Someone get this man an egg with toast cut into soldiers. And one for his newborn son.
Summary
Major Mountjoy-Standfast isn’t sure how to handle the “insurgents” when they’re not doing much of anything. Nobby is captured and brought to him, but Carcer is on hand to do the interrogation and insists that Keel is the ringleader of a revolution and they must act now before it’s too late. Vimes hears that they’ve brought siege weapons to the heftiest barricade, a contraption called Big Mary. He realizes that with Swing gone, Carcer has filled the void, and it’s leading to different outcomes than he remembers. He takes a group with carpentry equipment out through a small opening in the barricade to sabotage Big Mary (and the oxen pushing her). It works, but Vimes knows they’ll be back. Mountjoy-Standfast has decided that given the events in trying to use siege weaponry, this is now a political issue and above their pay grade. They send an officer to relay this to the higher ups. There is a banquet occurring, and Lady Meserole is quickly and carefully engineering people who are still for Winder into groups of people who are vehemently not, helping to shift the political tide. Lords Venturi and Selachii are informed of the way the barricades are holding and try to come up with other ways to break the rebel lines.
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In the wee hours, Sandra shows up with breakfast for Vimes and a chiding from Doctor Lawn (for not giving him any patients to see to). Before he can eat it, they fall under attack. Lord Winder has his cake carefully inspected for assassins and poisons before deigning to eat it, but afterward an assassin strides into the room, kills his bodyguards and takes out a sword. Winder asks who sent him and who he is—the man replies that the city sent him, and that he is Winder’s future. He goes to strike with the sword, but has succeeded in frightening the Patrician to death, and leaves with a flourish. Vimes directs his men on how to fight back against the crews trying to make it over the barricade, but a grapnel gets Nancyball, and he sends Widget with him to Doctor Lawn, knowing that he’ll die anyway. The men on the other side call for a brief truce to tend to their wounded and let them know of the change in leadership; Vimes assumes the fight is over. Snapcase gets into the Oblong Office and immediately decides that Keel is a threat and must be dealt with, and the revolution put down. Madam Meserole heads downstairs and tells Havelock to take her coach and warn Keel immediately.
All the men are talking about the amnesty when Vimes sees the Sweeper and realizes that it’s not over. Arrows shower them again, killing Wiglet, and Vimes tells everyone to duck into the nearest shop, and leg it out the back alley. Nobby finally explains that Carcer is the new captain of the palace guard and that Snapcase put the order out on him specifically. Vimes tries to leave and have the men save themselves, but the Watch aren’t having it—they want to face down Snapcase’s forces. Dickins recommends using lilac blooms as identification amongst their group; history starts up again. Carcer gathers his men, among them Knock, Quirke, and a reticent Coates, to take them on. There’s a new barricade in Cable Street, and Reg comes out from Vimes’s side swinging first, heartbroken at the failed revolution. He’s killed next after taking several arrows and a sword. The fight breaks out—it’s a mess, and many of Carcer’s men are killed, along with Dickins. Carcer’s people retreat. Vimes knocks his younger self out to keep him from the fight, and Coates switches sides, asking Vimes where he’s from. He admits that he time traveled and suddenly time freezes and Lu-Tze and Qu are there, with the real John Keel’s body. They tell him he needs to grab Carcer now and finish this; they also tell him that he’ll arrive in his present nude.
Vimes and Coates charge the group, Vimes gets his hands on Carcer, and they’re both brought back to the future, but Carcer isn’t with him. Vimes fears he’s probably gone to his house and tells all the men to get there immediately. He runs home naked and finds out that there’s trouble with the birth. Ridcully shows up on his lawn on a broomstick, so Vimes climbs on and asks to be taken to Doctor Lawn. Lawn recognizes him, but Vimes insists there’s no time to explain and brings him home to tend to Sybil. His house is full of watchmen. He puts on clothes. Lawn helps Sybil give birth, and Vimes falls asleep the instant after he sees his wife and newborn son, Sam. The next day he pays Lawn a ton of money and then heads to the cemetery to stand in front of Keel’s grave and the rest who perished in the final fight (Snouty and Coates also died). Reg gets out of his coffin and heads out, and Vimes realizes something is amiss right as Carcer attacks. The fight is vicious, but Vimes stops himself from killing the man because he wants him brought to justice. It turns out that Vetinari is in the cemetery and saw the whole thing. It also turns out that he took up a lilac and fought with the men after Keel died (and wondered why he’d looked so different in death). He suggests building a monument to the day, which sets Vimes off. Vetinari instead suggests that he gives Vimes back Treacle Mine Road to honor John Keel. Vimes agrees and insists that after Carcer’s trial, he’ll be spending time with his family. The two part ways, and Vimes takes Carcer to justice.
Commentary
You have to appreciate the twist in the time travel plot here: There are always events that need to be set back in place, and your average protagonist is always going to work like hell to ensure that things happen as they should or their future doesn’t exist. But Vimes knows that allowing those things to happen as he remembers means that a lot of people die, and despite how badly he wants to go home, he cannot just let it unfold as it’s meant to. It’s not in his nature to let things happen, which is an excellent difficulty to give a protagonist in a time travel story, and underutilized in my opinion. (Outside of the version where the protagonist sets out to create a different outcome i.e. “let’s kill Hitler,” which is a different kind of story.)
