The Proof House (19 page)

‘I’m Anax,’ said the old man. ‘This is Bollo.’ He smiled, revealing a dazzlingly wide array of teeth. ‘Welcome to the proof house.’

‘Thank you,’ Bardas said.

Anax nodded politely (Bollo didn’t seem to have noticed Bardas yet). ‘You don’t mind if we carry on, do you?’ he said - his voice was refined, cultured, very Son-of-Heaven. ‘We’ve got a lot to get through today, as you can see.’

‘Please, carry on,’ Bardas said; and at once Bollo hefted the hammer, swung it over his head and brought it down hard on the apex of the helmet. The clang made Bardas jump. Then the helmet rolled off the anvil and clattered on to the stone floor.

‘No good,’ said Anax sadly. ‘You heard the harmonics? Garbage.’ He stooped painfully, picked the helmet up and put it back on the anvil. There was a slight dent on the left side of the crown. ‘You can tell everything from the sound,’ Anax went on. ‘Listen. This is what it should sound like.’ He stooped again - bending down seemed to trouble him inordinately - and came up with another helmet, as far as Bardas could see identical to the first. Anax gripped it in the tongs, and Bollo thumped it.

‘You hear that?’ Anax said. ‘Completely different. Good helmet. Well, good seam. The rivets are garbage.’

Bardas looked at the good helmet; it too had a slight dent in the crown. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but I don’t see—’

‘Really?’ Anax nodded, and Bollo swung again. The sound hurt Bardas’ ears. ‘A fifth higher; sort of a purer, whiter sound. It’s a bit flat, of course, because of the garbage rivets. Here, it’s easier to tell on a cuirass.’ He groaned this time as he bent down; he came up with a dull grey breastplate which he laid over the top of the anvil, having first swept the two dented helmets on to the floor with the back of his hand. ‘Listen for the high note,’ he said. ‘You should hear it quite clearly.’

Bollo shifted his grip slightly on the hammer handle, then dealt the breastplate five enormous blows, two on each side and one on the ridge that ran up the centre. To Bardas, it sounded like an awful clanging noise.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘Yes, quite different.’

The old man laughed. ‘Fooled you,’ he said. ‘That one’s garbage too. Not that it seems to matter any; I test ’em and reject the batch, they issue them anyway, but with a little stamp on the inside: FP. It stands for Failed Proof. Wonderful, isn’t it?’

Bardas coughed. ‘I’m holding you up,’ he said. ‘You carry on, I’ll just watch for a bit.’

Anax laughed again. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Took me fifteen years before I started hearing it. Till then, I just bashed ’em till they fell apart, and never knew what I was doing. Now, of course, I can tell instantly. But we still go on bashing, because that’s what we do.’

Next on the anvil was a pair of clamshell gauntlets, a dull grey colour with flecks of rust. Bollo wrecked them both with seven blows, bursting the rivets and crushing the lames flat, while the noise bounced from wall to wall. ‘Good,’ said Anax, making a mark on a tally-stick with a small, thin knife. ‘Pass them. Do the pauldrons next.’

Bardas didn’t know what a pauldron was; it turned out to be a shoulder-guard, domed at the top to fit the ball of the shoulder, articulated with five lames to allow the arm to move freely. Bollo’s hammer didn’t seem to have much effect on it, but Anax didn’t seem impressed. ‘Fail,’ he said. ‘Sounds dull. Flaws in the metal, that’s what does it; bits of coke and grit and copper, all sorts of rubbish. Comes of having to use what we can get. I know,’ he added, his eyes suddenly lighting up. ‘Bollo, fetch the Iron Man. Let’s show our guest something a bit clever.’

Bollo let the hammer fall to the ground with a thud, then slouched away behind another stack of wrecked armour. He came back dragging a heavy iron trolley on which stood a lifesize human figure made of iron. It was red with rust; Bardas could smell the rust from where he was sitting. ‘Properly speaking,’ Anax was saying, ‘we ought to use the Iron Man all the time; but after, what, a hundred and twenty years of being bashed around, he’s getting a bit brittle. Aren’t you, pal?’ He patted the figure’s thigh. ‘See? No left hand. Snapped off. Won’t weld. Too much bashing, see, it goes all hard - work-hardened, we call it, very important concept - and when it gets hard it gets brittle, and when it’s brittle - that’s it, finish. All right, Bollo, this time we’ll use a number-four felling axe, let’s show the gentleman how it’s done.’

