Raising Steam: (Discworld novel 40) (Discworld Novels)

by Terry Pratchett

  And off they’d gone. The men with clean shirts every day. The men of the sliding rule. Moist liked them because they were everything he wasn’t. But maybe he should teach them about being a scoundrel. Oh, not about taking money from widows and orphans, but about being aware that many people weren’t as straight as a theodolite.

  The surveyors proved only too happy to agree that the area around Sto Lat was the gateway to the Sto Plains, so now all they needed to do was get the people with, as it were, the keys to the gate to understand this, a job that everybody was extremely happy to turn over to Mr Moist von Lipwig.

  As it turned out, there were a great many landowners between Ankh-Morpork and Sto Lat, and any number of tenants. Nobody minded a clacks tower near by. Indeed, often these days they demanded one, but, well, a mechanical thing chuffing through your cornfields and cabbage plantations spewing out smoke and cinders, well, that was a different matter, which would be the kind of problem that could be settled only by the application of that wonderful lubricant known to every negotiator as warm specie.fn24

  The aristocrats, if such they could be called, generally hated the whole concept of the train on the basis that it would encourage the lower classes to move about and not always be available. On the other hand, some were of a type that Moist recognized: shrewd old buffers who’d lead you to believe they were harmless and possibly slightly gaga and then, with a little twinkle in their eye – BANG! – squeeze more money out of you than a snake, twinkling all the way.

  Lord Underdale, one such gentleman, had plied Moist with an indecent amount of gin and brandy while naming his terms: ‘Now see here, young man – twinkle, twinkle – you can take your tracks across my land if we can agree a route and it won’t cost you a penny if you will firstly carry my freight for nothing and secondly put a loading station just where I want it so that I can also travel anywhere I want merely by flagging down one of your locomotives. Do you see, young man – twinkle, twinkle – I go free and my freight goes free. Do we have an accord?’

  Moist looked out of the wonderful mullioned windows at the smoke beyond the ancient trees and said, ‘What exactly is your freight, sir?’

  The old man, all beautiful long white hair and ditto beard, said, ‘Well, now, since you ask, it’s iron ore with a certain amount of lead and zinc. Oh dear, I see your glass is empty again. I must insist you have another brandy – it’s such a cold day, is it not? Twinkle, twinkle.’

  Moist smiled and said, ‘Well, your lordship, you are a tough bargainer and no mistaking – twinkle, twinkle, TWINKLE. Since our project is very heavy when it comes to metals, we could perhaps do business? That is to say if our surveyors don’t come up with any problems, such as swampy ground and suchlike.’

  ‘Well, Mister Moist, since you have drunk every last drop of brandy I have pressed on you without appearing to be the least bit intoxicated, I must consider you a man after my own heart – twinkle, twinkle.’

  And here Moist definitely detected the subtle signs of intoxication as the old man said, ‘I have to tell you that yesterday I was contacted by a man who said he represented the up-and-coming Big Cabbage Railway Company.’

  Moist knew about them, yes, they were a company all right, but they didn’t yet have a single engine or anybody as skilful as Simnel to tame the raw steam. He rather suspected that a lot of money would go their way from the gullible and then, when there was enough, the bright office would be empty and the gentlemen concerned, with different moustaches, would be legging it somewhere else to start up another railway company. Part of him longed to be one of them and then he thought, I am one of them, only this one has to work.

  ‘Apparently,’ continued Lord Underdale, ‘they are going to build a far superior engine to the one being demonstrated in Ankh-Morpork.’ The old man laughed at Moist’s almost total lack of expression and said, ‘You told me that you represented a railway company, Mister Lipwig. Well, now your company has … company!’

  Moist belched forensically, very carefully choosing his time. ‘This may be the case, sir, but we have – hic! – a working engine, which is … the toast of Ankh-Morpork!’ And here Moist allowed a certain slur to enter his voice and continued, ‘And now, why don’t we, as gentlemen, cut a deal and shake hands on it like gentlemen so we both know where we stand?’ He stood up and stumbled a little, saw the extra twinkle in the old man’s face, and rejoiced.

