The Urban Safari c8
Ponder and Johanna, from a thousand feet up, saw the convoy of large carts lumbering into the Park through the main gate and heading in the direction of the bewildebeeste herd. Miss N'Golate's party, with Ridcully in attendance, was spread out to cover their flank and rear against unaccounted feral cats. As they spiralled lower, they observed a man dancing in the path of the carts and trying to stop them, shouting incoherently and pointing a trembling arm in the direction of the divots sent up by the heavy horses, and the wheel-ruts the heavy carts were gouging in the turf. Even from this height they could make out thwarted near-hysteric rage, and noted that he had gone puce with fury. A broad-shouldered stocky man walking alongside the lead cart, apparently smoking a pipe, took the raging one by the dshoulder, steering him away from the hooves of one of the most massive horses Johanna had ever seen. At a signal from the calm man, two Watchmen physically lifted the enraged man off his feet and ran him back towards the gate.
"Now whet's heppening here?" she mused out loud, as the broomstick circled down, landing a respectful distance away from the huge closed carts, each of which was drawn by a team of four of the massive horses. The tweedy pipe-smoker strolled over to greet them.
"You'd be Miss Smith-Rhodes, the lady in charge?" he asked, affably. "I'm Dan Archer. Guild of Farmers. Over there on the lead wagon, that's my colleague, Walter Gabriel from the Guild of Drovers and Cattlemen." 1(1)
"'Ow-do, me old beauty!" Mr Gabriel acknowledged them.
"I didn't think Ankh-Morpork hed eny ferms!" Johanna remarked.
"A common misconception, Miss Smith-Rhodes." Mr Archer said, cheerfully. "Lord Vetinari's writ runs out for a reasonable way in all directions from the City and it covers a lot of farmland. At least as far as the accepted borders with Quirm and Pseudopolis. We're possibly what's left of the old Empire!"
She nodded.
"End you're here for?"
"Captain Carrot asked for our help. We'd just dropped off a load of Charolais bulls for the cattle auction, and he was lucky to find the wagons empty. He suggested we might be able to think of a way to round up your large cattle over there and get them out of the Park. Walter's got a few ideas about that, don't you worry!"
"But these are feral bovines." Johanna objected.
"All cattle is feral." Walter Gabriel announced. "The ones we breed for milk and meat and leather have just had a lot more practice at living alongside of people and puts up with us, as we feeds 'em and keeps 'em safe from predators! They'll gore you if you shows 'em no respect, sure as one of these longhorns!"
"End these wagons?" she asked, fascinated. In size and scale, they reminded her of the Boortrekkie wagons that her people had originally ridden out in, to colonise the Howondalandian interior. She'd been shown surviving examples in the Pratoria museum as a child, and had been told to remember.
Dan Archer showed her. "Wheels eight foot in diameter, iron-shod, on very heavy-duty springs. The cargo bed can take three or four large cows or bulls. The structure is made of inch-thick oak planks so there's no way a panicked creature can kick its way out. There are open slats at eye-level for the animals to look out. These admit cool air and sunlight for reassurance. Each cattle transport is pulled by four Quirmian Punch horses."
"The horses is a hangover from the days when knights in armour rode to battle on them horses with curtains on.. They needed a horse that was big and tough and strong enough to carry the weight of all the armour, including its own. When no knight rode out in armour no more, we carried on breeding the heavy horses for all them jobs in farming where it needed a big strong beat, like pulling ploughs or operating grinding mills or pullin' heavy loads." 2(2)
As they spoke, other farmhands were lowering ramps and applying brakes. The tranquillised bull that Ridcully's party had knocked down, with the loss of Special Constable Hancock, was being prepared for winching into the back of one of the cattle-wagons.
Walter Gabriel nodded at the bull.
"Cows is cows, miss. You drags the bull into the back of one of the wagons, and they'll follow. Then when we've loaded the herd, we close up and we takes them to a field out in the country. They'll be there for when you needs them. Captain Carrot knows where to find us."
Johanna smiled.
"I cen see you hev things under control here. Thenk you. Ponder, cen we go to the gates now?"
They could have walked to the main gate, Ponder reflected, but she still asked me to fly her. Not that I'm complaining.
From above, they could see Emmanuelle's party making it overland to the command post, escorting two cages full of doped baboons. There are still at least ten at large, Johanna estimated. But at least they're contained. Johanna also noted movement by the lake: seven or eight apes of various sizes, most black, save one with red hair. This group was also moving, with ponderous purpose, towards the gate. She nodded: the Librarian had been successful, then. They came in to land to a massive commotion, caused by one man.
