And so it was that one fine summer evening shortly afterwards, Moist and Adora Belle sat down to an excellent dinner of fresh lobsters from Quirm brought up on the new Fruits de Mer Express. They were good, and cheaper now than he ever remembered, and the dish went very well with the watercress, which burned all the way down as they ate it.
And afterwards there were fresh strawberries and a soft bed with fluffy pillows and somehow it made all the running around worthwhile.
It began in Higher Overhang in the Shires. People locally were saying they could hear noises in the night … metallic noises, clanking, and the occasional scream of metal straining in torment. Of course everybody said, Well, goblins, what can you expect?
And all this came to the notice of Chief Constable Feeney Upshot, attached to the Ankh-Morpork constabulary. Feeney liked the attachment. It meant that anyone getting stroppy with him would sooner or later have to deal with Commander Vimes or even Sergeant Detritus, whose appearance in this sleepy hinterland had caused such a big stir a couple of years before. So Feeney got on his horse and headed to the Overhangs, so called because in the flaming distant past the landscape had been twisted all over the place with unfathomable caverns and a jagged unforgiving terrain.
Feeney was a decent and sensible copper and such men made friends because they never knew when they would need one, especially when they were a copper all alone, although in theory Feeney had the support of Special Constable Of the Chimney the Bones. There had to be a law, and law applied to everyone, and now the law had decreed that goblins were people and therefore protected by the law in these parts, which, in fact, was made incarnate in Chief Constable Feeney and his constable. Amazingly, the constable allowed his superior officer to call him Boney on the sensible basis that if there was some mêlée or other and you needed help you’d want a simple word to scream.[53]
Feeney had been to Ankh-Morpork and was proud to have undertaken his basic training in Pseudopolis Yard under Sergeant Detritus. He recognized that Boney was slightly more intelligent than the notorious Corporal Nobby Nobbs and so he didn’t grumble. And now he was glad to see his constable waiting for him just outside the main goblin cave where he had an office, regarded by the local goblins as something of a shrine.
These days there was a flourishing colony of goblins in Overhang Minor. The goblins were purveyors of fine pots, and Feeney knew that the production of pots was generally a quiet pastime and didn’t involve very much banging. The small cave that passed as an office was, and you have to be careful about this sort of thing, definitely not manned but goblined. And the sound coming from the great cavern beyond it was not about pots, that was certain. It was metallic, heavy metal. Well — and Feeney stumbled here slightly, mentally at least — goblins were free, and if people wanted to bang metal around in the privacy of their great caverns, then they could. He blinked. It was the new world. If you didn’t get your head around it, it could turn you upside down.
Feeney was polite and had been smart enough to pick up some of the goblin lingo, which really helped. It was a sunny day and it was an easy trip to the Overhangs and, yes, on the hill above the cavern there was a clacks station, goblined by goblins. After delivering his papers and force orders, Feeney sat down for a quiet word with his fellow officer and broached, in a careful way, the subject of the goblins banging things around in a context of disturbing the peace. Since there were very few humans living anywhere near the goblins’ settlement, Chief Constable Feeney put the complaints down to the humans’ residual dislike of goblins doing anything whatsoever anywhere, but he did advise that maybe moving whatever it was they were doing further into their caves might be a very good idea.
The crackling voice of Boney said, ‘No worries, boss, hang. We are copacetic on this one. No problems here.’
‘Well, that’s good to know, but why all the banging and clanging, Boney?’
‘Chief, you know plenty goblins go to Ankh-Morpork and work for Sir Harry King, the shit magnet, on the railway. Know how it is, yess? Comes back every month with wages. Never had wages before! Sometime they comes with diagrams … And ideas and scheming attics.’
Boney watched his superior officer with a certain level of concern, and heard Feeney say, ‘They are stealing … ideas?’
There was silence and Feeney knew he had made a faux pas, but Boney laughed and said, ‘Nosir, improving! We like Sir Harry, veeery good employer, but we plan to build own goblin railway. Quick to get around and easy-no-problem — has found best way to build railway is not build. Digging! Dig underground. Underground goblin-size railway, yess? Will bring all goblins together from every caverns. So many caverns in bowels of world. It’s no fuss. Goblins needed all over. How would nice Miss Adora Belle Dearheart do, if no goblins on clacks? We can be trusted — well, as muches as we trust you stinking humans. Wonderful railways underground, narrow gauge, of course. You see? We even have lingo! No rain and no snow, no bothering donkeys, no frightening old ladies underground. Hang! At last goblins’ own world in tunnels under big-man human world. We goblins up in the light now. No turning back.’
Feeney thought about this on the ride home as his horse trotted gently towards the sunset. He wasn’t a philosopher and couldn’t even spell the word, but the voice of the goblin officer rang in his head. He thought, what would happen if goblins learned everything about humans and did everything the human way because they thought it was better than the goblin way? How long would it be before they were no longer goblins and left behind everything that was goblin, even their pots? The pots were lovely, he’d bought several for his mum. Goblins took pots seriously now, they sparkled, even at night, but what happens next? Will goblins really stop taking an interest in their pots and will humans learn the serious, valuable and difficult and almost magical skill of pot-making? Or will goblins become, well, just another kind of human? And which would be better?
And then he thought, maybe a policeman should stop thinking about all this because, after all, there was no crime, nothing was wrong … and yet in a subtle way, there was. Something was being stolen from the world without anybody noticing or caring. And then he gave up, because he was nearly home and his mum had promised him Man Dog Suck Po with mashed carrots, and it wasn’t even a Sunday.
Building the longest railway the world had yet seen was a matter of daily grind, and nightly grind too, and each week took Moist further away from the city. Visits home to enjoy the fruits of his labour[54] became even rarer.
Scattered along the thousand-mile route new railway yards were springing up, each one a constant hive of activity with wagons coming and going all hours of the day and night. And while the company made sure the workforce was well provisioned, since, as Harry King had told the Ankh-Morpork Times, railway workers seriously needed a good meal and a good sleep in a comfortable bed after a day of heavy labour, in the end whether or not the bed was warm or comfortable didn’t in fact really matter because a lad would sleep the moment he fell into it, just as soon as the former occupant, waving his billy can, had hurried off for his shift.
It was all about speed and occasionally pure machismo, or whatever it was called in the languages of trolls, goblins and golems and, of course, the real hard-core steel men from the mountains who fought amongst themselves over nothing.
53
Feeney was privileged. To a goblin, the name is always the name, untouchable and part of the goblin itself.