Luka and the Fire of Life (10 page)

‘Maybe they would,’ Nobodaddy replied, ‘if the Respectorate wasn’t growing so fast. Those scary Respecto-Rats roam far beyond their own borders trying to force everyone into line. If things continue as they are, the whole World of Magic is in danger of being strangled by an excess of respect.’

‘That’s as may be,’ Luka gasped, ‘but when you’re on the receiving end of the attack, it’s hard to be sympathetic, to be honest with you. And look at the condition of my dog and my bear. I don’t think they like Otters very much right now, either.’

‘Sometimes,’ Nobodaddy reflected, almost as though he were talking to himself, ‘the solution is to run towards the problem, not away from it.’

‘I am trying to run towards –’ began Luka, and then he stopped. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see what you’re saying. Not the golden ball. That’s not the problem, is it?’

‘Not at present,’ Nobodaddy agreed.

Luka squinted up into the sky. There she was, the Insultana, the Fairy Queen of the Otters, monarch of the skies, riding on King Solomon’s Carpet. She looked sixteen or seventeen but she was probably really thousands of years old, he thought, the way magical creatures were. ‘What’s her name?’ he wondered.

Nobodaddy looked pleased in the way that Rashid Khalifa looked pleased when Luka did well at mathematical calculation. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Knowing a magic creature’s name gives you power over it, yes it does! If you knew her name you could call her and she would have to come. Unfortunately, she is known by dozens of names, and maybe none of them are the real one. Keep your own name secret, that’s my advice. Because if they know your name in the Magic World, who knows what they might do with it.’

‘Do you know her name, then,’ Luka said impatiently, ‘or are you going on and on in this way to hide the fact that you don’t?’

‘Ooh, that stings,’ said Nobodaddy languidly, fanning himself with his hat. ‘What a sharp little tongue! You’d make a good Otter. As a matter of fact,’ he went on hastily, seeing Luka open his mouth again, ‘I’ve narrowed it down. After much thought and analysis, I’ve got it down to half a dozen. Six of the best. I’m pretty sure it’s one of those.’

‘“Pretty sure” isn’t very impressive,’ Luka said.

‘I haven’t had a chance to try them out,’ Nobodaddy replied, sounding indignant. ‘But why don’t you have a go right now and we’ll settle the matter once and for all?’

So Luka called out the names Nobodaddy gave him, one by one. ‘Bilqis! Makeda! Saba! Kandaka! Nicaula!’ The woman on the flying carpet ignored them all. Nobodaddy, looking crestfallen, suggested a few more names, but with decreasing conviction. Luka tried them too. ‘Meroë! Nana! Um …
what
did you say?’

‘Chalchiuhtlicue,’ Nobodaddy repeated doubtfully.

‘Chalchi …’ Luka began, then stopped.

‘… uhtlicue,’ Nobodaddy prompted.

‘Chalchiuhtlicue,’ Luka shouted, triumphantly.

‘It means “the woman in the jade skirt”,’ Nobodaddy explained.

‘I don’t care what it means,’ said Luka, ‘because it’s having no effect, so it obviously isn’t her name.’

For a moment Luka fell into a terrible sadness. He would never be able to get out of this mess, never be able to find the Fire of Life or save his father. This strange version of his father, Nobodaddy, was the only father he had now, and he wouldn’t have him for long, either. He would lose his father and his father’s fatal copy; it was time to get used to that horrible fact. All he would have left was his mother, and her beautiful voice …

‘I know the Insultana’s name,’ he said suddenly, and stepping out from the shadow of the awning, he called in a loud, clear voice, ‘Soraya!’

Time stopped. The descending jets of betel juice, the rotten tomatoes, the egg missiles froze in mid-flight; the Rats became motionless, like photographs of themselves; in the sky the Otters stood still on their carpets in attitudes of war, and the flying rugs, as if turned to stone, no longer flapped in the breeze; even Bear, Dog and Nobodaddy were as stiff as waxworks. In all that timeless universe only two people moved. One was Luka; the other, swooping down on King Solomon’s Carpet,
Resham
, and coming to a halt right in front of him, was the brilliant and slightly frightening Insultana of Ott. Except that Luka wasn’t scared of her. This was his father’s World of Magic, and therefore it was to be expected that this young Queen,
the most important female person in that world, had the same name as Luka’s mother, the most important woman in his, and his father’s, world. ‘You summoned me,’ she said. ‘You guessed my name, which stopped Time, so here I am. What do you want?’

