Harry felt like the only man in a mining camp who knows what gold looks like.
He started taking on whole streets at a time, and branched out. In the well-to-do areas the householders paid him, paid him, to take away night soil, the by now established buckets, the horse manure, the dustbins and even the dog muck. Dog muck? Did they have any idea how much the tanners paid for the finest white dog muck? It was like being paid to take away squishy diamonds.
Harry couldn’t help it. The world fell over itself to give him money. Someone, somewhere, would pay him for a dead horse or two tons of prawns so far beyond their best-before date it couldn’t be seen with a telescope, and the most wonderful part of all was that someone had already paid him to take them away. If anything
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absolutely failed to find a buyer, not even from the catmeat men, not even from the tanners, not even from Mr Dibbler himself, there were his mighty compost heaps downstream of the city, where the volcanic heat of decomposition made fertile soil (’10p a bag, bring your own bag . . .’) out of everything that was left including, according to rumour, various shadowy businessmen who had come second in a takeover battle (‘. . . brings up your dahlias a treat’).
He’d kept the woodpulp-and-rags business closer to home, though, along with the huge vats that contained the golden foundations of his fortune, because it was the only part of his business that his wife Effie would talk about. Rumour had it that she had also been behind the removal of the much-admired sign over the entrance to his yard, which said: H. King – Taking the Piss Since 1961. Now it read: H. King – Recycling Nature’s Bounty.
A small door within the large gates was opened by a troll. Harry was very forward-looking when it came to employing the non-human races, and had been among the first employers in the city to give a job to a troll. As far as organic substances were concerned, they had no sense of smell.
‘Yus?’
I’d like to speak to Mr King, please.’
‘Whatabaht?’
‘I want to buy a considerable amount of paper from him. Tell him it’s Mr de Worde.’
‘Right.’
The door slammed shut. They waited. After a few minutes the door opened again.
‘Der King will see you now,’ the troll announced.
And so William and Goodmountain were led into the yard of a man who, rumour said, was stockpiling used paper hankies against the day somebody found a way of extracting silver from bogeys.
On either side of the door huge black Rottweilers flung themselves against the bars of their day cages. Everyone knew Harry let them have the run of the yard at night. He made sure that everyone knew. And any nocturnal miscreant would have to be really good with dogs unless they wanted to end up as a few pounds of Tanners’ Grade 1 (White).
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The King of the Golden River had his office in a two-storey shed overlooking the yard, from where he could survey the steaming mounds and cisterns of his empire.
Even half hidden by his big desk Harry King was an enormous man, pink and shiny faced, with a few strands of hair teased across his head; it was hard to imagine him not in shirtsleeves and braces, even when he wasn’t, or not smoking a huge cigar, which he’d never been seen without. Perhaps it was some kind of defence against the odours which were, in a way, his stock in trade.
“evenin’, lads,’ he said amiably. ‘What can I do for you? As if I didn’t know.’
‘Do you remember me, Mr King?’ said William.
Harry nodded. ‘You’re Lord de Worde’s son, right? You put a piece in that letter of yourn last year when our Daphne got wed, right? My Effie was that impressed, all those nobs reading about our Daphne.’
‘It’s a rather bigger letter now, Mr King.’
‘Yes, I did hear about that,’ said the fat man. ‘Some of ’em’s already turnin’ up in our collections. Useful stuff, I’m getting the lads to store it sep’rate.’
His cigar shifted from one side of his mouth to the other. Harry could not read or write, a fact which had never stopped him besting those who could. He employed hundreds of workers to sort through the garbage; it was cheap enough to employ a few more who could sort through words.
‘Mr King–‘ William began.
‘I ain’t daft, lads,’ said Harry. ‘I know why you’re here. But business is business. You know how it is.’
‘We won’t have a business without paper!’ Goodmountain burst out.
The cigar shifted again. ‘And you’d be–?’
This is Mr Goodmountain,’ said William. ‘My printer.’
‘Dwarf, eh?’ said Harry, looking Goodmountain up and down. ‘Nothing against dwarfs, me, but you ain’t good sorters. Gnolls don’t cost much but the grubby little buggers eat half the rubbish. Trolls are okay. They stop with me ‘cos I pays ’em well. Golems is best – they’ll sort stuff all day and all night. Worth their weight in
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gold, which is bloody near what they want payin’ these days.’ The cigar began another journey back across the mouth. ‘Sorry, lads. A deal’s a deal. Wish I could help you. Sold right out of paper. Can’t.’
‘You’re knocking us back, just like that?’ said Goodmountain.
Harry gave him a narrow-eyed look through the haze.
‘You talking to me about knocking back? Don’t know what a tosheroon is, do you?’ he said. The dwarf shrugged.
‘Yes. I do,’ said William. There’s several meanings, but I think you’re referring to a big caked ball of mud and coins, such as you might find in some crevice in an old drain where the water forms an eddy. They can be quite valuable.’
‘What? You’ve got hands on you like a girl,’ said Harry, so surprised that the cigar momentarily drooped. ‘How come you know that?’
‘I like words, Mr King.’
‘I started out as a muckraker when I was three,’ said Harry, pushing his chair back. ‘Found me first tosheroon on day one. O’ course, one of the big kids nicked it off me right there. And you tell me about being knocked back? But I had a nose for the job even then. Then I–‘
They sat and listened, William more patiently than Good-mountain. It was fascinating, anyway, if you had the right kind of mind, although he knew a lot of the story; Harry King told it at every opportunity.
Young Harry King had been a mudlark with vision, combing the banks of the river and even the surface of the turbid Ankh itself for lost coins, bits of metal, useful lumps of coal, anything that had some value somewhere. By the time he was eight he was employing other kids. Whole stretches of the river belonged to him. Other gangs kept away, or were taken over. Harry wasn’t a bad fighter, and he could afford to employ those who were better.
And so it had gone on, the ascent of the King through horse manure sold by the bucket (guaranteed well stamped-down) to rags and bones and scrap metal and household dust and the famous buckets, where the future really was golden. It was a kind of history of civilization, but seen from the bottom looking up.
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‘You’re not a member of a Guild, Mr King?’ said William, during a pause for breath.
The cigar travelled from one side to the other and back quite fast, a sure sign that William had hit a nerve.
‘Damn Guilds,’ said its owner. They said I should join the Beggars! Me! I never begged for nothin’, not in my whole life! The nervel But I’ve seen ’em all off. I won’t deal with no Guild. I pay my lads well and they stand by me.’
‘It’s the Guilds that are trying to break us, Mr King. You know that. I know you get to hear about everything. If you can’t sell us paper, we’ve lost.’
‘What’d I be if I broke a deal?’ said Harry King. ‘This is my tosheroon, Mr King,’ said William. ‘And the kids who want to take it off me are big.’
Harry was silent for a while and then lumbered to his feet and crossed to the big window.
‘Come and look here, lads,’ he said.
At one end of the yard was a big treadmill, operated by a couple of golems. It powered a creaking endless belt which crossed most of the yard. At the other end, several trolls with broad shovels fed the belt from a heap of trash that was itself constantly refilled by the occasional cart.
Lining the belt itself were golems and trolls and even the occasional human. In the flickering torchlight they watched the moving debris carefully. Occasionally a hand would dart out and pitch something into a bin behind the worker.