Truth

by Pratchett, Terry

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To see how much seventy thousand dollars weigh!’

  ‘We haven’t got seventy thousand dollars!’

  ‘Look, even one dollar coin would do,’ said William patiently. ‘Ten dollars would just be more accurate, that’s all. I can work it out from there.’

  Ten assorted coins were eventually procured from the dwarfs’ cash box and were duly weighed. Then William turned to a fresh page in his notebook and bent his head in ferocious calculation. The dwarfs watched him solemnly, as if he was conducting an alchemical experiment. Finally he looked up from his figures, the light of revelation in his eyes.

  ‘That’s almost a third of a ton,’ he said. ‘That’s how much seventy thousand dollar coins weigh. I suppose a really good horse could carry that and a rider, but … Vetinari walks with a stick, you saw him. It’d take him for ever to load the horse up, and even if he got away he could hardly travel fast. Vimes must have worked it out. He said the facts were stupid facts!’

  Goodmountain had stationed himself before the rows of cases. ‘Ready when you are, chief,’ he said.

  ‘All right …’ William hesitated. He knew the facts, but what did the facts suggest?

  ‘Er … make the heading: “Who framed Lord Vetinari?” and then the story starts … er …’ William watched the hand pounce and grab among the little boxes of type, ‘A … er … “Ankh-Morpork City Watch now believe that at least one other person was involved in the … the …”’

  ‘Fracas?’ suggested Goodmountain.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Rumpus?’

  ‘“… in the attack at the palace on Tuesday night.”’ William waited until the dwarf had caught up. It was getting easier and easier to read the words forming in Goodmountain’s hands as the fingers jumped from box to box: m-i-g-h-t …

  ‘You got an m for an n there,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes. Sorry. Carry on.’

  ‘Er … “Evidence suggests that far from attacking his clerk as believed, Lord Vetinari may have discovered a crime in progress.”’

  The hand flew across the type … c-r-i-m-e-space-i-n …

  It stopped.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ said Goodmountain.

  ‘No, but it’s as good a theory as any other,’ said William. ‘That horse hadn’t been loaded to escape, it had been loaded to be discovered. Someone had some plan and it went wrong. I’m sure of that at least. Right … new paragraph. “A horse in the stables had been loaded with a third of a ton of coins, but in his current state of health the Patrician—”’

  One of the dwarfs had lit the stove. Another was stripping out the formes that contained the last edition. The room was coming alive again.

  ‘That’s about eight inches plus the heading,’ said Goodmountain, when William had finished. ‘That should rattle people. You want to add any more stuff? Miss Sacharissa did something about Lady Selachii’s ball, and there’s a few small things.’

  William yawned. He didn’t seem to be getting enough sleep these days.

  ‘Put them in,’ he said.

  ‘And there’s this clacks from Lancre that came in when you’d gone home,’ said the dwarf. ‘That’ll cost us another 50p for the messenger. You remember you sent a clacks this afternoon? About snakes?’ he added, in the face of William’s blank expression.

  William read the flimsy sheet of paper. The message had been carefully transcribed in the neat handwriting of the semaphore operator. It was probably the strangest message yet sent on the new technology.

  King Verence of Lancre had also mastered the idea that the clacks charged by the word.

  WOMEN OF LANCRE NOT RPT NOT IN HABIT BEARING SNAKES STOP CHILDREN BORN THIS MONTH WILLIAM WEAVER CONSTANCE THATCHER CATASTROPHE CARTER ALL PLUS ARMS LEGS MINUS SCALES FANGS

  ‘Hah! We have them!’ said William. ‘Give me five minutes and I’ll put together a story on this. We shall soon see if the sword of truth can’t beat the dragon of lies.’

  Boddony gave him a kind look. ‘Didn’t you say a lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on?’ he said.

  ‘But this is the truth.’

  ‘So? Where’s its boots?’

  Goodmountain nodded to the other dwarfs, who were yawning. ‘You get back to bed, lads. I’ll pull it all together.’

  He watched them disappear down the ladder to the cellar. Then he sat down, took out a small silver box and opened it.

