Pyramids: Difference between revisions

 

Teppic has just graduated from the Guild of Assassins' School, the finest educational establishment on the Disc, when he learns that his father has died and he is now King of Djelibeybi, a tiny backwards state (heavily based on [[Ancient Egypt]]) which has long since sold its empire to pay for more pyramids to bury its dead kings in. At first enamoured with the idea of being the king, Teppic soon discovers that it's not quite what it's hyped up to be. A country thousands of years old shows remarkable resistance to change (or plumbing), and Teppic soon begins to yearn for what he left behind. With the help of a surprisingly sharp handmaiden named Ptraci and a camel named You Bastard who is not all he seems, Teppic [[Arc Words|goes forth]] with the attempt to escape his own kingdom from the clutches of the domineering High Priest Dios.

[[Terry Pratchett]] has quoted the assassin "[[Driving Test|road test]]" as one of his favourite sequences, and that [[Writing by the Seat of Your Pants|he had no idea where it was going while he was writing it]].<ref>Back to the DMV office, where else would you expect to go?.</ref>

 

* [[Abdicate the Throne]]: {{spoiler|At the end, in favor of Ptraci.}}

** Subverted when Teppic's father meets [[Grim Reaper|Death]], and is confused because he does not look like a giant scarab. Apparently, Death ''used'' to look like whatever people expected the personification of death to look like, until it became too tiresome and he decided to settle for the "[[Dem Bones|skeleton with a scythe]]" look.

* [[Anatomically-Impossible Sex]]: It features on a tattoo that defies biological facts. (An in-story example; [[Take Our Word for It|all we are told about the tattoo is that it defies said facts.]])

* [[Ancient Egypt]]: Djelibeybi is a [[Fantasy Counterpart Culture]] of this, turned [[Up to Eleven]].

* [[Creature of Habit]]: Dios, literally.

* [[Does This Remind You of Anything?]]: The Assassin's Guild school's final exam resembles the UK driving license test.

* [[Due to the Dead]]: A handmaiden gets in trouble for not volunteering to accompany the king.

* [[Endless Daytime]]: Thanks to Djelibeybi's many sun gods fighting over control of the sun.

* [[Fate Worse Than Death]]: Or to phrase it another way, the Fate After Death for almost every single person who has been mummified in Djelibeybi. As a result of the rather convoluted belief system of the Djelibeybians, no one manages to truly die but neither do they manage to ever pass on. Instead, they remain bound to their bodies, which are then methodically dismantled and placed in tombs ''for all eternity''.

** Depending on perspective, this happens to Dios as well.

* [[Fun with Foreign Languages]]: Djelibeybi (of course) uses hieroglyphs, which Teppic pronounces out loud as "eagle, squiggle" and so on.

** And [[Fridge Brilliance]] for those that realised that when he imagines the hieroglyphs for 'feather mattress' it's a hippo's bottom, a reference to a long-running series of bed adverts in the UK starring a hippo and canary.

** The relationship between Dios and Teppic is a shout-out to the British comedy of government, ''[[Yes Minister]]'', with Dios playing the [[The Humphrey|Sir Humphrey Appleby]] role of senior civil servant effortlessly running rings round an enthusiastic but clueless Minister. Dios even ''says'' "I am but a humble servant..."

** There's a particularly clever one explained in one of the Discworld quiz books: it's mentioned the Assassins' School has a notoriously nasty bully called Fliemoe, who is clearly an [[Expy]] of the bully [[Flashman]] in ''[[Tom Brown's Schooldays]]''. Flashman had a sidekick called Speedicut; Flymo and Speedicut are both British makes of lawnmower.

* [[Stepping Stone Sword]]: Teppic uses knives this way, and notes that it's [[Awesome but Impractical]] as you eventually run out of knives, and it can ruin their cutting edges.

* [[Talking the Monster to Death]]: Played with. Pteppic gets past the sphinx by confusing it and tossing its own riddle back in its face. By the time it realizes something is wrong, he's already running.

* [[Trojan Horse]]: The original is parodied - both Ephebe and Tsort's armies have read their history and nowadays fight battles just by building a dozen wooden horses, placing them on opposite sides of the battlefield, and waiting for the enemy to blink first and grab one.

{{quote|"The one on the end's on rockers, sir; must be the officers."}}

** Both sides rationalize that if the enemy is dumb enough to try this tactic they are dumb enough to fall for it. Comes up again in ''Eric'', where it turns out the real original was an elaborate distraction for the commandos coming in the back gate while the defenders prepared to wipe out the team in the (empty) horse.

* [[War Elephants]]: According to Pteppic, they're useless, since all they do is trample on their own troops when they inevitably panic. The military responds to this by breeding bigger elephants.

** That Americans weren't getting the pun led Pratchett to create the nearby country of Hersheba.

 

{{reflist}}