Night Watch (Discworld 29)

'But supposing people get left out?' said Reg.

'There's enough for everyone to eat themselves sick, Reg.' Reg Shoe looked uncertain and disappointed, as though this prospect was less pleasing than carefully rationed scarcity. 'But I'll tell you what,' said Vimes. 'If this goes on, the city will see to it the deliveries come in by other gates. We'll be hungry then. That's when we'll need your organizational skills.'

'You mean we'll be in a famine situation?' said Reg, the light of hope in his eyes. 'If we aren't, Reg, I'm sure you could organize one,' said Vimes, and realized he'd gone just a bit too far. Reg was only stupid in certain areas, and now he looked as though he was going to cry. 'I just think it's important to be fair-' the man began. 'Yeah, Reg. I understand. But there's a time and a place, you know? Maybe the best way to build a bright new world is to peel some spuds in this one? Now, off you go. And you, Lance-Constable Vimes, you go and help him.' Vimes climbed back up the barricade. The city beyond was dark again, with only the occasional chink of light from a shuttered window. By comparison the streets of the Republic were ablaze. In a few hours the shops out there were expecting deliveries, and they weren't going to arrive. The government couldn't sit this one out. A city like Ankh-Morpork was only two meals away from chaos at the best of times. Every day, maybe a hundred cows died for Ankh-Morpork. So did a flock of sheep and a herd of pigs and the gods alone knew how many ducks, chickens and geese. Flour? He'd heard it was eighty tons, and about the same amount of potatoes and maybe twenty tons of herring. He didn't particularly want to know this kind of thing, but once you started having to sort out the everlasting traffic problem these were facts that got handed to you. Every day, forty thousand eggs were laid for the city. Every day, hundreds, thousands of carts and boats and barges converged on the city with fish and honey and oysters and olives and eels and lobsters. And then think of the horses dragging this stuff, and the windmills . . . and the wool coming in, too, every day, the cloth, the tobacco, the spices, the ore, the timber, the cheese, the coal, the fat, the tallow, the hay EVERY DAMN DAY.. . And that was now. Back home, the city was twice as big . . . Against the dark screen of night, Vimes had a vision of Ankh-Morpork. It wasn't a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who'd never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent their life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed . . .

. . . and gave back the dung from its pens and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also clothes, and fashions and ideas and interesting vices, songs and knowledge and something which, if looked at in the right light, was called civilization. That's what civilization meant. It meant the city. Was anyone else out there thinking about this? A lot of the stuff came in through the Onion Gate and the Shambling Gate, both now Republican and solidly locked. There'd be a military picket on them, surely. Right now, there were carts on the way that'd find those gates closed to them. Yet no matter what the politics, eggs hatch and milk sours and herds of driven animals need penning and watering and where was that going to happen? Would the military sort it out? Well, would they? While the carts rumbled up, and then were hemmed in by the carts behind, and the pigs escaped and the cattle herds wandered off? Was anyone important thinking about this? Suddenly the machine was wobbling, but Winder and his cronies didn't think about the machine, they thought about money. Meat and drink came from servants. They happened. Vetinari, Vimes realized, thought about this sort of thing all the time. The Ankh-Morpork back home was twice as big and four times as vulnerable. He wouldn't have let something like this happen. Little wheels must spin so that the machine can turn, he'd say. But now, in the dark, it all spun on Vimes. If the man breaks down, it all breaks down, he thought. The whole machine breaks down. And it goes on breaking down. And it breaks down the people. Behind him, he heard a relief squad marching down Heroes Street. '-how do they rise? They rise knees up! knees up! knees up! They rise knees up, knees up high. All the little angels-' For a moment Vimes wondered, looking out through a gap in the furniture, if there wasn't something in Fred's idea about moving the barricades on and on, like a sort of sieve, street by street. You could let through the decent people, and push the bastards, the rich bullies, the wheelers and dealers in people's fates, the leeches, the hangers-on, the brown-nosers and courtiers and smarmy plump devils in expensive clothes, all those people who didn't know or care about the machine but stole its grease, push them into a smaller and smaller compass and then leave them in there. Maybe you could toss some food in every couple of days, or maybe you could leave 'em to do what they'd always done, which was live off other people . . . There wasn't much noise from the dark streets. Vimes wondered what was going on. He wondered if anyone out there was taking care of business. Major Mountjoy-Standfast stared empty-eyed at the damn, damn map. 'How many, then?' he said. 'Thirty-two men injured, sir. And another twenty probable desertions,' said Captain Wrangle. 'And Big Mary is firewood, of course.'

