'You were a performing dog. How come you know all this stuff?'
'I ain't just a pretty face.'
'You aren't even a pretty face, Gaspode.'
The little dog shrugged. 'I've always had eyes and ears,' he said. 'You'd be amazed, the stuff you see and hear when you're a dog. I dint know what any of it meant at the time, of course. Now I do.'
Victor stared at the pages again. There certainly was a figure which, if you half-closed your eyes, looked very much like a statue of a knight with his hands resting on his sword.
'It might not mean a man,' he said. 'Pictographic writing doesn't work like that. It's all down to context, you see.' He racked his brains to think of some of the books he'd seen. 'For example, in the Agatean language the signs for “woman” and “slave” written down together actually mean “wife”.'
He looked closely at the page. The dead man - or the sleeping man, or the standing man resting his hands on his sword, the figure was so stylized it was hard to be sure seemed to appear beside another common picture. He ran his finger along the line of pictograms.
'See,' he said, 'it could be the man figure is only part of a word. See? It's always to the right of this other picture, which looks a bit like - a bit like a doorway, or something. So it might really mean-'he hesitated.' “Doorway/man”,' he hazarded.
He turned the book slightly.
'Could be some old king,' said Gaspode. 'Could mean something like The Man with the Sword is Imprisoned, or something. Or maybe it means Watch Out, There's a Man with a Sword behind the Door. Could mean anything, really.'
Victor squinted at the book again. 'It's funny,' he said. 'It doesn't look dead. Just . . . not alive. Waiting to be alive? A waiting man with a sword?'
Victor peered at the little man-figure. It had hardly any features, but still managed to look vaguely familiar.
'You know,' he said, 'it looks just like my Uncle Osric . . .'
Clickaclickaclicka. Click.
The film spun to a standstill. There was a thunder of applause, a stamping of feet and a barrage of empty banged grain bags.
In the very front row of the Odium the Librarian stared up at the now-empty screen. It was the fourth time that afternoon he'd watched Shadow of the Dessert, because there's something about a 300lb orangutan that doesn't encourage people to order it out of the pit between houses. A drift of peanut shells and screwed up paper bags lay around his feet.
The Librarian loved the clicks. They spoke to something in his soul. He'd even started writing a story which he thought would make a very good moving picture.[18] Everyone he showed it to said it was jolly good, often even before they'd read it.
But something about this click was worrying him. He'd sat through it four times, and he was still worried.
He eased himself out of the three seats he was occupying and knuckled his way up the aisle and into the little room where Bezam was rewinding the film.
Bezam looked up as the door opened.
'Get out-' he began, and then grinned desperately and said, 'Hallo, sir. Pretty good click, eh? We'll be showing it again any minute now and - what the hell are you doing? You can't do that!'
The Librarian ripped the huge roll of film off the projector and pulled it through his leathery fingers, holding it up to the light. Bezam tried to snatch it back and got a palm in his chest that sat him firmly on the floor, where great coils of film piled up on top of him.
He watched in horror as the great ape grunted, grasped a piece of the film in both hands and, with two bites, edited it. Then the Librarian picked him up, dusted him off, patted him on the head, thrust the great pile of unwound click into his helpless arms, and ambled swiftly out of the room with a few frames of film dangling from one paw.
Bezam stared helplessly after him.
'You're banned!' he shouted, when he judged the ape to be safely out of earshot.
Then he looked down at the two severed ends.
Breaks in films weren't unusual. Bezam had spent many a flustered few minutes feverishly cutting and pasting while the audience cheerfully stamped its feet and high-spiritedly threw peanuts, knives and double-headed axes at the screen.
He let the coils fall around him and reached for the scissors and glue. At least - he found, after holding the two ends up to the lantern - the Librarian hadn't taken a very interesting bit. Odd, that. Bezam wouldn't have put it past the ape to have taken a bit where the girl was definitely showing too much chest, or one of the fight scenes. But all he'd wanted was a piece that showed the Sons galloping down from their mountain fastness, in single file, on identical camels.
'Dunno what he wanted that for,' he muttered, taking the lid off the glue pot. 'It just shows a lot of rocks.'
Victor and Gaspode stood among the sand dunes near the beach.