The Last Hero

them, and the blanket slid away from her shoulders and fell on to the snow.
    "Well, gentlemen?" she said.
    Cohen pulled the gag off the minstrel's mouth. The man stared at him in terror.
    "What's your name, son?" said Cohen.
    "You kidnapped me! I was walking along the street and —"
    "How much?" said Cohen.
    "What?"
    "How much to write me a saga?"
    "You stink !"
    "Yeah, it's the walrus," said Cohen evenly. "It's a bit like garlic in that respect. Anyway... a saga, that's what I want. And what you want is a big bag of rubies, not unadjacent in size to the rubies what I have here."
    He upended a leather bag into the palm of his hand. The stones were so big the snow glowed red. The musician stared at them.
    "You got — what's that word, Truckle?" said Cohen.
    "Art," said Truckle.
    "You got art, and we got rubies. We give you rubies, you give us art," said Cohen. "End of problem, right?"
    "Problem?" The rubies were hypnotic.
    "Well, mainly the problem you'll have if you tell me you can't write me a saga," said Cohen, still in a pleasant tone of voice.
    "But... look, I'm sorry, but... sagas are just primitive poems, aren't they?" The wind, never ceasing here near the Hub, had several seconds in which to produce its more forlorn yet threatening whistle.
    "It'll be a long walk to civilisation , all by yourself," said Truckle, at length.
    "Without yer feet," said Boy Willie.
    "Please!"
    "Nah, nah, lads, we don't want to do that to the boy," said Cohen. "He's a bright lad, got a great future ahead of him..." He took a pull of his home-rolled cigarette and added, "up until now. Nah, I can see he's thinking about it. A heroic saga, lad. It'll be the most famousest one ever."
    "What about?"
    "Us."
    "You? But you're all ol—"
    The minstrel stopped. Even after a life that had hitherto held no danger greater than a hurled meat bone at a banquet, he could recognise sudden death when he saw it. And he saw it now. Age hadn't weakened here — well, except in one or two places. Mostly, it had hardened.
    "I wouldn't know how to compose a saga," he said feebly.
    "We'll help," said Truckle.
    "We know lots ," said Boy Willie.
    "Been in most of 'em," said Cohen.
    The minstrel's thoughts ran like this: These men are rubies insane. They are rubies sure to kill me. Rubies . They've dragged me rubies all the rubies rubies .
    They want to give me a big bag of rubies rubies ...
    "I suppose I could extend my repertoire," he mumbled. A look at their faces made him readjust his vocabulary. "All right, I'll do it," he said. A tiny bit of honesty, though, survived even the glow of the jewels. "I'm not the world's greatest minstrel, you know."
    "You will be after you write this saga," said Cohen, untying his ropes.
    "Well... I hope you like it..."
    Cohen grinned again. "'S not up to us to like it. We won't hear it," he said.
    "What? But you just said you wanted me to write you a saga —"
    "Yeah, yeah. But it's gonna be the saga of how we died."

It was a small flotilla that set sail from Ankh-Morpork next day. Things had happened quickly. It wasn't that the prospect of the end of the world was concentrating minds unduly, because that is a general and universal danger that people find hard to imagine. But the Patrician was being rather sharp with people, and that is a specific and highly personal danger and people had no problem relating to it at all.
    The barge, under whose huge tarpaulin something was already taking shape, wallowed between the boats. Lord Vetinari went aboard only once, and looked gloomily at the vast piles of material that littered the deck.
    "This is costing us a considerable amount of money," he told Leonard, who had set up an easel. "I just hope there will be something to show for it."
    "The continuation of the species, perhaps," said Leonard, completing a complex drawing and handing it to an apprentice.
    "Obviously that , yes."
    "We shall learn many new things," said Leonard, "that I am sure will be of immense benefit to posterity. For example, the survivor of the Maria Pesto reported that things floated around in the air as if they had become extremely light, so I have devised this ."
    He reached down and picked up what looked, to Lord Vetinari, like a perfectly normal kitchen utensil.
    "It's a frying pan that sticks to anything," he said, proudly. "I got the idea from observing a type of teazel, which —"
    "And this will be useful?" said Lord Vetinari.
    "Oh, indeed. We will need to eat meals and cannot have hot fat