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
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—’
Vimes ploughed on. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to find, but I suspect that people who try to take over boats, even a floating dung machine like the
For a while it looked as though Feeney was going to object, and then he simply nodded, patted his mount and waited, while another tiny wave splashed beside the horses. The sudden silence of someone normally so talkative disconcerted Vimes, and he said, ‘Are you waiting for something, Feeney?’
Feeney nodded and said, ‘I didn’t wish to interrupt you, commander, and as you say, you are in charge, but I was waiting until you said something I wanted to hear.’
‘Oh yes? Such as?’
‘Well, sir, to begin with I’d like to hear you say that it’s time to mount up and get out of here really fast because the water is rising and soon the alligators will wake up.’
Vimes looked around. One of the logs, which he had so carelessly dismissed, was extending legs. He landed on the back of his horse with the reins in his hand in little more than a second.
‘I’ll take that order as a given, then, shall I?’ shouted Feeney as he sped after Vimes.
Vimes did not attempt to slow down until he judged them high enough up the bank not to be of interest to anything that lived in water, and then waited for Feeney to catch up.
‘All right, Chief Constable Upshot, I’m still in charge, but I agree to respect your local knowledge. Will that satisfy you? Where
It certainly was rising: when they had started out you would have needed a ruler to be certain that it was flowing at all, but now little waves were dancing after one another and a light rain was starting to fall.
‘It’s that storm coming up behind us,’ said Feeney, ‘but don’t worry, sir, all that means is that the
The rain was falling faster now and Vimes said, ‘What happens if it decides to carry on? It’s not too far off sundown, surely?’
‘That won’t be a problem, commander, don’t you worry!’ shouted Feeney with infuriating cheeriness. ‘We’ll stay on the trails. No water ever gets up that far. Besides, wherever she is, the
Vimes wasn’t certain, but no officer ever likes to say that, so instead he parried with a question himself. ‘Mister Feeney, you make this river sound like a picnic! Look over there!’ He pointed across the river to a spot where the
