‘When we are away you may take the ship into Gebra,’ he said to the captain.
The captain trembled. ‘What shall I tell them, wali?’
‘Tell them the truth… eventually. The commander of the garrison is a man of no breeding and will torture you a little bit. Save up the truth until you need it. That will make him happy. It will help you to say that I forced you.’
‘Oh, I will. I will… tell that lie,’ the captain added quickly.
Ahmed nodded, slid down the rope into the boat and set it adrift.
The crew watched him row through the surf.
This wasn’t a nice beach. It was a wrecking coast. Ribcages of broken ships crumbled into the sand. Bones and driftwood and bleached white seaweed mounded along the high tide line. And, beyond, the dunes of the real desert rose. Even down here sand stung the eyes and gritted the teeth.
‘There’s sudden death on that beach,’ said the first mate, looking over the rail and trying to blink his eyes clear.
‘Yes,’ said the captain. ‘He’s just got out of the boat.’
The figure on the beach pulled the other, recumbent figure out of the boat and dragged him out of reach of the waves. The mate raised his bow.
‘I could kill him from here, master. Just say the word.’
‘How sure are you? Because you’d better be really sure. First, if you miss him you’re dead and, second, if you hit him, you’re still dead. Look up there.’
On the high distant dunes, dark against the sand-filled sky, there were mounted figures. The mate dropped his bow.
‘How did they know we were here?’
‘Oh, they watch the sea,’ said the captain. ‘D’regs like a good shipwreck as much as anyone else. More, in fact. A lot more.’
As they turned away from the rail, something leapt from the hull and entered the water with barely a splash.
Detritus tried to lurk in the shade, but there was not a lot of it about. The heat came off the high desert ahead of them like a blowtorch.
‘I’m gonna get fick,’ he muttered.
There was a shout from the lookout.
‘He says someone’s climbing the dunes,’ said Carrot. ‘Carrying someone else, he says.’
‘Er… female?’
‘Look, sir, I know Angua. She’s not the useless type. She doesn’t stand there and scream helplessly. She makes other people do that.’
‘Well… if you’re sure…’ Vimes turned to Jenkins. ‘Don’t bother to chase the ship, captain. Just keep heading for the shore.’
‘I don’t work like that, mister. For one thing, that’s a damn difficult shore, the wind’s always against you, and there’s some very nasty currents. Many an incautious sailorman has left his bones to bleach on those sands. No, we’ll stand out a little way and you can lower the— well, if we had a boat any more, you could lower it… and we’ll drop the anchor, oh, no, tell a lie, it turned out to be too heavy, didn’t it—’
‘You just keep straight on,’ said Vimes.
‘We’ll all be killed.’
‘Think of it as the lesser of two evils.’
‘What’s the other one?’
Vimes drew his sword.
‘Me.’
The Boat squeaked through the mysterious depths of the ocean. Leonard spent a lot of time looking out of the tiny windows, particularly interested in pieces of seaweed which, to Sergeant Colon, looked like pieces of seaweed.
‘Do you note the fine strands of Dropley’s Etoliated Bladderwrack?’ said Leonard. ‘That’s the brown stuff. A marvellous growth which, of course, you will see as significant.’
‘Could we just assume for the moment that I have neglected my seaweed studies in recent years?’ said the Patrician.
‘Really? Oh, the loss is entirely yours, I assure you. The point is, of course, that the Etoliated Bladderwrack is never usually found growing above thirty fathoms, and it’s only ten here.’
‘Ah.’ The Patrician flicked through a stack of Leonard’s drawings. ‘And the hieroglyphs — an alphabet of signs and colours. Colours as a language… what a fascinating idea…’
‘An emotional intensifier,’ said Leonard. ‘But of course we ourselves use something like it. Red for danger and so on. I never did succeed in translating it, though.’
‘Colours as a language…’ murmured Lord Vetinari.
Sergeant Colon cleared his throat. ‘I know something about seaweed, sir.’
‘Yes, sergeant?’
‘Yessir! If it’s wet, sir, it means it’s going to rain.’
‘Well done, sergeant,’ said Lord Vetinari, without turning his head. ‘I think it is quite possible that I will never forget you said that.’
Sergeant Colon beamed. He had Made A Contribution.
Nobby nudged him. ‘What’re we doing down here, sarge? I mean, what’s it all about? Poking around, looking at weird marks on the rocks, going in and out of caves… and the smell… well…’
‘It’s not me,’ said Sergeant Colon.
‘Smells like… sulphur…’
Little bubbles streamed past the window.
‘It stunk up on the surface, too,’ Nobby went on.
‘Nearly finished, gentlemen,’ said Lord Vetinari, putting the papers aside. ‘One last little venture and then we can surface. Very well, Leonard… take us underneath.’
‘Er… aren’t we underneath already, sir?’ said Colon.
‘Only underneath the sea, sergeant.’
‘Ah. Right.’ Colon gave this due consideration. ‘Is there anything else to be under, then, sir?’
‘Yes, sergeant. Now we’re going under the land.’
The beach was a lot closer now. The watchmen couldn’t help noticing that the sailors were all hurrying to the blunt end of the ship and hanging on to any small, lightweight and above all buoyant objects they could find.
‘This seems close enough,’ said Vimes. ‘Right. Stop here.’
‘Stop here? How?’
‘Don’t ask me, I’m no sailor. Aren’t there some sort of brakes?’
Jenkins stared at him. ‘You — you landlubber!’
‘I thought you never used the word!’
‘I never met one like you before! You even think we call the bows the sharp en—’
It was, the crew agreed later, one of the strangest landings in the history of bad seamanship. The shelving of the beach must have been right and the tide as well, because the ship did not so much hit the beach as sail up it, rising out of the water as the keel de-barnacled itself on the sand. Finally the forces of wind, water, impetus and friction all met at the point marked ‘fall over slowly’.
It did so, earning the title of ‘world’s most laughable shipwreck’.
‘Well, that might have been worse,’ said Vimes, when the splintering noises had died away.
He eased himself out of a tangle of canvas and adjusted his helmet with as much aplomb as he could muster.
He heard a groan from the lopsided hold.
‘Is dat you, Cheery?’
‘Yes, Detritus.’
‘Is dis me?’
‘No!’
‘Sorry.’
Carrot eased his way down the sloping deck and jumped onto the damp sand. He saluted.
‘All present and lightly bruised, sir. Shall we establish a beachhead?’
‘A what?’
‘We have to dig in, sir.’
Vimes looked both ways along the beach, if such a sunny-sounding word could be applied to the forsaken strand. It was really just a hem to the land. Nothing stirred except the heat haze and, in the distance, one or two carrion birds.
‘What for?’ he said.
‘Establish a defensible position. It’s just one of those things soldiers do, sir.’