  ‘Snuff?’ he said, offering the box to William. ‘Best thing you humans ever invented. Watson’s Red Roasted. Clears the mind a treat. No?’

  William shook his head.

  ‘What are you doing all this for, Mr de Worde?’ said Goodmountain, taking a monstrous suction of snuff up each nostril.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m not saying we don’t appreciate it, mark you,’ said Goodmountain. ‘It’s keeping the money coming in. The jobbing stuff is drying up more every day. Seems like every engraving shop was poised to go over to printing. All we did was give the young rips an opening. They’ll get us in the end, though. They’ve got money behind them. I don’t mind saying some of the lads are talking about selling up and going back to the lead mines.’

  ‘You can’t do that!’

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Goodmountain. ‘You mean you don’t want us to. I understand that. But we’ve been putting money by. We should be all right. I daresay we can flog the press to someone. We might have a spot of cash to take back home. That’s what this was all about. Money. What were you doing it for?’

  ‘Me? Because—’ William stopped. The truth was that he’d never decided to do anything. He’d never really made that kind of decision in his whole life. One thing had just gently led to another, and then the press had to be fed. It was waiting there now. You worked hard, you fed it, and it was still just as hungry an hour later and out in the world all your work was heading for Bin Six in Piss Harry’s and that was only the start of its troubles. Suddenly he had a proper job, with working hours, and yet everything he did was only as real as a sandcastle, on a beach where the tide only ever came in.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I suppose it’s because I’m no good at anything else. Now I can’t imagine doing anything else.’

  ‘But I heard your family’s got pots of money.’

  ‘Mr Goodmountain, I’m useless. I was educated to be useless. What we’ve always been supposed to do is hang around until there’s a war and do something really stupidly brave and then get killed. What we’ve mainly done is hang on to things. Ideas, mostly.’

  ‘You don’t get on with them, then.’

  ‘Look, I don’t need a heart-to-heart about this, can you understand? My father is not a nice man. Do I have to draw you a picture? He doesn’t much like me and I don’t like him. If it comes to that, he doesn’t like anyone very much. Especially dwarfs and trolls.’

  ‘No law says you have to like dwarfs and trolls,’ said Goodmountain.

  ‘Yes, but there ought to be a law against disliking them the way he does.’

  ‘Ah. Now you’ve drawn me a picture.’

  ‘Maybe you’ve heard the term “lesser races”?’

  ‘And now you’ve coloured it in.’

  ‘He won’t even live in Ankh-Morpork any more. Says it’s polluted.’

  ‘That’s observant of him.’

  ‘No, I mean—’

  ‘Oh, I know what you mean,’ said Goodmountain. ‘I’ve met humans like him.’

  ‘You said this was all about money?’ said William. ‘Is that true?’

  The dwarf nodded at the ingots of lead stacked up neatly by the press. ‘We wanted to turn lead into gold,’ he said. ‘We’d got a lot of lead. But we need gold.’

  William sighed. ‘My father used to say that gold is all dwarfs think about.’

  ‘Pretty much.’ The dwarf took another pinch of snuff. ‘But where people go wrong is … see, if all a human thinks about is gold, well, he’s a miser. If a dwarf
thinks about gold, he’s just being a dwarf. It’s diff’rent. What do you call them black humans that live in Howondaland?’

  ‘I know what my father calls them,’ said William. ‘But I call them “people who live in Howondaland”.’

  ‘Do you really? Well, I hear tell there’s one tribe where, before he can get married, a man has to kill a leopard and give the skin to the woman? It’s the same as that. A dwarf needs gold to get married.’

  ‘What … like a dowry? But I thought dwarfs didn’t differentiate between—’

  ‘No, no, the two dwarfs getting married each buy the other dwarf off their parents.’

  ‘Buy?’ said William. ‘How can you buy people?’

  ‘See? Cultural misunderstanding once again, lad. It costs a lot of money to raise a young dwarf to marriageable age. Food, clothes, chain mail … it all adds up over the years. It needs repaying. After all, the other dwarf is getting a valuable commodity. And it has to be paid for in gold. That’s traditional. Or gems. They’re fine, too. You must’ve heard our saying “worth his weight in gold”? Of course, if a dwarf’s been working for his parents that gets taken into account on the other side of the ledger. Why, a dwarf who’s left off marrying till late in life is probably owed quite a tidy sum in wages – you’re still looking at me in that funny way …’

  ‘It’s just that we don’t do it like that …’ mumbled William.