There are moments in life – not enough of them, but they do occur – when even young boys find exactly the right words to say at exactly the right time; when, like a gift, the right idea occurs to you just when you most need it. This, for Luka, was one such moment. He found himself saying to the great ruler of Ott, without fully knowing where in his head he had found the words, ‘I believe we can help each other, Insultana Soraya. There is something I need you to help me with, urgently, and in return I have an idea for you that might just win you this war.’

Soraya leaned forward. ‘Just tell me what you want from me,’ she commanded, in her rough Otter way, and Luka, his usually fluent tongue paralysed, pointed to the golden ball atop the Rathouse dome. ‘Yes, I see,’ said Soraya of Ott, ‘and afterwards, my young milord, no doubt you will wish to return to the River and be on your way.’ Luka nodded dumbly, not even surprised by how much the Insultana knew. ‘That is nothing,’ she said, and motioned Luka to come aboard the flying carpet, revealing a kinder nature than her sharp words implied.

An instant later the carpet took off, with Luka, caught off balance, lying flat on his back upon it; and an instant after that, they were at the golden ball, and Luka was able to get up and thump it, and heard the satisfying
ding
of a level being saved, and saw in the upper right-hand corner of his field of vision
the single-digit number climbing to 2. And then they were down on the ground again, next to Nobodaddy and Dog and Bear, all of whom were still frozen in time, and Soraya was saying, ‘Now it’s your turn. Or was that just big talk? Boys like you – you’re all mouth and no trousers, as the saying goes.’

‘Itching powder,’ Luka said humbly, thinking that it didn’t sound like such an impressive idea. But the Insultana was listening hard now, so Luka went ahead and told her, shyly and with considerable embarrassment, about his own military history, and the victory over the Imperial Highness Army in the Great Playground Wars. Soraya gave the impression of hanging on his every word, and when he had finished she gave a low, impressed whistle.

‘Itching-powder bombs,’ she said, mostly to herself. ‘Why did we never think of that? Those could work. Rats hate itches! Those should work. Yes! They
will
work!’ To Luka’s amazement and secret delight, she leaned down and kissed him three times, on the left cheek, then the right, and then the left again. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You are a man of your word.’

It was said of the Flying Carpet of King Solomon that it could carry any number of people, no matter how large that number might be, and any weight of goods, no matter how heavy that weight, and that it could grow until it was immensely large, as much as sixty miles long and sixty miles wide. When the weather called for shade, an army of birds would gather above it like a parasol, and the wind would blow it wherever it wanted to go, as fast as the blinking of an eye. But these were only stories, and what Luka saw next he saw with his own eyes: the Insultana
Soraya spread her arms wide, and the wind leapt up at her bidding. Then she quite simply disappeared, and, no more than ninety seconds later, reappeared; but this time the carpet was much larger and on it were literally tens of thousands of small paper airplanes. It was obvious that the ruler of Ott was capable of getting things done pretty quickly. An instant after her reappearance, the paper airplanes had taken flight and distributed themselves among all the members of her personal air force, which was still frozen in time like everything else as far as Luka could see. In the whole observable world only he and the Insultana and the armada of paper planes were moving. Also the green-and-gold Carpet of King Solomon, which, after passing out its cargo, returned to the size of a largish domestic rug.

‘How did you do that?’ Luka asked, and then added, ‘Never mind,’ knowing the answer before it was given. ‘I know. A P2C2E, and the itching-powder bombs were made at super-speed by M2C2Ds. Machines Too Complicated To Describe.’

‘I’m willing to bet,’ said the Insultana, ‘that you didn’t learn that at school.’

Many things make rats feel like scratching themselves, and there is nothing as unhappy as an itchy rodent. Rats get parasites – lice and mites and fleas – and these tiny bugs lay eggs at the base of the rats’ hairs, and they itch. Rats lead rough lives in dirty places and they get cuts and the cuts get infected and become sores and then the sores itch. Rats’ hair falls out and that makes their skin itch. Their skin gets dry, and they suffer from dandruff, and that’s itchy as well. Rats eat all kinds of
garbage and so they suffer from food allergies and eating too much of one thing and not enough of another and all that makes them itch like crazy. Rats suffer from eczema and ringworm and they get scabs and rashes and they can’t resist scratching them, even if the scratching makes things worse. And whatever could be said of rats in general was magnified in the case of the giant Rats of the Respectorate, the famously thinskinned Rats of I. And however itchy the Respectorate rodents might have been in the past, they had never experienced anything like the itchiness that was unleashed upon them by the Otter Queen and her air force.

