And he was, in fact, the greatest mathematician in the world.
You Bastard was thinking: there seems to be some growing dimensional instability here, swinging from zero to nearly forty-five degrees by the look of it. How interesting. I wonder what's causing it? Let V equal 3. Let Tau equal Chi/4. cudcudcud Let Kappa/y be an Evil-Smelling-Bugger[22] differential tensor domain with four imaginary spin co-efficients...
Ptraci hit him across the head with her sandal. 'Come on, get a move on!' she yelled. You Bastard thought: Therefore H to the enabling power equals V/s. cudcudcud Thus in hypersyllogic notation . . .
Teppic looked behind him. The strange distortions in the landscape seemed to be settling down, and Dios was . . .
Dios was striding out of the palace, and had actually managed to find several guards whose fear of disobedience overcame the terror of the mysteriously distorted world.
You Bastard stood stoically chewing. . . cudcudcud which gives us an interesting shortening oscillation. What would be the period of this? Let period = x. cudcudcud Let t = time. Let initial period . . .
Ptraci bounced up and down on his neck and kicked hard with her heels, an action which would have caused any anthropoid male to howl and bang his head against the wall.
'It won't move! Can't you hit it?'
Teppic brought his hand down as hard as he could on You Bastard's hide, raising a cloud of dust and deadening every nerve in his fingers. It was like hitting a large sack full of coathangers.
'Come on,' he muttered.
Dios raised a hand.
'Halt, in the name of the king!' he shouted.
An arrow thudded into You Bastard's hump.
. . . equals 6.3 recurring. Reduce. That gives us ouch . . . 314 seconds . . .
You Bastard turned his long neck around. His great hairy eyebrows made accusing curves as his yellow eyes narrowed and took a fix on the high priest, and he put aside the interesting problem for a moment and dredged up the familiar ancient maths that his race had perfected long ago:
Let range equal forty-one feet. Let windspeed equal 2. Vector one-eight. cud Let glutinosity equal 7 .
Teppic drew a throwing knife.
Dios took a deep breath. He's going to order them to fire on us, Teppic thought. In my own name, in my own kingdom, I'm going to be shot.
Angle two-five, cud Fire.
It was a magnificent volley. The gob of cud had commendable lift and spin and hit with a sound like, a sound like half a pound of semi-digested grass hitting someone in the face. There was nothing else it could sound like.
The silence that followed was by way of being a standing ovation.
The landscape began to distort again. This was clearly not a place to linger. You Bastard looked down at his front legs.
Let legs equal four .
He lumbered into a run. Camels apparently have more knees than any other creature and You Bastard ran like a steam engine, with lots of extraneous movement at right angles to the direction of motion accompanied by a thunderous barrage of digestive noises.
'Bloody stupid animal,' muttered Ptraci, as they jolted away from the palace, 'but it looks like it finally got the idea.'
. . . gauge-invariant repetition rate of 3.5/z. What's she talking about, Bloody Stupid lives over in Tsort . . .
Though they swung through the air as though jointed with bad elastic You Bastard's legs covered a lot of ground, and already they were bouncing through the sleeping packed-earth streets of the city.
'It's starting again, isn't it?' said Ptraci. 'I'm going to shut my eyes.'
Teppic nodded. The firebrick-hot houses around them were doing their slow motion mirror dance again, and the road was rising and falling in a way that solid land had no right to adopt.
'It's like the sea,' he said.