Luka and the Fire of Life (14 page)

‘What are you talking about?’ Soraya asked. ‘There’s no woman out there!’

‘Fifi,’ giggled Dog the bear. ‘The Famous Incredible Fire Illusion of Grandmaster Flame. F-I-F-I, Fifi! That was our name for it in the circus. So Captain Aag is behind all this! We should have known.’

‘You know the Grandmaster?’ Soraya actually gasped.

‘Grandmaster, bah!’ answered Bear the dog. ‘He was a phoney in the Real World, and he’s still a phoney here. These fantastic defences you’re so afraid of, they’re no defences at all.’

‘Fifi is an
illusion
,’ explained Dog the bear. ‘Smoke and mirrors! She’s a magic trick. She isn’t really there at all.’

‘We’ll show you,’ said Bear the dog. ‘We know how she
works. Put us ashore and we’ll put a stop to this silliness once and for all.’

Nobodaddy held up a warning hand. ‘Are you sure,’ he asked, ‘that the Captain Aag of your circus days is the same as the Grandmaster Flame of the Magic World? How can you be certain that these Great Rings of Fire aren’t the real thing, even if the circus illusion was a fake?’

‘Look up there,’ Luka said sharply. ‘Where did they appear from?’

Circling in the sky above their heads, horribly illuminated by the giant flames, were seven vultures wearing ruffs around their necks, like European noblemen in old paintings, and also like circus clowns.

That set Bear the dog and Dog the bear off again. ‘Ha! Ha!’ Dog the bear laughed, jumping off the
Argo
onto the shore. ‘Old Aag’s beaky buddies just spoiled his trick by flying through it!’

‘Ha! Ha!’ agreed Bear the dog. ‘Watch this, everyone!’

Whereupon they both ran directly at the Great Rings of Fire, and disappeared into the blaze.

Soraya shrieked, and Luka covered his mouth with his hands; and then in a flash the Rings vanished, the light changed, Bear and Dog came running back, the counter in the top right-hand corner of Luka’s field of vision
ding
ed up to 7, and the Heart of Magic lay revealed, lit up by the Dawn of Days.

The Heart of Magic – and also Captain Aag, astride a fire-breathing dragon.

‘Is this an illusion, too?’ Luka boldly asked Captain Aag. ‘Is this another of your pesky magic tricks?’ Captain Aag gave what might have been intended as a laugh but came out as a sort of snarl. ‘Security,’ he said, ‘is not an Illusion. Security is the Foundation of any World. Alas! Those of us who labour in the field of Security are often misunderstood, regularly abused, and frequently ignored by those whose safety and values we protect, and yet we struggle on. The Maintenance of Security, young feller-me-lad, is a Thankless Task, I’ll have you know; and yet Security must be Maintained. No, Security is not a Deception. It is a Burden, and it has fallen upon me. Fortunately, I do not work alone; and a loyal Fire Bug’ – here Luka saw the little telltale flame hovering at Aag’s shoulder – ‘who makes haste, overcoming all obstacles and distractions, to bring me word that thieves are on their way, a heroic Fire Bug such as we have here, such a Bug is not the creation of flimflam or prestidigitation. Such a Bug is Virtue’s Child. Nor is the murderous and terrifying Dragon Nuthog the product of any conjuring trick – as you will soon discover.’

He was a man of hair and anger, this Aag, whose henna-tinted
locks stood out from his head like wrathful orange serpents; a man, too, of chin hair, whose russet beard stuck out in all directions like the rays of an ill-tempered sun; a man of eyebrows, quarrelsome scarlet bushes which curled upwards and outwards above a pair of glaring black eyes; and a man also of ear hair, long, stiff, crimson strands of ear hair, that corkscrewed outwards from both those fleshy organs of hearing. Blood-red hair sprouted up from Aag’s shirt at the collar and out from his pirate’s greatcoat at the cuffs, and Luka imagined the Captain’s entire body covered in a luxuriant growth, as if that body were a farm and hair its only crop. Soraya, also a flame-haired person, whispered in Luka’s right ear that this Grandmaster’s bushy excessivity of hair might give all redheads a bad name.

The hair was Aag’s anger made visible. Luka could see that from the way it waved around, shaking itself in his direction as if it were a fist. Why was he so angry? Well, there was the little matter of the destruction of his circus by Luka’s curse, that much was obvious; but, in the first place, that circus was now revealed to be a side issue, merely the minor Real World plaything of the Gatekeeper of the Heart of Magic, and, in the second place, that hair had been growing for a long, long time, so Captain Aag had plainly been furious all his life, or, if he was by some chance immortal, then he must have been angry since the beginnings of Time.

