Night Watch

outside normal hours for a man who was a duke, and the richest man in the city, and the commander of the City Watch and, not least, quite prepared to kick the door down. There he signed over one hundred thousand dollars and the freehold of a large corner site in Goose Gate to one Dr. J. “Mossy” Lawn.
    And then, alone, he went up to Small Gods. Legitimate First, whatever his private feelings, knew enough not to shut the gates on this night, and he’d filled the lamps.
    Vimes strolled over the moss-grown gravel. In the twilight, the lilac blooms seemed to shine. Their scent hung in the air like fog.
    He waded through the grass and reached the grave of John Keel, where he sat on the headstone, taking care not to disturb the wreaths; he had a feeling that the sergeant would understand that a copper sometimes needed to take the weight off his feet. And he finished his cigar and stared into the sunset.
    After a while, he was aware of a scraping noise to his left and could just make out the turf starting to sag on one of the graves. A gray hand was thrust out of the ground, clutching a shovel. A few pieces of turf were pushed aside and, with some effort, Reg Shoe rose from the grave. He was halfway out before he noticed Vimes and nearly fell back.
    “Oh, you frightened the life out of me, Mister Vimes!”
    “Sorry, Reg,” said Vimes.
    “Of course, when I say you frightened the life out of me—” the zombie began gloomily.
    “Yes, Reg, I understood you. Quiet down there, was it?”
    “Very peaceful, sir, very peaceful. I think I’ll have to get myself a new coffin before next year, though. They don’t last any time at all these days.”
    “I suppose not that many people look for durability, Reg.”
    Reg slowly shoveled the soil back into place. “I know everyone thinks it’s a bit odd, but I think I owe it to them, really,” he said. “It’s only one day a year, but it’s like…solidarity.”
    “With the downtrodden masses, eh?” said Vimes.
    “What, sir?”
    “No argument from me, Reg,” said Vimes happily. This was a perfect moment. Not even Reg, fussing around smoothing down earth and patting turf into place, could detract from it.
    There’ll come a time when it’ll all be clear, Sweeper had said. A perfect moment.
    The occupants of these graves had died for something. In the sunset glow, in the rising of the moon, in the taste of the cigar, in the warmth that comes from sheer exhaustion, Vimes saw it.
    History finds a way. The nature of events changed, but the nature of the dead had not. It had been a mean, shameful little fight that ended them, a flyspecked footnote of history, but they hadn’t been mean or shameful men. They hadn’t run, and they could have run with honor. They’d stayed, and he wondered if the path had seemed as clear to them then as it did to him now. They’d stayed not because they wanted to be heroes, but because they chose to think of it as their job, and it was in front of them—
    “I’ll be off, then, sir,” said Reg, shouldering his shovel. He seemed a long way away. “Sir?”
    “Yeah, right. Right, Reg. Thank you,” mumbled Vimes, and in the pink glow of the moment watched the corporal march down the darkening path and out into the city.
    John Keel, Billy Wiglet, Horace Nancyball, Dai Dickins, Cecil “Snouty” Clapman, Ned Coates, and, technically, Reg Shoe. Probably there were no more than twenty people in the city now who knew all the names, because there were no statues, no monuments, nothing written down anywhere. You had to have been there.
    He felt privileged to have been there twice.
    The night was welling up as the sun set. It unfolded from the shadows where it had hidden from the day, and flowed and joined together. He felt his senses flow with it, spreading out like the whiskers of a dark, giant cat.
    Beyond the gates of the cemetery the city noise died down a little, although Ankh-Morpork never truly slept. It probably didn’t dare.
    Vimes felt now, in this strange calm mood, that he could hear everything, everything, just as he had done back in that terrible moment in Heroes Street when history came to claim its own. He heard the tiny sounds in the stone wall as it cooled, the slither of dirt underground as Reg’s vacated plot settled, the faint movement of the long grass around the graves…a thousand subtle sounds added up to a richly textured, localized silence. It was the song of the dark, and in it, on the edge of detection, was a