Guards! Guards! tds-8

by Terry Pratchett

  "Yes, sir," he said. "Thirty dollars a month. It's not right. We think," he licked his lips and glanced behind him at the other two, who were making vague encouraging motions,"we think a basic rate of, er, thirty-five dollars? A month?" He stared at the Patrician's stony expression. "With increments as per rank? We thought five dollars."

  He licked his lips again, unnerved by the Patrician's expression. "We won't go below four," he said. "And that's flat. Sorry, your Highness, but there it is."

  The Patrician glanced again at Vimes's impassive face, then looked back at the rank.

  "That's it?"he said.

  Nobby whispered in Colon's ear and then darted back. The sweating sergeant gripped his helmet as though it was the only real thing in the world.

  "There was another thing, your reverence," he said.

  "Ah." The Patrician smiled knowingly.

  "There's the kettle. It wasn't much good anyway, and then Errol et it. It was nearly two dollars." He swallowed. "We could do with a new kettle, if it's all the same, your lordship.''

  The Patrician leaned forward, gripping the arms of his chair.

  "I want to be clear about this," he said coldly. "Are we to believe that you are asking for a petty wage increase and a domestic utensil?"

  Carrot whispered in Colon's other ear.

  Colon turned two bulging, watery-rimmed eyes to the dignitaries. The rim of his helmet was passing through his fingers like a mill wheel.

  "Well," he began, "sometimes, we thought, you know, when we has our dinner break, or when it's quite, like, at the end of a watch as it may be, and we want to relax a bit, you know, wind down ..." His voice trailed away.

  "Yes?"

  Colon took a deep breath.

  "I suppose a dartboard would be out of the question…?"

  The thunderous silence that followed was broken by an erratic snorting.

  Vimes's helmet dropped out of his shaking hand. His breastplate wobbled as the suppressed laughter of the years burst out in great uncontrollable eruptions. He turned his face to the row of councillors and laughed and laughed until the tears came.

  Laughed at the way they got up, all confusion and outraged dignity.

  Laughed at the Patrician's carefully immobile expression.

  Laughed for the world and the saving of souls.

  Laughed and laughed, and laughed until the tears came.

  Nobby craned up to reach Colon's ear.

  "I told you," he hissed. "I said they'd never wear it. I knew a dartboard'd be pushing our luck. You've upset 'em all now."

  Dear Mother and Father [wrote Carrot] You will never guess, I have been in the Watch only a few weeks and, already I am to be a full Constable. Captain Vimes said, the Patrician himself said I was to be One, and that also he hoped I should have a long and successful career in the Watch as well and, he would follow it with special interest. Also my wages are to go up by ten dollars and we had a special bonus of twenty dollars that Captain Vimes paid for out of his own pocket,

  Sgt Colon said. Please find money enclosed. I am keeping a little bit by though because I went to see Reel and Mrs Palm said all the girls had been following my career with Great Interest as well and I am to come to dinner on my night off. Sgt Colon has been telling me about how to start courting, which is very interesting and not at all complicated it appears. I arrested a dragon but it got away. I hope Mr Varneshi is well.

  I am as happy as anyone can be in the whole world.

  Your son, Carrot.

  Vimes knocked on the door.

  An effort had been made to spruce up the Ramkin mansion, he noticed. The encroaching shrubbery had been pitilessly hacked back. An elderly workman atop a ladder was nailing the stucco back on the walls while another, with a spade, was rather arbitrarily defining the line where the lawn ended and the old flower beds had begun.

  Vimes stuck his helmet under his arm, smoothed back his hair, and knocked. He'd considered asking Sergeant Colon to accompany him, but had brushed the idea aside quickly. He couldn't have tolerated the sniggering. Anyway, what was there to be afraid of? He'd stared into the jaws of death three times; four, if you included telling Lord Vetinari to shut up.

  To his amazement the door was eventually opened by a butler so elderly that he might have been resurrected by the knocking.

  "Yerss?" he said.

  "Captain Vimes, City Watch," said Vimes.

  The man looked him up and down.