‘His original name was Menetius,’ Nobodaddy whispered into Luka’s left ear, ‘and he was once the Titan of Rage, until the King of the Gods lost patience with his crosspatchery, killed him with a thunderbolt, and hurled him into the underworld. Eventually he was allowed to return to this lowly job – he’s
no more than a doorman now – so here he is, in a worse mood than ever, I’m sorry to say.’

The seven vultures had arranged themselves in the air above Aag and the dragon, like guests at a banquet, waiting for a feast. Aag, however, was for a moment in a playful mood. ‘In other places, such as the Real World,’ he said from the dragon’s back, almost as if he were speaking to himself, looking off into the distance and adopting a thoughtful expression, ‘such terrible creatures as one might encounter – the Yeti, the Bigfoot, the Unbearably Unpleasant Child – are what I like to call
monsters in space
. There they are, but that’s all they are, unchangeable, therefore always the same. Whereas here, where you have no business to be, and where you will very shortly be no more, our monsters can be monsters in time as well; that is to say, they can be one monster after another. Nuthog, here, is actually called
Jaldibadal
, and she’s a Magical Chameleon: quite the quick-change artist is old Jaldi when she wants to be, but she’s a lazy good-for-nothing creature a lot of the time. Show them, Nuthog, why don’t you? There’s no real rush to cook them in dragon-fire, after all. The vultures can wait for their lunch.’

Nuthog the dragon – or, more properly, Jaldibadal the Changer – gave what sounded very like a tired, serpentine sigh and then mutated, with what looked very like a monstrous unwillingness, into, first, a giant metallic sow, and then, one after the other, a huge, shaggy woman-beast with the tail of a scorpion, a Monstrous Carbuncle (a mirrored creature with a diamond shining out of its head) and an immense mother-tortoise, and finally, with what felt very like a sullen resignation, back into a dragon again. ‘Congratulations, Nuthog,’ said Captain Aag
sarcastically, and his black eyes glittered with anger and his bushy beard flared out around his face like the red flame of an evil match. ‘An excellent show. And now, O indolent beast, get on with it and fry these thieves alive before I lose my temper.’

‘If my sisters were here beside me, to release me from your spell,’ Nuthog spat back, in a voice of considerable sweetness, and in surprising rhyme, ‘you wouldn’t speak so bravely, and we’d send you back to Hell.’

‘Who are her sisters? Where are they?’ Luka hissed at Nobodaddy; but then Nuthog blasted the
Argo
, and all the world was flame. ‘It’s odd, this business of losing a life,’ Luka thought. ‘You ought to feel something, but you don’t.’ Then he noticed that the counter in the top left-hand corner of his field of vision had gone down by
fifty lives
. ‘I’d better think fast,’ he realised, ‘or I’ll run out of chances right here.’ He had re-formed in the same place as before, and so had Bear and Dog. The residents of the World of Magic were unharmed, though Soraya was complaining loudly. ‘If I wanted to be sunburned,’ she said, ‘I would go and sit in the sun. Point that flame-thrower, please, in some other direction.’

Nobodaddy was examining his panama hat, which looked very slightly scorched. ‘That’s not right,’ he grumbled. ‘I like this hat.’
BLLLAAARRRTT!
Another blast of dragon-fire, another fifty lives lost. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ Soraya cried. ‘Don’t you know that flying carpets are made of delicate stuff?’ The Elephant Birds were also extremely upset. ‘Memory is a fragile flower,’ complained the Elephant Drake. ‘It doesn’t respond well to heat.’

Things were rapidly arriving at crisis point. ‘Nuthog’s sisters,’
murmured Nobodaddy, ‘were imprisoned by the Aalim in blocks of ice, over that way in the Ice Country of Sniffelheim, so that Nuthog would obey Aag’s orders.’
BLLLAAARRRTT!
‘That’s one hundred and fifty lives gone in no time at all, just four hundred and sixty-five left,’ Luka thought as he came back together; and when he looked around him this time, Soraya and the flying carpet had vanished altogether. ‘She has abandoned us,’ he thought. ‘Which means we’re done for.’

Just then Dog the bear asked Jaldibadal a question. ‘Are you happy?’ he demanded, and the monster looked surprised.

‘What sort of question is that?’ Nuthog asked in return, forgetting to rhyme in her confusion. ‘I’m in the process of burning you to death, and this is the thing you want to ask me? What’s it to you? Suppose I was happy; would you be happy for me? And if I was not happy, would you sympathise?’

‘For example,’ persisted Dog the bear, ‘are you getting enough to eat? Because I can see your ribs sticking out through your scales.’

‘Those aren’t my ribs,’ answered Nuthog, looking shifty. ‘Those are probably the skeletons of the last people I gobbled down.’

‘I knew it,’ said Dog the bear. ‘He’s starving you, just as he underfed the animals in the circus. A bony dragon is an even sadder sight than a skinny elephant.’

