“Gosh, that must’ve been a blow to a fighting man like yourself, commander?”
Fighting man? Maybe, Vimes thought, at least when no alternative presents itself, but how in the seven hells did you get the idea that I’m comfortable even looking at horses? And why are we still walking toward some barn that is going to be full of the wretched things, stamping and snorting and dribbling and rolling their eyes backward like they do? Well, I’ll tell you why. It’s because I’m too damn scared to tell Feeney that I’m too damn scared. Hah, the story of my life, too much of a damn coward to be a coward!
Now Feeney pushed aside a heavy wooden gate, which, to Vimes’s susceptible ear, creaked like a fresh gallows, and he groaned as they stepped through. Yes, it was a livery stable, and it made Vimes liverish. And there they were, the inevitable hangers-on: bandy-legged, no more than one button on their coats, and a certain suggestion of rat about the nose and wishbone about the legs. You could have played crockett with them. Every one of them would have a straw in his mouth, presumably because that’s what they lived on. And, helplessly, Vimes was introduced to men who knew they had heard of him, very big policeman certainly, while Feeney painted a picture of him as just the sort of man who would insist on riding the swiftest beast that they had installed in the stalls.
Two evil-looking mounts were led out, and Feeney generously brought the larger over to Vimes. “There you go, sir. Back in the saddle again, eh?” he said, and handed the reins to Vimes.
While Feeney was negotiating the hire, Vimes felt something tug at his leg and he looked down into the grinning face of Special Constable Stinky, who hissed, “Big trouble, fellow po-leess-maan colleague? Big trouble for a man scared of horses. Damn right!? Hate horse, can smell fear. You take me, po-leess-maan. I fix. No worry. You need Stinky anyway, yes? You find frightened goblin? Panic panic panic! But Stinky say shut gob goblins, this man despite appearances not too much of an arsehole, yes indeed!”
The wretched little goblin lowered his cracked voice still further, and added, so that Vimes could barely hear it, “And Stinky never ever said anything about po-leess-maan’s shirt-washing man and very cross bow, hey? Mr. Vimes? There is no race so wretched that there is not something out there that cares for them, Mr. Vimes.”
The words hit Vimes like a slap in the face. Had the little bugger said that? Had Vimes really heard it? The words had dropped into the conversation as if from somewhere else, somewhere very elsewhere. He stared at Stinky, who rattled his teeth at him cheerfully and swung himself dreadfully under the horse just as, on the other side of the yard, the brains trust of debating equestrian experts settled the negotiations with Feeney. The apparent boss spat on his hand and Feeney, against all public safety procedures, spat on his hand and then shook hands and then money changed hands, and Vimes hoped that it washed its hands.
Then, in front of Vimes, possibly to its own amazement, the horse knelt down. Vimes had only seen that in a circus, and everyone else acted as if they’d never seen it at all.
Stinky had miraculously disappeared, but when incredulous eyes are watching, as the venerable philosopher Ly Tin Weedle says, you have to do something or be considered, in the great scheme of things, a tit. And so Vimes went bowlegged and shuffled along the horse as nonchalantly as he could, and made the strange clicking noise that he’d heard ostlers use for every command, and the horse got to its hooves, raising Vimes as gently as a cradle to the astonishment and subsequent wild applause of the bandy-legged throng, who clapped and said things like, bless you, sir, you ought to get a job in a circus! And at the same time Feeney was all admiration, unfortunately.
The wind was blowing up, but there was still some daylight left, and Vimes let the constable lead the way at a gentle trot, which indeed turned out to be gentle.
“Looks like rain coming in, commander, so I reckon we’ll take it a little gently until we get down past Piper’s Holding, and then round by the shallows at Johnson’s Neck, where we can canter around the melon plantation, and by then we should be able to see the Fanny. Is that all right by you, sir?”
Sam Vimes solemnly waited for a few seconds to give the impression that he had the faintest idea about the local landscape, and then said, “Well, yes, I think that should be about right, Feeney.”
