Mort - Страница 45

THERE WAS ANOTHER THING, said Death. He reached under his robe again and pulled out an oblong shape inexpertly wrapped and tied with string.

IT’S FOR YOU, he said, PERSONALLY. YOU NEVER SHOWED ANY INTEREST IN IT BEFORE. DID YOU THINK IT DIDN’T EXIST?

Mort unwrapped the packet and realised he was holding a small leather-bound book. On the spine was blocked, in shiny gold leaf, the one word: Mort.

He leafed backwards through the unfilled pages until he found the little trail of ink, winding patiently down the page, and read: Mort shut the book with a little snap that sounded, in the silence, like the crack of creation, and smiled uneasily.

“There’s a lot of pages still to fill,” he said. “How much sand have I got left? Only Ysabell said that since you turned the glass over that means I shall die when I’m—”

YOU HAVE SUFFICIENT, said Death coldly. MATHEMATICS ISN’T ALL IT’S CRACKED UP TO BE.

“How do you feel about being invited to christenings?”

I THINK NOT. I WASN’T CUT OUT TO BE A FATHER, AND CERTAINLY NOT A GRANDAD. I HAVEN’T GOT THE RIGHT KIND OF KNEES.

He put down his wine glass and nodded at Mort.

MY REGARDS TO YOUR GOOD LADY, he said. AND NOW I REALLY MUST BE OFF.

“Are you sure? You’re welcome to stay.”

IT’S NICE OF YOU TO SAY SO, BUT DUTY CALLS. He extended a bony hand. YOU KNOW HOW IT IS.

Mort gripped the hand and shook it, ignoring the chill.

“Look,” he said. “If ever you want a few days off, you know, if you’d like a holiday—”

MANY THANKS FOR THE OFFER, said Death graciously. I SHALL THINK ABOUT IT MOST SERIOUSLY. AND NOW—

“Goodbye,” Mort said, and was surprised to find a lump in his throat. “It’s such an unpleasant word, isn’t it?”

QUITE SO. Death grinned because, as has so often been remarked, he didn’t have much option. But possibly he meant it, this time.

I PREFER AU REVOIR, he said.

THE END

notes

1

Practically anything can go faster than Disc light, which is lazy and tame, unlike ordinary light. The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles—kingons, or possibly queons—that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed.

2

The first pizza was created on the Disc by the Klatchian mystic Ronron ‘Revelation Joe’ Shuwadhi, who claimed to have been given the recipe in a dream by the Creator of the Discworld Himself, Who had apparently added that it was what He had intended all along. Those desert travellers who had seen the original, which is reputedly miraculously preserved in the Forbidden City of Ee, say that what the Creator had in mind then was a fairly small cheese and pepperoni affair with a few black olives* and things like mountains and seas got added out of last-minute enthusiasm, as so often happens.

* After the Schism of the Turnwise Ones and the deaths of some 25,000 people in the ensuing jihad the faithful were allowed to add one small bayleaf to the recipe.

3

Although not the droopy moustache and round furry hat with the spike on it.

4

The speech has been passed on to later generations in an epic poem commissioned by his son, who wasn’t born in a saddle and could eat with a knife and fork. It began:

“See yonder the stolid foemen slumber
Fat with stolen gold, corrupt of mind.
Let the spears of your wrath be as the steppe fire on a
windy day in the dry season,
Let your honest blade thrust like the horns of
a five-year old yok with severe toothache…”

And went on for three hours. Reality, which can’t usually afford to pay poets, records that in fact the entire speech ran: “Lads, most of them are still in bed, we should go through them like kzak fruit through a short grandmother, and I for one have had it right up to here with yurts, okay?”

5

The Disc’s greatest lovers were undoubtedly Mellius and Gretelina, whose pure, passionate and soul-searing affair would have scorched the pages of History if they had not, because of some unexplained quirk of fate, been born two hundred years apart on different continents. However, the gods took pity on them and turned him into an ironing board* and her into a small brass bollard.

* When you’re a god, you don’t have to have reasons.

6

There had been half a jar of elderly mayonnaise, a piece of very old cheese, and a tomato with white mould growing on it. Since during the day the pantry of the palace of Sto Lat normally contained fifteen whole stags, one hundred brace of partridges, fifty hogsheads of butter, two hundred jugs of hares, seventy-five sides of beef, two miles of assorted sausages, various fowls, eighty dozen eggs, several Circle Sea sturgeon, a vat of caviar and an elephant’s leg stuffed with olives, Cutwell had learned once again that one universal manifestation of raw, natural magic throughout the universe is this: that any domestic food store, raided furtively in the middle of the night, always contains, no matter what its daytime inventory, half a jar of elderly mayonnaise, a piece of very old cheese, and a tomato with white mould growing on it.

7

Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.

8

The stone garden of Universal Peace and Simplicity, laid out to the orders of the old Emperor One Sun Mirror*, used economy of position and shadow to symbolise the basic unity of soul and matter and the harmony of all things. It was said the secrets at the very heart of reality lay hidden in the precise ordering of its stones.

* Whose other claim to fame was his habit of cutting off his enemies’ lips and legs and then promising them their freedom if they could run through the city playing a trumpet.

9

This is not precisely true. It is generally agreed by philosophers that the shortest time in which everything can happen is one thousand billion years.

comments

1

Not only does ‘Mort’ mean ‘death’ in French, but in The Light Fantastic we also learned (on p. 95/95), that Death’s own (nick)name is Mort. Opinions on a.f.p. are divided as to which of these two facts is the ‘coincidence’ Death is talking about.

2

A reference to the old Eastern European practice of covering a dead friends’ eyes with coins.

In the Greek version of this custom, a single coin or obulus was put under the tongue of a deceased person. This was done so that the departed loved one would have some change handy to pay Charon with (the grumpy old ferryman who transported departed souls over the river Styx towards the afterlife—but only if they paid him first).

The Eastern European version has a similar background.

3

An acknowledgment of the “nothing is certain but death and taxes” saying.

4

The subplot of Ysabell and Mort and the matchmaking efforts by her father echoes Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (where Estelle, for instance, also insists on calling Pip ‘Boy’ all the time).

5

There exists a make of woodburning stove called ‘The Little Wenlock’.

For those who don’t know what a Moloch is, I’ll let Brewer do the explaining:

“Moloch: Any influence which demands from us the sacrifice of what we hold most dear. Thus war is a Moloch, king mob is a Moloch, the guillotine was the Moloch of the French Revolution, etc. The allusion is to the god of the Ammonites [Phoenicians], to whom children were ‘made to pass through the fire’ in sacrifice.”

To be fair, however, it must be pointed out that almost all we know about Moloch is based on what the bitter enemies of the Phoenicians said about him.

6

The whole section on Mort’s training, and this paragraph in particular, explores a theme familiar from stories such as told in The Karate Kid, or The Empire Strikes Back, and of course the TV series Kung Fu, where a young student is given many menial tasks to perform, which are revealed to be integral to his education.

7

Terry loves playing with morphogenetic principles in the Discworld canon, and I think this is the first place he explicitly mentions it. Morphogenetics are part of a controversial theory put forward by ex-Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake. ‘Controversial’ is in fact putting it rather mildly: personally I feel ‘crackpot’ would be a much better description. Which explains why on the Discworld, of course, it’s valid science.