  "Oh, yes," he said. "Her ladyship did say. I believe her ladyship is with her dragons," he said. "If you like to wait in 'ere, I will…"

  "I know the way," said Vimes, and set off around the overgrown path.

  The kennels were a ruin. An assortment of battered wooden boxes were lying around under an oilcloth awning. From their depths a few sad swamp dragons whiffled a greeting at him.

  A couple of women were moving purposefully among the boxes. Ladies, rather. They were far too untidy to be mere women. No ordinary women would have dreamed of looking so scruffy; you needed the complete self-confidence that comes with knowing who your great-great-great-great-grandfather was before you could wear clothes like that. But they were, Vimes noticed, incredibly good clothes, or had been once; clothes bought by one's parents, but so expensive and of such good quality that they never wore out and were handed down, like old china and silverware and gout.

  Dragon breeders, he thought. You can tell. There's something about them. It's the way they wear their silk scarves, old tweed coats and granddad's riding boots. And the smell, of course.

  A small wiry woman with a face like old saddle leather caught sight of him.

  "Ah," she said, "you'll be the gallant captain." She tucked an errant strand of white hair back under a headscarf and extended a veiny brown hand. "Brenda Rodley. That's Rosie Devant-Molei. She runs the Sunshine Sanctuary, you know." The other woman, who had the build of someone who could pick up carthorses hi one hand and shoe them with the other, gave him a friendly grin.

  "Samuel Vimes," said Vimes weakly.

  "My father was a Sam," said Brenda vaguely. "You can always trust a Sam, he said." She shooed a dragon back into its box. "We're just helping Sybil. Old friends, you know. The collection's all to blazes, of course. They're all over the city, the little devils. I dare say they'll come back when they're hungry, though. What a bloodline, eh?"

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Sybil reckons he was a sport, but I say we should be able to breed back into the line in three or four generations. I'm famed for my stud, you know," she said. "That'd be something, though. A whole new type of dragon."

  Vimes thought of supersonic contrails criss-crossing the sky.

  "Er," he said. "Yes."

  "Well, we must get on."

  "Er, isn't Lady Ramkin around?" said Vimes. "I got this message that it was essential, she said, for me to come here."

  "She's indoors somewhere," said Miss Rodley. "Said she had something important to see to. Oh, do be careful with that one, Rose, you silly gel!"

  "More important than dragons?" said Vimes.

  "Yes. Can't think what's come over her." Brenda Rodley fished in the pocket of an oversized waistcoat. "Nice to have met you, Captain. Always good to meet new members of the Fancy. Do drop in any time you're passing, I'd be only too happy to show you around." She extracted a grubby card and pressed it into his hand. "Must be off now, we've heard that some of them are trying to build nests on the University tower. Can't have that. Must get 'em down before it gets dark."

  Vimes squinted at the card as the women crunched off down the drive, carrying nets and ropes.

  It said: Brenda, Lady Rodley. The Dower House, Quirm Castle, Quirm. What it meant, he realized, was that striding away down the path like an animated rummage stall was the dowager Duchess of Quirm, who owned more country than you could see from a very high mountain on a very clear day. Nobby would not have approved. There seemed to be a special land of poverty that only the very, very rich could possibly afford . . .

 
That was how you got to be a power in the land, he thought. You never cared a toss about whatever anyone else thought and you were never, ever, uncertain about anything.

  He padded back to the house. A door was open. It led into a large but dark and musty hall. Up in the gloom the heads of dead animals haunted the walls. The Ramkins seemed to have endangered more species than an ice age.

  Vimes wandered aimlessly through another mahogany archway.

  It was a dining room, containing the kind of table where the people at the other end are in a different time zone. One end had been colonised by silver candlesticks.

  It was laid for two. A battery of cutlery flanked each plate. Antique wineglasses sparkled in the candlelight.

  A terrible premonition took hold of Vimes at the same moment as a gust of Captivation, the most expensive perfume available anywhere in Ankh-Morpork, blew past him.

  "Ah, Captain. So nice of you to come."

  Vimes turned around slowly, without his feet appearing to move.

  Lady Ramkin stood there, magnificently.

