Thief of Time

goodness. At least he’s done with the wet nurse. It was so embarrassing for him and the young lady, honestly, you didn’t know where to put your face and neither did he. I mean, mentally he’s nine hundred years old…”
    “That must make him very wise.”
    “Pretty wise, pretty wise. But age and wisdom don’t necessarily go together, I’ve always found,” said Lu-Tze, as they approached the abbot’s rooms. “Some people just become stupid with more authority. Not His Reverence, of course.”
    The abbot was in his high chair, and had recently flicked a spoonful of nourishing pap all over the chief acolyte, who was smiling like a man whose job depended on looking happy that parsnip-and-gooseberry custard was dribbling down his forehead.
    It occurred to Lobsang, not for the first time, that the abbot was a little bit more than purely random in his attacks on the man. The acolyte was, indeed, the kind of mildly objectionable person who engendered an irresistible urge by any right-thinking person to pour goo into his hair and hit him with a rubber yak, and the abbot was old enough to listen to his inner child.
    “You sent for me, Your Reverence,” said Lu-Tze, bowing.
    The abbot upturned his bowl down the chief acolyte’s robe.
    “ Wahahaahaha ah , yes…Lu-Tze. How old are you now?”
    “Eight hundred, Your Reverence. But that’s no age at all!”
    “Nevertheless, you have spent a lot of time in the world. I understood you were looking to retire and cultivate your gardens?”
    “Yes, but—”
    “But,” the abbot smiled angelically, “like an old warhorse, you say ‘haha!’ at the sound of trumpets, yes?”
    “I don’t think so,” said Lu-Tze. “There’s nothing funny about trumpets, really.”
    “I meant that you long to be out in the field again. But you have been helping to train world operatives for many years, haven’t you? These gentlemen?”
    On one side of the room, a number of burly and muscular monks were sitting. They were kitted out for travel, with rolled sleeping mats on their backs, and they were dressed in loose black clothing. They nodded sheepishly at Lu-Tze, and their eyes above their half-masks looked embarrassed.
    “I did my best,” said Lu-Tze. “Of course, others trained them. I just tried to undo the damage. I never taught them to be ninjas .” He nudged Lobsang. “That, apprentice, is Agatean for ‘the Passing Wind,’” he said in a stage whisper.
    “I am proposing to send them out immediately WAH! ” The abbot hit his high chair with his spoon. “That is my order, Lu-Tze. You are a legend…but you have been a legend for a long time. Why not trust in the future? Bikkit! ”
    “I see,” said Lu-Tze sadly. “Oh, well, it had to happen sometime. Thank you for your consideration, Your Reverence.”
    “ Brrmbrrm …Lu-Tze, I have known you a long time! You will not go within a hundred miles of Uberwald, will you?”
    “Not at all, Your Reverence.”
    “That is an order!”
    “I understand, of course.”
    “You’ve disobeyed my baababa orders before, though. In Omnia, I remember.”
    “Tactical decision made by the man on the spot, Your Reverence. It was more what you might call an interpretation of your order,” said Lu-Tze.
    “You mean, going where you had distinctly been told not to go and doing what you were absolutely forbidden to do?”
    “Yes, Your Reverence. Sometimes you have to move the seesaw by pushing the other end. When I did what shouldn’t be done in a place where I shouldn’t have been, I achieved what needed to be done in the place where it should have happened.”
    The abbot gave Lu-Tze a long hard stare, the kind that babies are good at giving.
    “Lu-Tze, you are not nmnmnbooboo to go to Uberwald or anywhere near Uberwald, understand?” he said.
    “I do, Your Reverence. You are right, of course. But, in my dotage, may I travel another path, of wisdom rather than violence? I wish to show this young man…the Way.”
    There was laughter from the other monks.
    “The Way of the Washerwoman?” said Rinpo.
    “Mrs. Cosmopilite is a dressmaker,” said Lu-Tze calmly.
    “Whose wisdom is in sayings like ‘It won’t get better if you pick it’?” said Rinpo, winking at the rest of the monks.
    “Few things get better if you pick at them,” said Lu-Tze, and now his calmness was a lake of tranquillity. “It may be a mean little Way but, small and unworthy though it is…it is my Way.” He turned to the abbot. “That was