Chapter 6: The little house on the pr... err... beach
Angelina is walking in the garden of the Steventon manor house. Cherry petals are falling out of the sky. Under a beech tree sits Penelope. She speaks. "I want porridge, I want porridge!" she keeps whining. Angelina lights a fire and pours oat flakes into a pot. Penelope pulls at her skirt. The porridge begins to bubble and rise and the pot overflows. Porridge floods over the grass and the path. Angelina picks up her sister and tries to run towards the door of the house, but she can't lift her feet off the ground. She hands Penelope to Constantin, who has appeared in front of her. The assassin carries the child away. An avalanche of porridge engulfs Angelina and drags her under...
She awoke, her heart pounding. It was completely dark. She stood up and felt sand under her bare feet. A dark sandy desert...
It didn't seem right, though. She could feel her breath, her heartbeat. There was a gentle, steady roar in the background. After a while, she recognized it as the sound of waves breaking on a beach. The air was warm and smelled of the sea and of lush vegetation.
So, she reasoned, she had been asleep and had been dreaming. She had vague memories of hands and voices and water poured into her mouth, strange tasting water. Was she alive then, and had been rescued?
"Ouch!"
She had turned around and stubbed her toe. When she clutched at her foot with her hand, she lost her balance and fell forwards, scraping her shin on a large hard object in front of her. If she needed any more convincing that she wasn't dead, this was it. Surely clumsiness wouldn't follow her beyond the grave? Down on her knees, she stretched out her hands to explore the object. It was roughly rectangular, consisting of an apparently wooden frame around a coarsely woven surface. She realized it was a bedstead.
A bed on a pitch black beach. It was puzzling, but that was not her main concern at the moment. Gingerly she extended her hand away from the bedstead. She felt nothing but empty space. Inch by inch she shuffled around the bed, until her free hand touched something solid. It was a wall.
She decided to try the other direction and ventured a step away from the bed. Nothing. Another step, another two. Her leg brushed against something. She leaned forward to touch. Yes, here was another bed. Anxiously she felt around until she found a hand. A large hand with long, thin fingers. Her own hand wandered up the arm, along the shoulder and arrived at a face. She held her breath while she explored it until she was sure it was the right face. Then she sank down and rested her head on his chest, listening to his beating heart.
When the sun rose over the Be Trobi Islands, Angelina awoke for the second time in this little hut by the sea shore. She opened her eyes and saw that it was indeed Vetinari in front of her and that he was alive. Since she never prayed to any gods, she didn't know what to do with her gratitude.
oOoOo
In a little pub in Welcome Soap, Constantin Greenway was onto his fourth mug of beer. He had never been great at holding his drink, but he'd had some practice lately. The problem was, though, that this mug would very likely be the last. The landlord wasn't going to give him any more credit. Because Constantin Greenaway wasn't just out of spirits, he was out of a job, and therefore out of money.
It wasn't fair, Constantin thought as he ran his thin hand through his brown curls. The other two bodyguards, who had shared the rota with him, had merely done their jobs, but Constantin had really put his heart into it. He had watched over Miss Winter as if she was his own sister, and he had felt just a little bit smug about the fact that he had been protecting her much better than her real brother had. Henry Winter! The thought of his colleague made Constantin snort. Henry Winter had relied on a printed threat, which was a much use as a candy floss hammer in the tougher parts of Ankh-Morpork. Constantin had been the one to dispose of more than one thug who might have cut short Miss Winter's career in the city. And it had been Constantin, whom Vetinari had chosen to follow the runaway alchemist to Pseudopolis and keep his vigilant eye on her. He had done it with great devotion, from ushering the genial Dr Donovan up to Steventon Manor when she was critically ill to assuming the role of a footman at the Pseudopolis Assembly Rooms, so he could observe Miss Winter's pursuits in society. The first fortnight after the wedding, Constantin had been enjoying a well-earned holiday. After all, his lordship could look after his wife himself now, couldn't he?
