Luka and the Fire of Life (11 page)

And before Nobodaddy could stop him, Luka began to talk very fast, to tell this astonishing young girl who had the same name as his mother exactly why he was here in the World of Magic, and what he hoped to do, and why. By the end of his little speech the Sultana of Ott’s eyes had widened and her hand had risen to her mouth. ‘Perhaps, in my pride, I spoke too soon,’ she said, and there was a note of awe in her voice. ‘It may be that you have asked me for a thing I cannot give.’

But then she grinned a mischievous grin and clapped her hands like a child. ‘To steal the Fire of Life, which has never been done in the whole history of the Magical World! Why, that would be the most deliciously Disrespectful Deed in All of Time! It would be outrageous, and wonderful. In a phrase, it would be completely Over The Top, and therefore it behoves any true Otter to help. My fellow warriors of the OAF, the Otter Air Force, must return home to Ott – but, Luka Khalifa, Thief of Fire, I, the Queen of the Otters, will do everything in my power to assist you to perpetrate your dreadful – and most noble, and most dangerous, and absolutely most enjoyable! – Crime.’

‘I’m in a sort of hurry,’ said Luka bravely, ‘and you have this super fast carpet. Is there any way you could rush me past all the other levels and take me right to the Fire, where I need to be, and afterwards get me back where I started from?’

‘The River is long and deceptive,’ said Insultana Soraya,
nodding thoughtfully. ‘And you still have to pass through the Mists of Time, where you can’t see a thing, and then there’s the Great Stagnation, where the River turns into a swamp and you can’t move, and the Inescapable Whirlpool, where Time spins round and round and you can’t escape, and the Trillion and One Forking Paths, where the River becomes a labyrinth – and you will certainly get lost in all those mazy waterways and never find the one single stream that is the true, continuous Path of Time. Very well,’ she said, in a voice that told Luka that a decision had been made, ‘I will join you in your adventure. There are at least those four stages – what did you call them? – “levels”? – four levels that I can enable you to skip. But after that we will just have to take things as they come.’

‘Why can’t you take me all the way?’ Luka blurted out, very disappointed.

‘Because, my sweet Luka,’ replied the Insultana of Ott, ‘this silken flying carpet given to me so long ago by King Solomon himself can do many wondrous things, but it cannot fly through the Great Rings of Fire.’

If you have not yet flown on a magic carpet, you probably don’t know about the seasickness. A flying carpet makes a slow, rolling, wavelike movement as it passes through the air, not exactly as if it’s floating on airwaves, but more as if the carpet itself has become a kind of silken air that can bear you aloft and take you wherever you want to go. It’s sad, but true, that your stomach may find this kind of travel disagreeable, at least for a while. And if you have never flown on a flying carpet accompanied by a nervous talking bear, an even more nervous talking dog, and an Elephant Duck and an Elephant Drake making the first flight of their otherwise flightless lives, to say nothing of a supernatural being who looks, acts and talks like your own father, as well as an ancient Queen who looks, acts and talks like a seventeen-year-old girl, and, in addition, a large amphibian boat tank named
Argo
, then you will just have to imagine the confusion that reigned aboard the green-and-gold
Resham
as it took off to begin its journey towards the Mists of Time. The flying carpet had grown considerably in size to accommodate all its passengers and cargo, and this exaggerated the waviness of the flight.

It was, it has to be said, a chaotic and noisy scene. There was a moaning and a howling and a groaning and a growling, and that honking sound elephants (and ducks) make when they are in distress. Dog the bear kept saying that if bears had been meant to fly they would have grown wings, and he mentioned, too, that when bears sat on carpets it made them think of bearskin rugs, but mainly it was the flying thing that was the problem; and Bear the dog was babbling anxiously and without stopping as he rolled around the rug, and his monologue went something like this:
I’m going to fall off, aren’t I? I am, don’t let me fall, am I going to fall off? I am, I can tell, I’m going to fall off, any second now, I’ll fall
; even though in fact the carpet carefully curved itself upwards whenever any of the travellers lurched too close to an edge, and deposited them safely back at, or near, the centre.

As for the Elephant Birds, they kept asking each other why they were there at all. In the excitement of the departure from the Respectorate, they had somehow been swept aboard along with the
Argo
, but they couldn’t remember being asked if they would actually like to come. ‘And if we can’t remember it, it didn’t happen,’ said the Elephant Drake. They felt kidnapped, shanghaied, dragged along on an adventure that had nothing to do with them and was very probably extremely dangerous, and yes, they thought they might fall off the rug as well.

