Jingo (30 page)

“That works, does it?”

“Never fails, sarge,” said Nobby confidently.

The desert looked like snow in the moonlight.

Vimes found himself quite at ease with the Tacticus method of fighting. It was how coppers had always fought. A proper copper didn’t line up with a lot of other coppers and rush at people. A copper lurked in the shadows, walked quietly and bided his time. In all honesty, of course, the time he bided until was the point when the criminal had already
committed
the crime and was carrying the loot. Otherwise, what was the point? You had to be realistic. “We got the man what done it” carries a lot more gravitas than “We got the man what looked as if he was going to do it,” especially when people say, “Prove it.”

Somewhere off to the left, in the distance, someone screamed.

Vimes was a bit uneasy in this robe, though. It was like going into battle in a nightshirt.

Because he wasn’t at all certain he could kill a man who wasn’t actively trying to kill
him
. Of course,
technically
any armed Klatchian these days was actively trying to kill him. That was what war was about. But—

He raised his head over the top of the dune. A Klatchian warrior was looking the other way. Vimes crept—

“Bingeley-bingeley beep! This is your seven eh em alarm call, Insert Name Here! At least I hope—”

“Huh?”

“
Damn
!”

Vimes reacted first and punched the man on the nose. Since there was no point in waiting to see what effect this would have, he threw himself forward and the two of them rolled down the other side of the freezing dune, struggling and punching.

“—but my real-time function seems erratic at the moment—”

The Klatchian was smaller than Vimes. He was younger, too. But it was unfortunate for him that he appeared to be too young to have learned the repertoire of dirty fighting that spelled survival in Ankh-Morpork’s back streets. Vimes, on the other hand, was prepared to hit anything
with
anything. The point was that the opponent shouldn’t get up again. Everything else was decoration.

They slid to a halt at the bottom of the dune, with Vimes on top and the Klatchian groaning.

“Things To Do,” the Dis-organizer shrilled: “Ache.”

And then…It was probably throat cutting time. Back home Vimes could have dragged him off to the cells, in the knowledge that everything would look better in the morning, but the desert had no such options.

No, he couldn’t do that. Thump the bloke senseless. That was the merciful way.

“Vindaloo! Vindaloo!”

Vimes’s fist stayed raised.

“What?”

“That’s you, isn’t it? Mr. Vimes? Vindaloo!”

Vimes pulled a fold of cloth away from the figure’s face.

“Are you
Goriff
’s boy?”

“I didn’t want to be here, Mr. Vimes!” The words came fast, desperate.

“All right, all right, I’m not going to hurt you…”

Vimes lowered his fist and stood up, pulling the boy up after him.

“Talk later,” he muttered. “Come on!”

“No! Everyone knows what the D’regs do to their captives!”

“Well
I’m
their captive and they’ll have to do it to both of us, okay? Keep away from the more amusing food and you’ll probably be okay.”

Someone whistled in the darkness.

“Come
on
, lad!” hissed Vimes. “No harm’s going to come to you! Well…less than’d come if you stayed here. All right?”

This time he didn’t give the boy time to argue, but dragged him along. As he headed toward the D’regs’ camp, other figures slid down the dunes.

One of them had an arm missing and had a sword sticking in him.

“How did you get on, Reg?” said Vimes.

“A bit odd, sir. After the first one chopped my arm off and stabbed me, the rest of them seemed to keep out of my way. Honestly, you’d think they’d never seen a man stabbed before.”

“Did you
find
your arm?”

Reg waved something in the air.

“That’s another thing,” he said. “I hit a few of them with it and they ran off screaming.”

“It’s your type of unarmed combat,” said Vimes. “It probably takes some getting used to.”

“Is that a prisoner you’ve got there?”

“In a way.” Vimes glanced around. “He seems to have fainted. I can’t think why.”

Reg leaned closer. “These foreigners are a bit weird,” he said.

“Reg?”

“Yes?”

“Your ear’s hanging off.”

“Is it? Wretched thing. You’d think a nail would work, wouldn’t you?”

Sergeant Colon looked up at the stars. They looked down at him. At least Fred Colon had a choice.

Beside him, Corporal Nobbs gave a groan. But the attackers had left him his pants. There are some places where the boldest dare not go, and those areas of Nobby upward of the knees and downward of the stomach were among them.

Well, Colon thought of them as attackers. Technically, he supposed they were defenders. Aggressive defenders.

“Just run all that past me again, will you?” he said.