I do think that the sections putting Vetinari in place to kill Winder happen a little too slowly? They lose some momentum for me because they occur very sporadically and it’s easy to forget he’s on the board until the next section shows up. It robs the whole arc of some intrigue and build on my end. Having said that, the actual moment is flawless in its execution, ten out of ten, no notes for the incomparable baby Havelock Vetinari. He killed the most powerful man in the city at the age of roughly sixteen by saying “Boo,” and this means I love him eternally. I’m well aware that this is a glaring flaw in my character.
There’s another minor peeve I’ve got here, being that while I appreciate that more serious medicine is needed to save Sybil and baby Sam, and while medical knowledge has greatly improved mortality rates among anyone giving birth… a lot of the knowledge and methods used by modern doctors in that arena were still pioneered by women. The issue with how Doctor Lawn is presented at the end of the novel is that it winds up reading like midwifing is somehow backward (though we know this isn’t the case on the Disc, given what we’ve seen from both Granny and Nanny), and modern medicine is the only thing that can fix what midwifing cannot do—and science-driven medicine is a thing that we only see being practiced by men in these books thus far.
The men who practiced obstetrics in earlier centuries were known for some absolutely horrific things (think of J. Marion Sims), while there were many women who tried throughout history to apply themselves in the field of women’s medicine and who did very important work to bring it forward (Louise Bourgeois, Justine Siegemund, Agnodice, the list goes on). I appreciate that Lawn learned medicine from Klatchians, but I do wish there had been some mention of one of his medical mentors in Klatch being a woman to pay tribute to that truth.
We continue our tradition of Sam Vimes going until he literally passes out from exhaustion (but only once he’s sure that everyone is safe). And then we arrive at this ending in the cemetery, which is such an important moment on so many levels, but specifically as a point of deep understanding between Vimes and Vetinari—of the sort they’ve never really had before. And to my mind, that understanding begins with this quote Vimes gives to Carcer:
“I’m hurting and I’m still doing it all by the book.”
Vetinari has made it clear—at the start of this book and at other times as well—that he’s aware of the fact that the City Watch has the power and ability to go too far, especially given the resources they now possess. He’s made it clear that he’s concerned over it, and allowed Vimes to give him answers like “we’ll keep each other accountable” and let certain moments and rejoinders slide. But standing in the shadows of the cemetery, he finally sees how Vimes handles that line within himself. That he’s aware of how it can be abused, and that maybe sometimes, he leans into that safety net too far.
Stepping out of the shadows is a way of saying, I can see you, even when you think I can’t. Remember that, every time you think of crossing that line. I’ll always know. Think twice before giving speeches like that outside this cemetery.
And knowing that he’s probably ruffled Vimes’s feathers a little too hard in playing that hand, he offers up something in exchange—giving his side of events on the 25th of May. Making it clear that, though Vimes never knew (and because in the original timeline, it may not have happened in the exact same way), he has been deeply entrenched on Vimes’s “side” for their entire lives. He was there, he fought, he wears the flower, he understands in part what all of it meant. And then he gives the man something he actually wants for a change—the old Watch House, to honor the man who made him, even if he didn’t get to this time around.
They are two political entities, but throughout the course of these books, their manner of acting out that theater has become decidedly personal. (Because the personal is political. They are a literal embodiment of the point, these two.) So personal, in fact, that Vimes feels an overwhelming need to shut this down and rush home to his family. He doesn’t like how well they see each other. He doesn’t like the fact that Havelock Vetinari might have somehow become the person who knows him best.
But that feeling surely runs both ways, even when Vimes can’t perceive it. And there we leave them. Happy Glorious 25th of May.
Asides and little thoughts:
- Thinking about the weight Ankh-Morpork exerts on the world: “People who’d never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent their life working for it.” Which is true for so many parts of the world that produce most of the food, clothing, and technology that the world utilizes. All of it funneling into cities so they can produce what we call “civilization,” which doesn’t sit right with Vimes, though he can’t pinpoint why exactly.
- Again we’re getting a deeper strain of fatphobia in the insistence that Winder is “unpleasantly plump,” specifically with the appearance of eating “too much rich food.” While there is obviously a classist element to that sort of note—it used to be that only the very rich could afford to eat very rich food—this is no longer the case, and isn’t true in Ankh-Morpork either, even for this period in the city (note that Dibbler’s already around). Cheap fried foods abound in most cities in the past hundred-fifty years or so. Equating the eating of rich foods and plumpness with unpleasantness isn’t really a thing that we need to be doing.
- Love the annoyance that time travel doesn’t do any of the movies conventions, like blue tunnels or time-lapse sunrises and sunsets or calendar pages being torn away.
- I realize that I forgot to bring up the cover of the book, which was a big deal for the fact that the original Discworld cover artist (Josh Kirby) had passed away. This cover is the first of the “main series” done by Paul Kidby, based on a Rembrandt painting of the same name as the novel. It was criticized at the time of release—for being too brown??—but it’s honestly pretty brilliant in its work as parody, the specificity Kidby uses the figures in the original painting for, and matching the less jovial tone.
Pratchettisms:
Vimes counted under his breath, and had only reached two when a cartwheel rolled out of the smoke and away down the road. This always happens.
People are content to wait a long time for salvation, but prefer dinner to turn up inside an hour.
That’s what civilization meant. It meant the city.
Of course, that was before people were civilized. These days, no one had to eat beans.
Lords come and go, but dust accumulates.
People fled at their approach. Some men walk in a way that projects bad news ahead of them.
Someone was slicing towards young Sam; Vimes brought a sword down on the arm in true self-defense.
Vimes’s brain lit up from whatever little pilot light of thought had been operating at the most basic level.
Next week, it’s time to meet Tiffany Aching and The Wee Free Men. We’ll read chapters 1–7.
