The old ladies don’t seem to have noticed. They’re exchanging photographs of their grandchildren and playing snap, while all around them the village green trembles, like the San Andreas fault having a temper tantrum, and design-and-build starter homes flip up out of the ground like poppers on a pinball table.
In the black transit, now parked in the car park of the brand new plastics factory, the little machine is buzzing like a tortured wasp. A big glass bottle, coddled and cosseted in gyroscopically mounted cradles, lead and cotton wool, slowly fills. When the meniscus reaches the twenty centilitre mark, the operator yanks back the handle, opens the door of the van and blows a whistle. The old ladies stop what they’re doing, grab their deck chairs and empty picnic baskets and make a run for the coach. Both vehicles gun their engines and race off with much spinning of wheels and burning of rubber because a village green in the process of going critical is no place to be. In fact, they’ve almost left it too late; just behind them the road uproots itself and contorts like a wounded python, coiling itself round a series of mini-roundabouts and branching off into a series of service roads leading to the new complex of out-of-town supermarkets. They’re level with the village church when it detonates and turns itself into a drive-in leisure multiplex, and only by standing on the accelerator can the driver get the coach clear of the Jacobean manor house before it implodes and shape-changes into Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits’ south-east regional management training centre.
A close shave, and the world owes a large debt of gratitude to the driver, for all that he’s a myrmidon of the Time thieves’ Mr Big. Because the transit van is carrying twenty centilitres of raw Time (destined to fill a lucrative order from Wall Street, which is frantically trying to make the most of the last few weeks of a Republican administration) and the thought of what would happen if that much ninety-eight-per-cent-pure stuff were to go off is enough to freeze the brain.
Raw Time, spontaneously detonating in the Earth’s chronological field. Historical meltdown. A Time bomb.
The man in the black transit is Chubby Stevenson, also known as The Temporiser and Mr Timeshare. Procrastination was framed; Chubby is the greatest thief of Time the world has ever seen. In his purpose-built silo, five hundred feet under the Nevada Desert, he has four hundred and sixteen litres of the stuff; enough to reprise the Renaissance and play Desert Island Decades. Do you suffer from persistent nostalgia? Do you wish it could be the Sixties all
over again? Just send your order, together with a banker’s draft with more noughts on it than there are portholes in the side of a trans-Atlantic liner, to Mr C. Stevenson, P0 Box 666, Las Monedas, Nevada.
Trying to get the petrol out of a Scorpion tank, the dragon discovered the hard way, is like breaking into a can of Coke after the little ring-pull thing has snapped off and you haven’t got a tin-opener. It calls for ingenuity, patience and very robust fingernails.
Two out of three will do at a pinch; and, having slaked his thirst, the dragon relaxed, closed his eyes and considered the situation, both in the short and medium term.
He wasn’t, in his opinion, excessively thin-skinned (just as well, considering the number of things that had been fired at him in the last twelve minutes) but he did get the impression that for some reason, the humans had taken against him rather. Apart from a broken claw and some light bruises the tanks hadn’t bothered him very much, and the petrol was much more to his taste than all those funny drinks, but the next escalation of human disapproval would probably be aircraft, and he knew from recent observation that those things had rather more biff to them than the little self-propelled cocktail shakers. Time, he decided regretfully, to make himself inconspicuous, which would mean having to quit this exceptionally stylish and well-designed body for a while and go back into boring, silly two-legged mufti. A pity, particularly since it was now nicely fuelled-up and ready to go.
He had business here in England, but it wouldn’t take long. Once that was out of the way, the world was his oyster, and there were bound to be big, flat, open spaces where a dragon could be without getting shot at all the time by cultural degenerates. So, under cover, do the job, and then we’re out of here. Can’t, frankly, wait.
He opened his wings and, having disposed of the empties tidily by dropping them in the sea, he soared up above the clouds, giving as wide a berth as possible to any aircraft his exceptional senses detected, and circled round until he saw what he was looking for. When he saw his chance, he swooped.
