There were more pressing problems, but this one intrigued Mr Pin.
‘How, exactly?’ he said.
‘I thought maybe a maypole,’ said Mr Tulip reflectively. ‘An’ then a display of country dancing, land tillage under the three-field system, several plagues and, if my — ing hand ain’t too tired, the invention of the — ing horse collar.’
‘Sounds good,’ said Mr Pin. ‘Now let’s find that damn dog.’
‘How we gonna do that?’
‘Intelligently,’ said Mr Pin.
‘I hate that — ing way.’
He was called King of the Golden River. This was a recognition of his wealth and achievements and the source of his advance on his former success, which was not quite the classical river of gold. It was a considerable advance on his former nickname, which was Piss Harry.
Harry King had made his fortune by the careful application of the old adage: where there’s muck there’s brass. There was money to be made out of things that people threw away. Especially the very human things that people threw away.
The real foundations of his fortune came when he started leaving empty buckets at various hostelries around the city centre, especially those that were more than a gutter’s length from the river. He charged a very modest fee to take them away when they were full. It became part of the life of every pub landlord; they’d hear a clank in the middle of the night and turn over in their sleep content in the knowledge that one of Piss Harry’s men was, in a small way, making the world a better-smelling place.
They didn’t wonder what happened to the full buckets, but Harry King had learned something that can be the key to great riches: there is very little, however disgusting, that isn’t used somewhere in some industry. There are people out there who want large quantities of ammonia and saltpetre. If you can’t sell it to the alchemists then the farmers probably want it. If even the farmers don’t want it then there is nothing, nothing, however gross, that you can’t sell to the tanners.
Harry felt like the only man in a mining camp who knows what gold looks like.
He started taking on whole streets at a time, and branched out. In the well-to-do areas the householders paid him, paid him, to take away night soil, the by now established buckets, the horse manure, the dustbins and even the dog muck. Dog muck? Did they have any idea how much the tanners paid for the finest white dog muck? It was like being paid to take away squishy diamonds.
Harry couldn’t help it. The world fell over itself to give him money. Someone, somewhere, would pay him for a dead horse or two tons of prawns so far beyond their best-before date it couldn’t be seen with a telescope, and the most wonderful part of all was that someone had already paid him to take them away. If anything absolutely failed to find a buyer, not even from the catmeat men, not even from the tanners, not even from Mr Dibbler himself, there were his mighty compost heaps downstream of the city, where the volcanic heat of decomposition made fertile soil (‘10p a bag, bring your own bag …’) out of everything that was left including, according to rumour, various shadowy businessmen who had come second in a takeover battle (‘… brings up your dahlias a treat’).
He’d kept the woodpulp-and-rags business closer to home, though, along with the huge vats that contained the golden foundations of his fortune, because it was the only part of his business that his wife Effie would talk about. Rumour had it that she had also been behind the removal of the much-admired sign over the entrance to his yard, which said: H. King — Taking the Piss Since 1961. Now it read: H. King — Recycling Nature’s Bounty.
A small door within the large gates was opened by a troll. Harry was very forward-looking when it came to employing the non-human races, and had been among the first employers in the city to give a job to a troll. As far as organic substances were concerned, they had no sense of smell.
‘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.’