The D’reg was staring at the desert sand between his feet.
“You know where he is now, don’t you?” Vimes prompted.
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“No. I swore to him.”
“But D’regs are oath-breakers. Everyone knows that.”
Jabbar gave Vimes a grin. “Oh,
oaths
. Stupid things. I gave him my
word
.”
“He won’t break it, sir,” said Carrot. “D’regs are very particular about things like that. It’s only when they swear on gods and things that they’ll ever break an oath.”
“I will not tell you where he is,” said Jabbar. “But…” he grinned again, but there was no humor in it, “how brave are you, Mr. Vimes?”
“Stop
complaining
, Nobby.”
“I’m not complaining. I’m just sayin’ these trousers are a bit draughty, that’s all I’m saying.”
“They look good on you, though.”
“And what’re these tin bowls supposed to be doing?”
“They’re supposed to be protecting the bits you haven’t got, Nobby.”
“The way this breeze is blowing, I could do with some to protect the bits I
have
.”
“Just try and act ladylike, will you, Nobby?”
Which would be hard, Sergeant Colon had to admit. The lady for whom the clothes had been made had been quite tall and somewhat full-figured, whereas Nobby without his armor could have hidden behind a short stick if you attached a toast rack to it about two-thirds of the way up. He looked like a gauzy accordion with a lot of jewelry. In theory, the costume would have been quite revealing, if Corporal Nobbs was something you wished to see revealed, but there were so many billows and folds now that all one could reliably say was that he was in there somewhere. He was leading the donkey, which seemed to like him. Animals tended to like Nobby. He didn’t smell wrong.
“And them boots don’t work,” Sergeant Colon went on.
“Why not? You kept
yours
on.”
“Yeah, but I’m not supposed to be a flower of the desert, right? A moon of someone’s delight shouldn’t kick up sparks when she walks, am I right?”
“They belonged to my gran, I ain’t leaving ’em around for anyone to nick, and I ain’t mooning for anyone’s delight,” said Nobby sulkily.
Lord Vetinari strode on ahead. The streets were already filling up. Al-Khali liked to get the business of the day started in the cool of dawn, before full day flamethrowered the landscape. No one paid the newcomers any attention, although a few people did turn round to watch Corporal Nobbs. Goats and chickens ambled out of the way as they passed.
“Watch out for people trying to sell you dirty postcards, Nobby,” said Colon. “My uncle was here once and he said some bloke tried to sell him a pack of dirty postcards for five dollars. Disgusted, he was.”
“Yeah, ’cos you can get ’em in the Shades for two dollars,” said Nobby.
“That’s what he said.
And
they were Ankh-Morpork ones. Trying to flog us our own dirty postcards? I call that disgusting, frankly.”
“Good morning, sultan!” said a cheerful and somehow familiar voice. “New in town, are we?”
All three of them turned to a figure that had magically appeared from the mouth of an alleyway.
“Indeed, yes,” said the Patrician.
“I could see you were! Everyone is, these days. And it is
your
lucky day, shah! I am here to help, right? You want something, I got it!”
Sergeant Colon had been staring at the newcomer. He said, in a faraway voice, “Your name’s going to be something like…Al-jibla or something, right?”
“Heard about me, have you?” said the trader jovially.
“Sort of, yeah,” said Colon slowly. “You’re amazingly…familiar.”
Lord Vetinari pushed him aside. “We are strolling entertainers,” he said. “We were hoping to get an engagement at the Prince’s palace…Perhaps you could help?”
The man rubbed his beard thoughtfully, causing various particles to cascade into the little bowls in his tray.
“Dunno about the palace,” he said. “What’s it you do?”
“We practice juggling, fire-eating, that sort of thing,” said Vetinari.
“Do we?” said Colon.
Al-jibla nodded at Nobby. “What does…”
“…she…” said Lord Vetinari helpfully.
“…she do?”
“Exotic dancing,” said Vetinari, while Nobby scowled.
“Pretty exotic, I should think,” said Al-jibla.
“You’d be amazed.”
A couple of armed men had drifted over to them. Sergeant Colon’s heart sank. In those bearded faces he saw himself and Nobby, who at home would always saunter over to anything on the street that looked interesting.