‘Why are you wasting time?’ Captain Aag roared from Nuthog’s back. ‘Get on with it and finish them off.’

‘We rebelled against him back in the Real World,’ said Bear the dog, ‘and he couldn’t do a thing about it, and that was the end of him in that place.’

‘Cook them!’ shouted Captain Aag. ‘Grill them, roast them,
blast them, toast them! Bear sausages for dinner! Dog chops! Boy cheeks! Cook them and let’s eat!’

‘It’s my sisters,’ Nuthog told Bear the dog mournfully. ‘As long as they are imprisoned I have no choice but to do as he says.’

‘You always have a choice,’ said Dog the bear.

‘Also,’ said a voice from the sky, ‘were these perhaps the sisters you were looking for?’

Everyone aboard the
Argo
looked up; and there, high above them, was Queen Soraya of Ott, on King Solomon’s magic carpet,
Resham
, which had grown large enough to carry three enormous, shivering monsters, just released from their prison of ice, too cold to fly, too unwell to metamorphose, but alive, and free.

‘Bahut-Sara! Badlo-Badlo! Gyara-Jinn!’ shouted Nuthog joyfully. The three rescued Changers uttered weak, but happy, moans in reply. Captain Aag had begun to look distinctly panicky on Nuthog’s back. ‘L-Let’s all stay calm now,’ he said, stammering a little. ‘Let’s all remember that I was only following orders, that it was the Aalim, the Guardians of the Fire, who put the three excellent ladies here on ice, and instructed me to work with you, Nuthog, to guard the Gate to the Heart. Let’s understand, too, that Security is a hard taskmaster, who requires some tough decisions, and that in consequence it can happen that some innocents suffer for the sake of the greater good. Nuthog, you can understand that, can’t you?’

‘Only my friends can call me Nuthog,’ said Nuthog, and with a smooth little wiggle she flipped Captain Aag off her back. He landed with a bump right under her smoking nose.
‘And you’re no friend of mine,’ Nuthog added, ‘so the name is Jaldibadal. And I’m sorry to tell you that, no, I don’t understand.’

Captain Aag stood up to face his fate. He looked like a very wretched pirate indeed, all hair and no fire. ‘Any last words?’ enquired Jaldibadal sweetly. Captain Aag shook his fist at her. ‘I’ll be back!’ he roared.

Jaldibadal shook her scaly head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid you won’t.’ Then she unleashed an immense flame that wrapped itself around Captain Aag, and when the flame died away there was no more Captain, just a small pile of angry-looking ash.

‘Actually, of course,’ she added, once Aag had been, so to speak, put out, and his vulture troupe had fled into some distant sky, never to be seen again, ‘there are Powers in the Heart that could bring him back to life if they chose. But he doesn‘t have many friends here, and I think he’s probably had his last chance.’ She blew hard on the little pile of ash that now lay under her nose, and it was scattered to the four winds. ‘Now, young Sir,’ she said, looking straight at Luka, ‘and, I should say, Sir Dog and Sir Bear, how can I be of assistance?’

Her sisters on the flying carpet flapped their wings experimentally; and found, to their great pleasure, that they could fly again. ‘We too will help you,’ said Badlo-Badlo the Changer, and Bahut-Sara and Gyara-Jinn nodded their assent. The Insultana Soraya clapped her hands in delight. ‘That’s more like it,’ she rejoiced. ‘We’ve got an army now.’

In all the excitement nobody noticed a small fiery Bug rushing away from them as quickly as it could fly, making its
way deep into the Heart of Magic, whooshing along as quickly as a wildfire running before a helpful wind.

Nobodaddy was acting strangely, Luka thought. He was fidgety, scratching constantly at his panama hat’s scorched brim. He seemed irritable, pacing up and down and rubbing his hands together and speaking in monosyllables, when he spoke at all. Sometimes he seemed almost transparent and at other times almost solid, so plainly Rashid Khalifa at home in Kahani was struggling for life and health, and maybe that struggle was having a bad effect on Nobodaddy’s mood. But Luka began to have other suspicions. Maybe Nobodaddy had just been humouring him, toying with him for his own warped amusement. Who knew what sort of twisted sense of humour such a creature might have? Maybe he had never expected Luka to get this far, and in fact didn’t like the idea that they were now flying towards the Fire of Life itself. Maybe he hadn’t been honest, and didn’t want the quest to succeed. He’d need watching carefully, Luka decided, in case he tried to sabotage everything at the last moment. He looked, walked and talked like the Shah of Blah, but that didn’t make him Luka’s father. Maybe Bear and Dog had been right: Nobodaddy was not to be trusted an inch. Or maybe there was an argument raging inside him, maybe the Rashid-ness he had absorbed was at war with the death-creature that did the absorbing. Maybe dying was always like this: an argument between death and life.