“You might just think you’ve been working the BookWorld for three years. It could be your backstory.”
“Okay,” I said, beginning to get angry, “we’ll both go out there and see who gets eaten by a crocodile or gets a poison dart in the eye. Then we’ll know.”
“Deal.”
The rest of the peace delegation had joined us on deck, and they were staring silently towards the Middle Station. As we drew closer, we could see that the houses had been recently burned, for wisps of smoke hung in the air with the faint smell of scorched custard. We waited for the steamer to drift towards the jetty, until it touched with a faint bump. The crew made the steamer fast before jumping back onto the boat, and we watched and waited as the steamer slowly swung around in the current. There was not a single sign of life anywhere in the station.
“Well,” said Colonel Barksdale after a few minutes, “I’ve seen enough—doubtless skirmishers from Racy Novel causing trouble. Let’s steam on deeper into the genre and start getting some face time with this lunatic.”
“We’re not going anywhere until we load some coal,” said the captain.
I stepped off the steamer and onto the rickety old jetty, Drake at my side. We walked slowly into the town. Drake looked about anxiously, but not, I realized, about the deserted Middle Station.
“You’ll keep an eye out for crocodiles, won’t you?” I asked.
“As long as you watch my back for poison darts.”
We came across the first body near the mailbox on the corner. There was an ugly wound in the middle of his chest, and the small letters and words that made up his existence had been caught by the breeze and blown into the fishing nets set up to dry. We looked around and noticed more bodies and the detritus of conflict: discarded rubber chickens, feather dusters, strings of silk flags, spinning bow ties and custard-pie shrapnel that somehow seemed sadder and less funny than usual.
“Is this a garrison town?” I asked.
“No,” replied the adventurer.
“Then what’s a lance corporal of the Fourteenth Motorized Clown doing up here?”
The corpse was indeed a member of Comedy’s frontline troops. He had orange hair, a bulbous red nose, and he was wearing camouflage battle dress, along with a pair of size-twenty-eight shoes. Not much good for marching and a hangover from their days as an Alpine regiment.
Drake placed his hand on the clown’s bright red nose.
“Still warm,” he said, “probably been dead less than an hour. Any thoughts?”
“I don’t know,” I said, picking up a nurse’s hat from the ground. A little farther on, a stethoscope was lying broken in the dust. “But it wasn’t just clowns who died here today.”
We walked some more and came across a dozen or so other bodies. All clowns, all dead and none meant to be here. Bawdy Romp was within Racy Novel’s control and officially a demilitarized zone.
“This doesn’t make sense,” said Drake. “Comedy never had any beef with Racy Novel. Quite the reverse—they actually got on very well. Without Racy Novel, Comedy would be very poor indeed—especially for the stand-ups.”
“Let’s not hang around. Where did the captain say the coal was?”
We walked deeper into the station and saw more evidence of a pitched battle having taken place not long before. We found the remains of several burned-out clown cars; despite their being able to drive in either direction and having a device for shedding all the body work in order to lighten the vehicle for a speedy getaway, it hadn’t done any good. There was evidence of atrocities, too. Medical staff had been killed. I noted several pretty nurses and a handsome doctor lying in a doorway, and several crash carts were strewn about. There were a few dead rustic serving wenches, too, a ripped bodice and a couple of horses with ruggedly handsome and now very dead riders lying in the road amidst scorched brickwork and smoking rubble. We came across more dead clowns; it seemed as though an entire company had been wiped out.
“Looks like someone was making sure Comedy couldn’t come to Racy Novel’s aid,” observed Drake.
“It makes me wonder why we’re bothering with peace talks. Crocodile.”
“What?”
“Behind you.”
Drake jumped out of the way as the crocodile’s jaws snapped shut. “Thank you.”
“Now do you believe you might be the fodder?” I asked.
Drake thought for a moment. “He could have been trying to eat his way through me to get to you.”
“Sure,” I said with a smile, “and while we’re on the subject: If I were the fodder, why didn’t you warn me? I warned you.”
“Because I . . . didn’t want to ruin your day?”
“How very generous of you.”
We found the coal heap amidst a few more civilians—this time pretty secretaries who had died in the arms of their bosses. We filled a couple of wheelbarrows with coal before returning to the steamer. As soon as we were aboard, the crew slipped the moorings and the captain ordered, “Astern slow,” and swung the bows into the limpid river. We took the left branch up the tributary known as the Innuendo, and pretty soon the steamer was at full speed once more. Despite others’ misgivings, Jobsworth seemed adamant that the peace talks should go ahead.
37.
Revision
Amongst all the genres on Fiction Island, Comedy is the only one that still demands compulsory military service and a bucket of water down the trousers for every citizen. Conscripts are trained in the clown martial art of slapstick and do not graduate from military academy until they can kill silently with a frying pan and achieve fatal accuracy with a custard pie at forty yards. It’s a bit like Sparta, only with jokes.
We convened in the bar soon afterwards and related everything we had seen at the Middle Station. Colonel Barksdale, Herring, Zhark and Senator Jobsworth listened carefully to all we had to say but didn’t seem to have any better idea of what was going on than we did.
“There is no reason for the Fourteenth Motorized Clown to be this far north,” declared Colonel Barksdale angrily. “It is a flagrant breach of numerous peace agreements and specifically the 1996 Clown Army Proliferation Treaty.”
“Shouldn’t you have known about it?” asked Emperor Zhark, who knew better than most the value of intelligence.
“The Textual Sieve network is patchy up here,” replied Barksdale in a sulky tone. “We can’t know everything. I can only think the Fourteenth Clown must have been massing in the demilitarized zone as the potential allies of Racy Novel.”
“Then who killed them and all the civilians?” asked the adventurer, to which question there didn’t seem to be much of an answer. They all fell silent for a moment.
“When do we meet with the other delegates?” asked Jobsworth.
“In an hour,” replied Herring. “Aunt Augusta of WomFic and Cardinal Fang of Outdated Religious Dogma are meeting us at Fanny Hill. Would you excuse me? We’re out of footnoterphone range, and I’m going to have to send a message to the council via the shortwave colophone.”
Drake and I were dismissed, as Jobsworth, Barksdale and Zhark had decided to discuss the finer points of the peace talks, something to which we could not be privy.
“I’m going to freshen up before we get there,” said Drake, “and maybe rub on some crocodile repellent.”
I laughed, saw he was serious, turned the laugh into a cough and said, “Good idea.”
We were now well within Racy Novel, and the rustling of bushes, the groans and squeaks of delight echoed in from the riverbanks, where large privet hedges were grown to afford some sort of privacy for the residents. Every now and then, a slip in the riverbank allowed us a brief glimpse of what went on, which was generally several scantily dressed people running around in a gleeful manner—usually in a bedroom somewhere, but occasionally in the outdoors and once on the top deck of a London bus.