‘Don’t be daft,’ said Victor. ‘How can we look at our own eyes?’
Gaspode shrugged. ‘You could look at each other’s,’ he suggested.
They automatically turned to face each other.
There was a long drawn-out moment. Gaspode employed it to urinate noisily against a tent peg.
Eventually Victor said, ‘Wow.’
Ginger said, ‘Mine, too?’
‘Yes. Doesn’t it hurt?’
‘You should know.’
‘There you are, then,’ said Gaspode. ‘And you look at Dibbler next time you see him. Really look, I mean.’
Victor rubbed his eyes, which were beginning to water. ‘It’s as though Holy Wood has called us here, is doing something to us and has, has-‘
‘-branded us,’ said Ginger bitterly. ‘That’s what it’s done.’
‘It, er, it does look quite attractive, actually,’ said Victor gallantly. ‘Gives them a sort of sparkle.’
A shadow fell across the sand.
‘Ah, there you are,’ said Dibbler. He put his arms around their shoulders as they stood up, and gave them a sort of hug. ‘You young people, always going off alone together,’ he said archly. ‘Great business. Great business. Very romantic. But we’ve got a click to make, and I’ve got lots of people standing around waiting for you, so let’s do it.’
‘See what I mean?’ muttered Gaspode, very quietly.
When you knew what you were looking for, you couldn’t miss it.
In the centre of both of Dibbler’s eyes was a tiny golden star.
In the heartlands of the great dark continent of Klatch the air was heavy and pregnant with the promise of the coming monsoon.
Bullfrogs croaked in the rushes[14] by the slow brown river. Crocodiles dozed on the mudflats.
Nature was holding its breath.
A cooing broke out in the pigeon loft of Azhural N’choate, stock dealer. He stopped dozing on the veranda, and went over to see what had caused the excitement.
In the vast pens behind the shack a few threadbare bewilderbeests, marked down for a quick sale, yawning and cudding in the heat, looked up in alarm as N’choate leapt the veranda steps in one bound and tore towards them.
He rounded the zebra pens and homed in on his assistant M’Bu, who was peacefully mucking out the ostriches.
‘How many-‘ he stopped, and began to wheeze.
M’Bu, who was twelve years old, dropped his shovel and patted him heavily on the back.
‘How many-‘ he tried again.
‘You been overdoing it again, boss?’ said M’Bu in a concerned voice.
‘How many elephants we got?’
‘I just done them,’ said M’Bu. ‘We got three.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, boss,’ said M’Bu, evenly. ‘It’s easy to be sure, with elephants.’
Azhural crouched in the red dust and hurriedly began to scrawl figures with a stick.
‘Old Muluccai’s bound to have half a dozen,’ he muttered. ‘And Tazikel’s usually got twenty or so, and then the people on the delta generally have-‘
‘Someone want elephants, boss?’
‘-got fifteen head, he was telling me, plus also there’s a load at the logging camp probably going cheap, call it two dozen-‘
‘Someone want a lot of elephants, boss?’
‘-was saying there’s a herd over T’etse way, shouldn’t be a problem, then there’s all the valleys over towards-‘
M’Bu leaned on the fence and waited.
‘Maybe two hundred, give or take ten,’ said Azhural, throwing down the stick. ‘Nowhere near enough.’
‘You can’t give or take ten elephants, boss,’ said M’Bu firmly. He knew that counting elephants was a precision job. A man might be uncertain about how many wives he had, but never about elephants. Either you had one, or you didn’t.
‘Our agent in Klatch has an order for’, Azhural swallowed, ‘a thousand elephants. A thousand! Immediately! Cash on delivery!’
Azhural let the paper drop to the ground. ‘To a place called Ankh-Morpork,’ he said despondently. He sighed. ‘It would have been nice,’ he said.
M’Bu scratched his head and stared at the hammerhead clouds massing over Mt F’twangi. Soon the dry veldt would boom to the thunder of the rains.
Then he reached down and picked up the stick.
‘What’re you doing?’ said Azhural.
‘Drawing a map, boss,’ said M’Bu.
Azhural shook his head. ‘Not worth it, boy. Three thousand miles to Ankh, I reckon, I let myself get carried away. Too many miles, not enough elephants.’
‘We could go across the plains, boss,’ said M’Bu. ‘Lot of elephants on the plains. Send messengers ahead. We could pick up plenty more elephants on the way, no problem. That whole plain just about covered in damn elephants.’
