A certain realization dawned on him.
‘Oh,’ he said. yes, said Death.
‘Not even time to finish my cake?’
No. there is no more time, even for cake. for you, the cake
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IS OVER. YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF CAKE.
A grapnel thudded into the wall beside Vimes. There were shouts along the barricade. More hooks snaked up and bit into the wood.
Another rain of arrows clattered on the roofs of the houses.
The attackers weren’t ready to risk hitting their own side, but arrows were snapping and bouncing in the street below. Vimes heard shouts, and the clang of arrows on armour.
A sound made him turn. A helmeted head rose level with his and the face beneath it blanched in terror when it saw Vimes.
‘That was my egg, you bastard!’ he screamed, punching the nose. ‘With soldiers!’
The man fell back, by the sound of it, on to other climbers.
Men were yelling all along the parapet.
Vimes pulled out his truncheon. ‘At ’em, lads,’ he yelled.
“Truncheons! Nothing fancy! Bop ’em on the fingers and let gravity do the work! They’re goin’ down!’
He ducked, pressing close to the wood, and tried to find a spyhole-
‘They’re using big catapults,’ said Sandra, who’d found a gap a few feet away. There’s a-‘
Vimes pulled her away. ‘What are you doing still up here?’ he roared.
‘It’s safer than the street!’ she yelled back, nose to nose with him.
‘Not if one of those grapnels hits you it isn’t!’ He grabbed his knife. ‘Here, take this… you see a rope anywhere, cut it!’
He scurried along behind the shelter of the wobbling parapet, but the defenders were doing very well. It wasn’t exactly rocket magic, in any case. The people at ground level were firing out through any crack they could find and, while aiming was not easy, it didn’t need to be. There is nothing like the zip and zing
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of arrows around them to make people nervous at their work.
And the climbers were too bunched up. They had to be. If they tried attacking on a broad front there’d be three defenders to greet each man. So they were in one another’s way, and every falling man would take a couple more down with him, and the barricade was full of little gaps and holes where a defender with a spear could seriously prod those trying to climb up the outside.
This is stupid, Vimes thought. It’d take a thousand men to break through, and that’d only be when the last fifty ran up the slope made of the bodies of all the rest of them. Someone out there is doing the old ‘hit them at their strongest point to show
’em we mean business’ thinking. Ye gods, is this how we won our wars?
So how would I have dealt with this? Well, I’d have said
‘Detritus, remove the barricade’ and made sure that the defenders heard me, that’s what I’d have done. End of problem.
There was a scream from further along the parapet. A grapnel had caught one of the watchmen and pulled him hard against the wood. Vimes reached him in time to see a hook dragged into the man’s body, through breastplate and mail, as an attacker hauled himself up-Vimes caught the man’s sword arm in one hand and punched him with the other, letting him tumble into the melee below.
The stricken watchman was Nancyball. His face was
bluewhite, his mouth opened and shut soundlessly, and blood pooled around his feet. It dripped through the planks.
‘Let’s get the bloody thing out-‘ Wiglet said, grabbing the hook. Vimes pushed him away, as a couple of arrows hummed overhead.
‘That could do more damage. Call up some lads, take him down really carefully and get him to Lawn.’ Vimes snatched up Nancyball’s truncheon and brought it down on the helmet of another struggling climber.
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‘He’s still breathing, sarge!’ said Wiglet.
‘Right, right,’ said Vimes. It was amazing how willing people were to see life in the corpse of a friend. ‘So make yourself useful and get him down to the doctor.’ And, speaking as one who’d seen some stricken men in his time, he mentally added: and if Lawn can sort him out, he can start his own religion.
A lucky attacker, who’d achieved the top of the barricade and then found himself horribly alone, slashed desperately at Vimes with his sword. Vimes turned back to business.
Ankh-Morpork was good at this, and had become good at it without anyone ever discussing it. Things flowed rather than happened; that is, you’d sometimes have to look quite hard to find the point of change between ‘hasn’t been done yet’ and
‘already taken care of, old boy’. And that was how it was done.
Things were taken care of.
It was twenty minutes before Mr Snapcase arrived and
twentyfive minutes before he was duly sworn in as Patrician, had magically become Lord Snapcase and was sitting in the Oblong Office; this included the one minute’s silence for the late Lord Winder, whose body had been taken care of.
A number of servants were shown the door without any great unpleasantness, and even Spymould was allowed to remove his toad farm in peace. But those who filled the grates and dusted the furniture and swept the floors stayed on, as they had stayed on before, because they seldom paid any attention to, or possibly didn’t even know, who their lord was, and in any case were too useful and knew where the brooms were kept. Lords come and go, but dust accumulates.
And it was the morning of a new day which looked, seen from below, quite like the old ones.
After a while, someone raised the question of the fighting, which clearly needed to be taken care of.
There were scuffles all along the barricade now, but they were
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going only one way. Siege ladders had been brought up and at several places along the parapet men had managed to climb in.
But they could never get enough in one place. There were far more defenders than attackers, and they weren’t all men under arms. One thing Vimes was learning fast was the natural vindictiveness of old ladies, who had no sense of fair play when it came to fighting soldiers; give a granny a spear and a hole to jab it through, and young men on the other side were in big trouble.
And then there was Reg Shoe’s inspired idea of the use of steak dinners as a weapon. The attackers did not come from homes where steak was ever on the table. Meat tended to be the flavouring, not the meal. But here and there men who’d achieved the top of the ladders, in darkness, with the groans and yells of their unsuccessful comrades below them, had their weapons dragged from their hands by wellfed former colleagues who were not unkind and who directed them down the ladder inside for steak and eggs and roast chicken and a promise that every day would be like this, come the revolution.
Vimes didn’t want that news to get out, in case there was a rush to invade.
But the grannies, oh, the grannies… The neighbourhoods of the Republic were a natural recruiting ground for the regiments.
It was also an area of big families and matriarchs whose word was family law. It had almost been cheating, putting them on the parapet with a megaphone during the lulls.
‘I knows you’re out there, our Ron! This is your Nan! You climb up one more time and you’ll feel the back of my hand!
Our Rita sends her love and wants you to hurry home. Grandpa is feeling a lot better with the new ointment! Now stop being a silly boy!’
It was a dirty trick, and he was proud of it. Messages like that sapped a fighting spirit better than arrows.
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And then Vimes realized there were no more men on the ropes and ladders. He could hear yells and groans below, but those soldiers who could stand were withdrawing to a safe distance.
Now me, thought Vimes, I’d have gone down to the cellars of the houses near the street. Ankh-Morpork is all cellars. And I’d have chipped my way through the rotten walls, and half the cellars on this side of the barricades would have men in them now, nice and snug.
Admittedly last night I had the men nail up and bar every cellar door they could find but, after all, I wouldn’t be fighting me, now, would I?
He peered through a gap between planks, and was amazed to see a man walking gingerly forward among the wreckage and the groaning men. He was carrying a white flag, and stopped occasionally to wave it but not to shout ‘Hurrah!’
When he was as close as possible to the barricade, he called up: ‘I say?’