Night Watch

Billy,” he said.
    “But Sarge—”
    “That was an order. Get out, get back, get people off the street as fast as possible. Do it!”
    Vimes crawled up to one of the front wheels and held the wedge ready between wheel and axle. The cart stopped for a moment, and he thrust the wedge into the gap and thumped it with the hammer. He had time for another blow before the cart gave a creak that suggested the oxen were pushing again. The he crawled back quickly and took the sack from Billy before the little man, with a reluctant glance, scuttled out into the forest of legs.
    Vimes got a third wedge in before loud voices somewhere behind him indicated that the lack of progress had been noticed. The wheels rocked, and bound even further on the wedges. The wheels would have to come off before they could be got out.
    Even so, oxen were powerful beasts. Enough of them would have no problem at all in dragging the cart as well as the barricade. And the nice thing, the nice thing, was that people thought of a barricade as something people tried to get into, not out of…
    Vimes slipped out into the noisy, confusing night. There were soldiers, and watchmen, and refugees, all cursing at cross-purposes. In the flickering shadows, Vimes was just another shape. He pushed his way confidently around to the straining oxen and their driver, who was prodding them with a stick. He was heartened by the fact that the man looked the kind of man who’d get six out of ten when answering the question: “What is your name?”
    Vimes didn’t even stop. The important thing was not to let the other person have a chance to say “But—,” let alone “who the hell do you think you are?” He pushed the man aside and glared at the sweating beasts.
    “Ah, right, I can see your problem right here,” he said in the voice of one who knows everything there is to know about oxen. “They’ve got the glaggies. But we can fix that. Hold up that one’s tail. Hurry up, man!”
    The ox poker responded to the voice of authority. Vimes palmed a lump of ginger. Here goes, he thought. At least it’s somewhere warm on a cold night…
    “Okay. Now the other one…right. Okay. Now, I’ll just go around and, er…just go round…” said Vimes, hurrying back into the shadows.
    He shouldered his way through the throng and dived through the tiny hole.
    “It’s all right, Sarge, I spied you coming through Mrs. Rutherford’s dining room chairs,” said Fred Colon, hauling him upright. “Well, you stopped it, Sarge, and no mistake. You really…urrrhg…”
    “Yes, don’t shake hands with me until I’ve had a wash,” said Vimes, heading for the pump.
    He kept an ear cocked for any strange noises on the other side of the barricade. There were none for several seconds. And then he heard it…
    Nothing much had happened for some while after his visit to the oxen except that, very slowly, their eyes had begun to cross and then, also quite slowly, turn red. It takes a long time for anything to happen inside the head of an ox, but, when it does, it happens extensively.
    The moo started off low and rose slowly. It was a visceral sound that had rolled across the ancient tundra and told early man that here came dinner or death, and either way it was pissed. It was the sound of a big beast that was still too small to restrain all the emotions that were welling up inside it. And it was a duet.
    Vimes, hauling himself up the barricade, saw people running. Then the whole of Big Mary shuddered. That didn’t look too impressive unless you knew that a couple of tons of wood had just jumped sideways. Then there was the sound of splintering, two of Big Mary’s locked wheels collapsed, and she toppled sideways in a mass of flame, splinters, smoke, and dust.
    Vimes counted under his breath, and had only reached two when a cartwheel rolled out of the smoke and away down the road. This always happens.
    It wasn’t over, though. The oxen, tangled in the remains of the shafts and harness, and now an enraged joint creature that could only get six legs out of eight on the ground, headed erratically but with surprising speed in the opposite direction.
    The other oxen, which had been waiting for the big pull, watched it approach. They were already spooked by the crash, and now they caught the stink of terror and fury, and began a slow stampede away from it and toward, as it turned out, the waiting bowmen behind them who, in turn, tried to run into the cavalry. The horses were not