We’ve made a deal with a dragon that we can’t undo. Back to Guards! Guards!
Summary
The Watch is stationed about for the coronation (after Carrot makes note that he thinks Errol must be ill because he’s far too hot). Vimes causes a ruckus at the sight of raven’s wings, which infuriates Wonse, who tells him to turn over his badge. Vimes heads back to the Watch House while his officers talk to each other through the fog. What Colon thinks is a statue turns out to be the dragon, and it takes to the sky. Vimes hears the screams outside, puts on his helmet, and rushes out to help. He runs into a child and has to threaten it to get it to leave, then Lady Ramkin jumps down from a nearby fountain. They watch the priest of Blind Io give the dragon the crown meant for the coronation—but it’s only gold-foiled, so that dragon burns the fellow to ash. Lupine Wonse tries to flee, but the dragon snatches him up and head for the palace. Vimes is hysterical with laughter for the monarch they’ve actually crowned.
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A Master of Djinn
True to Vimes’s expectation, the people of Ankh-Morpork do begin to accept the idea of a dragon as a king. The various leaders are summoned to a lunch. Wonse is present for the proceedings and explains the new system to them; they are now a privy council, and they will advise everyone to pay homage to the king with treasure. In addition, they will be reconsidering their relationships with various outlying kingdoms and getting a great deal of treasure from them. The king will need to be fed once a month, unmarried women of any age. As they leave, one of the councillor’s notes that Wonse had said two final words very quietly: “Help me.” This is because Wonse is the Supreme Grand Master of the Elucidated Brethren, and he’s being held by the dragon, which can communicate directly to him. Wonse tells the dragon that this plan is better than terrorizing people, and soon they’ll act as though it was their own idea. The dragon is mortified by that notion, but lets him continue on, though it won’t budge on the eating people bit, insisting that’s what Wonse wanted anyhow.
Nobby, Colon, and Carrot are back at Pseudopolis Yard, looking over a dwarfish cake Carrot’s mother sent along. They get to talking about Vimes’s departure, and about how none of them wants to be captain. They head out at night, and run into palace guards who let them know about the decree of eating virgins and tell them they have to inform the public. Colon doesn’t believe the people will stand for it. Vimes brings Errol to Lady Ramkin over his odd eating habits, and insists that he stay with her; he’s got to be leaving and looking at prospects elsewhere now that he’s fired. Lady Ramkin tries to tell him that he’s brave, but Vimes won’t have it, and they part awkwardly. Suddenly, Vimes has a thought and rushes off. Colon gives the news to the people and almost gets them on board with resisting the dragon, but plenty of them think this is a pretty decent plan. One fellow with daughters dissents, but the dragon appears and promptly vaporizes him. The dragon starts several fires after that to make a point, and all dissent seems to die down.
Carrot mentions that the way you kill a dragon is to hit it in its “voonerable” spots, which is what his dad taught him. Nobby notes that Colon is reportedly great at archery, so he should give it a go. Colon insists that if he’s going to, Nobby has to accompany him, and Carrot offers to come along too. Vimes shows up in the Patrician’s office where Wonse is, claiming to have figured it all out. Wonse tries to pass off the problem as the Patrician’s idea, but Vimes tells him that he noticed he ran from the coronation the same way the hooded figure ran from the Elucidated Brethren’s demise. Wonse says he’ll give Vimes his job back, but Vimes claims it was never his to take in the first place because he’s an officer of the law. And now the only law left in the city is the dragon’s anyhow. Wonse calls in the guards, who worry Vimes must be a hero type since he’s smiling and not carrying weapons. They throw him in the dungeon—where he’s got company.
