Night Watch - Terry Pratchett [93]
“Tidy yourselves, lads,” said Vimes. “Captain’ll be down in a few minutes. Apparently it’s time for a show of strength.”
“What strength?” said Billy Wiglet.
“Ah, Billy, what happens is, the vicious revolutionaries take one look at us and scuttle off back to their holes,” said Vimes. He was immediately sorry he’d said that. Billy hadn’t learned irony.
“I mean we just give the uniforms an airing,” he translated.
“We’ll get cheesed,” said Fred Colon.
“Not if we stick together,” said Sam.
“Right,” said Vimes. “After all, we’re heavily armed men going on patrol among civilians who are, by law, unarmed. If we’re careful, we shouldn’t get too badly hurt.”
Another bad move. Dark sarcasm ought to be taught in schools, he thought. Besides, armed men could get into trouble if the unarmed civilians were angry enough, especially if there were cobblestones on the streets.
He heard the distant clocks strike three. Tonight, the streets would explode.
According to the history books, it would be one shot that did it, around about sunset. One of the foot regiments would be assembled in Hen and Chickens Field, awaiting orders. And there would be people watching them. Troops always drew an audience…impressionable kids, the inevitable Ankh-Morpork floating street crowd, and, of course, the ladies whose affection was extremely negotiable.
The crowd shouldn’t have been there, people said afterward. But where should it have been? The field was a popular spot. It was the only vaguely green space in that part of the city. People played games there, and, of course, there was always the progress of the corpse on the gibbet to inspect. Besides, they were troops, ordinary foot soldiers, people’s sons and husbands, taking a bit of a rest and having a drink.
Oh, that was right—afterward, it was said that the troops were drunk. And that they shouldn’t have been there. Yep, that was the reason, Vimes reflected. No one should have been there.
But they were, and when that captain got an arrow in his stomach and was groaning on the ground, some of the crossbowmen fired in the direction of the shot. That’s what the history books said. They fired at the house windows, where people had been watching. Perhaps the shot had come from one of them.
Some arrows fell short, some did not. And there were people who fired back.
And then, one after another, horrible things would happen. By then it was too late for them not to. The tension would unwind like a spring, scything through the city.
There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who’d had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called “The People.” Vimes had spent his life on the streets and had met decent men, and fools, and people who’d steal a penny from a blind beggar, and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he’d never met The People.
People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up.
What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn’t be a revolution or a riot. It’d be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when all the machinery of a city faltered, the wheels stopped turning, and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep.