— The Carpet People —
Terry Pratchett

Chapter 3

When Snibril awoke, the night was nearly past. He was lying by a dying fire, a pelt covering him. He felt warm and achy. He shut his eyes again, hurriedly.

“You’re awake,” said Bane, who was sitting with his back against a barrel and his hat, as usual, over his eyes. Roland was tethered to a nearby hair.

Snibril sat up and yawned. “What happened? Is everyone all right?”

“Oh, yes. At least, what you would call all right. You Munrungs are difficult to kill. But plenty were injured, your brother the worst, I fear. Mouls rely on poison on their swords, and they cause a . . . a sleep that you don’t wake up from. Pismire is with him now. No, stay there. If anyone can cure him, then Pismire can. It won’t help to have you under his feet. Besides,” he added quickly, when he saw the look in Snibril’s eyes, “how about you? We had to pull you out from under that creature.”

Snibril murmured something and looked around him. The camp was as peaceful as a camp could be, which is to say the early dawn was filled with noises and shouts, and the sounds of people. And they were cheerful sounds, with a note of defiance.

The attack had been beaten off. For a moment, with first light glimmering in the hairs, the Munrungs felt in the mood to take on Fray and all his snargs. Some—like Bane, who never seemed to sleep—had stayed up by their fires, and early breakfasts were being cooked.

Without saying a word, Bane raked a bundle out of the ashes. Warm smells rose from it. “Haunch of snarg, baked in its own juices,” he said, slitting the burnt outer crust. “I killed the owner myself, I’m pleased to say.”

“Protein is where you find it. I will have a piece with no fat on it,” said Pismire, stepping down from the Orkson cart.

Snibril saw the weariness in the old man’s face. His herb bag lay beside him, almost empty. Pismire ate in silence for a while, and then wiped his mouth.

“He’s as strong as a horse,” he said in answer to their unspoken question. “The gods of all large, amiable creatures must have been present at his birth, whether he believes in them or not. He’ll still be weak, though, until the poison has completely gone. He should stay in bed for at least two days, so I told Bertha six. Then he’ll fret and bully her into letting him up the day after tomorrow, and feel a lot better for having outwitted me. Positive thinking, that’s the style.”

He looked at Snibril.

“What about you? You might not have escaped half so easily. Oh, I know it’s useless to say all this,” he added, catching Bane’s grin, “but I wish that the people who sing about the deeds of heroes would think about the people who have to clear up after them.”

He held up his herb bag. “And with this,” he said. “Just different types of dust, a few useful plants. That’s not medicine. That’s just a way of keeping people amused while they’re ill. We’ve lost such a lot.”

“You said that before,” said Snibril. “What have we lost?”

“Knowledge. Proper medicine. Books. Carpography. People get lazy. Empires, too. If you don’t look after knowledge, it goes away. Look at this.”

He threw down what looked like a belt, made up of seven different-colored squares, linked together with thongs.

“That was made by wights. Go on, ask me.”

“I think I’ve heard them mentioned . . . wights?” said Snibril obediently.

“You see? A tribe. In the old days. The tribe. The first Carpet people. The ones who crossed the Tiles and brought back fire. They quarried wood at the Woodwall. They found out how to melt varnish off achairleg. Don’t see them so much nowadays, but they used to be around a lot, pushing these big varnish boilers from tribe to tribe. It’s amazing, the stuff they could make out of it . . . Anyway, they used to make these belts. Seven different substances, you see. Carpet hair, bronze from the High Gate Land, varnish, wood, dust, sugar, and grit. Every wight had to make one.”

“Why?”

“To prove they could. Mysticism. Of course, that was long ago. I haven’t seen wights for years. And now their belts turn up as collars on these . . . things. We’ve lost so much. We wrote too much down, and forgot it.” He shook his head. “I’m going to have a nap. Wake me up when we leave.” He wandered off to one of the carts and pulled a blanket over his head.

“What did he mean?” said Snibril.

“A nap?” said Bane. “It’s like a short sleep.”

“I mean about writing down too much. Who wrote down too much? What does that mean?”

For the first time since Snibril had met him, Bane looked uncomfortable.

“That’s up to him to tell you,” he said. “Everyone has . . . things they remember.”

