Snuff

by Terry Pratchett

  Now Vimes could hear slow and heavy footsteps in the distance, getting closer. He saw the local men as they arrived in their working clothes and carrying what most people would call agricultural implements, but which Vimes mentally noted as offensive weapons. The troupe stopped outside the door and now he heard whispering. The three Toms were imparting today’s news, apparently, and it seemed to be received with either incredulity or scorn. Some sort of conclusion was being reached, not happily.

  And then the men lurched in, and Vimes’s mind clocked them for ready reference. Exhibit one was an elderly man with a long white beard and, good heavens, a smock. Did they really still wear those? Whatever his name the others probably called him “Granddad.” He shyly touched his forefinger to his forehead in salute and headed for the bar, job safely done. He had been carrying a big hook, not a nice weapon. Exhibit two carried a shovel, which could be an ax or a club if a man knew what he was doing. He was smocked up too, didn’t catch Vimes’s eye, and his salute had been more like a begrudged wave. Exhibit three, who was holding a toolbox (terrific weapon if swung accurately) scurried past with speed and barely glanced in Vimes’s direction. He looked young and rather weedy, but nevertheless you can get a good momentum on one of those boxes. Then there was another elderly man, wearing a blacksmith’s apron, but the wrong build, so Vimes marked him down as a farrier. Yes, that would be it, short and wiry, would easily be able to get under a horse. The man presented a reasonable attempt at a forelock salute, and Vimes was unable to make out any dangerous bulges concealed by the apron. He couldn’t help this algebra; it was what you did when you did the job. Even if you didn’t expect trouble, you, well, expected trouble.

  And then the room froze.

  There had been some desultory conversation in the vicinity of Jiminy but it stopped now as the real blacksmith came in. Bugger. All Vimes’s warning bells rang at once, and they weren’t tinkly bells. They clanged. After a brief glower round the room the man headed for the bar on the course that would take him past, or probably over, or even through Sam Vimes. As it was, Vimes carefully pulled his mug out of harm’s way so that the man’s undisguised attempt to “accidentally” spill it failed.

  “Mr. Jiminy,” Vimes called out, “a round of drinks for these gentlemen, all right?”

  This caused a certain amount of cheerfulness among the other newcomers, but the smith slammed a hand like a shovel down on the wood so that glasses jumped.

  “I don’t care to drink with them as grinds the faces of the poor!”

  Vimes held his gaze, and said, “Sorry, I didn’t bring my grinder with me today.” It was silly, because a couple of sniggers from hopeful drinkers at the bar merely stoked whatever fires the blacksmith had neglected to leave at work, and made him angry.

  “Who are you to think you’re a better man than me?”

  Vimes shrugged, and said, “I don’t know if I am a better man than you.” But he was thinking: you look to me like a big man in a small community, and you think you’re tough because you’re strong and metal doesn’t sneak up behind you and try to kick you in the goolies. Good grief, you don’t even know how to stand right! Even Corporal Nobbs could get you down and be kicking you industriously in the fork before you knew what was happening.

  Like any man fearing that something expensive could get broken, Jiminy came bustling across the floor and grabbed the smith by one arm, saying, “Come on, Jethro, let’s have no trouble. His grace is just having a drink the like of which any man is entitled to…”

  This appeared to work, although aggression smouldered on Jethro’s face and indeed in the surrounding air. By the look on the faces of the other men, this was a performance they were familiar with. It was a poor copper who couldn’t read a pub crowd, and Vimes could probably write a history, with footnotes. Every community has its firebrand, or madman, or self-taught politician. Usually they are tolerated because they add to the gaiety of nations, as it were, and people say things like “It’s just his way,” and the air clears and life goes on. But Jethro, now sitting in the far corner of the bar nursing his pint like a lion huddled over his gazelle, well, Jethro, in the Vimes lexicon of risk, was a man likely to explode. Of course the world sometimes needed blowing up, just so long as it didn’t happen where Vimes was drinking.

  Vimes was becoming aware that the pub was filling up, mostly with other sons of the soil, but also with people who, whether they were gentlemen or not, would expect to be called so. They wore colorful caps and white trousers and spoke continuously.

