‘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
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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
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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 diffrent. 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
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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.*
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,
* Most dwarfs were still referred to as ‘he’ as well, even when they were getting married. It was generally assumed that somewhere under all that chain mail one of them was female and that both of them knew which one this was. But the whole subject of sex was one that traditionally minded dwarfs did not discuss, perhaps out of modesty, possibly because it didn’t interest them very much and certainly because they took the view that what two dwarfs decided to do together was entirely their own business.
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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.