The Fifth Elephant

“they were hiding while we were there.”
    “Not rats, then.”
    “No, sir. Sorry, sir.”
    Vimes fastened his cloak and took his helmet off its peg.
    “So someone has stolen a replica of the Scone of Stone a few weeks before the real one is due to be used in a very important ceremony,” he said. “I find this intriguing.”
    “That’s what I thought too, sir.”
    Vimes sighed. “I hate the political ones.”
    When they’d gone, Lady Sybil sat for a while staring at her hands. Then she took a lamp into the library and pulled down a slim volume, bound in white leather on which had been embossed in gold the words OUR WEDDING .
    It had been a strange event. Ankh-Morpork’s high society—so high that it’s stinking, Sam always said—had turned up mostly out of curiosity. She was Ankh-Morpork’s most eligible spinster who’d never thought she’d be married, and he was a mere captain of the guard who tended to annoy a lot of people.
    And here were the iconographs of the event. There she was, looking rather more expansive than radiant, and there Sam was, scowling at the camera with his hair hastily smoothed down. There was Sergeant Colon with his chest inflated so much his feet had almost left the ground, and Nobby grinning widely or perhaps just making a face, it was so hard to tell with Nobby.
    Sybil turned over the pages with care. She had put a sheet of tissue between each one, to protect them.
    In many ways, she told herself, she was very lucky. She was very proud of Sam. He worked hard for a lot of people. He cared about people who weren’t important. He always had far more to cope with than was good for him. He was the most civilized man she’d ever met. Not a gentleman, thank goodness, but a gentle man.
    She never really knew what it was he did . Oh, she knew what the job was, but by all accounts he didn’t spend much time behind his desk. He tended to drop his clothes into the laundry basket before he eventually came to bed, so she’d only hear later from the laundry girl about the bloodstains and the mud. There were rumors of chases over rooftops, hand-to-hand and knee-to-groin fights with men who had names like Harry “The Boltcutter” Weems…
    There was a Sam Vimes she knew, who went out and came home again, and out there was another Sam Vimes who hardly belonged to her and lived in the same world as all those men with the dreadful names…
    Sybil Ramkin had been brought up to be thrifty, thoughtful, genteel in an outdoor sort of way, and to think kindly of people.
    She looked at the pictures again, in the silence of the house.
    Then she blew her nose loudly and went off to do the packing and other sensible things.

    Corporal Cheery Littlebottom pronounced her name “Cheri.” She was a she, and therefore a rare bloom in Ankh-Morpork.
    It wasn’t that dwarfs weren’t interested in sex. They saw the vital need for fresh dwarfs to leave their goods to and continue the mining work after they had gone. It was simply that they also saw no point in distinguishing between the sexes anywhere but in private. There was no such thing as a Dwarfish female pronoun or, once the children were on solids, any such thing as women’s work.
    Then Cheery Littlebottom had arrived in Ankh-Morpork, and had seen that there were men out there who did not wear chain mail or leather underwear * , but did wear interesting colors and exciting makeup, and these men were called “women.” †
    And in the little bullet head the thought had arisen: “Why not me?”
    Now she was being denounced in cellars and dwarf bars across the city as the first dwarf in Ankh-Morpork to wear a skirt. It was hard-wearing brown leather and as objectively erotic as a piece of wood but, as some older dwarfs would point out, somewhere under there were his knees . *
    Worse, they were now finding that among their sons were some—they choked on the word—“daughters.” Cheery was only the frothy bit on the tip of the wave. Some younger dwarfs were shyly wearing eye shadow and declaring that, as a matter of fact, they didn’t like beer. A current was running through dwarf society.
    Dwarf society was not against a few well-thrown rocks in the direction of those bobbing on the current, but Captain Carrot had put the word on the street that this would be assault on an officer, a subject on which the Watch held views , and however short the miscreants, their feet really would not touch the ground.
    Cheery had retained her beard and