“You are jugglers, are you?” said one of them. “Let’s see you juggle, then.”
Lord Vetinari gave them a blank look and then glanced down at the tray around Al-jibla’s neck. Among the more identifiable foodstuffs were a number of green melons.
“Very well,” he said, and picked up three of them.
Sergeant Colon shut his eyes.
After a few seconds he opened them again because a guard had said, “All right, but anyone can do it with three.”
“In that case perhaps Mr. Al-jibla will throw me a few more?” said the Patrician, as the balls spun through his hands.
Sergeant Colon shut his eyes again.
After a short while a guard said, “Seven is pretty good. But it’s just melons.”
Colon opened his eyes.
The Klatchian guard twitched his robe aside. Half a dozen throwing knives glinted. And so did his teeth.
Lord Vetinari nodded. To Colon’s growing surprise he did not seem to be watching the tumbling melons at all.
“Four melons and three knives,” he said. “If you would care to give the knives to my charming assistant Beti…”
“
Who
?” said Nobby.
“Oh? Why not seven knives, then?”
“Kind sirs, that would be too simple,” said Lord Vetinari.
*
“I am but a humble tumbler. Please let me practice my art.”
“
Beti
?” said Nobby, glowering under his veils.
Three fruits arced gently out of the green whirl and thumped on to Al-jibla’s tray.
The guards looked carefully, and to Colon’s mind nervously, at the cross-dressed figure of the cross corporal.
“She’s not going to do any kind of dance, is she?” one of them ventured.
“No!” snapped Beti.
“Promise?”
*
Nobby grabbed three of the knives and tugged them out of the man’s belt.
“I’ll give them to his lor—to him, shall I, Beti?” said Colon, suddenly quite sure that keeping the Patrician alive was almost certainly the only way to avoid a brief cigarette in the sunshine. He was also aware that other people were drifting over to watch the show.
“To me, please…Al,” said the Patrician, nodding.
Colon tossed him the knives, slowly and gingerly. He’s going to try to stab the guards, he thought. It’s a
ruse
. And then everyone’s going to tear us apart.
Now the circling blur glinted in the sunlight. There was a murmur of approval from the crowd.
“Yet somehow dull,” said the Patrician.
And his hands moved in a complex pattern that suggested that his wrists must have moved through one another at least twice.
The tangled ball of hurtling fruit and cutlery leapt into the air.
Three melons dropped to the ground, cut cleanly in two.
Three knives thudded into the dust a few inches from their owner’s sandals.
And Sergeant Colon looked up and into a growing, greenish, expanding—
The melon exploded, and so did the audience, but both their laughter and the humor was slightly lost on Colon as he scraped over-ripe pith out of his ears.
The survival instinct cut in again. Stagger around backward, it said. So he staggered around backward, waving his legs in the air. Fall down heavily, it said. So he sat down, and almost squashed a chicken. Lose your dignity, it said; of all the things you’ve got, it’s the one you can most afford to lose.
Lord Vetinari helped him up. “Our very lives depend on your appearing to be a stupid fat idiot,” he hissed, putting Colon’s fez back on his head.
“I ain’t very good at acting, sir—”
“Good!”
“Yessir.”
The Patrician scooped up three melon halves and positively
skipped
over to a stall that a woman had just set up, snatching an egg from a basket as he went past. Sergeant Colon blinked again. This was not…
real
. The Patrician didn’t do this sort of thing…
“Ladies and gentlemen! You see—an egg! And here we have a—melon rind! Egg, melon! Melon, egg! We put the melon over the egg!” His hands darted across the three halves, switching them at bewildering speed. “Round and round they go, just like that! Now…where’s the egg? What about you, shah?”
Al-jibla smirked.
“’s the one on the left,” he said. “It always is.”
Lord Vetinari lifted the melon. The board below was eggless.
“And you, noble guardsman?”
“’s got to be the one in the middle,” said the guard.
“Yes, of course…oh dear, it isn’t…”
The crowd looked at the last melon. They were street people. They knew the score. When the object can be under one of three things, and it’s already turned out not to be under two of them, then the one place it was certainly not going to be was under the third. Only some kind of gullible fool would believe something like that. Of
course
there was going to be a trick. There always
was
a trick. But you watched it, in order to see a trick done well.
