Going Postal

‘Helped?'

Miss Dearheart shrugged. ‘A lot of the cultures that built golems thought tools shouldn't talk. They have no tongues.'

‘And the Trust gives them some extra clay, eh?' said Moist cheerfully.

She gave him a look. ‘It's a bit more mystical than that,' she said solemnly.

‘Well, dumb is okay so long as they're not stupid,' said Moist, trying to look serious. ‘This Anghammarad's got a name? Not just a description?'

‘A lot of the very old ones have. Tell me, what do you want them to do?' said the woman.

‘Be postmen,' said Moist.

‘Working in public?'

‘I don't think you can have secret postmen,' said Moist, briefly seeing shadowy figures skulking from door to door. ‘Anything wrong with that?'

‘Well... no. Certainly not! It's just that people get a bit nervous, and set fire to the shop. I'll bring them down as soon as possible.' She paused. ‘You do understand that owned golems have to have a day off every week? You did read the pamphlet, didn't you?'

‘Er... time off?' said Moist. ‘What do they need time off for? A hammer doesn't get time off, does it?'

‘In order to be golems. Don't ask what they do - I think just go and sit in a cellar somewhere. It's... it's a way to show they're not a hammer, Mr Lipwig. The buried ones forget. The free golems teach them. But don't worry, the rest of the time they won't even sleep.'

‘So... Mr Pump has a day off coming?' said Moist.

‘Of course,' said Miss Dearheart, and Moist filed this one under ‘useful to know'.

‘Good. Thank you,' he said. Would you like to have dinner tonight? Moist normally had no trouble with words, but these stuck to his tongue. There was something pineapple-prickly about Miss Dearheart. There was something about her expression, too, which said: there's no possible way you could surprise me. I know all about you.

‘Is there anything else?' she said. ‘Only you're standing there with your mouth open.'

‘Er... no. That's fine. Thank you,' mumbled Moist.

She smiled at him, and bits of Moist tingled.

‘Well, off you go then, Mr Lipwig,' she said. ‘Brighten up the world like a little sunbeam.'

Four out of the five postmen were what Mr Groat called horse de combat and were brewing tea in the mail-stuffed cubbyhole that was laughingly called their Rest Room. Aggy had been sent home after the bulldog had been prised from his leg; Moist had a big basket of fruit sent round. You couldn't go wrong with a basket of fruit.

Well, they'd made an impression, at least. So had the bulldog. But some mail had been delivered, you had to admit it. You had to admit, too, that it was years and years late, but the post was moving. You could sense it in the air. The place didn't feel so much like a tomb. Now Moist had retired to his office, where he was getting creative.

‘Cup of tea, Mr Lipwig?'

He looked up from his work into the slightly strange face of Stanley.

‘Thank you, Stanley,' he said, laying down his pen. ‘And I see you got nearly all of it in the cup this time! Nicely done!'

‘What're you drawing, Mr Lipwig?' said the boy, craning his neck. ‘It looks like the Post Office!'

‘Well done. It's going to be on a stamp, Stanley. Here, what do you think of the others?' He passed over the other sketches.

‘Coo, you're a good draw-er, Mr Lipwig. That looks just like Lord Vetinari!'

‘That's the penny stamp,' said Moist. ‘I copied the likeness off a penny. City coat-of-arms on the twopenny, Morporkia with her fork on the fivepenny, Tower of Art on the big one-dollar stamp. I was thinking of a tenpenny stamp, too.'

‘They look very nice, Mr Lipwig,' said Stanley. ‘All that detail. Like little paintings. What's all those tiny lines called?'

‘Cross-hatching. Makes them hard to forge. And when the letter with the stamp on it comes into the Post Office, you see, we take one of the old rubber stamps and stamp over the new stamps so they can't be used again, and the—'

‘Yes, ‘cos they're like money, really,' said Stanley cheerfully.

‘Pardon?' said Moist, tea halfway to his lips.

‘Like money. These stamps'll be like money, ‘cos a penny stamp is a penny, when you think about it. Are you all right, Mr Lipwig? Only you've gone all funny. Mr Lipwig?'

‘Er... what?' said Moist, who was staring at the wall with a strange, faraway grin.

‘Are you all right, sir?'

‘What? Oh. Yes. Yes, indeed. Er... do we need a bigger stamp, do you think? Five dollars, perhaps?'