  Goodmountain gave him a sharp look. ‘Don’t you, now?’ he said. ‘Really? What do you use instead, then?’

  ‘Er … gratitude, I suppose,’ said William. He wanted this conversation to stop, right now. It was heading out over thin ice.

  ‘And how’s that calculated?’

  ‘Well … it isn’t, as such …’

  ‘Doesn’t that cause problems?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Ah. Well, we know about gratitude, too. But our way means the couple start their new lives in a state of … g’daraka … er, free, unencumbered, new dwarfs. Then their parents might well give them a huge wedding present, much bigger than the dowry. But it is between dwarf and dwarf, out of love and respect, not between debtor and creditor … though I have to say these human words are not really the best way of describing it. It works for us. It’s worked for a thousand years.’

  ‘I suppose to a human it sounds a bit … chilly,’ said William.

  Goodmountain gave him another studied look.

  ‘You mean by comparison to the warm and wonderful ways humans conduct their affairs?’ he said. ‘You don’t have to answer that one. Anyway, me and Boddony want to open up a mine together, and we’re expensive dwarfs. We know how to work lead, so we thought a year or two of this would see us right.’

  ‘You’re getting married?’

  ‘We want to,’ said Goodmountain.

  ‘Oh … well, congratulations,’ said William. He knew enough not to comment on the fact that both dwarfs looked like small barbarian warriors with long beards. All traditional dwarfs looked like that.11

  Goodmountain grinned. ‘Don’t worry too much about your father, lad. People change. My grandmother used to think humans were sort of hairless bears. She doesn’t any more.’

  ‘What changed her mind?’

  ‘I reckon it was the dying that did it.’

  Goodmountain stood up and patted William on the shoulder. ‘Come on, let’s get the paper finished. We’ll start the run when the lads wake up.’

  Breakfast was cooking when William got back, and Mrs Arcanum was waiting. Her mouth was set in the firm line of someone hot on the trail of unrespectable behaviour.

  ‘I shall require an explanation of last night’s affair,’ she said, confronting him in the hallway, ‘and a week’s notice, if you please.’

  William was too exhausted to lie. ‘I wanted to see how much seventy thousand dollars weighed,’ he said.

  Muscles moved in various areas of the landlady’s face. She knew William’s background, being the kind of woman who finds out about that kind of thing very quickly, and the twitching was a sign of some internal struggle based around the definite fact that seventy thousand dollars was a respectable sum.

  ‘I may perhaps have been a little hasty,’ she ventured. ‘Did you find out how much the money weighed?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘Would you like to keep the scales for a few days in case you want to weigh any more?’

  ‘I think I’ve finished the weighing, Mrs Arcanum, but thank you all the same.’

  ‘Breakfast has already begun, Mr de Worde, but … well, perhaps I can make allowances this time.’

  He was given a second boiled egg, too. This was a rare sign of favour.

  The latest news was already the subject of deep discussion.

  ‘I am frankly amazed,’ said Mr Cartwright. ‘It beats me how they find this stuff out.’

  ‘It certainly makes you wonder what’s going on that we aren’t told,’ said Mr Windling.

  William listened for a while, until he couldn’t wait any longer.

  ‘Something interesting in the paper?’ he asked innocently.

  ‘A woman in Kicklebury Street says her husband has been kidnapped by elves,’ said Mr Mackleduff, holding up the Inquirer. The heading was very clear on the subject:

  ELVES STOLE MY HUSBAND!

  ‘That’s made up!’ said William.

  ‘Can’t be,’ said Mackleduff. ‘There’s the lady’s name and address, right there. They wouldn’t put that in the paper if they were telling lies, would they?’

  William looked at the name and address. ‘I know this lady,’ he said.

  ‘There you are, then!’

