The Fifth Elephant (Discworld 24)

"You have fond memories, my lord?" he ventured.

"Hmm? Oh, she was a very... unusual lady but, alas, rather older than me," said Vetinari.

"Much older, I have to say. But it was a long time ago. Life teaches us its small lessons and we move on." There was that distant look again. "Well, well, well..."

"And no doubt the lady is now dead," said Leonard. He was not much good at this sort of conversation.

"Oh, I very much doubt that," said Vetinari. "I have no doubt she thrives." He smiled. The world was becoming more... interesting. "Tell me, Leonard," he said. "Has it ever occurred to you that one day wars will be fought with brains?"

Leonard picked up his coffee cup. "Oh dear. Won"t that be rather messy?" he said.

Vetinari sighed again. "Not perhaps as messy as the other sort," he said, trying the coffee. It really was rather good.

The ducal coach rolled past the last of the outlying buildings and on to the vast, flat Sto Plains. Cheery and Detritus had tactfully decided to ride on the top for the morning, leaving the Duke and Duchess alone inside. Skimmer was indulging in some uneasy class solidarity and riding with the servants for a while.

"Angua seems to have gone into hiding," said Vimes, watching the cabbage fields pass by.

"Poor girl," said Sybil. "The city"s not really the place for her."

"Well, you couldn"t winkle Carrot out of it with a big pin," said Vimes. "And that"s the problem, I suppose."

"Part of the problem," said Sybil.

Vimes nodded. The other part, which no one talked about, was children.

Sometimes it seemed to Vimes that everyone knew that Carrot was the true heir to the redundant throne of the city. It just so happened that he didn"t want to be. He wanted to be a copper, and everyone went along with the idea. But kingship was a bit like a grand piano - you could put a cover over it, but you could still see what shape it was underneath.

Vimes wasn"t sure what you got if a human and a werewolf had kids. Possibly you just got someone who had to shave twice a day around full moon and occasionally felt like chasing carts. And when you remembered what some of the city"s rulers had been like, a known werewolf as ruler ought to hold no terrors. It was the buggers who looked human all the time that were the problem. That was just his view, though. Other people might see things differently. No wonder she"d gone off to think about things.

He realized he was looking, unseeing, out of the window.

To take his mind off this he opened the package of papers that Skimmer had handed him just as he got on the coach. It was called "briefing material". The man seemed to be an expert on Uberwald, and Vimes wondered how many other clerks there were in the Patrician"s palace, beavering away, becoming experts. He settled down glumly and began to read.

The first page showed the crest of the Unholy Empire that had once ruled most of the huge country. Vimes couldn"t recall much about it, except that one of the emperors once had a man"s hat nailed to his head for a joke. Uberwald seemed to be a big, cold, depressing place, so perhaps people would do anything for a laugh.

The crest was altogether too florid for Vimes"s taste, and was dominated by a double-headed bat.

The first document was entitled: THE FATBEARING STRATA OF THE SCHMALTZBERG REGION ("THE LAND OF THE FIFTH ELEPHANT").

He knew the legend, of course. There had once been five elephants, not four, standing on the back of Great A"Tuin, but one had lost its footing or had been shaken loose and had drifted off into a curved orbit before eventually crashing down, a billion tons of enraged pachyderm, with a force that had rocked the entire world and split it up

into the continents people know today. The rocks that fell back had , covered and compressed the corpse and the rest, after millennia of under ground cooking and rendering, was fat history. According to legend, gold and iron and all the other metals were also part of the carcase. After all, an elephant big enough to support the world on its back wasn"t going to have ordinary bones, was it?

The notes in front of him were a little more believable, talking about some unknown catastrophe that had killed millions of the mammoths, bison, and giant shrews and then covered them over, pretty much like the Fifth Elephant in the story. There were notes about old troll sagas and legends of the dwarfs. Possibly ice had been involved. Or a flood. In the case of the trolls, who were believed to be the first species in the world, maybe they"d been there and seen the elephant trumpeting across the sky.

The result, anyway, was the same. Everyone well, everyone except Vimes - knew the best fat came from the Schmaltzberg wells and mines. It made the whitest, brightest candles, the creamiest soap, the hottest, cleanest lamp oil. The yellow tallow from Ankh-Morpork"s boilers didn"t come close.

Vimes didn"t see the point. Gold... now that was important. People died for it. And iron Ankh-Morpork needed iron. Timber, too. Stone, even. Silver, now, was very...

He flicked back to a page headed "Natural Resources", and under "Silver" read: "Silver has not been mined in Uberwald since the Diet of Bugs in Am 1880, and the possession of the metal is technically illegal."

There was no explanation. He made a note to ask Inigo. After all, where you got werewolves, didn"t you need silver? And things must have been pretty bad if everyone had to eat insects.

Anyway, silver was useful, too, but fat was just... fat. It was like biscuits, or tea, or sugar. It was just something that turned up in the cupboard. There was no style to it, no romance. It was stuff in tubs.

A note was clipped to the next page. He read:

"The Fifth Elephant as a metaphor also appears in the Uberwald languages. Depending on context it can mean "a thing that does not exist" (as we would say, "Klatchian mist"), "a thing that is other than it seems" and "a thing that, while unseen, controls events" (in the same way that we would use the term eminence grise)."