M’Bu scratched his head and stared at the hammerhead clouds massing over Mt F’twangi. Soon the dry veldt would boom to the thunder of the rains.
Then he reached down and picked up the stick.
‘What’re you doing?’ said Azhural.
‘Drawing a map, boss,’ said M’Bu.
Azhural shook his head. ‘Not worth it, boy. Three thousand miles to Ankh, I reckon. I let myself get carried away. Too many miles, not enough elephants.’
‘We could go across the plains, boss,’ said M’Bu. ‘Lot of elephants on the plains. Send messengers ahead. We could pick up plenty more elephants on the way, no problem. That whole plain just about covered in damn elephants.’
‘No, we’d have to go around on the coast,’ said the dealer, drawing a long curving line in the sand. ‘The reason being, there’s the jungle, just
M’Bu took the stick and drew a straight line through the jungle.
‘Where a thousand elephants want to go, boss, they don’t need no roads.’
Azhural considered this. Then he took the stick and drew a jagged line by the jungle.
‘But here’s the Mountains of the Sun,’ he said. ‘Very high. Lots of deep ravines. And no bridges.’
M’Bu took the stick, indicated the jungle, and grinned.
‘I know where there’s a lot of prime timber just been uprooted, boss,’ he said.
‘Yeah? OK, boy, but we’ve still got to get it into the mountains.’
‘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
‘Sure, boss.’
‘Right over the mountains!’
‘Sure, boss.’
If you looked really hard, you could just see that the purple-grey 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
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 any more 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.’