At more or less the same moment as the dragon was mangling armoured fighting vehicles on the playing fields of Lancashire, someone who had been asleep for a very long time woke up.
You know what it’s like when you’ve overslept. Head full of sawdust. Eyelids as difficult to open as painted-over window frames. Interior of mouth tasting so repulsive you wonder who’s been doing what in it while you’ve been sleeping. Multiply that by a couple of thousand years and maybe you get the idea.
‘Where,’ muttered George to himself, ‘the flick am I?’
A pigeon, who was sitting on his head, removed its head from its armpit and looked round. ‘Who said that?’ it demanded.
George, who could understand the language of birds, cleared his throat. ‘Down here,’ he said.
‘What, you?’
‘Yes, me?’
‘The statue?’
‘Yes.’
‘Jeez!’ The pigeon froze, kebabbed with embarrassment. ‘I didn’t know statues could ... Look, I really am terribly sorry. I’ll clean it all off, promise.
‘I’m not really,’ George explained, ‘a statue.’
‘I see. You’re a very big, grey person lying absolutely still. Well, it takes all sorts, I can see that, I just naturally assumed you were a statue. If you’ll just bear with me I can be back with a cloth and some white spirit before you can say—’
‘Shut up and listen, you stupid bird. I’m inside the statue. Sort of. I’m a saint.’
The pigeon hesitated a while before replying. ‘Fine,’ it said. ‘Where I come from we call that a non-sequitur, but never mind. Logic is for wimps, right?’
‘I am a saint,’ George repeated, the fuel gauge on his patience edging audibly into the red. ‘I appear to have reincarnated into a statue of myself. And before you ask, I have no idea why. Now then, where is this...’ George looked round; a circumscribed view, since he couldn’t move his head, but sufficient for his purposes ‘ ... ghastly, awful, God-forsaken place? Last thing I knew I was in open countryside.’
‘Birmingham,’ replied the pigeon promptly. ‘West Midlands metropolitan district, England, Europe. Population—’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Really?’ The pigeon sounded surprised. ‘Been away long?’
‘Last time I looked, it was a hundred and something AD.’
Pigeons can’t whistle. ‘Strewth, mate, that’s a long time. Eighteen hundred years, give or take a bit. This is...’ The pigeon counted on its feathers. ‘Nineteen ninety-eight. June. Welcome back,’ it added tentatively.
George swivelled his eyeballs. ‘I sincerely hope I’m not stopping,’ he replied. ‘Whatever happened to grass? We used to have a lot of it in my day.’
The pigeon shuffled its wings. ‘Still plenty of it about,’ it replied. ‘But this is the middle of a city. Did they have cities then?’
‘A few.’ George stopped talking and winced; two thousand years’ worth of pins and needles was catching up with him. ‘Aaaagh,’ he said.
‘Problem?’
‘My leg hurts. Go on with what you were saying.’
‘About Birmingham? Okay. Rated as Great Britain’s second largest city, in its nineteenth-century heyday Birmingham truly merited its proud title of “workshop of the world”. Post-war recessions and the decline of British industry in general have inevitably left their mark, but the city continues to breed a defiantly positive and dynamic mercantile—’
‘Pigeon.’
‘Yes?’
‘All right,’ replied the pigeon, offended. ‘You were the one who asked. Anyway,’ it added, ‘that’s a fine way for a saint to talk, I must say.’
George’s eyebrows were mobile again and he frowned. ‘Is it?’
The pigeon nodded. ‘Sure. You’re supposed to be all meek and holy and stuff.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘Straight up. I know these things. My address: The Old Blocked Gutter, West Roof, St Chad’s Cathedral, Birmingham 4. I know a lot of religion,’ the pigeon continued proudly, ‘especially the lilies of the field and St Francis of Assisi. Saints don’t eff and blind, it’s the rules.’
‘Shows what you know,’ George replied. ‘Right, I’m going to move now, so I suggest you piss off and go sit somewhere else. Before you go, however, I want you to tell me where a man can get a drink around here.’
