Jingo

dirty postcards? I call that disgusting, frankly.”

“Good morning, sultan!” said a cheerful and somehow familiar voice. “New in town, are we?”

All three of them turned to a figure that had magically appeared from the mouth of an alleyway.

“Indeed, yes,” said the Patrician.

“I could see you were! Everyone is, these days. And it is your lucky day, shah! I am here to help, right? You want something, I got it!”

Sergeant Colon had been staring at the newcomer. He said, in a faraway voice, “Your name's going to be something like… Al-jibla or something, right?”

“Heard about me, have you?” said the trader jovially.

“Sort of, yeah,” said Colon slowly. “You're amazingly… familiar.”

Lord Vetinari pushed him aside. “We are strolling entertainers,” he said. “We were hoping to get an engagement at the Prince's palace… Perhaps you could help?”

The man rubbed his beard thoughtfully, causing various particles to cascade into the little bowls in his tray.

“Dunno about the palace,” he said. “What's it you do?”

“We practise juggling, fire-eating, that sort of thing,” said Vetinari.

“Do we?” said Colon.

Al-jibla nodded at Nobby. “What does…”

“…she…” said Lord Vetinari helpfully.

“…she do?”

“Exotic dancing,” said Vetinari, while Nobby scowled.

“Pretty exotic, I should think,” said Al-jibla.

“You'd be amazed.”

A couple of armed men had drifted over to them. Sergeant Colon's heart sank. In those bearded faces he saw himself and Nobby, who at home would always saunter over to anything on the street that looked interesting.

“You are jugglers, are you?” said one of them. “Let's see you juggle, then.”

Lord Vetinari gave them a blank look and then glanced down at the tray around Al-jibla's neck. Among the more identifiable foodstuffs were a number of green melons.

“Very well,” he said, and picked up three of them.

Sergeant Colon shut his eyes.

After a few seconds he opened them again because a guard had said, “All right, but anyone can do it with three.”

“In that case perhaps Mr Al-jibla will throw me a few more?” said the Patrician, as the balls spun through his hands.

Sergeant Colon shut his eyes again.

After a short while a guard said, “Seven is pretty good. But it's just melons.”

Colon opened his eyes.

The Klatchian guard twitched his robe aside. Half a dozen throwing knives glinted. And so did his teeth.

Lord Vetinari nodded. To Colon's growing surprise he did not seem to be watching the tumbling melons at all.

“Four melons and three knives,” he said. “If you would care to give the knives to my charming assistant Beti…”

“Who?” said Nobby.

“Oh? Why not seven knives, then?”

“Kind sirs, that would be too simple,” said Lord Vetinari.13 “I am but a humble tumbler. Please let me practice my art.”

“Beti?” said Nobby, glowering under his veils.

Three fruits arced gently out of the green whirl and thumped on to Al-jibla's tray.

The guards looked carefully, and to Colon's mind nervously, at the cross-dressed figure of the cross corporal.

“She's not going to do any kind of dance, is she?” one of them ventured.

“No!” snapped Beti.

“Promise?”14

Nobby grabbed three of the knives and tugged them out of the man's belt.

“I'll give them to his lor— to him, shall I, Beti?” said Colon, suddenly quite sure that keeping the Patrician alive was almost certainly the only way to avoid a brief cigarette in the sunshine. He was also aware that other people were drifting over to watch the show.

“To me, please… Al,” said the Patrician, nodding.

Colon tossed him the knives, slowly and gingerly. He's going to try to stab the guards, he thought. It's a ruse. And then everyone's going to tear us apart.

Now the circling blur glinted in the sunlight. There was a murmur of approval from the crowd.

“Yet somehow dull,” said the Patrician.

And his hands moved in a complex pattern that suggested that his wrists must have moved through one another at least twice.

The tangled ball of hurtling fruit and cutlery leapt into the air.

Three melons dropped to the ground, cut cleanly in two.

Three knives thudded into the dust a few inches from their owner's sandals.

And Sergeant Colon looked up and into a growing, greenish, expanding—

The melon exploded, and so did the audience, but both their laughter and the humour was slightly lost on Colon as he scraped over-ripe pith out of his ears.

The survival instinct cut in again. Stagger around backwards, it said. So he staggered around backwards, waving his legs in the air. Fall down heavily, it said. So he sat down, and almost squashed a chicken. Lose your dignity, it said; of all the things you've got, it's the one you can most afford to lose.

Lord Vetinari helped him up. “Our very lives depend on your appearing to be a stupid fat idiot,” he hissed, putting Colon's fez back on his head.

“I ain't very good at acting, sir—”

“Good!”

“Yessir.”

The Patrician scooped up three melon halves and positively skipped over to a stall that a woman had just set up, snatching an egg from a basket as he went past. Sergeant Colon blinked again. This was not… real. The Patrician didn't do this sort of thing…

“Ladies and gentlemen! You see — an egg! And here we have a — melon rind! Egg, melon! Melon, egg!^{80} We put the melon over the egg!” His hands darted across the three halves, switching them at bewildering speed. “Round and round they go, just like that! Now… where's the egg? What about you, shah?”

Al-jibla smirked.

“'s the one on the left,” he said. “It always is.”

Lord Vetinari lifted the melon. The board below was eggless.

“And you, noble guardsman?”

“'s got to be the one in the middle,” said the guard.

“Yes, of course… oh dear, it isn't…”

The crowd looked at the last melon. They were street people. They knew the score. When the object can be under one of three things, and it's already turned out not to be under two of them, then the one place it was certainly not going to be was under the third. Only some kind of gullible fool would believe something like that. Of course there was going to be a trick. There always was a trick. But you watched it, in order to see a trick done well.

Lord Vetinari raised the melon nevertheless, and the crowd nodded in satisfaction. Of course it wasn't there. It'd be a pretty poor day for street entertainment if things were where they were supposed to be.

Sergeant Colon knew what was going to happen next, and he knew this because for the last minute or so