The Proof House (16 page)

‘You coming, then?’

‘Sorry,’ Bardas said.

‘This way,’ said Haj; and a moment later he vanished. Bardas stood for a second or two, trying to work out where he’d gone; then he saw a little, low archway in the gallery wall, nearly invisible in the dim light. He had to bend almost double to get under it.

The archway led to a short, very narrow passageway that ended in another steep, scary staircase that spiralled four turns and emerged on to a plank catwalk, high above the shop floor. There was no handrail.
Fancy that
, Bardas reflected, glancing down.
Presumably I’ve been afraid of heights all my life and never realised it till now.
He fixed his eyes on the door at the end of the catwalk, which led into the back wall of the gallery. Unless Haj had fallen to his death or turned into a bird, he was beyond that door somewhere. Bardas sucked in a long, deep breath and followed, his hands clasped behind his back, taking care not to look at his feet.

Beyond the door there was another narrow corridor, which turned a right angle and then stretched on into the darkness. Doors opened off it at frequent intervals; one of them was open, and Bardas went in.

‘There you are,’ said Haj’s voice in the gloom. ‘Well, this is it. Nice room.’

Bardas felt his way along the wall with his hands until something blocked his way. He reached out and felt rough wood; flat planks and a bar. He lifted the bar, which slipped through his fingers and fell on the floor, then groped around until he found a handle, and pulled. The room flooded with light as the shutter swung back, revealing what looked depressingly like a prison cell. There was a shelf projecting out of the wall, with a single folded blanket and a single yellowing pillow; another ledge under the window, on which stood a plain brown pottery jug and a white-enamelled tin bowl. That was it.

‘Thank you,’ Bardas said.

Haj sniffed. ‘You don’t like it, I can tell,’ he said.

‘No, no,’ Bardas said, ‘it’s fine. At least, I’ve lived in worse.’

‘Really?’ Haj said. ‘Most of us sleep on the roof, or under our benches in the shop in the wet season.’ He looked round, as if daring Bardas to criticise further. ‘Has anybody told you what you’re meant to be doing?’ he said.

‘Not really,’ Bardas replied. ‘The adjutant said something about supervising, but—’

Haj smiled. ‘You don’t want to bother too much about anything
he
says. It’s the foremen who run this place, which is how it should be, of course.’

‘I see,’ Bardas said. ‘And what am I? A foreman?’

Haj shook his head. ‘Really, you haven’t got a job,’ he said. ‘They do this from time to time, send us people they can’t find places for anywhere else. Doesn’t do any harm, usually, so long as they keep out of everybody’s road. Basically, you do what the hell you like, just don’t interfere, that’s all. Let’s see, pay call’s last day of the month; you lose two quarters kit and uniform levy, three quarters wounds and burial club, two quarters retentions, and the rest of it’s yours to spend, though if you’ve got any sense you’ll keep it in the big safe in the back of the stockroom, like the rest of them do. Good rule of thumb: don’t leave anything lying about unless you don’t care if it gets stolen. Lot of light-fingered types here; nothing else to do, see. Right, mess call’s an hour after each shift; you’re entitled to use the officers’ mess in the tower basement, but that comes expensive, a quarter a day not including wine or beer. Otherwise, you can muck in with the rest of us in the canteen; ask anybody and they’ll show you where it is.’

Bardas nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘What’s retentions? ’

‘Retentions,’ Haj repeated. ‘Two quarters a month. Don’t you know what retentions are?’

‘Sorry,’ Bardas said. ‘Not something we had in the sappers, or at any rate we didn’t call it that.’

Haj sighed a little. ‘Retentions is what’s stopped out of everybody’s pay for their demob. You know,’ he added, ‘when you leave the army. It’s for your old age, that sort of thing; you get back what you put in, plus your gratuity, less stoppages, fines, levies, exemptions, stuff like that. Didn’t you have that in the mines?’

‘No,’ Bardas said. ‘I suppose the chance of any of us having an old age was too small to warrant the extra work.’

‘Whatever,’ Haj said. ‘Well, we got it here. Now, is there anything else I’ve got to tell you? Don’t think so. Anything you don’t understand, just ask somebody, all right?’

‘That’s fine,’ Bardas said. ‘Thank you.’

Haj nodded. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Now I’ve got to get back down there, before the whole section grinds to a halt.’

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 an 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?’