Interesting Times

jokes and he just hadn’t seen the point. Perhaps comedians here got big laughs with lines like: “I say, I say, I say, I met a man on the way to the theater and he didn’t chop my legs off , urinating dog, urinating dog—”
    He had been aware of the jingle of harness on the road, but hadn’t paid it any attention. He hadn’t even looked up at the sound of someone approaching. By the time he did think of looking up it was too late, because someone had their boot on his neck.
    “Oh, urinating dog,” he said, before passing out.

    There was a puff of air and the Luggage appeared, dropping heavily into a snowdrift.
    There was a meat cleaver sticking into its lid.
    It remained motionless for some time and then, its legs moving in a complicated little dance, it turned around 360 degrees.
    The Luggage did not think. It had nothing to think with. Whatever processes went on inside it probably had more to do with the way a tree reacts to sun and rain and sudden storms, but speeded up very fast.
    After a while it seemed to get its bearings and ambled off across the melting snow.
    The Luggage did not feel, either. It had nothing to feel with. But it reacted, in the same way that a tree reacts to the changing of the seasons.
    Its pace quickened.
    It was close to home.

    Rincewind had to concede that the shouting man was right. Not, that is, about Rincewind’s father being the diseased liver of a type of mountain panda and his mother being a bucket of turtle slime; Rincewind had no personal experience of either parent but felt that they were probably at least vaguely humanoid, if only briefly. But on the subject of appearing to own a stolen horse he had Rincewind bang to rights and, also, a foot on his neck. A foot on the neck is nine points of the law.
    He felt hands rummaging in his pockets.
    Another person—Rincewind was not able to see much beyond a few inches of alluvial soil, but from context it appeared to be an unsympathetic person—joined in the shouting.
    Rincewind was hauled upright.
    The guards were pretty much like guards as Rincewind had experienced them everywhere. They had exactly the amount of intellect required to hit people and drag them off to the scorpion pit. They were league champions at shouting at people a few inches from their face.
    The effect was made surreal by the fact that the guards themselves had no faces, or at least no faces they could call their own. Their ornate, black-enameled helmets had huge moustached visages painted on them, leaving only the owner’s mouth uncovered so that he could, for example, call Rincewind’s grandfather a box of inferior goldfish droppings.
    What I Did On My Holidays was waved in front of his face.
    “Bag of rotted fish!”
    “I don’t know what it means,” said Rincewind. “Someone just gave it to—”
    “Feet of extreme decayed milk!”
    “Could you perhaps not shout quite so loud? I think my eardrum has just exploded.”
    The guard subsided, possibly only because he had run out of breath. Rincewind had a moment to look at the scenery.
    There were two carts on the road. One of them seemed to be a cage on wheels; he made out faces watching him in terror. The other was an ornate palanquin carried by eight peasants; rich curtains covered the sides but he could see where they had been twitched aside so that someone within could look at him.
    The guards were aware of this. It seemed to make them awkward.
    “If I could just expl—”
    “Silence, mouth of—” The guard hesitated.
    “You’ve used turtle, goldfish, and what you probably meant to be cheese,” said Rincewind.
    “Mouth of chicken gizzards!”
    A long, thin hand emerged from the curtains and beckoned, just once.
    Rincewind was hustled forward. The hand had the longest fingernails he’d ever seen on something that didn’t purr.
    “Kowtow!”
    “Sorry?” said Rincewind.
    “ Kowtow! ”
    Swords were produced.
    “I don’t know what you mean!” Rincewind wailed.
    “Kowtow, please,” whispered a voice by his ear. It was not a particularly friendly voice but compared to all the other voices it was positively affectionate. It sounded as though it belonged to quite a young man. And it was speaking very good Morporkian.
    “ How? ”
    “You don’t know that? Kneel down, press your forehead on the ground. That’s if you want to be able to wear a hat again.”
    Rincewind hesitated. He was a free-born Morporkian, and on the list of things a citizen didn’t do was bow down to