“Not time yet,” said Nanny.
“What did you goe and bang the bell for? I don't know, I haven't had a wynke of sleep for two hundred years, some sodde alwayes bangs the bell. Go awaye.”
The warrior lay back.
“It's some old king and his warriors,” whispered Nanny, as they hurried away. “Some kind of magical sleep, I'm told. Some old wizard did it. They're supposed to wake up for some final battle when a wolf eats the sun.”
“Those wizards, always smoking something,” said Casanunda.
“Could be. Go right here. Always go right.”
“We're walking in a circle?”
“A spiral. We're right under the Long Man now.”
“No, that can't be right,” said Casanunda. “We climbed down a hole under the Long Man . . . hold on . . . you mean we're in the place where we started and it's a different place?”
“You're getting the hang of this, I can see that.”
They followed the spiral.
Which, at length, brought them to a door, of sorts.
The air was hotter here. Red light glowed from side passages.
Two massive stones had been set up against a rock wall, with a third stone across them. Animal skins hung across the crude entrance thus formed; wisps of steam curled around them.
“They got put up at the same time as the Dancers,” said Nanny, conversationally. “Only the hole here's vertical, so they only needed three. Might as well leave your crowbar here and take your boots off if they've got nails in 'em.”
“These boots were stitched by the finest shoemaker in Ankh-Morpork,” said Casanunda, “and one day I shall pay him.”
Nanny pulled aside the skins.
Steam billowed out.
There was darkness inside, thick and hot as treacle and smelling of a fox's locker room. As Casanunda followed Nanny Ogg he sensed unseen figures in the reeking air, and heard the silence of murmured conversations suddenly curtailed. At one point he thought he saw a bowl of red hot stones, and then a shadowy hand moved across them and upturned a ladle, hiding them in steam.
This can't be inside the Long Man, he told himself. That's an earthworks, this is a long tent of skins.
They can't both be the same thing.
He realized he was dripping with sweat.
Two torches became visible as the steam swirled, their light hardly more than a red tint to the darkness. But they were enough to show a huge sprawled figure lying by another bowl of hot stones.
It looked up. Antlers moved in the damp, clinging heat.
“Ah. Mrs. Ogg.”
The voice was like chocolate.
“Y'lordship,” said Nanny.
“I suppose it is too much to expect you to kneel?”
“Yes indeed, y'honor,” said Nanny, grinning.
“You know, Mrs. Ogg, you have a way of showing respect to your god that would make the average atheist green with envy,” said the dark figure. It yawned.