"Now, mr Flowerdew. Please be reasonable!" Commander Vimes said, exuding much-abused patience.
"You are wrecking my Park, Commander!" the barrel-chested little man in his late fifties said, from behind a fussy little moustache, his whole body radiating terminal indignation.
"If there was any other way, Mr Flowerdew, I'd have used it. But these are exceptional circumstances. Captain Carrot was absolutely right to have sent those carts in. Or do you want a herd of huge wild cows roaming around your park in perpetuity?"
"Look at the mess they're making of my grass!" Mr Robert Flowerdew nearly screamed. As the head park-keeper at Hide Park, he took a very great pride in the facility the City paid him to keep in good order. Perhaps too much pride, others whispered: Flowerdew was known to have bitten through his picker-uppy-spiked stick in sheer rage at the sight of a single piece of litter. He had frequently petitioned Vetinari for the re-introduction of birching for anyone ignoring the Keep Off The Grass signs, and he was certainly no friend of incontinent dogs on his premises. The sight of amateur gardeners taking clippings of his plants and flowers filled him with berserker rage, and even the City's premier youth gangs, such as the Shamlegger Street Rude Boys, still spoke with awe and fear of the time Flowerdew had caught them having an impromptu game of football on the bowling green, and had gone into a one-parkie-beserker-rage, scattering thugs, vandals, GBH-artists and graffiti-sprayers in every direction in terrified panic. 3(3)
Vimes regretted the lost opportunity to have sent Mr Flowerdew up against the lions, considering the City would have benefited in either outcome.
"And that's another thing, Commander! I don't tolerate dogs crapping in my park! What them bloody buffaloes have done don't bear thinking about!"
"My gardener says it's good for the roses, Mr Flowerdew?"
Johanna coughed to attract attention.
"We should perhaps consider Mr King's men to perform a necessary clear-up efter we are finished, Commender Vimes?"
Flowerdew and Vimes both looked at her.
"Herry King would pey for the dung these creatures hev left. Call it a donation to the Widows End Orphens' Fund?"
Vimes nodded. Flowerdew opened his mouth to rage again, something about gnolls coming into his park only over his cold dead body, and then Emmanuelle's party started to stream out through the gates. Johanna leapt to issue instructions and directions to them, with Vimes filling them in about where the first few batches of animals had been sent.
As a working party of student Assassins started on the walk to the Patrician's Palace, Emmanuelle fixed Flowerdew with the cold glare that could and often did silence a classroom.
"Over your dead body, you say, mon vieux? I believe that can so easily be arranged. Luckily for you, you are speaking to the professionals!"
It takes a lot to silence a professionally aggrieved park-keeper, but an Assassin can always find something up her sleeve. Flowerdew subsided into silence.
Vimes moved over to Johanna.
"I'd be very interested to hear how you propose to get Harry King to pay us for clearing up the sh…dung." he said. "Isn't it usually the way that we pay him to send his lads round with buckets and shovels?"
Johanna smiled.
"Oh, he will, Commender, when I explain a few things to him. He will."
"Sir!" a Watchman called. Vimes turned his head. He looked to Johanna.
"Let them come." she said. No hindrance. They will be quiet end present no risk."
The Librarian and the family of gorillas were knuckling slowly along.
"End please ensure they hev more bananas and other soft fruit."
Ponder Stibbons stepped forward to watch the spectacle. He and Johanna unconsciously moved close to each other.
"In a way, it's quite spectacular, isn't it?" he said.
She nodded. "Gorillas hev elweys been my favourites of the Great Apes" she said. Almost unconsciously, her hand found Ponder's and clasped it. "A quiet and usually gentle enimel thet lives in small, well-ordered, family groups. They give us no trouble end we ere careful to give none to them. Oh, no, whet is thet idiot doing…"
Senior Park-Keeper Flowerdew was leaping up and down in rage. In rage, people often say and do things they come to regret later. Senior Park-Keeper Flowerdew was no exception.
"Here!" he almost shrieked, pointing at Junior. "That bloody monkey's eating my bloody daffodils! They cost good money, they did, and took days to plant all the beds down the lakeside! And all that to end up as monkey-food?"
Flowedew realised he was in the middle of a widening empty circle as people around him edged away. He also realised eight pairs of simian eyes were looking in his direction. Unblinking and unfriendly simian eyes.
The dominant silverback said Groink—oink-oink-WhooOOOP! {"well, that just about tears it! I can forgive them the whoop-phalange bit, as that's technical vocabulary, but this?"}
The Librarian, still holding the baby gorilla, made the best bow he could to the silverback.
