Interesting Times

It was a fine morning. The hideout echoed to the sounds of the Silver Horde getting up, groaning, adjusting various home-made surgical supports, com-plaining that they couldn't find their spectacles, and mistakenly gumming one another's dentures.

Cohen sat with his feet in a bath of warm water, enjoying the sunshine.

'Teach?'

The former geography teacher concentrated on a cap he was making.

'Yes, Ghenghiz?'

'What's Mad Hamish going on about?'

'He says the bread's stale and he can't find his teeth.'

'Tell him if things go right for us he can have a dozen young women just to chew his bread for him,' said Cohen.

'That is not very hygienic, Ghenghiz,' said Mr Saveloy, without bothering to look up. 'Remember, I explained about hygiene.'

Cohen didn't bother to answer. He was thinking: six old men. And you can't really count Teach, he's a thinker, not a fighter...

Self-doubt was not something regularly entertained within the Cohen cranium. When you're trying to carry a struggling temple maiden and a sack of looted temple goods in one hand and fight off half a dozen angry priests with the other there is little time for reflection. Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like 'What is my purpose in life?' very quickly lacked both.

But: six old men... and the Empire had almost a million men under arms.

When you looked at the odds in the cold light of dawn, or even this rather pleasant warm light of dawn, they made you stop and do the arithmetic of death. If the Plan went wrong...

Cohen bit his lip thoughtfully. If the Plan went wrong, it'd take weeks to kill all of them. Maybe he should have let old Thog the Butcher come along too, even though he had to stop fighting every ten minutes to go to the lavatory.

Oh, well. He was committed now, so he might as well make the best of it.

Cohen's father had taken him to a mountain top, when he was no more than a lad, and explained to him the hero's creed and told him that there was no greater joy than to die in battle.

Cohen had seen the flaw in this straight away, and a lifetime's experience had reinforced his belief that in fact a greater joy was to kill the other bugger in battle and end up sitting on a heap of gold higher than your horse. It was an observation that had served him well.

He stood up and stretched in the sunshine.

'It's a lovely morning, lads,' he said. 'I feel like a million dollars. Don't you?'

There was a murmur of reluctant agreement.

'Good,' said Cohen. 'Let's go and get some.'

The Great Wall completely surrounds the Agatean Empire. The word is completely.

It is usually about twenty feet high and sheer on its inner side. It is built along beaches and across howling deserts and even on the lip of sheer cliffs where the possibility of attack from outside is remote. On subject islands like Bhangbhangduc and Tingling there are similar walls, all metaphorically the same wall, and tnat seems strange to those of an unthinking military disposition who do not realize what its function really is.

It is more than just a wall, it is a marker. On one side is the Empire, which in the Agatean language is a word identical with 'universe'. On the other side is - nothing. After all, the universe is everything there is.

Oh, there may appear to be things, like sea, islands, other continents and so on. They may even appear solid, it may be possible to conquer them, walk on them... but they are not ultimately real. The Agatean word for foreigner is the same as the word for ghost, and only one brush stroke away from the word for victim.

The walls are sheer in order to discourage those boring people who persist in believing that there might be anything interesting on the other side. Amaz-ingly enough there are people who simply won't take the hint, even after thousands of years. The ones near the coast build rafts and head out across lonely seas to lands that are a fable. The ones inland resort to man-carrying kites and chairs propelled by fireworks. Many of them die in the attempt, of course. Most of the others are soon caught, and made to live in interesting times.

But some did make it to the great melting pot called Ankh-Morpork. They arrived with no money - sailors charged what the market would bear, which was everything - but they had a mad gleam in their eye and they opened shops and restaurants and worked twenty-four hours a day. People called this the Ankh-Morpork Dream (of making piles of cash in a place where your death was unlikely to be a matter of public policy). And it was dreamed all the stronger by people who didn't sleep.