Night Watch

Sergeant Colon’s normally amiable eyes had narrowed and the message they were sending was: you’re on thin ice, lad, and it’s starting to creak…
    “I mean, my landlady’s got a garden and I could easily go and cut a—” Ping went on in an uncharacteristic attempt at suicide.
    “You’d wear the lilac today, would you?” said Colon quietly.
    “I just meant that if you wanted me to I could go and—”
    “Were you there?” said Colon, getting to his feet so fast that his chair fell over.
    “Steady, Fred,” murmured Nobby.
    “I didn’t mean…” Ping began. “I mean…was I where, Sarge?”
    Colon leaned on the desk, bringing his round red face an inch away from Ping’s nose.
    “If you don’t know where there was, you weren’t there,” he said in the same quiet voice.
    He stood up straight again.
    “Now me an’ Nobby has got a job to do,” he said. “At ease, Ping. We are going out .”
    “Er…”
    This was not being a good day for Corporal Ping.
    “ Yes? ” said Colon.
    “Er…standing orders, Sarge…you’re the ranking officer, you see, and I’m orderly officer for the day, I wouldn’t ask otherwise but…if you’re going out, Sarge, you’ve got to tell me where you’re going. Just in case anyone has to contact you, see? I got to write it down in the book. In pen and everything,” he added.
    “You know what day it is, Ping?” said Colon.
    “Er…25th of May, Sarge.”
    “And you 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