THE PURCHASE OF A (ONE HORSE, OPEN) SLEIGH
Uberwald is a dark and forbidding country, a land of mountains that cut into the sky like hatchets; of black forests impenetrable to anyone with a healthy survival instinct; and ultimately, of cold, which waits in the earth and the air and the people's blood even at the height of summer. In Uberwald, friendly woodsmen tend to die young, and innkeepers are more inclined towards penny pinching meanness - a kind of small-minded bullying of all that portion of the world they can reach - than jocularity. Snow maidens, which in a kinder and more logical part of the multiverse would be considered one of the few good points of such an ice-bound, northern nation, are perfunctorily set on fire by the ready mob, when they did have the nerve to pop up at all.
All of these things are true. Also true is that Uberwald has a burgeoning tourist trade that composes twenty percent of the national income(1).
Right now, somewhere on the outskirts of those black forests, the Duke and Duchess of Ankh-Morpork are adding their small but notable contribution to that income in an attempt to purchase a sleigh.
(1) Of which a further forty percent is fat, and thirty iron and tin. The remaining ten percent is cherry trees, for reasons incomprehensible to most foreigners but in all probability having to do with morphic resonance and an unfortunately tormented young playwright by the name of Chekhov.
--
Closer...
There was a loud screeching noise, a curse, and an amusing series of mysterious thumps. A stuffed badger appeared out of nowhere, and was ignored. In Bonk, traffic along the Main and Only Street came rumbling to a halt.
"Why," hissed Vimes, "is the sleigh staring at me?"
"Don't be silly, dear," Sybil said, patting him gently on the arm and trying to budge him from the spot where his feet had apparently taken root in the uncompromising snow - right in the middle of the narrow street, as it happened, and to the dismay of the stopped carriage driver who was now caught in a horrible dilemma between running someone over and freezing his fingers off while waiting for the someone in question to move(1). Sybil was aware, in a genteel sort of way, that normally this would have been no contest; the only reason her husband wasn't now somewhat flatter than previously was the floppy hat and the tights, which suggested that here was someone rich enough to have serious men in dark suits who would come after their murderer with either very small knives or, worse, lawsuits. She knew insisting on formal attire had been a good idea. "That's just the fascinating cultural designs carved into the wood."
"No, it isn't. Look! That eyeball moved!"
"Maybe it's shy," she said evenly. "You do have a rather forbidding stare, you know."
"That's not the point!" said Vimes, but with a growing hopeless note in his voice. "I mean - I mean - it moved..."
"They're called fascinating cultural designs for reason," Sybil pointed out, and finally succeeded in pushing him forward with a loud crack as a chunk of frost that had solidified on his boot heel shattered. He sighed, and let her guide him, though not without keeping his gaze on the fascinating cultural designs until his peripheral vision could no longer take the stress.
It was a bit unnerving, as sleighs went, Sybil admitted, in the privacy of her own mind. Crude, little more than grey logs held together with sap and twine, the knots in the woods patterned into terrible visages with open mouths and staring eyes and weird bones in the wrong places. But that was what made them so cultural and fascinating, she was sure. It was only Sam's imagination that one of them had moved.
She had almost convinced herself of this when one of the faces creaked, out of the corner of its mouth, "T'anks, miss. 'E's got a hell of a stare, dun't 'e?"
She couldn't help it. She giggled. Vimes dutifully pretended not to notice it, with little success, and tried not to think about the wooden voice that had immediately preceded this ominous sound, with even less success.
"I didn't hear that," he said aloud.
Sybil giggled harder, and together they moved on. There were, after all, other sleighs.
(1) In fact he lost no fingers, but did part with half an ear before Vimes was dislodged, and ever after cursed Ankh-Morpork and its ambassador nightly(2) for the asymmetry that had crushed his hopes and dreams of one day becoming a ventriloquist.
(2) Amusingly enough, this concentration of belief was enough to change the world very slightly, pushing an untimely brick off a roof just as the Commander was passing by and knocking him out(3).
(3) Causing him to sustain a minor concussion and major embarrassment. Needless to say, Angua was unable to keep a straight face in his presence for days, and would after resent the brick for the loss of seven dollars' worth of armor allowance, promptly docked when she burst out laughing at the way his helmet sat askew on the lump protruding from his skull.
