Moving pictures tds-10

by Terry David John Pratchett

  'And the People said to one another, Funny, he lookes just like my Uncle Osbert . . . '

  The Librarian turned the page.

  ' . . . But there were among them, humans and animals alike, those touched by the magic of Holy Wood. It goeth through the generations like an ancient curse, until the priests cease in their Remembrance and the Golden Man sleepeth. Then let the world Beware . . . '

  The Librarian let the book snap shut.

  It wasn't an uncommon legend. -He'd read it before at least, had read most of it in books considerably less dangerous than this. You came across variants in all the cities of the Sto Plain. There had been a city once, in the mists of pre-history bigger than Ankh-Morpork, if that were possible. And the inhabitants had done something, some sort of unspeakable crime not just against Mankind or the gods but against the very nature of the universe itself, which had been so dreadful that it had sunk beneath the sea one stormy night. Only a few people had survived to carry to the barbarian peoples in the less-advanced parts of the Disc all the arts and crafts of civilization, such as usury and macrame.

  No-one had ever really taken it seriously. It was just one of those usual 'If you don't stop it you'll go blind' myths that civilizations tended to hand on to their descendants.

  After all, Ankh-Morpork itself was generally considered as wicked a city as you could hope to find in a year of shore leaves, and seemed to have avoided any kind of supernatural vengeance, although it was always possible that it had taken place and no-one had noticed.

  Legend had always put the nameless city far away and long ago.

  No-one knew where it was, or even if it had existed.

  The Librarian glanced at the symbols again.

  They were very familiar. They were on the old ruins all over Holy Wood.

  Azhural stood on a low hill, watching the sea of elephants move below him. Here and there a supply wagon bobbed between the dusty grey bodies like a rudderless boat. A mile of veldt was being churned into a soggy mud wallow, bare of grass although, by the smell of it, it'd be the greenest patch on the Disc after the rains came.

  He dabbed at his eyes with a corner of his robe.

  Three hundred and sixty-three! Who'd have thought it?

  The air was solid with the piqued trumpeting of three hundred and sixty-three elephants. And with the hunting and trapping parties already going on ahead, there should be plenty more. According to M'Bu, anyway. And he wasn't going to argue.

  Funny, that. For years he'd thought of M'Bu as a sort of mobile smile. A handy lad with a brush and shovel, but not what you might call a major achiever.

  And then suddenly someone somewhere wanted a thousand elephants, and the lad had raised his head and a gleam had come into his eye and you could see that under that grin was a skilled kilopachydermatolist ready to answer the call. Funny. You could know someone for their whole life and not realize that the gods had put them in this world to move a thousand elephants around the place.

  Azhural had no sons. He'd already made up his mind to leave everything to his assistant. Everything he had at this

  point amounted to three hundred and sixty-three elephants and, ahaha, a mammoth overdraft, but it was the thought that counted.

  M'Bu trotted up the path towards him, his clipboard held firmly under one arm.

  'Everything ready, boss,' he said. 'You just got to say the word.'

  Azhural drew himself up. He looked around at the heaving plain, the distant baobab trees, the purple mountains. Oh, yes. The mountains. He'd had misgivings about the mountains. He'd mentioned them to M'Bu, who said, 'We'll cross them bridges when we get to 'em, boss,' and when Azhural had pointed out that there weren't any bridges, had looked him squarely in the eye and said firmly, 'First we build them bridge, then we cross 'em.'

  Far beyond the mountains was the Circle Sea and Ankh-Morpork and this Holy Wood place. Far-away places with strange sounding names.

  A wind blew across the veldt, carrying faint whispers, even here.

  Azhural raised his staff.

  'It's fifteen hundred miles to Ankh-Morpork,' he said. 'We've got three hundred and sixty-three elephants, fifty carts of forage, the monsoon's about to break and we're wearing . . . we're wearing . . . sort of things, like glass, only dark . . . dark glass things on our eyes . . . ' His voice trailed off. His brow furrowed, as if he'd just been listening to his own voice and hadn't understood it. '

  The air seemed to glitter.

  He saw M'Bu staring at him.

  He shrugged. 'Let's go,' he said.

