Ankh-Morpork was celebrating. No one was quite sure why, but they'd worked themselves up for a celebration tonight, barrels had been broached, oxen had been put on spits, one paper hat and celebratory mug had been issued per child, and it seemed a shame to waste all that effort. Anyway, it had been a very interesting day, and the people of Ankh-Morpork set great store by entertainment.
'The way I see it,' said one of the revellers, halfway through a huge greasy lump of half-raw meat, 'a dragon as king mightn't be a bad idea. When you think it through, is what I mean.'
'It definitely looked very gracious,' said the woman to his right, as if testing the idea. 'Sort of, well, sleek. Nice and smart. Not scruffy. Takes a bit of a pride in itself.'' She glared at some of the younger revellers further down the table. 'The trouble with people today is they don't take pride in themselves.'
'And there's foreign policy, of course,' said a third, helping himself to a rib. 'When you come to think about it.'
'What d'you mean?'
'Diplomacy,' said the rib-eater, flatly.
They thought about it. And then you could see them turning the idea around and thinking about it the other way, in a polite effort to see what the hell he was getting at.
'Dunno,' said the monarchical expert slowly. 'I mean, your actual dragon, it's got these, basically, two sort of ways of negotiation. Hasn't it? I mean, it's either roasting you alive, or it isn't. Correct me if I'm wrong,' he added.
'That's my point. I mean, let's say the ambassador from Klatch comes along, you know how arrogant that lot are, suppose he says: we want this, we want that, we want the other thing. Well,' he said, beaming at them, 'what we say is, shut your face unless you want to go home in a jar.'
They tried out this idea for mental fit. It had that certain something.
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