Terry Pratchett - Bromeliad 1 Truckers

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mayflies sit around complaining about how life this minute isn t a patch on

the good old minutes of long ago, when the world was young and the sun

seemed so much brighter and larvae showed you a bit of respect. Whereas

the trees, which are not famous for their quick reactions, may just have

time to notice the way the sky keeps flickering before the dry rot and

woodworm set in.

It's all a sort of relativity. The faster you live, the more time stretches

out. To a nome, a year lasts as long as ten years does to a human Re-

member it Don't let it concern you They don't. They don't even know.

In the beginning...

I. There was the Site.

II. And Arnold Bros (est. 1905) Moved upon the face of the Site, and

Saw that it had Potential.

III. For it was In the High Street.

IV. Yea, it was also Handy for the Buses.

V. And Arnold Bros (est. 1905) said, Let there be a Store, And Let it be

a Store such as the World has not Seen hitherto;

VI. Let the length of it be from Palmer Street even unto the Fish Market,

and the Width of It, from the High Street right back to Disraeli Road;

VII. Let it be High even Unto Five Storeys plus Basement, And bright

with Lifts; let there be the Eternal Fires of the Boiler-Room in the sub-

basement and, above all other floors, let there be Customer Accounts to

Order All Things;

VIII. For this must be what all shall Know of Arnold Bros (est. 1905): All

Things Under One Roof. And it shall be called: the Store of Arnold Bros

(est. 1905).

IX. And Thus it Was.

X. And Arnold Bros (est. 1905) divided the Store into Departments, of

Ironmongery, Corsetry, Modes and others After their Kind, and Created

Humans to fill them with All Things saying, Yea, All Things Are Here. And

Arnold Bros (est. 1905) said, Let there be Lorries, and Let their Colours be

the country lanes, smashing through street lamps and swinging from side

to side and shattering shop windows and rolling to a halt when the police

chased it. And when the baffled men went back to their car to report Listen,

will you, listen? There isn't anyone driving it!, it became the story of the

lorry that started up again, rolled away from the astonished men, and van-

ished into the night.

But the story didn't end there.

It didn't start there, either.

The sky rained dismal. It rained humdrum. It rained the kind of rain that

is so much wetter than normal rain, the kind of rain that comes down in big

drops and splats, the kind of rain that is merely an upright sea with slots in

it.

It rained a tattoo on the old hamburger boxes and chip papers in the

wire basket that was giving Masklin a temporary hiding place.

Look at him. Wet. Cold. Extremely worried. And four inches high.

The waste-bin was usually a good hunting ground, even in winter. There

were often a few cold chips in their wrapping, sometimes even a chicken

bone. Once or twice there had been a rat, too. It had been a really good

day when there had last been a rat - it had kept them going for a week. The

trouble was that you could get pretty fed up with rat by the third day. By the

third mouthful, come to that.

Masklin scanned the lorry park.

And here it came, right on time, crashing through the puddles and pull-

ing up with a hiss of brakes.

He'd watched this lorry arrive every Tuesday and Thursday morning for

the last four weeks. He timed the driver's stop carefully.

They had exactly three minutes. To someone the size of a nome, that's

more than half an hour.

He scrambled down through the greasy paper, dropped out of the bot-

tom of the bin, and ran for the bushes at the edge of the park where

Grimma and the old folk were waiting.

'It's here!' he said. 'Come on!'

They re frightened, she said. You go on. Ill bring them out.

There wasn't time to argue. Masklin ran back across the soaking mud of

the park, unslinging the rope and grapnel. It had taken him a week to make

the hook, out of a bit of wire teased off a fence, and he'd spent days prac-

ticing; he was already swinging it around his head as he reached the lorry's

wheel.

The hook caught the tarpaulin high above him at the second try. He

tested it once or twice and then, his feet scrabbling for a grip on the tire,

pulled himself up.

He'd done it before. Oh, he'd done it three or four times. He scrambled

under the heavy tarpaulin and into the darkness beyond, pulling out more

line and tying it as tightly as possible around one of the ropes that were as

thick as his arm.

Then he slid back to the edge and, thank goodness, Grimma was herd-

ing the old people across the gravel. He could hear them complaining

about the puddles.

