The Proof House

by K. J. Parker

  When he’d gone, Bardas sat on the bed for a while, staring at the opposite wall, listening to the sound of hammers. Just the ticket, he told himself cheerfully; no problem at all staying out of trouble. I’m going to like it here. It didn’t work. Above all, he could hear the pecking of the hammers; when he put his hands over his ears, he could feel them just as clearly. It’s higher up than the mines, he tried hopefully. And there’s nobody trying to kill me; now that’s got to be worth something.

  After an hour alone in his quarters, Bardas carefully picked his way back along the corridors, over the catwalk and down the stairs into the gallery. He stood for a moment, letting the noise overwhelm him, trying to savour it instead of shut it out. Then he marched over to the nearest workbench, where a man was cutting shapes out of a sheet of steel with a heavy-grade bench shear.

  ‘I’m Bardas Loredan,’ he shouted. ‘I’m the new—’ He searched his mind frantically for something that would sound authentic. ‘The new deputy inspector. Tell me exactly what you’re doing here.’

  The man looked at him as if he was mad. ‘Cutting out,’ he replied. ‘What does it look like?’

  Bardas clenched his face into a frown. ‘That’s not the sort of attitude I want to see around here,’ he said. ‘Describe your working method.’

  The man shrugged. ‘I get the plates from the layout section,’ he said, ‘with the patterns scribed out and marked up with blue. I cut them out and put them in this tray here. When the tray’s full, someone comes down and takes it over there.’ He indicated the far side of the shop with a nod of his head. ‘That’s it,’ he concluded.

  Bardas pursed his lips. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Now let me see you do one.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to see if you’re doing it right.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ The man hefted another sheet, laid it face down on the bench and turned it round. Gripping the sheet with one hand and the long lever of the shear in the other, he fed the sheet into the cutting jaws and drew down the handle. The cut seemed to take far less effort than Bardas had imagined; it looked for all the world like cutting cloth, except that one jaw of the scissors was bolted down to the bench. To make the curves, he moved over to another tool mounted on the other side; this one had the same long handle, but instead of the top blade of the scissors there was a circular cutter with serrations round the edge of the blade.

  ‘All right so far?’ the man asked.

  ‘It’ll do,’ Bardas grunted. ‘Carry on.’

  The man didn’t quite smirk, but he didn’t have to. ‘So you don’t want to see the third step, then?’

  ‘What? Oh, well, yes, why not?’

  The man took the cut-out pieces and clamped them in an enormous bench-vice, lining the edge up carefully along the line of the jaw so that only the edge, left slightly ragged by the shear, was exposed; then he picked a big, wide chisel out of the rack next to the vice, laid it level on the top of the leading jaw, right at the edge and at right angles to the sheet, and started whacking the back of the chisel with a huge square wooden mallet. The ragged edge was sliced away, leaving a smooth, perfect edge.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Do another one.’

  The man did another one; and another, and then two more. ‘There,’ he said, ‘that’s a trayful. Did I pass?’

  Bardas made the most noncommittal noise he could manage. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What else do you do?’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘What else do you do?’ Bardas repeated. ‘Other procedures, stages in the operation.’

  Again, the man looked at him as if he was gibbering. ‘That’s all,’ he said. ‘I cut out tasset-lame blanks. Why, am I supposed to be doing something else as well? Nobody’s ever said.’

  Bardas picked up the tray. ‘Carry on,’ he said, and headed for the area the man had pointed to.

  In the far corner, a man was feeding bits of metal that looked like the bits in the tray into a large contraption that was basically three long, thick rollers laid horizontally in a massive wrought-iron frame. One roller revolved as the man turned a handle; this drew the steel plate under the other two rollers (whose pitch and settings could be adjusted by turning the large set-screws at either end) and fed it out the other side, by which point it had been turned from a straight strip into a shallow, even curve, the shape of one of the small plates that made up an assembly of shoulder armour; which, presumably, was what the term ‘tasset lame’ actually meant. After rolling each piece he held it up to a curved piece of wood on a stand, the idea apparently being that if it fitted snugly against the wood, he added it to the pile of completed pieces; otherwise it went back under the rollers, and the man fiddled with the set-screws until it came out sufficiently curved to fit the wooden pattern.

