Interesting Times

Lord Fang and some of his more trusted warriors had clustered on the side of the hills. A good general always knows when to leave the battlefield, and as far as Lord Fang was concerned, it was when he saw the enemy coming towards him.

The men were shaken. They hadn't tried to face the Red Army. Those who had were dead.

'We... regroup,' panted Lord Fang. 'And then we'll wait until nightfall and - What's that?'

There was a rhythmic noise coming from the bushes further up the slope, where sliding earth had left another bush-filled ravine.

'Sounds like a carpenter, m'lord,' said one of the soldiers.

'Up here? In the middle of a war? Go and see what it is!'

The man scrambled away. After a while there was a pause in the sawing noise. Then it started again.

Lord Fang had been trying to work out a fresh battle plan according to the Nine Useful Principles. He threw down his map.

'Why is that still going on? Where is Captain Nong?'

'Hasn't come back, m'lord.'

'Then go and see what has happened to him!'

Lord Fang tried to remember if the great military sage had ever had anything to say about fighting giant invulnerable statues. He—

The sawing paused. Then it was replaced by the sound of hammering.

Lord Fang looked around.

'Can I have an order obeyed around here?' he bellowed.

He picked up his sword and scrambled up the muddy slope. The bushes parted ahead of him. There was a clearing. There was a rushing shape, on hundreds of little le—

There was a snap.

The rain was coming down so fast that the drops were having to queue.

The red earth was hundreds of feet deep in places. It produced two or three crops a year. It was rich. It was fecund. It was, when wet, extremely sticky.

The surviving armies had squelched from the field of battle, as red from head to toe as the terracotta men. Not counting those merely trodden on, the Red Army had not in fact killed very many people. Terror had done most of their work. Rather more soldiers had been killed in the brief inter-army battles and, in the scramble to escape, by their own sides.

The terracotta army had the field to itself. It was celebrating victory in various ways. Many guards were walking around in circles, wading through the clinging mud as if it was so much dirty air. A number were digging a trench, the sides of which were washing in on them in the thundering rain. A few were trying to climb walls that weren't there. Several, possibly as a result of the exertion following centuries of zero maintenance, had spontaneously exploded in a shower of blue sparks, the red-hot clay shrapnel being a major factor in the opposition's death count.

And all the time the rain fell, a solid curtain of water. It didn't look natural. It was as though the sea had decided to reclaim the land by air drop.

Rincewind shut his eyes. Mud covered the armour. He couldn't make out the pictures any more, and that was something of a relief because he was pretty certain he was messing things up. You could see what any warrior was seeing - at least, presumably you could, if you knew what some of the odder pictures actually did and how to press them in the right order. Rincewind didn't, and in any case whoever had made the magic armour hadn't assumed it would be used in knee-deep mud during a vertical river. Every now and again it sizzled. One of the boots was getting hot.

It had started out so well! But there had been what he was coming to think of as the Rincewind factor. Probably some other wizard would have marched the army out and wouldn't have been rained on and even now would be parading through the streets of Hung-hung while people threw flowers and said, 'My word, there's a Great Wizard and no mistake.'

Some other wizard wouldn't have pressed the wrong picture and started the things digging.

He realized he was wallowing in self-pity. Rather more pertinently, he was also wallowing in mud. And he was sinking. Trying to pull a foot out was no use - it didn't work, and the other foot only went deeper, and got hotter.

Lightning struck the ground nearby. He heard it sizzle, saw the steam, felt the tingle of electricity and tasted the taste of burning tin.

Another bolt hit a warrior. Its torso exploded, raining a sticky black tar. The legs kept going for a few steps, and then stopped.

Water poured past him, thick and red now that the river Hung was overflowing. And the mud continued to suck on his feet like a hollow tooth.

Something swirled past on the muddy water. It looked like a scrap of paper.

Rincewind hesitated, then reached out awkwardly with a gloved hand and scooped it up.

It was, as he'd expected, a butterfly.

'Thank you very much,' he said, bitterly.

The water drained through his fingers.

He half closed his hand and then sighed and, as gently as he could, manoeuvred the creature on to a finger. Its wings hung damply.

He shielded it with his other hand and blew on the wings a few times.

'Go on, push off.'

The butterfly turned. Its multi-faceted eyes glinted green for a moment and then it flapped its wings experimentally.