“We find a couple of blokes about our height and weight—”

“We did that.”

“We lure them into this alley—”

“We did that.”

“I take a swing at them with a length of wood and hit you by accident in the dark and they get angry and turn out to be thieves and nick all our clothes.”

“We weren’t supposed to do that.”

“Well it worked
basically
,” said Nobby, managing to get to his knees. “We could give it another go.”

“Nobby, you’re in a port in a foreign city clad only in your, and I use this word with feeling, Nobby, your unmentionables. This is not the point to start talking about luring people into alleys. There could be talk.”

“Angua always says that nakedness is the national costume everywhere, sarge.”

“She was talking about herself, Nobby,” said Colon, sidling along in the shadows. “It’s different for you.”

He peered around the other end of the alley. There was noise and chatter from the building that formed one of the walls. A couple of laden donkeys waited patiently outside.

“Nip out and grab one of those packs, right?”

“Why me, sarge?”

“’cos you’re the corporal and I’m the sergeant. And you’ve got more on than me.”

Grumbling under his breath, Nobby edged into the narrow street and unfastened a tether as fast as he could. The animal followed him obediently.

Sergeant Colon pulled at the pack.

“If push comes to shove we can wear the sacks,” he said. “That’ll—What’s this?”

He held up something red.

“Flowerpot?” said Nobby helpfully.

“It’s a fez! Some Klatchians wear ’em. Looks like we’ve struck lucky. Whoops, here’s another one. Try it on, Nobby. And…looks like one of them nightshirts they wear…and here’s another one of those, too. We’re home and dry, Nobby.”

“They’re a bit short, sarge.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” said Colon, struggling into the costume. “Go on, put your fez on.”

“It makes me look like a twit, sarge.”

“Look, I’ll put mine on, all right?”

“Then we’ll be fez to fez, sarge.”

Sergeant Colon gave him a severe look. “Did you have that one prepared, Nobby?”

“No, sarge, I just made it up in my head right then.”

“Well, look, no calling me sarge. That doesn’t sound Klatchian.”

“Nor does Nobby, sa—Sorry…”

“Oh, I dunno…you could be…Knobi…or Nhobi…or Gnobbee…Sounds pretty Klatchian to me.”

“What’s a good Klatchian name for you, then? I don’t know hardly any,” said Nhobi.

Sergeant Colon didn’t answer. He was peering round the corner again.

“His lordship did say we was not to hang about,” Nobby murmured.

“Yeah, but inside that tin can, well, it smells pretty
lived-in
, if you know what I mean. What I wouldn’t give for—”

There was a bellow behind them. They turned.

There were three Klatchian soldiers. Or possibly watchmen. Nobby and Sergeant Colon didn’t look much further than the swords.

The leader growled a question at them.

“What did he say?” Nobby quavered.

“Dunno!”

“Where you from?” said the leader, in Morporkian.

“What? Oh…er…” Colon hesitated, waiting for shiny death.

“Hah, yes.” The guard lowered his sword and jerked a thumb toward the docks. “You get back to your detachment now!”

“Right!” said Nobby.

“What your name?” one of the guards demanded.

“Nhobi,” said Nobby. This seemed to pass.

“And you, fat one?”

Colon was panicking on the spot. He sought desperately for any name that sounded Klatchian, and there was only one that presented itself and which was absolutely and authentically Klatchian.

“Al,” he said, his knees trembling.

“You get back right now or there will be trouble!”

The watchmen ran for it, dragging the donkey behind them, and didn’t stop until they were on the greasy jetty, which somehow felt like home.

“What was that all about, s—Al?” said Nobby. “All they wanted to do was push us around a bit! Typical Watch behavior,” he added. “Not ours, of course.”

“I suppose we had the right clothes on…”

“You didn’t even tell them where we came from!
And
they spoke our language!”

“Well, they…I mean…
anyone
ought to be able to speak Morporkian,” said Colon, gradually regaining his mental balance. “Even babies learn it. I bet it comes easy after learning somethin’ as complicated as Klatchian.”

“What’re we going to do with the donkey, Al?”

“Do you think it can pedal?”

“I doubt it.”

“Then leave it up here.”

“But it’ll get pinched, Al.”

“Oh, these Klatchians’ll pinch anything.”

“Not like us, eh, Al?”

Nobby looked at the forest of masts filling the bay.

“Looks like even more of ’em from here,” he said. “You could walk from boat to boat for a mile. What’re they all here for?”

