“Ah, yes,” said the merchant, “but they charge high prices and they can’t carry everything and, anyway, no one trusts them much.”

“But they’re very honest!”

“Huh, yes,” he said. “But you know what they say: never trust an honest man.” He smiled knowingly.

“Who says that?”

“They do. You know. People,” he said, a certain uneasiness entering his voice.

“Oh,” said Esk. She thought about it. “They must be very silly,” she said primly. “Thank you, anyway.”

He watched her wander off and got back to his counting. A moment later there was another tug at his coat.

“Fiftysevenfiftysevenfiftysevenwell?” he said, trying not to lose his place.

“Sorry to bother you again,” said Esk, “but those bale things ….”

“What about them fiftysevenfiftysevenfiftyseven?”

“Well, are they supposed to have little white worm things in them?”

“Fiftysev—what?” The merchant lowered his slate and stared at Esk, “What little worms?”

“Wriggly ones. White,” added Esk, helpfully. “All sort of burrowing about in the middle of the bales.”

“You mean tobacco threadworm?” He looked wild-eyed at the stack of bales being unloaded by, now he came to think about it, a vendor with the nervous look of a midnight sprite who wants to get away before you find out what fairy gold turns into in the morning. “But he told me these had been well stored and—how do you know, anyway? ”

The child had disappeared among the crowds. The merchant looked hard at the spot where she had been. He looked hard at the vendor, who was grinning nervously. He looked hard at the sky. Then took his sampling knife out of his pocket, stared at it for a moment, appeared to reach a decision, and sidled towards the nearest bale.