And that was when it had all gone pear-shaped. Never would it have occurred to Constantin that the Patrician could become a victim of anyone or anything, not even of the elements. Yet he had come back from his visit home to find a redundancy notification in his pigeonhole, Rust in the Oblong Office and a story all over the city that he could scarce believe.
Ever since then, Constantin had been reduced to doing contract work. Contract work was something he was pretty useless at. For a start, he detested killing people, which was a significant drawback in his line of work. Moreover, though, Constantin was used to being committed. His job satisfaction depended on his need to look up to somebody, and since he had been looking up devotedly to somebody so extraordinary for quite some time, he found it near impossible to look up to anybody else. In short, he missed the Patrician.
For while he found it upsetting that Miss Winter was missing, presumed dead, it was nothing compared to what he felt about the loss of Vetinari. The Patrician had been his hero since his days in the Guild school, where the legends about young Havelock flourished among the pupils. Working for Vetinari had been his main ambition since the third year, and he had cherished his position at the palace more than anything else. It involved regular hours, regular pay and very seldom the necessity to kill anybody, but most of all it afforded him the occasional conversation with his lordship. Constantin knew genius when he saw it, and Vetinari was the most brilliant man he had ever met. But now the genius had fallen prey to storm and water, according to the story that was repeated over and over again in the city.
A story he could scarce believe.
There was a pause, during which the universe held its breath. 1) Then the drunken stupor fled from Constantin, having no desire to become closer acquainted with the sudden rage that flooded the young man's mind. Three seconds later, Constantin was through the door and out on the street, heading towards the palace.
1) Yet another of those obnoxious metaphors.
oOoOo
Angelina was still curled up against Vetinari's chest, when two women appeared at the door of the hut. She looked up. As soon as the women saw her, they began talking excitedly. One of them, apparently the younger, hurried away. The other woman approached Angelina and spoke to her, uttering words that were incomprehensible but clearly expressed some form of greeting. She was short and dark, her long, flowing grey hair adorned with flowers. The lower part of her body was wrapped in a bright green cloth printed with purple hippos, while her upper half was bare. She looked at Angelina with a toothless smile.
Angelina stood up and nodded politely, concentrating her look on the woman's face.
"Good morning", she said and wondered what to say next to a person who obviously didn't speak her language and who wore significantly less clothing than Angelina was used to consider necessary. At that moment, another woman appeared, slightly taller and much younger than either of the other two. She, too, wore nothing but a cloth around her hips.
"Good morning," she said with a smile that showed a tiny gap between her front teeth. "My name Kamauri. You better?"
"Yes, thank you. Errr …I am Angelina Winter, and this is…"
She glanced down at Vetinari, who had chosen this inopportune moment to open his eyes.
"No, actually, I am Angelina Vetinari and this is …"
In an instant, Vetinari was upright and by her side.
"I am Havelock Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, and this is my wife."
A wave of understanding passed visibly over the young woman's face.
"This very fine! We know of famous Lord Vetinari. You welcome to our island."
She indicated the older woman beside her.
"This woman name Taihameme. She look after you when you come here."
Taihameme exposed her toothless gums again. Vetinari made a bow in her direction.
"We are greatly indebted to you, madam," he said smoothly. Then he addressed Kamauri:
"Would you be so kind as to tell us about our arrival here? I find myself in the embarrassing position of not being able to assemble all the details."
Kamauri looked confused. Angelina translated quickly:
"Tell us how we came here, please."
"Fisherman from our village see you boat before five day. Bring you here. You very ill. Not had water, not had food. Too much sun. Put you here in empty hut. Woman look after you. Give you water and coconut milk. Very worry you die. But is fine. Very happy you not die. Very happy you stand and talk."
"I assume that 'here' is be Trobi?" enquired Vetinari.
"Yes, be Trobi," said Kamauri. "Aloaoey Island. Very good, very pretty. Come and see."
