Night Watch - Terry Pratchett [133]
“He’s still breathing, Sarge!” said Wiglet.
“Right, right,” said Vimes. It was amazing how willing people were to see life in the corpse of a friend. “So make yourself useful and get him down to the doctor.” And, speaking as one who has seen some stricken men in his time, he mentally added: and if Lawn can sort him out, he can start his own religion.
A lucky attacker, who’d achieved the top of the barricade and then found himself horribly alone, slashed desperately at Vimes with his sword. Vimes turned back to business.
Ankh-Morpork was good at this, and had become good at it without anyone ever discussing it. Things flowed quietly rather than happened; that is, you’d sometimes have to look quite hard to find the point of change between “hasn’t been done yet” to “already taken care of, old boy.” And that was how it was done. Things were taken care of.
It was twenty minutes before Mr. Snapcase arrived and twenty-five minutes before he was duly sworn in as Patrician, had magically become Lord Snapcase, and was sitting in the Oblong Office; this included the one-minute’s silence for the late Lord Winder, whose body had been taken care of.
A number of servants were shown the door without any great unpleasantness, and Spymould was even allowed to remove his toad farm in peace. But those who filled the grates and dusted the furniture and swept the floors stayed on, as they had stayed on before, because they seldom paid any attention to, or possibly didn’t even know, who their lord was, and, in any case, were too useful and knew where the brooms were kept. Men come and go, but dust accumulates.
And it was the morning of a new day, which looked, seen from below, quite like the old ones.
After a while, someone raised the question of the fighting, which clearly needed to be taken care of.
There were scuffles all along the barricade now, but they were going only one way. Siege ladders had been brought up, and at several places along the parapet men had managed to climb in. But they could never get enough in one place. There were far more defenders than attackers, and they weren’t all men under arms. One thing Vimes was learning fast was the natural vindictiveness of old ladies, who had no sense of fair play when it came to fighting soldiers; give a granny a spear and a hole to jab it through, and young men on the other side were in big trouble.
And then there was Reg Shoe’s inspired idea of the use of steak dinners as a weapon. The attackers did not come from homes where steak was ever on the table. Meat tended to be the flavoring, not the meal. But, here and there, men who’d achieved the top of the ladders, in darkness, with the groans and yells of their unsuccessful comrades below them, had their weapons dragged from their hands by well-fed former colleagues who were not unkind and who directed them down the ladder inside for steak and eggs and roast chicken and a promise that every day would be like this, come the revolution.
Vimes didn’t want that news to get out, in case there was a rush to invade.
But the grannies, oh, the grannies…The area of the Republic was a natural recruiting ground for the regiments. It was also an area of big families and matriarchs whose word was family law. It had almost been cheating, putting them on the parapet with a megaphone during the lulls: “I knows you’re out there, our Ron! This is your Nan! You climb up one more time and you’ll feel the back of my hand! Our Rita sends her love and wants you to hurry home. Grandpa is feeling a lot better with the new ointment! Now stop being a silly boy!”
It was a dirty trick, and he was proud of it. Messages like that sapped fighting spirit better than arrows.
And then Vimes realized that there were no more men on the ropes and ladders. He could hear yells and groans below, but those soldiers who could stand were withdrawing to a safe distance.
Now me, thought Vimes, I’d have gone down to the cellars of the houses near the street. Ankh-Morpork is all cellars. And I’d have chipped my way through