Moving Pictures - Terry Pratchett [54]
“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-gray 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-gray 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 anymore 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.
A few acres of scrubby backlot stopped being the rolling dunes of the Great Nef and went back to being scrubby backlot again. Victor felt that much the same thing was happening to him.
In ones and twos, the makers of moving-picture magic departed, laughing and joking and arranging to meet at Borgle’s later on.
Ginger and Victor were left alone in a widening circle of emptiness.
“I felt like this the first time the circus went away,” said Ginger.
“Mr. Dibbler said we were