‘Before I unfreeze everyone,’ the Insultana instructed Luka, ‘take your friends indoors and wait until I tell you it’s safe to come out.’ Her tone had changed completely, Luka noted; no trace of sharpness remained. In fact, it was positively friendly, even affectionate.

Luka did as the Insultana told him, hustling his little party into the grey bakery and then pressing up against the glass windowpane; so he and Dog and Bear and Nobodaddy only saw a little bit of the large-scale destruction that followed. The Insultana waved an imperious arm and the Respectorate unfroze. Now Luka watched the Otters swooping and diving around the city streets unleashing their enchanted paper planes, which seemed to be equipped with Rat-seeking homing devices and chased the Rats wherever they went, indoors and outdoors, under their bed sheets or up on roofs, and it wasn’t long before the attack succeeded and had the Rats on the run. Betel juice and eggs and rotten vegetables had been effective as insults, but the itching powder didn’t just hurt the Rats’ feelings and ruin
their clothes and make them smell even worse than they did already. Luka saw even the nastiest-looking giant Rats – the mirror-shade-wearing, heavily armed, super-nasty Respecto-Rats of I – running in circles and screaming as the paper planes chased them and poured itching powder on their heads and down the backs of their necks. He saw them tearing at themselves with their long angry claws and ripping great lumps off their own bodies as they tried to stop the itching. The air was full of Rat shrieks, growing louder and louder, so loud that Luka had to cover his ears because it was almost too much to bear.

‘If that powder is what I think it is,’ Nobodaddy said at last, in a voice filled with wonder, ‘if that is indeed made, as I believe it may be, from the deadly Asian Khujli plant, mixed up, I don’t doubt, with powder from the seeds of Alifbay’s own, overpowering, though rare, Gudgudi flower … and if the Insultana has included material from the Sickening Yuckbone or Magic Itch Bean of Germany, spores from the Demonic Abraxas of Egypt, the Kachukachu of Peru, and whirligigs from Africa’s Fatal Pipipi, then we may be witnessing the end of the Rat Infestation of the Magical World. What is interesting about the formula which I believe the Insultana may have used is that ordinary people are immune to these occult powders; rodents alone are affected. Yes, she asked you to take shelter, but that was to protect the dog and the bear, as a precautionary measure; and above all, I surmise, to save us all from the Rats possessed of their last and lethal Frenzy.’

The Rats had indeed taken leave of their senses. Through the window of the grey bakery, Luka witnessed their mounting
insanity and their dying throes. The thin-skinned masters of the Respectorate were literally scratching themselves to bits, actually ripping themselves apart, until there was nothing left of them but lumps of mangy fur and grey, ugly meat. The shrieking of the Rats reached a terrible crescendo, and then slowly the air grew quieter, and silence fell. At the very end Luka saw the Over-Rat himself come running down the street towards the River of Time, slashing himself as he ran, and at the end of the street he leapt into the River with a terrible cry and, as he was the one Rat in the World of Magic who was unable to swim, because he had always been too lazy and spoiled to take the trouble to learn, he drowned in the Temporal Flow.

And that was the end of that.

Slowly, slowly, the non-Rat inhabitants of the Respectorate came out of their homes and understood that their ordeal was at an end, and then in great happiness they rushed to the fences that separated the Respectorate from the rest of the Magical World and tore them down and flung away the broken remnants of their prison walls for ever. And if any Rats did survive the Great Itch Bombing they were never seen again, but crawled back into the darkness behind the cracks of the world, which was where Rats belonged.

Soraya of Ott on her green-and-gold carpet landed outside the grey bakery as Luka and his companions emerged. ‘Luka Khalifa,’ she said, and Luka didn’t even ask her how she knew his name, ‘you have done the World of Magic a great service. Aren’t you going to ask me for anything else in return? You guessed my name; that alone should get you at least the traditional three wishes, and you’ve only used up one. But for the
idea of the Itch Bombs! Who knows what’s a fair reward for that. Why don’t you just think of the biggest, most important wish you can come up with, and I’ll see if I can do anything to help?’