Snibril watched him patting Roland absently on the muzzle. Who was Bane, if it came to that? He seemed to generate a feeling that made it hard to ask. He looked like a wild man, but there was something about him . . . It seemed to Snibril that if a pot that was about to boil over had arms and legs, that would be Bane. Every move he made was deliberate and careful, as if he’d rehearsed it beforehand. Snibril wasn’t sure if Bane was a friend. He hoped so. He’d be a terrible enemy.

Snibril lay back with the belt in his lap and thought of wights. Eventually he slept. At least, it seemed like sleep, but he thought that he could still hear the camp around him and see the outline of Burnt End across the clearing. But he wondered afterward. It seemed like a dream. He saw, in a little blurred picture hanging in the smoke-scented air, the Carpet. He was flying through the hairs, well above the dust. It was nighttime and very dark, although, oddly enough, he could see quite clearly. He drifted over grazing herds, a group of hooded figures—wights!—pushing a cart, a sleeping village . . . And then, as if he had been drawn to this spot, to a tiny figure walking among the hairs. As he drifted down toward it, it became a person, all in white. Everything about it was white. It turned and looked up at him, the first creature he had seen who seemed to know he was there, and he sank toward those pale, watchful eyes . . .

He woke suddenly and the picture faded, while he sat up clutching the seven squares tightly in both hands.

 

A little later they broke camp, with Pismire driving the leading cart.

Glurk lay inside, white and shaken but strong enough to curse colorfully every time they went over a bump. Sometimes Fray rumbled, far off in the south.

Bane and Snibril, now wearing the belt around his waist, rode on ahead.

 

 

The Carpet was changing color. That in itself was not strange. Around the Woodwall the hairs were dark green and gray, but west in Tregon Marus they were a light, dusty blue. Here the green was fading to yellow, and the hairs themselves were thicker, and gnarled. Some bore fruit, large, prickly balls that grew right out of the trunk of the hair.

Bane cut into one with his knife and showed Snibril the thick, sweet syrup.

Later they passed far under some kind of construction high in the hairs. Striped creatures peered down from their lofty fortress and hummed angrily as the carts passed beneath.

“They’re hymetors,” called out Pismire, while the noise thrummed above their heads. “Don’t take any notice of them! They’re peaceful enough if you leave them alone, but if they think you’re after their honey, they’ll sting you!”

“Are they intelligent?” said Snibril.

“Together, they are. Individually, they’re stupid. Hah! The opposite of us, really. Incidentally, their stings are deadly.”

After that, no one so much as looked at a syrup ball, and Bane spent a lot of time glancing upward, with one hand on his sword.

 

 

After a while they reached a place where two tracks crossed. A cairn of grit marked the crossroads. On the cairn, their packs at their feet, sat a man and a woman. They were ragged creatures; their clothes made Bane’s clean tatters look like an emperor’s robe.

They were eating cheese. Both started to back away when Bane and Snibril approached, and then relaxed.

The man wanted to talk. Words seemed to have piled up inside him.

“Camus Cadmes is my name,” he said. “I was a haircutter for the sawmill in Marus there. I suppose I’m still a haircutter now, too, if anyone wants to employ me. Hmm? Oh. I was out marking hairs for cutting and Lydia here had brought me my dinner and then there was this sort of heavy feeling and then—”

And then he’d got to a point where words weren’t enough, and had to be replaced by arm waving and a look of extreme terror.

“When we got back, I don’t think there was a yard of wall left standing. The houses just fell in on themselves. We did what we could but . . . well, anyone who could, just left. You can’t rebuild from something like that. Then I heard the wolf things, and . . . we ran.”

He took the piece of meat that Snibril gave him, and they ate it hungrily.

“Did no one else escape?” asked Snibril.

“Escape? From that? Maybe, those outside the walls. There was Barlen Corronson with us until yesterday. But he went after the syrup of those humming things, and they got him. Now we’re going east. I’ve got family that way. I hope.”

They gave them new clothes and full packs, and sent them on their way. The couple hurried off, almost as fearful of the Munrungs as they were of the other sudden terrors of the Carpet.

“Everyone ran,” said Snibril. “We’re all running away.”

“Yes,” said Bane, looking down the west path with an odd expression. “Even these.” He pointed, and there, coming slowly up the path, was a heavy wagon drawn by a line of bent, plodding figures.

Chapter 4

“Wights,” said Bane. “Don’t speak to them unless they speak first.”

“I saw them last night in a dream . . .” began Snibril.

Pismire showed no surprise. “You’ve got one of their belts. You know when you really work hard at something, you’re really putting yourself into your work? They mean it.”

