‘Never mind, squire, will have it as it comes, please. And for record, Mister Mar-keee, they ain’t my people, they your people. I’m an Ankh-Morpork lad. Have seen the big horse[42] and all that stuff.’
The view in the late afternoon sun over the maquis from the terrace was wonderful.
‘You have many goblins in Ankh-Morpork, Mister Lipwig?’ the Marquis asked as he poured Moist a glass of chilled wine. ‘I’ve ’eard, of course, of Milord Vetinari’s famous melting pot. And yet I am informed zat many people in Ankh-Morpork still feel very unsure about them and think that getting involved with goblins shows that ze owner is dirty! So much for the prejudices of your countrymen who are, one ’as to say, a fairly dirty lot in any case. Whereas ’ere in Quirm notre logique points out that we are cleaner. After all, Quirm is the ’ome of Monsieur Bidet! Yet another apparatus for keeping clean and yet you in Ankh-Morpork sneer at us for being dirty.’
‘Yes, I know, it’s deplorable,’ said Moist. ‘I did meet Monsieur Bidet, although regrettably I didn’t shake him by the hand. Excuse me? Is something wrong?’
The Marquis suddenly looked preoccupied. ‘Someone was watching us from the tree over zere. I must ’ave spoken too loudly because ’oever it is has made ’aste to get down to the cover of the ground. He’s small, but larger than a goblin; you ’ardly ever see zem in ze trees.’
There was a movement in the air as Of the Twilight the Darkness vaulted over the parapet and disappeared into the landscape below. He reappeared almost as quickly, saying, ‘Dwarf bugger. Have it away on toes. I spit me of him!’
The Marquis topped up Moist’s glass and said, ‘A dwarf? Something to do with you, Mister Lipwig? Industrial espionage? One would expect the dwarfs to be keen on something like a railway … they are, after all, metalworkers and traders in ore.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Moist. ‘The clacks saw a bit of trouble a few months ago with extremist factions knocking down some of their towers, but that seems to have died down now. And there don’t seem to be many dwarfs interested in working on the railway. Something to do with the grags, I expect. The grags don’t seem to like anybody of importance in Ankh-Morpork.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said the Marquis. ‘The famous Koom Valley Accord and all zat business. I believed it to be sorted out.’
‘So did everybody else. You must know how it is. Can’t please absolutely everybody. And you certainly can’t please the grags, however hard you try.’
Fully refreshed, Moist and Of the Twilight the Darkness set off into the maquis to find the goblin denizens, who even if they did not, strictly speaking, own the land through which the railway would go, needed to be informed and consulted. As squatters on unclaimed land, Moist thought, they surely must have some claim to it.
As they made their way into the scrubby and thorny landscape, Moist pondered the significance of the dwarf who had been spying on him, right here in Quirm, where you didn’t normally see dwarfs. This meant he had been followed, and that almost surely meant more than one person. During his misspent youth and, not to put too fine a point on it, his largely misspent early middle age, he’d reckoned to be conversant with the methodology of spying, and one person alone couldn’t ensure reasonable tracking of the target. What was the dwarf doing there? Where had he come from? And, more important, where did he go?
His reverie was interrupted when Of the Twilight the Darkness stopped suddenly by a rocky outcrop which, as far as Moist could tell, was indistinguishable from several other similar outcrops they had passed already. It was hot. Very hot.
‘Wait here,’ said the goblin. ‘Will be back in a shake.’
In fact it was another sweaty hour and the sun was beginning to dip below the horizon before the goblin came back along the track, trailed by a large crowd of Quirmian goblins, their numbers swelling all the time as even more of them emerged from the undergrowth.
When it came to looks the Quirm goblins seemed exactly the same as the ones over the border in Ankh-Morpork. However, unlike the Ankh-Morpork goblins, the Quirmian goblins were dressed in a way that could only be called snazzy. They had a certain panache unavailable to their Ankh-Morpork brethren, and a whiff about them of what was probably eau de snail.[43] Admittedly, the materials on show were effectively the same — bits of animal skin or indeed the animals themselves, birds, feathers — all embellished with sparkling stones. It was as if goblins had discovered taxidermy, but hadn’t quite got the important, nay, essential point of scooping out the messy bits first. But trust Quirm goblins to make their own haute couture.
Moist smiled. He could see that somehow the goblin lads here in Quirm were trying to do it better, possibly because they had a better class of shaky swagger and a certain cheerful up yours look in their eyes.
Nevertheless, they looked like a people who had been hammered hard on the anvil of fate and had been laminated with a natural bravado, which did not entirely hide their wounds.
Moist was glad he had Of the Twilight the Darkness on his side, because the goblins of this part of the maquis clearly had no liking for humanity. Of the Twilight the Darkness now sidled up to him in his bandy-legged and sneery little way and said, ‘These people hurting oh-so bad it is. People gone. Little ones gone. Pots gone. Gone. But put big faces on it, yes. Can no more be truly goblin. Hurt. Hurt. Hurt. Now I give speech.’
Of the Twilight the Darkness turned out to be the goblin equivalent of Moist himself.
Moist wasn’t fluent in goblin, but you didn’t need to know what was being said as you watched the faces and the way Of the Twilight the Darkness waved his hands. He was, in fact, doing a number.
Moist couldn’t make out the words, but assumed it was something like, ‘New life in Ankh-Morpork with all the rats you want and wages.’ For there they were, ideas and promises curving through the air.
And so certain was Moist that he had picked up what was going on that he leaned down and said, ‘Don’t forget to say that in Ankh-Morpork goblins are now citizens with rights.’
Moist was extremely pleased to see the goblin pause and look at him. ‘How you know I was talking of Ankh-Morpork, Mister Lipwig?’
‘Takes one to know one.’
While Of the Twilight the Darkness delivered his speech, the goblins stared at Moist. As stares went, their eyes were not baleful or angry, they were just … hopeful, in the grudging way of people who had had to learn pessimism as a survival tactic.
One of the goblins then stepped forward and beckoned, clearly wanting to show him something. Of the Twilight the Darkness was also nudging him to follow. As Moist gingerly threaded his way through the network of almost invisible paths in the wasteland of thorns, pools of poisonous water and occasional blockages caused by old rock falls, he noticed a crackling underfoot. Bones, he realized — mostly small bones — and in his ear were the words of Of the Twilight the Darkness: ‘Young goblins! Veeeeery tasty! A lot of good eating. Bandits thought so. But we hang, Mister Lipwig, we hang. We hang on.’
The horror tripped its way icily over Moist’s backbone. Of the Twilight the Darkness continued.
‘Those bandits was hungry. Small goblins. Easy to catch.’
‘Are you saying they were eating the goblins?’
42
An Ankh-Morpork citizen will never yield to the idea that there are other cities at least as good as their own and treat the concept that there could be with humorous disdain. The phrase originated when an Ankh-Morpork citizen was shown an equestrian statue in Pseudopolis and when faced with the beast, said, ‘Maybe it’s a Big Horse I’m Morporkian’, an incident that gave rise to a popular bar room song.