“Don’t be daft, Nobby. It’s obvious. They’re to take everyone to Ankh-Morpork!”

“What for? We don’t eat that much cur—”

“
Invasion
, Nobby! There’s a war on, remember?”

They looked back at the ships. Riding lights gleamed on the water.

The bit of it that was immediately below them bubbled for a moment, and then the hull of the Boat rose a few inches above the surface. The lid unscrewed and Leonard’s worried face appeared.

“Ah, there you are,” he said. “We were getting concerned…”

They lowered themselves down into the fetid interior of the vessel.

Lord Vetinari was sitting with a pad of paper across his knees, writing carefully. He glanced up briefly.

“Report.”

Nobby fidgeted while Sergeant Colon delivered a more or less accurate account, although there was some witty repartee with the Klatchian guards that the corporal had not hitherto recalled.

Vetinari did not look up. Still writing, he said, “Sergeant, Ur is an old country Rimward of the kingdom of Djelibeybi, whose occupants are a byword for bucolic stupidity. For some reason, I cannot think why, the guard must have assumed you were from there. And Morporkian is something of a lingua franca even in the Klatchian empire. When someone from Hersheba needs to trade with someone from Istanzia, they will undoubtedly haggle in Morporkian. This will serve us well, of course. The force that is being assembled here must mean that practically every man is a distant stranger with outlandish ways. Provided we do not act
too
foreign, we should pass muster. This means not asking for curry with swede and currants in it and refraining from ordering pints of Winkle’s Old Peculiar, do I make myself clear?”

“Er…what is it we’re going to
do
, sir?”

“We will reconnoiter initially.”

“Ah, right. Yes. Very important.”

“And then seek out the Klatchian high command. Thanks to Leonard I have a little…package to deliver. I hope it will end the war very quickly.”

Sergeant Colon looked blank. At some point in the last few seconds the conversation had run away with him.

“Sorry, sir…you said high command, sir.”

“Yes, sergeant.”

“Like…the top brass, or turbans or whatever…all surrounded by crack troops, sir. That’s where you always put the best troops, around the top brass.”

“I expect this will be the case, yes. In fact, I rather hope it is.”

Sergeant Colon, once again, tried to keep up.

“Ah. Right. And we’ll go and look for them, will we, sir?”

“I can hardly ask them to come to us, sergeant.”

“Right, sir. I can see that. It could get a bit crowded.”

At last, Lord Vetinari looked up.

“Is there some problem, sergeant?”

And Sergeant Colon once again knew a secret about bravery. It was arguably a kind of enhanced cowardice—the knowledge that while death
may
await you if you advance it will be a picnic compared to the
certain
living hell that awaits should you retreat.

“Er…not as such, sir,” he said.

“Very well.” Vetinari pushed his paperwork aside. “If there is more suitable clothing in your bag, I will get changed and we can take a look at Al-Khali.”

“Oh, gods…”

“Sorry, sergeant?”

“Oh, good, sir.”

“Good.” Vetinari began to pull other items out of the liberated sack. There was a set of juggler’s clubs, a bag of colored balls and finally a placard, such as might be placed to one side of the stage during an artist’s performance.

“‘Gulli, Gulli and Beti,’” he read. “‘Exotic tricks and dances.’ Hmm,” he added. “It would seem there was a lady among the owners of this sack.”

The watchmen looked at the gauzy material that came out of the sack next. Nobby’s eyes bulged.

“What are
them
?”

“I believe they are called harem pants, corporal.”

“They’re very—”

“Curiously, the purpose of the clothing of the nautch girl or exotic dancer has always been less to reveal and more to suggest the
imminence
of revelation,” said the Patrician.

Nobby looked down at his costume, and then at Sergeant Al-Colon in
his
costume, and said cheerfully, “Well, I ain’t sure it’s going to suit you, sir.”

He regretted the words immediately.

“I hadn’t intended that they should suit
me
,” said the Patrician calmly. “Please pass me your fez, Corporal Beti.”

The subtle, deceiving dawn-before-dawn slid over the desert, and the commander of the Klatchian detachment wasn’t happy about it.

The D’regs always attacked at dawn. All of them. It didn’t matter how many of them there were, or how many of you there were. Anyway, the whole tribe attacked. It wasn’t just the women and children, but the camels, goats, sheep and chickens, too. Of course you were expecting them and bows could cut them down, but…they always appeared suddenly, as if even the desert had spat them out. Get it wrong, be too slow, and you’d be hacked, kicked, butted, pecked and viciously spat at.