"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 throat sweets 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 Copperhead, you know? They get along with humans. Some of them even acknowledge that... they"ve got daughters, sir. But some of the more... old fashioned... Uberwald dwarfs haven"t got out so much. They act as if B"hrian Bloodaxe was still alive. That"s why we call them drudak"ak."
Vimes had a go, but he knew that to really speak dwarfish you needed a lifetime"s study and, if at all possible, a serious throat infection.
" "above ground"... "they negatively"..." he faltered.
" "They do not get out in the fresh air enough," " Cheery supplied.
"Ah, right. And everyone thought the new king was going to be one of these?"
"They say Albrecht"s never seen sunlight in his life. His clan never goes above ground in daylight. Everyone was certain it"d be him."
And as it turned out it wasn"t, thought Vimes. Some of the Uberwald dwarfs hadn"t supported him. And the world had moved on. There were plenty of dwarfs around now who had been born in Ankh-Morpork. Their kids went around with their helmets on back to front and spoke dwarfish only at home. Many of them wouldn"t know a pick-axe if you hit them with it. They weren"t about to be told how to run their lives by an old dwarf sitting on a stale bun under some distant mountain.
He tapped his pencil on his notebook thoughtfully. And because of this, he thought, dwarfs are punching one another on my streets.
"I"ve seen more of those dwarf sedan chair things around lately," he said. "You know, the ones carried by a couple of trolls. They have thick leather curtains..."
"Drudak"ak," said Cheery. "Very... traditional dwarfs. If they have to go out in daylight, they don"t look at it."
"I don"t recall them a year ago."
Cheery shrugged. "There"s lots of dwarfs here now, sir. The drudak"ak feel they"re among dwarfs now. They don"t have to deal with humans for anything."
"They don"t like us?"
"They won"t even talk to a human. They"re fairly choosy about talking to most dwarfs, to tell you the truth."
"That"s daft!" said Vimes. "How do they get food? You can"t live on fungi! How do they trade ore, dam streams, get wood for shoring up their shafts?"
"Well, either other dwarfs are paid to do it or humans are employed," said Cheery. "They can afford it. They"re very good miners. Well, they own very good mines, in any case."
"Sounds to me they"re a bunch of - " Vimes stopped himself. He was aware that a wise man should always respect the folkways of others, to use Carrot"s happy phrase, but Vimes often had difficulty with this idea. For one thing, there were people in the world whose folkways consisted of gutting other people like clams and this was not a procedure that commanded, in Vimes, any kind of respect at all.
"I"m not thinking diplomatically, am I?" he said. Cheery watched him with a carefully blank expression.
"Oh, I don"t know about that, sir," she said. "You didn"t actually finish the sentence. And, well, a lot of dwarfs respect them. You know... feel better for seeing them."
Vimes looked puzzled. Then understanding dawned.
"Oh, I get it," he said. "I bet they say things like "Thank goodness people are keeping up the old ways," eh?"