  Taking a deep breath, Bardas walked up to this man, put the tray of steel bits down on the nearest bench and went through the deputy-inspector routine again. This man seemed marginally less sceptical (or else he cared even less); he carried on with his work as if Bardas wasn’t there, until his tray was full.

  ‘Right,’ Bardas said. ‘Now where do these go?’

  The man didn’t say anything, but he nodded his head sideways in the direction of the west end of the gallery. Resting the tray against his chest (it was no lightweight; forty or so curved sections, neatly stacked together in concentric semicircles, like the flaky cross-section flesh of a slice of overcooked salmon) Bardas tottered across the shop, once again hoping he’d recognise someone working with something similar before he’d made a complete and utter fool of himself. Fortunately, the next stage in the process was reasonably easy to spot: a man with a hammer and a small hole-punch, knocking rivet-holes into a batch of sections identical to the ones he was carrying.

  ‘Easy as pie,’ explained the hole-puncher, who was more than happy to explain every aspect of his job to the deputy inspector. ‘You look for the punch-marks where the layout boys have marked out where the holes’ve got to go; then you take the work in your left hand, like so, and press it against the bench so; then you get your punch in your left hand and your hammer in your right, and –’ (clink, went the hammer) ‘- there you are. Simple, isn’t it?’

  Bardas nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, because it was.

  ‘Another thing; it’s not only simple, it’s fucking boring.’

  ‘What?’

  The man looked at him. ‘You know how long I was supposed to be doing this for? Two weeks, until the new man came and I got moved on to planishing, like I was trained for. And you know how long I’ve been here now? Six years. Six years, dammit, doing this pathetically simple job over and over and over—’ The man took a deep breath. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you’re the deputy inspector, see if you can’t put a word in for me, all right? I mean, the bloke who had your job before, he promised he’d put in a word for me, but that was two years ago and did anything come of it? Did it hell as like; and if I stay here much longer—’

  ‘All right,’ Bardas said quickly. ‘Leave it with me, I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘You will?’ The man’s face lit up with joy, then clouded over with suspicion. ‘If you remember, is what you mean; if you remember and you can be bothered. Well, all I can say is, I’ve heard that one before and all I can say about that is, I won’t be holding my breath—’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Bardas repeated, taking a step back. ‘Just leave it with—’

  ‘You haven’t even asked me my name,’ the man called after him, angrily, but Bardas was far enough away by now that he didn’t have to look back; he could pretend not to have heard. He walked away quickly, as if he knew where he was going, until he tripped over a large wooden block and had to grab hold of a workbench to stop himself falling.

  ‘Watch it,’ said the man behind the bench. ‘I could have smashed my thumb, you doing that.’

  Bardas looked up. The man was holding a piece of steel in one hand and a hammer of sorts in the other. It didn’t look like a
n ordinary hammer; instead of a steel head, it had a tightly wound roll of rawhide jammed into a heavy iron tube, set at right angles to the handle. ‘Sorry,’ Bardas replied. ‘It’s my first day.’

  The man shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But look where you’re going next time.’ On the bench in front of him was another block of wood, maybe a little larger than the one Bardas had just barked his shin on. In the middle of the block – Bardas recognised it as oak – was a square hole, in which sat an iron stake topped by an iron ball slightly smaller than a child’s head. The piece of metal the man was holding over this ball was roughly triangular and looked like a shallow dish; it was a panel for a four-piece conical helmet, the old-fashioned kind that was still issued to some of the auxiliary cavalry units.

  The man noticed that Bardas was staring. ‘Do you want something?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m the new deputy inspector,’ Bardas replied. ‘Tell me about what you’re doing.’

  ‘Planishing,’ the man replied. ‘You know what planishing means?’

  ‘You tell me. In your own words,’ Bardas added.

