Guards! Guards! (Discworld 8)

“Yes, but-but maybe I'm just tall for my height,” said Carrot desperately. “After all, if you can have short humans, can't you have tall dwarfs?”

His father patted him companionably on the back of the knees.

“You've got to face facts, boy. You'd be much more at home up on the surface. It's in your blood. The roof isn't so low, either.” You can't keep knocking yourself out on the sky, he told himself.

“Hold on,” said Carrot, his honest brow wrinkling with the effort of calculation. “You're a dwarf, right? And mam's a dwarf. So I should be a dwarf, too. Fact of life.”

The dwarf sighed. He'd hoped to creep up on this, over a period of months maybe, sort of break it to him gently, but there wasn't any time any more.

“Sit down, lad,” he said. Carrot sat.

“The thing is,” he said wretchedly, when the boy's big honest face was a little nearer his own, “we found you in the woods one day. Toddling about near one of the tracks . . . um.” The loose rivet squeaked. The king plunged on.

“Thing is, you see ... there were these carts. On fire, as you might say. And dead people. Um, yes. Extremely dead people. Because of bandits. It was a bad winter that winter, there were all sorts coming into the hills ... So we took you in, of course, and then, well, it was a long winter, like I said, and your mam got used to you, and, well, we never got around to asking Varneshi to make enquiries. That's the long and the short of it.”

Carrot took this fairly calmly, mostly because he didn't understand nearly all of it. Besides, as far as he was aware, being found toddling in the woods was the normal method of childbirth. A dwarf is not considered old enough to have the technical processes explained to him[3] until he has reached puberty.[4]

“All right, dad,” he said, and leaned down so as to be level with the dwarf's ear. “But you know, me and-you know Minty Rocksmacker? She's really beautiful, dad, got a beard as soft as a, a, a very soft thing-we've got an understanding, and-”

“Yes,” said the dwarf, coldly. “I know. Her father's had a word with me.” So did her mother with your mother, he added silently, and then she had a word with me. Lots of words.

It's not that they don't like you, you're a steady lad and a fine worker, you'd make a good son-in-law. Four good sons-in-law. That's the trouble. And she's only sixty, anyway. It's not proper. It's not right.

He'd heard about children being reared by wolves.

He wondered whether the leader of the pack ever had to sort out something tricky like this. Perhaps he'd have to take him into a quiet clearing somewhere and say, Look, son, you might have wondered why you're not as hairy as everyone else . . .

He'd discussed it with Varneshi. A good solid man, Varneshi. Of course, he'd known the man's father. And his grandfather, now he came to think about it. Humans didn't seem to last long, it was probably all the effort of pumping blood up that high.

“Got a problem there, king.[5] Right enough,” the old man had said, as they shared a nip of spirits on a bench outside Shaft #2.

“He's a good lad, mind you,” said the king. “Sound character. Honest. Not exactly brilliant, but you tell him to do something, he don't rest until he's done it. Obedient.”

“You could chop his legs off,” said Varneshi.

“It's not his legs that's going to be the problem,” said the king darkly.

“Ah. Yes. Well, in that case you could-”

“No.”

“No,” agreed Varneshi, thoughtfully. “Hmm. Well, then what you should do is, you should send him away for a bit. Let him mix a bit with humans.” He sat back. “What you've got here, king, is a duck,” he added, in knowledgeable tones.

“I don't think I should tell him that. He's refusing to believe he's a human as it is.”

“What I mean is, a duck brought up among chickens. Well-known farmyard phenomenon. Finds it can't bloody well peck and doesn't know what swimming is.” The king listened politely. Dwarfs don't go in much for agriculture. “But you send him off to see a lot of other ducks, let him get his feet wet, and he won't go running around after bantams any more. And Bob's your uncle. ”

Varneshi sat back and looked rather pleased with himself.

When you spend a large part of your life underground, you develop a very literal mind. Dwarfs have no use for metaphor and simile. Rocks are hard, the darkness is dark. Start messing around with descriptions like that and you're in big trouble, is their motto. But after two hundred years of talking to humans the king had, as it were, developed a painstaking mental toolkit which was nearly adequate for the job of understanding them.

“Surely Bjorn Stronginthearm is my uncle, ” he pointed out, slowly.

“Same thing. ”

There was a pause while the king subjected this to careful analysis.

“You're saying, ” he said, weighing each word, “that we should send Carrot away to be a duck among humans because Bjorn Stronginthearm is my uncle. ”