  M'Bu cupped his hands. He'd spent all night working out the order of the march.

  'Blue Section bilong Uncle N'gru - forward!' he shouted. 'Yellow Section bilong Aunti Googool - forward! Green Section bilong Second-cousin! Kck! forward . . . '

  An hour later the veldt in front of the low hill was deserted except for a billion flies and one dung beetle who couldn't believe his luck.

  Something went 'plop' on the red dust, throwing up a little crater.

  And again, and again.

  Lightning split the trunk of a nearby baobab.

  The rains began.

  Victor's back was beginning to ache. Carrying young women to safety looked a good idea on paper, but had major drawbacks after the first hundred yards.

  'Have you any idea where she lives?' he said. 'And is it somewhere close?'

  'No idea,' said Gaspode.

  'She once said something about it being over a clothes shop,' said Victor.

  'That'll be in the alley alongside Borgle's then,' said Gaspode.

  Gaspode and Laddie led the way through the alleys and up a rickety outside staircase. Maybe they smelled out Ginger's room. Victor wasn't going to argue with mysterious animal senses.

  Victor went up the back stairs as quietly as possible. He was dimly aware that where people stayed was often infested by the Common or Greatly Suspicious Landlady, and he felt that he had enough problems as it was.

  He used Ginger's feet to push open the door.

  It was a small room, low-ceilinged and furnished with the sad, washed-out furniture found in rented rooms across the multiverse. At least, that's how it had started out.

  What it was furnished with now was Ginger.

  She had saved every poster. Even those from early clicks, when she was just in very small print as A Girl. They were thumb-tacked to the walls. Ginger's face and his own stared at him from every angle.

  There was a large mirror at one end of the poky room, and a couple of half-burned candles in front of him.

  Victor deposited the girl carefully on the narrow bed and then stared around him, very carefully. His sixth, seventh and eighth senses were screaming at him. He was in a place of magic.

  'It's like a sort of temple,' he said. 'A temple to . . . herself.'

  'It gives me the willies,' said Gaspode.

  Victor stared. Maybe he'd always successfully avoided being awarded the pointy hat and big staff, but he had acquired wizard instincts. He had a sudden vision of a city under the sea, with octopuses curling stealthily through the drowned doorways and lobsters watching the streets.

  'Fate don't like it when people take up more space than they ought to. Everyone knows that.'

  I'm going to be the most famous person in the whole world, thought Victor. That's what she sail. He shook his head.

  'No,' he said aloud. 'She just likes posters. It's just ordinary vanity.'

  It didn't sound believable, even to him. The room fairly hummed with . . .

  . . . what? He hadn't felt anything like it before. Power of some sort, certainly. Something that was brushing tantalizingly against his senses. Not exactly magic. At least, not the kind he was used to. But something that seemed similar while not being the same, like sugar compared with salt; the same shape and the same colour, but . . .

  Ambition wasn't magical. Powerful, yes, but not magical . . . surely?

  Magic wasn't difficult. That was the big secret that the whole baroque edifice
of wizardry had been set up to conceal. Anyone with a bit of intelligence and enough perseverance could do magic, which was why the wizards cloaked it with rituals and the whole pointyhat business.

  The trick was to do magic and get away with it.

  Because it was as if the human race was a field of corn and magic helped the users grow just that bit taller, so that they stood out. That attracted the attention of the gods and Victor hesitated other Things. outside this world.

  People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end.

  All over the entire room, sometimes.

  He pictured Ginger, back on the beach. I want to be the most famous person in the whole world. Perhaps that was something new, come to think of it. Not ambition for gold, or power, or land or all the things that were familiar parts of the human world. Just ambition to be yourself, as big as possible. Not ambition for, but to be.

  He shook his head. He was just in some room in some cheap building in some town that was about as real as, as, as, well, as the thickness of a click. It wasn't the place to have thoughts like this.

  The important thing was to remember that Holy Wood wasn't a real place at all.

  He stared at the posters again. You just get one chance, she said. You live for maybe seventy years, and if you're lucky you get one chance. Think of all the natural skiers who are born in deserts. Think of all the genius blacksmiths who were born hundreds of years before anyone invented the horse. All the skills that are never used. All the wasted chances.

