Night Watch Read Free Page B

know what that means, Ping?”
    “Er…”
    “It means,” said Nobby, “that anyone important enough to ask where we’re going—”
    “—knows where we’ve gone,” said Fred Colon.
    The door slammed behind them.

     

    This cemetery of Small Gods was for the people who didn’t know what happened next. They didn’t know what they believed in or if there was life after death and, often, they didn’t know what hit them. They’d gone through life being amiably uncertain, until the ultimate certainty had claimed them at the last. Among the city’s bone orchards, the cemetery was the equivalent of the drawer marked MISC , where people were interred in the glorious expectation of nothing very much.
    Most of the Watch got buried there. Policemen, after a few years, found it hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone they couldn’t see.
    For once, it wasn’t raining. The breeze shook the sooty poplars around the wall, making them rustle.
    “We ought to have brought some flowers,” said Colon, as they made their way through the long grass.
    “I could nick a few off some of the fresh graves, Sarge,” Nobby volunteered.
    “Not the kind of thing I want to hear you saying at this time, Nobby,” said Colon severely.
    “Sorry, Sarge.”
    “At a time like this a man ought to be thinking of his immortal soul viz ah viz the endless mighty river that is History. I should do that if I was you, Nobby.”
    Up against one wall, lilac trees were growing. That is, at some point in the past a lilac had been planted there, and had given rise, as lilac will, to hundreds of whippy suckers, so that what had once been one stem was now a thicket. Every branch was covered in pale mauve blooms.
    The graves were still just visible in the tangled vegetation. In front of them stood Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, Ankh-Morpork’s least successful businessman, with a sprig of lilac in his hat.
    He caught sight of the watchmen and nodded to them. They nodded back. All three stood looking down at the seven graves. Only one had been maintained. The marble headstone on that one was shiny and moss-free, the turf was clipped, the stone border was sparkling.
    Moss had grown over the wooden markers of the other six, but it had been scraped off the central one, revealing the name:

    John Keel

    And carved underneath, by someone who had taken some pains, was:

    How Do They Rise Up

    A huge wreath of lilac flowers, bound with purple ribbon, had been placed on the grave. On top of it, tied around with another piece of purple ribbon, was an egg.
    “Mrs. Palm and Mrs. Battye and some of the girls were up here earlier,” said Dibbler. “And, of course, Madam always makes sure there’s the egg.”
    “It’s nice, the way they always remember,” said Sergeant Colon.
    The three stood in silence. They were not, on the whole, men with a vocabulary designed for times like this. After a while, though, Nobby felt moved to speak.
    “He gave me a spoon once,” he said to the air in general.
    “Yeah, I know,” said Colon.
    “My dad pinched it off me when he come out of prison, but it was my spoon,” said Nobby persistently. “That means a lot to a kid, your own spoon.”
    “Come to that, he was the first person to make me a sergeant,” said Colon. “Got busted again, of course, but I knew I could do it again then. He was a good copper.”
    “He bought a pie off me, first week I was starting out,” said Dibbler. “Ate it all . Didn’t spit out anything .”
    There was more silence.
    After a while Sergeant Colon cleared his throat, a general signal to indicate that some sort of appropriate moment was now over. There was a relaxation of muscles all around.
    “Y’know, we ought to come up here one day with a billhook and clear this lot up a bit,” said the sergeant.
    “You always say that, Sarge, every year,” said Nobby as they walked away. “And we never do.”
    “If I had a dollar for every copper’s funeral I’ve attended up here,”