  There was also further activity outside; horses and carriages were filling the lane. Hammering was going on somewhere and Jiminy’s wife was now manning or, more correctly, womaning the bar while her husband ran back and forth with his tray. Jethro remained in his corner like a man biding his time, occasionally glaring daggers, and probably fists as well with an option on boots, if Vimes so much as looked at him.

  Vimes decided to take a look out of the grubby pub window. Regrettably, the pub was that most terrifying of things, picturesque, which meant that the window consisted of small round panes fixed in place with lead. They were for letting the light in, not for looking out of, since they bent light so erratically that it nearly broke. One pane showed what was probably a sheep but which looked like a white whale, until it moved, when it became a mushroom. A man walked past with no head until he reached another pane and then had one enormous eyeball. Young Sam would have loved it, but his father decided to give eventual blindness a miss and stepped out into the sunshine.

  Ah, he thought, some kind of game.

  Oh well.

  Vimes wasn’t keen on games because they led to crowds, and crowds led to work for coppers. But here in fact he wasn’t a copper, was he? It was a strange feeling, so he left the pub and became an innocent bystander. He couldn’t remember when he had been one before. It felt…vulnerable. He strolled over to the nearest man, who was hammering some stakes into the ground, and asked, “What’s going on here, then?” Realizing that he had spoken in copper rather than in ordinary citizen, he added quickly, “If you don’t mind me asking?”

  The man straightened up. He was one of the ones with the colorful caps. “Haven’t you ever seen a game of crockett, sir? It’s the game of games!”

  Mr. Civilian Vimes did his best to look like a man eager for more delicious information. Judging by his informant’s enthusiastic grin, he was about to learn the rules of crockett, whether he wanted to or not. Well, he thought, I did ask…

  “At first sight, sir, Crockett might seem like just another ball game wherein two sides strive against one another by endeavoring to propel the ball by hand or bat or other device into the opponents’ goal of some sort. Crockett, however, was invented during a game of croquet at St. Onan’s Theological College in Ham-on-Rye, when the novice priest Jackson Fieldfair, now the Bishop of Quirm, took his mallet in both hands, and instead of giving the ball a gentle tap…”

  After that Vimes gave up, not only because the rules of the game were incomprehensible in their own right, but also because the extremely enthusiastic young man allowed his enthusiasm to overtake any consideration of the need to explain things in some sensible order, which meant that the flood of information was continually punctuated by apologetic comments on the lines of “I’m sorry, I should have explained earlier that a second cone is not allowed more than once per exchange, and in normal play there is only one tump, unless, of course, you’re talking about royal crockett…”

  Vimes died…The sun dropped out of the sky, giant lizards took over the world, the stars exploded and went out and all hope vanished with a gurgle into the sink-trap of oblivion, and gas filled the firmament and combusted and behold there was a new heaven, one careful owner, and a new disc, and lo, and possibly verily, life crawled out of the sea, or possibly didn’t because it had been made by the gods—that was really up to the bystander—and lizards turned into less scaly lizards, or possibly did not, and lizards turned into birds, and worms turned in
to butterflies, and a species of apple turned into bananas, and possibly a kind of monkey fell out of a tree and realized that life was better when you didn’t have to spend your time hanging onto something, and, in only a few million years, evolved trousers and ornamental stripy hats and lastly the game of crockett and there, magically reincarnated, was Vimes, a little dizzy, standing on the village green looking into the smiling countenance of an enthusiast.

  He managed to say, “Well, that’s amazing, thank you so very much. I look forward to enjoying the game.” At which point, he thought, a brisk walk home might be in order, only to be foiled by a regrettably familiar voice behind him saying, “You, I say you, yes, you! Aren’t you Vimes?”

  It was Lord Rust, usually of Ankh-Morpork, and a fierce old warhorse, without whose unique grasp of strategy and tactics several wars would not have been so bloodily won. Now he was in a wheelchair, a newfangled variety pushed by a man, whose life was, knowing his lordship, quite probably unbearable.

