by Tom Holt
The hell with that, she told herself. Makes it sound like they’re doing me a favour.
Yes. Well. And whose dragon caused all this mess in the first place?
‘Mike,’ she croaked, ‘I need a brand new set of the big chisels, another hide mallet and coffee, about a gallon and a half. Would you...?’
‘On my way.’
‘Mrs Cornwall’s nose. Could you do me a six by four enlargement of the wart? I can’t see from this whether it’s a straightforward spherical type or more your cottage loaf job.’
‘No problem.’
She sighed, wiped her forehead with her sleeve. ‘And when you’ve done that,’ she said, ‘if you could see your way to making a start on roughing out Mrs Ferguson with the angle grinder. I’ve marked her up, and it’d save ever such a lot of time.’
‘Mrs Ferguson, angle grinder. Right you are.’
‘Oh, and Mike.’
‘Yes?’
‘Thanks.’
Mike laughed, without much humour. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘After all, what are friends for? Apart, that is, from heavy lifting, telling lies to next of kin, basic catering and other unpaid chores?’
‘Dunno. Moral support?’
Mike shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said, ‘my morals collapsed years ago. Be seeing you.’
Left alone, Bianca tried to clear her mind of everything except the technicalities of sculpture. Easier said than done; it was like clearing a pub on Cup Final night, only rather more difficult. The hardest part, unexpectedly enough, was the way the faces from the photographs stayed in her mind, plastered across her retina like fly-posters, even when her eyes were tight shut. That meant something, she felt sure, but she hadn’t the faintest idea what.
‘Excuse me.’
Kurt stopped dead in his tracks, closed his eyes and counted to ten. Once upon a time, that particular ritual had been a foolproof method of keeping his temper. Now all it meant was that he lost his rag ten seconds later.
‘Hi,’ he replied, cramming a smile onto his face, which had never been exactly smile-shaped at the best of times. These past few days, however, cheerful expressions tended to perch apprehensively on his features, like a unicyclist crossing a skating rink.
‘Mr Lundqvist.’ It was the Canova again. ‘May I have a word with you, please?’
‘Lady...’
Inside the Classical perfection of the Canova bivouacked all that was immortal of Mrs Blanchflower. By a prodigious effort of his imagination, Kurt had worked out a scenario where he would actually be pleased to see Mrs Blanchflower, but it involved her being in the water and him being a twenty-foot-long Mako shark. The only reason why he hadn’t yet mortally insulted her was because he never seemed to be able to get a word in edgeways.
‘Mr Lundqvist,’ said the Canova. ‘Now, as you know, I’m the last person ever to complain about anything, but I really most protest, in the strongest possible...’
Getting past Mrs Blanchflower, of course, was the beginning, not the end, of the aggravation. She was the worst individual specimen, yes, the gold medallist in the Pest Olympics, but there were fourteen others right behind her sharing silver. And it’s no real escape to elude one Mohammed Ali only to be set upon by fourteen Leon Spinkses.
‘SHUTTUP!’ Kurt therefore bellowed, as he shouldered past the Canova into the main area of the Nissen hut. That bought him, albeit at terrible cost, a whole half second of dead silence.
‘And LISTEN!’ he said. ‘Thank you. Now then, folks, gather round. And you better pay attention, ’cos this is important.’
Fifteen statues all started to complain at once.
‘Okay.’ Kurt backed away and climbed onto a chair. ‘Okay,’ he repeated, just loud enough to be audible. ‘If you guys don’t want to go home, that’s up to you. Well, so long. It’s been...’
Silence. Well, virtual silence. Mrs Hamstraw (by Bernini) finished her sentence about the sultanas in her muesli (she’d told him, three times, the doctor had told her no sultanas) and Ms Stones reiterated her threat of writing to Roger Cook for the seventy-eighth time, but apart from that there was a silence so complete, Kurt felt he knew what it must have been like at five to nine on the first day of Creation.
‘On the other hand,’ he went on, calm and quiet as the Speaking Clock, ‘anybody who wants out had better listen good. Now, then...’