  Later, in the stables, as he saddled up to go home, Moist audited his afternoon’s work. This was a game he knew all too well. He had seen the trap and had been prepared, and thus the side deal for iron-ore shipments and railway access was a sensible one but slightly more beneficial for the railway, in recognition of the fact that elderly gentlemen shouldn’t try to get impressionable young men drunk, especially when they own more land than any reasonable person could ever need. Yes, Moist thought, moral compass? He smiled.

  Before he mounted up, Moist carefully removed from about his person two hot-water bottles and a rubber pipe. He very carefully stowed both bottles in a large padded saddlebag, smiling as he did so. The old boy really shouldn’t have tried to make him drunk. It was so … unethical.

  When Moist eventually got back to the city, he went straight to the centre of Harry King’s compound, ran up the stairs to Sir Harry’s great big office, and dropped yet another portfolio, prepared by Mr Drumknott, of all the contacts he had dealt with, the rents, the routes agreed.

  ‘These are for your lads, Harry, and this is for you.’ He set down very carefully a large crate containing a number of bottles.

  Harry stared at him and said, ‘What the hell are these for!’

  Moist shrugged and tapped his nose. ‘Well, Harry, it’s like this. A lot of the people I have to deal with are elderly men who think they’re cunning and try to fill me with expensive alcohol in the belief that they can get the better of the deal and no mistake. Of course, I drink every drink put in front of me! No! Don’t look like that! I really can hold my drink. In fact I can hold a great deal of drink, and I’m pleased to report that rubber doesn’t detract from the taste of whisky, very fine brandy or Jimkin Bearhugger’s best gin.’

  ‘Well done, Mister Lipwig. I’ve always known you’re a man to watch extremely carefully and I do so like to see a master at … work. Now follow me, Mister Lipwig, and try not to slosh, will you?’

  In a few weeks the compound had changed beyond recognition: the big drop forges that used to thud behind Quarry Lane had been moved wholesale out of the centre of the city and enormously augmented their rate of hammering with the rhythms of the railway factory.

  Harry seemed very proud of it, considering that if muck was brass, a thump of the hammer was pennies from heaven. As they walked through the cacophony he shouted, ‘Great lads, the golems! They’re always punctual, and they don’t get ill. Most of all, they just like working! And I like anyone who likes to work: goblins, golems, I don’t care what you are if you’re a good worker.’ He thought for a moment and added, ‘As long as you don’t dribble too much. Just look at the way those lads hammer things with their fists. I wish I could get more of them, but you know how it is.’

  Moist looked around the fiery hellhole that was the ironworks. In the satanic air he could just about tell the golems from the human workers in their leather overalls, because the golems were the ones walking around holding pieces of red-hot iron in their bare hands. The furnaces illuminated the grey sky, and always and forever the clanging went on. And the pile of fresh new rails got bigger and bigger.

  He nodded, since normal speech was clearly out of the question among the clanging and the banging. Indeed, he knew how it was. In short, the citizens of Ankh-Morpork who might be expected to fill the heavy-lifting trades, such as the golems and the trolls, were increasingly realizing that just because they were big and tough did not mean they had to do a big tough job if they didn’t want to. This was, after all, Ankh-Morpork, where a man walked free even if he was not, strictly speaking, a man.

  The prob
lem, if you could call it that, had been building up for some time. Moist had first noticed what was happening when Adora Belle said that her new hair stylist was a troll, Mr Teasy-Weasy Fornacitefn25, and, as it turned out, a pretty good hairdresser, according to Adora Belle and her friends. And there it was: the new reality. If all sapient species were equal, that’s what you got: golem housekeepers and goblin maids and, he thought, troll lawyers.

  Harry King was rumbling on as they emerged back into the open: ‘It’s a bugger! Now they’re free, you can’t get the golems! Ask your missus! They’re all off doing landscape gardening and suchlike daisy rubbish, and I reckon I’m paying every human ironworker in the damn city double the odds, and only twenty-one of them heavy boys. It’s such a shame, such a shame.’

