Raising Steam (6 page)

‘One of them, a scion of the aforesaid Simnel, has apparently been scratching about in his father’s shed and most certainly wondered if
he
, with his infinite curiosity, could achieve what his father, alas, had not. And now this young man has created a machine which devours wood and coal and spews out flames, polluting the sky, undoubtedly scaring every living creature for miles around, and making the gods’ own noise. Or so I am told.

‘Finally, young Mister Simnel has found his way to our good friend Sir Harry King. And apparently the two of them are now dreaming up an enterprise, which I believe is called … the rail way.’

Vetinari paused only briefly before continuing. ‘Mister Lipwig, I feel the pressure of the future and in this turning world must either kill it or become its master. I have a nose for these things, just as I had for you, Mister Lipwig. And so I intend to be like the people of Fourecks and surf the future. Giving it a little tweak here and there has always worked for me and my instincts are telling me that this wretched rail way, which appears to be a problem, might just prove to be a remarkable solution.’

Moist looked at the Patrician’s grey expression. He had articulated the term ‘rail way’ in something like the voice of an
elderly duchess finding something unmentionable in her soup. It had total disdain floating in the air around it. But if you watched the weather of Lord Vetinari, and Moist was an expert in the Patrician’s meteorology, you would notice that sometimes a metaphysical cloudburst might very shortly turn into a lovely day in the park. He could almost smell his lordship coming to terms with the reality in front of him: tiny movements of the face, changes of posture and the whole litany of Havelock Vetinari thinking suddenly delivered one of those smiles which Moist knew suggested that the game was afoot, and the mind of Lord Vetinari was running and well oiled.

Vetinari said, getting more cheerful at every word, ‘My coach is waiting downstairs, Mister Lipwig. Come.’

Moist knew that any kind of argument was useless, and he also knew that Lord Vetinari most definitely knew that too; but there was such a thing as pride, and so he said, ‘My lord, I must protest! I have a lot of work to be done. Surely you are aware?’

Lord Vetinari, his robe fluttering behind him like a banner, was already halfway to the door. He was a long-boned man and Moist had to run to keep up, occasionally hopping down the stairs two at a time, with Drumknott in pursuit.

Ahead of him his lordship said, over his shoulder, ‘Mister Lipwig, you
don’t
in fact have a great deal of work to do. In fact, as Postmaster General, Deputy Chairman of the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork
^fn18
and, of course, Master of the Royal Mint, you employ on
our
behalf a great many extremely clever people, who work very hard, that is true. Your strange camaraderie, your skill at getting people to like you against all the evidence and amazingly
continue
to like you, makes you a very good boss, it must be said, with staff who are very loyal to you. But ultimately all
you
really need to do in the way of desk work is a little light auditing every so often.’

Lord Vetinari stepped up his pace and continued, ‘And what is it that we can take away from all this, I fail to hear you ask? Well, I shall tell you. What the wise man will take away is a certainty that any favour is worth doing for a good boss, and I, Mister Lipwig, am a most exemplary and forbearing employer. This is apparent from the circumstance that
your
head is still clearly resting on
your
shoulders despite the fact that it might possibly be in, oh, so many other places, as it were.’

The country of Llamedos prided itself on being
sensibly
dwarfish. In truth, there were as many humans as dwarfs who called Llamedos home but since most of them were miners, and, as a rule, were either small or almost permanently concussed, you really would have to look carefully to tell the species apart. Therefore, given that practically no one was bigger than anybody else, there was a general amiability in the area, especially since, although this wasn’t generally talked about, the Goddess of Love saw to it that her spell covered all alike. And because nobody talked about it, well, nobody talked about it, and so life moved on with the mining for gold – what little there was of it by now – iron ore, such zinc and arsenic as could be teased out of the unforgiving rock and, of course, coal. All this was supplemented with fishing on the coast. The outside world was involved only occasionally, when something of
real
importance happened.

That was yesterday. Today, it happened.

The ship arrived at the dock in Pantygirdl, the largest town in Llamedos, just after lunch. The arrival of the grags on board, who had come to preach the truth of pure dwarfishness to the people of the town, would have been welcomed had they not come with delvers, the shock troops of the grags, who had never before been seen above ground. Until then, the people of Llamedos were quite happy that the grags were doing whatever it was they did in the realm of the spirit and the observances thereof, keeping
things done properly so that everybody else could get on with the unimportant things like the mining and the fishing and the stonework up in the hills.

