‘Fish heads, bones, rags, paper . . . I got twenty-seven different bins so far, including one for gold and silver, ‘cos you’d be amazed what gets thrown away by mistake. Tinkle, tinkle, little spoon, wedding ring will follow soon . . . That’s what I used to sing to my little girls. Stuff like your paper of news goes in bin six, Low Grade Paper Waste. I sells most of that to Bob Holtely up in Five and Seven Yard.’
‘What does he do with it?’ said William, noting the ‘Low Grade’.
‘Pulps it for lavatory paper,’ said Harry. ‘The wife swears by it.
Pers’n’ly I cut out the middle man.’ He sighed, apparently oblivious
of the sudden sag in William’s self-esteem. ‘Y’know, sometimes I
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stand here of an evenin’ when the line is rumbling and the sunset is shinin’ on the settlin’ tanks and, I don’t mind admitting it, a tear comes to my eye.’
‘To tell you the truth, it comes to mine, too, sir,’ said William.
‘Now then, lad . . . when that kid nicked my first tosheroon, I didn’t go around complaining, did I? I knew I’d got an eye for it, see? I carried on, and I found plenty more. And on my eighth birthday I paid a couple of trolls to seek out the man who’d pinched my first one and slap seven kinds of snot out of him. Did you know that?’
‘No, Mr King.’
Harry King stared at William through the smoke. William felt that he was being turned over and examined, like something found in the trash.
‘My youngest daughter, Hermione . . . she’s getting married at the end of next week,’ said Harry. ‘Big show. Temple of Offler. Choirs and everything. I’m inviting all the top nobs. Effie insisted. They won’t come, o’ course. Not for Piss Harry.’
The Times would have been there, though,’ said William. ‘With coloured pictures. Except we go out of business tomorrow.’
‘Coloured, eh? You get someone to paint ’em in, do you?’
‘No. We’ve . . . got a special way,’ said William, hoping against hope that Otto was serious. He wasn’t just out on a limb here, he was dangerously out of the tree.
That’d be something to see,’ said Harry. He took out his cigar, stared reflectively at the end and put it back in his mouth. Through the smoke he watched William carefully.
William felt the distinct unease of a well-educated man who has to confront the fact that the illiterate man watching him could probably out-think him three times over.
‘Mr King, we really need that paper,’ he said, to break the thoughtful silence.
There’s something about you, Mr de Worde,’ said the King. ‘I buy and sell clerks when I need them, and you don’t smell like a clerk to me. You’ve got the air about you of a man who’d scrabble through a ton o’ shit to find a farthin’, and I’m wonderin’ why that is.’
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‘Look, Mr King, will you please sell us some paper at the old price?’ said William.
‘Couldn’t do that. I told you. A deal’s a deal. The Engravers’ve paid me,’ said Harry shortly.
William opened his mouth but Goodmountain laid a hand on his arm. The King was clearly working his way to the end of a line of thought.
Harry went over to the window again and stared pensively at the yard with its steaming piles. Then . . .
‘Oh, will you look at that,’ he said, stepping back from the window in tremendous astonishment. ‘See that cart at the other gate down there?’
They saw the cart.
‘I must’ve told the lads a hundred times, don’t leave a cart all laden up and ready to go right by an open gate like that. Someone’ll nick it, I told ’em.’
William wondered who’d steal anything from the King of the Golden River, a man with all those red-hot compost heaps.
‘That’s the last quarter of the order for the Engravers’ Guild,’ said Harry, to the world in general. I’d have to repay ’em if it got half-inched right out of my yard. I’ll have to tell the foreman. He’s getting forgetful these days.’
‘We should be leaving, William,’ said Goodmountain, grabbing William’s arm again.
‘Why? We haven’t–‘
‘However can we repay you, Mr King?’ said the dwarf, dragging William towards the door.
The bridesmaids’ll be wearing oh-de-nill, whatever that is,’ said the King of the Golden River. ‘Oh, and if I don’t get eighty dollars from you by the end of the month you lads will be in deep’ – the cigar did a double length of the mouth – ‘trouble. Head downwards.’
Two minutes later the cart was creaking out of the yard, under the curiously uninterested eyes of the troll foreman.
‘No, it’s not stealing,’ said Goodmountain emphatically, shaking the reins. ‘The King pays the bastards back their money and we pay him the old price. So we’re all happy
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except for the Inquirer, and who cares about them?’
‘I didn’t like the bit about the deep pause trouble,’ said William. ‘Head downwards.’
‘I’m shorter’n you so I lose out either way up,’ said the dwarf.
After watching the cart disappear the King yelled downstairs for one of his clerks and told him to fetch a copy of the Times from Bin Six. He sat impassively, except for the oscillating cigar, while the stained and crumpled paper was read to him.
After a while his smile broadened and he asked the clerk to read a few extracts again.
‘Ah,’ he said, when the man had finished. ‘I reckoned that was it. The boy’s a born muckraker. Shame for him he was born a long way from honest muck.’
‘Shall I do a credit note for the Engravers, Mr King?’
‘Aye.’
‘You reckon you’ll get your money back, Mr King?’
Harry King usually didn’t take this sort of thing from clerks. They were there to do the adding-up, not discuss policy. On the other hand, Harry had made a fortune seeing the sparkle in the mire, and sometimes you had to recognize expertise when you saw it.
‘What colour’s oh-de-nill?’ he said.
‘Oh, one of those difficult colours, Mr King. A sort of light blue with a hint of green.’
‘Could you get ink that colour?’
‘I could find out. It’d be expensive.’
The cigar made its traverse from one side of Harry King to the other. He was known to dote on his daughters, who he felt had suffered rather from having a father who needed to take two baths just to get dirty.
‘We shall just have to keep an eye on our little writing man,’ he said. Tip off the lads, will you? I wouldn’t like to see our Effie disappointed.’
The dwarfs were working on the press again, Sacharissa noticed. It seldom stayed the same shape for more than a couple of hours. The dwarfs designed as they went along.
It looked to Sacharissa that the only tools a dwarf needed were
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his axe and some means of making fire. That’d eventually get him a forge, and with that he could make simple tools, and with those he could make complex tools, and with complex tools a dwarf could more or less make anything.
A couple of them were rummaging around in the industrial junk that had been piled against the walls. A couple of metal mangles had been melted down for their iron already, and the rocking horses were being used to melt lead. One or two of the dwarfs had left the shed on mysterious errands, too, and had returned carrying small sacks and furtive expressions. A dwarf is also very good at making use of things other people have thrown away, even if they haven’t actually thrown them away yet.
She was turning her attention to a report of the Nap Hill Jolly Pals annual meeting when a crash and some cursing in Uberwaldean, a good cursing language, made her run over to the cellar entrance.
‘Are you all right, Mr Chriek? Do you want me to get the dustpan and brush?’
‘Bodrozvachski zhaltziet! . . . oh, sorry, Miss Sacharissa! Zere has been a minor pothole on zer road to progress.’
Sacharissa made her way down the ladder.
Otto was at his makeshift bench. Boxes of demons hung on the wall. Some salamanders dozed in their cages. In a big dark jar, land eels slithered. But a jar next to it was broken.
‘I vas clumsy and knocked it over,’ said Otto, looking embarrassed. ‘And now zer stupid eel ‘as gone behind the bench.’
‘Does it bite?’
‘Oh no, zey are very lazy wretches–‘
‘What is this you’ve been working on, Otto?’ Sacharissa said, turning to look closer at something big on the bench.
He tried to dart in front of her. ‘Oh, it is all very experimental–‘
The way of making coloured plates?’
‘Yes, but it is just a crude lash-up–‘