Diggers

  TERRY

  PRATCHETT

  DIGGERS

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Excerpt from The Bromeliad Trilogy: Wings

  About the Author

  Other Works

  Credits

  Copyright

  Back Ad

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  IN THE BEGINNING . . .

  . . . Arnold Bros (est. 1905) created the Store.

  At least, that was the belief of thousands of nomes who for many generations* had lived under the floorboards of Arnold Bros (est. 1905), an old and respected department store.

  The Store had become their world. A world with a roof and walls.

  Wind and Rain were ancient legends. So were Day and Night. Now there were sprinkler systems and air conditioners, and their small crowded lives ticked to the clock of Opening Time and Closing Time. The seasons of their year were January Sales, Spring Into Spring Fashions, Summer Bargains, and Christmas Fayre. Led by the Abbot and priesthood of the Stationeri, they worshipped—in a polite, easy-going sort of way, so as not to upset him—Arnold Bros (est. 1905), who they believed had created everything, i.e. the Store and all the contents therein.

  Some families of nomes had grown rich and powerful and took the names—more or less—of the Store departments they lived under . . . the Del Icatessen, the Ironmongri, the Haberdasheri.

  And into the Store, on the back of a truck, came the last nomes to live Outside. They knew what wind and rain were, all right. That’s why they’d tried to leave them behind.

  Among them was Masklin, rat-hunter, and Granny Morkie and Grimma, although they were women and didn’t really count. And, of course, there was the Thing.

  No one quite understood the Thing. Masklin’s people had handed it down for centuries; it was very important, that was all they knew. When it came near the electricity in the Store it was able to talk. It said it was a thinking machine from a ship which, thousands of years before, had brought the nomes from a far Store, or possibly star. It also said it could hear electricity talk, and one of the things the electricity was saying was that the Store would be demolished in three weeks.

  It was Masklin who suggested that the nomes leave the Store on a truck. He found, oddly enough, that actually working out how you could drive a giant truck was the easiest part. The hardest part was getting people to believe that they could do it.

  He wasn’t the leader. He’d have liked to be a leader. A leader could stick his chin out and do brave things. What Masklin had to do was argue and persuade and, sometimes, lie very slightly. He found it was often easier to get people to do things if you let them think it was their idea.

  Ideas! That was the tricky bit, all right. And there were lots of ideas that they needed. They needed to learn to work together. They needed to learn to read. They needed to think that female nomes were, well, nearly as intelligent as males (although everyone knew that really this was ridiculous and that if females were encouraged to think too much their brains overheated).

  Anyway, it all worked. The truck did leave the Store just before it mysteriously burned down and, hardly damaging anything very much, was driven out into the country.

  The nomes found an abandoned quarry tucked into a hillside, and moved into the ruined buildings. And then, they knew, everything was going to be All Right. There was going to be, they’d heard, a Bright New Dawn.

  Of course, most nomes had never seen a dawn, bright or otherwise, and if they had they would have known that the trouble with bright new dawns is that they’re usually followed by cloudy days. With scattered showers.

  Six months passed. . . .

  This is the story of the Winter.

  This is the Great Battle.

  This is the story of the awakening of Big John, the Dragon in the Hill, with eyes like great eyes and a voice like a great voice and teeth like great teeth.

  But the story didn’t end there.

  It didn’t start there, either.

  The sky blew a gale. The sky blew a fury. The wind became a wall sweeping across the country, a giant stamping on the land. Small trees bent, big trees broke. The last leaves of autumn whirred through the air like lost bullets.

  The trash heap by the gravel pits was deserted. The seagulls that patrolled it had found shelter somewhere, but it was still full of movement.

  The wind tore into the heap as though it had something particular against old detergent boxes and leftover shoes. Cans rolled into the ruts and clanked miserably, while lighter bits of rubbish flew up and joined the riot in the sky.

  Still the wind burrowed. Papers rustled for a while, then got caught and blasted away.

  Finally, one piece that had been flapping for hours tore free and flew up into the booming air. It looked like a large white bird with oblong wings.

  Watch it tumble. . . .

  It gets caught on a fence, but very briefly. Half of it tears off and now, that much lighter, it pinwheels across the furrows of the field beyond. . . .

  It is just gathering speed when a hedge looms up and snaps it out of the air like a fly.

  1

  I. And in that time were Strange Happenings: the Air moved harshly, the Warmth of the Sky grew Less, on some mornings the tops of puddles grew Hard and Cold.

  II. And the nomes said unto one another, What is this Thing?

  From The Book of Nome,

  Quarries Chap. 1, v. I–II

  “WINTER,” SAID MASKLIN firmly. “It’s called winter.”

  Abbot Gurder frowned at him.

  “You never said it would be like this,” he said. “It’s so cold.”