Stinky dragged himself up the horse’s mane, grinning again, and held up a large thumb, fortunately his own.
Feeney gathered up the reins. “Good, sir, then I think we’d better bustle!”
It took Vimes a little while to fully understand what was going on. There was Feeney, on his horse, there was the statutory clicking noise, and then no Feeney, no horse, but quite a lot of dust in the distance and the cracked voice of Stinky saying, “Hold on tight, Mr. Po-leess-maan!” And then the horizon jumped toward him. Galloping was somehow not as bad as trotting, and he managed to more or less lie on the horse and hope that somebody knew what was going on. Stinky appeared to be in charge.
The track was quite wide and they thundered along it, trailing white dust; and then suddenly they were heading downward while the land on Vimes’s right was going up and the river was appearing behind some trees. He knew already that it was a river that saw no point in hurrying. After all, it was made up of water, and it is generally agreed that water has memory. It knew the score: you evaporated, you floated around in a cloud until somebody organized everybody, and then you all fell down as rain. It happened all the time. There was no point in hurrying. After your first splash, you’d seen it all before.
And so the river meandered. Even the Ankh was faster—and while the Ankh stank like a drain, it didn’t wobble slowly backward and forward, from one bank to the other, as Old Treachery did, as if uncertain about the whole water cycle business. And as the river wiggled like a snake, so did the banks, which, in accordance with the general placid and unhurried landscape, were overgrown and thick with vegetation.
Nevertheless, Feeney kept up the pace, and Vimes simply clung on, on the basis that horses probably didn’t willfully try falling into water of their own accord. He remained lying flat because the increasingly low branches and tangled foliage otherwise threatened to smite him off his mount like a fly.
Ah yes, the flies. The riverside bred them by the million. He could feel them crawling over his hair until some leaf or twig swatted them off. The likelihood of spotting the Wonderful— boat without having one’s head smacked off seemed extremely little.
And yet here, suddenly, was a respite for Vimes’s aching backside, the sand bar with a few logs marooned on it, and Feeney just reining his horse to a stop. Vimes managed to get upright again, just in time, and both men slid to the ground.
“Very well done, commander! You were born in the saddle, obviously! Good news! Can you smell that?”
Vimes sniffed, giving himself a noseful of flies and a very heavy stink of cattle dung. “Hangs in the air, don’t it?” said Feeney. “That’s the smell of a two-oxen boat, right enough! They muck out as they go, you know.”
Vimes looked at the turgid water. “I’m not surprised.” Perhaps, he thought, this might be the time to have a little discussion with the kid. He cleared his throat and looked blankly at the mud as he got his thoughts in order; a little trickle of water dribbled over the bar, and the horses shifted uneasily.
“Feeney, I don’t know what we’ll be getting into when we catch up with the boat, understand? I don’t know if we can turn it round, or get the goblins out and then get them home overland, or if we’ll even have to ride it down all the way to the coast, but I’m in charge, do you understand? I’m in charge because I am very used to people not wanting to see me in front of them, or even alive.”
“Yessir,” Feeney began, “but I think—”
Vimes plowed on. “I don’t know what we’re going to find, but I suspect that people who try to take over boats, even a floating dung machine like the Fanny, probably get treated by the crew as pirates immediately, and so I’m going to give the orders and I want you to do exactly
what I tell you, okay?”
For a while it looked as though Feeney was going to object, and then he simply nodded, patted his mount and waited, while another tiny wave splashed beside the horses. The sudden silence of someone normally so talkative disconcerted Vimes, and he said, “Are you waiting for something, Feeney?”
Feeney nodded and said, “I didn’t wish to interrupt you, commander, and as you say, you are in charge, but I was waiting until you said something I wanted to hear.”
“Oh yes? Such as?”
“Well, sir, to begin with I’d like to hear you say that it’s time to mount up and get out of here really fast because the water is rising and soon the alligators will wake up.”
Vimes looked around. One of the logs, which he had so carelessly dismissed, was extending legs. He landed on the back of his horse with the reins in his hand in little more than a second.
