The uproar returned, as it always did, but Rhys thought he could see some comfort in the faces around the table and then his gaze ran into Ardent and triumph wobbled a little and he thought softly: sooner or later, my friend Mister Ardent, I will have to deal with you.
Lord Vetinari’s expression did not alter as he read the headline in the Ankh-Morpork Times: ‘LOCOMOTIVE PROJECT DANGEROUS FOR HEALTH’ followed in a much smaller font by ‘SO IT IS CLAIMED’. And it wouldn’t alter until he had had a word with the editor. Of course, the Patrician knew that any change was an affront to somebody, and quite clearly the proposed locomotive undertaking couldn’t hope to be anything other than a target.
‘Apparently,’ Vetinari remarked to Drumknott, ‘the pounding rhythm of the railway wagons will lead to immorality. This from a Mister Reginald Stibbings of Dolly Sisters.’ He signalled to one of the dark clerks. ‘Geoffrey, what do we know about this Mister Stibbings? Does he have a particular expertise in immorality?’
‘The one at Loose Chippings, my lord? I am informed that he has a very young mistress, sir. A young lady formerly employed at the Pink PussyCat, and very highly thought of there, I believe.’
‘Does he? An expert indeed, then.’ Vetinari sighed and continued, ‘Though of course I do not imagine it is in my remit to monitor the private doings of my people.’
‘My lord,’ interjected Drumknott. ‘As a tyrant that is, in fact, exactly what you do.’
Vetinari gave him a look that did not actually employ a raised eyebrow but which implied that one might be forthcoming if the recipient of the look pushed his luck. He shook the paper in front of him and continued. ‘A Mrs Baskerville from Peach Pie Street says that young ladies travelling on the train might find any kind of gentlemen sitting next to them.’ He thought for a moment and said, ‘In this city, expecting to encounter any kind of gentleman seems somewhat optimistic. But perhaps she has a point. It might be prudent to have compartments for ladies only. I rather think that Effie King would approve that.’
‘Excellent idea as always, sir.’
‘And what do we have here? A Captain Slope is very concerned about noxious gases around the lines of the railway.’
Lord Vetinari snapped his paper shut and exclaimed, ‘The people of Ankh-Morpork are already at home to noxious gases. It’s their birthright. Not only are they at home with them, they quietly persist in making more. It seems that Captain Slope is one of those people who won’t like the railway at any price. Suggesting that sheep will miscarry and horses will run until they die of exhaustion … Indeed, it seems that Captain Slope thinks the railway will be the end of the world. Well, Drumknott, you know my motto: vox populi, vox deorum.’
Curious, the Patrician thought, as Drumknott hurried away to dispatch a clacks to the editor of the Times, that people in Ankh-Morpork professed not to like change while at the same time fixating on every new entertainment and diversion that came their way. There was nothing the mob liked better than novelty. Lord Vetinari sighed again. Did they actually think? These days everybody used the clacks, even little old ladies who used it to send him clacks messages complaining about all these new-fangled ideas, totally missing the irony. And in this doleful mood he ventured to wonder if they ever thought back to when things were just old-fangled or not fangled at all as against the modern day when fangled had reached its apogee. Fangling was indeed, he thought, here to stay. Then he wondered: had anyone ever thought of themselves as a fangler?
However, on the other hand, his lordship quite saw the point of the coach drivers and the others who even now, according to the Times, could see their business falling away if the railway were to be introduced, and he pondered, in such circumstances, what is the careful prince to do?
He thought, how many lives had been saved by the clacks, and not just lives: marriages and reputations and possibly thrones? The clacks towers now spanned the continent this side of the Hub and Adora Belle Dearheart had provided evidence that the clacksmen had several times spotted nascent fires, and on one occasion, outside Quirm, a shipwreck a little way out to sea — when they had clacksed that information to the nearest harbour master, saving all hands.
There was nothing for it but to follow the wave. New things, new ideas arrived and strutted their stuff and were vilified by some and then lo! that which had been a monster was suddenly totally important to the world. All the time the fanglers and artificers were coming up with even more useful things that hadn’t been foreseen and suddenly became essential. And the pillars of the world remained unshaken.
As a responsible tyrant, Lord Vetinari regularly audited his actions fearsomely and without favour. Trolls in Ankh-Morpork were rarely talked about these days because, amazingly, people barely thought of them as trolls any more, just as, well, large people. Much the same, although different. And then there was the position of the dwarfs, the Ankh-Morpork dwarfs. Dwarfish? Yes, but now on their own terms. The Low King was certainly aware that in Ankh-Morpork there was a large population of dwarfs that had taken a look at the future and decided to grab a slice of it. Tradition? they had thought. Well, if it suits us then every so often we’ll have a parade of all things dwarfish. Sons and daughters of our parents but, as it were, augmented. We have seen the city. The city where almost anything is plausible, if not possible, including, for the ladies, a better class of lingerie.
Far away in a small mine at Copperhead, Maelog Cheerysson the cobbler put down his hammer and tacks.
‘Look here, my boy,’ he said to his son, who was leaning on his work bench. ‘I’ve heard what you said about the grags being the salvation of dwarfs, and this morning I found this: it’s an iconograph of me in Koom Valley. The last time. Oh, yes, I was there, nearly everybody was there. We’d been told by the grags that the trolls were our enemies and I thought of them as nothing more than nasty big lumps of rock out to crush us! Well, we were all lined up facing the buggers, and then somebody shouted, “Trolls, put down your weapons! Dwarfs, put down your weapons! Humans, put down your weapons!”
‘And there we stood and we could all hear other voices in different languages and right in front of me there was this bloody big troll, oh my! He had his great big hammer ready to pulverize me. That was not to say that my axe wasn’t about to take his bloody knees off at the same time, but the voices were so loud that everybody stopped and looked around and he looked at me and I looked at him and he said, “What’s happening here, mister?” and I said, “I’m damned if I know!”
‘But I could see the other side of the valley and there was a great big kerfuffle between the top brass, all screaming about dropping our weapons, and I looked at the troll and he looked at me, and he said, “Are we going to have a war, or what?” and I said, “Oh, and I’m pleased to meet you, my name is Maelog Cheerysson,” and he sort of grinned and said, “They call me Smack, and I’m pleased to meet you.”
‘And all around us people were wandering around and asking one another what the hell was going on and were we fighting or were we not fighting and if we were fighting what were we fighting for? So some of the lads sat down and lit a fire for a brew-up, while at the other end of the valley the flags were fluttering and everybody was walking around like it was a holiday or something.
‘And then a dwarf came up to us and said, “Good fortune, lads, you’re going to see something that no one else has seen for millions of years,” and we did, I reckon. We were some way away from the front of the queue because trolls and humans and dwarfs were coming back out of the cavern, and every single one of them going past us looked as if he’d been hypnotized.