AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Aeron’s eyes narrowed and his hand went to the hilt of his sword. ‘Of course it is. What a ridiculous question. Treacherous, too!’
Moist put his hand out placatingly. ‘Look, you know I’m on your side! I have to ask because of something I saw at Mrs Simnel’s house.’
Aeron looked startled and said, ‘I believe the side you’re on is your own, sir, and whatever you think you saw it’s certainly no business of yours.’
‘Indeed it is, my friend,’ Moist replied. ‘The gods, for my sins, gave me a nose for scenting when the metaphorical shit is about to hit the windmill, and I want to be prepared.’
Aeron stood frozen, and without looking directly at Moist he said, ‘Your perspicacity does you credit, Mister Lipwig. Your silence even more!’
‘Oh, come on. There’s something going on here and I’m not in on it. Don’t force me to draw my own conclusions. I do have a very big pencil.’
But Aeron clearly had nothing further to say. The appearance of a couple of engineers at the end of the carriage provided the excuse he needed for bringing the conversation to an abrupt close. He turned on his heel and marched smartly off down the corridor, leaving Moist with every suspicious nerve in his body jangling.
An hour or so later, a knock at the entrance to the guard’s van heralded the King’s secretary, who this time smiled strangely and said, ‘The King would like to grant you an audience, Mister Lipwig.’ And he smiled again and said, ‘And that, I’m sure you’re aware, means at once.’
The King was sitting at a little table doing paperwork when Moist arrived, and beckoned him towards another chair in the carriage, saying, ‘Mister Lipwig, I understand that following our visit to Mister Simnel’s mother, you appear to be under the impression that I may be … hiding something. Is that the case, boyo?’
The King looked at Moist with a stern glare, almost as if daring him to utter what he was thinking.
‘Well, she does have a lot of … feminine insight …’ Moist let the rest of the sentence tail away and watched carefully.
The King sighed and looked at Aeron, who was standing on guard by the door. Rhys nodded and then turned back to Moist.
‘Mister Lipwig, I’m sure you are aware that the sex of dwarfs is often a well-kept secret and there have been times when even to enquire about the sex of another dwarf was considered a terrible thing. I am the Low King of the Dwarfs, but if I can get to what I might call the bottom line, I am also female.’
And there it was. This was the thing that had been niggling at the back of his mind ever since Mrs Simnel had started making the sleeping King – Queen now, he reminded himself – comfortable back in Sto Lat. He coughed and said, ‘Well, nobody’s perfect, your majesty. And to tell you the truth, I think I’ve known for some time. I’m good at putting rumours, suspicions and instinct together and getting the right result, because I’m a scoundrel. I expect Lord Vetinari has warned you about me. You could say that I’m Lord Vetinari’s scoundrel.’
‘As if he needs one!’
‘Scoundrels take a different look at people, just to get the measure of them: the way they walk, the way they talk, the way they sit. All the little details left unsaid in the wrong place.’
The Queen was silent for a moment and said, ‘A real scoundrel?’
‘Yes, m’lady, I would say one of the best, possibly the best,’ said Moist. ‘But these days you might say that I’m tamed and at heel, which means I’m a very trustworthy scoundrel.’
‘At Vetinari’s heel? You poor boy.’
And now the Queen looked as if something worrying had been chased away and she said, ‘You must know, Mister Lipwig, there are only very few people who are aware of my secret and they are trusted. One of them is Lady Margolotta and another, of course, is Lord Vetinari.
‘It has always seemed to me that the attitude of dwarfs when it comes to gender is curdling us. Dwarfs, we keep insisting, must be seen to be male – and what does it say about a species if they can’t look their own mothers in the face? We live a stupid lie and play a stupid game and I don’t want this state of affairs to continue. I am indeed the Low Queen, Mister Lipwig, and I thank you for your silence at this time.’
The Queen appeared as innocent as one of those mountains which year after year do nothing very much but smoke a little, and then one day end up causing a whole civilization to become an art installation.
‘Mrs Simnel is a nice lady,’ she continued, ‘although perhaps not as discreet as she thought … Of course, I know I can depend on you to treat my secret as if it were your own. I’m sure Lord Vetinari would be upset if you didn’t do so.’
Moist polished his best reassuring smile to sparkling. ‘As I told you, ma’am, I’m a born scoundrel, so I’ve learned to be very, very discreet for the sake of keeping my own neck safe from people who take a dim view of scoundrelhood. And as for Mrs
Simnel, she knew all about the secret of steam and never told anyone about it.’
The Queen stroked her beard and said, ‘For a proud mother that must have been testing indeed … Very well, Mister Scoundrel, I will have faith in you both. And now I can see that Aeron is becoming restive, so I’d better return to my paperwork.’ She sent what Moist would swear was a teasing glance in her secretary’s direction.
Moist, for whom it was second nature to watch and listen carefully – most particularly to what was not said – now felt he knew another secret, a secret as yet unacknowledged. The Queen and her secretary were, without doubt, lovers. Possibly you had to be married to notice this fact, but their body language shone through.
A meaning cough from Aeron recalled his attention. The secretary was holding the door open for him, in a clear signal that the audience was over. As Moist stepped out past him Aeron said, ‘Thank you, Mister Lipwig … From both of us.’
Before he set off back to the guard’s van, Moist stood for a while letting the revelations settle. The King being a Queen was looming in his mind. Oh yes, everybody knew that dwarf women looked very much like the dwarf men, beards and all, even Cheery Littlebottom – an Ankh-Morpork dwarf if ever there was one and a strict feminist; although she was adamant that beyond the beards dwarf females were not the same as dwarf men. And since she was now very big, as it were, in the Watch, her insistence on chainmail skirts and subtly altered breastplates didn’t matter too much, but the Queen—? What would happen if the Queen declared it! It would be iacta alea est in spades! And there would be no going back from that.
Aeron had now disappeared back into the Queen’s armoured coach, and Moist was left listening to the rattling of the train. The future, he thought, was going to be … incredibly interesting.