Of course the Insultana Soraya abused the lot of them roundly, as it was in her nature to do, calling them babies and girls and boobies and not-ducks-but-geese; she told them they were scaredy-cats and namby-pambies, sissies and yellow-bellies, milksops and Milquetoasts and candy-asses (a term with which Luka was not familiar, though he thought he could probably work out
what it meant). She made chicken noises at them to call them cowards, and the worst part of all was when she squeaked at them contemptuously, which meant she was calling them mice.

Nobodaddy, naturally, handled the flying-carpet ride effortlessly, and stood coolly and with perfect assurance beside the Insultana, and that made Luka determined to find his ‘carpet legs’ as soon as possible. After a while he did, and stopped falling over; and after a further while the four animals found their twelve legs as well, and then, at last, the moaning and groaning stopped and things settled down, and nobody had actually been sick.

Once he could stand up and keep his balance on the flying carpet, Luka noticed that he was getting extremely cold. The carpet was beginning to fly higher and faster, and his teeth were beginning to chatter. The Insultana Soraya did not seem to be affected by the cold, even though she was wearing floaty garments that appeared to be constructed out of cobwebs and butterflies’ wings, and neither did Nobodaddy, who stood beside her in Rashid Khalifa’s short-sleeved vermilion bush shirt, looking quite unconcerned. Dog the bear seemed fine under all that hair, and the Elephant Drake and Duck had their downy feathers to keep them warm, but Bear the dog looked shivery and Luka was getting very cold indeed. ‘Who would have thought,’ Luka mused, ‘that this business of flying through the air would present so many practical problems?’ Inevitably the Insultana called him a whole set of new names when she saw that he was freezing to death. ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that you expected this flying carpet to have central heating and whatnot. But this, my dear, is no modern softie’s suburban deep-shag-pile rug. This, I’ll have you know, is an
antique
.’

When Soraya had finished teasing Luka, however, she clapped her hands, and at once an old oak chest – which Luka had not noticed until that moment, but which had apparently been aboard the flying carpet the whole time – sprang open, and out flew two seemingly flimsy shawls. One shawl flew into Luka’s hands and the other wrapped itself around Bear. When Luka put the shawl around him he immediately began to feel as if he had been transported to somewhere in the tropics – almost too warm, almost as if he would prefer it to be a little cooler. ‘Some people are never satisfied,’ said the Insultana, reading his mind, and she turned away from him to hide her affectionate grin.

Now that he was warm as well as balanced, Luka was able to take in the wonderful sight that lay before him. The flying carpet was following the course of the River of Time. The World of Magic lay spread out on both banks of the River, and Luka, the storyteller’s son, began to recognise all the places he knew so well from his father’s tales. The landscape was dotted with cities, and with a rising excitement and a pounding heart Luka recognised them all, Khwáb, the City of Dreams, and Umeed Nagar, the City of Hope, and Zamurrad, the Emerald City, and Baadal-Garh, the Fortress City built upon a Cloud. In the distance to the east, rising up against the horizon, were the blue hills of the Land of Lost Childhood, and in the west lay the Undiscovered Country, and there – over there – was the Place Where Nobody Lived. Luka recognised with a thrill the crazy architecture of the House of Games and the Hall of Mirrors, and beside them the gardens of Paradise, Gulistan and Bostan, and, most exciting of all, the large Country of Imaginary Beings, Peristan, in which the peris, or fairies, endlessly did battle with
malevolent ogres known as
devs
or
bhoots
. ‘I wish I wasn’t in such a hurry,’ Luka thought, because this was the world he had always thought of as being even better than his own, the world he had drawn and painted all his life.

He also saw, now that he was aloft and could take it all in, the enormous size of the Magic World, and the colossal length of the River of Time; and he understood that he would never have been able to get where he needed to go if he had had to rely on the Memory of the Elephant Birds for fuel, and their pulling power for speed. But now the Flying Carpet of King Solomon was carrying him at a great rate towards his goal, and even though he knew there would be dangers ahead he entered a state of high excitement, because, thanks to the Insultana of Ott, the impossible had just become a little more possible. And then he saw the Mists of Time.

