'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 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 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.'
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 going to do another one tomorrow,' said Victor. 'I'm sure he just makes them up as he goes along. Still, we got ten dollars each. Minus what we owe Gaspode,' he added conscientiously. He grinned foolishly at her. 'Cheer up,' he said. 'You're doing what you've always wanted to do.'
'Don't be stupid. I didn't even know about moving pictures a couple of months ago. There weren't any.'
They strolled aimlessly towards the town.
'What did you want to be?' he ventured.
She shrugged. 'I didn't know. I just knew I didn't want to be a milkmaid.'
There had been milkmaids at home. Victor tried to recollect anything about them. 'It always looked quite an interesting job to me, milkmaiding,' he said vaguely. 'Buttercups, you know. And fresh air.'
'It's cold and wet and just as you've finished the bloody cow kicks the bucket over. Don't tell me about milking. Or being a shepherdess. Or a goosegirl. I really hated our farm.'