The Fifth Elephant

perhaps as messy as the other sort,” he said, trying the coffee. It really was rather good.

    The ducal coach rolled past the last of the outlying buildings and onto the vast, flat Sto Plains. Cheery and Detritus had tactfully decided to ride on the top for the morning, and leave the duke and duchess alone inside. Skimmer was indulging in some uneasy class solidarity and riding with the servants for a while.
    “Angua seems to have gone into hiding,” said Vimes, watching the cabbage fields pass by.
    “Poor girl,” said Sybil. “The city’s not really the place for her.”
    “Well, you couldn’t winkle Carrot out of it with a big pin,” said Vimes. “And that’s the problem, I suppose.”
    “Part of the problem,” said Sybil.
    Vimes nodded. The other part, which no one talked about, was children.
    Sometimes it seemed to Vimes that everyone knew that Carrot was the true heir to the redundant throne of the city. It just so happened that he didn’t want to be. He wanted to be a copper, and everyone went along with the idea. But kingship was a bit like a grand piano—you could put a cover over it, but you could still see what shape it was underneath.
    Vimes wasn’t sure what the result was if a human and a werewolf had kids. Maybe you just got someone who had to shave twice a day around full moon and occasionally felt like chasing carts. And when you remembered what some of the city’s rulers had been like, a known werewolf as ruler ought to hold no terrors. It was the buggers who looked human all the time that were the problem. That was just his view, though. Other people might see things differently. No wonder she’d gone off to think about things.
    He realized he was looking, unseeing, out of the window.
    To take his mind off this he opened the package of papers that Skimmer had handed him just as he got on the coach. It was called “briefing material.” The man seemed to be an expert on Uberwald, and Vimes wondered how many other clerks there were in the Patrician’s palace, beavering away, becoming experts . He settled down glumly and began to read.
    The first page showed the crest of the Unholy Empire that had once ruled most of the huge country. Vimes couldn’t recall much about it, except that one of the emperors once had a man’s hat nailed to his head for a joke. Uberwald seemed to be a big, cold, depressing place, so perhaps people would do anything for a laugh.
    The crest was altogether too florid for Vimes’s taste and was dominated by a double-headed bat.
    The first document was entitled: THE FAT-BEARING STRATA OF THE SHMALTZBERG REGION (“ THE LAND OF THE FIFTH ELEPHANT ”).
    He knew the legend, of course. There had once been five elephants, not four, standing on the back of Great A’Tuin, but one had lost its footing or had been shaken loose and had drifted off into a curved orbit before eventually crashing down, a billion tons of enraged pachyderm, with a force that had rocked the entire world and split it up into the continents people knew today. The rocks that fell back had covered and compressed the corpse and the rest, after millennia of underground cooking and rendering, was fat history. According to legend, gold and iron and all the other metals were also part of the carcass. After all, an elephant big enough to support the world on its back wasn’t going to have ordinary bones, was it?
    The notes in front of him were a little more believable, talking about some unknown catastrophe that had killed millions of the mammoths, bison and giant shrews and then covered them over, pretty much like the fifth elephant in the story. There were notes about old troll sagas and legends of the dwarfs. Possibly ice had been involved. Or a flood. In the case of the trolls, who were believed to be the first species in the world, maybe they’d been there and seen the elephant trumpeting across the sky.
    The result, anyway, was the same. Everyone—well, everyone except Vimes—knew the best fat came from the Shmaltzberg wells and mines. It made the whitest, brightest candles, the creamiest soap, the hottest, cleanest lamp oil. The yellow tallow from Ankh-Morpork’s boilers didn’t come close.
    Vimes didn’t see the point. Gold…now that was important. People died for it. And iron—Ankh-Morpork needed iron. Timber, too. Stone, even. Silver, now, was very…
    He flocked back to a page headed NATURAL RESOURCES , and under SILVER read: “No silver has been mined in Uberwald since the