Lord Vetinari raised the melon nevertheless, and the crowd nodded in satisfaction. Of
course
it wasn’t there. It’d be a pretty poor day for street entertainment if things were where they were supposed to be.
Sergeant Colon knew what was going to happen next, and he knew this because for the last minute or so something had been pecking at his head.
Aware that this was probably his moment, he raised his fez and revealed a very small fluffy chick.
“Have you got a towel? I am afraid it has just gone to the toilet on my head, sir.”
There was laughter, some applause and, to his amazement, a tinkling of coins around his feet.
“And finally,” said the Patrician, “the beautiful Beti will do an exotic dance.”
The crowd fell silent.
Then someone at the back said, “How much do we have to pay for her not to?”
“Right! I’ve just about had enough of this!” Veils flying out behind her, bangles jingling, elbows waving viciously and boots kicking up sparks, the lovely Beti strode into the crowd. “Which of you said that?”
People shrank away from her.
Armies
would have retreated. And there, revealed like a jellyfish deserted by a suddenly ebbing tide, was a small man about to fry in the wrath of the ascendant Nobbs.
“I meant no offense, oh, doe-eyed one—”
“Oh? Pastry-faced, am I?” Nobby flung out an arm in a crash of bracelets and knocked the man over. “You’ve got a lot to learn about women, young man!” And then, because a Nobbs could never resist a prone target, the petite Beti drew back a steel-capped boot—
“Beti!” snapped the Patrician.
“Oh, right, yeah,
right
,” said Nobby, with veiled contempt. “Everyone can tell me what to do, right? Just because I happen to be the woman around here I’m just supposed to accept it all, eh?”
“No, you just ain’t supposed to kick him inna fork,” hissed Colon, pulling him away. “It don’t look good.” Although, he noted, the women in the crowd seemed to be disappointed by the sudden curtailment of the performance.
“And there are many strange stories we can tell you!” shouted the Patrician.
“Beti certainly could,” murmured Colon, and was kicked sharply on his ankle.
“And many strange sights we can show you!”
“Beti cert—Aargh!”
“But for now we will seek the shade of yonder caravanserai…”
“
What’re we doing
?”
“
We’re going to the pub
.”
The crowd began to disperse, but with occasional amused glances back at the trio.
One of the guards nodded at Colon. “Nice show,” he said. “Especially the bit where your lady didn’t remove any veils—” He darted behind his colleague as Nobby spun round like an avenging angel.
“Sergeant,” the Patrician whispered. “It is very important that we learn the current whereabouts of Prince Cadram, do you understand? In taverns, people talk. Let us keep our ears open.”
The tavern wasn’t Colon’s idea of a pub. For one thing, most of it had no roof. Arched walls surrounded a courtyard. A grapevine grew out of a huge cracked urn and had been teased overhead on trellises. There was the gentle sound of tinkling water, and unlike the Mended Drum this was not because the bar backed onto the privies but because of a small fountain in the middle of the cobbles. And it was cool, much cooler than in the street, even though the vine leaves scarcely hid the sky.
“Didn’t know you could juggle, sir,” Colon whispered to Lord Vetinari.
“You mean you can’t, sergeant?”
“Nossir!”
“How strange. It’s hardly a skill, is it? One knows what the objects are and where they want to go. After that it’s just a case of letting them occupy the correct positions in time and space.”
“You’re dead good at it, sir. Practice often, do you?”
“Until today, I’ve never tried.” Lord Vetinari looked at Colon’s astonished expression. “After Ankh-Morpork, sergeant, a handful of flying melons present a very minor problem indeed.”
“I’m amazed, sir.”
“And in politics, sergeant, it is always important to know where the chicken is.”
Colon raised his fez. “Is this one still on my head?”
“It seems to have gone to sleep. I wouldn’t disturb it, if I were you.”
“’ere, you, juggler…she can’t come in here!”
They looked up. Someone with a face and apron that said “barman” in seven hundred languages was standing over them, a wine jug in each hand.
“No women in here,” he went on.
“Why not?” said Nobby.
“No women asking questions, neither.”