--
Eventually, they settled on a pretty, rather newer sleigh, all smoothly cut boards painted dark red and varnished so that it glittered attractively and caught the eye of, well, tourists such as themselves. There were matching dark red reins and harnesses and - and strappy things, and pointy bits, and so on. Also, bells. Lots of bells. Little yellow bells that seemed intent on jingling indefinitely, now that Vimes had been so foolish as to give them an opening by putting a hand on the headboard and thus setting off some infinitesimal vibration that was all the pernicious jinglers needed to start merrily... jingling. Vimes experimentally lifted one hand off his ear, to see if they had at least died down while he had been clutching his palms to his head, and winced.
Sybil, meanwhile, had clearly been enjoying herself. Vimes was fervently glad that he wasn't the seller of the sleigh.
"Well, Your Grace, you must understand," the man gibbered, "the costs of lumber these days, and bells, and well, and bells..."
"Don't talk nonsense, man," Sybil boomed. Her cheeks were red from the nip in the air and her eyes were dancing; she seemed more alive and vivacious than she had since singing dwarfish opera, and Vimes could be appreciative of it, although of course with the greatest sympathy for her victim. "Your son's a woodcutter, isn't he?" (She had wrested this fact from the man's wife, earlier, when the question must have seemed innocuous). "You must get it nearly free!"
"Ah - er - you know how it is with young men - he's a stingy boy, I don't doubt not mine, you oughtn't trust a word my wife said. But," he added hastily, "I'll take... twenty crowns, since you've been put to such trouble by her. And that's my last offer."
Sybil said, with an air of triumph, "Fifteen, and you include the tack."
Vimes lost track of the dickering only a few minutes after and took a moment outside to smoke a much-needed cigar and call Detritus over to the little carpentry shop.
"Am I needed for purposes of persuasion, sir?" said Detritus as he stumped over, to the general distress of those few pedestrians nearby, who were not used to trolls in such dashing leather uniforms and were merely awed, not angry in any way, Vimes thought. Ahahaha.
"No, no," said Vimes, "but I think we're going to be quitting this place soon. You're still getting some very unfriendly looks, sergeant, and besides, Sybil's almost browbeaten the man into submission."
"I don't know what you mean, I'm sure," said Sybil, with considerable dignity as she emerged from beneath the curly wood overhang. "It was just a bit of friendly dickering - it's all part of the tourist experience."
"I see," said Vimes. "What about the paying exorbitant prices for shiny objects that fall apart as soon as they cross the border part of the tourist experience?"
"One can't have everything," she replied. "But in any case, I think the tip covered that part."
Vimes laughed - with real mirth, for once, and not all that much cynicism to it. His wife smiled at him. There was a small comfortable moment, the kind that normally gets a bit lost among all the pregnant pauses, who it finds very intimidating, but was now enjoying a brief respite from the crowd of all the other moments and, metaphorically, settling into a suddenly materialized armchair with an equally sudden pipe next to the merrily crackling fireplace of every human's subconscious.
Detritus said, patiently as ever when dealing with mysterious human affairs, "We ought to be goin' back to the embassy, sir."
"Yes, of course," said Vimes, a little distant. Detritus recognized the look and shouldered the sleigh himself, with a stony sigh, and together they walked back to the last outcrop of Ankh-Morpork they would see in several weeks.
Captain Carrot greeted them at the door of the stables. "Hello, sir, Lady Sybil, sergeant. What a nice sleigh. One horse, I see?"
"That's right," said Sybil, while Vimes wondered vaguely how you could tell - why not two skinny horses? "We're going to take a leisurely pace. Aren't we, Sam?"
"Hmm? Oh. Yes, indeed." She prodded him in the side. "Ow!"
"Well, good!" said Carrot, cheerfully ignoring his superior officer's distress. "I drew up a list of sights you might want to take a look at on the way." He rummaged around in his armor for a bit, while Sam and Sybil both politely averted their eyes(1), and finally came up with a somewhat rumpled sheaf of what looked like several thousand sights to see. Vimes winced. Sybil brightened still more, until she was practically incandescent.
"This will be very helpful, Captain, thank you." A moment later she was perusing the sheaf with interest, apparently oblivious to the world. "Mm... the Chocolate Factory, yes... Cuckoo Museum..."
There was a thoughtful silence, broken only by muttering, and then Vimes took Carrot aside a little.
"The horse?" he asked, pointedly.