‘A drink,’ the pigeon repeated. ‘Milk?’
‘Don’t be bloody stupid.’
‘Water, then?’
‘Booze,’ George snarled. ‘Alcohol. Fermented liquor.’ A horrible thought struck him. ‘They do still have it, don’t they? Please tell me they haven’t done away with it, because—’
‘Sure they do,’ the pigeon said. ‘Beer and wine and gin and stuff, makes your mob sing a lot and fall over. Saints don’t drink, though. Well-known fact.’
‘What you know about saints,’ muttered George, ‘you could write on a grape pip in big letters. Just point me in the right direction and then clear off, before I use you to wipe my nose.
The pigeon made the closest approximation it could to a disapproving tut and extended a wingtip. ‘Draught Mitchell and Butlers,’ it said.
‘A word of warning, though.’
‘Well?’
Pigeons; Mother Nature’s flying diplomatic corps. ‘The sword,’ it said. ‘The armour. The horse. The being seven and a half feet high. Frowned upon.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Times change,’ said the pigeon. ‘Not to mention fashions. Can you do anything about that?’
‘I’m not sure.’ George concentrated. ‘Apparently I can. Is this better?’
The pigeon looked down. It was now sitting on the head of a short, bald man in a blue donkey jacket, jeans and scruffy trainers. ‘Fine,’ it said. ‘How did you do that?’
George shrugged. ‘Dunno. Who cares? When I get there, what should I ask for?’
‘Um.’ The pigeon searched its memory — about a quarter of a byte, say a large nibble — for a phrase overheard in crisp-shrapnel-rich beer gardens. ‘A pint of bitter, please, mate, and a packet of dry roasted peanuts. That usually does the trick.’
‘A pint of bitter, please, mate, and a packet of dry roasted peanuts.'
‘You’ve got it.’
‘Right. A pint of bitter, please, mate, and a packet of dry roasted peanuts. A pint of bitter, please, mate, and a packet of dry roasted peanuts. So long, birdbrain. A pint of bit...’
Standing on the empty plinth, the pigeon watched until George disappeared through the pub doorway, still rehearsing his line. It waited for a while. Then it preened itself. Then it started to peck at a cigarette butt. Two minutes or so later, the whole incident had been edited out of the active files of its mind and was held in limbo, awaiting deletion. And then...
The pigeon looked down.
It was, once again, standing on a statue.
Vaguely, it recalled something it had learned recently about statues. It took another look at what it was standing on. Ah shit, it said to itself.
‘Mike.’
‘Yes?’
‘Just come and have a look at this, will you?’
Instead of folding the tarpaulin, Bianca just let it fall. Then they stood for a while and took a long, hard look.
‘Swings and roundabouts,’ Mike said eventually. ‘Snakes and ladders. Maybe even omelettes and eggs.’
‘What?’
Mike shrugged. ‘I’m trying to be balanced and unhysterical,’ he said. ‘We now have the dragon back. True, we do seem to have lost Saint George, but...’
Slowly and very tentatively, Bianca leaned forwards. She laid the palm of her hand on the dragon’s cold, scaly flank. Marble. Solid, cool, bloody-awkward-to-move-about stone. ‘This,’ she said at last, ‘is beginning to get on my nerves.’
‘Maybe it’s a form of advanced job-sharing,’ Mike suggested. ‘You know, like flexi-time. I think West Midlands Council’s all in favour of it, and I suppose you could just about classify these two as Council employees.’
‘Mike.’
‘Mm?’
‘Please go away.’
Alone with her creation, Bianca thought long and hard. Sometimes she leaned against the statue, holding it. Sometimes she pressed her ear against it, as if listening. From time to time she kicked it.
After a while, she opened her portfolio and studied some sketches and plans. She took out a tape and made some measurements, both of the statue and the surrounding area. She climbed up onto its front paws and sniffed its spectacular, gaping jaws.