Lady Ramkin gets up to tend her dragon and finds Errol cold as ice. There’s a knock at her door, and she rushes to it, thinking it’s Vimes, but it turns out to be a palace guard. They’ve been sent to summon her for sacrifice, and she tries to fight them off, but doesn’t succeed. Vimes realizes that the Patrician is also in the dungeon with him, and he’s got the rats there aiding him—he offers advice and they help him out and bring him all the news. Vimes thinks the Patrician has lost it, believing that he has control from inside the dungeon, but he’s directed to look at the door. Vimes realizes that though it’s got an impenetrable lock, all the bolts and bars of the door are on the inside. Meanwhile, the rank get up on the roof and prepare for Colon to fire his lucky arrow at the dragon. They discuss the importance of believing in million-to-one shots, otherwise there’d be no point in living. Nobby suggests that they remember to jump into the pond below in the event that this doesn’t work out.
Commentary
We continue on this theme of what people are willing to put up with, but as is usually the case with Pratchett, we get two sides to that argument. While Vimes and the dragon and even Colon are generally horrified over what people will say yes to, how they will allow themselves to be subjugated if the deal sounds reasonable enough, Lady Ramkin takes it from a different perspective—you can’t expect people to handle things well when they’re frightened. And the point is that everyone is right, of course. Fear gets the human brain to do all sorts of awful and irrational things, and some of that really comes down to instinct. Conversely, though, it is terrifying to realize the things people can convince themselves to be okay with under difficult circumstances. This is basically a satirical version of Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, and you’re not liable to feel great about it in the aftermath.
The discussion about having Colon use his special arrow to shoot the dragon in the “voonerables” is, of course, a longform reference to many fantasy stories, but The Hobbit in particular. Which is mostly excellent because the idea of Colon as a suitable replacement for Bard the Bowman is hilarious. Honestly, most of the fun of the Watch stories comes from whenever most or all of the rank is hanging around and talking about how they’re going to handle a given situation, so this time on the roof is wonderfully done. I am beginning to realize that when I remembered this book, I always thought of Carrot as having more a central role in the action, however. Strange what your brain does in filling in the gaps of stories.
I also definitely thought we got more clues about what was going on with the dragon, but aside from Errol, we don’t get much of a hint. Which I like quite a bit, in fact.
We have the parting between Lady Ramkin and Vimes because we’ve hit that essential trope—the point where a woman tells a man to step up, but he’s not up to the challenge yet. (I’m always put in mind of different versions of this scenario every time I encounter it; this time around I was thinking about Peggy Carter giving Steve Rogers a hard time on his USO tour as he sketched himself as a performing monkey: “And those are your only options?”) It’s the first time we haven’t seen Sibyl’s indefatigable nature bring out the best in people. Vimes is too busy film noir-ing himself into depression to get it together.
But it’s this bit that always gets me the hardest, as he’s walking away and telling himself he won’t look back: “So when he heard the door shut when he was only halfway down the drive he suddenly felt very, very angry, as if he had just been robbed.” This might just be a me thing, but this is one moment when I feel for Vimes’s overly-dramatic nature. There’s a self-awareness to him that feels frightfully real sometimes, because plenty of us do have that inclination to frame our lives as stories. The moments when Vimes is looking to see a certain cliché fulfilled only to get blocked by reality, are the moments when he feels far more possible as a person than anyone Humphrey Bogart or Clint Eastwood ever played.
Similarly, as a send up of these sorts of stories, I adore the confrontation between Vimes and Wonse because it is always treated this way, as though figuring out the mystery is the endgame because no one would ever have a plan once they knew they’d been discovered. Like being caught robs a villain of their adaptability and imbues the detective with a power of their own. Oh no, Detective Poirot is going to explain to us who the killer is, it’s all over now. When that is, of course, nonsense. If you’ve survived as long as Wonse has doing this sort of thing, you are at least somewhat prepared for the eventuality of being confronted. And it’s apropos that here is where we get the title drop, as Wonse calls for guards to drag Vimes away.
And then we get this fascinating clarity around the Patrician. We’ve gotten windows into his head before, but for some reason, there is nothing so telling as his relationship to the rats and how he creates order in his cell. That and the insistence that you should never build a dungeon you wouldn’t stay in, which feels very Princess Bride. But we don’t get to the good part of this until next time.
