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Lord Vetinari’s hand moved to pluck something out of the air before his brain could catch up with itself, and he looked down with some surprise to find that, for the first time in decades, he was holding a snowball.
He had decided, on this occasion, to forgo the coach in favour of walking to Scoone Avenue to visit Lady Ramkin for tea; he’d made some excuse about not wishing to be in a coach on the icy, slushy roads today, and it was of course completely irrelevant that he’d glanced out of the window some ten minutes earlier and seen his coachman building a snowman with his children beside the coach house.
The Palace staff did not comment on this. They entertained his whims with nothing more than hushed conversations behind closed doors, which was precisely as he preferred it; he was certain that they just thought of him as “quirky”, and indeed he had worked hard to ensure that this was so. Commander Vimes on the other hand, in response to Vetinari’s off-hand comment on his intention at their meeting, had insisted on escorting him. For… protection, he’d said. He was about to decline the offer, but then he remembered that this was Vimes he was talking to, and had graciously Acquiesced, with a distinct capital A, out of a sort of solidarity in flimsy excuses to go for a walk in the snow.
And so, somehow, he found himself in Vimes’s wake, picking his way through the snow to Scoone Avenue at that special policeman’s pace the man seemed to adopt as second nature. Ankh-Morpork rarely got what people refer to as “proper snow”, the precise definition of which is unclear, but most people seem to agree that it means snow that settles, that they only got when it had something to settle on, which usually meant that the usual everyday muck of the city had frozen solid. It meant the kind of snowflakes that look like downy white feathers.
Hah – Downey. Yes, he had never been far away whenever it had snowed during their time at the Assassins’ Guild, with ready with an oh-so-original handful of snow to stuff down the back of his coat. Vetinari had allowed him to do so, for the most part, at least. It had been easier all-round.
He could already feel cold water seeping into his glove. He turned to face the direction from which the snowball had come and found himself looking into the owlish eyes of a small boy, perhaps the same age as Young Sam Vimes, perhaps a couple of years older. Old enough to be allowed out to play with the older boys; whom Vetinari could see had scarpered and left him alone to fend for himself; but still young enough that his mittens were sewn onto a piece of string and attached to his coat.
The lad looked as though he was close to tears, and Vetinari simply couldn’t have that. He smiled slowly and conspiratorially, then looked from the snowball to the child, winked, then drew his arm back and, without taking his eyes off the boy, sent the snowball flying for the second time in its short existence. He watched the boy’s wide eyes follow the snowball’s trajectory until it hit Vimes’s helmet with a satisfying metallic sound.[1]
Vimes stopped dead, although Vetinari still wasn’t looking at him. By the time he turned around, Vetinari was standing with both hands on his cane, to cover the snow that still clung to the underside of his glove.
He felt rather than saw Vimes’s glowering, but he saw that the other children were peering at them from the hiding places that they had chosen with varying degrees of success, and there were one or two giggles.
He did turn back to Vimes then, eyebrow raised in a kind of challenge: What are you going to do now, Commander? Bearing in mind that we have an audience.
‘You call that a snowball?’ Vimes said, turning is attention to the children. ‘Ye gods, I barely even felt that! Now, this is a snowball!’
Vetinari watched with a small, careful smile on his face as the Commander of the Watch scooped up a handful of snow and the children leapt out from behind dustbins and crumbling walls with delighted expressions and lumps of snow that scarcely fit into their hands. He made a quick decision as to precisely how much snow he would allow to hit him, although he’d certainly not allow Vimes himself the satisfaction.
Old Stoneface, indeed.
[1] Whose onomatopoeic description would be “bonk”.