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.”