Truth

by Pratchett, Terry

‘Yus?’

  ‘I’d like to speak to Mr King, please.’

  ‘What abaht?’

  ‘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).

  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 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 Goodmountain. 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.

  ‘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 nerve! 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 torch-light they watched the moving debris carefully. Occasionally a hand would dart out and pitch something into a bin behind the worker.

  ‘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 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.’

  ‘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 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 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—’

  Sacharissa caught sight of a movement out of the corner of her eye. The escaped land eel, having got bored behind the bench, was making a very sluggish bid for new horizons where an eel could wriggle proud and horizontal.

  ‘Please don’t—’ Otto began.

  ‘Oh, it’s all right, I’m not at all squeamish …’

  Sacharissa’s hand closed on the eel.

  She came to with Otto’s black handkerchief being flapped desperately in her face.

  ‘Oh, my goodness …’ she said, trying to sit up.

  Otto’s face was a picture of such terror that Sacharissa forgot her own splitting headache for a moment.

  ‘What’s happened to you?’ she said. ‘You look terrible.’

  Otto jerked back, tried to stand up and half collapsed against the bench, clutching at his chest.

  ‘Cheese!’ he moaned. ‘Please get me some cheese! Or a big apple! Something to bite! Pleeease!’

  ‘There’s nothing like
that down here—’

  ‘Keep avay from me! And do not breathe like zat!’ Otto wailed.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Zer bosoms going in and out and up and down like zat! I am a vampire! A fainting young lady, please understand, zer panting, zer heaving of zer bosoms … it calls somezing terrible from vithin …’ With a lurch he pushed himself upright and gripped the black twist of ribbon from his lapel. ‘But I vill be stronk!’ he screamed. ‘I vill not let everyvun down!’

  He stood stiffly to attention, although slightly blurred because of the vibration shaking him from head to foot, and in a trembling voice sang: ‘Oh vill you come to zer mission, vill you come, come, come, Zere’s a nice cup of tea and a bun, and a bun—’

  The ladder was suddenly alive with tumbling dwarfs.

  ‘Are you all right, miss?’ said Boddony, running forward with his axe. ‘Has he tried anything?’

  ‘No, no! He’s—’

  ‘—zer drink zat’s in zer livink vein, Is not zer drink for me—’ Sweat was running down Otto’s face. He stood with one hand pressed over his heart.

  ‘That’s right, Otto!’ shouted Sacharissa. ‘Fight it! Fight it!’ She turned to the dwarfs. ‘Have any of you got any raw meat?’

  ‘—to life anew and temperance too, And to pure cold vater ve’ll come—’ Veins were throbbing on Otto’s pale head.

  ‘Got some fresh rat fillets upstairs,’ muttered one of the dwarfs. ‘Cost me tuppence …’

  ‘You get them right now, Gowdie,’ snapped Boddony. ‘This looks bad!’

  ‘—oh ve can drink brandy and gin if it’s handy, and ve can sup vhisky and rum, but zer drink ve abhor and ve drink no more, is zer—’

  ‘Tuppence is tuppence, that’s all I’m saying!’

  ‘Look, he’s starting to twitch!’ said Sacharissa.

  ‘And he can’t sing, either,’ said Gowdie. ‘All right, all right, I’m going, I’m going …’

  Sacharissa patted Otto’s clammy hand.

  ‘You can beat it!’ she said urgently. ‘We’re all here for you! Aren’t we, everyone? Aren’t we?’ Under her baleful gaze the dwarfs responded with a chorus of half-hearted ‘yesses’, even though Boddony’s expression suggested that he wasn’t certain what Otto was here for.