“I’ll take that order as a given, then, shall I?” shouted Feeney as he sped after Vimes.
Vimes did not attempt to slow down until he judged them high enough up the bank not to be of interest to anything that lived in water, and then waited for Feeney to catch up.
“All right, Chief Constable Upshot, I’m still in charge, but I agree to respect your local knowledge. Will that satisfy you? Where is the water coming from?”
It certainly was rising: when they had started out you would have needed a ruler to be certain that it was flowing at all, but now little waves were dancing after one another and a light rain was starting to fall.
“It’s that storm coming up behind us,” said Feeney, “but don’t worry, sir, all that means is that the Fanny will tie up if it gets too strong. Then we can just climb on board.”
The rain was falling faster now and Vimes said, “What happens if it decides to carry on? It’s not too far off sundown, surely?”
“That won’t be a problem, commander, don’t you worry!” shouted Feeney with infuriating cheeriness. “We’ll stay on the trails. No water ever gets up that far. Besides, wherever she is, the Fanny will have running lights on, red ones, oil lamps as a matter of fact. So don’t worry,” Feeney finished. “If she’s still on the river we’ll find her, sir, one way or the other, and may I ask, sir, what your intentions are then?”
Vimes wasn’t certain, but no officer ever likes to say that, so instead he parried with a question himself. “Mr. Feeney, you make this river sound like a picnic! Look over there!” He pointed across the river to a spot where the water spun and gurgled and was almost visibly rising as they stared at it.
“Oh,” said Feeney, “you always get debris coming down Old Treachery. The only time to worry is if you get a damn slam.* They only happen very rarely when circumstances are right, sir, and you can be sure the captain will have the Fanny well out of any danger if one of those should happen. Besides, he can’t possibly navigate the river in bad weather at night; Old Treachery is full of snags and sand bars. It would be suicidal, even for a pilot as good as Mr. Sillitoe!”
They rode on in silence, except for the terrible swirling and gurgling of dark waters down in the torrent below the bank. Only a little daylight remained now and it was a dirty orange, helped out occasionally by flashes of lightning, followed by stone-cracking thunder. In the woods on either side of the river trees lit and occasionally burned, which was, Vimes thought, at least a help to navigation. The rain was soaking his clothing now, and so he shouted in a voice which betrayed his belief that he would not like the answer to what he was about to ask, “Apropos of nothing, and just to pass the time, lad, would you tell me what exactly a damn slam is?”
Feeney’s voice was initially drowned by a thunder-roll behind them, but on the next go he managed, “It’s an occasional phenomenon caused by a storm getting stuck in the valley and the debris of the storm getting piled up in a certain way, sir…”
Stinky scrambled up from who would dare to speculate where and up onto the horse’s head. He glowed with a faint blue corpse light. Vimes reached out a finger to touch him and a tiny blue flame danced across his hand. He knew it. “St. Ungulant’s fire,” he said aloud, and wished that he was in a position to use it to light his last cigar, even if it was an exhalation of the corpses of the drowned. Sometimes you just needed a little tobacco.
Feeney was staring at the blue light with an expression of such horror that Vimes hardly dared to disturb him. But he said, “Then what happens, lad?”
Lightning, with a sense for the dramatic moment, illuminated Feeney’s face as he turned. “Well, commander, the debris will build up and up and tangle until it’s one mass, and the river is building up so much behind it that sooner or later it’ll overcome the strength of the natural dam, which will plow down the river, mercilessly sweeping up or capsizing everything in its path, all the way to the sea, sir. That’s why this river is called ‘Old Treachery’!”
“Well, of course,” said Vimes. “I’m a simple man from the city who doesn’t know very much about these things, but I take it that a build-up of debris which plows its way downriver sweeping up or capsizing everything in its path all the way down to the sea is generally considered to be a bad thing?”
There was a long-drawn-out creak behind them as another tree was hit by a flash. “Yes, sir. You left out the word ‘mercilessly,’ sir,” said Feeney, carefully. “I think we really should try to catch up with the Fanny as quickly as possible.”
