Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett [65]
“Fancy,” said the leaky-guttering woman.
“Money, too,” said the monarchist, enjoying the attention. “They don’t carry it. That’s how you can always tell a king.”
“Why? It’s not that heavy,” said the man whose remaining hair was spread across the dome of his head like the remnant of a defeated army. “I can carry hundreds of dollars, no problem.”
“You probably get weak arms, being a king,” said the woman wisely. “Probably with the waving.”
“I’ve always thought,” said the monarchist, pulling out a pipe and beginning to fill it with the ponderous air of one who is going to deliver a lecture, “that one of the major problems of being a king is the risk of your daughter getting a prick.”
There was a thoughtful pause.
“And falling asleep for a hundred years,” the monarchist went on stolidly.
“Ah,” said the others, unaccountably relieved.
“And then there’s wear and tear on peas,” he added.
“Well, there would be,” said the woman, uncertainly.
“Having to sleep on them all the time,” said the monarchist.
“Not to mention hundreds of mattresses.”
“Right.”
“Is that so? I think I could get ’em for him wholesale,” said Throat. He turned to Vimes, who had been listening to all this with leaden depression. “See, Captain? And you’d be in the royal guard, I expect. Get some plumes in your helmet.”
“Ah, pageantry,” said the monarchist, pointing with his pipe. “Very important. Lots of spectacles.”
“What, free?” said Throat.
“We-ell, I think maybe you have to pay for the frames,” said the monarchist.
“You’re all bloody mad!” shouted Vimes. “You don’t know anything about him and he hasn’t even won yet!”
“Bit of a formality, I expect,” said the woman.
“It’s a fire-breathing dragon!” screamed Vimes, remembering those nostrils. “And he’s just a guy on a horse, for heaven’s sake!”
Throat prodded him gently in the breastplate. “You got no soul, Cap’n,” he said. “When a stranger comes into the city under the thrall of the dragon and challenges it with a glittery sword, weeell, there’s only one outcome, ain’t there? It’s probably destiny.”
“Thrall?” shouted Vimes. “Thrall? You thieving bugger, Throat, you were flogging cuddly dragon dolls yesterday!”
“That was just business, Cap’n. No need to get excited about it,” said Throat pleasantly.
Vimes went back to the rank in a gloomy rage. Say what you liked about the people of Ankh-Morpork they had always been staunchly independent, yielding to no man their right to rob, defraud, embezzle and murder on an equal basis. This seemed absolutely right, to Vimes’s way of thinking. There was no difference at all between the richest man and the poorest beggar, apart from the fact that the former had lots of money, food, power, fine clothes, and good health. But at least he wasn’t any better. Just richer, fatter, more powerful, better dressed and healthier. It had been like that for hundreds of years.
“And now they get one sniff of an ermine robe and they go all gooey,” he muttered.
The dragon was circling the plaza slowly and warily. Vimes craned to see over the heads in front of him.
In the same way that various predators have the silhouette of their prey almost programmed into their genes, it was possible that the shape of someone on a horse holding a sword clicked a few tumblers in a dragon’s brain. It was showing keen but wary interest.
Back in the crowd, Vimes shrugged. “I didn’t even know we were a kingdom.”
“Well, we haven’t been for ages,” said Lady Ramkin. “The kings got thrown out, and jolly good job too. They could be quite frightful.”
“But you’re, well, from a pos—from a high-born family,” he said. “I should have thought you’d be all for kings.”
“Some of them were fearful oiks, you know,” she said airily. “Wives all over the place, and chopping people’s heads off, fighting pointless wars, eating with their knife, chucking half-eaten chicken legs over their shoulders, that sort of thing. Not our sort of people at all.”
The plaza went quiet. The dragon had flapped slowly to the far end and was almost stationary in the air, apart from the slow beating of its