After all, Ankh-Morpork itself was generally considered as wicked a city as you could hope to find in a year of shore leaves, and seemed to have avoided any kind of supernatural vengeance, although it was always possible that it had taken place and no-one had noticed.
Legend had always put the nameless city far away and long ago.
No-one knew where it was, or even if it had existed.
The Librarian glanced at the symbols again.
They were very familiar. They were on the old ruins all over Holy Wood.
Azhural stood on a low hill, watching the sea of elephants move below him. Here and there a supply wagon bobbed between the dusty grey bodies like a rudderless boat. A mile of veldt was being churned into a soggy mud wallow, bare of grass - although, by the smell of it, it'd be the greenest patch on the Disc after the rains came.
He dabbed at his eyes with a corner of his robe.
Three hundred and sixty-three! Who'd have thought it?
The air was solid with the piqued trumpeting of three hundred and sixty-three elephants. And with the hunting and trapping parties already going on ahead, there should be plenty more. According to M'Bu, anyway. And he wasn't going to argue.
Funny, that. For years he'd thought of M'Bu as a sort of mobile smile. A handy lad with a brush and shovel, but not what you might call a major achiever.
And then suddenly someone somewhere wanted a thousand elephants, and the lad had raised his head and a gleam had come into his eye and you could see that under that grin was a skilled kilopachydermatolist ready to answer the call. Funny. You could know someone for their whole life and not realize that the gods had put them in this world to move a thousand elephants around the place.
Azhural had no sons. He'd already made up his mind to leave everything to his assistant. Everything he had at this
point amounted to three hundred and sixty-three elephants and, ahaha, a mammoth overdraft, but it was the thought that counted.
M'Bu trotted up the path towards him, his clipboard held firmly under one arm.
'Everything ready, boss,' he said. 'You just got to say the word.'
Azhural drew himself up. He looked around at the heaving plain, the distant baobab trees, the purple mountains. Oh, yes. The mountains. He'd had misgivings about the mountains. He'd mentioned them to M'Bu, who said, 'We'll cross them bridges when we get to 'em, boss,' and when Azhural had pointed out that there weren't any bridges, had looked him squarely in the eye and said firmly, 'First we build them bridge, then we cross 'em.'
Far beyond the mountains was the Circle Sea and Ankh-Morpork and this Holy Wood place. Far-away places with strange sounding names.
A wind blew across the veldt, carrying faint whispers, even here.
Azhural raised his staff.
'It's fifteen hundred miles to Ankh-Morpork,' he said. 'We've got three hundred and sixty-three elephants, fifty carts of forage, the monsoon's about to break and we're wearing . . . we're wearing . . . sort of things, like glass, only dark . . . dark glass things on our eyes . . . ' His voice trailed off. His brow furrowed, as if he'd just been listening to his own voice and hadn't understood it. '
The air seemed to glitter.
He saw M'Bu staring at him.
He shrugged. 'Let's go,' he said.
M'Bu cupped his hands. He'd spent all night working out the order of the march.
'Blue Section bilong Uncle N'gru - forward!' he shouted. 'Yellow Section bilong Aunti Googool - forward! Green Section bilong Second-cousin! Kck! - forward . . . '
An hour later the veldt in front of the low hill was deserted except for a billion flies and one dung beetle who couldn't believe his luck.
Something went 'plop' on the red dust, throwing up a little crater.
And again, and again.
Lightning split the trunk of a nearby baobab.
The rains began.