Bollo grunted, wiped his forehead with his leg-thick forearm - there wasn’t a single hair left on it, Bardas noticed - and bent over, rummaging in a long metal box. Meanwhile Anax was strapping pieces of armour to the iron figure, carefully tightening buckles and adjusting the tension in the various straps. ‘Got to be straight and true before we start,’ Anax said, ‘or it won’t mean anything.’

The iron figure had vanished under the grey steel, not a square inch of rust to be seen; and in its place stood what Bardas would have sworn blind was a man in full armour. ‘All right,’ Anax called out, brushing powdered rust from his hands. ‘Stand well back,’ he told Bardas. ‘Sometimes you get bits falling off and flying round the room. Depends a lot, of course, on who’s bashing and who’s getting bashed. Slowly now, Bollo, it’s not a race. This is work, remember, not fun.’

How hard would he hit if it was fun? Bardas wondered, and braced himself just in time as Bollo swung the axe over his shoulder like a sack, then accelerated it as he bent his knees, throwing his entire bodyweight into the stroke. Bardas had been expecting an almighty clang, but the noise was different, more of a high-pitched clunk, as the force of the blow was transmitted through the thin skin of the steel knee-cop into the solid iron behind it; it was a musical, pulsating sound, short and clipped, the sound of extreme force being applied and turned back - Bardas heard the turning-back, and saw the axehead bounce off, all the force having nowhere to soak away into. The place on the armour where the axe-blade had hit was deeply scored but the steel skin was unbroken.

‘Now that’s bad,’ Anax said. ‘Hold that sound in your mind. All right, Bollo.’

The next blow landed on the point of the left elbow; and sure enough, the sound was a little different, just as the damage was evident and extensive, the steel being caved in and crushed. But Anax looked pleased. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Properly domed, the way it should be. Well, think about it, will you? You get hit very hard, where do you want the force of the hit to go, into the steel or into you? That’s what good armour does, it takes the blow. Bad armour passes it on. Simple as that.’

Good armour takes the blow, Bardas repeated to himself, bad armour passes it on. ‘So this is what you do here?’ he said.

Anax grinned from ear to ear. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘it’s a bloody funny way to earn a living. I mean, take yourself, you’re clearly an intelligent man, you’ve been around, been in the wars, I dare say - well of course you have, you’re a hero, I was forgetting. You look at that -’ he pointed to one piece of scrap armour ‘- and then you look at that.’ He indicated another, just as badly mangled. ‘And you say to yourself, they’re both busted, I guess they both failed. Wrong. It’s a philosophy, you see,’ he went on, wiping his nose on the inside of his wrist. ‘It all fails, you see; there’s nothing, no piece of munitions-grade plate in the whole world, that can stand up to Bollo here and the big, big hammer. It’s
how
it fails that matters. And that’s what I can’t get them to understand, ’ he added, a tiny spurt of anger showing in his pale eyes. ‘Because unless you’re me, or someone else who’s been destroying and wrecking stuff day in, day out, all his life, long as he can remember, you can’t even understand there’s a good way to get smashed into scrap, and there’s a bad way. Your generals, now, and your brass in the provincial office, they say, we want a pattern that won’t fail, period. And I say, all right; I can tell them how to make it, specifications, gauges and angles and heat treatment and all the rest of it, but you couldn’t afford it and nobody could ever wear it. You want practical armour, you’ve got to come to an understanding with Bollo here and the number-four felling axe. And he’ll scrap it, every time.’

Bardas nodded, trying to look as if he’d understood something. ‘And you say it’s the sound it makes?’ he said, but the old man just looked impatient.

‘That’s just one test,’ he said. ‘One criterion for one test. Believe me, we don’t just bash on the stuff with hammers and axes. Oh no. We shoot at it with longbows and crossbows, we squash it between rollers, there’s the puncture test, the shear test, the breaking-strain test, the crush test, the flex test - you don’t want to know all the different ways we can prove a piece, if anybody ever gave us a piece that got that far. And the point I’m trying to make is, it always fails - if it didn’t fail, it’d be a pretty useless test. We deal in
extremes
here, Mister Hero; otherwise there wouldn’t be any point.’

Anax suddenly stopped talking; he was staring at something. ‘What is it?’ Bardas asked.

‘Duff copper rivets,’ Anax replied, as if drawing Bardas’ attention to a widening crack in the sky. ‘Look at that, will you?’ He pointed with a long, brittle-looking finger. ‘See there, the rivets in that cop. Shorn off.’