A mother, they say, instinctively knows what her baby is thinking. If it’s in trouble, she can feel it, deep inside. Bianca frowned. No, not trouble, exactly. More sort of up to something. But what?
Finally, she packed up, replaced the tarpaulin and started to walk away. Having covered ten yards she turned, faced the statue, and put on her most menacing scowl.
‘Sit!’ she commanded, and stalked off down Colmore Row.
Chapter 3
Having parked his shape in Victoria Square, the dragon ambled down Colmore Row to Snow Hill and consulted the railway timetable. Three minutes later a rather bemused tram pulled up (wondering, among other things, how the hell it had managed to get there from Dumfries in a hundred and eighty seconds) and he climbed aboard.
‘Colchester,’ he said aloud.
The voice of the train, inaudible to everyone except the dragon, pointed out that the Snow Hill line doesn’t go to Colchester. The dragon smiled pleasantly and invited the train to put its money where its mouth was.
Alighting at Colchester, a place he had heard of but never actually been to, the dragon took a taxi to 35 Vespasian Street, explained to the driver and climbed the stairs.
The top floor of 35 Vespasian Street is given over to a suite of offices consisting of a chair, a desk, a computer terminal, an electric kettle, an anomaly in the telephone network and seven hundred and forty-three filing cabinets. The door says:
L. KORTRIGHT ASSOCIATES
SUPERNATURAL AGENCY
Lin Kortright was on the anomaly when the dragon walked in. He was explaining to Horus, the Egyptian charioteer of the Sun, that simply picking it up, moving it along in a straight line and putting it down again without dropping it was no longer good enough to guarantee him full employment, and had he considered, for example, juggling with it or balancing it on a stick while riding a unicycle. As the door opened he didn’t look up, merely made a go-away gesture. He was about to suggest training it to do simple tricks when he noticed that the receiver was back on its cradle and he was, in fact, talking to the palm of his hand. He raised his eyes, impressed.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘how’d you do that?’
‘Do what?’
‘It’s purely instinctive with you, huh? No matter. What can I do for you?’
‘I’m looking,’ the dragon replied, sitting on a chair last seen two seconds previously under an actuary in Stroud and still warm, ‘for a job. I imagine you might be able to help.’
Mr Kortright studied the chair for a while, and then nodded. ‘Possibly, possibly,’ he said. ‘What d’you do?’
‘What needs doing?’
Mr Kortright frowned. ‘No, no, no,’ he said, ‘that’s not the way it works. You gotta have an act befo
re you come bothering me. Let’s see. You can do telekinesis, right?’
‘Can I?’
‘Oh boy, a natural,’ Mr Kortright sighed, rather as Saint Sebastian would have done if, just as the last arrow thudded home in his ribcage, he also remembered he’d left home without switching off the oven. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he added, ‘maybe I can still find you something, if you don’t mind touring. Done any poltergeisting?’
The dragon’s brow furrowed in thought until he looked like a fight between two privet hedges. Ever since he’d come back, he’d been letting his subconscious fill in as many of the gaps as possible, mostly by opening a direct line from his exceptional ears to his memory. In consequence, the back lots of his brain were stuffed with thousands of unprocessed eavesdroppings, waiting to be filtered and condensed into usable ready-to-wear background information. ‘Poltergeists,’ he mused, accessing a fragment of a documentary overheard when the taxi drove within a mile of a TV showroom. ‘That’s a ghost or similar evil spirit who throws things, yes?’
‘Yup.’
‘No. Sorry.’
Mr Kortright’s shoulders rose and fell like share prices during a closely contested election. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You wanna learn?’
‘Not really, no. All seems a bit gratuitous if you ask me. And besides, I don’t plan on being here very long, so there’s little point learning new skills.’
‘Picky, huh? You got a nerve.’
‘Several,’ replied the dragon, absently. ‘In this body, anyway. The other one’s just animated rock.’
Paint Your Dragon Tom Holt Page 3