Snuff

Stinky had miraculously disappeared, but when incredulous eyes are watching, as the venerable philosopher Ly Tin Weedle says, you have to do something or be considered, in the great scheme of things, a tit. And so Vimes went bow-legged and shuffled along the horse as nonchalantly as he could, and made the strange clicking noise that he’d heard ostlers use for every command, and the horse got to its hooves, raising Vimes as gently as a cradle to the astonishment and subsequent wild applause of the bandy-legged throng, who clapped and said things like bless you, sir, you ought to get a job in a circus! And at the same time Feeney was all admiration, unfortunately.

The wind was blowing up, but there was still some daylight left, and Vimes let the constable lead the way at a gentle trot, which indeed turned out to be gentle.

‘Looks like rain coming in, commander, so I reckon we’ll take it a little gently until we get down past Piper’s Holding, and then round by the shallows at Johnson’s Neck, where we can canter around the melon plantation, and by then we should be able to see the Fanny. Is that all right by you, sir?’

Sam Vimes solemnly waited for a few seconds to give the impression that he had the faintest idea about the local landscape, and then said, ‘Well, yes, I think that should be about right, Feeney.’

Stinky dragged himself up the horse’s mane, grinning again, and held up a large thumb, fortunately his own.

Feeney gathered up the reins. ‘Good, sir, then I think we’d better bustle!’

It took Vimes a little while to fully understand what was going on. There was Feeney, on his horse, there was the statutory clicking noise, and then no Feeney, no horse, but quite a lot of dust in the distance and the cracked voice of Stinky saying, ‘Hold on tight, Mister Po-leess-maan!’ And then the horizon jumped towards him. Galloping was somehow not as bad as trotting, and he managed to more or less lie on the horse and hope that somebody knew what was going on. Stinky appeared to be in charge.

The track was quite wide and they thundered along it, trailing white dust; and then suddenly they were heading downwards while the land on Vimes’s right was going up and the river was appearing behind some trees. He knew already that it was a river that saw no point in hurrying. After all, it was made up of water, and it is generally agreed that water has memory. It knew the score: you evaporated, you floated around in a cloud until somebody organized everybody, and then you all fell down as rain. It happened all the time. There was no point in hurrying. After your first splash, you’d seen it all before.

And so the river meandered. Even the Ankh was faster – and while the Ankh stank like a drain, it didn’t wobble slowly backwards and forwards, from one bank to the other, as Old Treachery did, as if uncertain about the whole water cycle business. And as the river wiggled like a snake, so did the banks, which, in accordance with the general placid and unhurried landscape, were overgrown and thick with vegetation.

Nevertheless, Feeney kept up the pace, and Vimes simply clung on, on the basis that horses probably didn’t wilfully try falling into water of their own accord. He remained lying flat because the increasingly low branches and tangled foliage otherwise threatened to smite him off his mount like a fly.

Ah yes, the flies. The riverside bred them by the million. He could feel them crawling over his hair until some leaf or twig swatted them off. The likelihood of spotting the Wonderful—boat without having one’s head smacked off seemed extremely little.

And yet here, suddenly, was a respite for Vimes’s aching backside, the sand bar with a few logs marooned on it, and Feeney just reining his horse to a stop. Vimes managed to get upright again, just in time, and both men slid to the ground.

‘Very well done, commander! You were born in the saddle, obviously! Good news! Can you smell that?’

Vimes sniffed, giving himself a noseful of flies and a very heavy stink of cattle dung. ‘Hangs in the air, don’t it?’ said Feeney. ‘That’s the smell of a two-oxen boat, right enough! They muck out as they go, you know.’

Vimes looked at the turgid water. ‘I’m not surprised.’ Perhaps, he thought, this might be the time to have a little discussion with the kid. He cleared his throat and looked blankly at the mud as he got his thoughts in order; a little trickle of water dribbled over the bar, and the horses shifted uneasily.

‘Feeney, I don’t know what we’ll be getting into when we catch up with the boat, understand? I don’t know if we can turn it round, or get the goblins out and then get them home overland, or if we’ll even have to ride it down all the way to the coast, but I’m in charge, do you understand? I’m in charge because I am very used to people not wanting to see me in front of them, or even alive.’

‘Yessir,’ Feeney began, ‘but I think—’