  “Call this cold?” said Granny Morkie. “Cold? This ain’t cold. You think this is cold? You wait till it gets really cold!” She was enjoying this, Masklin noticed; Granny Morkie always enjoyed doom—it was what kept her going. “It’ll be really cold then, when it gets cold. You get real frosts and, and water comes down out of the sky in frozen bits!” She leaned back triumphantly. “What d’you think to that, then? Eh?”

  “You don’t have to use baby talk to us.” Gurder sighed. “We can read, you know. We know what snow is.”

  “Yes,” said Dorcas. “There used to be cards with pictures on, back in the Store. Every time Christmas Fayre came around. We know about snow. It’s glittery.”

  “You get robins,” agreed Gurder.

  “There’s, er, actually there’s a bit more to it than that,” Masklin began.

  Dorcas waved him into silence. “I don’t think we need to worry,” he said. “We’re well dug in, the food stores are looking satisfactory, and we know where to go to get more if we need it. Unless anyone’s got anything else to raise, why don’t we close the meeting?”

  Everything was going well. Or, at least, not very badly.

  Oh, there was still plenty of squabbling and rows between the various families, but that was nomish nature for you. That’s why they’d set up the Council, which seemed to be working.

  Nomes liked arguing. At least the Council of Drivers meant they could argue without hitting one another—or hardly ever.

  Funny thing, though. Back in the Store, the great departmental families had run things. But now all the families were mixed up and, anyway, there were no departments in a quarry. But by instinct, almost, nomes liked hierarchies. The world had always been neatly divided between those who told people what to do and those who did it. So, in a strang
e way, a new set of leaders was emerging.

  The Drivers.

  It depended on where you had been during the Long Drive. If you were one of the ones who had been in the truck cab, then you were a Driver. All the rest were just Passengers. No one talked about it much. It wasn’t official or anything. It was just that the bulk of nomekind felt that anyone who could get the Truck all the way here was the sort of person who knew what they were doing.

  Being a Driver wasn’t necessarily much fun.

  Last year, before they’d found the Store, Masklin had to hunt all day. Now he hunted only when he felt like it; the younger Store nomes liked hunting, and apparently it wasn’t right for a Driver to do it. They mined potatoes, and there’d been a big harvest of corn from a nearby field, even after the machines had been round. Masklin would have preferred them to grow their own food, but the nomes didn’t seem to have the knack of making seeds grow in the rock-hard ground of the quarry. But they were getting fed, that was the main thing.

  Around him he could feel thousands of nomes living their lives. Raising families. Settling down.

  He wandered back to his own burrow, down under one of the derelict quarry sheds. After a while he reached a decision and pulled the Thing out of its own hole in the wall.

  None of its lights were on. They wouldn’t go on until it was close to electricity wires, when it would light up and be able to talk. There were some in the quarry, and Dorcas had got them working. Masklin hadn’t taken the Thing to them, though. The solid black box had a way of talking that always made him unsettled.

  He was pretty certain it could hear, though.

  “Old Torrit died last week,” he said after a while. “We were a bit sad but, after all, he was very old and he just died. I mean, nothing ate him first or ran him over or anything.”

  Masklin’s little tribe had once lived in a highway embankment beside rolling countryside that was full of things that were hungry for fresh nome. The idea that you could die simply of not being alive anymore was a new one to them.

  “So we buried him up on the edge of the potato field, too deep for the plow. The Store nomes haven’t got the hang of burial yet, I think. They think he’s going to sprout, or something. I think they’re mixing it up with what you do with seeds. Of course, they don’t know about growing things. Because of living in the Store, you see. It’s all new to them. They’re always complaining about eating food that comes out of the ground; they think it’s not natural. And they think the rain is a sprinkler system. I think they think the whole world is just a bigger store. Um.”

  He stared at the unresponsive cube for a while, scraping his mind for other things to say.

  “Anyway, that means Granny Morkie is the oldest nome,” he said eventually. “And that means she’s entitled to a place on the Council even though she’s a woman. Abbot Gurder objected to that, but we said, All right, you tell her, and he wouldn’t, so she is. Um.”

  He looked at his fingernails. The Thing had a way of listening that was quite off-putting.

  “Everyone’s worried about the winter. Um. But we’ve got masses of potatoes stored up, and it’s quite warm down here. They’ve got some funny ideas, though. In the Store they said that when it was Christmas Fayre time, there was this thing that came called Santer Claws. I just hope it hasn’t followed us, that’s all. Um.”

  He scratched an ear.

  “All in all, everything’s going right. Um.”

  He leaned closer.

  “You know what that means? If you think everything’s going right, something’s going wrong that you haven’t heard about yet. That’s what I say. Um.”

  The black cube managed to look sympathetic.

  “Everyone says I worry too much. I don’t think it’s possible to worry too much. Um.”

  He thought some more.

  “Um. I think that’s about all the news for now.” He lifted the Thing up and put it back in its hole.