Snibril slipped the belt from his tunic and, without quite knowing why he did it, tucked it into his pack.

Behind them the rest of the carts slowed down and drew to the side of the path.

The wight-drawn wagon rumbled on until it reached the cairn. Both parties looked across at the other. Then a small wight left the cart and walked over to Snibril and Bane. Close to, its robe could be seen to be not just black but covered in a crisscross of faint gray lines. The deep hood covered its face.

“Hello,” said the wight.

“Hello,” said Bane.

“Hello.” The wight nodded again.

It stood there and said nothing else.

“Do they understand language?” said Snibril.

“Probably,” said Pismire. “They invented it.”

Snibril felt the steady gaze from its hidden eyes. And he felt the hardness of the belt rubbing into his back, and he shifted uneasily. The wight turned its gaze on Bane. “Tonight we eat the Feast of Bronze. You are invited. You will accept. Seven only. When the nighttime fires are lit.”

“We accept,” said Bane gravely.

The wight turned on its heel and strode back to the wagon.

“Tonight?” said Pismire. “The Feast of Bronze? As if it was Feast of Sugar or Hair? Amazing. I thought they never invited strangers.”

“Who’s invited who?” growled someone from inside the cart. There was a stamping about, and Glurk’s head poked through the curtains over the front.

“You know what I said about getting up,” Pismire began, but since Glurk was already dressed, there was very little he could do, except wink slyly at Bane and Snibril.

“Wights? I thought they were just a children’s story,” Glurk said, after it had been explained to him. “Still, it’s a free meal. What’s wrong with that? To tell the truth, I don’t know more’n a scrap about them, but I never heard of a bad wight.”

“I’d hardly heard of wights at all until now,” said Snibril.

“Ah, but you weren’t alive when old Granddad was,” said Glurk. “He told me he met one in the hairs once. He lent it his ax.”

“Did he get it back?” said Pismire.

“No.”

“That was a wight, all right, then,” said Pismire. “They tend to be too preoccupied to think about simple things.”

“He said it was a good ax, too.”

“There’s no question of refusing to go,” said Pismire.

“That’s right,” said Bane.

“But it’s so easy to get things wrong. You know how sensitive they are. They’ve got all kinds of strange beliefs. You’ve got to know that, you two. Tell them, General.”

“Well,” said Bane, “seven’s very important to them. Seven elements in the Carpet, seven colors—”

“Tell them about the Chays.”

“I was coming to that . . . seven Chays. They’re like . . . periods of time. But not regular ones. Sometimes they’re short, sometimes they’re long. Only the wights know how long. Remember the belt? Seven squares, and each represents a Chay. So the Chay of Salt, you see, is a time when people prosper and trade, and the Chay of Grit is when they build empires and walls . . . Am I going too fast?”

General? thought Snibril. That’s what Pismire called Bane. He wasn’t thinking. And a general’s a chief soldier . . . and now they’re all looking at me. None of them noticed!

“Hmm?” he said. He tried to recall what Bane had been saying. “Oh . . . so tonight’s feast means we’re in the Chay of Bronze, yes?”

“It means it’s starting,” said Pismire. “It’s a time of war and destruction.”

Glurk coughed. “How long does this last, then?”

“It’ll last as long as the wights think it will. Don’t ask me how they know. But tonight, wights all over the Carpet will celebrate the Feast of Bronze. It’s something to do with their memories.”

“Sounds a bit unbelievable to me,” said Glurk.

“Oh, yes. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

“You certainly know a lot about them,” said Snibril.

“I don’t,” said Pismire simply. “You never know anything where wights are concerned. You remember tales, see things, pick up little bits of knowledge here and there, but you never know anything for certain.”

“All right,” said Glurk. He stood up on the driving board of the cart. “We’ll go. Don’t see we can do nothing else, anyway. Bertha’ll come, and Gurth, and, let’s see . . . yes, Damion Oddfoot. It strikes me that when a wight asks you to dinner, you go, and that’s it. In sevens.”

 

They entered the wights’ little camp sheepishly, keeping together.

Wights always traveled in numbers of seven, twenty-one, or forty-nine. No one knew what happened to any wights left over. Perhaps the other ones killed and ate them, suggested Glurk, who had taken a sort of ancestral dislike to ax-stealing wights. Pismire told him to shut up.