  But hatred tends not to have a long half-life and in recent years Vimes had regarded the man as now no more than a titled idiot, rendered helpless by age, yet still possessed of an annoying horsy voice that, suitably harnessed, might be used to saw down trees. Lord Rust was not a problem anymore. There were surely only a few more years to go before he would rust in peace. And somewhere in his knobbly heart Vimes still retained a slight admiration for the cantankerous old butcher, with his evergreen self-esteem and absolute readiness not to change his mind about anything at all. The old boy had reacted to the fact that Vimes, the hated policeman, was now a duke, and therefore a lot more nobby than he was, by simply assuming that this could not possibly be true, and therefore totally ignoring it. Lord Rust, in Vimes’s book, was a dangerous buffoon but, and here was the difficult bit, an incredibly, if suicidally, brave one. This would have been absolutely ticketyboo were it not for the suicides of those poor fools who followed him into battle.

  Witnesses had said that it was uncanny: Rust would gallop into the jaws of death at the head of his men and was never seen to flinch, yet arrows and morningstars always missed him while invariably hitting the men right behind him. Bystanders—or rather people peering at the battle from behind comfortingly large rocks—had testified to this. Perhaps he was capable of ignoring, too, the arrows meant for him. But age could not be so easily upstaged, and the old man, while no less arrogant, had a sunken look.

  Rust, most unusually, smiled at Vimes and said, “First time I’ve ever seen you down here, Vimes. Is Sybil going back to her roots, what?”

  “She wants Young Sam to get some mud on his boots, Rust.”

  “Well done, her, what! It’ll do the boy good and make a man of him, what!”

  Vimes never understood where the explosive whats came from. After all, he thought, what’s the point of just barking out “What!” for absolutely no discernible reason? And as for, “What what!” well, what was that all about? Why what? Whats seemed to be tent-pegs hammered into the conversation, but what the hells for, what?

  “So not down here on any official business, then, what?”

  Vimes’s mind spun so quickly that Rust should have heard the wheels go round. It analyzed the tone of voice, the look of the man, that slight, ever so slight but nevertheless perceptible hint of a hope that the answer would be “no,” and presented him with a suggestion that it might not be a bad idea to drop a tiny kitten among the pigeons.

  He laughed. “Well, Rust, Sybil has been banging on about coming down here since Young Sam was born, and this year she put her foot down and I suppose an order from his wife must be considered official, when!” Vimes saw the man who pushed the enormous wheelchair trying to conceal a smile, especially when Rust responded with a baffled “What?”

  Vimes decided not to go with “Where” and instead said, in an offhand way, “Well, you know how it is, Lord Rust. A policeman will find a crime anywhere if he decides to look hard enough.”

  Lord Rust’s smile remained, but it had congealed slightly as he said, “I should listen to the advice of your good lady, Vimes. I don’t think you’ll find anything worth your mettle down here!” There was no “what” to follow, and the lack of it was somehow an emphasis.

  It was often a good idea, Vimes had always found, to give the silly bits of the brain something to do, so that they did not interfere with the important ones which had a proper job to fulfil. So he watched his first game of crockett for a full half-hour before an internal alarm told him that shortly he should be back at the Hall in time to read to Young Sam—something that with any luck did not have poo mentioned on every page—and tuck him into bed before dinner.

  His prompt arrival got a nod of approval from Sybil, who gingerly handed him a new book to read to Young Sam.

  Vimes looked at the cover. The title was The World of Poo. When his wife was out of eyeshot he carefully leafed through it. Well, okay, you had to accept that the world had moved on and these days fairy stories were probably not going to be about twinkly little things with wings. As he turned page after page, it dawned on him that whoever had written this book, they certainly knew what would make kids like Young Sam laugh until they were nearly sick. The bit about sailing down the river almost made him smile. But interspersed with the scatology was actually quite interesting stuff about septic tanks and dunnakin divers and gongfermors and how dog muck helped make the very best leather, and other things that you never thought you would need to know, but once heard somehow lodged in your mind.

  Apparently it was by the author of Wee and if Young Sam had one vote for the best book ever written, then it would go to Wee. His enthusiasm was perhaps fanned all the more because a rare imp of mischief in Vimes led him to do all the necessary straining noises.