Masklin jumped up and down with impatience. It seemed to take hours.

He explained it to them millions of times, but people hadn't been pulled up

on to the backs of lorries when they were children and they didn't see why

they should start now. Old Granny Morkie insisted that all the men look the

other way so that they wouldn't see up her skirts, for example, and old Tor-

rit whimpered so much that Masklin had to lower him again so that Grimma

could blindfold him. It wasn't so bad after he'd hauled the first few up, be-

cause they were able to help on the rope, but time still stretched out.

He pulled Grimma up last. She was light. They were all light, if it came

to that. You didn't get rat every day.

It was amazing. They were all on board. He'd worked with an ear

cocked for the sound of foot-steps on gravel and the slamming of the

driver's door, and it hadn't happened.

'Right,' he said, shaking with the effort. 'That's it, then. Now if we just go

We can t go without it, said Grimma.

'Of course we can. It's just a, a thing. We won't need the wretched ob-

ject where we're going.'

He felt guilty as soon as he'd said it, amazed at his own lips for uttering

such words. Grimma looked horrified. Granny Morkie drew herself up to her

full, quivering height.

'May you be forgiven!' she barked. 'What a terrible thing to say! You tell

him, Torrit.' She nudged Torrit in the ribs.

'If we ain't taking the Thing, I ain't going,' said Torrit sulkily.

'It's not-'

'That's your leader talkin' to you,' interrupted Granny Morkie. 'So you do

what you're told. Leave it behind, indeed! It wouldn't be decent. It wouldn't

be right. So you go and get it, this minute.'

Masklin stared wordlessly down at the soaking mud and then, with a

desperate motion, threw the line over the edge and slid down it.

It was raining harder now, with a touch of sleet. The wind whipped at

him as he dropped past the great arc of the wheel and landed heavily in the

puddle. He reached out and scooped up the Thing- And the lorry started to

move.

First there was a roar, so loud that it went beyond sound and became a

solid wall of noise. Then there was a blast of stinking air and a vibration

that shook the ground.

He pulled sharply on the line and yelled at them to pull him up, and re-

alized that even he couldn't hear his own voice. But Grimma or someone

must have got the idea because, just as the big wheel began to turn, the

rope tightened and he felt his feet lifted off the mud.

He bounced and spun back and forth as, with painful slowness, they

pulled him past the wheel. It turned only a few inches away from him, a

black, chilly blur, and all the time the hammering sound battered at his

head.

I'm not scared, he told himself. This is much worse than anything I've

ever faced, and it's not frightening. It's too terrible to be

Hands reached down and caught him under the arms and dragged him

into

the booming space under the tarpaulin and, with some difficulty, prised

the Thing out of his grip.

Behind the speeding lorry fresh curtains of grey rain dragged across the

empty fields.

And, across the whole country, there were no more nomes.

There had been plenty of them, in the days when it didn't seem to rain

so much. Masklin could remember at least forty. But then the motorway

had come; the stream was put in pipes under-ground, and the nearest

hedges were grubbed up. Nomes had always lived in the corners of the

world, and suddenly there weren't too many corners any more.

The numbers started going down. A lot of this was due to natural

causes,

and when you're four inches high natural causes can be anything with

teeth and speed and hunger. Then Pyrrince, who was by way of being

the

most adventurous, led a desperate expedition across the carriageway

one

night, to investigate the woods on the other side. They never came

back.

Some said it was hawks, some said it was a lorry. Some even said

they'd

made it halfway and were marooned on the cen-tral reservation be-

tween

endless swishing lines of cars.

Then the cafe had been built, a little further along the road. It had

been a sort of improvement. It depended how you looked at it. If cold

Hunting by yourself was like dying a bit at a time. Most of the things

you were hunting were also hunting you. And even if you were lucky and

made a kill, how did you get it home? It had taken two days with the

rat, including sitting out at night to fight off other creatures. Ten

strong hunters could do anything - rob bees' nests, trap mice, catch

moles, anything but one hunter by himself, with no one to watch his

back

in the long grass, was simply the next meal for everything with talons

and claws.

To get enough to eat, you needed lots of healthy hunters. But to get

lots of healthy hunters, you needed enough to eat.