  Vimes was vaguely aware of a brilliant blue dress that sparkled in the candlelight, a mass of hair the colour of chestnuts, a slightly anxious face that suggested that a whole battalion of skilled painters and decorators had only just dismantled their scaffolding and gone home, and a faint creaking that said underneath it all mere corsetry was being subjected to the kind of tensions more usually found in the heart of large stars.

  "I, er," he said. "If you, er. If you'd said, er. I'd, er. Dress more suitable, er. Extremely, er. Very. Er."

  She bore down upon him like a glittering siege engine.

  In a sort of dream he allowed himself to be ushered to a seat. He must have eaten, because servants appeared out of nowhere with things stuffed with other things, and came back later and took the plates away. The butler reanimated occasionally to fill glass after glass with strange wines. The heat from the candles was enough to cook by. And all the time Lady Ramkin talked in a bright and brittle way — about the size of the house, the responsibilities of a huge estate, the feeling that it was time to take One's Position in Society More Seriously, while the setting sun filled the room with red and Vimes's head began to spin.

  Society, he managed to think, didn't know what was going to hit it. Dragons weren't mentioned once, although after a while something under the table put its head on Vimes's knee and dribbled.

  Vimes found it impossible to contribute to the conversation. He felt outflanked, beleaguered. He made one sally, hoping maybe to reach high ground from which to flee into exile.

  "Where do you think they've gone?" he said.

  "Where what?" said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted.

  "The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi — female."

  "Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imagine," said Lady Ramkin. "Favourite country for dragons."

  "But it — she's a magical animal," said Vimes. "What'll happen when the magic goes away?"

  Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.

  "Most people seem to manage," she said.

  She reached across the table and touched his hand.

  "Your men think you need looking after," she said meekly.

  "Oh. Do they?" said Vimes.

  "Sergeant Colon said he thought we'd get along like a maison en Flame. "

  "Oh. Did he?"

  "And he said something else," she said. "What was it, now? Oh, yes: 'It's a million to one chance,'," said Lady Ramkin,' 'I think he said, 'but it might just work'.''

  She smiled at him.

  And then it arose and struck Vimes that, in her own special category, she was quite beautiful; this was the category of all the women, in his entire life, who had ever thought he was worth smiling at. She couldn't do worse, but then, he couldn't do better. So maybe it balanced out. She wasn't getting any younger but then, who was? And she had style and money and common-sense and self-assurance and all the things that he didn't, and she had opened her heart, and if you let her she could engulf you; the woman was a city.

  And eventually, under siege, you did what Ankh-Morpork had always done — unbar the gates, let the conquerors in, and make them your own.

  How did you start? She seemed to be expecting something.

  He shrugged, and picked up his wine glass and sought for a phrase. One crept into his wildly resonating mind.

  "Here's looking at you, kid," he said.

  The gongs of various midnights banged out the old day.

  (. . . and further towards the Hub, where the Ram-top Mountains joined the forbidding spires of the central massif, where strange hairy creatures roamed the eternal snows, where blizzards howled around the freezing peaks, the lights of a lone lamasery shone out over the high valleys. In the courtyard a couple of yellow-robed monks stacked the last case of small green bottles on to a sleigh, ready for the first leg of the incredibly difficult journey down to the distant plains. The box was labelled, in careful brush-strokes, "Mstr. C.M.O.T. Dibbler, Ankh-Morpork."

  "You know, Lobsang," said one of them, "one cannot help wondering what it is he does with this stuff.")

  Corporal Nobbs and Sergeant Colon lounged in the shadows near the Mended Drum, but straightened up as Carrot came out bearing a tray. Detritus the troll stepped aside respectfully.

  "Here we are, lads," said Carrot. "Three pints. On the house."

  "Bloody hell, I never thought you'd do it," said Colon, grasping a handle. "What did you say to him?"

  "I just explained how it was the duty of all good citizens to help the guard at all times," said Carrot innocently, ' 'and I thanked him for his co-operation.''

  "Yeah, and the rest," said Nobby.

  "No, that was all I said."

