Hobson had tried Boris as a racehorse and he would have been a very good one were it not for his unbreakable habit, at the off, of attacking the horse next to him and jumping the railings at the first bend. Moist clapped one hand on to his hat, wedged his toes into the belly band and hung on to the reins as Broadway came at him all at once, carts and people blurring past, his eyeballs pressing into his head.
There was a cart across the street but there was no possibility of steering Boris. Huge muscles bunched and there was a long, slow, silent moment as he
Hooves slid over the cobbles ahead of a trail of sparks when he landed again, but he recovered by sheer momentum and
The usual crowd around the Hubwards Gate scattered and there, filling the horizon, were the plains. They did something to Boris’s mad horse brain. All that space, nice and flat with only a few easily jumped obstacles, like trees…
He found extra muscle and speeded up again, bushes and trees and carts flying towards him.
Moist cursed the bravado with which he’d ordered the saddle taken away. Every part of his body already hated him. But in truth Boris, once you got past the pineapple, wasn’t too bad a ride. He’d hit his rhythm, a natural single-footed gait, and his burning eyes were focused on the blueness. His hatred of everything was for the moment subsumed in the sheer joy of space. Hobson was right, you couldn’t steer him with a mallet, but at least he was headed in the right direction, which was away from his stable. Boris didn’t want to spend the days kicking the bricks out of his wall while waiting to throw the next bumptious idiot. He wanted to bite the horizon. He wanted to run.
Moist carefully removed his hat and gripped it in his mouth. He didn’t dare imagine what’d happen if he lost it, and he’d need to have it on his head at the end of the journey. It was important. It was all about style.
One of the towers of the Grand Trunk was ahead and slightly to the left. There were two in the twenty miles between Ankh-Morpork and Sto Lat, because they were taking almost all the traffic of lines that stretched right across the continent. Beyond Sto Lat the Trunk began to split into tributaries, but here, flashing overhead, the words of the world were flowing—
—should be flowing. But the shutters were still. As he drew level, Moist saw men working high up on the open wooden tower; by the look of it, a whole section had broken off.
Ha! So long, suckers! That’d take some repairing! Worth an overnight attempt at a delivery to Pseudopolis, maybe? He’d talk to the coachmen. It wasn’t as if they’d ever paid the Post Office for their damn coaches. And it wouldn’t matter if the clacks got repaired in time, either, because the Post Office would have
Carefully, he eased more of the blanket under him. Various organs were going numb.
The towering fumes of Ankh-Morpork were falling far behind. Sto Lat was visible between Boris’s ears, a plume of lesser smokes. The tower disappeared astern and already Moist could see the next one. He’d ridden more than a third of the way in twenty minutes, and Boris was still eating up the ground.
About halfway between the cities was an old stone tower, all that remained of a heap of ruins surrounded by woodland. It was almost as high as a clacks tower and Moist wondered why they hadn’t simply used it as one. It was probably too derelict to survive in a gale under the weight of the shutters, he thought. The area looked bleak, a piece of weedy wilderness in the endless fields.
If he’d had spurs, Moist would have spurred Boris on at this point, and would probably have been thrown, trampled and eaten for his pains.* Instead, he lay low over the horse’s back and tried not to think about what this ride was doing to his kidneys.
* Which would have been agonizing.
Time passed.
The second tower went by, and Boris dropped into a canter. Sto Lat was clearly visible now; Moist could make out the city walls and the turrets of the castle.
He’d have to jump off; there was no other way. Moist had tried out half a dozen scenarios as the walls loomed, but nearly all of them involved haystacks. The one that didn’t was the one where he broke his neck.
But it didn’t seem to occur to Boris to turn aside. He was on a road, the road was straight, it went through this gateway and Boris had no problem with that. Besides, he wanted a drink.
