Discworld 39 - Snuff Read online

  “Who can imagine his joy when the inevitable apple fell and a second apple was seen rising from the tree and disappearing at speed into the vaults of heaven, proving the hypothesis that what goes up must come down, provided that what goes down must come up, thus safeguarding the equilibrium of the Universe. Regrettably, this only works with apples and, amazingly, only the apples on this one tree, Malus equilibria! I hear someone has worked out that the apples at the top of the tree fill with gas and fly up when the tree is disturbed so that it can set its seeds some way off. Wonderful thing, nature, shame the fruit tastes like dog’s business,” Willikins added as Young Sam spat some out. “To tell you the truth, commander, I wouldn’t give you tuppence for a lot of the upper classes I’ve met, especially in the city, but some of them in these old country houses changed the world for the better. Like Turnip Ramkin, who revolutionized agriculture … .”

  “I think I’ve heard of him,” said Vimes. “Wasn’t he something to do with planting root crops? Wasn’t that how he got his nickname?”

  “Very nearly right, sir,” said Willikins. “In fact, he invented the seed drill, which meant more reliable crops and a great saving in seed corn. He only looked like a turnip. People can be so cruel sometimes, sir. There was also his brother, ‘Rubber Ramkin,’ who devised not only rubber boots but also rubberized fabric, even before the dwarfs did. Very interested indeed in rubber, so I heard, but it takes all sorts to make a world and it would be a funny old place if we were all the same, and especially if we were all like him. Dry feet and dry shoulders, sir, what every farmworker prays for! I did a spell cutting cabbages one winter, sir, weather as cold as charity and rain coming down so fast it had to queue up to hit the ground. I blessed his name then, so I did, even if it was true what they said about the young ladies, who I heard actually enjoyed the experience … .”

  “This is all very well,” said Vimes, “but it doesn’t make up for all the stupid, arrogant—”

  This time it was Willikins who interrupted his master. “And then there was the flying machine, of course. Her ladyship’s late brother put a lot of work into the project, but it never got off the ground. Flying without a broomstick or a magic spell was his goal, but regrettably he fell victim to the outbreak of crisms, poor lad. There’s a model of it in the nursery, as a matter of fact. It runs on rubber bands.”

  “I expect there was plenty of material around the place, unless Rubber Ramkin tidied up after himself,” said Vimes.

  The tour continued, across meadows of what Vimes decided to call cows and around fields of standing corn. They navigated their way around a ha-ha, kept their distance from the ho-ho and completely ignored the he-he, then climbed a gentle path up a hill on which was planted a grove of beech trees and from which you could see practically everywhere, and certainly to the end of the universe, but that probably involved looking straight up with no beech trees in the way. It was even possible to make out the tall cloud of smoke and fumes that rose from the city of Ankh-Morpork.

  “This is Hangman’s Hill,” said Willikins, as Vimes got his breath back. “And you might not want to go any further,” he said as they neared the summit, “unless, that is, you want to explain to your young lad what a gibbet is.”

  Vimes looked questioningly at his servant. “Really?”

  “Well, as I say, this is Hangman’s Hill. Why do you think they named it that, sir? ‘Black Jack’ Ramkin was regrettably mistaken when he made an enormous drunken wager with one of his equally drunk drinking pals that he could see the smoke of the city from his estate. He was told by a surveyor, who had tested the hypothesis, that the hill was thirty feet too short. Pausing only to attempt to bribe the surveyor and when unsuccessful to subsequently horsewhip the same, he rallied all the working men from this estate and all the others round here and set them to raise the hill by the aforesaid thirty feet, a most ambitious project. It cost a fortune, of course, but every family in the district probably got warm winter clothes and new boots out of it. It made him very popular, and of course he won his bet.”

  Vimes sighed. “Somehow I think I know the answer to this, but I’m going to ask anyway: how much was the bet?”

  “Two gallons of brandy,” said Willikins triumphantly, “which he drank in one go while standing on this very spot, to the cheers of the assembled workforce, and then, according to legend, rolled all the way down to the bottom, to more cheers.”

  “Even when I was a boozer I don’t think I could have taken two gallons of brandy,” said Vimes. “That’s twelve bottles!”

  “Well, toward the end I expect a lot of it went down his trousers, one way or the other. There were plenty like him, even so … .”

  “All down his trousers,” Young Sam piped up, and dissolved into that curious hoarse laughter of a six-year-old who thinks he has heard something naughty. And by the sound of it the workmen who had cheered the old drunk had thought the same way. Cheering a man drinking a year’s wages in one go? What was the point?