"Ooook!" he said, making a generous arm-gesture towards the silverback and then to Flowerdew. {"Be my guest!"}
"Oh, DEAR!" Vimes said, as the silverback, full of purpose and an affronted need to chastise, knuckled forward.
"IGOR! You're needed!" Vimes called.
"Nobody uses the m-word to the Librarian any more" Ponder remarked to an amused Johanna. "But you'd think they'd stop and realise orangs aren't the only apes!"
"The Great Apes all shere meny cherecter traits." Johanna replied. "If we hed gibbons here, they would elso react bedly to being celled m… celled by the m-word".
She realised she was still holding his hand, but neither of them was in a hurry to let go.
"Perheps.. just perhaps… you might like to call round and see the Enimel Menegement Unit et some point? I realise zoology is a soft science, so-celled, and it doesn't really compare to your High Energy Megic Building…"
"But you run your own scientific facility. That takes some doing! I bet you have the same problems with Lord Downey that I have with Ridcully!"
"Hah! Getting my finance out of the Derk Council…" she paused. An idea glimmered. "And I get the Master dropping by unannounced, with ideas he doesn't understand, or requests to drop everything I'm working on to setisfy some verdammte whim of his…"
"Dealing with students and trying to make sure they don't break too much expensive equipment…"
"Reining in the pupils when they get over-confident or plain clumsy…"
"Recapturing escaped demons because the student hasn't properly drawn the magical octagram…"
"Hah! I had escaped scorpions to recepture efter my students failed to secure a tenk!"
"And the Bursar's insane…well, he takes gentle handling…"
"Heving to cultivate tree frogs, so Mr Winvoe the Guild Treasurer cen hev his dried frog pills…"
Johanna and Ponder looked into each other's eyes and both smiled, then laughed.
"You'd be right at home in the H.E.M." Ponder said, reflectively. "Why not, you know, call by? I'd love to show you round!"
Johanna rested her head against his shoulder.
"Ponder, I would like thet very much!"
Ponder Stibbons sighed, happily. This was almost completely unfamiliar ground to him, but he was learning how to navigate it. He also had a growing sense that there were some aspects of life that Johanna had just been too busy to add to her curriculum vitae.
Then she was the schoolteacher again.
"Excuse me" she said, and stepped forward to speak to the silverback, who was holding a mercifully unconscious Mr Flowerdew up by one ankle while beating his own chest with the other huge ape fist.
"Grooink?" she said, hopefully. The huge gorilla calmed down, and gently laid down the body of the park-keeper. As Igor ran forward to perform basic first-aid, the silverback extended an open hand to her. She took it, and smiled.
"I think we understend each other, Mr Father Of His Whoop." she said. "I will do my best to see you and your whoop re-housed in a place you will be comfortable in. You know me. You hev my word!"
The silverback inclined his head in acknowledgement, and then returned to his family.
"I always thought it was a phalange of gorillas." Ponder said, thoughtfully. Johanna sighed.
"It's a whoop, Professor. A whoop of gorillas and a phalange of baboons!"
But she smiled as she said it, and took his hand again.
The gorillas were soon moving off, in the back of an open cart, to take temporary residence in a spare enclosure at the Patrician's Menagerie.
_____________________________--
Emmanuelle, meanwhile, was in conference with the Igors over Catherine Perry-Bowen.
"We couldn't save her eyes. They were damaged beyond repair" Igorina said, quietly.
Emmanuelle nodded. She'd expected to hear as much. Now she had the hard job of breaking the news to the family and arranging for the poor blind child to be transferred to a school more appropriate for her new needs. She couldn't, of course, remain at the Assassins' School.
"There is another way." Igor said. "Bio-artificing."
"You can replace eyes?"
"He breeds them" said Igorina. She went to the back of the hospital trailer and called "Constable Williams?"
The Watchman stepped forwards. Emmanuelle looked at his face. One eye was blue, the other… brown?
"He lost an eye while on Watch service." Igor said, smoothly. "I replaced it with a bioartificed organ."
Emmanuelle asked Williams a few questions, discovering that he'd had his original right eye gouged out in a fight4(4) and Igor had been very keen to try out his new idea to see if it had worked. Assuring herself that it was as good as the real thing, she had given consent to replacement of the eyes, provided, and I wish you to be completely clear on this, mr Igor, they are both of the same colour, hmmm?
.Igor had agreed instantly, but had asked "One last thing, Madame? With a view to improving my stock, may I take a tissue sample from you?"
Emmanuelle was on her guard.
"May I ask, for what reason?"
"You depend on your eyes for your work. Your vision has to be excellent in all respects. I would dearly like to be able to bio-replicate the eyes of a superbly co-ordinated athlete and fighting swordswoman. To use only the very best! All I need is a very small tissue sample…"
"From my EYES?" she nearly shrieked.