‘Hah, I should think you could send a big letter all the way to Fourecks for that, Mr Lipwig!' said Stanley cheerfully.

‘Worth thinking ahead, then,' said Moist. ‘I mean, since we're designing the stamps and everything...'

But now Stanley was admiring Mr Robinson's box. It was an old friend to Moist. He never used ‘Mr Robinson' as an alias except to get it stored by some halfway-honest merchant or publican, so that it'd be somewhere safe even if he had to leave town quickly. It was for a con-man and forger what a set of lock picks is to a burglar, but with the contents of this box you could open people's brains.

It was a work of art in its own right, the way all the little compartments lifted up and fanned out when you opened it. There were pens and inks, of course, but also little pots of paints and tints, stains and solvents. And, kept carefully flat, thirty-six different types of paper, some of them quite hard to obtain. Paper was important. Get the weight and translucence wrong, and no amount of skill would save you. You could get away with bad penmanship much more easily than you could with bad paper. In fact, rough penmanship often worked better than a week of industrious midnights spent getting every little thing right, because there was something in people's heads that spotted some little detail that wasn't quite right but at the same time would fill in details that had merely been suggested by a few careful strokes. Attitude, expectation and presentation were everything.

Just like me, he thought.

The door was knocked on and opened in one movement.

‘Yes?' snapped Moist, not looking up. ‘I'm busy designing mon— stamps here, you know!'

‘There's a lady,' panted Groat. ‘With golems!'

‘Ah, that'll be Miss Dearheart,' said Moist, laying down his pen.

‘Yessir. She said "Tell Mr Sunshine I've brought him his postmen", sir! You're going to use golems as postmen, sir?'

‘Yes. Why not?' said Moist, giving Groat a severe look. ‘You get on okay with Mr Pump, don't you?'

‘Well, he's all right, sir,' the old man mumbled. ‘I mean, he keeps the place tidy, he's always very respectful... I speak as I find, but people can be a bit odd about golems, sir, what with them glowing eyes and all, and the way they never stops. The lads might not take to ‘em, sir, that's all I'm saying.'

Moist stared at him. Golems were thorough, reliable and by gods they took orders. He'd get another chance to be smiled at by Miss Dearheart— Think about golems! Golems, golems, golems!

He smiled, and said, ‘Even if I can prove they're real postmen?'

Ten minutes later the fist of the golem called Anghammarad smashed through a letter box and several square inches of splintering wood.

‘Mail Delivered,' it announced, and went still. The eyes dulled.

Moist turned to the cluster of human postmen and gestured towards the impromptu Postman's Walk he'd set up in the big hall.

‘Note the flattened roller skate, gentlemen. Note the heap of ground glass where the beer bottle was. And Mr Anghammarad did it all with a hood on his head, I might add.'

‘Yeah, but his eyes burned holes in it,' Groat pointed out.

‘None of us can help the way we're made,' said Adora Belle Dearheart primly.

‘I've got to admit, it did my heart good to see him punch through that door,' said Senior Postman Bates. ‘That'll teach ‘em to put ‘em low and sharp.'

‘And no problem with dogs, I expect,' said Jimmy Tropes. ‘He'd never get the arse bitten out of his trousers.'

‘So you all agree a golem is suitable to become a postman?' said Moist.

Suddenly all the faces twisted up as the postmen shuffled into a chorus.

‘Well, it's not us, you understand...'

‘... people can be a bit funny about, er, clay folk...'

‘... all that stuff about taking jobs away from real people...'

‘... nothing against him at all, but...'

They stopped, because the golem Anghammarad was beginning to speak again. Unlike Mr Pump, it took him some time to get up to speed. And when his voice arrived it seemed to be coming from long ago and far away, like the sound of surf in a fossil shell.

He said: ‘What Is A Post Man?'

‘A messenger, Anghammarad,' said Miss Dearheart. Moist noticed that she spoke to golems differently. There was actual tenderness in her voice.

‘Gentlemen,' he said to the postmen, ‘I know you feel—'

‘I Was A Messenger,' Anghammarad rumbled.

His voice was not like Mr Pump's, and neither was his clay. He looked like a crude jigsaw puzzle of different clays, from almost black through red to light grey. Anghammarad's eyes, unlike the furnace glow of those of the other golems, burned a deep ruby red. He looked old. More than that, he felt old. The chill of time radiated off him.