  Willikins must have read his thoughts. “The country isn’t as subtle as the city, commander. They like big and straightforward things here, and Black Jack was as big and as straight as you could hope for. That’s why they liked him, because they knew where they stood, even if he was about to fall down. I bet they boasted about him all over the Shires. I can just imagine it. Our drunken old lord can outdrink your drunken old lord any day of the week, and they would be proud of it. I’m sure you thought you were doing the right thing when you shook hands with the gardener, but you puzzled people. They don’t know what to make of you. Are you a man or a master? Are you a nob or one of them? Because, commander, from where they sit no man can be both. It would be against nature. And the countryside doesn’t like puzzles, either.”

  “Big puzzled trousers!” said Young Sam and fell on the grass, overwhelmed with humor.

  “I don’t know what to make of me either,” said Vimes, picking up his son and following Willikins down the slope. “But Sybil does. She’s got me marked down for balls, dances, dinners, and, oh yes, soirées,” he finished, in the tones of a man genetically programmed to distrust any word with an acute accent in it. “I mean, that sort of thing in the city I’ve come to terms with. If I reckon that it’s going to be too bloody dreadful I make certain I get called out in an emergency halfway through—at least I used to, before Sybil twigged on. It’s a terrible thing when a man’s employees take their orders from his wife, you know?”

  “Yes, commander. She has given the kitchen staff orders that no bacon sandwiches are to be prepared without her express permission.”

  Vimes winced. “You brought the little cookery kit, didn’t you?”

  “Unfortunately, her ladyship knows about our little cookery kit, commander. She has forbidden the kitchen to give me bacon unless the order comes directly from her.”

  “Honestly, she’s as bad as Vetinari! How does she find out all this stuff?”

  “As a matter of fact, commander, I don’t think she does, at least as an actual fact. She just knows you. Perhaps you should think of it as amiable suspicion. We should be getting along, commander. I’m told there is chicken salad for lunch.”

  “Do I like chicken salad?”

  “Yes, commander, her ladyship tells me that you do.”

  Vimes gave in. “Then I do.”

  Back in Scoone Ave
nue, Vimes and Sybil generally took only one meal a day together, in the kitchen, which was always pleasantly snug by then. They sat facing one another at the table, which was long enough to carry Vimes’s huge collection of sauce bottles, mustard pots, pickles and, of course, chutneys, Vimes being of the popular persuasion that no jar of pickles is ever truly empty if you rattle the spoon around inside it long enough.

  Things were different at the Hall. For one thing there was far too much food. Vimes had not been born yesterday, or even the day before, and refrained from commenting.

  Willikins served Vimes and Lady Sybil. Strictly speaking it wasn’t his job while they were away from home, but strictly speaking most gentlemen’s gentlemen didn’t carry a set of brass knuckles in their well-cut jacket either.

  “And what did you boys do this morning?” said Sybil cheerfully, as the plates were emptied.

  “We saw the stinky bone man!” said Young Sam. “He was like all beard, but stinky! And we found the smelly apple tree which is like poo!”

  Lady Sybil’s placid expression did not change. “And then you came down the roly-poly hill, didn’t you? And what about the ha-ha, the ho-ho and the he-he?”

  “Yes, but there’s all cow poo! I treaded in it!” Young Sam waited for an adult response, and his mother said, “Well, you’ve got your new country boots, haven’t you? Treading in cow poo is what they’re for.”

  Sam Vimes watched his son’s face glow with impossible pleasure as his mother went on. “Your grandfather always told me that if I saw a big pile of muck in a field I should kick it around a bit so as to spread it evenly, because that way all the grass will grow properly.” She smiled at Vimes’s expression and said, “Well, it’s true, dear. A lot of farming is about manure.”

  “Just so long as he understands that he doesn’t start kicking up the gutters when he gets back to the city,” Vimes said. “Some of that stuff will kick back.”

  “He should learn about the countryside. He should know where food comes from and how we get it. This is important, Sam!”

  “Of course, dear.”

  Lady Sybil gave her husband a look only a wife can give. “That was your put-upon-but-dutiful voice, Sam.”

  “Yes, but I don’t see—”

  Sybil interrupted him. “Young Sam will own all this one day and I’d like him to have some idea about it all, just as I’d like you to relax and enjoy your holiday. I’m taking Young Sam over to Home Farm later on, to see the cows being milked, and to collect some eggs.” She stood up. “But first I’m going to take him down to the crypt, to see his ancestors.” She noted her husband’s look of panic and added, quickly, “It’s all right, Sam, they aren’t walking around; they are, in fact, in very expensive boxes. Why don’t you come too?”

  Sam Vimes was no stranger to death, and vice versa. It was the suicides that got him down. They were mostly hangings, because you would have to be extremely suicidal to jump into the River Ankh, not least because you would bounce several times before you broke through the crust. And they all had to be investigated, just in case it was a murder in disguise,** and whereas Mr. Trooper, the current city hangman, could drop someone into eternity so quickly and smoothly that they probably didn’t notice, too often Vimes had seen what amateurs managed to do.

