Pyramids

King Teppicymon XXVII got out of bed and clapped his hands over his ears to shut out the roar of the sea. It was strong tonight.

It was always louder when he was feeling out of sorts. He needed something to distract himself. He could send for Ptraci,^{15} his favourite handmaiden. She was special. Her singing always cheered him up. Life seemed so much brighter when she stopped.

Or there was the sunrise. That was always comforting. It was pleasant to sit wrapped in a blanket on the topmost roof of the palace, watching the mists lift from the river as the golden flood poured over the land. You got the warm, contented feeling of another job well done. Even if you didn’t actually know how you’d done it …

He got up, shuffled on his slippers, and padded out of his bedroom and down the wide corridor that led to the huge spiral stairs and the roof. A few rushlights illuminated the statues of the other local gods, painting the walls with shifting shadow pictures of things dog-headed, fish-bodied, spider-armed. He’d known them since childhood. His juvenile nightmares would have been quite formless without them.

The sea. He’d only seen it once, when he was a boy. He couldn’t recall a lot about it, except the size. And the noise. And the seagulls.

They’d preyed on his mind. They seemed to have it far better worked out, seagulls. He wished he could come back as one, one day, but of course that wasn’t an option if you were a pharaoh. You never came back. You didn’t exactly go away, in fact.

‘Well, what is it?’ said Teppic.

‘Try it,’ said Chidder, ‘just try it. You’ll never have the chance again.’

‘Seems a shame to spoil it,’ said Arthur gallantly, looking down at the delicate pattern on his plate. ‘What are all the little red things?’

‘They’re just radishes,’ said Chidder dismissively. ‘They’re not the important part. Go on.’

Teppic reached over with the little wooden fork and skewered a paper-thin sliver of white fish. The squishi chef was scrutinizing him with the air of one watching a toddler on his first birthday. So, he realized, was the rest of the restaurant.

He chewed it carefully. It was salty and faintly rubbery, with a hint of sewage outfall.

‘Nice?’ said Chidder anxiously. Several nearby diners started to clap.

‘Different,’ Teppic conceded, chewing. ‘What is it?’

‘Deep sea blowfish,’ said Chidder.

‘It’s all right,’ he said hastily as Teppic laid down his fork meaningfully, ‘it’s perfectly safe provided every bit of stomach, liver and digestive tract is removed, that’s why it cost so much, there’s no such thing as a second-best blowfish chef, it’s the most expensive food in the world, people write poems about it—’

‘Could be a taste explosion,’ muttered Teppic, getting a grip on himself. Still, it must have been done properly, otherwise the place would now be wearing him as wallpaper. He poked carefully at the sliced roots which occupied the rest of the plate.

‘What do these do to you?’ he said.

‘Well, unless they’re prepared in exactly the right way over a six-week period they react catastrophically with your stomach acids,’ said Chidder. ‘Sorry. I thought we should celebrate with the most expensive meal we could afford.’

‘I see. Fish and chips for Men,’ said Teppic.

‘Do they have any vinegar in this place?’ said Arthur, his mouth full. ‘And some mushy peas would go down a treat.’

But the wine was good. Not incredibly good, though. Not one of the great vintages. But it did explain why Teppic had gone through the whole of the day with a headache.

It had been the hangunder. His friend had bought four bottles of otherwise quite ordinary white wine. The reason it was so expensive was that the grapes it was made from hadn’t actually been planted yet[8].

***

Light moves slowly, lazily on the Disc. It’s in no hurry to get anywhere. Why bother? At lightspeed, everywhere is the same place.

King Teppicymon XXVII watched the golden disc float over the edge of the world. A flight of cranes took off from the mist-covered river.

He’d been conscientious, he told himself. No one had ever explained to him how one made the sun come up and the river flood and the corn grow. How could they? He was the god, after all. He should know. But he didn’t, so he’d just gone through life hoping like hell that it would all work properly, and that seemed to have done the trick. The trouble was, though, that if it didn’t work, he wouldn’t know why not. A recurrent nightmare was of Dios the high priest shaking him awake one morning, only it wouldn’t be a morning, of course, and of every light in the palace burning and an angry crowd muttering in the star-lit darkness outside and everyone looking expectantly at him …

And all he’d be able to say was, ‘Sorry’.

It terrified him. How easy to imagine the ice forming on the river, the eternal frost riming the palm trees and snapping off the leaves (which would smash when they hit the frozen ground) and the birds dropping lifeless from the sky …