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Young Sam frowned at this as if somebody was questioning his life’s work. Then he looked up brightly and said, “Without poo, you would go off bang!” And he stood there beaming, the meaning of life completely solved.
And Tears of the Mushroom laughed. It was a rather staccato laugh, reminding Vimes of the laughter of certain kinds of women, after certain kinds of too much gin. But it was laughter—straight, genuine and unaffected—and Young Sam bathed in it, giggling, and so did Sam Vimes, with sweat beginning to cool on his neck.
Then Young Sam said, “I wish I had big hands like you. What’s your name?”
In that clipped way Vimes was learning to recognize, the goblin girl said, “I am the Tears of the Mushroom.”
Instantly Young Sam threw his arms around as much of her as he could encompass and shouted, “Mushrooms shouldn’t cry!”
The look that the goblin girl gave Vimes was one that he had seen many times before on the face of someone in receipt of Young Sam’s hugs: a mixture of surprise and what Vimes had to call non-plussedness.
At this point Miss Beedle came back into the room holding a plate which she passed to Tears of the Mushroom. “Please be so good as to serve our guests, my dear.”
Tears of the Mushroom picked up the plate and tentatively pushed it toward Vimes, and said something that sounded like half a dozen coconuts rolling downstairs, but somehow managed to include the syllables you and eat and I make. There seemed to be a pleading in her expression, as if trying to make him understand.
Vimes stared at her face a while and then thought, Well, I could understand, couldn’t I? It has to be worth a try, and closed his eyes, an errand of some dubiousness when you were face-to-longer-face with a jaw like that. With eyes firmly shut, and one hand over them to cut out the last vestige of light, he said, “Will you say that again, young…lady?” And in the darkness of his skull he heard, quite clearly, “I have baked biscuits today Mr. Po-leees-man. I washed my hands,” she added nervously. “They are clean and tasty. This I have said and it is a thing exact.”
Baked by a goblin, thought Vimes as he opened his eyes and took a knobbly but appetizing-looking biscuit from the plate in front of him, then shut his eyes again and asked, “Why does the mushroom cry?”
In the dark he heard the goblin girl gasp, and then say, “It cries so that there are many more mushrooms. This is a certain thing.”
Vimes heard the faint chink of crockery behind him, but as he took his hands away from his eyes Miss Beedle said, “No, stay in darkness, commander. So it’s true what the dwarfs say about you.”
“I wouldn’t know. What do the dwarfs say about me, Miss Beedle?”
Vimes opened his eyes. Miss Beedle sat down on a chair almost opposite, while Tears of the Mushroom waited for more biscuit activity with the air of someone who would probably wait forever or until told not to. She looked imploringly at Vimes and then at Young Sam, who was studying Tears of the Mushroom with interest, although, knowing Young Sam, most of the interest had to do with the plate of biscuits. So he said, “Okay, lad, you may ask the lady for a biscuit, but mind your manners.”
“They say that the dark is in you, commander, but you keep it in a cage. A present from Koom Valley, they say.”
Vimes blinked in the light. “A dwarf superstition in a goblin cave? You know a lot about dwarfs?”
“Quite a lot,” said Miss Beedle, “but far more about goblins, and they believe in the Summoning Dark, just like the dwarfs, after all, they are both creatures of the caves and the Summoning Dark is real. It’s not all in your head, commander: no matter what you hear, I sometimes hear it too. Oh dear, you of all people must recognize a substition when you’re possessed by it? It’s the opposite of a superstition: it’s real even if you don’t believe in it. My mother taught me that; she was a goblin.”
Vimes looked at the pleasant brown-haired woman in front of him and said, politely, “No.”
“All right, perhaps you’ll allow me a little theatricality and misdirection for effect? Truthfully, my mother was found as a child when she was three and raised by goblins in Uberwald. Until she was about eleven—and I say about because she was never quite certain about the passage of time—she pretty much thought and acted like a goblin and picked up their language, which is insanely difficult to learn if you’re not brought up to it. She ate with them, had her own plot in the mushroom farm and was very highly thought of among them for the way she looked after the rat farm. She once told me that until she met my father, all her best recollections were of those years in the goblin cave.”
