Eric

put the word in. You play discus with me and I’ll play discus with you.” *
    “What seat?” said Rincewind, reeling from the gusts of garlic.
    “It’s the war triremes,” said the sergeant cheerfully. “Three seats, see, one above the other? Triremes . You get chained to the oars for years, see, and it’s all according whether you’re in the top seat, up in the fresh air and that, or the bottom seat where”—he grinned—“you’re not. So it’s down to you, lads. Be cooperative and all you’ll need to worry about will be the seagulls. Now . Why only the two of you?”
    He leaned back again.
    “Excuse me,” said Eric, “is that Tsort, by any chance?”
    “You wouldn’t be trying to make fun of me, would you now, boy? Only there’s such a thing as quinquiremes, see? You wouldn’t like that at all .”
    “No, sir ,” said Eric. “If you please, sir, I’m just a little lad led astray by bad companionship.”
    “Oh, thank you,” said Rincewind bitterly. “You just accidentally drew a lot of occult circles, did you, and—”
    “Sarge! Sarge!” A soldier burst into the guardroom. The sergeant looked up.
    “There’s another of ’em, sarge! Right outside the gates this time!”
    The sergeant grinned triumphantly at Rincewind.
    “Oh, that’s it, is it?” he said. “You were just the advance party, come to open the gates or whatever. Right . We’ll just go and sort your friends out, and we’ll be right back.” He indicated the captives. “You stay here. If they move, do something horrible to them.”
    Rincewind and Eric were left alone with the guard.
    “You know what you’ve done, don’t you,” said Eric. “You’ve only taken us all the way back to the Tsortean Wars! Thousands of years! We did it at school, the wooden horse, everything! How the beautiful Elenor was kidnaped from the Ephebians—or maybe it was by the Ephebians—and there was this siege to get her back and everything.” He paused. “Hey, that means I’m going to meet her .” He paused again. “Wow!” he said.
    Rincewind looked around the room. It didn’t look ancient, but then it wouldn’t, because it wasn’t, yet. Everywhere in time was now, once you were there, or then. He tried to remember what little he knew of classical history, but it was just a confusion of battles, one-eyed giants and women launching thousands of ships with their faces.
    “Don’t you see?” hissed Eric, his glasses aglow. “They must have brought the horse in before the soldiers had hidden in it! We know what’s going to happen! We could make a fortune!”
    “How, exactly?”
    “Well…” The boy hesitated. “We could bet on horses, that sort of thing.”
    “Great idea,” said Rincewind.
    “Yes, and—”
    “All we’ve got to do is escape, then find out if they have horse races here, and then really try hard to remember the names of the horses that won races in Tsort thousands of years ago.”
    They went back to looking glumly at the floor. That was the thing about time travel. You were never ready for it. About the only thing he could hope for, Rincewind decided, was finding da Quirm’s Fountain of Youth and managing to stay alive for a few thousand years so he’d be ready to kill his own grandfather, which was the only aspect of time travel that had ever remotely appealed to him. He had always felt that his ancestors had it coming to them.
    Funny thing, though. He could remember the famous wooden horse, which had been used to trick a way into the fortified city. He didn’t remember anything about there being two of them. There was something inevitable about the next thought that turned up.
    “Excuse me,” he said to the guard. “This, er, this second wooden thing outside the gate…it’s probably not a horse, I expect?”
    “Well, of course you’d know that, wouldn’t you?” said the guard. “You’re spies.”
    “I bet it’s more oblong and sort of smaller?” said Rincewind, his face a picture of innocent inquiry.
    “You bet. Pretty unimaginative bastards, aren’t you?”
    “I see .” Rincewind folded his hands on his lap.
    “Try to escape,” said the guard. “Go on, just try it. You try it and see what happens.”
    “I expect your colleagues will be bringing it into the city,” Rincewind went on.
    “They might do that,” the guard conceded.
    Eric began to giggle.
    It had begun to dawn on the guard that there was a lot of shouting going on in the distance. Someone tried to blow a