Snuff by Terry Pratchett Page A

his mother went on. ‘Your grandfather always told me that if I saw a big pile of muck in a field I should kick it around a bit so as to spread it evenly, because that way all the grass will grow properly.’ She smiled at Vimes’s expression and said, ‘Well, it’s true, dear. A lot of farming is about manure.’
    ‘Just so long as he understands that he doesn’t start kicking up the gutters when he gets back to the city,’ Vimes said. ‘Some of that stuff will kick back.’
    ‘He should learn about the countryside. He should know where food comes from and how we get it. This is important, Sam!’
    ‘Of course, dear.’
    Lady Sybil gave her husband a look only a wife can give. ‘That was your put-upon-but-dutiful voice, Sam.’
    ‘Yes, but I don’t see—’
    Sybil interrupted him. ‘Young Sam will own all this one day and I’d like him to have some idea about it all, just as I’d like you to relax and enjoy your holiday. I’m taking Young Sam over to the Home Farm later on, to see the cows being milked, and to collect some eggs.’ She stood up. ‘But first I’m going to take him down to the crypt, to see his ancestors.’ She noted her husband’s look of panic and added, quickly, ‘It’s all right, Sam, they aren’t walking around; they are, in fact, in very expensive boxes. Why don’t you come too?’
    Sam Vimes was no stranger to death, and vice versa. It was the suicides that got him down. They were mostly hangings, because you would have to be extremely suicidal to jump into the River Ankh, not least because you would bounce several times before you broke through the crust. And they all had to be investigated, just in case it was a murder in disguise, 9 and whereas Mr Trooper, the current city hangman, could drop someone into eternity so quickly and smoothly that they probably didn’t notice, too often Vimes had seen what amateurs managed to do.
    The Ramkin family crypt reminded him of the city morgue after hours. It was crowded; some coffins were stacked edgewise, as though they were on shelves in the mortuary, but, it was to be hoped, they didn’t slide out. Vimes watched warily as his wife carefully took their son from plaque to plaque reading out the names and explaining a little about every occupant, and he felt the cold, bottomless depths of time around him, somehow breathing from the walls. How could it feel for Young Sam to know the names of all those grandfathers and grandmothers down the centuries? Vimes had never known his father. His mum told him that the man had been run over by a cart, but Vimes suspected that if this was true at all, then it was probably a brewer’s cart, which had ‘run him over’ a bit at a time for years. Oh, of course there was Old Stoneface, the regicide, now rehabilitated and with his own statue in the city which was never graffitied because Vimes had made it clear what would happen to the perpetrator.
    But Old Stoneface was just a point in time, a kind of true myth. There wasn’t a line between him and Sam Vimes, only an aching gulf.
    Still, Young Sam would be a duke one day, and that was a thought worth hanging on to. He wouldn’t grow up worrying about what he was, because he would know , and the influence of his mother might just outweigh the enormous drag factor of having Samuel Vimes as a father. Young Sam would be able to shake up the world the right way. You need confidence to do that, and having a bunch of (apparently) loony but interesting ancestors could only impress the man in the street, and Vimes knew a lot of streets, and a lot of men.
    Willikins hadn’t entirely told the truth. Even city people liked a character, especially a black-hearted one or one interesting enough to materially add to the endless crazy circus show which was the street life of Ankh-Morpork, and while having a drunkard for a father was a social faux pas, having a great-great-great-grandfather who could drink so much brandy that his urine must surely have been