Men at Arms

tame lightning.’ Man was an idiot!”
    “Oh, not an idiot,” said Silverfish, picking up a billiard ball that had miraculously escaped the detonations. “Just so sharp he kept cutting himself, as my granny used to say. Lightning lemons! Where’s the sense in that? It was as bad as his ‘voices-in-the-sky’ machine. I told him: Leonard, I said, what are wizards for, eh? There’s perfectly normal magic available for that kind of thing. Lightning lemons? It’ll be men with wings next! And you know what he said? You know what he said? He said: Funny you should say that…Poor old chap.”
    Even Cuddy joined in the laughter.
    “And did you try it?” he said, afterwards.
    “Try what?” said Silverfish.
    “Har. Har. Har,” said Detritus, toiling behind the others.
    “Putting the metal rods in the lemons?”
    “Don’t be a damn fool.”
    “What dis letter mean?” said Detritus, pointing at the paper.
    They looked.
    “Oh, that’s not a symbol,” said Silverfish. “That’s just old Leonard’s way. He was always doodling in margins. Doodle, doodle, doodle. I told him: you should call yourself Mr. Doodle.”
    “I thought it was some alchemy thing,” said Cuddy. “It looks a bit like a crossbow without the bow. And this word Ennogeht. What does that mean?”
    “Search me. Sounds barbarian to me. Anyway…if that’s all, officer…we’ve got some serious research to do,” said Silverfish, tossing the fake ivory ball up in the air and catching it again. “We’re not all daydreamers like poor old Leonard.”
    “Ennogeht,” said Cuddy, turning the paper round and round. “T-h-e-g-o-n-n-e—”
    Silverfish missed the ball. Cuddy got behind Detritus just in time.

    “I’ve done this before,” said Sergeant Colon, as he and Nobby approached the Fools’ Guild. “Keep up against the wall when I bangs the knocker, all right?”
    It was shaped like a pair of artificial breasts, the sort that are highly amusing to rugby players and anyone whose sense of humor has been surgically removed. Colon gave it a quick rap and then flung himself to safety.
    There was a whoop, a few honks on a horn, a little tune that someone somewhere must have thought was very jolly, a small hatch slid aside above the knocker and a custard pie emerged slowly, on the end of a wooden arm. Then the arm snapped and the pie collapsed in a little heap by Colon’s foot.
    “It’s sad, isn’t it?” said Nobby.
    The door opened awkwardly, but only by a few inches, and a small clown stared up at him.
    “I say, I say, I say,” it said, “why did the fat man knock at the door?”
    “I don’t know,” said Colon automatically. “Why did the fat man knock at the door?”
    They stared at each other, tangled in the punch-line.
    “That’s what I asked you ,” said the clown reproachfully. He had a depressed, hopeless voice.
    Sergeant Colon struck out toward sanity.
    “Sergeant Colon, Night Watch,” he said, “and this here is Corporal Nobbs. We’ve come to talk to someone about the man who…was found in the river, OK?”
    “Oh. Yes. Poor Brother Beano. I suppose you’d better come in, then,” said the clown.
    Nobby was about to push at the door when Colon stopped him, and pointed wordlessly upwards.
    “There seems to be a bucket of whitewash over the door,” he said.
    “Is there?” said the clown. He was very small, with huge boots that made him look like a capital L. His face was plastered with flesh-colored make-up on which a big frown had been painted. His hair had been made from a couple of old mops, painted red. He wasn’t fat, but a sort of hoop in his trousers was supposed to make him look amusingly overweight. A pair of rubber braces, so that his trousers bounced up and down when he walked, were a further component in the overall picture of a complete and utter twerp.
    “Yes,” said Colon. “There is.”
    “Sure?”
    “Positive.”
    “Sorry about that,” said the clown. “It’s stupid, I know, but kind of traditional. Wait a moment.”
    There were sounds of a stepladder being lugged into position, and various clankings and swearwords.
    “All right, come on in.”
    The clown led the way through the gatehouse. There was no sound but the flop-flop of his boots on the cobbles. Then an idea seemed to occur to him.
    “It’s a long shot, I know, but I suppose neither of you gentlemen’d like a sniff of my buttonhole?”
    “No.”
    “No.”
    “No, I suppose not.” The clown sighed. “It’s not