Asides and little thoughts:
- Okay, but I love that the child bothering Vimes about the dragon is never given a gender. To the point where it’s referred to as “it” because it is a generic stock character child.
- The line where it says “Someone out there was going to find out that their worst nightmare was a maddened Librarian. With a badge.” is a reference to a movie with Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte called 48 Hrs. And if that isn’t the oddest place to find a reference for it, I’m not sure what is.
- There’s a cute mention of Mort here, where Lady Ramkin suggests that she could get Vimes a new job with the Duke of Sto Helit, which makes me extremely curious about her relationship to other Disc nobles.
Pratchettisms:
By the small portable sacrificial altar a tethered billy goat was peacefully chewing the cud and possibly thinking, in Goat: What a lucky billy goat I am, to be given such a good view of the proceedings. This is going to be something to tell the kids.
The dragon blinked with Jurassic patience.
He laughed on, knowing that when he stopped black depression was going to drop on him like a lead soufflé.
“The people united can never be ignited!”
She had cried a bit before going to sleep, but not much, because it was no use being soppy and letting the side down.
Next week we finish the book!
Note: Today is the sixth anniversary of Terry Pratchett’s death.
This section introduces what I call the Cardinal Rule of Discworld Probability, frequently described as “Million-to-one-chances succeed nine times out of ten.” If there’s a million-to-one chance of something happening — and/or someone says there is — then it will happen. Almost all of the time, anyway. It doesn’t happen in this case, but the mens’ elaborate experimental setup, described in the next section, must not have established precisely the right probability.
Fictional meals at which the guests might or might not get eaten always amuse me. And we get a description of tasty-sounding food — a rarity in Discworld books, which more often describe food in vividly disgusting terms.
“Sticky swathes of smoke and stale steam” — nice alliteration.
Call-forwards:
The dragon killed the High Priest of Blind Io. Hughnon Ridcully will thus take that position very soon, around the same time as his brother becomes Archchancellor of Unseen University.
This is the first time we see Ankh-Morpork residents express aggressive racism against Klatch, and the first time we see Vimes get sacked. Not the last of either.
The Librarian wouldn’t interfere with the past to save people from being burned, but at some point, he did or will do it to save books from being burned. I suppose the consequences of the latter action were less complicated.
Vetinari’s rat companions can’t read, but we’ll eventually meet rats who can.
Lord Vetinari very dedicated to his job. He doesn’t have an escape tunnel because he won’t run away. But he does have a secure dungeon. 😉
@AeronaGreenjoy
Thank you for pointing post the date. GNU Terry Pratchett!
<rant>Colon is responsible for a guy getting fried by a dragon. Whenever readers express outrage at the things he says in future books (he is after all, a walking example of the banality of evil) I point them back here and remind them. Colon is not a nice guy: it’s only his subordination to Vimes that keeps him on the ethical straight and narrow. He’s the sort of cop that will allow corruption to fester by actively turning the other way or by giving his tacit approval because he disapproves of the victims.</rant>
Pratchettism: Never trust a ruler who puts his faith in tunnels and bunkers and escape routes. The chances are that his heart isn’t in the job. ISTM this is Vetinari in a nutshell; Vimes gets to do the Chandler routine at the beginning of the book, but Vetinari wants to make Ankh-Morpork run — for its own sake and/or because he actually does love the city, without being melodramatic about it.
@@.-@: I think you are utterly misreading Colon; I don’t think he’s trying to get people burned.
@5 He’s not setting out to do it but he is part of the group that inspires the guy to stand up to the dragon and he then shuffles away afterwards without any consequences. There isn’t even a mention of him trying to help out the guy’s family who are going to struggle without their dad. I shouldn’t be this mad at a fictional character but Colon has a lot of disagreeable opinions in later books and this sort of behaviour doesn’t help me maintain a comfortable distance from him.