  ‘I don’t know, Harry, you seem to be moving phenomenally fast.’

  Harry nudged Moist and said, in a conspiratorial tone, ‘I’ll have you dumped in the river if you tell anybody this, but I’m loving it! I mean, most of my life has been, not to put too much of a fine point on it, shit, honest to goodness shit, not to mention of course piss, which has also been a very good friend to me, but you see all that is just moving stuff about, not actually making something. And it gets better because, you see, it’s something me and the Duchess can talk about in polite company. Oh, of course, I’ll still be maintaining the night-soil business and all of that … it is, after all, my bread and butter, so to speak, which, to tell you the truth, is more like steak and all the trimmings nowadays, but right now my heart is in the iron. And who can say that ain’t beautiful, Mister Lipwig? I mean, daffodils, well, I quite like them, but look at the sheen on the steel, the sweat on the men; the future being made one hammer blow at a time. Even the slag is beautiful in a way.’

  Iron Girder passed by on her everlasting journey around the compound and Harry said, ‘What we need is the right class of poet.’ He flung out a hand towards the admirers with their notebooks and all the others who clung to the railings. ‘Look at them all! They’re looking for miracles. And you know what? They’ll get them.’

  It started to rain, but the onlookers, especially the train spotters, with their very useful clothing, just stood there, watching Iron Girder kick up a mist into the air.

  It seemed to Moist that for a moment Harry King was somehow different, even more alive than usual, and Harry, it had to be said, was pretty vital in any case. And now Harry King, Cess Pit Man, was metamorphosing into a National Treasure.

  Bedwyr Beddsson tried to get his boots off. After a night in the mines it was amazing what you found in your boots, some of it alive. When the boots were off, not without a struggle, he took the harness off Daisy the pit pony and watched her sniff the clean air and canter into the little field near the entrance to the mine. It did your heart good to see her. There were times when Bedwyr would have liked to do the same thing. His mother had told him, you can’t change your stars, meaning, presumably, this is your life and you have to live it. Now, as he stepped inside his living quarters, he wondered if Tak might let him try again.

  He loved Bleddyn, his wife of many years, and his children were doing just fine in the school in Lancre, but today he was troubled. The grags had called and were quite polite this time, although neither he nor Bleddyn really cared for politics. How could they mean anything when you’ve spent your life sweating down in the mines? His pony was now free, but he was at the end of his tether. He just wanted to provide for his family as best he could. What was a dwarf to do?

  Bedwyr wanted his children to do better than him, and it looked as though they would. His father had been annoyed about this. Bedwyr was sorry that the old boy was dead, but the world kept turning and the Turtle moved. New things were being done in new ways. And it wasn’t that the grags were holding hard to yesterday; they hadn’t even got as far as this century.

  Bleddyn had cooked a good rat supper and was upset when she saw his face and said, ‘Those damn grags again! Why don’t you tell them to put their nonsense where the light shines too much!’fn26

  Bleddyn didn’t usually swear, so that surprised him, and she continued, ‘They had a point once. They said that we were being swallowed up by the humans and the trolls, and you know it’s true, except that it’s the wrong kind of truth. The kids’ve got human friends and one or two trolls as well and nobody notices, nobody thinks about it. Everyone is just people.’

  He looked at her face and said, ‘But we’re diminished, less important!’

  But Bleddyn was emphatic and said, ‘You silly old dwarf. Don’t you think the trolls consider themselves diminished too? People mingle and mingling is good! You’re a dwarf, with big dwarf hobnail boots and everything else it takes to be a dwarf. And remember, it wasn’t so long ago that dwarfs were very scarce outside of Uberwald. You must know your history? Nobody can take that away, and who knows, maybe some trolls are saying right now, “Oh dear, my little pebbles is being influenced by the dwarfs! It’s a sin!” The Turtle moves for everybody all the time, and those grags schism so often that they consider everyone is a schism out there on their own. Look it up. I’ve cooked you a lovely rat – nice and tender – so why not eat it up and get out into the sunshine? I know it isn’t dwarfish, but it’s good for getting your clothes dried.’