“I think you’re right, lad, and right now I suggest—”
Whatever it was that Stinky was doing, and whatever it was that Stinky actually was, the horses were already becoming skittish to the point of bolting. There was so much water in the air and so little light left that the difference between the river and the shore could only be judged by seeing which one you fell into.
And there was solid rain now, rain that blew from every direction, including upward, and the symphony of dark destruction was punctuated by the sound of banks slipping inexorably into the churning water. The horses were now frantic and direction had no meaning, and nor did warmth and the world was nothing but darkness, water, cold despair and two red eyes.
Feeney saw them first and then Vimes picked up the smell. It was the rich, desperate smell of oxen getting really worried and was thick enough to stink its way out of the turmoil. Amazingly, the boat was still churning the water, making progress of sorts despite the fact that its trailing flotilla of barges was jack-knifing, tangling and generally swishing across the river like the tail of an angry cat.
“Why didn’t she tie up somewhere?” shouted Feeney to the storm. It sounded like despair, but Vimes dismounted, grabbed the sticky shape of Stinky and slapped his horse on the rump. It certainly stood a better chance by itself now than it did with him, after all.
And then for a moment his inner eyes looked at Koom Valley. He had nearly died that day as water poured off the valley walls and thundered through the endless caves in the limestone, smacking him against the walls, banging him on the floors and ceilings and finally dropping him on a tiny beach of sand, in utter darkness. And the darkness had been his friend, and Vimes had floated on the face of the darkness, and there he had found enlightenment growing, and understood that fear and rage could be hammered into a sword, and the desire to once again read a book to a child could be forged into a shield and armor for a ragged dying castaway, who thereafter shook hands with kings.
After that, what could be frightening about rescuing goblins and who knew how many other people from a floundering boat on a black and treacherous river in thundering, steaming darkness?
He was running now along the squelching bank, water pouring down his neck. But running wasn’t enough. You had to think. You thought that the pilot of the boat knew the river and knew the boat. He could have moored at any time, couldn’t he? And he hadn’t done so, but he clearly wasn’t a fool, because even having known the river for only a few hours, Vimes could see that no fool would survive on it for more than a few journeys. It was built to be a trap for the stupid.
; On the other hand, if you were not stupid then being an ox-boat pilot was a pretty good gig: you’d have prestige, respect, responsibility and a steady wage for a steady job, in addition to the envy of all the little boys on every landing stage. Sybil had told him all about them, with some enthusiasm, one evening. So why, in such a decent position, would a man pilot such a valuable boat with a valuable cargo down a river on an evening that promised annihilation around every snake-like bend when no blame would attach to mooring up for a while?
Money? No, Vimes thought. They call this river Old Treachery, and surely money wasn’t any good to you when you were sinking dreadfully in its muddy embrace. Besides, Vimes knew men like that, and they tended to be proud, self-reliant and impossible to bribe. He probably wouldn’t jeopardize the boat, even if you held a knife to his throat— But traditionally the family comes too; the pilot was always working from home, wasn’t he?
And what would a desperate pilot do then? What would he do if a knife was held to the throat of a wife, or a child? What else could he do but sail on, trusting a lifetime of experience to see them all to safety? And it wouldn’t be one unwelcome guest, no, because then you would try to run the boat heavily aground while you, muscles tensed, would rely on the confusion to leap at the fallen man and strangle him with your bare hands, but that would only work if he hadn’t brought along an ally. And so then you stayed at the wheel, hoping and praying, and expecting, at any moment, the rumble of the damn slam.
Feeney was sprinting along the bank after him now, and managed to pant, “What are we going to do, sir? Seriously, what are we going to do!”
Vimes ignored Feeney for a moment. Rain, boiling surf and fallen logs were enough to contend with, but he kept his eye on the line of barges. Right now there was a rhythm as they snaked back and forth, but it was constantly interrupted by bits of driftwood and whatever attempt at steering was happening along there in the wheelhouse. Every time the rearmost barge hit the bank there was a moment, one precious little moment, when a man might jump aboard, if that man were foolish.