Colon – I don’t see an evil bone in Colon’s body. His name says it all. He digests what comes his way and tries to get it out. In most cases he’s out for himself but he’s also capable of heroism. Trying to kill a dragon with a single arrow was his decision. As far as helping the family, he barely makes enough to keep his own family going. Which ties into his essential motivation of looking out for himself.
The Vs – Vetinari and Vimes mesh so well because both are motivated by their love for the city which is not affected by their loss of their jobs.
Errol – One of my favorite characters in the book. I shall have more to say when we learn more.
The People – Sybil and Vimes are both right about what motivates them (and you could add many other things as well). But, to me, it boils down to most people want to be led. They don’t realize that the implication of “the Lord is my shepherd” is “and you are my sheep.”
“He [Vimes] was thinking of a running man. And, further back in the fuddled mists of his life, a boy running to keep up. And under his breath he said, ‘Any of them get out?’ “
Any comments on this? It seems like a moment of introspection, but I don’t understand his question.
“She lit the lamp, pulled on her rubber boots, grabbed the stick which might be all that stood between her and theoretical loss of virtue, and hurried down through the shadowy house.”
I was surprised by this reference to rape. It seems a bit…out of place. Why might Pratchett have chosen to include this?
Edit: Thanks for the responses, everyone!
@8: It’s Vimes remembering how Wonse runs, and putting that together with Wonse’s question of ‘any of them get out?’ being slightly out of place — in that it signposted that Wonse *knew* who was in in there. Wonse covered initially, but Vimes is shown here working it out.
@8 – Pratchett is always concerned about the abuse of women, including rape. I think that this is just a reminder that it isn’t just poor women who are in danger.
@8 – I think the “theoretical” is riffing on Sybil’s self view that she is someone men don’t think about that way. She’s resigned herself to perpetual maidenhood and is being practical and getting on with life. She still goes through the motions she is expected to however.
The way it is written also emphasises Sybil’s matter-of-fact, forthright, attitude too. A woman has gotta do what a woman has gotta do, and there is no use blubbering or letting your fears get hold of you while doing so. It is very Sybil.
Colon is a wonderful example of a person having questionable views on things, narrow-mindedness, and all sorts of cultural prejudices but still being an inherently decent person at the end of the day. He isn’t remotely clever or brave, but he usually does the right thing. Often in he acts in direct contrast to whatever backward view he spouts off. He holds broad racial prejudices, but he seems to treat individuals uniformly the same in person. He has a litany of faults, but he is definitely one of the good guys.
Colon is what you get when you tell people not to question the way of things. He gets all his information, which he takes in uncritically from “some bloke in a pub” which he treats as gospel because you don’t ask questions, and so spirals inwards. I think the series has been good at examining that, we get to see that background level of awfulness that Colon has been exposed to and taken in, but we also see as the series progresses that Fred can learn to overcome it. Each book has him be taught to question things as Carrot and Vimes, and even occasionally Nobby, start telling him it is okay to learn and to make mistakes. It is not a one and done come to mama conversion, he has to learn what his prejudices are and how to overcome them one-by-one as they come up.
In many ways Colon is as much a victim of that mindset as he is a spouter of unexamined bigotry. Nobody took the time to help him when he was young, but instead ground him down instead. He could have had a better life, if anyone had cared. That is the genius of the novels, it teaches caring and teaches us that nobody [well, almost nobody-but we’ll come to that later] is beyond redemption. It just gets harder the older you get.
I think Colon is meant by Pratchett to serve as the vox populi, voice of the people. Pratchett does not view the people, as a whole, as deplorable but as basically good hearted with deplorable views. Over the course of the books Colon, and the people of Ankh-Morpork, will moderate their views and become more accepting.
As an aside, Colon is at his funniest when he is put in charge, something he, and most people, don’t really want. Call forward – two words – sugar cubes.
@15: I pitied Colon during his time ‘in charge.’ He was just like a porcupinefish — when terrified, he (mettyphorically) inflated himself into a ball of spikes. I could relate.