‘And what good would that do, my boy?’ said his mother sternly. And she watched the glow in her son’s eyes as he said, ‘Everything, Mother. Everything.’
Still in a haze of slight misunderstanding, Mrs Simnel watched him unroll a large and rather grubby piece of paper.
‘It’s called a blueprint, Mother. You’ve got to have a blueprint. It shows you how everything fits together.’
‘Is this part of the pro-to-type?’
The boy looked at his doting mother’s face and realized that a little more exposition should be forthcoming. He took her by the hand and said, ‘Mother, I know they’re all lines and circles to you, but once you have the knowing of the circles and the lines and all, you know that this is a picture of an engine.’
Mrs Simnel gripped his hand and said, ‘What do you think you’re going to do with it, our Dick?’
And young Simnel grinned and said happily, ‘Change things as needs changing, Mother.’
Mrs Simnel gave her son a curious look for a moment or two, then appeared to reach a grudging conclusion and said, ‘Just you come with me, my lad.’
She led him back into the house, where they climbed up the ladder into the attic. She pointed out to her son a sturdy seaman’s chest covered in dust.
‘Your granddad gave me this to give to you, when I thought you needed it. Here’s the key.’
She was gratified that he didn’t grab it and indeed looked carefully at the trunk before opening it. As he pushed up the lid, suddenly the air was filled with the glimmer of gold.
‘Your granddad were slightly a bit of a pirate and then he got religion and were a bit afeared, and the last words he said to me on his deathbed were, “That young lad’ll do something one day, you mark my words, our Elsie, but I’m damned if I know what it’s going to be.”’
The people of the town were quite accustomed to the clangings and bangings emanating every day from the various blacksmith forges for which the area was famous. It seemed that, even though he had set up a forge of his own, young Simnel had decided not to enter the blacksmithing trade, possibly due to the dreadful business of Mr Simnel Senior’s leaving the world so abruptly. The local blacksmiths soon got used to making mysterious items that young Mr Simnel had sketched out meticulously. He never told them what he was constructing, but since they were earning a lot of money they didn’t mind.
The news of his legacy got around, of course — gold always finds its way out somehow — and there was a scratching of heads among the population exemplified by the oldest inhabitant, who, sitting on the bench outside the tavern, said, ‘Well, bugger me! Lad were blessed wi’ an inherited fortune in gold and turned it into a load of old iron!’
He laughed, and so did everybody else, but nevertheless they continued to watch young Dick Simnel slip in and out of the wicket gate of his old and almost derelict barn, double-padlocked at all times.
Simnel had found a couple of local likely lads who helped him make things and move things around. Over time, the barn was augmented by a host of other sheds. More lads were taken on and the hammers were heard all day every day and, a bit at a time, information trickled into what might be called the local consciousness.
Apparently the lad had made a pump, an interesting pump that pumped water very high. And then he’d thrown everything away and said things like, ‘We need more steel than iron.’
There were tales of great reams of paper laid out on desks as young Simnel worked out a wonderful ‘undertaking’, as he called it. Admittedly there had been the occasional explosion, and then people heard about what the lads called ‘The Bunker’, which had been useful to jump into on several occasions when there had been a little … incident. And then there was the unfamiliar but somehow homely and rhythmic ‘chuffing’ noise. Really quite a pleasant noise, almost hypnotic, which was strange because the mechanical creature that was making the noise sounded more alive than you would have expected.
It was noticed in the locality that the two main co-workers of Mr Simnel, or ‘Mad Iron’ Simnel as some were now calling him, seemed somewhat changed, more grown-up and aware of themselves; young men, acolytes of the mysterious thing behind the doors. And no amount of bribery by beer or by women in the pub would make them give up the precious secrets of the barn.[1] They conducted themselves now as befitted the masters of the fiery furnace.
And then, of course, there were the sunny days when young Simnel and his cohorts dug long lines in the field next to the barn and filled them with metal while the furnace glowed day and night and everyone shook their heads and said, ‘Madness.’ And this went on, it seemed for ever, until ever was finished and the banging and clanging and smelting had stopped. Then Mr Simnel’s lieutenants pulled aside the double doors of the big barn and filled the world with smoke.
Very little happened in this part of Sto Lat and this was enough to bring people running. Most of them arrived in time to see something heading out towards them, panting and steaming, with fast-spinning wheels and oscillating rods eerily appearing and disappearing in the smoke and the haze, and on top of it all, like a sort of king of smoke and fire, Dick Simnel, his face contorted with the effort of concentration. It was faintly reassuring that this something was apparently under the control of somebody human — although the more thoughtful of the onlookers might have added ‘So what? So’s a spoon,’ and got ready to run away as the steaming, dancing, spinning, reciprocating engine cleared the barn and plunged on down the tracks laid in the field. And the bystanders, most of whom were now byrunners, and in certain instances bystampeders, fled and complained, except, of course, for every little boy of any age who followed it with eyes open wide, vowing there and then that one day he would be the captain of the terrible noxious engine, oh yes indeed. A prince of the steam! A master of the sparks! A coachman of the Thunderbolts!
And outside, freed at last, the smoke drifted purposefully away from the shed in the direction of the largest city in the world. It drifted slowly at first, but gathered speed.
Later that day, and after several triumphant turns around the short track in the field, Simnel sat down with his helpers.
‘Wally, Dave, I’m running out of brass, lads,’ he said. ‘Get your mothers to get your stuff together, make us some butties, bring out the ’orses. We’re taking Iron Girder to Ankh-Morpork. I ’ear it’s the place where things ’appen.’
Of course Lord Vetinari, Tyrant of Ankh-Morpork, would occasionally meet Lady Margolotta, Governess of Uberwald. Why shouldn’t he? After all, he also occasionally had meetings with Diamond King of Trolls up near Koom Valley, and indeed with the Low King of the Dwarfs, Rhys Rhysson, in his caverns under Uberwald. This, as everybody knew, was politics.
Yes, politics. The secret glue that stopped the world falling into warfare. In the past there had been so much war, far too much, but as every schoolboy knew, or at least knew in those days when schoolboys actually read anything more demanding than a crisp packet, not so long ago a truly terrible war, the last war of Koom Valley, had almost happened, out of which the dwarfs and trolls had managed to achieve not exactly peace, but an understanding from which, hopefully, peace might evolve. There had been the shaking of hands, important hands, shaken fervently, and so there was hope, hope as fragile as a thought.
1
There were some salacious comments about this, but it appeared, alas, to the local and as yet unmarried girls that Mad Iron Simnel and his men had found something more interesting than women and apparently it was made of steel.