She beckoned them to follow her out of the hut. They walked towards the door, stopped simultaneously, turned back and, after a short delay in the service of decency, stepped outside.
oOoOo
The differences between the previous and the current Patrician were so manifold, that describing them all would have filled a small library. Fortunately, there is no need for doing so within the confines of this story. One difference, however, shall be mentioned at this point: Lord Vetinari did not snore. Lord Rust did, and terrifically so. He had the kind of snore that makes the fainthearted tremble. The snore knew how to have a ball. It bounced off the ceiling, frolicked around the room and made the glass of water on his bedside table rattle gently. It was a vigorous snore, a potent snore, and it was the reason Lady Rust had insisted on separate bedrooms. In different wings of the building.
However, in the usual manner of snorers everywhere, Lord Rust was oblivious to the racket he was creating. His mind was blissfully immersed in a dream about pink bunnies and giant apple tarts. This agreeable state of things was suddenly changed, when outlying parts of his brain alerted him to the fact that a sharp object was causing some discomfort to his neck.
He opened his eyes and found that the brain had been right. Clearly a shadowy figure was sitting on his bed. A stray beam of moonlight glinted on a silky sleeve and the sharp object, Rust comprehended in a rare moment of realism, was a dagger. An assassin. Of all the questions that could have raced through Rust's mind at this moment, the only one that actually materialized was this: If there was an assassin in his bedchamber, why was he still alive?
"What have you done to Vetinari?" the figure hissed.
"Hsfm?"
"What - have - you - done - to - Vetinari?" the shadow repeated with increased emphasis. The blade was pressed in further.
"Nothing," rasped Rust and tried to push himself as far back into his pillow as he could.
"Don't lie to me. You have done away with him. How did you do it?"
"No. No, please, I had nothing to do with it. I don't know anything about it."
Rust felt a sharp pain and then a warm trickle down his neck. It was followed by another warm trickle elsewhere. He should shout for the guards. Then it dawned on him that guards would probably be dead, because how else could the assassin have got into his room? This felon was going to kill him. 2) "I swear, that's the truth! I know nothing!"
Something in his voice must have conveyed the candour of his words to the other man, because he suddenly rose and rushed towards the open window, climbed onto the windowsill and dropped into the darkness.
Rust lay in his bed, shaking. Pursuit was the last thing on his mind. He knew he ought to summon guards, servants, somebody, but right now his entire mental capacities were occupied by the frantic search for a way to hide the wet patch in his bed from the chamber maid.
2) Rust was having uncommonly many lucid moments that night, but still it did not occur to him that assassins get paid to inhume people, not interrogate them.
oOoOo
The news that the strangers had woken up spread on the island with the speed of light, that is to say, it rolled gently from hut to hut until it had covered the whole village. Thus it was that when Vetinari and Angelina stepped outside behind the two women, they were faced by a semicircle of about three hundred be Trobi, who all eyed them with unabashed curiosity.
They were a curious sight indeed. More than five weeks under the open sky had given them a substantial tan, and they would have blended in well with the golden-skinned be Trobi, had it not been for their wild hair and Vetinari's piercing blue eyes and, of course, the small matter of their attire. They had hastily dressed in their own clothes, which they had found clean and dry, albeit still tattered, by their bedsides. 3)
Next to the be Trobi in their cheerful garb they looked like beggars. The carrot diet had not been without effect, either. Angelina, who had never suffered from a tendency to be skinny, was merely a bit thin, but Vetinari looked skeletal.
Shouts of cheer arose from the crowd of islanders, and presently a short, but amply proportioned man stepped forward. Like the others, the entirety of his dress consisted of a boldly patterned cloth 4) that covered him from waist to ankle.
"Good morning and welcome to Aloaoey Island! I am the Alibi of this village, and my name is Ka'adburi Ba. May I congratulate you on your recovery."
He walked towards them with a wide grin and shook their hands enthusiastically.
"Havelock Vetinari," his lordship replied, "and my wife, Angelina."
The Alibi's face split into a broad grin, and he seized Vetinari's hand again and shook it some more.
