Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett [68]
Lord Vetinari seldom had balls. There was a popular song about it, in fact. But now it was going to be balls all the way.
She couldn’t stand balls. For sheer enjoyment it wasn’t a patch on mucking out dragons. You knew where you were, mucking out dragons. You didn’t get hot and pink and have to eat silly things on sticks, or wear a dress that made you look like a cloud full of cherubs. Little dragons didn’t give a damn what you looked like so long as there was a feeding bowl in your hands.
Funny, really. She’d always thought it took weeks, months, to organize a ball. Invitations, decorations, sausages on poles, ghastly chickeny mixture to force into those little pastry cases. But it had all been done in a matter of hours, as if someone had been expecting it. One of the miracles of catering, obviously. She’d even danced with the, for want of a better word, new king, who had said some polite words to her although they had been rather muffled.
And a coronation tomorrow. You’d have thought it’d take months to sort out.
She was still musing on that as she mixed the dragons’ late night feed of rock oil and peat, spiked with flowers of sulfur. She didn’t bother to change out of the ballgown but slipped the heavy apron over the top, donned the gloves and helmet, pulled the visor down over her face and ran, clutching the feed buckets, through the driving rain to the shed.
She knew it as soon as she opened the door. Normally the arrival of food would be greeted with hoots and whistles and brief bursts of flame.
The dragons, each in its pen, were sitting up in attentive silence and staring up through the roof.
It was somehow scary. She clanged the buckets together.
“No need to be afraid, nasty big dragon all gone!” she said brightly. “Get stuck in to this, you people!”
One or two of them gave her a brief glance, and then went back to their—
What? They didn’t seem to be frightened. Just very, very attentive. It was like a vigil. They were waiting for something to happen.
The thunder muttered again.
A couple of minutes later she was on her way down into the damp city.
There are some songs which are never sung sober. “Nellie Dean” is one. So is any song beginning “As I was a walking…” In the area around Ankh-Morpork the favored air is “A Wizard’s Staff Has A Knob On The End.”
The rank were drunk. At least, two out of three of the rank were drunk. Carrot had been persuaded to try a shandy and hadn’t liked it much. He didn’t know all the words, either, and many of the ones he did know he didn’t understand.
“Oh, I see,” he said eventually. “It’s a sort of humorous play on words, is it?”
“You know,” said Colon wistfully, peering into the thickening mists rolling in off the Ankh, “s’at times like this I wish old—”
“You’re not to say it,” said Nobby, swaying a little. “You agreed, we wouldn’t say nothing, it’s no good talking about it.”
“It was his favorite song,” said Colon sadly. “He was a good light tenor.”
“Now, Sarge—”
“He was a righteous man, our Gaskin,” said Colon.
“We couldn’t of helped it,” said Nobby sulkily.
“We could have,” said Colon. “We could have run faster.”
“What happened, then?” said Carrot.
“He died,” said Nobby, “in the hexecution of his duty.”
“I told him,” said Colon, taking a swig at the bottle they had brought along to see them through the night, “I told him. Slow down, I said. You’ll do yourself a mischief, I said. I don’t know what got into him, running ahead like that.”
“I blame the Thieves’ Guild,” said Nobby. “Allowing people like that on the streets—”
“There was this bloke we saw done a robbery one night,” said Colon miserably. “Right in front of us! And Captain Vimes, he said Come On, and we run, only the point is you shouldn’t run too fast, see. Else you might catch them. Leads to all sorts of problems, catching people—”
“They don’t like it,” said Nobby. There was a mutter of thunder, and a flurry