  "Then you must have a really convincing tone of voice."

  "Ah. Well, make the most of it, lads, while it lasts," said Colon.

  They drank thoughtfully. It was a moment of supreme peace, a few minutes snatched from the realities of real life. It was a brief bite of stolen fruit and enjoyed as such. No one in the whole city seemed to be fighting or stabbing or making affray and, just for now, it was possible to believe that this wonderful state of affairs might continue.

  And even if it didn't, then there were memories to get them through. Of running, and people getting out of the way. Of the looks on the faces of the horrible palace guard. Of, when all the thieves and heroes and gods had failed, of being there. Of nearly doing things nearly right.

  Nobby shoved the pot on a convenient window sill, stamped some life back into his feet and blew on his fingers. A brief fumble in the dark recesses of his ear produced a fragment of cigarette.

  "What a time, eh?" said Colon contentedly, as the flare of a match illuminated the three of them.

  The others nodded. Yesterday seemed like a lifetime ago, even now. But you could never forget something like that, no matter who else did, no matter what happened from now on.

  "If I never see any bloody king it'll be too soon," said Nobby.

  "I don't reckon he was the right king, anyway," said Carrot. "Talking of kings: anyone want a crisp?"

  "There's no right longs,'' said Colon, but without much rancour. Ten dollars a month was going to make a big difference. Mrs Colon was acting very differently towards a man bringing home another ten dollars a month. Her notes on the kitchen table were a lot more friendly.

  "No, but I mean, there's nothing special about having an ancient sword," said Carrot. "Or a birthmark. I mean, look at me. I've got a birthmark on my arm."

  "My brother's got one, too," said Colon. "Shaped like a boat."

  "Mine's more like a crown thing," said Carrot.

  "Oho, that makes you a king, then," grinned Nobby. "Stands to reason."

  "I don't see why. My brother's not an admiral," said Colon reasonably.

  "And I've got this sword," said Carrot.

  He drew it. Colon took it from his hand, and turned it over and over in the light from the flare over the Drum's door. The blade was dull a
nd short, and notched like a saw. It was well-made and there might have been an inscription on it once, but it had long ago been worn into indecipherability by sheer use.

  "It's a nice sword," he said thoughtfully. "Well-balanced."

  "But not one for a king," said Carrot. "Kings' swords are big and shiny and magical and have jewels on and when you hold them up they catch the light, ting. "

  "Ting, " said Colon. "Yes. I suppose they have to, really."

  "I'm just saying you can't go round giving people thrones just because of stuff like that,'' said Carrot. "That's what Captain Vimes said."

  "Nice job, mind," said Nobby. "Good hours, kinging."

  "Hmm?" Colon had momentarily been lost in a little world of speculation. Real kings had shiny swords, obviously. Except, except, except maybe your real real king of, like, days of yore, he would have a sword that didn't sparkle one bit but was bloody efficient at cutting things. Just a thought.

  "I say kinging's a good job," Nobby repeated. "Short hours."

  "Yeah. Yeah. But not long days," said Colon. He gave Carrot a thoughtful look.

  "Ah. There's that, of course."

  "Anyway, my father says being king's too much like hard work," said Carrot. "All the surveying and assaying and everything." He drained his pint. "It's not the kind of thing for the likes of us. Us," he looked proudly,"guards. You all right, Sergeant?"

  "Hmm? What? Oh. Yes." Colon shrugged. What about it, anyway? Maybe things turned out for the best. He finished the beer. "Best be off," he said. "What time was it?"

  "About twelve o'clock," said Carrot.

  "Anything else?"

  Carrot gave it some thought."And all's well?'' he said.

  "Right. Just testing."

  "You know," said Nobby, "the way you say it, lad, you could almost believe it was true."

  Let the eye of attention pull back . . .

  This is the Disc, world and mirror of worlds, borne through space on the back of four giant elephants who stand on the back of Great A'Tuin the Sky Turtle. Around the Rim of this world the ocean pours off endlessly into the night. At its Hub rises the ten-mile spike of the Cori Celesti, on whose glittering summit the gods play games with the fates of men...