Jingo

“Ah, there you are,” he said. “We were getting concerned…”

They lowered themselves down into the fetid interior of the vessel.

Lord Vetinari was sitting with a pad of paper across his knees, writing carefully. He glanced up briefly.

“Report.”

Nobby fidgeted while Sergeant Colon delivered a more or less accurate account, although there was some witty repartee with the Klatchian guards that the corporal had not hitherto recalled.

Vetinari did not look up. Still writing, he said, “Sergeant, Ur is an old country Rimward of the kingdom of Djelibeybi, whose occupants are a byword for bucolic stupidity. For some reason, I cannot think why, the guard must have assumed you were from there. And Morporkian is something of a lingua franca even in the Klatchian empire. When someone from Hersheba^{77} needs to trade with someone from Istanzia, they will undoubtedly haggle in Morporkian. This will serve us well, of course. The force that is being assembled here must mean that practically every man is a distant stranger with outlandish ways. Provided we do not act too foreign, we should pass muster. This means not asking for curry with swede and currants in it and refraining from ordering pints of Winkle's Old Peculiar, do I make myself clear?”

“Er… what is it we're going to do, sir?”

“We will reconnoitre initially.”

“Ah, right. Yes. Very important.”

“And then seek out the Klatchian high command. Thanks to Leonard I have a little… package to deliver. I hope it will end the war very quickly.”

Sergeant Colon looked blank. At some point in the last few seconds the conversation had run away with him.

“Sorry, sir… you said high command, sir.”

“Yes, sergeant.”

“Like… the top brass, or turbans or whatever… all surrounded by crack troops, sir. That's where you always put the best troops, around the top brass.”

“I expect this will be the case, yes. In fact, I rather hope it is.”

Sergeant Colon, once again, tried to keep up.

“Ah. Right. And we'll go and look for them, will we, sir?”

“I can hardly ask them to come to us, sergeant.”

“Right, sir. I can see that. It could get a bit crowded.”

At last, Lord Vetinari looked up.

“Is there some problem, sergeant?”

And Sergeant Colon once again knew a secret about bravery. It was arguably a kind of enhanced cowardice, the knowledge that while death may await you if you advance, it will be a picnic compared to the certain living hell that awaits should you retreat.

“Er… not as such, sir,” he said.

“Very well.” Vetinari pushed his paperwork aside. “If there is more suitable clothing in your bag, I will get changed and we can take a look at Al-Khali.”

“Oh, gods…”

“Sorry, sergeant?”

“Oh, good, sir.”

“Good.” Vetinari began to pull other items out of the liberated sack. There was a set of jugglers clubs, a bag of coloured balls and finally a placard, such as might be placed to one side of the stage during an artiste's performance.

“‘Gulli, Gulli and Beti’,”^{78} he read. “‘Exotic tricks and dances’. Hmm,” he added. “It would seem there was a lady among the owners of this sack.”

The watchmen looked at the gauzy material that came out of the sack next. Nobby's eyes bulged.

“What are them?”

“I believe they are called harem pants, corporal.”

“They're very—”

“Curiously, the purpose of the clothing of the nautch girl or exotic dancer has always been less to reveal and more to suggest the imminence of revelation,” said the Patrician.

Nobby looked down at his costume, and then at Sergeant Al-Colon in his costume, and said cheerfully, “Well, I ain't sure it's going to suit you, sir.”

He regretted the words immediately.

“I hadn't intended that they should suit me,” said the Patrician calmly. “Please pass me your fez, Corporal Beti.”

The subtle, deceiving dawn-before-dawn slid over the desert, and the commander of the Klatchian detachment wasn't happy about it.

The D'regs always attacked at dawn. All of them. It didn't matter how many of them there were, or how many of you there were. Anyway, the whole tribe attacked. It wasn't just the women and children, but the camels, goats, sheep and chickens too. Of course you were expecting them and bows could cut them down, but… they always appeared suddenly, as if even the desert had spat them out. Get it wrong, be too slow, and you'd be hacked, kicked, butted, pecked and viciously spat at.

His troops lay in wait. Well, if you could call them troops. He'd said they were overstretched… well, he hadn't actually said, because that sort of thing could get you into trouble in this man's army, but he'd thought it very hard. Half of them were keen kids who thought that if you went into battle shouting and waving your sword in the air the enemy just ran away. They'd never faced a D'reg chicken coming in at eye height.

As for the rest of it… in the night people had run into one another, ambushed one another by mistake and were now as jittery as peas on a drum. A man had lost his sword and swore that someone had walked away with it stuck right through him. And some kind of rock had got up and walked around hitting people. With other people.

The sun was well up now.

“It's the waiting that's the worst part,” said his sergeant, next to him.

“It might be the worst part,” said the commander. “Or, there again, the bit where they suddenly rise out of the desert and cut you in half might be the worst part.” He stared mournfully at the treacherously empty sand. “Or the bit where a maddened sheep tries to gnaw your nose off might be the worst part. In fact, when you think of all the things that can happen when you're surrounded by a horde of screaming D'regs, the bit where they aren't there at all is, I think you'll find, the best part.”

The sergeant wasn't trained for this sort of thing. So he said, “They're late.”

“Good. Rather them than us.”

“Sun's right up now, sir.”

The commander looked at his shadow. It was full day, and the sand was mercifully free of his blood. The commander had been pacifying various recalcitrant parts of Klatch for long enough to wonder why, if he was pacifying people, he always seemed to be fighting them. Experience had taught him never to say things like “I don't like it, it's too quiet.” There was no such thing as too quiet.

“They might have decamped in the night, sir,” said the sergeant.

“That doesn't sound like the D'regs. They never run away. Anyway, I can see their tents.”

“Why don't we rush 'em, sir?”

“You haven't fought D'regs before, sergeant?”

“No, sir. I've been pacifying the Mad Savatars in Uhistan, though, and they're—”

“The D'regs are worse, sergeant. They pacify right back at you.”

“I didn't say how mad the Savatars were, sir.”

“Compared to the D'regs, they were merely slightly vexed.”

The sergeant felt that his reputation was being impugned.

“How about I take a few men and investigate, sir?”

The commander glanced at the sun again. Already the air was too hot to breathe.