Bardas made a show of looking. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What’s the significance of that?’

Anax sighed. ‘It’s the whole point of copper rivets,’ he said. ‘Your copper rivet, when you put it under a strain it can’t handle, it stretches - look, here, like this.’ He prodded a derelict gauntlet with his toe. ‘That’s what it’s meant to do. Now look at these here, on the cop. Torn the heads off. So that lot’s no good, not that anybody’s going to want to know that. It’d mean junking the whole batch, probably a hundred thousand rivets; if we do that, there’s some clerk in an office in Procurement who’ll have to answer for it. But he doesn’t want to do that, and nobody really believes me anyway, so they won’t take any notice. I tell you, if this wasn’t what I do, I wouldn’t do it any more.’

Bollo, who’d been standing by with the axe over his shoulder, seemed to have lost patience; quite unexpectedly, he whirled the axe round and brought it down on the point of the Iron Man’s shoulder.

‘Sharp clunk,’ Bardas said. ‘Not good?’

‘Terrible,’ replied Anax sadly. ‘But what they’ll do is, they’ll issue double padding to go inside the pauldron cup, and then it won’t seem so bad; at least anybody who wears the stuff won’t wind up with a smashed collar-bone. But it’ll be wrong. And I’ll know.’

‘I suppose so,’ Bardas said evenly.

‘Well of course,’ Anax said. ‘I always know.’

 

Theudas Morosin had found a ship; that is, he’d spoken to a man, a dealer in bulk almonds, who’d been talking to the captain of another ship a week or so before, who’d happened to mention that once he’d found a buyer for his cargo of ebony baluster-rail blanks from Colleon (he had no idea how he’d come to have a hold full of thirty-inch sections of ebony suitable for making baluster rails out of, assuming you had a lathe and a market for ebony baluster rails; price had been a part of the equation, but there’d been more to it than that) he was going to use the proceeds to buy a consignment of seven hundred sacks of duck-belly feathers he’d been promised by a man he knew in Ap’ Helidon; the deal being, he’d have to go to Perimadeia (what used to be Perimadeia) to collect them. ‘Although,’ (he’d said, apparently), ‘it may not be that much of a deal, at that, because who’s to say how big a sack is?’ The man Theudas had been talking to had then asked this other man, he didn’t say how big the sacks were? And the man had replied no, but it can’t be that important, because unless he was saying sack when really he meant bag, seven hundred sacks, at that price, is still a lot of feathers.

‘I see,’ Gannadius replied when his nephew had finished explaining all this. ‘And you’re hoping that when this man, the one who’s buying the feathers, comes to collect his cargo, he’ll take us with him.’

‘Yes,’ Theudas said. ‘And then we’ll be home again. Well, what do you think?’

Gannadius considered his reply. ‘It depends,’ he said. ‘If they’re small sacks, maybe he won’t bother. If they’re big sacks, there may well not be room for us on the boat. And didn’t you say all this depends on him finding a buyer for a shipload of ebony stair-rods?’

‘Baluster rails,’ Theudas amended. ‘Oh, come on. I’d have thought you’d be pleased.’

Gannadius scratched his nose. ‘I’m just trying to tell you not to get your hopes up, that’s all. And didn’t you say this man comes from Ap’ Helidon? I don’t remember you saying he was going to take the feathers to the Island when - if - he got them. I don’t really want to go to Ap’ Helidon, if it’s all the same to you. If it’s where I think it is, it’s part of the Empire. We’d be worse off than we are here.’

‘No, we wouldn’t.’ Theudas folded his arms and looked away. ‘Anywhere would be better than here. Here is
nowhere.
’

Outside the tent somewhere a man was singing, while a couple of other men accompanied him on a pipe and some kind of stringed instrument. The words didn’t seem to make much sense -

 

- but the music was fast and cheerful, and the men sounded like they were enjoying making it; there were worse noises, both outside and inside Gannadius’ head. ‘There’ll be a ship,’ he said sleepily, ‘sooner or later. We’ve just got to be patient, that’s all. What we don’t want to do is go blundering about the western seaboard just for the sake of doing something. For one thing, I might die, and how are you going to explain that to Athli?’

That just made Theudas more irritable. ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything. And what’s all this stuff about dying? You aren’t even ill, you’re just lazy.’

Gannadius smiled. ‘That nice lady doctor wouldn’t agree with you. She says I still need plenty of rest, after what I’ve been through.’