  ‘All right.’ The man grinned. ‘They send you people out here, don’t they, and you haven’t got a bloody clue. No skin off my nose, though. Right, planishing is where we hammer the outside of the nearly finished article to take out the bumps and dents, get it smooth for the polishers. All the actual shaping, see, that’s done from the inside; so to finish off, we just go over it lightly from the outside, not enough to move any metal, really it’s just to leave it looking nice. I wouldn’t tell you that if you were a real inspector, or else I’d be out of a job. You want to watch how I do this?’

  Bardas nodded, and the man carried on with what he’d been doing, angling the work down on to the ball and smoothing the marks out of it with a series of crisp, even taps, letting the hammer fall in its own weight and bounce back off the surface of the metal. ‘The trick is not to bash,’ the man explained. ‘Bashing gets you nowhere fast, you just let the mallet drop and the weight does all the work. That’s why I’m holding it just so, trapped between my middle finger and the base of my thumb, look.’ He held up his right hand to demonstrate. ‘Here, you want a go?’

  Bardas hesitated. ‘All right,’ he said, and held out his hand for the hammer. ‘Is that right?’

  The man shook his head. ‘You’re gripping,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to grip, you’re not trying to strangle the bloody thing, you just want to hold it firm enough so you can keep control – there, you’re getting it. Pretty simple once you know, but you’ll never get there just by light of nature.’

  ‘Strange,’ Bardas said. ‘I’d never have guessed a lot of little gentle taps with a bit of rolled-up leather could actually shape a piece of steel.’

  The man laughed. ‘That’s the whole point,’ he said. ‘Thousands and thousands of little light taps with the hide mallet make the thing so hard and close-grained that a bloody great hard two-handed bash with a six-pound axe just bounces off.’ He lifted the piece of work off the steel ball and ran a fingertip over it. ‘A bit like life, really,’ he went on. ‘The more you get shit kicked out of you, the harder you are to kill.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  No, no, they’d told him – they’d sounded quite shocked – you mustn’t call it a civil war, it was a rebellion. It’d only have been a civil war if they’d won.

  It wasn’t the sort of victory Temrai wanted to dwell on any more than he had to; but it was in order, diplomatically speaking, for his new neighbours in the provincial office to express their pleasure, now it was all safely over, that the best man had won. A simple letter would have done; or a messenger with his words written out for him in big letters on a bit of parchment; there wasn’t really any need to send a full proconsular delegation (although strictly speaking, as Deputy Proconsul Arshad carefully explained, since the mission was to a recognised non-aligned friendly sovereign state, from a provincial directorate as opposed to a provincial governor, it being a directly governed province and therefore in theory under the direct supervision of the chancellor of the Empire, by way of his duly appointed delegates, protocol did require a personal attendance by the senior ranking diplomat; anything less, Arshad implied, would have been an insult, or at the very least a display of bad manners and ignorance).

  ‘I see,’ Temrai replied untruthfully. ‘Well, it’s very kind of you to have come all this way; but as you can see, I’m still very much in one piece, as are the rest of my senior officers and ministers; really, in fact, no harm done.’ He stopped, unable to think of anything else to say. Of all the people he’d met in the course of his extremely eventful life, Deputy Proconsul Arshad was the most inhuman. Light seemed to fall away into his eyes like water draining into sand, and when he spoke, the words seemed to come from a great way off. Temrai felt compelled to carry on talking, in an effort to fill the gap in nature the man seemed to produce. ‘Of course,’ Temrai went on, ‘it was a dreadful business; we were fighting people who we thought of as our friends – well, more than friends, family. I’m still not sure what it was all about, to be honest with you. It just happened, I suppose. One minute we were all on the same side, wanting the same things, just not completely in agreement about how to go about achieving them. Next thing we knew, we weren’t talking any more, and they’d left the camp and gone off somewhere with their horses and sheep and goats. Well, that was all right, if they didn’t want to stay here, that was up to them. But then they started making trouble; nothing terrible, just awkward, rude I suppose you could call it. They wouldn’t let some of our people water their stock at a river they’d decided was theirs; stupid thing to argue over, especially since if our side had moved a couple of miles up river, they’d have been drinking exactly the same water (just a few minutes earlier) and everybody would have been happy.

