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 escallops 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.
Th
ey 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.
Deserts are, by definition, big; and this is a big desert.
The dragon, waiting in the shade of the huge stack of cardboard boxes that contains the Great Wall of China for his scheduled rendezvous with Chubby and the boys, looks tiny; from a distance you’d think he was a wee lizard, the sort of thing desert travellers evict from their boots every morning before setting out.
But that’s perspective playing tricks on you, because the dragon is, of course, huge. And, more to the point, quite incredibly strong. Maybe you haven’t yet realised how strong the dragon is; well, consider this. Between one and five am last night, this dragon single-handedly dismantled the Great Wall and lugged it here, boxful by boxful across the Gobi Desert, without making a sound or disturbing anybody. No real trouble; to the dragon, it was just like picking up so much Lego off the living-room carpet.
It was still, nevertheless, one hell of a lot of Lego, and the effort, combined with the heat, is making him sleepy. His soul (for want of a better word) is hovering in the middle air, looking down at the stack of boxes and thinking, Pretty neat, huh?
Then, suddenly, it starts to panic. Instinctively it makes to dart back into its body, but it can’t. Imagine that nauseating feeling when you’ve just stepped outside to get the milk in and the front door slams shut behind you, locking you out. Normally, the dragon’s soul would have the door kicked in and be back inside in twenty seconds flat. But this time, what with purloining walls all night and not getting much sleep while it was at it, it simply hasn’t got the strength. Which is unfortunate, because ...
Cut to —
Saint George, toiling wearily up a vast sand escarpment,
on his way to the scheduled rendezvous with Chubby, the boys and a billion tons of hooky masonry.
He feels — strange ...
Oh look, he mutters to himself, I’m flying.
Or at least part of me is. The rest of me — head, arms, torso, legs — is down there on the deck, flat on my face ...
(Cue rushing wind, shimmering tinkly sound, shorthand for magic, deep and rumbling unworldly laughter...)
Nkunzana, moving with remarkable agility for a man of his advanced years, shinned out of the bathroom window, dropped five feet onto the fire escape, clattered down the steps like a ten-year-old and sprinted across the alleyway to where Kurt had the van parked, engine running.
‘Quick!’ he panted. No need to explain further. There was a squeal and a smell of burning rubber.
‘Okay?’ Kurt asked, glancing down at the road map open on his knee.
‘No,’ snapped the witch-doctor, ‘it isn’t. You might have warned me.’
‘Warned you?’ Kurt grinned. ‘Hey, man, I wouldn’t insult you. I mean, you being a witch-doctor and all, I’d have thought you’d have known...’
‘The hell with you, white boy. Let’s see if it’s so funny when I’ve turned you into a beetle.’
Feeling that the conversation was becoming a little unfocused, Bianca interrupted. ‘What Kurt meant to say was,’ she said, ‘is everything going to plan? With the, um, spirits, I mean?’
‘Huh?’ Nkunzana frowned, then nodded. ‘Sure, no problem. The fifteen dead people are out of the stolen statues and into the statues you made for them. The same with the souls of the dragon and Saint George; I’ve conjured them out of their bodies, and the dragon’ll be too knackered after all that heavy lifting he’s been doing ...
The old man paused, his eyes tight shut, and chuckled. ‘Hey, man,’ he muttered, ‘this is fun. I really wish you could see this.’
Cut to —
Three disembodied spirits, hovering in the upper air.
The first is the dragon, scrabbling frantically at the door of his magnificent, wonderful, all-powerful body. But he’s too weak. He can’t open the damn thing.
The second is Saint George, also unexpectedly evicted from his body by the Zulu doctor’s magic. Not his body, strictly speaking; remember, he’s been dossing down in the statue Bianca made for Mike to live in, which he stole when the dragon carbonised him on his return from the future.
George is just about to nip back in when he realises he’s not the only disembodied spook out and about this fine Mongolian summer morning. A mere hundred miles or so to his west, he becomes aware of the soul of his oldest, greatest enemy, and, more to the point, the empty dragon body.
He hesitates. He thinks.
YES!
Well, wouldn’t you? Think it over. Yours for the hijacking, the most powerful, the strongest, the most stylish, the fastest, the most heavily armed and armoured, the slinkiest piece of flesh ever in the history of the Universe, with the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition. One swift, slick job of taking and driving away, and then we’ll see exactly who’s vapourising whom...
With a none too gentle shove and a merry shout of, ‘Move over, asshole!’, George heaved the dragon’s enervated soul out of the way, scrambled into the dragon body and hit the gas. There was a roar and a stunning thump, as the beast’s enormous wings scooped up air like ice-cream from the tub. Wild with fury and terror, the dragon’s soul scrabbled desperately at its own body, but there was no way in. A fraction of a second later, the body had gone.
‘Shit,’ whimpered the dragon. He collapsed onto the sand and started to quiver.
The third spirit in waiting is Bianca’s friend Mike. He has the advantage over the other two of knowing what’s going on, and the moment George abandons his earthly overcoat and makes his dash for the dragon costume, Mike lets himself quietly out of Saint George, marble statue by Bianca Wilson, and tiptoes across the middle air to where his own familiar shape is standing, vacant and unlocked, among the dunes. He drops in. He rams the legs into first gear. He scrams.
And now the dragon’s soul is alone. Ebbing fast, still weak from his exertions and the devastating trauma of watching his own body zooming off over the horizon with his mortal enemy at the controls, he flickers on the edge of dissolution. Why bother? he asks himself. Bugger this for the proverbial duffing up to nothing.
But not for long. Because dragons don’t quit. And, as the saying goes, a third-class ride beats the shit out of a first-class walk. There, abandoned on the escarpment of a dune, stands Bianca Wilson’s statue of Saint George, empty. Disgusted but grimly determined, the soul of the last of the great serpents of the dawn of the world drags itself through the dry, gritty air and flops wretchedly into George.
And notices something. And suddenly feels a tiny bit better, becau
se it suggests, somehow, that more than meets the eye is going on.
Because, in the back window of Saint George, somebody has stuck a little bit of shiny white cardboard, with five words written on it in red lipstick. They were:
MY OTHER CAR’S A PORSCHE
Yes, mutters the dragon, suddenly and savagely cheerful. Isn’t it ever.
Like a salmon leaping the waterfall of the sun, the great dragon soared; wings incandescent, fire streaming off his flawlessly armoured flanks, the scream of the slipstream drowning out all sounds except the exultant crowing of his own triumphant soul, which sang:
Sheeeeit! Wow! Fuck me! Is this a bit of all right, then, or what?
Now bursting up through the clouds like a leaping dolphin, now swooping like a hunting eagle; now high, now low, as the intoxication of flight and power made his brain swim, his blood surge. Mine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever.
And then a light flashed soberingly bright in his eyes and he glanced down. There, on the desert floor below him, two men stood beside a Land Rover, on which was mounted a huge mirror.
Dragons have eyes like hawks — that’s a very silly thing to say, because hawks are just birds, whereas dragons’ eyes are the finest optical instruments in the cosmos; the point being, although the two men were a long way away, George recognised them easily. Chubby Stevenson and the man Kortright; he’d seen him about the place, though he didn’t know who he was. Intrigued, he swooped.
‘Hey,’ Kortright yelled through a bullhorn. ‘Where the fuck you been? Get down here like now.’
It then occurred to George that they didn’t know it was him. They thought it was the dragon — his, George’s, enemy. Yet these people were supposed to be his friends, good guys. The hell with that! He filled his lungs and took aim —
No, they’ll keep. Let’s find out what’s going on before we fry anybody we might be able to use later.
Paint Your Dragon Tom Holt Page 25