  Later, over dinner, Sybil quizzed him about his afternoon. She was particularly interested when he mentioned stopping by to watch the crockett.

  “Oh they still play it? That’s wonderful! How did it go?”

  Vimes put down his knife and fork and stared thoughtfully at the ceiling for a moment or two, then said, “Well, I was talking to Lord Rust for some of the time, and I had to leave, of course, because of Young Sam, but fortune favored the priests, when their striker managed to tump a couple of the farmers by a crafty use of the hamper. There were several appeals to the hat man about this, because he broke his mallet in so doing, and in my opinion the hat man’s decision was entirely correct, especially since the farmers had played a hawk maneuver.” He took a deep breath. “When play recommenced, the farmers still had not found their stride but got a breathing space when a sheep wandered onto the pitch and the priests, assuming that this would stop play, relaxed too soon, and Higgins J. fired a magnificent handsaw under the offending ruminant…”

  Sybil finally stopped him when she realized that the meal was growing very cold, and said, “Sam! How did you become an expert on the noble game of crockett?”

  Vimes picked up his knife and fork. “Please don’t ask me again,” he sighed. In his head meanwhile a little voice said, Lord Rust tells me there is nothing here for me. Oh dear, I’d better find out what it is, what?

  He cleared his throat and said, “Sybil, did you actually look at that book I’m reading to Young Sam?”

  “Yes, dear. Felicity Beedle is the most famous children’s writer in the world. She’s been at it for years. She wrote Melvin and the Enormous Boil, Geoffrey and the Magic Pillow Case, The Little Duckling Who Thought He Was an Elephant…”

  “Did she write one about an elephant who thought he was a duckling?”

  “No, Sam, because that would be silly. Oh, she also wrote Daphne and the Nose Pickers and Gaston’s Enormous Problem won for her the Gladys H. J. Ferguson award—the fifth time she’s been given it. She gets children interested in reading, you see?”

  “Yes,” said Vimes, “but they’re reading about poo and brain-dead ducklings!”

  “Sam, that’s part of the commonality of mankind, so don’t be so prudish. Young Sam’s a coun
try boy now, and I’m very proud of him, and he likes books. That’s the whole point! Miss Beedle also finances scholarships for the Quirm College for Young Ladies. She must be quite wealthy now, but I hear she’s taken Apple Tree Cottage—you can practically see it from here, it’s on the side of the hill—and I think it right, if you don’t mind, of course, that we invite her here to the Hall.”

  “Of course,” said Vimes, though his dontmindedness was entirely due to the way his wife’s question had been phrased and the subtle resonances that Miss Beedle’s attendance was a done deal.

  Vimes slept a lot better that night, partly because he could feel that somewhere in the universe nearby there was a clue waiting for him to pull. That made his fingers itch already.

  In the morning, as he had promised, he took Young Sam horse riding. Vimes could ride, but hated doing so. Nevertheless, falling off the back of a pony onto one’s head was a skill that every young man should learn if only so that he resolved never to do it again.

  The rest of the day, however, did not work out well. Vimes, suspicions filling his mind, was metaphorically and only just short of literally dragged by Sybil to see her friend Ariadne, the lady blessed with the six daughters. In actual fact there were only five visible in the chintzy drawing room when Sybil and he were ushered in. He was feted as “the Dear Brave Commander Vimes”—he hated that shit, but under Sybil’s benign but careful gaze he was wise enough not to say so, at least not in those precise words. And so he grinned and bore it while they fluttered around him like large moths, and he waved away yet more teacakes, and cups of tea that would have been welcome were it not that they looked and tasted like what proper tea turns into shortly after you drink it. As far as Sam Vimes was concerned, he liked tea, but tea was not tea if, even before drinking, you could see the bottom of the cup.

  Still worse than the stuff he was being offered was the conversation, which inclined toward bonnets, a subject on which his ignorance was not just treasured but venerated. And besides, his breeches were chafing: wretched things, but Sybil had insisted, saying that he looked very smart in them, just like a country gentleman. Vimes had to suppose that country gentleman had different arrangements in the groinal department.