  When he laughed she smiled and said, ‘All that’s wrong in the world is that it’s spilling over us as if we’re stones in a stream, and it’ll leave us eventually. Remember your old granddad telling you about going to fight the trolls in Koom Valley, yes? And then you told your son how you went back to Koom Valley and found out the whole damn business was a misunderstanding. And because of all this, our Brynmor won’t even have to fight unless someone is extremely stupid. Say no to the grags. Really, they’re bogeymen. I’ve spoken to all the women round here and they say exactly the same thing. You’re a dwarf. You won’t stop being a dwarf until you die. And you could be a clever dwarf or you could be a stupid dwarf, like the ones who knock down clacks towers.’

  Bedwyr very much enjoyed the rat, which had been nicely seasoned, and, as a wise husband does, he thought about things.

  Two days later, coming back from Blackglass, where he had gone to buy a load of candles, Bedwyr found two dark dwarfs setting fire to the base of a clacks tower. All he had on him were his tools and it was amazing how useful a simple miner’s tools could be. A number of clacksmen and goblins joined him hastily in putting out the fire, and they had to stop Bedwyr from using his heavy boots to show his disdain for those who resort to arson. He told them, ‘My brother’s daughter, our Berwyn, she works on the clacks down in Quirm … All this stuff you don’t notice until it’s on your doorstep, and now I think I’ve woken up.’

  Bedwyr didn’t kill the delvers, he just, as it were, disabled them. But when he left hurriedly to go home, he noticed that the goblins were … busy. From the point of view of people working in an undefended clacks tower in the wilderness, the world was seen as black and white, and for these delvers it went black.

  Railway fever, already red-hot, was becoming incandescent, at least across the Sto Plains. Would-be investors clamoured for a stake in the Ankh-Morpork and Sto Plains Hygienic Railway.fn27 There were swamps to drain, bridges to reinforce and so theodolites twinkled in the sunshine.

  But even with Vetinari’s support and Harry’s millions, it was a slow business. Every piece of track had to be laid with care and tested before anything could be run along it – let alone a train. Moist had expected that Harry would want to get things done fast at any cost with little thought of safety all round. Oh yes, he shouted a bit when the surveyors took up too much time, but the grumble remained a grumble. The same picture kept coming back into Moist’s mind: Harry King already had the money, lots of it, but the railways were going to be his legacy. No more the King of the Midden. A Lord of the Smoke was better any day and so while he screamed that he was being sent to the poorhouse he nevertheless signed the paperwork promptly.

  To Effie, now definitely a Lady,fn28 her hus
band the railway entrepreneur at last had a job that his wife liked to talk about. And Effie didn’t just like to talk about it, she got involved with it and increasingly often was to be found in Harry’s office. As it happened, it was Effie who came up with the idea of the moving gangs. And so trail after trail of wagons were working their way through the countryside, in which working men and surveyors could sleep and take their meals anywhere the railway wanted them to go rather than wasting time going home at night.

  The track-laying was now pressing hard at Moist’s heels as he dealt with the multiplicity of landowners along the route. And that was a painfully slow business too, every one of them exercised by the internal conundrum: if you held out for too much then there might just be somebody reasonably close by who would welcome the train for a pittance, if he was stupid enough, but then of course he might be clever and he would get his perishable produce to market before you could, and there you would be: with all the dust and all the noise and all the smoke and none of the money.

  In the interests of keeping things moving as quickly as possible, the Patrician had allowed Moist to requisition one of the city’s few golem horses. The horses were notable for their indefatigable galloping and also for turning your pelvis into jelly if you didn’t pad up extremely well, but even with all the multiple layers Moist was just about rattling when he got back to the city after weeks of negotiations.

  Exhausted, and in defiance of custom and practice, health and safety – but, on the other hand, with all the glory of the gods of style – to the dismay of the palace guards he rode the golem horse all the way up the steps to the door of the Oblong Office. There he was pleased to see Drumknott, who deftly opened the door and stepped backwards so quickly that Moist, by ducking, managed to trot neatly to within a foot of Lord Vetinari’s desk.