'Oh gods . . .'

'Do you want to hear the rest, sir?'

'There's more?'

'I'm afraid there is, sir. Before the remains of Big Mary left Heroes Street, sir, she smashed twenty shop windows and various carts, doing damage estimated at-'

'Fortunes of war, captain. We can't help that!'

'No, sir.' The captain coughed. 'Do you want to know what happened next, sir?'

'Next? There was a next?' said the major, beginning to panic. 'Um . . . yes, sir. Quite a lot of next, actually, sir. Um. The three gates through which most of the agricultural produce comes into the city are picketed, sir, on your orders, so the carters and drovers are trying to bring their stuff along Short Street, sir. Fortunately not too many animals at this time of night, sir, but there were six millers' wagons, one wagon of, er, dried fruits and spices, four dairymen's wagons and three hegglers' carts. All wrecked, sir. Those oxen really were very feisty, sir.'

'Hegglers? What the hell are hegglers?' said the major, bewildered. 'Egg marketers, sir. They travel around the farms, pick up the eggs-'

'Yes, all right! And what are we supposed to do?'

'We could make an enormous cake, sir.'

'Tom!'

'Sorry, sir. But the city doesn't stop, you see. It's not like a battlefield. The best place for urban fighting is right out in the countryside, sir, where there's nothing else in the way.'

'It's a bloody big barricade, Tom. Too well defended. We can't even set fire to the damn thing, it'll take the city up with it!'

'Yes, sir. And the point is, sir, that they're not actually doing anything, sir. Except being there.'

'What do you mean?'

'They're even putting old grannies up on the barricades, shouting down to the lads. Poor Sergeant Franklin, sir, his granny saw him and said that if he didn't turn it up she'd tell everyone what he did when he was eleven, sir.'

'The men are armed, aren't they?' said the major, wiping his forehead. 'Oh, yes. But we've kind of advised them not to shoot unarmed old ladies, sir. We don't want another Dolly Sisters, do we, sir?'

The major stared at the map. There was a solution, he felt. 'Well, what did Sergeant Franklin do when he was-' he said absent-mindedly. 'She didn't say, sir.' A sudden feeling of relief stole over the major. 'Captain, you know what this is now?'

'I'm sure you'll tell me, sir.'

'I will, Tom, I will. This is political, Tom. We're soldiers. Political goes higher up.'

'You're right, sir. Well done, sir!'

'Dig out a lieutenant who has been a bit slack lately and send him up to tell their lordships,' said the major. 'Isn't that a bit cruel, sir?'

'Of course it is. This is politics now.' Lord Albert Selachii didn't much like parties. There was too much politics. And he particularly didn't like this one because it meant he was in the same room as Lord Winder, a man who, deep down, he believed to be A Bad Sort. In his personal vocabulary, there was no greater condemnation. What made it worse was that, while seeking to avoid him, he also had to try at the same time to avoid Lord Venturi. Their families cordially detested one another. Lord Albert wasn't sure, now, what event in history had caused the rift, but it must have been important, obviously, otherwise it would be silly to go on like this. Had the Selachii and the Venturi been hill clans, they would have been a-feudin' and a-fightin'; since they were two of the city's leading families they were chillingly, viciously, icily polite to each other whenever social fate forced them together. And right now his careful orbit of the less dangerously political areas of the damn party had brought him face to face with Lord Charles Venturi. It was bad enough having to campaign with the feller, he thought, without being forced to talk to him over some rather inferior wine, but currently the party's tides offered no way of escape without being impolite. And, curiously, upper-class etiquette in Ankh-Morpork held that, while you could snub your friends any time you felt like it, it was the height of bad form to be impolite to your worst enemy. 'Venturi,' he said, raising his glass a carefully calculated fraction of an inch. 'Selachii,' said Lord Venturi, doing the same thing. 'This is a party,' said Albert. 'Indeed. I see you are standing upright.'

'Indeed. So are you, I see.'

'Indeed. Indeed. On that subject, I notice many others are doing the same thing.'

'Which is not to say that the horizontal position does not have its merits when it comes to, for example, sleeping,' said Albert. 'Quite so. Obviously that would not be done here.'