Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett Page A

sludgy depths of his soul. It was, to his amazement, a generous impulse.
    He slid off the horse and held out the reins. A horse was useful, but he was used to doing without one. Besides, over a short distance a man could run faster than a horse, and this was a fact very dear to Rincewind’s heart.
    “Here,” he said. “You can have it. For the fish.”
    The wheelbarrow-pusher screamed, grabbed the handles of his conveyance, and hurtled desperately away. Several people were thrown off, took one almost-look at Rincewind, also screamed, and ran after him.
    Worse than whips, Cohen had said. They’ve got something here worse than whips. They don’t need whips anymore. Rincewind hoped he’d never find out what it was, if it had done this to people.
    He rode on through an endless panorama of fields. There weren’t even any patches of roadside scrub, or taverns. Away among the fields were shapes that might be small towns or villages, but no apparent paths to them, possibly because paths used up valuable agricultural mud.
    Finally he sat down on a rock that presumably not even the peasants’ most concerted efforts had been able to move, and reached into his pocket for his shameful dried fish lunch.
    His hand touched the bundle of papers Mr. Saveloy had given him. He pulled them out, and got crumbs on them.
    This is what it’s all about, the barbarian teacher had said. He hadn’t explained what “it” was.
    WHAT I DID ON MY HOLIDAYS , said the title. It was in bad handwriting or, rather, bad painting—the Agateans wrote with paintbrushes, assembling little word pictures out of handy components. One picture wasn’t just worth a thousand words, it was a thousand words.
    Rincewind wasn’t much good at reading the language. There were very few Agatean books even in the Unseen University Library. And this one looked as though whoever had written it had been trying to make sense of something unfamiliar.
    He turned over a couple of pages. It was a story about a Great City, containing magnificent things—“beer strong like an ox,” it said, and “pies containing many many parts of pig.” Everyone in the city seemed to be wise, kind, strong, or all three, especially some character called the Great Wizard who seemed to feature largely in the text.
    And there were mystifying little comments, as in, “I saw a man tread upon the toes of a City Guard who said to him ‘Your wife is a big hippo!’ to which the man responded ‘Place it where the sun does not shed daylight, enormous person,’ upon which the Guard [this bit was in red ink and the handwriting was shaky, as if the writer was quite excited] did not remove the man’s head according to ancient custom .” The statement was followed by a pictogram of a dog passing water, which was for some obscure reason the Agatean equivalent of an exclamation mark. There were five of these.
    Rincewind flicked through the pages. They were filled with the same dull stuff, sentences stating the blindingly obvious but often followed by several incontinent dogs. Such as: “The innkeeper said the City had demanded tax but he did not intend to pay, and when I asked if he was not afraid he vouch-safed: ‘[Complicated pictogram] them all except one and he can [complicated pictogram] himself’ [urinating dog, urinating dog]. He went on to say, ‘The [pictogram indicating Supreme Ruler] is a [another pictogram which, after some thought and holding up the picture at various angles, Rincewind decided meant “a horse’s bottom”] and you can tell him I said so,’ at which point a Guard in the tavern did not disembowel him [urinating dog, urinating dog] but said, ‘Tell him from me also’ [urinating dog, urinating dog, urinating dog, urinating dog, urinating dog].”
    What was so odd about that? People talked like that in Ankh-Morpork all the time, or at least expressed those sentiments. Apart from the dog.
    Mind you, a country that’d wipe out a whole city to teach the other cities a