He put his arm round Victor’s shoulder and half walked, half dragged him towards the tents.
‘This is going to be a great picture!’ he said.
‘Oh, good,’ said Victor weakly.
‘You play this bandit chieftain,’ said Dibbler, ‘only a nice guy, too, kind to women and so forth, and you raid this village and you carry off this slave girl only when you look into her eyes, see, you fall for her, and then there’s this raid and hundreds of men on elephants come charging—’
‘Camels,’ said a skinny youth behind Dibbler. ‘It’s camels.’
‘I ordered elephants!’
‘You got camels.’
‘Camels, elephants,’ said Dibbler dismissively. ‘We’re talking
‘And we’ve only got one,’ said the youth.
‘One what?’
‘Camel. We could only find one camel,’ said the youth.
‘But I’ve got dozens of guys with bedsheets on their heads waiting for camels!’ shouted Dibbler, waving his hands in the air. ‘Lots of camels, right?’
‘We only got one camel ’cos there’s only one camel in Holy Wood and that’s only ’cos a guy from Klatch rode all the way here on it,’ said the youth.
‘You should have sent away for more!’ snapped Dibbler.
‘Mr Silverfish said I wasn’t to.’
Dibbler growled.
‘Maybe if it moves around a lot it’ll look like more than one camel,’ said the youth optimistically.
‘Why not ride the camel past the picture box, and then get the handleman to stop the demons, and lead it back and put a different rider on it, then start up the box again and ride it past again?’ said Victor. ‘Would that work?’
Dibbler looked at him open-mouthed.
‘What did I tell you?’ he said, to the sky in general. ‘The lad is a genius! That way we can get a hundred camels for the price of one, right?’
‘It means the desert bandits ride in single file, though,’ said the youth. ‘It’s not like, you know, a massed attack.’
‘Sure, sure,’ said Dibbler dismissively. ‘Makes sense. We just put a card up where the leader says, he says—’ He thought for a second. ‘He says, “Follow me in single file, bwanas, to fool the hated enemy,” OK?’
He nodded at Victor. ‘Have you met my nephew Soll?’ he said. ‘Keen lad. Been nearly to school and everything. Brought him out here yesterday. He’s Vice-President in Charge of Making Pictures.’
Soll and Victor exchanged nods.
‘I don’t think “bwanas” is the right word, Uncle,’ said Soll.
‘It’s Klatchian, isn’t it?’ said Dibbler.
‘Well, technically, but I think it’s the wrong part of Klatch and maybe “effendies” or something—’
‘Just so long as it’s foreign,’ said Dibbler with an air that suggested the matter was settled. He patted Victor on the back again. ‘OK, kid, get into costume.’ He chuckled. ‘A hundred camels! What a mind!’
‘Excuse me, Mr Dibbler,’ said the poster artist, who had been hovering uneasily, ‘I don’t understand this bit here …’
Dibbler snatched the paper from him.
‘Which bit?’ he snapped.
‘Where you’re describing Miss De Syn—’
‘It’s obvious,’ said Dibbler. ‘What we want here is to conjure up the exotic, alluring yet distant romance of pyramid-studded Klatch, right, so nat’r’ly we gotta use the symbol of a mysterious and unscrutable continent, see? Do I have to explain everything to everyone all the time?’
‘It’s just that I thought—’ the artist began.
‘Just do it!’
The artist looked down at the paper. ‘ “She has the face”,’ he read, ‘“of a Spink.”’
‘Right,’ said Dibbler. ‘Right!’
‘I thought maybe Sphinx—’
‘Will you listen to the man?’ said Dibbler, talking to the sky again. He glared at the artist. ‘She doesn’t look like
The artist gave Victor an agonized look he was coming to recognize. Everyone around Dibbler wore them after a while.
‘Right, you are, Mr Dibbler,’ he said.
‘Right.’ Dibbler turned to Victor.
‘Why aren’t you changed?’ he said.
Victor ducked quickly into a tent. A little old lady[10] shaped like a cottage loaf helped him into a costume apparently made of sheets inexpertly dyed black, although given the current state of accommodation in Holy Wood they were probably just sheets taken off a bed at random. Then she handed him a curved sword.
‘Why’s it bent?’ he asked.
‘I think it’s meant to be, dear,’ she said doubtfully.
‘I thought swords had to be straight,’ said Victor. Outside, he could hear Dibbler asking the sky why everyone was so stupid.
‘Perhaps they start out straight and go bendy with use,’ said the old lady, patting him on the hand. ‘A lot of things do.’
She gave him a bright smile. ‘If you’re all right, dear, I’d better go and help the young lady, in case any little dwarfs is peering in at her.’
She waddled out of the tent. From the tent next door came a metallic chinking noise and the sound of Ginger’s voice raised in complaint.
Victor made a few experimental slashes with the sword.
Gaspode watched him with his head on one side.
‘What’re you supposed to be?’ he said at last.
‘A leader of a pack of desert bandits, apparently,’ said Victor. ‘Romantic and dashing.’
‘Dashing where?’
