Guards! Guards! (Discworld 8)

It wasn't only the fresh mountain air that had given Carrot his huge physique. Being brought up in a gold mine run by dwarfs and working a twelve-hour day hauling wagons to the surface must have helped.

He walked with a stoop. What will do that is being brought up in a gold mine run by dwarfs who thought that five feet was a good height for a ceiling.

He'd always known he was different. More bruised for one thing. And then one day his father had come up to him or, rather, come up to his waist, and told him that he was not, in fact, as he had always believed, a dwarf.

It's a terrible thing to be nearly sixteen and the wrong species.

“We didn't like to say so before, son,” said his father. “We thought you'd grow out of it, see.”

“Grow out of what?” said Carrot.

“Growing. But now your mother thinks, that is, we both think, it's time you went out among your own kind. I mean, it's not fair, keeping you cooped up here without company of your own height.” His father twiddled a loose rivet on his helmet, a sure sign that he was worried. “Er,” he added.

“But you're my kind!” said Carrot desperately.

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” said his father.

"In another manner of speaking, which is a rather more precise and accurate manner of speaking, no. It's all this genetics business, you see. So it might be a very good idea if you were to go out and see something of the world.''

“What, for good?”

“Oh, no! No. Of course not. Come back and visit whenever you like. But, well, a lad your age, stuck down here . . . It's not right. You know. I mean. Not a child any more. Having to shuffle around on your knees most of the time, and everything. It's not right.”

' 'What is my own kind, then?'' said Carrot, bewildered.

The old dwarf took a deep breath. “You're human,” he said.

' 'What, like Mr Varneshi?'' Mr Varneshi drove an ox-cart up the mountain trails once a week, to trade things for gold. “One of the Big People?”

“You're six foot six, lad. He's only five foot.” The dwarf twiddled the loose rivet again. “You see how it is.”

“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 . . .