  How lucky for me, he thought gloomily, that I happen to be alive at this time.

  Ginger turned over in her sleep. At least her breathing was more regular now.

  'Come on,' said Gaspode. 'It's not right, you being alone in a lady's boodwah.'

  'I'm not alone,' Victor said. 'She's with me.'

  'That's the point,' said Gaspode.

  'Woof,' Laddie added, loyally.

  'You know,' said Victor, following the dogs down the stairs, 'I'm beginning to feel there's something wrong here. There's something going on and I don't know what it is. Why was she trying to get into the hill?'

  'Prob'ly in league with dread Powers,' said Gaspode.

  'The city and the hill and the old book and everything,' said Victor, ignoring this. 'It all makes sense if only I knew what was connecting it.'

  He stepped out into the early evening, into the lights and noise of Holy Wood.

  'Tomorrow we'll go up there in the daylight and sort this out once and for all,' he said.

  'No, we won't,' said Gaspode. 'The reason being, tomorrow we're goin' to Ankh-Morpork, remember?'

  'We?' said Victor. 'Ginger and I are going. I didn't know about you.'

  'Laddie goin', too,' said Gaspode. 'I-'

  'Good boy Laddie!'

  'Yeah, yeah. I heard the trainers say. So I've got to go with him to see he don't get into any trouble, style of fing.'

  Victor yawned. 'Well, I'm going to go to bed. We'll probably have to start early.'

  Gaspode looked innocently up and down the alley. Somewhere a door opened and there was the sound of drunken laughter.

  'I fought I might have a bit of a stroll before turnin' in,' he said. 'Show Laddie-'

  'Laddie good boy!'

  '-the sights and that.'

  Victor looked doubtful.

  'Don't keep him out too late,' he said. 'People will worry.9

  'Yeah, right,' said Gaspode. 'G'night.'

  He sat and watched Victor wander off.

  'Huh,' he said, under his dreadful breath. 'Catch anyone worryin' about me.' He glared up at Laddie, who sprang to obedient attention.

  'Right, young fells-me-pup,' he said. ' 'S time you got educated. Lesson One, Glomming Free Drinks in Bars. It's lucky for you', he added, 'that you met me.'

  Two canine shapes staggered uncertainly up the midnight street.

  'We're poor li'l lambs', Gaspode howled, 'wot have loorst our way . . . ' 'Woof! Woof! Woof!'

  'We're li'l loorst sheeps wot have wot have . . . ' Gaspode sagged down, and scratched an ear, or at least where he vaguely thought an ear might be. His leg waved uncertainly in the air. Laddie gave him a sympathetic look.

  It had been an amazingly successful evening. Gaspode had always got his free drinks by simply sitting and staring intently at people until they got uncomfortable and poured him some beer in a saucer in the hope that he would drink it and go away. It was slow and tedious, but as a technique it had served him well. Whereas Laddie . . .

  Laddie did tricks. Laddie could drink out of bottles. Laddie could bark the number of fingers people held up; so could Gaspode, of course, but it had never occurred to him that such an activity could be rewarded.

  Laddie could home in on young women who were being taken out for the evening by a hopeful swain and lay his head on their lap and give them such a soulful look that the swain would buy him a saucer of beer and a bag of goldfish-shaped biscuits just in order to impress the prospective loved-one. Gaspode had never been able to do that, because he was too short for laps and, anyway, got nothing but disgusted screams if he tried it.

  He'd sat under the table in perplexed disapproval to begin with, and then in alcoholic perplexed disapproval, because Laddie was generosity itself when it came to sharing saucers of beer.

  Now, after they'd both been thrown out, Gaspode decided it was time for a lecture in true dogness.

  'You don't want to go himblong. Umlong. Humbling yourself to 'umans,' he said. 'It's letting everyone down. We'll never frow off the shackles of dependency on mankind if dogs like you go aroun' bein' glad to see people the whole time. I was person'ly disgusted when you did that Lyin'-on-your-back-and-playin'-dead routine, let me tell you.'

  'Woof.'

  'You're just a running dog of the human imperialists,' said Gaspode severely.

