She was still musing on that as she mixed the dragons' late night feed of rock oil and peat, spiked with flowers of sulphur. She didn't bother to change out of the ball gown but slipped the heavy apron over the top, donned the gloves and helmet, pulled the visor down over her face and ran, clutching the feed buckets, through the driving rain to the shed.
She knew it as soon as she opened the door. Normally the arrival of food would be greeted with hoots and whistles and brief bursts of flame.
The dragons, each in its pen, were sitting up in attentive silence and staring up through the roof.
It was somehow scary. She clanged the buckets together.
'No need to be afraid, nasty big dragon all gone!' she said brightly. 'Get stuck in to this, you people!'
One or two of them gave her a brief glance, and then went back to their…
What? They didn't seem to be frightened. Just very, very attentive. It was like a vigil. They were waiting for something to happen.
The thunder muttered again.
A couple of minutes later she was on her way down into the damp city.
There are some songs which are never sung sober. 'Nellie Dean' is one. So is any song beginning 'As I was a walking ...' In the area around Ankh-Morpork, the favoured air is 'A Wizard's Staff Has A Knob On The End'.
The rank were drunk. At least, two out of three of the rank were drunk. Carrot had been persuaded to try a shandy and hadn't liked it much. He didn't know all the words, either, and many of the ones he did know he didn't understand.
'Oh, I see,' he said eventually. 'It's a sort of humorous play on words, is it?'
'You know,' said Colon wistfully, peering into the thickening mists rolling in off the Ankh, 's'at times like this I wish old-'
'You're not to say it,' said Nobby, swaying a little. 'You agreed, we wouldn't say nothing, it's no good talking about it.'
'It was his favourite song,' said Colon sadly. 'He was a good light tenor.'
'Now, Sarge-'
'He was a righteous man, our Gaskin,' said Colon.
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