Thud! (Discworld 34)

that. Six o"clock, prompt. Every day. Read to Young Sam. No excuses. He"d promised himself that. No excuses. No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.

He had nightmares about being too late.

He had a lot of nightmares about Young Sam. They involved empty cots, and darkness.

It had all been too ... good. In a few short years he, Sam Vimes, had gone up in the world like a balloon. He was a duke, he commanded the Watch, he was powerful, he was married to a woman whose compassion, love and understanding he knew a man such as he did not deserve, and he was as rich as Creosote. Fortune had rained its gravy, and he"d been the man with the big bowl. And it had all happened so fast.

And then Young Sam had come along. At first it had been fine. The baby was, well, a baby, all lolling head and burping and unfocused eyes, entirely the preserve of his mother. And then, one evening, his son had turned and looked directly at Vimes, with eyes that for his father outshone the lamps of the world, and fear had poured into Sam Vimes"s life in a terrible wave. All this good fortune, all this fierce joy ... it was wrong. Surely the universe could not allow this amount of happiness in one man, not without presenting a bill. Somewhere a big dark wave was cresting, and when it broke over his head it would wash everything away. Some days, he was sure he could hear its distant roar ...

Shouting incoherent thanks, he leapt down as the coach slowed, flailed to stay upright, and skidded into his driveway. The front door was already opening when he raced towards it, scattering gravel, and there was Willikins holding up The Book. Vimes grabbed it and pounded up the stairs as, down in the city, the clocks began to mark various approximations to the hour of six o"clock.

Sybil had been adamant about not having a nursemaid. Vimes, for once, had been even more adamant that they get one, and a head cavern girl for the pedigree dragon pens outside. A body could

only do so much, after all. He"d won. Purity, who seemed a decent type, had just finished settling Young Sam into his cot when Vimes staggered in. She gave him about one third of a curtsy before she caught his pained expression and remembered last week"s impromptu lecture on the Rights of Man, and then she hurried out. It was important that no one else was here. This moment in time was just for the Sams.

Young Sam pulled himself up against the cot"s rails, and said, "Da!" The world went soft.

Vimes stroked his son"s hair. It was funny, really. He spent the day yelling and shouting and talking and bellowing ... but here, in this quiet time smelling (thanks to Purity) of soap, he never knew what to say. He was tongue-tied in the presence of a fourteen-month-old baby. All the things he thought of saying, like "Who"s Daddy"s little boy, then?" sounded horribly false, as though he"d got them from a book. There was nothing to say, nor, in this soft pastel room, anything that needed to be said.

There was a grunt from under the cot. Dribble the dragon was dozing there. Ancient, fireless, with ragged wings and no teeth, he clambered up the stairs every day and took up station under the cot. No one knew why. He made little whistling noises in his sleep.

The happy silence enveloped Vimes, but it couldn"t last. There was The Reading Of The Picture Book to be undertaken. That was the meaning of six o"clock.

It was the same book, every day. The pages of said book were rounded and soft where Young Sam had chewed them, but to one person in this nursery this was the book of books, the greatest story ever told. Vimes didn"t need to read it any more. He knew it by heart.

It was called Where"s My Cow?

The unidentified complainant had lost their cow. That was the story, really.

Page one started promisingly:

Where"s my cow?

Is that my cow?

It goes, "Baa!"

It is a sheep! That"s not my cow!

Then the author began to get to grips with their material:

Where"s my cow?

Is that my cow?

It goes, "Neigh!"

It is a horse! That"s not my cow!

At this point the author had reached an agony of creation and was writing from the racked depths of their soul.

Where"s my cow?

Is that my cow?

It goes, "Hruuugh!"

It is a hippopotamus! That"s not my cow!