Terry Pratchett - Reaper Man

Through it all two figures whirled as though there was no tomorrow.

The lead fiddler was dimly aware that, when he paused for breath, a spinning figure tapdanced a storm out of the floor and a voice by his ear said:

YOU WILL CONTINUE, I PROMISE YOU.

When he flagged a second time a diamond as big as his fist landed on the boards in front of him. A smaller figure sashayed out of the dancers and said:

"If you boys don't go on playing, William Spigot. I will personally make sure your life becomes absolutely foul."

And it returned to the press of bodies.

The fiddler looked down at the diamond. It could have ransomed any five kings the world would care to name. He kicked it hurriedly behind him.

"More power to your elbow, eh?" said the drummer, grinning.

"Shut up and play!"

He was aware that tunes were turning up at the ends of his fingers that his brain had never known. The drummer and the piper felt it too. Music was pouring in from somewhere. They weren't playing it. It was playing them.

IT IS TIME FOR A NEW DANCE TO BEGIN.

"Duurrrump-da-dum-dum," hummed the fiddler, the sweat running off his chin as he was caught up in a different tune.

The dancers milled around uncertainly, unsure about the steps. But one pair moved purposefully through them at a predatory crouch, arms clasped ahead of them like the bowsprit of a killer galleon. At the end of the floor they turned in a flurry of limbs that appeared to defy normal anatomy and began the angular advance back through the crowd.

"What's this one called?"

TANGO.

"Can you get put in prison for it?"

I DON'T BELIEVE SO.

"Amazing."

The music changed.

"I know this one! It's the Quirmish bullfight dance! Oh-lay!"

WITH MILK?

A high-speed fusillade of hollow snapping noises suddenly kept time with the music.

"Who's playing the maracas?"

Death grinned.

MARACAS? I DON'T NEED... MARACAS.

And then it was now.

The moon was a ghost of itself on one horizon. On the other there was already the distant glow of the advancing day.

They left the dance floor.

Whatever had been propelling the band through the hours of the night drained slowly away. They looked at one another. Spigot the fiddler glanced down at the jewel.

It was still there.

The drummer tried to massage some life back into his wrists.

Spigot stared helplessly at the exhausted dancers.

"Well, then... " he said, and raised the fiddle one more time.

Miss Flitworth and her companion listened from the mists that were threading around the field in the dawn light.

Death recognised the slow, insistent beat. It made him think of wooden figures, whirling through Time until the spring unwound.

I DON'T KNOW THAT ONE.

"It's the last waltz."

I SUSPECT THERE'S NO SUCH THING.

"You know," said Miss Flitworth, "I've been wondering all evening how it's going to happen. How you're going to do it. I mean, people have to die of something, don't they? I thought maybe it was going to be of exhaustion, but I've never felt better. I've had the time of my life and I'm not even out of breath. In fact it's been a real tonic, Bill Door. And I -"

She stopped.

"I'm not breathing, am I." It wasn't a question. She held a hand in front of her face and huffed on it.

NO.

"I see. I've never enjoyed myself so much in all my life... ha! So... when -?"

YOU KNOW WHEN YOU SAID THAT SEEING ME GAVE YOU QUITE A START?

"Yes?"

I GAVE YOU QUITE A STOP.

Miss Flitworth didn't appear to hear him. She kept turning her hand backwards and forwards, as if she'd never seen it before.

"I see you made a few changes, Bill Door," she said.

NO. IT IS LIFE THAT MAKES MANY CHANGES.

"I mean that I appear to be younger."

THAT'S WHAT I MEANT ALSO.

He snapped his fingers. Binky stopped his grazing by the hedge and trotted over.

"You know," said Miss Flitworth, "I've often thought... I often thought that everyone has their, you know, natural age. You see children of ten who act as though they're thirty-five. Some people are born middle-aged, even. It'd be nice to think I've been... " she looked down at herself, "oh, let's say eighteen... all my life. Inside."

Death said nothing. He helped her up on to the horse.

"When I see what life does to people, you know, you don't seem so bad. " she said nervously.

Death made a clicking noise with his teeth. Binky walked forward.

"You've never met Life, have you?"

I CAN SAY IN ALL HONESTY THAT I HAVE NOT.

"Probably some great white crackling thing. Like an electric storm in trousers," said Miss Flitworth.

I THINK NOT.

Binky rose up into the morning sky.

"Anyway... death to all tyrants," said Miss FIitworth.

YES.

"Where are we going?"

Binky was galloping, but the landscape did not move.

"That's a pretty good horse you've got there," said Miss Flitworth. her voice shaking.

YES.

"But what is he doing?"

GETTING UP SPEED.

"But we're not going anywhere -"

They vanished.

They reappeared.

The landscape was snow and green ice on broken mountains. These weren't old mountains, worn down by time and weather and full of gentle ski slopes, but young, sulky, adolescent mountains. They held secret ravines and merciless crevices. One yodel out of place would attract, not the jolly echo of a lonely goat herd, but fifty tons of express-delivery snow.

The horse landed on a snowbank that should not, by rights, have been able to support it.

Death dismounted and helped Miss Flitworth down.

They walked over the snow to a frozen muddy track that hugged the mountain side.

"Why are we here?" said the spirit of Miss Flitworth.

I DO NOT SPECULATE ON COSMIC MATTERS.

"I mean here on this mountain. Here on this geography," said Miss Flitworth patiently.

THAT IS NOT GEOGRAPHY.

"What is it, then?"

HISTORY.

They rounded a bend in the track. There was a pony there, eating a bush, with a pack on its back. The track ended in a wall of suspiciously clean snow.

Death removed a lifetimer from the recesses of his robe.

Now, he said, and stepped into the snow.

She watched it for a moment, wondering if she could have done that too. Solidity was an awfully hard habit to give up.

And then she didn't have to.

Someone came out.

Death adjusted Binky's bridle, and mounted up. He paused for a moment to watch the two figures by the avalanche.

They had faded almost to invisibility, their voices no more than textured air.

"All he said was "WHEREVER YOU GO, YOU GO TOGETHER. " I said where? He said he didn't know. What's happened?"

"Rufus - you're going to find this very hard to believe, my love -"

"And who was that masked man?" They both looked around. There was no-one there.

In the village in the Ramtops where they understand what the Morris dance is all about, they dance it just once, at dawn, on the first day of spring. They don't dance it after that, all through the summer. After all, what would be the point? What use would it be?

But on a certain day when the nights are drawing in, the dancers leave work early and take, from attics and cupboards, the other costume, the black one, and the other bells. And they go by separate ways to a valley among the leafless trees. They don't speak. There is no music. It's very hard to imagine what kind there could be.

The bells don't ring. They're made of octiron, a magic metal. But they're not, precisely, silent bells. Silence is merely the absence of noise. They make the opposite of noise, a sort of heavily textured silence.

And in the cold afternoon, as the light drains from the sky, among the frosty leaves and in the damp air, they dance the other Morris. Because of the balance of things.