"Oh, sorry, sir, she's right in here. I think Lady Sybil is busy ordering the packing...?"
And, indeed, in the intervening seconds she had put the inventory down and started ordering around the newest Constable Igor on the beat. The pile of bundles carefully stacked up on the front under-curly bit (as Vimes thought of it) was already quite large. He was pleased to see an armload of wrapped bacon going in, too(2).
He tore himself away and let Carrot show him the horse.
(1) Because there is nothing more embarrassing than seeing a grown man try to pull an extremely secure leather pouch from his breastplate, popular notions of concealed weaponry, coins, and letters aside.
(2) Which sight he would one day, far in a future full of healthy greens and depressingly white meat, look back upon with great and unshakable nostalgia.
--
It was a good horse. Definitely. You could tell by the way it had four legs, and two eyes, and two ears, and two nostrils, and approximately fifteen thousand teeth, all of which were facing him.
"Er," he said. "Is is... healthy?"
"Oh, yes, sir," said Carrot. Vimes didn't doubt him - the beast seemed quite rotund, and was kicking the door to its stall with great strength and vigor.
"She, sir," the man added, reproachfully.
"She?"
"The horse."
"Oh. Right. Of course." Vimes edged a little farther away.
Fortunately, Sybil had finished her packing extravaganza - it was really only moving a pile of bundles from the hallway to the sledge, he knew - and chose that moment to sail into the room, thereby freeing her husband of the duty to ask ridiculously inane questions about horse physiognomy and other such hilarious subjects.
"We're ready!" she announced. "Oh, you're a pretty old mare, you are," she added, in the brisk tones of someone who has certain responsibilities to her class and gender(1), but who is inclined to get it over with as soon as possible.
The horse backed away a little.
"Would you like a carrot?" Sybil tried, hopefully.
Both Carrot and the horse looked terrified. Vimes grinned a mad grin, lit another cigar, and strolled out; after all, his part had been played, hadn't it?
"I'm going to call you Lucille," he heard Sybil declare, as the door closed behind him.
(1) Responsibilities in this case going braindead around acceptably graceful mares, ponies, and the like in a way that often involves pink ribbons and sugar cubes.
--
In the end, Detritus and Carrot managed to drag newly-christened Lucille the Horse from where it had pressed itself up against the very back of its stall in a desperate attempt to escape the ribbons Sybil was holding up in a threatening fashion. After that, it was just a question of knotting. The poor thing never had a chance.
Then there were blankets and amusing mishaps involving grease and bells. Cheery tearfully pressed a hand-knit scarf into Sybil's arms(1), Igor asked if he couldn't just do a quick surgery on the horse to make it a wee bit more efficient - so on and so forth.
When the sleigh finally got out of earshot and eyesight of the embassy - though not, alas, of the bells, even clogged up as they were with lard - Vimes breathed a sigh of relief and leaned back.
"Oh, good," said Sybil. "And now we can talk about the baby."
(1) Bright green, and covered with sequins. When Vimes asked, much later, Cheery said only: "Well, lettuce does have some uses, sir."
--
Uberwald is a dark and forbidding country. Nevertheless, here in the heart of that dark and forbidding country, it was a nice day.
The sun was at its zenith, more or less, the sky very blue and hard. Snow lay over the earth less like a choking blanket and more like powdered sugar than might be considered strictly normal. The mountains were more scenic than menacing. Even the trees seemed a little closer to the green blobs on brown stalks of the imagination than to strange, black sentinels inclined to drop branches on unwary heads.
And slicing through the snow was a small, bright sleigh, built for two, drawn by a single unfortunately ribbon-bedecked grey mare. In the sleigh was an extremely snug married couple, one of whom was still wearing a floppy hat.
"But what if it's a girl?" said the floppy hat wearer.
"It's not a girl," said Sybil, firmly. "A woman knows these things."
"Oh, well," Vimes sighed. "Have it your way. Blue it is."
"Well, good. That's the nursery settled," said Sybil, with great satisfaction. "Now what about -"
"Sybil," said her husband, and kissed her.
There was a pleasant hush, not counting the strangled gurgling of the clogged up bells. Then:
"Your nose is cold," Sybil said sternly. Vimes laughed. She gave him a still sterner look. He laughed harder.
"But I suppose," she continued slowly, after some deliberation, "that the subject of appropriate toys can wait, hmm?"
"I think so," he replied, and then there was no more talking.