‘Gaspode?’ said Victor levelly.
‘What?’
‘You were a performing dog. How come you know all this stuff?’
‘I ain’t just a pretty face.’
‘You aren’t even a pretty face, Gaspode.’
The little dog shrugged. ‘I’ve always had eyes and ears,’ he said. ‘You’d be amazed, the stuff you see and hear when you’re a dog. I dint know what any of it meant at the time, of course. Now I do.’
Victor stared at the pages again. There certainly was a figure which, if you half-closed your eyes, looked very much like a statue of a knight with his hands resting on his sword.
‘It might not mean a man,’ he said. ‘Pictographic writing doesn’t work like that. It’s all down to context, you see.’ He racked his brains to think of some of the books he’d seen. ‘For example, in the Agatean language the signs for “woman” and “slave” written down together actually mean “wife”.’
He looked closely at the page. The dead man – or the sleeping man, or the standing man resting his hands on his sword, the figure was so stylized it was hard to be sure seemed to appear beside another common picture. He ran his finger along the line of pictograms.
‘See,’ he said, ‘it could be the man figure is only part of a word. See? It’s always to the right of this other picture, which looks a bit like – a bit like a doorway, or something. So it might really mean-‘he hesitated.’ “Doorway/man”,’ he hazarded.
He turned the book slightly.
‘Could be some old king,’ said Gaspode. ‘Could mean something like The Man with the Sword is Imprisoned, or something. Or maybe it means Watch Out, There’s a Man with a Sword behind the Door. Could mean anything, really.’
Victor squinted at the book again. ‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t look dead. Just . . . not alive. Waiting to be alive? A waiting man with a sword?’
Victor peered at the little man-figure. It had hardly any features, but still managed to look vaguely familiar.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘it looks just like my Uncle Osric . . .’
Clickaclickaclicka. Click.
The film spun to a standstill. There was a thunder of applause, a stamping of feet and a barrage of empty banged grain bags.
In the very front row of the Odium the Librarian stared up at the now-empty screen. It was the fourth time that afternoon he’d watched Shadow of the Dessert, because there’s something about a 300lb orangutan that doesn’t encourage people to order it out of the pit between houses. A drift of peanut shells and screwed up paper bags lay around his feet.
The Librarian loved the clicks. They spoke to something in his soul. He’d even started writing a story which he thought would make a very good moving picture.[18] Everyone he showed it to said it was jolly good, often even before they’d read it.
But something about this click was worrying him. He’d sat through it four times, and he was still worried.
He eased himself out of the three seats he was occupying and knuckled his way up the aisle and into the little room where Bezam was rewinding the film.
Bezam looked up as the door opened.
‘Get out-‘ he began, and then grinned desperately and said, ‘Hallo, sir. Pretty good click, eh? We’ll be showing it again any minute now and – what the hell are you doing? You can’t do that!’
The Librarian ripped the huge roll of film off the projector and pulled it through his leathery fingers, holding it up to the light. Bezam tried to snatch it back and got a palm in his chest that sat him firmly on the floor, where great coils of film piled up on top of him.
He watched in horror as the great ape grunted, grasped a piece of the film in both hands and, with two bites, edited it. Then the Librarian picked him up, dusted him off, patted him on the head, thrust the great pile of unwound click into his helpless arms, and ambled swiftly out of the room with a few frames of film dangling from one paw.
Bezam stared helplessly after him.
‘You’re banned!’ he shouted, when he judged the ape to be safely out of earshot.
Then he looked down at the two severed ends.
Breaks in films weren’t unusual. Bezam had spent many a flustered few minutes feverishly cutting and pasting while the audience cheerfully stamped its feet and high-spiritedly threw peanuts, knives and double-headed axes at the screen.
He let the coils fall around him and reached for the scissors and glue. At least – he found, after holding the two ends up to the lantern – the Librarian hadn’t taken a very interesting bit. Odd, that. Bezam wouldn’t have put it past the ape to have taken a bit where the girl was definitely showing too much chest, or one of the fight scenes. But all he’d wanted was a piece that showed the Sons galloping down from their mountain fastness, in single file, on identical camels.
‘Dunno what he wanted that for,’ he muttered, taking the lid off the glue pot. ‘It just shows a lot of rocks.’
Victor and Gaspode stood among the sand dunes near the beach.
‘That’s where the driftwood but is,’ said Victor, pointing, ‘and then if you look hard you can see there’s a sort of road pointing straight towards the hill. But there’s nothing on the hill but the old trees.’
Gaspode looked back at Holy Wood Bay.
‘Funny it bein’ circular,’ he said.
‘I thought so,’ said Victor.
‘I heard once where there was this city that was so wicked that the gods turned it into a puddle of molten glass,’ said Gaspode, apropos of nothing. ‘And the only person who saw it happen was turned into a pillar of salt by day and a cheese shaker by night.’
‘Gosh. What had the people been doing?’
‘Dunno. Prob’ly not much. It doesn’t take much to annoy gods.’
‘Me good boy! Good boy Laddie!’
The dog came streaking over the dunes, a comet of gold and orange hair. It skidded to a halt in front of Gaspode, and then began to dance around excitedly, yapping.
‘He’s escaped and he wants me to play with him,’ said Gaspode despondently. ‘Ridiculous, ain’t it? Laddie drop dead.’
Laddie rolled over obediently, all four legs in the air.
‘See? He understands every word I say,’ muttered Gaspode.
‘He likes you,’ said Victor.
‘Huh,’ sniffed Gaspode. ‘How’re dogs ever goin’ to amount to anything if they bounce around worshipping people just ‘cos they’ve been given a meal? What’s he want me to do with this??’
Laddie had dropped a stick in front of Gaspode and was looking at him expectantly.
‘He wants you to throw it,’ said Victor.
‘What for?’
‘So he can bring it back.’
‘What I don’t understand,’ said Gaspode, as Victor picked up the stick and hurled it away, Laddie racing along underneath it, ‘is how come we’re descended from wolves. I mean, your average wolf, he’s a bright bugger, know what I mean? Chock full of cunnin’ an’ like that. We’re talking grey paws racing over the trackless tundra, is what I’m getting at.’
Gaspode looked wistfully at the distant mountains. ‘And suddenly a handful of generations later we’ve got Percy the Pup here with a cold nose, bright eyes, glossy coat and the brains of a stunned herring.’
‘And you,’ said Victor. Laddie whirled back in a storm of sand and dropped the damp stick in front of him. Victor picked it up and threw it again. Laddie bounded off, yapping himself sick with excitement.
‘Well, yeah,’ said Gaspode, ambling along in a bowlegged swagger. ‘Only I can look after myself. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. You think Dopey the Mutt there would last five minutes in Ankh-Morpork? He set one paw in some o’ the streets, he’s three sets of fur gloves an’ Crispy Fried No. 27 at the nearest Klatchian all-night carryout.’
Victor threw the stick again.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘who was the famous Gaspode you’re named after?’
‘You never heard of him?’
‘No.’
‘He was dead famous.’
‘He was a dog?’
‘Yeah. It was years and years ago. There was this ole bloke in Ankh who snuffed it, and he belonged to one of them religions where they bury you after you’re dead, an’, they did, and he had this ole dog-‘
‘-called Gaspode-?’
‘Yeah, and this ole dog had been his only companion and after they buried the man he lay down on his grave and howled and howled for a couple of weeks. Growled at everybody who came near. An’ then died.’
Victor paused in the act of throwing the stick again.
‘That’s very sad,’ he said. He threw. Laddie tore along underneath it, and disappeared into a stand of scrubby trees on the hillside.