The oldest wight in the group was the Master. There were twenty-one in this group, and Pismire, looking at their cart, pointed out the big varnish boiler on top of it. Wights specialized in smelting the varnish that was mined at the Varnisholme, the giant pillar of red wood in the north known as achairleg in Dumii. Then they went from village to village, selling it. Varnish could be cast into a spearhead, or a knife, or just about anything.

Snibril wondered how long it would be before anyone noticed he had shoved the belt into his pack. But he wasn’t going to give it up, he told himself. They’d be bound to want it back if they saw it.

There were seven fires, close together, and three wights around each. They looked identical. How do they tell one another apart? Snibril wondered.

 

 

“Oh, there’s something else I forgot to tell you,” said Pismire, as the wights busied themselves over their cooking pots. “They have perfect memories. Um. They remember everything. That’s why they find it so hard to talk to ordinary people.”

“I don’t understand,” said Snibril.

“Don’t be surprised if they give you answers before you’ve asked the question. Sometimes even they get confused,” Pismire went on.

“Never mind about them. I’m confused.”

“They remember everything, I said. Everything. Everything that’s ever going to happen to them. Their minds . . . work differently. The past and the future are all the same to them. Please try to understand what I’m saying. They remember things that haven’t happened yet.”

Snibril’s jaw dropped.

“Then we could ask them—” he began.

“No! We mustn’t! Why, thank you,” Pismire continued, in a more normal voice, taking a plate from a wight, “that looks . . . um . . . delicious.”

They ate in silence. Snibril thought: Do they say nothing because they already know what it was they said? No, that can’t be right. They’d have to speak now to remember having said it . . . or . . .

“I am Noral the kilnmaster,” said the wight on his left.

“My name—”

“Yes.”

“We—”

“Yes.”

“There was—”

“I know.”

“How?”

“You’re going to tell me after dinner.”

“Oh.” Snibril tried to think. Pismire was right. It was almost impossible to hold a conversation with someone who’d already heard it once. “You really know everything that’s going to happen?” was all he could think of.

There was the trace of a smile in the depths of the hood.

“Not everything. How can anyone know everything? But a number of things I do know, yes.”

Snibril looked around desperately. Pismire and Bane were deep in conversation with wights, and were not paying him any attention.

“But . . . but . . . supposing you knew when you were going to die? Supposing a wild animal was going to attack you?”

“Yes?” said Noral politely.

“You could just make sure you weren’t there?”

“Weren’t there when you died?” said the wight. “That would be a good trick.”

“No! I mean . . . you could avoid—”

“I know what you mean. But we couldn’t. It’s hard to explain. Or easy to explain and hard to understand. We have to follow the Thread. The one Thread. We mustn’t break it.”

“Doesn’t anything ever come as a surprise?” said Snibril.

“I don’t know. What is a surprise?”

“Can you tell me what’s going to happen to me? To all of us? You know what’s been happening already. It would help a lot to know the future.”

The dark hood turned toward him.

“It wouldn’t. It makes living very hard.”

“We need help,” said Snibril, in a frantic whisper. “What’s Fray? Where can we go to be safe? What should we do? Can’t you tell us?”

The wight leaned closer.

“Can you keep a secret?” it said conspiratorially.

“Yes!” said Snibril.

“Really keep a secret? Even though you’d give anything to tell other people? Even though it’s like trying to hold a hot coal in your hand? Can you really keep a secret?”

“Er . . . yes.”

“Well,” said the wight, leaning back again. “So can we.”

“But—”

“Enjoy your meal.”

“Will I?”

“Yes. You certainly did.” The wight went to turn away, and then turned back. “And you may keep the belt.”

“Oh. You know I’ve got the belt.”

“I do now.”

Snibril hesitated. “Hang on,” he said, “I only said that because you—”

“It’s best if you don’t try to understand,” said Noral kindly.

Snibril ate for a while, but the questions kept bothering him.

“Listen. Everything happens,” said Noral. “Like a thread of the Carpet. Nothing can be changed. Even the changes are . . . already part of the future. That’s all you need to know.”

It was a strange meal. You could never be certain if the person you were talking to was listening to what you were going to say in ten minutes’ time. It only cheered up a bit when one of the wights gave Glurk an ax. It was his grandfather’s, although the handle and the blade had been replaced a few times.

Bane and Pismire were quiet when the travelers went back to their carts.

“Did they tell you anything?” asked Snibril.

“No,” said Pismire. “They never do. But . . .”

“It’s the way they acted,” said Bane. “They can’t help it.”

“They don’t like what it is they’re not telling us,” said Pismire