Jingo by Terry Pratchett Page B

others…he shuddered. It looked as if people had once tried to add human touches to structures that were already ancient…
    It was because of his son that everyone was staying in the boats.
    A party of Ankh-Morpork fishermen had gone ashore that morning to search for the heaps of treasure that everyone knew littered the ocean bottom and had found a tiled floor, washed clean by the rain. Pretty blue and white squares showed a pattern of waves and shells and, in the middle, a squid.
    And Les had said, “That looks pretty big, Dad.”
    And everyone had looked around at the weed-covered buildings and had shared the Thought, which remained unspoken but was made up of a lot of little thoughts like the occasional ripples in the pools, and the little splashes in the dark water of cellars that made the mind think of claws, winnowing the deeps, and the odd things that sometimes got washed up on beaches or turned up in nets. Sometimes you pulled things over the side that’d put a man off fish for life.
    And suddenly no one wanted to explore any more, just in case they found something.
    Solid Jackson pulled his head back under the cover.
    “Why’n’t we going home, Dad?” said his son. “You said this place gives you the willies.”
    “All right, but they’re Ankh-Morpork willies, see? And no foreigner’s going to get his hands on them.”
    “Dad?”
    “Yes, lad?”
    “Who was Mr. Hong?”
    “How should I know?”
    “Only, when we was all heading back for the boats one of the other men said, ‘We all know what happened to Mr. Hong when he opened the Three Jolly Luck Take-Away Fish Bar on the site of the old fish-god temple in Dagon Street on the night of the full moon, don’t we…?’ Well, I don’t know.”
    “Ah…” Solid Jackson hesitated. Still, Les was a big lad now…
    “He…closed up and left in a bit of a hurry, lad. So quick he had to leave some things behind.”
    “Like what?”
    “If you must know…half an earhole and one kidney.”
    “Cool!”
    The boat rocked, and wood splintered. Jackson jerked the cover up. Spray washed over him. Somewhere close in the wet darkness a voice shouted: “Why you not carrying lights, you second cousin of a jackal?”
    Jackson pulled out the lantern and held it up.
    “What’re you doing in Ankh-Morpork territorial waters, you camel-eating devil?”
    “These waters belong to us!”
    “We were here first!”
    “Yeah? We were here first!”
    “We were here first first !”
    “You damaged my boat! That’s piracy , that is!”
    There were other shouts around them. In the darkness the two flotillas had collided. Bowsprits tore away rigging. Hulls boomed. The controlled panic that is normal sailing became the frantic panic composed of darkness, spray and too much rigging coming unrigged.
    At times like this the ancient traditions of the sea that unite all mariners should come to the fore and see them combine in the face of their common foe, the hungry and relentless ocean.
    However, at this point Mr. Arif hit Mr. Jackson over the head with an oar.

    “Hnh? Wuh?”
    Vimes opened the only eye that appeared to respond. A horrible sight met it.
    … I read him his rites, whereupon, he said up, yours copper. Sgnt Detritus then, cautioned him, upon which he said, ouch …
    There may be a lot of things I’m not good at, thought Vimes, but at least I don’t treat the punctuation of a sentence like a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey…
    He rolled his head away from Carrot’s fractured grammar. The pile of paper shifted under him.
    Vimes’s desk was becoming famous. Once there were piles, but they had slipped as piles do, forming this dense compacted layer that was now turning into something like peat. It was said there were plates and unfinished meals somewhere down there. No one wanted to check. Some people said they’d heard movement.
    There was a genteel cough. Vimes rolled his head again and looked up into the big pink face of Willikins, Lady Sybil’s butler.