Pyramids

Then they kissed in a fairly chaste fashion, insofar as camels are any judge. A decision was reached.

You Bastard lost interest at this point, and decided to eat his lunch again.

IN THE BEGINNING …

It was peaceful in the valley. The river, its banks as yet untamed, wandered languidly through thickets of rush and papyrus. Ibises waded in the shallows; in the deeps, hippos rose and sank slowly, like pickled eggs.

The only sound in the damp silence was the occasional plop of a fish or hiss of a crocodile.

Dios lay in the mud for some time. He wasn’t sure how he’d got there, or why half his robes were torn off and the other half scorched black. He dimly recalled a loud noise and a sensation of extreme speed while, at the same time, he’d been standing still. Right at this moment, he didn’t want any answers. Answers implied questions, and questions never got anyone anywhere. Questions only spoiled things. The mud was cool and soothing, and he didn’t need to know anything else for a while.

The sun went down. Various nocturnal prowlers wandered near to Dios, and by some animal instinct decided that he certainly wasn’t going to be worth all the trouble that would accrue from biting his leg off.

The sun rose again. Herons honked. Mist unspooled between the pools, was burned up as the sky turned from blue to new bronze.

And time unrolled in glorious uneventfulness for Dios until an alien noise took the silence and did the equivalent of cutting it into small pieces with a rusty breadknife.

It was a noise, in fact, like a donkey being chain-sawed. As sounds went, it was to melody what a boxful of dates is to high-performance motocross. Nevertheless, as other voices joined it, similar but different, in a variety of fractured keys and broken tones, the overall effect was curiously attractive. It had lure. It had pull. It had a strange suction.

The noise reached a plateau, one pure note made of a succession of discordances, and then, for just the fraction of a second, the voices split away, each along a vector …

There was a stirring of the air, a flickering of the sun.

And a dozen camels appeared over the distant hills, skinny and dusty, running towards the water. Birds erupted from the reeds. Leftover saurians slid smoothly off the sandbanks. Within a minute the shore was a mass of churned mud as the knobbly-kneed creatures jostled, nose deep in the water.

Dios sat up, and saw his staff lying in the mud. It was a little scorched, but still intact, and he noticed what somehow had never been apparent before. Before? Had there been a before? There had certainly been a dream, something like a dream …

Each snake had its tail in its mouth.

Down the slope after the camels, his ragged family trailing behind him, was a small brown figure waving a camel prod. He looked hot and very bewildered.

He looked, in fact, like someone in need of good advice and careful guidance.

Dios’s eyes turned back to the staff. It meant something very important, he knew. He couldn’t remember what, though. All he could remember was that it was very heavy, yet at the same time hard to put down. Very hard to put down. Better not to pick it up, he thought.

Perhaps just pick it up for a while, and go and explain about gods and why pyramids were so important. And then he could put it down afterwards, certainly.

Sighing, pulling the remnants of his robes around him to give himself dignity, using the staff to steady himself, Dios went forth.

THE END

About the Author

Terry Pratchett is the accliamed creator of the global bestselling Discworld^® series, the first title of which, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. In all, he is the author of over fifty bestselling books. His novels have been widely adapted for stage and screen, and he is the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, as well as being awarded a knighthood for services to literature. Worldwide sales of his books now stand at 70 million, and they have been translated into thirty-seven languages.

For more information about Terry Pratchett and his books, please visit www.terrypratchett.co.uk

Introducing Discworld

The Discworld Series is a continuous history of a world not totally unlike our own except that it is a flat disc carried on the backs of four elephants astride a giant turtle floating through space, and that it is peopled by, among others, wizards, dwarves, policemen, thieves, beggars, vampires and witches. Within the history of Discworld there are many individual stories, which can be read in any order, but reading them in sequence can increase your enjoyment through the accumulation of all the fine detail that contributes to the teeming imaginative complexity of this brilliantly conceived world.

Also by Terry Pratchett

The Discworld^® series

1. THE COLOUR OF MAGIC

2. THE LIGHT FANTASTIC

3. EQUAL RITES

4. MORT

5. SOURCERY

6. WYRD SISTERS

7. PYRAMIDS