‘Shut up.’
‘Duke Thar-Vint and his steward Lart—’
‘Trusty steward,’ Kara reminded him.
‘Thank you,’ Kevin said sarcastically, ‘Trusty steward Lart, were journeying to the Vale of Tyra-Shakir for the great celebration of the feast of Joppa—’
‘That’s in Edinburgh,’ Andrea objected. ‘They’re hardly going to go on some great epic journey on their stupid shaggy mountain ponies to go to Edinburgh, are they?’
Kevin ignored her. ‘It will be difficult travelling but the feast must be observed—’ Kevin interrupted himself for once to explain, ‘Of course, parties really are a pre-Murk thing, the Murk is a bit like Cromwell’s Protectorate,’ he explained, ‘no singing, no dancing, that kind of thing.’
Professor Cousins looked perplexed. ‘And so . . . the dragons are Royalists?’
‘No, no, no,’ Kevin scowled, ‘the dragons don’t hold with affiliation .’ His face took on a dreamy expression. ‘Before the Murk, the Duke Thar-Vint was renowned for his parties – the food was wonderful, naturally—’
‘Naturally,’ Martha said.
‘The entertainments were spectacular – the famous acrobats of Hartha-Melchior, the jugglers of Wei-Wan, the dressage horses from the plains of—’
‘Kevin,’ Martha said looking very pained, ‘could you just get on?’
‘If the Duke Thar-Vint hadn’t stolen the treasure of Alsinelg to begin with he wouldn’t be in this mess,’ Kara said.
‘Yes, but that’s the whole point,’ Kevin said crossly.
‘Kevin,’ Martha warned.
‘The Duke Thar-Vint scanned the vast horizon for signs of danger. This journey would be perilous, he knew – the greatest test yet of his courage and ingenuity. It was spring, yet not a green bud was to be seen. In the old days before the Murk fell on the land the steppes of Chargap would have been ablaze with flowers, the Verduna plants like tiny blue stars and the Rykil which the wise women of the steppes plucked and used for their healing properties.
His faithful steed, Demaal, sniffed the air—
~ How long are you going to go on without stopping him? Nora asks, rather irritably. You’re wasting words.
‘There isn’t a finite stock of them.’
~ How do you know? You might suddenly just run out and then you won’t be able to finish the—
Chez Bob
FOR JAMES THE SPECTRE OF THE OMNISCIENT AUTHOR CANNOT be dismissed lightly. He cannot sanction interference with the interior drama of the novel. Given historical perspective, I think it is easier for us to recognize this aspect of the book as a precondition of the type of realism to which George Eliot subscribed .
I wasn’t sure I actually understood that sentence. I had stolen it from a book, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was any good. I tried it out on Andrea, who had come home with me instead of going to work on Annasach , the student newspaper, and was now hanging around disconsolately in Paton’s Lane in the hope that Shug might turn up. She was laying out her Tarot pack amongst the clutter on the table.
‘You couldn’t just magic up an essay for me, could you?’ I asked her.
‘Magic isn’t to be used for selfish purposes or personal gain,’ she intoned solemnly as if she was reading from a necromancer’s primer.
I still felt queasy from Martha’s tutorial. Perhaps there was a bug going around. It was extraordinarily cold in the flat, even though both bars of the electric fire were burning. The fire was giving off an unpleasant smell of molten dust and melting fuses.
‘Damart,’ Andrea said enigmatically when I queried the wisdom of wearing broderie-anglaise in this weather.
The Court of the Crimson King was playing very loudly on the stereo and every time I tried to turn it down Bob wandered back over to it and innocently turned it up again. He was eating Marmite straight from the jar and looking perplexed.
Bob had recently begun to make incoherent attempts at study and he was surrounded now by a chaotic sea of textbooks and essays. The textbooks – Descartes’ Discourse on Method , Woozley’s Theory of Knowledge , Ayer’s Foundation of Empirical Knowledge – were mostly stolen – Bob didn’t think that stealing books was actually a crime (‘Thought’s free, isn’t it?’) – and remained steadfastly unopened, as if he was hoping to absorb their contents by osmosis.
The guddle of essays had all been salvaged from people I’d never heard of – ‘ Could scientific advance show that we are never really free ?’ by an unlikely-sounding Wendy Darling Brandy; ‘ Is there a Cartesian Circle ?’ by someone called Gary Seven and ‘ What has Hume shown about our belief in miracles ?’ by an Audrey Baxter.