‘No, we’d have to go around on the coast,’ said the dealer, drawing a long curving line in the sand. ‘The reason being, there’s the jungle just here,’ he tapped on the parched ground, ‘and here,’ he tapped again, slightly concussing an emerging locust that had optimistically mistaken the first tap for the onset of the rains. ‘No roads in the jungle.’
M’Bu took the stick and drew a straight line through the jungle.
‘Where a thousand elephants want to go, boss, they don’t need no roads.’
Azhural considered this. Then he took the stick and drew a jagged line by the jungle.
‘But here’s the Mountains of the Sun,’ he said. ‘Very high. Lots of deep ravines. And no bridges.’
M’Bu took the stick, indicated the jungle, and grinned.
‘I know where there’s a lot of prime timber just been uprooted, boss,’ he said.
‘Yeah? OK, boy, but we’ve still got to get it into the mountains.’
‘It just so happen that a t’ousand real strong elephants’ll be goin’ that way, boss.’
M’Bu grinned again. His tribe went in for sharpening their teeth to points.[15] He handed back the stick.
Azhural’s mouth opened slowly.
‘By the seven moons of Nasreem,’ he breathed. ‘We could do it, you know. It’s only, oh, thirteen or fourteen hundred miles that way. Maybe less, even. Yeah. We could really do it.’
‘Yes, boss.’
‘Y’know, I’ve always wanted to do something big with my life. Something real,’ said Azhural. ‘I mean, an ostrich here, a giraffe there . . . it’s not the sort of thing you get remembered for . . . ‘ He stared at the purple-grey horizon. ‘We could do it, couldn’t we?’ he said.
‘Sure, boss.’
‘Right over the mountains!’
‘Sure, boss.’
If you looked really hard, you could just see that the purple-grey was topped with white.
‘They’re pretty high mountains,’ said Azhural, his voice now edged with doubt.
‘Slope go up, slope go down,’ said M’Bu gnomically.
‘That’s true,’ said Azhural. ‘Like, on average, it’s flat all the way.’
He gazed at the mountains again.
‘A thousand elephants,’ he muttered. ‘D’you know, boy, when they built the Tomb of King Leonid of Ephebe they used a hundred elephants to cart the stone? And two hundred elephants, history tells us, were employed in the building of the palace of the Rhoxie in Klatch city.’
Thunder rumbled in the distance.
‘A thousand elephants,’ Azhural repeated. ‘A thousand elephants. I wonder what they want them for?’
The rest of the day passed in a trance for Victor.
There was more galloping and fighting, and more rearranging of time. Victor still found that hard to understand. Apparently the film could be cut up and then stuck together again later, so that things happened in the right order. And some things didn’t have to happen at all. He saw the artist draw one card which said ‘In thee Kinges’ Palace, One Houre Latre.’
One hour of Time had been vanished, just like that. Of course, he knew that it hadn’t really been surgically removed from his life. It was the sort of thing that happened all the time in books. And on the stage, too. He’d seen a group of strolling players once, and the performance had leapt magically from ‘A Battlefield in Tsort’ to ‘The Ephebian Fortresse, That Nighte’ with no more than a brief descent of the sackcloth curtain and a lot of muffled bumping and cursing as the scenery was changed.
But this was different. Ten minutes after doing a scene, you’d do another scene that was taking place the day before, somewhere else, because Dibbler had rented the tents for both scenes and didn’t want to have to pay any more rent than necessary. You just had to try and forget about everything but Now, and that was hard when you were also waiting every moment for that fading sensation . . .
It didn’t come. Just after another half-hearted fight scene Dibbler announced that it was all finished.
‘Aren’t we going to do the ending?’ said Ginger.
‘You did that this morning,’ said Soll.
‘Oh.’
There was a chattering noise as the demons were let out of their box and sat swinging their little legs on the edge of the lid and passing a tiny cigarette from hand to hand. The extras queued up for their wages. The camel kicked the Vice-President in Charge of Camels. The handlemen wound the great reels of film out of the boxes and went away to whatever arcane cutting and gluing the handlemen got up to in the hours of darkness. Mrs Cosmopilite, Vice-President in Charge of Wardrobe, gathered up the costumes and toddled off, possibly to put them back on the beds.