Pyramids

bread sprouting, which suggested he’d drunk too much. All Teppic could remember was waking up with a terrible sense of loss, as his memory failed to hold and leaked away its new treasures. It was like the tremendous insights that come in dreams and vanish on waking. He’d known everything, but as soon as he tried to remember what it was it poured out of his head, as from a leaky bucket.
    But it had left him with a new sensation. Before, his life had been ambling along, bent by circumstance. Now it was clicking along on bright rails. Perhaps he hadn’t got it in him to be an assassin, but he knew he could be a king.
    His feet found solid ground. The boat had dropped him off a little way downstream of the palace and, blue in the moonlight, the pyramid flares on the far bank were filling the night with their familiar glow.
    The abodes of the happy dead came in all sizes although not, of course, in all shapes. They clustered thickly nearer the city, as though the dead like company.
    And even the oldest ones were all complete. No one had borrowed any of the stones to build houses or make roads. Teppic felt obscurely proud of that. No one had unsealed the doors and wandered around inside to see if the dead had any old treasures they weren’t using anymore. And every day, without fail, food was left in the little antechambers; the commissaries of the dead occupied a large part of the palace.
    Sometimes the food went, sometimes it didn’t. The priests, however, were very clear on this point. Regardless of whether the food was consumed or not, it had been eaten by the dead . Presumably they enjoyed it; they never complained, or came back for seconds.
    Look after the dead, said the priests, and the dead would look after you. After all, they were in the majority.
    Teppic pushed aside the reeds. He straightened his clothing, brushed some mud off his sleeve and set off for the palace.
    Ahead of him, dark against the flarelight, stood the great statue of Khuft. Seven thousand years ago Khuft had led his people out of—Teppic couldn’t remember, but somewhere where they hadn’t liked being, probably, and for thoroughly good reasons; it was at times like this he wished he knew more history—and had prayed in the desert and the gods of the place had shown him the Old Kingdom. And he had entered, yea, and taken possession thereof, that it should ever be the dwelling place of his seed. Something like that, anyway. There were probably more yeas and a few verilys, with added milk and honey. But the sight of that great patriarchal face, that outstretched arm, that chin you could crack stones on, bold in the flarelight, told him what he already knew.
    He was home, and he was never going to leave again.
    The sun began to rise.

    The greatest mathematician alive on the Disc, and in fact the last one in the Old Kingdom, stretched out in his stall and counted the pieces of straw in his bedding. Then he estimated the number of nails in the wall. Then he spent a few minutes proving that an automorphic resonance field has a semi-infinite number of irresolute prime ideals. After that, in order to pass the time, he ate his breakfast again.

 
    Two weeks went past. Ritual and ceremony in their due times kept the world under the sky and the stars in their courses. It was astonishing what ritual and ceremony could do.
    The new king examined himself in the mirror, and frowned.
    “What’s it made of?” he said. “It’s rather foggy.”
    “Bronze, sire. Polished bronze,” said Dios, handing him the Flail of Mercy.
    “In Ankh-Morpork we had glass mirrors with silver on the back. They were very good.”
    “Yes, sire. Here we have bronze, sire.”
    “Do I really have to wear this gold mask?”
    “The Face of the Sun, sire. Handed down through all the ages. Yes, sire. On all public occasions, sire.”
    Teppic peered out through the eye slots. It was certainly a handsome face. It smiled faintly. He remembered his father visiting the nursery one day and forgetting to take it off; Teppic had screamed the place down.
    “It’s rather heavy.”
    “It is weighted with the centuries,” said Dios, and passed over the obsidian Reaping Hook of Justice.
    “Have you been a priest long, Dios?”
    “Many years, sire, man and eunuch. Now—”
    “Father said you were high priest even in grandad’s time. You must be very old.”
    “Well-preserved, sire. The gods have been kind to me,” said Dios, in the face of the evidence. “And now, sire,