  ‘But it didn’t turn out that way, worse luck; first there was a standoff, then there was a scuffle, you couldn’t call it more than that, but a man was killed, so I had to get involved; looking back, I keep asking myself if I could have handled it differently, found some way not to make an issue out of it. But I found myself insisting that the man who’d struck the actual blow had to be sent back here to answer for what he’d done; they refused, so I sent some people to fetch him. There was more fighting—’ He shook his head. ‘It shouldn’t have happened, gods know, but it did; and now here we are, looking back on our first civil war. I suppose it’s a sign of how far we’ve come, in a way. I mean, it’s things like this that sort of define a nation.’ Temrai bit his lip; he couldn’t believe some of the things he was hearing himself say. But Deputy Proconsul Arshad was just sitting there, drawing the words out of him like a child sucking an egg. Presumably that was what he’d come for. Even so, he couldn’t really see the point of the exercise. It was like deliberately opening a vein.

  ‘A most unhappy sequence of events,’ Arshad said eventually, moving his head very slightly forward, though the rest of his body remained motionless. He had an ugly scar running from the corner of his left eye right down to the lobe of his ear, and it was all Temrai could do not to stare at it helplessly. ‘Let us hope that by dealing with the problem so quickly and decisively, you’ve effectively forestalled any further opposition to what we consider to be a most welcome and positive program of social reforms. As you say, if your actions here have ensured that something like this is unlikely ever to happen again, you’re entitled to feel a considerable degree of satisfaction.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Temrai replied, though he wasn’t entirely sure what he was thanking this peculiar man for. What he really wanted, of course, was for the Son of Heaven and his grim-faced retinue to go away and never come back. Maybe there was a special way diplomats could say that sort of thing without giving offence or starting a war; but if there was, nobody had let him in on the secret. ‘Personally, I’ve had enough of wars and fighting to last me a lifetime. I mean to say, just because you’re really quite good at something, it doesn’t actually follow that yo
u like doing it. Definitely that way with me and fighting wars – well, not just me, all of us, really. I’d say that, as a nation, we’ve been through all that proving-ourselves stuff and now it’s time to move on.’

  Deputy Proconsul Arshad studied him for a moment in silence, as if making up his mind whether to knock him on the head now or throw him back and let him grow a little bigger. ‘I most sincerely hope those aspirations will prove to be attainable,’ he said. ‘For the present, may I remind you of something from my people’s most respected treatise on the art of war. To paraphrase – necessarily – it says that trying to make peace without total victory is like trying to make soup without onions; it can’t be done.’ He didn’t smile, but there was a space for where a smile would have been, had he been human. ‘You have work to do; I’ve trespassed on your time long enough. May I conclude by saying that the Empire is delighted that at long last we have you for a neighbour.’

  When Arshad had gone – Temrai saw him leave, but he had a totally irrational feeling that he might still be there somewhere, lurking – he breathed a long sigh of relief and asked, ‘Anybody care to tell me what all that was about?’

  Poscai, the newly appointed treasurer (his predecessor had been on the other side in the civil war, and hadn’t survived it), smiled ruefully. ‘Welcome to politics,’ he said. ‘They say it gets easier as you go along, but I have my doubts. I think it gets worse and worse, until finally both sides give up and go to war, the way human beings were meant to.’

  Temrai shook his head. ‘Why on earth should they want to start a war with us? We haven’t done them any harm. And I can’t believe we’ve got anything they could possibly want. Do you really think they’re going to attack us, Poscai? Maybe I wasn’t listening properly, but I don’t think I heard anything you could actually describe as a threat. Nothing so straightforward,’ he added.

  General Hebbekai pulled the cushion off the chair Arshad had been sitting on, put it down next to Temrai’s feet and sat on it. ‘Oh, there were threats all right. If the provincial office tells you it likes the shoes you’re wearing, that’s a threat: they’re going to kill you and take your shoes. If they say it’s a nice day for the time of year, that’s a threat too. If they don’t say anything at all, just sit there and smile at you, that’s a really bad threat. You don’t think a man like that’d come all this way just to borrow a pair of shears.’