Terry Pratchett - Feet of Clay

It was a warm spring night when a fist knocked at the door so hard that the hinges bent.

A man opened it and peered out into the street. There was mist coming off the river and it was a cloudy night. He might as well have tried to see through white velvet.

But he thought afterwards that there had been shapes out there, just beyond the light spilling out into the road. A lot of shapes, watching him carefully. He thought maybe there'd been very faint points of light...

There was no mistaking the shape right in front of him, though. It was big and dark red and looked like a child's clay model of a man. Its eyes were two embers.

'Well? What do you want at this time of night?'

The golem handed him a slate, on which was written:

WE HEAR YOU WANT A GOLEM.

Of course, golems couldn't speak, could they?

'Hah. Want, yes. Afford, no. I've been asking around but it's wicked the prices you're going for these days...'

The golem rubbed the words off the slate and wrote:

TO YOU, ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS.

'You're for sale?'

NO.

The golem lurched aside. Another one stepped into the light.

It was also a golem, the man could see that. But it wasn't like the usual lumpen clay things that you occasionally saw. This one gleamed like a newly polished statue, perfect down to the detailing of the clothes. It reminded him of one of the old pictures of the city's kings, all haughty stance and imperious haircut. In fact, it even had a small coronet moulded on to its head.

'A hundred dollars?' the man said suspiciously. 'What's wrong with it? Who's selling it?'

NOTHING IS WRONG. PERFECT IN ALL DETAIL. NINETY DOLLARS.

'Sounds like someone wants to get rid of it in a hurry...'

GOLEM MUST WORK. GOLEM MUST HAVE A MASTER.

'Yeah, right, but you hear stories... Going mad and making too many things, and that.'

NOT MAD. EIGHTY DOLLARS.

'It looks... new,' said the man, tapping the gleaming chest. 'But no one's making golems any more, that's what's keeping the price up beyond the purse of the small business—' He stopped. 'Is someone making them again?'

EIGHTY DOLLARS.

‘I heard the priests banned making 'em years ago. A man could get in a lot of trouble.'

SEVENTY DOLLARS.

'Who's doing it?'

SIXTY DOLLARS.

'Is he selling them to Albertson? Or Spadger and Williams? It's hard enough competing as it is, and they've got the money to invest in new plant—'

FIFTY DOLLARS.

The man walked around the golem. 'A man can't sit by and watch his company collapse under him because of unfair price cutting, I mean to say...'

FORTY DOLLARS.

'Religion is all very well, but what do prophets know about profits, eh? Hmm...' He looked up at the shapeless golem in the shadows. 'Was that thirty dollars I just saw you write?'

YES.

'I've always liked dealing wholesale. Wait one moment.' He went back inside and returned with a handful of coins. 'Will you be selling any to them other bastards?'

NO.

'Good. Tell your boss it's a pleasure to do business with him. Get along inside, Sunny Jim.'

The white golem walked into the factory. The man, glancing from side to side, trotted in after it and shut the door.

Deeper shadows moved in the dark. There was a faint hissing. Then, rocking slightly, the big heavy shapes moved away.

Shortly afterwards, and around the corner, a beggar holding out a hopeful hand for alms was amazed to find himself suddenly richer by a whole thirty dollars.[1]

The Discworld turned against the glittering backdrop of space, spinning very gently on the backs of the four giant elephants that perched on the shell of Great A'Tuin the star turtle. Continents drifted slowly past, topped by weather systems that themselves turned gently against the flow, like waltzers spinning counter to the whirl of the dance. A billion tons of geography rolled slowly through the sky.

People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science,[2] But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.

Even on the Discworld, with its tiny orbiting sun tilting over the turning world, the seasons moved. In Ankh-Morpork, greatest of its cities, spring was nudged aside by summer, and summer was prodded in the back by autumn.

Geographically speaking, there was not a lot of difference within the city itself, although in late spring the scum on the river was often a nice emerald green. The mist of spring became the fog of autumn, which mixed with fumes and smoke from the magical quarter and the workshops of the alchemists until it seemed to have a thick, choking life of its own.

And time moved on.

Autumn fog pressed itself against the midnight window-panes.

Blood ran in a trickle across the pages of a rare volume of religious essays, which had been torn in half.

There had been no need for that, thought Father Tubelcek.

A further thought suggested that there had been no need to hit him either. But Father Tubelcek had never been very concerned about that sort of thing. People healed, books didn't. He reached out shakily and tried to gather up the pages, but slumped back again.

The room was spinning.

The door swung open. Heavy footsteps creaked across the floor - one footstep at least, and one dragging noise.

Step. Drag. Step. Drag.

Father Tubelcek tried to focus.' You?' he croaked.

Nod.

'Pick ... up the ... books.'

The old priest watched as the books were retrieved and piled carefully with fingers not well suited to the task.

The newcomer took a quill pen from the debris, carefully wrote something on a scrap of paper, then rolled it up and placed it delicately between Father Tubelcek's lips.

The dying priest tried to smile.

'We don't work like that,' he mumbled, the little cylinder wobbling like a last cigarette. 'We... make... our... own... w...'

The kneeling figure watched him for a while and then, taking great care, leaned forward slowly and closed his eyes.

Commander Sir Samuel Vimes, Ankh-Morpork City Guard, frowned at himself in the mirror and began to shave.

The razor was a sword of freedom. Shaving was an act of rebellion.

These days, someone ran his bath (every day! -you wouldn't think the human skin could stand it). And someone laid out his clothes (such clothes!). And someone cooked his meals (what meals! — he was putting on weight, he knew). And someone even polislied his boots (and such boots! - no cardboard-soled wrecks but big, well-fitting boots of genuine shiny leather). There was someone to do nearly everything for him, but there were some things a man ought to do for himself, and one of them was shaving.

He knew that Lady Sybil mildly disapproved. Her father had never shaved himself in his life. He had a man for it. Vimes had protested that he'd spent too many years trudging the night-time streets to be happy about anyone else wielding a blade anywhere near his neck, but the real reason, the unspoken reason, was that he hated the very idea of the world being divided into the shaved and the shavers. Or those who wore the shiny boots and those who cleaned the mud off them. Every time he saw Willikins the butler fold his, Vimes's, clothes, he suppressed a terrible urge to kick the butler's shiny backside as an affront to the dignity of man. The razor moved calmly over the stubble of the night.

Yesterday there had been some official dinner. He couldn't recall now what it had been for. He seemed to spend his whole life at the things. Arch, giggling women and braying young men who'd been at the back of the line when the chins were handed out. And, as usual, he'd come back through the fog-bound city in a filthy temper with himself. He'd noticed a light under the kitchen door and heard conversation and laughter, and had gone in. Willikins was there, with the old man who stoked the boiler, and the head gardener, and the boy who cleaned the spoons and lit the fires. They were playing cards. There were bottles of beer on the table.