‘I still say that, after last time ...’
The Great Goat turned his head about twenty-seven degrees and scowled.
‘Thank you,’ he said, in a voice you could have freeze-dried coffee in. ‘Shall we proceed?’
A nice man, Dr Thwaites; all his patients would have agreed, likewise his colleagues, his neighbours, even some of his relations. A kind man, for whom nothing would ever be too much trouble. A patient man, prepared to listen politely and attentively to every hypochondriac who ever thought mild indigestion was a heart attack. But flawed, nevertheless. Albert Schweitzer was the same, and likewise Walt Disney.
‘If you insist,’ muttered the Lesser Goat. ‘Now then, where’s that wretched skull?’
Because Dr Thwaites, having paid Farmer Melrose six months’ rent for conjuring rites on Lower Copses Meadow, was damned if he was going to forfeit half his money - thirty pounds, fifty pence - with three months still to run. It was, as far as he was concerned, a matter of principle.
‘When you’re ready, Miss Frobisher. Now then.’ He cleared his throat. ‘By Asmoday and Beelzebub I conjure you, spirits of—’ He stopped. If someone had just popped an apple in his mouth, they couldn’t have shut him up quicker or more effectively.
‘Don’t mind us,’ said the Captain of Spectral Warriors, in a soft, speaking-in-church voice. ‘Just pretend we aren’t here, okay?’
The Great Goat would dearly have liked to do just that, but unfortunately it was out of the question. It takes a special sort of mental discipline to ignore five hundred of Hell’s finest, in full battledress uniform, all displaced heads, unexpected limbs and weird appendages, creeping stealthily past you in the early hours of the morning.
“Ere, doc,’ said the thurifer at his elbow. ‘You’re really good at this, aren’t you?’
The Great Goat swallowed hard. ‘Apparently,’ he said. In his subconscious he was wondering whether he could persuade Mr Melrose to impose a retrospective rent increase, because the thought of performances like this every week for the next three months was enough to drive a man insane. He’d have to rethink all his cosy preconceptions about anatomy, for a start.
‘Excuse me.’ The Captain was talking to him. He forced himself to listen.
‘Sorry, I was, um, miles away. Can I, er, be of assistance?’
‘We’re trying to get to—’ The Captain consulted a clipboard. ‘Place called Birmingham. Would you happen to know where that is?’
‘Birmingham.’
‘That’s right. I’ve got this map here, but it hasn’t photocopied terribly well, so if you could just set us on the right track, we’d be ever so grateful.’
His disbelief suspended on full pay, the Great Goat felt in the pockets of his robes and produced a pencil and the back of an envelope.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Big Fight.
Seen purely from the viewpoint of logistics and administration, it was the greatest show in history. Everybody who was, had been or would be anybody was there, and the complexities of setting up a switchboard for the retrospective booking office had taxed Mr Kortright’s ingenuity to its fullest extent. Or take the popcorn concession, a chronological disaster poised to happen. Any popcorn eaten by visitors from the past or the future would leave a serious imbalance in the fabric of reality, particularly after it had passed through the visitor’s digestive system and entered the ecology of his native century. In order to compensate, Kortright had had to estimate the amount of popcorn likely to be eaten and arrange for compensatory amounts of matter to be removed from/added to a whole series of past and future destinations. As for the env
elope of artificial Time in which the auditorium was contained, it had cleaned out Chubby’s stocks down to the last second. God only knew what would happen if the fight lasted beyond the twelfth round.
All these problems, of course, were more than adequately accounted for in the price of the tickets; and that caused yet another organisational nightmare, given that (for example) in order to pay for his ticket the Emperor Nero had leeched out the entire economy of the Roman Empire, which could only mean total fiscal meltdown, violence in the streets and the fall of the Empire several centuries ahead of schedule. Fortunately, a client of Lin Kortright’s who controlled various financial syndicates in the first century AD was able to offer bridging finance; disaster was averted, ten per cent was earned for the Kortright Agency, and Nero (who paid the first instalment of the loan by insuring Rome and then burning it down) was sitting in the front row, munching olives and trying unsuccessfully to persuade Genghis Khan to take St George to win at fifteen to one.