  He’d wondered whether to tell it about his argument with Grimma, but that was, well, personal.

  It was all that reading books, that was what it was. He shouldn’t have let her learn to read, filling her head with stuff she didn’t need to know. Gurder was right—women’s brains did overheat. Grimma’s seemed to be boiling hot the whole time, these days.

  He’d gone and said, Look, now everything was settled down more, it was time they got married like the Store nomes did, with the Abbot muttering words and everything.

  And she’d said she wasn’t sure.

  So he’d said, It doesn’t work like that—you get told, you get married, that’s how it’s done.

  And she’d said, Not anymore.

  He’d complained to Granny Morkie. You’d have expected some support there, he thought. She was a great one for tradition, was Granny. He’d said: Granny, Grimma isn’t doing what I tell her.

  And she’d said: Good luck to her. Wish I’d thought of not doin’ what I was told when I was a girl.

  Then he’d complained to Gurder, who’d said, Yes, it was very wrong, girls should do what they were instructed. And Masklin had said, Right then, you tell her. And Gurder had said, Well, er, she’s got a real temper on her, perhaps it would be better to leave it a bit and these were, after all, changing times. . . .

  Changing times. Well, that was true enough. Masklin had done most of the changing. He’d had to make people think in different ways to leave the Store. Changing was necessary. Change was right. He was all in favor of change.

  What he was dead set against was things not staying the same.

  His spear was leaning in the corner. What a pathetic thing it was . . . now. Just a bit of flint held onto the shaft with a twist of binder twine. They’d brought saws and things from the Store. They could use metal these days.

  He stared at the spear for some time. Then he picked it up and went out for a long, serious think about things and his position in them. Or, as other people would have put it, a good sulk.

  The old quarry was about halfway up the hillside. There was a steep turf slope above it, which in turn became a riot of bramble and hawthorn thicket. There were fields beyond.

  Below the quarry, a lane wound down through scrubby hedges and joined the main road. Beyond that there was the railway, another name for two long lines of metal on big wooden blocks. Things like very long trucks went along it sometimes, all joined together.

  The nomes had not got the railway fully worked out yet. But it was obviously dangerous, because they could see a lane that crossed it, and whenever the railway moving thing was coming, two gates came down over the road.

  The nomes knew what gates were for. You saw them on fields, to stop things getting out. It stood to reason, therefore, that the gates were to stop the railway from escaping from its rails and rushing around on the roads.

  Then there were more fields, some gravel pits—good for fishing, for the nomes who wanted fish—and then there was the airport.

  Masklin had spent hours in the summer watching the planes. They drove along the ground, he noticed, and then went up sharply, like birds, and got smaller and smaller and disappeared.

  That was the big worry. Masklin sat on his favorite stone, in the rain that was starting to fall, and started to worry about it. So many things were worrying him these days, he had to stack them up, but below all of them was this big one.

  They should be going where the planes went. That was what the Thing had told him, when it was still speaking to him. The nomes had come from the sky. Up above the sky, in fact, which was a bit hard to understand, because surely the only thing above the sky was more sky. And they should go back. It was their . . . something beginning with D. Density. Their density. Worlds of their own, they once had. And somehow they’d got stuck here. But—this was the worrying part—the Ship thing, the airplane that flew through the really high sky, between the stars, was still up there somewhere. The first nomes had left it behind when they came down here in a smaller ship, and it had crashed, and they hadn’t been abl
e to get back.

  And he was the only one who knew.

  The old Abbot, the one before Gurder, he had known. Grimma and Dorcas and Gurder all knew some of it, but they had busy minds and they were practical people, and there was so much to organize these days.

  It was just that everyone was settling down. We’re going to turn this into our little world, just like in the Store, Masklin realized. They thought the roof was the sky, and we think the sky is the roof.

  We’ll just stay and . . .

  There was a truck coming up the quarry road. It was such an unusual sight that Masklin realized he had been watching it for a while without really seeing it at all.

  “There was no one on watch! Why wasn’t there anyone on watch? I said there should always be someone on watch!”

  Half a dozen nomes scurried through the dying bracken toward the quarry gate.

  “It was Sacco’s turn,” muttered Angalo.

  “No, it wasn’t!” hissed Sacco. “You remember, yesterday you asked me to swap because—”

  “I don’t care whose turn it was!” shouted Masklin. “There was no one there! And there should have been! Right?”

  “Sorry, Masklin.”

  “Yeah. Sorry, Masklin.”

  They scrambled up a bank and flattened themselves behind a tuft of dried grass.

  It was a small truck, as far as trucks went. A human had already climbed out of it and was doing something to the gates leading into the quarry.

  “It’s a Land Rover,” said Angalo smugly. He’d spent a long time in the Store reading everything he could about vehicles, before the Long Drive. He liked them. “It’s not really a truck, it’s more to carry humans over—”

  “That human is sticking something on the gate,” said Masklin.