“About five hundred years, I think.”
“Gosh, I am sorry. I was aiming for the cellars, but I seem to have lost my bearings.”
“Don’t you worry about that, Mr. Poons,” said the dwarf cheerfully. “Everything’s growing like crazy anyway. I’ll fill it in this afternoon and put some more seed down and five hundred years will just zoom past, you wait and see.”
“The way things are going, I probably will,” said Windle moodily. He looked around. “Is the Archchancellor here?” he said.
“I saw them all going up to the palace,” said the gardener.
“Then I think I’ll just go and have a quick bath and a change of clothes. I wouldn’t want to disturb anyone.”
“I heard you wasn’t just dead but buried too,” said the gardener, as Windle lurched off.
“That’s right.”
“Can’t keep a good man down, eh?”
Windle turned back.
“By the way…where’s Elm Street?”
Modo scratched an ear. “Isn’t it that one off Treacle Mine Road?”
“Oh, yes. I remember.”
Modo went back to his weeding.
The circular nature of Windle Poons’ death didn’t bother him much. After all, trees looked dead in the winter, burst forth again every spring. Dried up old seeds went in the ground, fresh young plants sprang up. Practically nothing ever died for long. Take compost, for example.
Modo believed in compost with the same passion that other people believed in gods. His compost heaps heaved and fermented and glowed faintly in the dark, perhaps because of the mysterious and possibly illegal ingredients Modo fed them, although nothing had ever been proved and, anyway, no one was about to dig into one to see what was in it.
All dead stuff, but somehow alive. And it certainly grew roses. The Senior Wrangler had explained to Modo that his roses grew so big because it was a miracle of existence, but Modo privately thought that they just wanted to get as far away from the compost as possible.
The heaps were in for a treat tonight. The weeds were really doing well. He’d never known plants to grow so fast and luxuriantly. It must be all the compost, Modo thought.
By the time the wizards reached the palace it was in uproar. Pieces of furniture were gliding across the ceiling. A shoal of cutlery, like silvery minnows in mid-air, flashed past the Archchancellor and dived away down a corridor. The place seemed to be in the grip of a selective and tidy-minded hurricane.
Other people had already arrived. They included a group dressed very like the wizards in many ways, although there were important differences to the trained eye.
“Priests?” said the Dean. “Here? Before us?”
The two groups began very surreptitiously to adopt positions that left their hands free.
“What good are they?” said the Senior Wrangler.
There was a noticeable drop in metaphorical temperature.
A carpet undulated past.
The Archchancellor met the gaze of the enormous Chief Priest of Blind Io who, as senior priest of the senior god in the Discworld’s rambling pantheon, was the nearest thing Ankh-Morpork had to a spokesman on religious affairs.
“Credulous fools,” muttered the Senior Wrangler.
“Godless tinkerers,” said a small acolyte, peering out from behind the Chief Priest’s bulk.
“Gullible idiots!”
“Atheistic scum!”