  Laddie put his paws over his nose.

  Gaspode tried to stand up, tripped over his legs, and sat down heavily. After a while a couple of huge tears coursed down his fur.

  'Concourse,' he said, 'I never had a chance, you know.' He managed to get back on all four feet. 'I mean, look at the start I had in life. Frone inna river inna sack. An actual sack, Dear little puppy dog opens his eyes, look out in wonder at the world, style offing, he's in this sack.' The tears dripped off his nose. 'For two weeks I thought the brick was my mother.'

  'Woof,' said Laddie, with uncomprehending sympathy.

  'Just my luck they threw me in the Ankh,' Gaspode went on. 'Any other river, I'd have drowned and gone to doggy heaven. I heard where this big black ghostly dog comes up to you when you die an' says, your time has gome. Cone. Come.'

  Gaspode stared at nothing much. 'Can't sink in the Ankh, though,' he said thoughtfully. 'Ver' tough river, the Ankh.'

  'Woof.'

  'It shouldn't happen to a dog,' said Gaspode. 'Metaphorically.'

  'Woof.'

  Gaspode peered blearily at Laddie's bright, alert and irrevocably stupid face.

  'You don't understand a bloody word I've been saying, do you?' he muttered.

  'Woof.' said Laddie, begging.

  'Lucky bugger,' sighed Gaspode.

  There was a commotion at the other end of the alley. He heard a voice say, 'There he is! Here, Laddie! Here, boy!' The words dripped relief.

  'It's the Man,' growled Gaspode. 'You don't have to go.)

  'Good boy Laddie! Laddie good boy!' barked Laddie, trotting forward obediently, if a little unsteadily.

  'We've been looking for you everywhere!' muttered one of the trainers, raising a stick.

  'Don't hit it!' said the other trainer. 'You'll ruin everything.' He peered into the alley, and met Gaspode's stare coming the other way.

  'That's the fleabag that's been hanging around,' he said. 'It gives me the creeps.'

  'Heave something at it,' suggested the other man.

  The trainer reached down and picked up a stone. When he stood up again the alley was empty. Drunk or sober, Gaspode had
perfect reflexes in certain circumstances.

  'See?' the trainer said, glaring at the shadows. 'It's like it's some kind of mind reader.'

  'It's just a mutt,' said his companion. 'Don't worry about it. Come on, get the leash on this one and let's get him back before Mr Dibbler finds out.'

  Laddie followed them obediently back to Century of the Fruitbat, and allowed himself to be chained up to his kennel. Possibly he didn't like the idea, but it was hard to be sure in the network of duties, obligations and vague emotional shadows that made up what, for want of a better word, had to be called his mind.

  He pulled experimentally on the chain once or twice, and then lay down, awaiting developments.

  After a while a small hoarse voice on the other side of the fence said, 'I could send you a bone with a file in it, only you'd eat it.'

  Laddie perked up.

  'Good boy Laddie! Good boy Gaspode!'

  'Ssh! Ssh! At least they ort to let you speak to a lawyer,' said Gaspode. 'Chaining someone up's against human rights.'

  'Woof.'

  'Anyway, I paid 'em back. I followed the 'orrible one back to his house an' piddled all down his front door.'

  'Woof.'

  Gaspode sighed, and waddled away. Sometimes, in his heart of hearts, he wondered whether it wouldn't after all be nice to belong to someone. Not just be owned by them or chained up by them, but actually belong, so that you were glad to see them and carried their slippers in your mouth and pined away when they died, etc.

  Laddie actually liked that kind of stuff, if you could call it 'liked'; it was more like something built into his bones. Gaspode wondered darkly if this was true dogness, and growled deep in his throat. It wasn't, if he had anything to do with it. Because true dogness wasn't about slippers and walkies and pining for people, Gaspode was sure. Dogness was about being tough and independent and mean.

  Yeah.

  Gaspode had heard that all canines could interbreed, even back to the original wolves, so that must mean that, deep down inside, every dog was a wolf. You could make a dog out of a wolf, but you couldn't take the wolf out of a dog. When the hardpad was acting up and the fleas were feisty and acting full of plumptiousness, it was a comforting thought.