‘Mr Groat is not the postmaster, Mr Pump. I am.’
Good gods, the madness is catching, Moist thought, as the golem’s glow disappeared into the darkness outside. I am not the postmaster, I’m some poor bastard who’s the victim of some stupid . . . experiment. What a place! What a situation! What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.
He tried to find the angle, the way out . . . but all the time a conversation kept bouncing off the insides of his brain.
Imagine a hole, a hundred feet deep and full of water.
Imagine the darkness. Imagine, at the bottom of the hole, a figure roughly of human shape, turning in that swirling darkness a massive handle once every eight seconds.
Pump . . . Pump . . . Pump . . .
For two hundred and forty years.
‘You didn’t mind?’ Moist had asked.
‘You Mean Did I Harbour Resentment, Mr Lipvig? But I Was Doing Useful And Necessary Work! Besides, There Was Much For Me To Think About.’
‘At the bottom of a hundred feet of dirty water? What the hell did you find to think about?’
‘Pumping, Mr Lipvig.’
And then, the golem said, had come cessation, and dim light, a lowering of levels, a locking of chains, movement upwards, emergence into a world of light and colour . . . and other golems.
Moist knew something about golems. They used to be baked out of clay, thousands of years ago, and brought to life by some kind of scroll put inside their heads, and they never wore out and they worked, all the time. You saw them pushing brooms, or doing heavy work in timber yards and foundries. Most of them you never saw at all. They made the hidden wheels go round, down in the dark. And that was more or less the limit of his interest in them. They were, almost by definition, honest.
But now the golems were freeing themselves. It was the quietest, most socially responsible revolution in history. They were property, and so they saved up and bought themselves.
Mr Pump was buying his freedom by seriously limiting the freedom of Moist. A man could get quite upset about that. Surely that wasn’t how freedom was supposed to work?
Ye gods, thought Moist, back in the here-and-now, no wonder Groat sucked cough sweets all the time, the dust in this place could choke you!
He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out the diamond-shaped cough lozenge the old man had given him. It looked harmless enough.
One minute later, after Mr Pump had lurched into the room and slapped him heavily on the back, the steaming lozenge was stuck to the wall on the far side of the room where, by morning, it had dissolved quite a lot of the plaster.
Mr Groat took a measured spoonful of tincture of rhubarb and cayenne pepper, to keep the tubes open, and checked that he still had the dead mole round his neck, to ward off any sudden attack of doctors. Everyone knew doctors made you ill, it stood to reason. Nature’s remedies were the trick every time, not some hellish potion made of gods knew what. He smacked his lips appreciatively. He’d put fresh sulphur in his socks tonight, too, and he could feel it doing him good.
Two candle lanterns glowed in the velvet, papery darkness of the main sorting office. The light was shining through the outer glass, filled with water so that the candle would go out if it was dropped; it made the lanterns look like the lights of some abyssal fish from the squiddy, iron-hard depths.
There was a little glugging noise in the dark. Groat corked his bottle of elixir and got on with business.
‘Be the inkwells filled, Apprentice Postman Stanley?’ he intoned.
‘Aye, Junior Postman Groat, full to a depth of one-third of one inch from the top as per Post Office Counter Regulations, Daily Observances, Rule C18,’ said Stanley.
There was a rustle as Groat turned the pages of a huge book on the lectern in front of him.
‘Can I see the picture, Mr Groat?’ said Stanley eagerly.
Groat smiled. It had become part of the ceremony, and he gave the reply he gave every time.
‘Very well, but this is the last time. It’s not good to look too often on the face of a god,’ he said. ‘Or any other part.’
‘But you said there used to be a gold statue of him in the big hall, Mr Groat. People must’ve looked on it all the time.’
Groat hesitated. But Stanley was a growing lad. He’d have to know sooner or later.
‘Mind you, I don’t reckon people used to look on the face much,’ he said. ‘They looked more on the . . . wings.’
