Night Watch

He realized he was humming a different song under his breath. It was a tune he'd forgotten for years. It went with the lilac, scent and song together. He stopped, feeling guilty.

He was finishing the letter when there was a knock at the door.

“Nearly done!” he shouted.

“It'th me, thur,” said Constable Igor, pushing his head round the door, and then he added, “Igor, sir.”

“Yes, Igor?” said Vimes, wondering not for the first time why anyone with stitches all round his head needed to tell anyone who he was.1

“I would just like to thay, sir, that I could have got young Thtronginthearm back on his feet, thur,” said Igor, a shade reproachfully.

Vimes sighed. Igor's face was full of concern, tinged with disappointment. He had been prevented from plying his…craft. He was naturally disappointed.

“We've been through this, Igor. It's not like sewing a leg back on. And dwarfs are dead set against that sort of thing.”

“There's nothing thupernatural about it, thur. I am a man of Natural Philothophy! And he was still warm when they brought him in—”

“Those are the rules, Igor. Thanks all the same. We know your heart is in the right place—”

“They are in the right places, sir,” said Igor reproachfully.

“That's what I meant,” Vimes said, without missing a beat, just as Igor never did.

“Oh, very well, sir,” said Igor, giving up. He paused, and then said: “How is her ladyship, sir?”

Vimes had been expecting this. It was a terrible thing for a mind to do, but his had already presented him with the idea of Igor and Sybil in the same sentence. Not that he disliked Igor. Quite the reverse. There were watchmen walking around the streets right now who wouldn't have legs if it wasn't for Igor's genius with a needle. But—

“Fine. She's fine,” he said abruptly.

“Only I heard that Mrs Content was a bit worr—”

“Igor, there are some areas where…Look, do you know anything about…women and babies?”

“Not in so many wordth, sir, but I find that once I've got someone on the slab and had a good, you know, rummage around, I can thort out most thingth—”

Vimes's imagination actually shut down at this point.

“Thank you, Igor,” he managed, without his voice trembling, “but Mrs Content is a very experienced midwife.”

“Jutht as you say, sir,” said Igor, but doubt rode on the words.

“And now I've got to go,” said Vimes. “It's going to be a long day.”

He ran down the stairs, tossed the letter to Sergeant Colon, nodded to Carrot and they set off at a fast walk for the palace.

After the door had shut one of the watchmen looked up from the desk where he'd been wrestling with a report and the effort of writing down, as policemen do, what ought to have happened.

“Sarge?”

“Yes, Corporal Ping?”

“Why're some of you wearing purple flowers, sarge?”

There was a subtle change in the atmosphere, a suction of sound caused by many pairs of ears listening intently. All the officers in the room had stopped writing.

“I mean, I saw you and Reg and Nobby wearing 'em this time last year, and I wondered if we were all supposed to…” Ping faltered. Sergeant Colon's normally amiable eyes had narrowed and the message they were sending was: you're on thin ice, lad, and it's starting to creak…

“I mean, my landlady's got a garden and I could easily go and cut a—” Ping went on, in an uncharacteristic attempt at suicide.

“You'd wear the lilac today, would you?” said Colon quietly.

“I just meant that if you wanted me to I could go and—”

“Were you there?” said Colon, getting to his feet so fast that his chair fell over.

“Steady, Fred,” murmured Nobby.

“I didn't mean—” Ping began. “I mean…was I where, sarge?”

Colon leaned on the desk, bringing his round red face an inch away from Ping's nose.

“If you don't know where there was, you weren't there,” he said, in the same quiet voice.

He stood up straight again.

“Now me an' Nobby has got a job to do,” he said. “At ease, Ping. We are going out.”

“Er…”

This was not being a good day for Corporal Ping.

“Yes?” said Colon.

“Er…standing orders, sarge…you're the ranking officer, you see, and I'm orderly officer for the day, I wouldn't ask otherwise but…if you're going out, sarge, you've got to tell me where you're going. Just in case anyone has to contact you, see? I got to write it down in the book. In pen and everything,” he added.

“You know what day it is, Ping?” said Colon.

“Er…twenty-fifth of May, sarge.”

“And you know what that means, Ping?”

“Er…”

“It means,” said Nobby, “that anyone important enough to ask where we're going—”

“—knows where we've gone,” said Fred Colon.

The door slammed behind them.

The cemetery of Small Gods was for the people who didn't know what happened next. They didn't know what they believed in or if there was life after death and, often, they didn't know what hit them. They'd gone through life being amiably uncertain, until the ultimate certainty had claimed them at the last. Among the city's bone orchards the cemetery was the equivalent of the drawer marked misc, where people were interred in the glorious expectation of nothing very much.

Most of the Watch got buried there. Policemen, after a few years, found it hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone they couldn't see.

For once, it wasn't raining. The breeze shook the sooty poplars around the wall, making them rustle.

“We ought to have brought some flowers,” said Colon, as they made their way through the long grass.

“I could nick a few off some of the fresh graves, sarge,” Nobby volunteered.

“Not the kind of thing I want to hear you saying at this time, Nobby,” said Colon severely.

“Sorry, sarge.”

“At a time like this a man ought to be thinking of his immortal soul viz ah viz the endless mighty river that is History. I should do that, if I was you. Nobby.”

“Right, sarge. Will do. I see someone's doing it already, sarge.”

Up against one wall, lilac trees were growing. That is, at some point in the past a lilac had been planted there, and had given rise, as lilac will, to hundreds of whippy suckers, so that what had once been one stem was now a thicket. Every branch was covered in pale mauve blooms.

The graves were still just visible in the tangled vegetation. In front of them stood Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, Ankh-Morpork's least successful businessman, with a sprig of lilac in his hat.

He caught sight of the watchmen and nodded to them. They nodded back. All three stood looking down at the seven graves. Only one had been maintained. The marble headstone on that one was shiny and moss-free, the turf was clipped, the stone border was sparkling.