"Ah, I"m afraid there is no copy of the painting; he said. "Clearly, a copy that did it justice hwould be quite hard to make. But, er, this rather sensationalist treatise has many detailed sketches, at least. These days every visitor seems to have a copy, of course. Did you know that more than two thousand, four hundred and ninety individual dwarfs and trolls can be identified by armour or body markings in the original picture? It drove Rascal quite mad, poor fellow. It took him sixteen years to complete!"
"That"s nothing," said Nobby cheerfully. "Fred here hasn"t finished painting his kitchen yet, and he started twenty years ago!"
"Thank you for that, Nobby," said Colon, coldly. He took the book from the curator. The title was The Koom Valley Codex. "Mad how?" he said.
[1] Anoia is the Ankh-Morpork Goddess of Things That Get Stuck in Drawers.
"Well, he neglected his other work, you see. He was constantly moving his lodgings because he couldn"t pay the rent and he had to drag that huge canvas with him. Imagine! He had to beg for paints in the street, which took up a lot of his time, since not many people have a tube of Burnt Umber on them. He said it talked to him, too. You"ll find it all in there. Rather dramatized, I fear."
"The painting talked to him?"
Sir Reynold made a face. "We believe that"s what he meant. We don"t really know. He did not have any friends. He was convinced that if he went to sleep at night he would turn into a chicken. He"d leave little notes for himself saying, "You are not a chicken", although sometimes he thought he was lying. The general belief is that he concentrated so much on the painting that it gave him some kind of brain fever. Towards the end he hwas sure he hwas losing his mind. He said he could hearh the battle."
"How do you know that, sir?" said Fred Colon. "You said he didn"t have any friends."
"Ah, the incisive intellect of the policeman!" said Sir Reynold, smiling. "He left notes to himself, sergeant. All the time. Hwhen his last landlady entered his room, she found many hundreds of them, stuffed in old chicken-feed sacks. Fortunately, she couldn"t read, and since she"d fixed in her mind the ideah that the lodger was some sort of genius and therefore might have something she could sell, she called in a neighbour, a Miss Adelina Happily, hwho painted watercolours, and Miss Happily called in a friend hwho framed pictures, who hurriedly summoned Ephraim Dowster, the noted landscape artist. Scholars have puzzled over the notes ever since, seeking some insight into the poor man"s tortured mind. They are not in order, you see. Some are very ... odd."
"Odder than "You are not a chicken"?" said Fred.
"Yes," said Sir Reynold. "Oh, there is stuff about voices, omens, ghosts ... He also hwrote his journal on random pieces of paper, you know, and never gave any indication as to the date or hwhere
he hwas staying, in case the chicken found him. And he used very guarded language, because he didn"t hwant the chicken to find out."
"Sorry, I thought you said he thought he was the chick-" Colon began.
"hWho can fathom the thought processes of the sadleah disturbed, sergeant?" said Sir Reynold wearily.
"Er ... and does the painting talk?" said Nobby Nobbs. "Stranger things have happened, right?"
"Ahah, no," said Sir Reynold. "At least, not in my time. Ever since that book was reprinted there"s been a guard in here during visiting hours and he says it has never uttered a word. Certainly it has always fascinated people and there have always been stories about hidden treasure there. That is hwhy the book has been republished. People love a mystereah, don"t they?"
"Not us," said Fred Colon.
"I don"t even know what a mister rear is," said Nobby, leafing through the Codex. "Here, I heard about this book. My friend Dave who runs the stamp shop says there"s this story about a dwarf, right, who turned up in this town near Koom Valley, more"n two weeks after the battle, an" he was all injured "cos he"d been ambushed by trolls, an" starvin, right, an" no one knew much dwarfish but it was like he wanted them to follow him and he kept sayin" this word over and over again which turned out, right, to be dwarfish for "treasure"; right, only when they followed him back to the valley, right, he died on the way an" they never found nothin, an" then this artist bloke found some ... thing in Koom Valley and hid the place where he"d found it in this painting, but it drove him bananas. Like it was haunted, Dave said. He said the government hushed it up.,
"Yeah, but your mate Dave says the government always hushes
things up, Nobby," said Fred. "Well, they do."
"Except he always gets to hear about "em, and he never gets hushed up," said Fred.
"I know you like to point the finger of scoff, sarge, but there"s a lot goes on that we don"t know about."
"Like what, exactly?" Colon retorted. "Name me one thing that"s going on that you don"t know about. There - you can"t, can you?"
Sir Reynold cleared his throat. "That is certainly one of the theoreahs," he said, speaking carefully as people tended to after hearing the Colon-Nobbs Brains Trust crossing purposes. "Regrettably, Methodia Rascal"s notes support just about any theoreah one may prefer. The current populariteah of the painting is, I suspect, because the book does indeed revisit the old story that there"s some huge secret hidden in the painting."
"Oh?" said Fred Colon, perking up. "What kind of secret?
"I have no idea. The landscape hwas painted in great detail. A pointer to a secret cave, perhaps? Something about the positioning of some of the combatants? There are all kinds of theoreahs. Rather strange people come along with tape measures and rather hworryingly intent expressions, but I don"t think they ever find anything."
"Perhaps one of them pinched it?" Nobby suggested.
"I doubt it. They tend to be rather furtive individuals who bring sandwiches and a flask and stay here all day. The sort of people who love anagrams and secret signs and have little theoreahs and pimples. Probably quite harmless except to one another. Besides, hwhy steal it? We like people to take an interest in it. I don"t think that kind of person would want to take it home, because it would be too large to fit under the bed. Did you know that Rascal wrote that sometimes in the night he heard screams? The noise of battle, one is forced to assume. So sad:
"Not something you"d want over the fireplace, then," said Fred Colon.
"Precisely, sergeant. Even if it hwere possible to have a fireplace fifty feet long."