‘On his hat and his ankles,’ said Stanley. ‘So he could fly the messages at the speed of . . . messages.’
A little bead of sweat dripped off Groat’s forehead. ‘Mostly on his hat and ankles, yes,’ he said. ‘Er . . . but not only there.’
Stanley peered at the picture. ‘Oh, yes. I never noticed them before. He’s got wings on—’
‘The fig leaf,’ said Groat quickly. ‘That’s what we call it.’
‘Why’s he got a leaf there?’ said Stanley.
cOh, they all had ‘em in the olden days, ‘cos of being Classical,’ said Groat, relieved to be shifting away from the heart of the matter. ‘It’s a fig leaf. Off a fig tree.’
‘Haha, the joke’s on them, there’s no fig trees round here!’ said Stanley, in the manner of one exposing the flaw in a long-held dogma.
‘Yes, lad, very good, but it was a tin one anyway,’ said Groat, with patience.
‘And the wings?’ said the boy.
‘We-ell, I s’pose they thought that the more wings, the better,’ said Groat.
‘Yes, but s’posing his hat wings and his ankle wings stopped working, he’d be held up by—’
‘Stanley! It’s just a statue! Don’t get excited! Calm down! You don’t want to upset . . . them’.
Stanley hung his head. ‘They’ve been . . . whispering to me again, Mr Groat,’ he confided in a low voice.
‘Yes, Stanley. They whisper to me, too.’
‘I remember ‘em last time, talking in the night, Mr Groat,’ said Stanley, his voice trembling. ‘I shut my eyes and I keep seeing the writin’ . . .’
‘Yes, Stanley. Don’t worry about it. Try not to think about it. It’s Mr Lipstick’s fault, stirring them up. Leave well alone, I say. They never listen, and then what happens? They find out the hard way’
‘It seems like only yesterday, those watchmen drawing that chalk outline round Mr Mutable,’ said Stanley, beginning to tremble. ‘He found out the hard way!’
‘Calm down, now, calm down,’ said Groat, patting him gently on the shoulder. ‘You’ll set ‘em off. Think about pins.’
‘But it’s a cruel shame, Mr Groat, them never being alive long enough to make you Senior Postman!’
Groat sniffed. ‘Oh, that’s enough of that. That’s not important, Stanley,’ he said, his face like thunder.
‘Yes, Mr Groat, but you’re an old, old man and you’re still only a Junior Postm—’ Stanley persisted.
‘I said that’s enough, Stanley! Now, just raise that lamp again, will you? Good. That’s better. I’ll read a page of the Regulations, that always quietens them down.’ Groat cleared his throat. ‘I shall now read from the Book of Regulations, Delivery Times (Metropolitan) (Sundays and Octedays excepted),’ he announced to the air. ‘As follows: “The hours by which letters should be put into the receiving houses in town for each delivery within the city walls of Ankh-Morpork are as the following: overnight by eight o’clock in the evening, for the first delivery. Morning by eight o’clock, for the second delivery. Morning by ten o’clock, for the third delivery. Morning by twelve o’clock, for the fourth delivery. Afternoon by two o’clock, for the fifth delivery. Afternoon by four o’clock, for the sixth delivery. Afternoon by six o’clock, for the seventh delivery.” These are the hours, and I have read them.’ Groat hung his head for a moment, and then he closed the book with a snap.
‘Why are we doing this, Mr Groat?’ said Stanley meekly.
‘ ‘Cos of hub-riss,’ said Mr Groat. ‘That’s what it was. Hub-riss killed the Post Office. Hub-riss and greed and Bloody Stupid Johnson and the New Pie.’
‘A pie, Mr Groat? How could a pie—’
‘Don’t ask, Stanley. It gets complicated and there’s nothing in it about pins.’
They put out the candles, and left.
When they had gone, a faint whispering started.
Chapter Three
Our Own Hand, Or None
In which our hero discovers the world of pins – The Greengrocer’s
Apostrophe – S.W.A.L.K. – The path of Fate – The Golem Lady – The