There was also a band, and cheer-leaders, and huge spotlights producing as much light and heat as a small star, and commentators from every TV station in Eternity all getting ready to provide simultaneous coverage (live was, in context, a word best avoided), and cameras and film crews and sound crews and men in leather jackets with headphones on wandering about prodding bits of trailing flex and engineers swearing at each other, and all the spectacle and pageantry of a galaxy-class sporting event. The panel of judges (two saints, two devils and, representing the saurian community, two enormous iguanas) were sworn in. There was an awed hush as the doors at the back swung open to admit the referee; no less a dignitary than Quetzalcoatl, Feathered Serpent of the Aztecs. Had his worshippers in pre-Conquest Mexico known that when he promised to come again to judge the quick and the dead, he meant this, maybe they’d have been a little bit less forthcoming with the gold and blood sacrifices.
It was nearly time. The food vendors left the auditorium, trays empty. The roar of voices dwindled down to an expectant buzz. All it needed now was for the contestants to show up, and the contest for the ethical championship of the universe could begin.
And Kortright turned to Stevenson and said, ‘Well, where the fuck are they?’
And Stevenson leant across to Kortright and said, ‘I thought they were with you.’
‘Finished,’ Bianca gasped.
Forget the aesthetics for a moment; in terms of sheer stamina, it was the greatest achievement in the history of Art. With an effort she unclenched her cramped fingers sufficiently to allow chisel and mallet to fall to the ground and collapsed backwards into her chair, only to find there was someone already sitting in it.
‘Sakubona, inkosazana.’ Bianca did a quick Zebedee impression, looked down and saw a little, wizened man curled up in her chair. He was wearing a leopard skin with lots of unusual accessories, and holding a fly-whisk.
‘Hi,’ she replied. ‘You must be Nkunzana. I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘No,’ the witch-doctor replied, ‘you didn’t.’ He nodded towards the statues. ‘Impressive,’ he said.
‘All my own work,’ Bianca replied, flustered. ‘You know what you’ve got to do?’
‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’
‘Right. Well, I’d better leave you to it, then. Do you need anything? Um, hot water, towels, that sort of thing?’
Nkunzana shook his head. ‘A fire and a pinch of dust, my sister,’ he replied. Before Bianca could offer further assistance, he produced a big brass Zippo from the catskin bag hung round his neck.
‘Dust?’
Nkunzana grinned and drew a fingertip across the surface of the table beside his chair. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I remind you of your mother.’
‘In certain respects,’ Bianca replied. ‘She could never have worn leopard, though. Not with her colouring.’
The witch-doctor shrugged; then, with a tiny movement of his thumb he lit the lighter, sprinkled the dust and mumbled something that Bianca didn’t quite catch.
And...
... Action!
Cut to -
Kurt’s Nissen hut (you could call it the Galleria Lundqvist, but not, if you want to see tomorrow, while he’s listening) where fifteen statues with strong West Midland accents are telling him exactly why they refuse to have anything at all to do with his plan.
Sound effects; rushing wind, a shimmering tinkly sound (shorthand for magic), deep and rumbling unworldly laughter, followed by—
Silence. The other noises off were just meretricious effects, the parsley garnish on a slice of underdone magic. But the silence, the absence of querulous whining, that’s something else. Uncanny is an understatement in the same league as describing the Black Death as a nasty bug that’s going around.
Kurt reacts; he says -
‘YIPPEE!’
- and so would you if you’d just spent several weeks cooped up with Mrs Blanchflower, Mr Potts and thirteen others, extremely similar. In their place, fifteen of the world’s finest, most exquisite statues; solid masonry from head to toe, without enough sentience between the lot of them to animate a DSS counter clerk. Kurt looked round, gazing ecstatically at each one in turn; compared to him, stout Cortes would have made one hell of a poker player. No more whingeing. No more threats to report him to the English Tourist Board. No more caustic remarks about the lack of brown sauce to go with the escalops of veal.