Miss Beedle stirred her coffee and continued. “And she also told me her worst recollections, the ones that haunted her nightmares and, I might say, haunt mine now: of one day after some nearby humans had found out that there was a golden-haired, pink-cheeked human girl running around underground with evil, treacherous brutes who, as everybody knows, eat babies. Well, she screamed and fought as they tried to take her away, especially since people who she had thought of as family were being slaughtered around her.”
There was a pause. And Vimes glanced somewhat fearfully at Young Sam, who, thankfully, had returned to The Joy of Earwax and was therefore oblivious of all else.
“You haven’t touched your coffee, commander. You’re just holding it in your hand and looking at me.”
Vimes took a deep draft of very hot coffee, which at the moment suited him just fine. He said, “This is true? I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say.”
Tears of the Mushroom was watching him carefully, ready should he feel a biscuit attack coming on. They were in fact pretty good, and to hide his confusion he thanked her and took another one.
“Best not to say anything, then,” said Miss Beedle. “All slaughtered, for no reason. It happens. Everybody knows they’re a worthless people, don’t they? I tell you, commander, it’s true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they’re doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved. Well, it took a lot of those things, and quite a lot of time, to convince a little girl that she wasn’t one of the nasty goblins anymore and was really one of the human beings who were not nasty at all, because one day they were certain she would understand that all this terrible business with the bucket of cold water and the beatings every time she spoke in the goblin tongue, or started absentmindedly to sing a goblin song, was in her best interest. Fortunately, although she probably didn’t think so at the time, she was strong and clever and she learned: learned to be a good girl, learned to wear proper dresses and eat with a knife and fork and kneel down to pray her thanks for all that she was receiving, including the beatings. And she learned not to be a goblin so successfully that they allowed her to work in the gar
den, where she vaulted over the wall. They never broke her, and she said to me that there would always be some goblin in her. I never met my father. According to my mother he was a decent and hardworking man, and a considerate and understanding one too, I suspect.”
Miss Beedle stood up and brushed at her dress, as if trying to remove the crumbs of history. Standing there, in the chintzy room with the harp in it, she said, “I don’t know who those people were who killed the goblins and beat my mother, but if I ever found out I would slaughter them without a thought, because good people have no business being so bad. Goodness is about what you do. Not what you pray to. And that’s how it went,” she said. “My father was a jeweler, and he soon found out that my mother was absolutely gifted in that respect, probably because of her goblin background that led her to have a feel for stones. I’m sure that made up for having a wife who would swear in goblin when she was annoyed—and let me tell you a good goblin swear can go on for at least a quarter of an hour. She wasn’t one for the books, as you might expect, but my dad had been, and one day I thought, “How hard can writing be? After all, most of the words are going to be and, the and I and it, and so on, and there’s a huge number to choose from, so a lot of the work has already been done for you. That was fifty-seven books ago. It seems to have worked.”
Miss Beedle sat back down in her chair and leaned forward. “They have the most complex language you could possibly imagine, commander. The meaning of every word is contingent on the words around it, the speaker, the listener, the time of year, the weather, oh, and so many other things. They have something equivalent to what we think of as poetry; they use and control fire…And about three years ago nearly all of them in this countryside were rounded up and carted away, because they were a nuisance. Isn’t that why you’re here?”
Vimes took a deep breath. “Actually, Miss Beedle, I came here to see my wife’s family estate and let my lad learn about the countryside. In the process of which I’ve already been arrested on suspicion of killing a blacksmith and have seen the brutally slaughtered body of a goblin woman. On top of this I have no knowledge of the whereabouts of said blacksmith and, Miss Beedle, would like somebody to enlighten me, preferably yourself.”
“Yes, I saw the poor thing, and I’m sorry that I can’t tell you where Jethro is.”