  The Ramkin family crypt reminded him of the city morgue after hours. It was crowded; some coffins were stacked edgewise, as though they were on shelves in the mortuary, but, it was to be hoped, they didn’t slide out. Vimes watched warily as his wife carefully took their son from plaque to plaque reading out the names and explaining a little about every occupant, and he felt the cold, bottomless depths of time around him, somehow breathing from the walls. How could it feel for Young Sam to know the names of all those grandfathers and grandmothers down the centuries? Vimes had never known his father. His mum told him that the man had been run over by a cart, but Vimes suspected that if this was true at all, then it was probably a brewer’s cart, which had “run him over” a bit at a time for years. Oh, of course there was Old Stoneface, the regicide, now rehabilitated and with his own statue in the city which was never graffitied because Vimes had made it clear what would happen to the perpetrator.

  But Old Stoneface was just a point in time, a kind of true myth. There wasn’t a line between him and Sam Vimes, only an aching gulf.

  Still, Young Sam would be a duke one day, and that was a thought worth hanging on to. He wouldn’t grow up worrying about what he was, because he would know, and the influence of his mother might just outweigh the enormous drag factor of having Samuel Vimes as a father. Young Sam would be able to shake up the world the right way. You need confidence to do that, and having a bunch of (apparently) loony but interesting ancestors could only impress the man in the street, and Vimes knew a lot of streets, and a lot of men.

  Willikins hadn’t entirely told the truth. Even city people liked a character, especially a black-hearted one or one interesting enough to materially add to the endless crazy circus show which was the street life of Ankh-Morpork, and while having a drunkard for a father was a social faux pas, having a great-great-great-grandfather who could drink so much brandy that his urine must surely have been inflammable, and then, according to Willikins, proceeded to go home to a meal of turbot followed by roast goose (with appropriate wines) and then played a hand of saddle pork** with his cronies until dawn, winning back his earlier losses … Well, people loved that sort of thing, and that sort of person, who kicked the world in the arse and shouted at it. That was an ancestor to be proud of, surely?

  “I think … I’d like to go for a walk by myself,” said Vimes. “You know, have a look round, poke about a bit, get the hang of this countryside business at my own pace.”

  “Willikins ought to accompany you, dear,” said Lady Sybil, “just in case.”

  “In case of what, my dear? I walk around the streets of the city every night, don’t I? I don’t think I need a chaperone for a stroll in the country, do I? I’m trying to get into the spirit of things. I’ll look at daffodils to see if they fill me with joy, or whatever it is they’re supposed to do, and keep an eye open for the very rare grebe warbler and watch the moles take flight. I’ve been reading the nature notes in the paper for weeks. I think I know how to do this by myself, dear. The commander of the Watch is not afraid to spot the spotted flycatcher!”

  Lady Sybil had learned from experience when it was wise not to argue, and contented herself with saying, “Don’t upset anybody, at least, will you, dear?”

  After ten minutes of walking, Vimes was lost. Not physically lost but metaphorically, spiritually and peripatetically lost. The fragrances of the hedgerows were somehow without body compared with the robust stinks of the city, and he had not the faintest idea what was rustling in the undergrowth. He recognized heifers and bullocks, because he often walked through the slaughterhouse district, but the ones out here weren’t bewildered by fear and stared at him carefully as he walked past as if they were calmly taking notes. Yes—that was it! The world was back to front! He was a copper, he had always been a copper, and he would die a copper. You never stopped being a copper, on the whole, and as a copper he walked around the city more or less invisible, except to those people who make it their business to spot coppers, and whose livelihood depends upon their spotting coppers before coppers spot them. Mostly you were part of the sc
enery, until the scream, the tinkle of broken glass and the sound of felonious footsteps brought you into focus.

  But here everything was watching him. Things darted away behind a hedge, flew up in panic or just rustled suspiciously in the undergrowth. He was the stranger, the interloper, not wanted here.

  He turned another corner, and there was the village. He had seen the chimneys some way off, but the lanes and footpaths criss-crossed one another in a tangle, repeated in the overflowing hedgerows and trees, that made tunnels of shade—which were welcome—and played merry hells with his sense of direction, which was not.

  He had lost all his bearings and was hot and bothered by the time he came out into a long dusty lane with thatched cottages on either side and halfway down a large building which had “pub” written all over it, particularly by the three old men who were sitting on the bench outside it eyeing the approaching Vimes hopefully in case he was the kind of man who would buy another man a pint. They wore clothes that looked as if they had been nailed on. Then, when he got closer, one said something to the other two and they stood up as he passed, index fingers touching their hat brims. One of them said, “Garternoon, yer grace,” a phrase which Vimes interpreted after a little thought. There was also a slight and meaningful tip of the empty tankards to indicate that they were, in fact, empty tankards and therefore an anomaly in need of rectification.