Slowly, almost like a moon-walker in the deliberation of his movements, Kurt got to his feet, crossed the floor and picked up a frozen tiramisu he’d been defrosting for tonight’s dinner. Then he planted himself in front of the Canova, stuck his tongue out, raised the tiramisu and rubbed it into the statue’s face.
Cut to -
Bianca’s studio. Bianca has just left, leaving the door unlocked and a note.
Cue sound effects, as above, except for the silence. Instead, fade in a yammering fugue of West Midland voices raised in pique. And hold it, as -
The statues realise something has changed. Typically thoughtful, Bianca has left a big, clothes-shop style mirror facing them. They see themselves. Let’s repeat that line, for emphasis. They see ...
Themselves ...
Silence.
And then one of them - yes, absolutely right, it’s Mrs Blanchflower—says -
‘Well!’
- and they all start talking at once. No need to report the exact words spoken; the gist of it is that they’re all as pleased as anything to be out of those ridiculous, freezing cold, uncomfortable statues and back in their own bodies again, but that doesn’t alter the fact that they’ve been mucked about something terrible (with hindsight, scrawling Sorry for any inconvenience on the mirror in lipstick wasn’t the most tactful thing Bianca ever did) and just wait, someone hasn’t heard the last of this, my lawyers, my husband, my Euro MP...
At the back of the room, a scruffy heap which at first sight was only a bundle of old rags sits up, double-takes and huddles down again, furtively pulling a mangy leopard skin over his head and hoping to hell they haven’t spotted him. Too late—
With a simultaneous yowl of fury, fifteen angry ex-statues turn on Nkunzana, shaking fists and demanding explanations. The witch-doctor freezes, unable to move. In the course of his professional activities, he’s daily called upon to face down swarms of gibbering unquiet spirits, quell mobs of loutish ghosts by sheer force of personality, command fiends and boss about the scum of twelve dimensions. Piece of cake. Faced with Mrs Blanchflower and the other Sadley Grange victims, he’s a mongoose-fazed snake.
Spirits, he hisses under his breath, I command you by Nkulunkulu, the Great One, get me the hell out of here!
The spirits attend, as they are bound to do when a master of the Art orders them. Although only the isangona can see them, they’re there, as present as a college of notaries, standing at the back of the room looking extremely embarrassed.
Sorry, amakhosi, they mouth noiselessly. This time, you’re on your own.
Cut to -
A police
station on the very northernmost edge of China. Behind the desk, a sergeant slumbers dreamlessly under a circular fan.
The door opens. Enter three very embarrassed-looking men.
They wake the sergeant, who grunts and reaches for his notebook and a pen. What, he enquires, can he do for them?
They nudge each other. Imploring looks are exchanged. Nobody wants to be the one who has to say it.
A spokesman is finally selected. He clears his throat. The expression on his face is so pitiful the desk sergeant starts groping instinctively for a clean handkerchief.
We’d like, the spokesman mumbles, to report a theft.
Right. Fine. What’s been nicked?
A wall.
Sorry?
A wall. Quite a big wall, actually.
Look, sorry about this, did you just say somebody’s stolen a wall?
That’s right. Here, come and see for yourself.
Bemused policeman rises, totters sleepily round the edge of the counter to the station door, looks out.
Look, is this some sort of a joke, because if it is ...
And then he sees the mountains. And that’s really weird, because everybody knows you can’t see the mountains from here. Because the Wall’s in the way. Further up the valley, yes, you can see the mountains. Down here ...
The sergeant begins to scream.
Cut to—
A brain-emptying vastness of sand, where the reflected heat hits you like a falling roof. Shimmering in the heat-haze, the sun flickers like an Aldis lamp. No wicked stepmother’s smile was ever as cruel as the unvarying blue of the pitiless sky. Sun and sand; yes, sun and sand we got, but you really don’t want to come here for two weeks in August.