At first they were no more than a white, cloudy mass on the horizon, but their true immensity became apparent as the carpet hurtled towards them. They stretched from horizon to horizon like a soft wall across the world, flowing across the River’s course and swallowing it up, engulfing the enchanted landscape and gobbling the sky. Any moment now they would fill Luka’s entire field of vision, and then there would be no Magic World left, only these clammy Mists. Luka felt the optimism and excitement drain out of him and a cold, bad feeling crept into the pit of his stomach. He felt Soraya’s hand on his shoulder, but did not feel reassured.

‘We have reached the Limits of Memory,’ Nobodaddy announced. ‘This is as far as your hybrid, surf-and-turf friends here would have been able to bring you.’ The Elephant Birds
were most displeased. ‘We are not accustomed,’ said the Elephant Duck with immense dignity, ‘to being described as menu items.’ (That had been the true Nobodaddy speaking, Luka realised, the creature he didn’t like, and indeed had every reason not to like. His own father would never have said such a thing.) ‘Also,’ said the Elephant Drake, ‘may we remind you of the old cautionary saying regarding what you should do when you reach the Limits of even an elephantine Memory?’

‘What should you do?’ Luka asked.

‘Duck,’ said the Elephant Duck.

No sooner had she spoken than a fusillade of missiles came flying out of the Mists of Time, and the carpet had to take swift evasive action, diving and climbing and swerving to right and left. (The animals and Luka lost their balance again, and once more there was much rolling about and many noisy ursine, canine and duck-elephantine protests.) The missiles seemed to be made out of the same substance as the Mists themselves: they were white Mistballs the size of large cannonballs. ‘Can they really hurt us that much if they’re made out of fog?’ Luka asked. ‘What happens if one of them hits you?’ Nobodaddy shook his head. ‘Don’t underestimate the Weapons of Time,’ he said. ‘If a Mistball struck you, your entire memory would immediately be erased. You would not remember your life, or your language, or even who you were. You would become an empty shell, good for nothing, finished.’ That silenced Luka. If that was what a Mistball could do, he was thinking, what would happen when they plunged into the Mists of Time themselves? They wouldn’t stand a chance. He must have been crazy to think he could penetrate all the defences of the Magic World
and reach the Heart of Time itself. He was just a boy, and the job he had given himself was far beyond his capabilities. If he went on, it would mean not only his own destruction but the ruin of his friends. He couldn’t do it; but, on the other hand, he couldn’t stop, because to stop would be to give up hope for his father, however slim that hope might be.

‘Don’t worry so much,’ Soraya of Ott said, interrupting his anguished thoughts. ‘You are not defenceless here. Have some faith in the great Flying Carpet of King Solomon the Wise.’

Luka’s spirits lifted a little, but only a little. ‘Does somebody know we are coming?’ he wondered. ‘Mustn’t that be why the missiles were fired?’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Nobodaddy. ‘I believe we may have triggered an automatic defence system by coming so close to the Mists of Time. We are about to break the Rules of History, after all, young Luka. When we enter the Mists we will leave behind the world of Living Memory and move towards Eternity; that is,’ he went on, seeing from the confusion on Luka’s face that he needed to be clearer, ‘towards the secret zone, where clocks do not tick, and Time stands still. Not one of us is supposed to be there. Let me put it like this. When a bug of some sort enters your system, when it starts moving around your body and making you feel unwell, your body dispatches Antibodies to fight it until it’s destroyed, and you start feeling better. In this case, I’m afraid, we are the bugs, and so we must expect … opposition.’

When Luka was just six years old he had seen pictures of the planet Jupiter on television, pictures beamed back to Earth by a tiny, unmanned space probe that was actually falling slowly towards the surface of that great gas giant of a planet. Every
day the probe got closer and the planet loomed larger and larger. The pictures clearly showed the slow movement of the gases of Jupiter, the way they created layers of colour and movement, arranging themselves in stripes and swirls, and, of course, forming the two famous Spots, the huge one and the smaller one. In the end the probe was pulled down by the planet’s gravitational force and disappeared for ever, with what Luka imagined to be a soft
gloop
, a slow sucking sound, and after that there were no more pictures of Jupiter on television. As the flying carpet
Resham
approached the Mists of Time, Luka could see that their surface, too, was full of movement, just like Jupiter’s. The Mists, too, flowed and swirled and were full of intricate patterns, and there were colours there, too – as Luka got closer and closer he could see the whiteness breaking up into many subtly graded hues. ‘We are the probe,’ he thought, ‘a manned probe, not an unmanned one, but any second now there will probably be a
gloop
, and that will be that. End of transmission.’