Eric

Above them - a long way above them - and supported on four massive legs, which ran down to a huge wheeled platform, there was undoubtedly a huge wooden horse. More correctly, the rear of a huge wooden horse.

The builder could have put the exit hatch in a more dignified place, but for humorous reasons of his own had apparently decided not to.

"Er," said Rincewind.

Someone coughed.

He looked down.

The evaporating mists now revealed a broad circle of armed men, many of them grinning and all of them carrying mass-produced, soulless but above all sharp long spears.

"Ah," said Rincewind.

He looked back at the hatchway. It said it all, really.

"The only thing I don't understand," said the captain of the guard, "is: why two of you? We were expecting maybe a hundred."

He leaned back on his stool, his great plumed helmet in his lap, a pleased smile on his face.

"Honestly, you Ephebian!" he said. Talk about laugh! You must think we was born yesterday! All night nothing but sawing and hammering, the next thing there's a damn great wooden horse outside the gates, so I think, that's funny, a bloody great wooden horse with airholes. That's the kind of little detail I notice, see. Airholes. So I muster all the lads and we nips out extra early and drag it in the gates, as per expectations, and then we bides quiet, like, around it, waiting to see what it coughs up. In a manner of speaking. Now," he pushed his unshaven face close to Rincewind, "you've got a choice, see? Top seat or bottom seat, it's up to you. I just have to put the word in. You play discus with me and I'll play discus with you."

"What seat?" said Rincewind, reeling from the gusts of garlic.

"It's the war triremes," said the sergeant cheerfully. "Three seats, see, one above the other? Triremes. You get chained to the oars for years, see, and it's all according whether you're in the top seat, up in the fresh air and that, or the bottom seat where" - he grinned - "you're not. So it's down to you, lads. Be co-operative and all you'll need to worry about will be the seagulls. Now. Why only the two of you?"

He leaned back again.

"Excuse me," said Eric, "is that Tsort, by any chance?"

"You wouldn't be trying to make fun of me, would you now, boy? Only there's such a thing as quinquiremes, see? You wouldn't like that at all."

"No, sir," said Eric. "If you please, sir, I'm just a little lad lead astray by bad companionship."

"Oh, thank you," said Rincewind bitterly. "You just accidentally drew a lot of occult circles, did you, and - "

"Sarge! Sarge!" A soldier burst into the guardroom. The sergeant looked up.

"There's another of ‘em, sarge! Right out side the gates this time!"

The sergeant grinned triumphantly at Rincewind.

"Oh, that's it, is it?" he said. "You were just the advance party, come to open the gates or whatever. Right. We'll just go and sort your friends out, and we'll be right back." He indicated the captives. "You stay here. If they move, do something horrible to them."

Rincewind and Eric were left alone with the guard.

"You know what you've done, don't you," said Eric. "You've only taken us all the way back to the Tsortean Wars! Thousands of Years! We did it at school, the wooden horse, everything! How the beautiful Elenor was kidnapped from the Ephebians - or maybe it was by the Ephebians - and there was this siege to get her back and everything." He paused. "Hey, that means I'm going to meet her." He paused again. "Wow!" he said.

Rincewind looked around the room. It didn't look ancient, but then it wouldn't, because it wasn't, yet. Everywhere in time was now, once you were there, or then. He tried to remember what little he knew of classical history, but it was just a confusion of battles, one-eyed giants and women launching thousands of ships with their faces.

"Don't you see?" hissed Eric, his glasses aglow. "They must have brought the horse in before the soldiers had hidden in it! We know what's going to happen! We could make a fortune!"

"How, exactly?"

"Well..." The boy hesitated. "We could bet on horses, sort of thing."

"Good idea," said Rincewind.

"Yes, and -"

"All we've got to do is escape, then find out if they have horse races here, and then really try hard to remember the names of the horses that won races in Tsort thousands of years ago."

They went back to looking glumly at the floor. That was the thing about time travel. You were never ready for it. About the only thing he could hope for, Rincewind decided, was finding da Quirm's Fountain of Youth and managing to stay alive for a few thousand years so he'd be ready to kill his own grandfather, which was the only aspect of time travel that had ever remotely appealed to him. He had always felt that his ancestors had it coming to them.

Funny thing, though. He could remember the famous wooden horse, which had been used to trick a way into the fortified city. He didn't remember anything about there being two of them. There was something inevitable about the next thought that turned up.