But today it all went horribly wrong, because Blodwen Footcracker was getting married to Davy Counter, an excellent miner and fisherman and, importantly, a human, although the importance of this fact did not seem to most people locally to be, well, important. Just about everybody in Pantygirdl knew them both and considered them a sensible match, especially as they had known one another since they were toddlers. And while they were growing up people wondered, as people did, about the chances of a dwarf and a human conceiving a child and considered it a long shot to say the least, but then they satisfied themselves by telling one another that, after all, love was certainly there in abundance and, besides, whose business was it anyway? He and she were compatible and loving and, as the mines and the boats took their toll of miner and fisherman alike, there were always plenty of orphans anxious for a new home in their own country. And everybody in Pantygirdl agreed that the situation, while not as it might have been, was nevertheless satisfactory to the kind of people who minded their own business, and they wished the happy couple, who were, it must be said, very nearly the same size, all the very best.

Alas, the grags and the delvers must have thought otherwise, and they broke down the doors of the chapel, and since people in Llamedos didn’t go armed to their weddings the grags had it all their own way. And it might have been a complete massacre were it not for old Fflergant sitting hitherto unnoticed in the corner, who, as everyone ran for shelter, threw off his cloak and turned out to be exactly the kind of dwarf who
would
take heavy weaponry to a wedding.

He swung a heavy sword and axe together in a wonderful destructive unison, a whirlwind of fighting, and in the end there were only two casualties among the wedding party. Unfortunately
one of those was Blodwen, killed by a grag whilst clinging on to her husband’s arm.

Covered in blood, Fflergant looked around at the shocked wedding guests and said, ‘You all know me. I don’t like mixed marriages, but like you I can’t abide those bloody grags, the bastards! May the Gap take them!’

Lord Vetinari’s coach spun through the streets of Ankh-Morpork, and Moist watched the traffic scatter around them until they reached the River Gate and were out of the city proper. The coach bowled quickly along the road as it followed the Ankh downstream, towards Harry King’s Industrial Estate, a world of smokes, steams and, most of all, undesirable odours.

Ankh-Morpork was cleaning up its act. It had been a good act, full of spices, plagues, floods and other entertainments. But now the Ankh-Morpork dollar was rising high, and so was the price of property. Amazingly, a great many people wanted to live in Ankh-Morpork, as opposed to somewhere else (or quite possibly as opposed to being
dead
in Ankh-Morpork, which was always an optional extra). But, as everybody knew, the city was gripped in its ancient stone corsetry, and nobody wanted to be there, metaphorically speaking, when the stays burst.

There was overspill, and my, how it was spilling. Farming land around the city state, always at a premium, was now full of speculative building.
^fn19
It was a wonderful game, and Moist, in a
previous life, would undoubtedly have joined in and made a fortune, several fortunes in fact. And indeed, while Lord Vetinari was looking out of the window, Moist listened to the sirens and their beguiling songs of money to be made by the right man in this right place and the entrancing vision hung in the air for a tantalizing moment.

Ankh-Morpork was surrounded by clay, easily dug up, so if the cow shit ran out there was the material for your bricks, right there in front of you, with timber easily available from the dwarfs, delivered to your site by water. Soon you’d have a terrace of bright new homes available to the rising and aspirational population anxious to buy, and then all you needed was a shiny billboard, and, most definitely, an exit strategy.

The coach passed by many buildings of this sort, which would no doubt be little palaces to the occupants, who had escaped from Cockbill Street and Pigsty Hill and all the other neighbourhoods where people still dreamed that they could ‘better themselves’, an achievement that might be attained, oh happy day, when they had ‘a little place of their own’. It was an inspiring dream, if you didn’t look too deeply into words like mortgage and repayments and repossession and bankruptcy, and the lower middle classes of Ankh-Morpork, who saw themselves as being trodden on by the class above and illegally robbed by the one below, lined up with borrowed money to purchase, by instalments, their own little Oi Dong
^fn20
. As the coach rumbled past the settlements, known together as New Ankh, Moist wondered whether this time Vetinari, in allowing all these lands to be colonized in such a way, had been very stupid or indeed very,
very
clever. He plumped for ‘clever’. It was a good bet.

