K. Parker: The Proof House

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was looking for Dondai.’

The man looked at him, frowning slightly.

‘Dondai the fletcher,’ Temrai repeated. ‘Is he asleep?’

‘You could say that,’ the man replied. ‘He died three days ago.’

‘Oh.’ For some reason Temrai was shocked, out of all proportion. True, he’d been eating Dondai’s white-flour pancakes since he was a boy, but that was all the old man had meant to him, a sure hand with a pottery bowl and a flat iron pan. ‘I’m so sorry.’

The man shrugged. ‘He was eighty-four,’ he replied. ‘When people get that old, they tend to die. It’s not as if it’s unfair or anything. I’m his nephew, by the way, Dassascai. You were a friend of his, then?’

‘An acquaintance,’ Temrai replied. ‘You haven’t been in the army long, have you?’

‘I’m not in the army,’ Dassascai replied. ‘Until recently, I had a stall in Ap’ Escatoy market, selling fish. Lived there most of my life, in fact.’

‘Really?’ Temrai said. ‘It must have been terrible, these last few years.’

Dassascai shook his head. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It was a port, remember, and the provincial office couldn’t spare any ships. There were never any shortages, people were spending money; it was a good war as wars go.’

Temrai nodded slowly. ‘So what happened to you?’ he asked. ‘I’d sort of gathered that not many people made it out alive.’

‘That’s quite right,’ Dassascai said. ‘Fortunately, I wasn’t there when it happened; I was on my way here, to see my uncle like a good nephew and then on to the Island to buy salt cod. In fact, I left two days before it happened, so you can see I’m a very lucky boy. Except,’ he added with a sour grin, ‘that I never take my wife and family with me on business trips. Plus, there’s the small matter of a lifetime’s accumulated property, though you aren’t really supposed to mention that in the same breath as family. But the truth is, I know which I miss more.’

Temrai sat down on the ground, keeping the fire between them. ‘So what are you going to do? Follow in your uncle’s footsteps?’

‘Pulling wing-feathers out of live geese for the rest of my life? Hardly.’ Dassascai stood up, a furiously struggling goose hanging upside down by its legs in one hand, a small bunch of feathers in the other. ‘For one thing, goose down makes me sneeze. For another, they stink. I’m doing this now because if I don’t work, I don’t eat. But something else’ll come along, and when it does I’ll be on my way.’

‘Fair enough,’ Temrai said. ‘Any idea what form this something might take? In my line of work I occasionally come across good opportunities that need good people; I could keep my eyes open for you.’

Dassascai looked at him through the flames. ‘And your line of work is?’

‘Administration, mostly,’ Temrai replied. ‘And I hang about at staff meetings. That sort of thing.’

‘A man of power and influence,’ Dassascai replied. ‘Well, I’d better tell you what I’m good at. I can buy, and I can sell; I’m used to travelling, I can bargain, usually get a good deal. My mother used to say I’ve got an honest face. That’s about it.’

Temrai smiled. ‘You’d probably have made a good Perimadeian,’ he said. ‘Or an Islander. How did you come to be in Ap’ Escatoy, anyhow?’

Dassascai made a sudden swoop and stood up again, cramping another struggling goose to his chest. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, sitting down. ‘When I was a kid I fell out with my father about something or other. He got angry, I walked away and kept going. Some time later I found myself in Ap’ Escatoy, hiding behind a row of barrels with a basket of stolen crayfish. Next thing I knew, I’d sold the crayfish and bought some more at the wharf. After that it was all reassuringly boring for a while. I like life better when it’s boring.’

Temrai rubbed the tip of his nose with his knuckle. ‘Do you?’ he said.

‘You don’t, obviously.’

‘I’m very hard to bore,’ Temrai answered. ‘Nearly everything interests me. For instance, I’d find building up a fishmonger’s business from scratch very interesting indeed.’

Dassascai shook his head. ‘Don’t be so sure,’ he said. ‘You stand behind a trestle in the market all day, wondering how the hell you’re going to shift the stock before it starts to smell if nobody ever stops and buys anything. You do this for most of the day, even on days when you sell out. Your feet hurt. You stare at the faces of dead fish and they stare back at you. Ten years later, you rent a covered stall with a torn awning. Five years after that, you worry about how much money your wife’s spending on carpets, and try and figure out how exactly the hired help’s ripping you off without it showing up in the accounts. Five years after that -’ he lifted his head and smiled ‘- some bastard saps the walls of your city and you get another job plucking geese. The boring bits were the best, no doubt about it.’

Temrai stood up. ‘I think you may well be right,’ he said. ‘If I hear of anything really dull, I’ll let you know.’

‘Thanks,’ Dassascai replied. ‘I’d like that.’

When he got back to his tent, Temrai found Bossocai the engineer and Albocai the captain of the reserves waiting for him, sitting on little folding stools just outside the flap. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘have you been waiting long?’

‘No, not at all,’ replied Albocai, who was a rotten liar.

‘I’ve just been talking to a most interesting spy,’ Temrai went on, pushing open the flap and waving them through into the tent. ‘Keep your voices down, by the way, my wife’s still asleep.’

‘How do you know he was a spy?’ Bossocai asked.

Temrai grinned. ‘If he’d had SPY tattooed on his forehead it couldn’t have been any plainer,’ he replied. ‘He was a nice man. I knew his uncle for years.’

Albocai frowned. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’d better have him arrested. What’s his name?’

‘No need for that,’ Temrai replied. ‘It’s not as if we’ve got any secrets worth stealing. In fact,’ he continued, with a smile the other two couldn’t understand, ‘being a spy in our camp must be the most boring job on earth, so that’s all right. I’m not sure who he’s spying for, but my guess is that he’s been sent by the provincial office. That’s interesting, don’t you think?’

‘I think you’re either wrong or taking this far too lightly,’ Albocai said. ‘Are you sure he’s a spy?’

Temrai nodded. ‘When a man passes himself off as the nephew of a man I’ve known all my life and who never had a brother or a sister, let alone a nephew, and sits there knowing perfectly well who I am while pretending he doesn’t know me, and then, in a not-so-roundabout way, asks me to employ him as a spy, I draw the logical conclusion. That reminds me – Albocai, I want you to find out what happened to a man called Dondai-’

‘The goose-plucker? He died.’

‘Ah, right. Find out more about it, would you? If he was murdered, you can have your spy with my blessing, and the next time I see him I’ll expect him to be in several pieces. Anyway, that’s enough about that. What can I do for you?’

‘Well,’ said the engineer, and launched into a detailed technical enquiry about torsion-engine rope settings, a subject about which Temrai knew more than anybody else in the army; after he’d got his answer, Albocai chivvied him about finalising the order of battle for the reserve light infantry. When they’d both gone, Temrai looked at the bed and yawned; he felt sleepy, and it was far too late now to go to bed. He picked up his quiver, sat down on the clothes-press and began whetting the blades of his arrowheads on a leather strop.