"All I need to is to take a swab from the surface of your cornea. This will provide enough living cells, perfectly painlessly, for the bio-replication process to begin. In eight weeks, a perfect clone of your eyes will exist, for implantation into a lucky recipient…"
All eyes moved to Catherine.
"And in the meantime, she has a temporary set? Then the permanent eyes she receives are a copy of mine?"
Despite herself, Emmmanuelle felt flattered.
"And who knows, her swordswoman skills are bound to improve. Eh bien, take your samples!"
_______________________________-
The troop of chimpanzees came in to surrender, filing quietly and meekly past Johanna, Vimes and Carrot. Vimes noted that they were trying not to catch her eye and were seeking to get as far away from her as possible. He wondered why. Then she squealed with delight and cried out
"Mr Boggis!"
Vimes looked around him, but the Head Thief was still conspicuous by his absence.
"No, down here, Commender. This fellow here!"
She beckoned a chimp forward with her finger. It inched forwards with extreme reluctance. First it placed its hands over its eyes, trying to blot out the frightening sight and make it not be there. Then it placed its hands over its ears, trying to make the sound of the feared voice not be there. Finally it placed its hands over its mouth, so as not to incriminate itself.
"Show leg!" Johanna commanded it. The chimp extended a leg with extreme reluctance. Johanna took it in a firm hand, and showed Vimes the tag.
"I met this fellow et home in Howondaland lest summer" she said. "You should take one of your criminal iconogrephs of this rescel, Sir Samuel. I believe we heve here the criminal mastermind responsible for a spate of raids on orcherds and fruit farms eround Piemberg. I wes celled upon to help capture the chimpanzees responsible, and this particular ringleader I tagged and named Mr Boggis, efter the head of the Thieves' Guild. Wetch this one. He is clever end unscrupulous!"
Vimes grinned, appreciatively. There was a certain Boggis-like shiftiness to the chimp, now he came to look. And a certain facial similarity.
"Commander Vimes? Miss Smith-Rhodes? Please be so good as to stand just so, to either side of the most iconogenic Mister Boggis, if you please…"
There was a massive actinic-white flash.
"Thank you both so much!"
Vimes sighed. Otto Chriek had made it here, then, and was taking pictures for the Times. Well, better make sure he gets some good ones, and the Times gets our version of the story first…
"Sir?"
Carrot made to pass Vimes a steaming mug of tea.
"Ah, than…"
Vimes had a glimpse of the mug lifted out of his almost-grasp by a hairy arm. His gaze swivelled round to where a chimp was draining it with every sign of appreciation. Meanwhile, Otto Chriek had taken another picture, with a cry of appreciation.
"I'm sorry, Commender." Johanna sighed. "I should have warned you that sometimes, you get a chimpanzee who has been brought up as a pet, hes edopted human mennerisms, end released beck into the wild when it gets too large end unpredictable. When the species gets a taste for tea, it will kill for a cup. Literally. I should consider thet mug to be lost to you now."
Vimes sighed.
"If I light a cigar, will I regret it? Do any of them smoke?"
"They are en intelligent species, Commender!"
1 (1) Yes, I know. I'm plundering names again from characters in the long-running BBC rural soap opera, The Archers.
2 (2) Really true. When archery, artillery and handguns made the heavy-armoured knight obsolete no later than 1550, the horse studs that served them lived on, and adapted the animals to agriculture and other heavy duties such as pulling barges. The percheron of the 15th century knight is today the Suffolk Punch, a recognised breed of horse and a mainstay of British agriculture and heavy haulage for several hundred years. Even after mechanisation, the heavy horses are still there.
3 (3) A staple of British humour over the years has been the officious, petty-Hitler, attitude of the municipal park-keeper, in his polished boots, black uniform, and impeccable military-style peaked cap. Parks are an open green space for pleasure and recreation, usually provided by the civic authority. Who then hire Mr Flowerdew to police it and enforce the by-laws. Ah, the Parkie….
4 (4) This was true, so far as it went. Williams had drilled a peep-hole down through the roof of the womens' shower-room from the floor above. However, rather than Angua or Sally, he'd surprised the immensely strong Constable Precious Jolson, who had screamed and punched upwards at the eye staring at her. Parts of the shattered floorboards had pierced his eye, and Igor had replaced it with a home-grown. Williams had also been fined by Vimes for "damage to Watch property", in that Precious would not have smashed the floor into his face if she'd not been voyeured upon. A lady large in all departments, Precious had then been the butt of jokes like "she'll have your eye out for looking at those", or "you'll go blind for looking"