'It'll be all right in the autumn,' said Grimma, bandaging his arm where

a stoat had caught it. 'There'll be mushrooms and berries and nuts and

everything.'

Well, there hadn't been any mushrooms and it rained so much that most

the berries rotted before they ripened. There were plenty of nuts,

though. The nearest hazel tree was half a day's journey away. Masklin

could carry a dozen nuts if he smashed them out of their shells and

dragged them back in a paper bag from the bin. It took a whole day to

it, risking hawks all the way, and it was just enough food for a day as

well.

And then the back of the burrow fell in, because of all the rain. It was

almost pleasant to get out, then. It was better than listening to the

grumbling about him not doing essential repairs. Oh, and there was the

fire. You needed a fire at the burrow mouth, both for cooking and for

keep-ing away night prowlers. Granny Morkie went to sleep one day and

let it go out. Even she had the decency to be embarrassed.

them You ought to bring back another fag-end, boy, Im right out of

tobac-co," and "We never have fish these days, you might find the time

to go down to the river," and "Self, self, self, that's all you young

people think about, in my day-"

Grimma sighed. 'They do their best,' she said. 'It's just that they

don't realize. There were hun-dreds of us when they were young.'

'It's going to take days to get that fire lit,' said Masklin. They had a

spectacle lens; it needed a very sunny day to work.

He poked aimlessly in the mud by his feet.

'I've had enough,' he said quietly, 'I'm going to leave.!

'But we need you!'

'I need me, too. I mean, what kind of life is this?'

'But they'll die if you go away!'

'They'll die anyway,' said Masklin.

'That's a wicked thing to say!'

'Well, it's true. Everyone dies anyway. We'll die anyway. Look at you.

You spend your whole time washing and tidying up and cooking and

chasing

after them. You're nearly three! It's about time you had a life of your

own.'

'Granny Morkie was very kind to me when I was small,' said Grimma

defensively. 'You'll be old one day.'

brave ones had gone long ago, one way or the other. Good old Masklin,

they'd said, stout chap, you look after the old folk and we'll be back

before you know it, just as soon as we've found a better place. Every

time good old Masklin thought about this he got indignant with them for

going and with himself for staying. He always gave in, that was his

trouble. He knew it. Whatever he promised him- self at the start, he

always took the way of least resistance.

Grimma was glaring at him.

He shrugged.'

'All right, all right, so they can come with us,' he said.

'You know they won't go,' she said. 'They're too old. They all grew up

round here. They like it here.'

'They like it here when there's us around to wait on them,' muttered

Masklin.

They left it at that. There were nuts for dinner. Masklin's had a maggot

in it.

He went out afterwards and sat at the top of the bank with his chin in

his hands, watching the motorway again.

It was a stream of red and white lights. There were humans inside those

boxes, going about whatever mysterious business humans spent their

time

on. They were always in a hurry to get to it, whatever it was.

He was prepared to bet they didn't eat rat. Humans had it really easy.

They were big and slow, but they didn't have to live in damp burrows

and setting out across the fields with the bad weather coming on didn t

bear thinking about.

Of course, he'd never do it. You never actually did it, in the end. You

just dreamed about following those swishing lights.

And above the rushing lights, the stars. Torrit said the stars were very

important. Right at the moment, Masklin didn't agree. You couldn't eat

them. They weren't even much good for seeing by. The stars were

pretty

useless, when you thought about it...

Somebody screamed.

Masklin's body got to his feet almost before his mind had even thought

about it, and sped silently through the scrubby bushes towards the

burrow.

Where, its head entirely underground and its brush waving excitedly at

the stars, was a dog fox. He recognized it. He'd had a couple of close

shaves with it in the past.

Somewhere inside Masklin's head, the bit of him that was really him -

old Torrit had a lot to say about this bit was horrified to see him

snatch up his spear, which was still in the ground where he had plunged

it, and stab the fox as hard as he could in a hind leg.

There was a muffled yelp and the animal struggled backwards, turning

evil, foaming

mask to its tormentor. Two bright yellow eyes focused on Masklin, who

leaned panting on his spear. This was one of those times when time

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Terry Pratchett - Bromeliad 1 Truckers

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