Eventually they arrived at the first outpost of the complicated, stinking, but ultimately most profitable, wire-netting-fenced
compound of Sir Harry King, sometime tosher and rag-and-bone man, now believed to be the richest man in the city.

Moist liked Sir Harry, he liked him a lot, and occasionally they shared the wink of men who had made it the hard way. Harry King had indeed come up the hard way and those who got in his way went down the hard way too.

Most of the area before them was full of the products of Harry King’s noisome profession, conveyor belts coming and going from who knows where, being loaded and unloaded and sorted by goblins and free golems. Horses and carts went past loaded with even more grist for that particular mill. At the far end of the compound was a collection of large sheds, and in front of them a stretch of surprisingly clear space. Moist suddenly noticed the crowd outside the compound fence, pressing up against every inch of wire netting, and felt their expectancy.

As the coach stopped, he smelled the acrid scent of coal smoke cutting through the general fetor, and heard what sounded like a dragon having difficulty sleeping, a kind of chuffing noise, very repetitive, and then suddenly there was a scream, as if the biggest kettle in the world had got very, very angry.

Lord Vetinari tapped Moist on the shoulder and said, ‘Sir Harry tells me that the thing is quite docile if handled with care. Shall we go and have a look? You first, of course, Mister Lipwig.’

He pointed to the sheds, and as they got nearer the smell of coal smoke got thicker, and the almost liquid chuffing noise got louder. Moist thought, well it was a mechanism, that’s what it was, wasn’t it? Merely a thing like a clock, yes, just a mechanism, and so he straightened up and walked fearlessly, on the outside at least, towards the door where a young man with a greasy hat and an even more greasy overall was beckoning with a greasy grin like a fox looking speculatively at some chickens. It seemed they were expected.

Harry came bustling out and said, ‘Greetings, my lord … Mister
Lipwig. Please come and meet my new associate, Mister Dick Simnel.’

Behind them, inside the shed, was the shuddering metallic monster, and it was alive. It really was alive! The thought lodged instantly in Moist’s brain. He smelled its breath and heard its voice. Yes, life; strange life but nonetheless life of a sort. Every part of it was subtly shaking and moving, almost dancing by itself, a thing alive, and waiting.

Behind the beast, in the shed, he saw wagons, presumably ready to be towed, and he thought, yes, it’s an iron horse. All around it were acolytes: men working on lathes, hammering on metal, running backwards and forwards with buckets of grease and cans of oil and occasionally pieces of wood which, right now, looked out of place amongst all the iron. And there was a strong sense of purpose that meant
we want something done and we want it done fast.

Dick Simnel smiled broadly from behind a mask of grease and said, ‘’ow do you do, sirs. Well, ’ere she is! Nowt to be afraid of! Her name, technically, is Number One, but I call ’er Iron Girder! She’s my machine. I made her, every little bit: nuts, bolts, flanges and not to forget each and every rivet. Thousands of ’em! And all the glasswork too. Very important, your sight glasses and gauges. Had to design everything meself because no one has ever done it before.’

‘And when you give her rails she’ll move more freight than a battalion of trolls, and get there much faster to boot,’ said Sir Harry, standing behind Moist. And he added, ‘It’s true. I swear that young Simnel tinkers with Iron Girder all the time: tinker, tinker, tinker. An overhaul every day.’ He laughed and said, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he eventually got her to fly.’

Mr Simnel wiped his hands on his greasy rag, causing them to get even more greasy, and then proffered one to Lord Vetinari, who gently waved it away, saying, ‘I would prefer it if you dealt
with Mister Lipwig, Mister Simnel. If I decide to allow you your fascinating … experiment, it will be to him that you answer, in the first part. Personally, I treasure my ignorance of how machinery works, although I am well aware that this is something of great interest to some people,’ he added, in a tone of voice that suggested he meant strange and secret people … busy people, excitable people, fiddling people, tinkering and volatile people. A kind, alas, who would say something as innocent as, let’s give it a try, it can’t hurt, surely? We can always hide under the coffee table.