"We are honoured, sir, we are honoured. I am sure you wonder why I speak Morporkian," said the Alibi.
"Do I?" Vetinari withdrew his hand and placed is behind his back.
"The explanation is simple," continued the Alibi regardless, "I went to guild school."
"Indeed?" Vetinari raised an eyebrow. "I cannot seem to recall..."
"Oh, it was a tough regime, and no doubt about it. Dr Whiteface used to be very strict. But looking back, it seems like a jolly old time."
Vetinari didn't so much as blink, while Ka'adburi Ba waxed lyrical in reminiscences of his time at the Fools' Guild. Meanwhile, Angelina had become surrounded by a crowd of women, who fingered her hair and dress, laughing and chattering away in Trob. She smiled politely, but was glad when the Alibi turned his attention to her.
"We are delighted to welcome you to Aloaoey, madam. There will be a special feast tonight to celebrate your rescue. In the meantime, is there anything you wish for?"
Angelina sighed.
"Could I please have a bath?"
Once translated by Kamauri, this request caused great hilarity among the villagers, and with much laughter and shouting, Angelina was dragged away by a crowd of merry be Trobi women. Vetinari followed at a dignified pace. The women led them along a winding path to a little glade in the jungle, where a rivulet among rocks had formed a deep pool of clear water. Surrounded by lush vegetation on all sides and scented with the perfume of exotic blooms, it was a heavenly bathing place beyond Angelina's wildest imagination. Anxious to get in immediately, she turned to watch her escort leave. The be Trobi women, however, stood in a little cluster with broad smiles on their faces. Taihameme gave her an encouraging grin and gestured for her to take her clothes off.
Angelina approached the group of women and whispered to Kamauri.
"Can you please tell them to go away?"
"No need go away," replied Kamauri, beaming. "Finish chores for today, not need cook dinner till later. Have lots time stay here and watch."
"But I ... I would like to be alone. I don't want to take my clothes off in front of all these people. Please go away. I will find the way back," - a smirk appeared on Vetinari's face - "and my husband is here to protect me."
Thoughts were passing slowly and visibly over Kamauri's face like demented whales. 5)
"You wish for..." She hesitated. "...the strange loneliness that come from desire to shut out eyes of friendly neighbours?"
"She means privacy," said Vetinari to the puzzled Angelina.
"Privacy," repeated Kamauri. "Your language very strange, very short."
"Well, privacy is what I would like to have. Could you please tell these women that I am not used to have strangers watch me bathing?"
Kamauri turned to the others and spoke at length in Trob. The women shook their heads in disbelief and cast bewildered glances at Angelina, but at last they sauntered off back towards the village. When she was quite sure that they had disappeared, Angelina undressed quickly and dived into the water.
Vetinari merely removed his shoes and socks and sat on the edge of the pool, letting his feet dangle in the water. Angelina splashed and splattered about with the enthusiasm of a toddler. Eventually it occurred to her that the last time she had spoken to Vetinari, they had been expecting to die soon.
"We have been saved!" she called.
"It would appear so, and not before time. However, far away as we might be from home, we are conveniently placed, since all we have to do now is wait for the next rubber shipment to Ankh-Morpork."
"True enough." She swam up to him and held on to the rocks. "Why don't you come in?"
"Because my desire for privacy is even greater than yours."
"Surely you are not bashful in front of your wife? You do remember that you married me, don't you?"
"Believe me, the fact is firmly engrained in my memory. How could I ever forget your look of embarrassment, when the Low King asked you for a dance?"
"Oh, you take delight in teasing me. But it's time you took that smug grin off your face."
"Why?"
"Because this," she said and suddenly dragged him into the water, "is where you learn to swim."
There was a splash and then, predictably, an outburst of laughter from among the trees.
3) Their considerable embarrassment on discovering their nudity had caused Taihameme and Kamauri much mirth.
4) Blue crocodiles on a pink background, interspersed for some reason with yellow hairbrushes.
5) This doesn't even qualify as a metaphor, so bring it on, Olaf Quimby II.