Mort

'Is that why you've been reading all those books?' he said.

Ysabell looked down, and twiddled a sandalled toe in the gravel in an embarrassed fashion.

'They're very romantic,' she said. 'There's some really lovely stories. There was this girl who drank poison when her young man had died, and there was one who jumped off a cliff because her father insisted she should marry this old man, and another one drowned herself rather than submit to—'

Mort listened in astonishment. To judge by Ysabell's careful choice of reading matter, it was a matter of note for any Disc female to survive adolescence long enough to wear out a pair of stockings.

'— and then she thought he was dead, and she killed herself and then he woke up and so he did kill himself, and then there was this girl —'

Common sense suggested that at least a few women reached their third decade without killing themselves for love, but common sense didn't seem to get even a walk-on part in these dramas.

[5]

Mort was already aware that love made you feel hot and cold and cruel and weak, but he hadn't realized that it could make you stupid.

' — swam the river every night, but one night there was this storm, and when he didn't arrive she —'

Mort felt instinctively that some young couples met, say, at a village dance, and hit it off, and went out together for a year or two, had a few rows, made up, got married and didn't kill themselves at all.

He became aware that the litany of star-crossed love had wound down.

'Oh,' he said, weakly. 'Doesn't anyone just, you know, just get along any more?'

To love is to suffer,' said Ysabell. 'There's got to be lots of dark passion.'

'Has there?'

'Absolutely. And anguish.'

Ysabell appeared to recall something.

'Did you say something about something flapping around loose?' she said, in the tight voice of someone pulling themselves together.

Mort considered. 'No,' he said.

'I'm afraid I wasn't paying much attention.'

'It doesn't matter at all.'

They strolled back to the house in silence.

When Mort went back to the study he found that Death had gone, leaving four hourglasses on the desk. The big leather book was lying on a lectern, securely locked shut.

There was a note tucked under the glasses.

Mort had imagined that Death's handwriting would either be gothic or else tombstone angular, but Death had in fact studied a classic work on graphology before selecting a style and had adopted a hand that indicated a balanced, well-adjusted personality.

It said:

Gone fyshing. Theyre ys ane execution in Pseudopoiis, a naturral in Krull, a faytal fall in the Carrick Mtns, ane ague in Ell-Kinte. Thee rest of thee day's your own.

Mort thought that history was thrashing around like a steel hawser with the tension off, twanging backwards and forwards across reality in great destructive sweeps.

History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always — eventually — manages to spring back into its old familiar shape. History