Interesting Times

Nothing he could see would make him run any faster.
    There was a large shapeless village ahead, a construction apparently of mud and dung. In the fields in front of it a dozen peasants looked up from their toil at the accelerating wizard.
    Perhaps it was Rincewind’s imagination, but as he passed them he could have sworn that he heard the cry:
    “Necessarily Extended Duration To The Red Army! Regrettable Decease Without Undue Suffering To The Forces Of Oppression!”
    Rincewind dived through the huts as the soldiers charged at the peasants.
    Cohen had been right. There seemed to be a revolution. But the Empire had been in unchanged existence for thousands of years, courtesy and a respect for protocol were part of its very fabric, and by the sound of it the revolutionaries had yet to master the art of impolite slogans.
    Rincewind preferred running to hiding. Hiding was all very well, but if you were found then you were stuck. But the village was the only cover for miles around, and some of the soldiers had horses. A man might be faster than a horse over a short distance, but over this panorama of flat, open fields a horse had a running man done up like a clam.
    So he ducked into a building at random and pushed aside the first door he came to.
    It had, pasted on it, the words: Examination. Silence!
    Forty expectant and slightly worried faces looked up at him from their writing stools. They weren’t children, but full-grown adults.
    There was a lectern at the end of the room and, on it, a pile of papers sealed with string and wax.
    Rincewind felt the atmosphere was familiar. He’d breathed it before, even if it had been a world away. It was full of those cold sweaty odours created by the sudden realization that it was probably too late to do that revision you’d kept on putting off. Rincewind had faced many horrors in his time, but none held quite the same place in the lexicon of dread as those few seconds after someone said, “Turn over your papers now .”
    The candidates were watching him.
    There was shouting somewhere outside.
    He hurried up to the lectern, tore at the string and distributed the papers as fast as he could. Then he dived back to the safety of the lectern, removed his hat, and was bent low when the door opened slowly.
    “Go away!” he screamed. “Examination in progress!”
    The unseen figure behind the door murmured something to someone else. The door was closed again.
    The candidates were still staring at him.
    “Er. Very well. Turn over your papers.”
    There was a rustle, a few moments of that dreadful silence, and then much activity with brushes.
    Competitive examinations. Oh, yes. That was another thing people knew about the Empire. They were the only way to get any kind of public post and the security that brought. People had said that this must be a very good system, because it opened up opportunities for people of merit.
    Rincewind picked up a spare paper and read it.
    It was headed: Examination for the post of Assistant Night-Soil Operative for the District of W’ung.
    He read question one. It required candidates to write a sixteen-line poem on evening mist over the reed beds.
    Question two seemed to be about the use of metaphor in some book Rincewind had never heard of.
    Then there was a question about music…
    Rincewind turned the paper over a couple of times. There didn’t seem to be any mention, anywhere, of words like “compost” or “bucket” or “wheelbarrow.” But presumably all this produced a better class of person than the Ankh-Morpork system, which asked just one question: “Got your own shovel, have you?”
    The shouting outside seemed to have died away; Rincewind risked poking his head out of the door. There was a commotion near the road but it no longer seemed Rincewind-orientated.
    He ran for it.
    The students got on with their examination. One of the more enterprising, however, rolled up his trouser leg and copied down a poem about mist he’d composed, at great effort, some time previously. After a while you got to know what kind of questions the examiners asked.
    Rincewind trotted onwards, trying to keep to ditches wherever these weren’t knee deep in sucking mud. It wasn’t a landscape built for concealment. The Agateans grew crops on any piece of ground the seeds wouldn’t roll off. Apart from the occasional rocky outcrop there was a distinct lack of places in which to lurk.
    No one paid him much attention once he’d left the village far behind.