  ‘She was the one last month who said her husband had been carried off by a big silver dish that came out of the sky,’ said William, who had a good memory for this sort of thing. He’d nearly put it in his news letter as an ‘On a lighter note’ but had thought better of it. ‘And you, Mr Prone, said everyone knew her husband had carried himself off with a lady called Flo who used to work as a waitress in Harga’s House of Ribs.’

  Mrs Arcanum gave William a sharp look which said that the whole subject of nocturnal kitchenware theft could be reopened at any time, extra egg or no.

  ‘I am not partial to that kind of talk at the table,’ she said coldly.

  ‘Well, then, it’s obvious,’ said Mr Cartwright. ‘He must’ve come back.’

  ‘From the silver dish or from Flo?’ said William.

  ‘Mr de Worde!’

  ‘I was only asking,’ said William. ‘Ah, I see they’re revealing the name of the man who broke into the jeweller’s the other day. Shame it’s Done It Duncan, poor old chap.’

  ‘A notorious criminal, by the sound of it,’ said Mr Windling. ‘It’s shocking that the Watch won’t arrest him.’

  ‘Especially since he calls on them every day,’ said William.

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘A hot meal and a bed for the night,’ said William. ‘Done It Duncan confesses to everything, you see. Original sin, murders, minor thefts … everything. When he’s desperate he tries to turn himself in for the reward.’

  ‘Then they ought to do something about him,’ said Mrs Arcanum.

  ‘I believe they generally give him a mug of tea,’ said William. He paused and then ventured: ‘Is there anything in the other paper?’

  ‘Oh, they’re still trying to say that Vetinari didn’t do it,’ said Mr Mackleduff. ‘And the King of Lancre says women in Lancre don’t give birth to snakes.’

  ‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?’ said Mrs Arcanum.

  ‘Vetinari must’ve done something,’ said Mr Windling. ‘Otherwise why would he be helping the Watch with their inquiries? That’s not the action of an innocent man, in my humble opinion.’12

  ‘I believe there’s plenty of evidence that throws doubt on his guilt,’ said William.

  ‘Really,’ said Mr Windling, making the word suggest that William’s opinion was considerably more humble than his.
‘Anyway, I understand the Guild leaders are meeting today.’ He sniffed. ‘It’s time for a change. Frankly, we could do with a ruler who is a little more responsive to the views of ordinary people.’

  William glanced at Mr Longshaft, the dwarf, who was peacefully cutting some toast into soldiers. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed. Perhaps there was nothing to notice and William was being oversensitive. But years of listening to Lord de Worde’s opinions had given him a certain ear. It told him when phrases like ‘the views of ordinary people’, innocent and worthy in themselves, were being used to mean that someone should be whipped.

  ‘How do you mean?’ he said.

  ‘The … city is getting too big,’ said Mr Windling. ‘In the old days the gates were kept shut, not left open to all and sundry. And people could leave their doors unlocked.’

  ‘We didn’t have anything worth stealing,’ said Mr Cartwright.

  ‘That’s true. There’s more money around,’ said Mr Prone.

  ‘It doesn’t all stay here, though,’ said Mr Windling. That was true, at least. ‘Sending money home’ was the major export activity of the city, and dwarfs were right at the front of it. William also knew that most of it came back again, because dwarfs bought from the best dwarf craftsmen and, mostly, the best dwarf craftsmen worked in Ankh-Morpork these days. And they sent money back home. A tide of gold coins rolled back and forth and seldom had a chance to go cold. But it upset the Windlings of the city.

  Mr Longshaft quietly picked up his boiled egg and inserted it into an eggcup.

  ‘There’s just too many people in the city,’ Mr Windling repeated. ‘I’ve nothing against … outsiders, heavens know, but Vetinari let it go far too far. Everyone knows we need someone who is prepared to be a little more firm.’

  There was a metallic noise. Mr Longshaft, still staring fixedly at his egg, had reached down and drawn a smallish but still impressively axe-like axe from his bag. Watching the egg carefully, as if it was about to run away, he leaned slowly back, paused for a moment, then brought the blade round in an arc of silver.

  The top of the egg flew up with hardly a noise, turned over in mid-air several feet above the plate, and landed beside the eggcup.