The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett Read Free Book Online

things on their mind, and the people from outside who came to explore went into the forests and never came out again. And for centuries no one had bothered about the place. You couldn’t sell things to people hidden by too many trees.
    It was probably the coach road that had changed everything, a few years back, when they drove it all the way through to Genua. A road is built to follow. Mountain people had always gravitated to the plains, and in recent years Uberwald folk had joined them. The news got back home: There’s money to be made in Ankh-Morpork, bring the kids. You don’t need to bring the garlic, though because all the vampires work down at the kosher butchers’. And if you’re pushed in Ankh-Morpork, you are allowed to push back. No one cares enough about you to want to kill you.
    Vimes could just about tell the difference between the Uberwald dwarfs and the ones from Copperhead, who were shorter, noisier and rather more at home among humans. The Uberwald dwarfs were quiet, tended to scuttle around corners, and often didn’t speak Morporkian. In some of the alleys off Treacle Mine Road you could believe you were in another country. But they were what every copper desires in a citizen. They were no trouble. They mostly had jobs working for one another, they paid their taxes rather more readily than humans did, although to be honest there were small piles of mouse droppings that yielded more money than most Ankh-Morpork citizens, and generally any problems they had they sorted out among themselves. If such people ever come to the attention of the police, it’s usually only as a chalk outline.
    It turned out, though, that within the community, behind the grubby facades of all those tenements and workshops in Cable Street and Whalebone Lane, there were vendettas and feuds that had their origins in two adjoining mine shafts five hundred miles away and a thousand years ago. There were pubs you only drank in if you were from a particular mountain. There were streets you didn’t walk down if your clan mined a particular lode. The way you wore your helmet, the way you parted your beard, spoke complicated volumes to other dwarfs. They didn’t even hand a piece of paper to Vimes.
    “Then there’s the way you krazak your G’ardrgh ,” said Corporal Littlebottom.
    “I won’t even ask,” said Vimes.
    “I’m afraid I can’t explain in any case,” said Cheery.
    “Have I got a Gaadrerghuh?” said Vimes. Cheery winced at the mispronunciation.
    “Yes, sir. Everyone has. But only a dwarf can krazak his properly,” she said. “Or hers,” she added.
    Vimes sighed, and looked down at the pages of scrawl in his notebook, under the heading: UBERWALD . He wasn’t strictly aware of it, but he treated even geography as if he was investigating a crime (Did you see who carved out the valley? Would you recognize that glacier if you saw it again?).
    “I’m going to make a lot of mistakes, Cheery,” he said.
    “I shouldn’t worry about that, sir. Humans always do. But most dwarfs can spot if you’re trying not to make them.”
    “Are you sure you don’t mind coming?”
    “Got to face it sooner or later, sir.”
    Vimes shook his head sadly.
    “I don’t get it, Cheery. There’s all this fuss about a female dwarf trying to act like, like—”
    “A lady, sir?”
    “Right, and yet no one says anything about Carrot being called a dwarf, but he’s a human—”
    “No, sir. Like he says, he’s a dwarf. He was adopted by dwarfs, he’s performed the Y’grad , he observes the j’kargra insofar as that’s possible in a city. He’s a dwarf.”
    “He’s six foot high!”
    “He’s a tall dwarf, sir. We don’t mind if he wants to be a human as well. Not even the drudak’ak would have a problem with that.”
    “I’m running out of cough drops here, Cheery. What was that?”
    “Look, sir, most of the dwarfs here are…well, I suppose you’d call them liberal, sir. They’re mainly from the mountains behind