Moving Pictures (Discworld 10)

'Someone want elephants, boss?'

'-got fifteen head, he was telling me, plus also there's a load at the logging camp probably going cheap, call it two dozen-'

'Someone want a lot of elephants, boss?'

'-was saying there's a herd over T'etse way, shouldn't be a problem, then there's all the valleys over towards-'

M'Bu leaned on the fence and waited.

'Maybe two hundred, give or take ten,' said Azhural, throwing down the stick. 'Nowhere near enough.'

'You can't give or take ten elephants, boss,' said M'Bu firmly. He knew that counting elephants was a precision job. A man might be uncertain about how many wives he had, but never about elephants. Either you had one, or you didn't.

'Our agent in Klatch has an order for', Azhural swallowed, 'a thousand elephants. A thousand! Immediately! Cash on delivery!'

Azhural let the paper drop to the ground. 'To a place called Ankh-Morpork,' he said despondently. He sighed. 'It would have been nice,' he said.

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 here,' he tapped on the parched ground, 'and here,' he tapped again, slightly concussing an emerging locust that had optimistically mistaken the first tap for the onset of the rains. 'No roads in the jungle.'

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 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-grey horizon. 'We could do it, couldn't we?' he said.

'Sure, boss.'