Moving Pictures

that look like ten percent to you, Victor?”
    “You negotiated his dinner ?”
    Gaspode’s voice was muffled by meat. “I reckon ten percent is ver’ fair. Very fair, in the circumstances.”
    “You know, you really are a son of a bitch,” said Victor.
    “Proud of it,” said Gaspode, indistinctly. He bolted the last of the steak. “What shall we do now?”
    “I’m supposed to get an early night. We’re starting for Ankh very early tomorrow,” said Victor doubtfully.
    “Still not made any progress with the book?”
    “No.”
    “Let me have a look, then.”
    “Can you read?”
    “Dunno. Never tried.”
    Victor looked around them. No one was paying him any attention. They never did. Once the handles stopped turning, no one bothered about performers; it was like being temporarily invisible.
    He sat down on a pile of lumber, opened the book randomly at an early page, and held it out in front of Gaspode’s critical stare.
    Eventually the dog said, “It’s got all marks on it.”
    Victor sighed. “That’s writing,” he said.
    Gaspode squinted. “What, all them little pictures?”
    “Early writing was like that. People drew little pictures to represent ideas.”
    “So…if there’s a lot of one picture, it means it’s an important idea?”
    “What? Well, yes. I suppose so.”
    “Like the dead man.”
    Victor was lost.
    “The dead man on the beach?”
    “No. The dead man on the pages. See? Everywhere, there’s the dead man.”
    Victor gave him an odd look, and then turned the book around and peered at it.
    “Where? I don’t see any dead men.”
    Gaspode snorted.
    “Look, all over the page,” he said. “He looks just like those tombs you get in old temples and stuff. You know? Where they do this statchoo of the stiff lyin’ on top of the tomb, with his arms crossed an’ holdin’ his sword. Dead noble.”
    “Good grief! You’re right! It does look sort of…dead…”
    “Prob’ly all the writing’s goin’ on about what a great guy he was when he was alive,” said Gaspode knowledgeably.
    “You know, ‘Slayer of thousands’ stuff. Prob’ly he left a lot of money for priests to say prayers and light candles and sacrifice goats and stuff. There used to be a lot of that sort of thing. You know, you’d get dese guys whorin’ and drinkin’ and carryin’ on regardless their whole life, and then when the old Grim Reaper starts sharpenin’ his scythe they suddenly becomes all pious and pays a lot of priests to give their soul a quick wash-and-brush-up and gen’rally keep on tellin’ the gods what a decent chap they was.”
    “Gaspode?” said Victor levelly.
    “What?”
    “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