Luka and the Fire of Life (23 page)

It was not a cheerful sight. They had been blown far away from the River. The City of Dreams was below them now, and as Soraya fought to steer the flying carpet in the right direction, Luka could see the towers of the Dream City toppling like card palaces, its homes lying in roofless ruin, and he saw, too, many of the unhoused Dreams, which only flourished behind drawn
curtains in comfortable darkness, staggering into the bright streets to collapse and wither in the light. Nightmares galloped blindly down the City’s roads, and only a few citizens seemed unaffected; but even these were wandering about vaguely, not paying attention to the chaos around them, as if they lived in worlds of their own. ‘Those must be Daydreams,’ Luka guessed.

The collapse of the World of Magic terrified him, because it could only mean that Rashid Khalifa’s life was sliding down its last slope, and so, while Luka watched in horror the crumbling of the fields and farms of the Land of Lost Childhood, while he saw the smoke rising from the forest fires burning on the Blue Remembered Hills, while he witnessed the collapse of the City of Hope, all he could think was: ‘
Get me back in time, please don’t let me be too late, just get me back in time
.’

Then he saw the Cloud Fortress of Baadal-Garh heading towards them at high speed, its massive fortifications intact, the Cloud upon which it stood boiling and bubbling like a sped-up film of itself, and with a sinking heart he understood that his final battle still lay ahead. His left hand clutched at the Ott Pot hanging round his neck, and its warmth gave him a little strength. He crawled on all fours along the flying carpet until he reached Soraya – it was impossible to walk on that rippling, zooming, wind-tossed rug – and he asked, already knowing the answers, ‘Who is in charge of that Fortress? Do they mean us any harm?’ Soraya’s face and body were filled with tension. ‘I wish we hadn’t outrun the Otter Air Force,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘But, anyway, they wouldn’t have been much use against this enemy.’ Then she turned sadly to Luka and answered him. ‘In my heart of hearts I knew this would happen,’ she said. ‘I didn’t
know where or how or when, but I knew they would not stand back. It is the Aalim, Luka – the Guardians of the Fire, the Lords of Time. Jo-Hua, Jo-Hai, Jo-Aiga. A harsher Trinity you never will see. And with them, just as I suspected, there is a traitor and a turncoat. Look, there, upon the battlement. That vermilion bush shirt. That battered panama hat. There is the scoundrel, among the ranks of your deadliest foes.’

Yes, it was Nobodaddy, no longer a transparent spectre, but looking as solid as any man. Rage and misery wrestled with each other in Luka’s heart, but he fought them both back. This was a situation for calm minds. The Fortress City of Baadal-Garh was upon them, and as it neared, it grew. The Cloud upon which it stood spread around the Flying Carpet of King Solomon the Wise, and as it encircled them so did the Fortress’s lengthening walls. They were in a prison in the sky, Luka realised, and even though the air above them was clear he was sure that some unseen barrier would block their way if they attempted to escape. They were the prisoners of Time, and the flying carpet came to a halt right below the battlement where the creature Luka had known as Nobodaddy stood, looking down at them with scorn.

‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘As you see, you are already too late.’

Luka had to fight for self-control then, but he managed to shout back, ‘That can’t be true, otherwise you’d no longer be around, would you? If you were telling the truth about what happens when your work is done, then you’d have done that opposite-of-the-Bang thing, you’d – whatever you called it –
un-become
, and you told me you didn’t want to do that –’

‘
Un-Be
,’ Nobodaddy corrected him. ‘You should know the
terminology by now. Oh, and when I said I didn’t want to do that? I lied. Why would any creature not want to do the thing it was created for? If you’re born to dance, you dance. If you’re born to sing, you don’t sit around keeping your mouth shut. And if you come into being in order to eat a man’s life, then finishing the job and Un-Being after it’s done is the supreme achievement, the absolutely satisfying climax. Yes! A thing of ecstasy.

‘It sounds like you’re in love with death, to be honest with you,’ said Luka, and then understood the meaning of what he’d said.

‘Quite,’ said Nobodaddy. ‘Now you get it. I do confess to a measure of self-love. And that is not a noble quality, I readily concede the point. But, I repeat:
ecstasy
. All the more so in a case like this one. Your father has fought me with all his might, I should tell you. My compliments to him. He clearly feels he has powerful reasons to stay alive, and maybe you are one of those reasons. But I have my hand on his throat now. And you are right: when I said you were too late, I lied again. Look.’

He held up his right hand, and Luka could see that half of the middle finger was missing. ‘That’s all the life he has left,’ said Nobodaddy. ‘And while we’re talking, he’s emptying out, and I am filling up. Who knows? Maybe you’ll still be around to witness the great event. You can certainly forget about getting home in time to save him, even if you do have the Fire of Life in that Ott Pot around your neck. Congratulations on getting that far, by the way. Level Eight! Quite an achievement. But now, let’s not forget, Time is on my side.’

‘You turned out to be a nasty piece of work, and no mistake,’
said Luka. ‘What a fool I was to be taken in by you.’ Nobodaddy laughed a cold laugh. ‘Ah, but if you hadn’t gone along with me, there would have been none of this fun,’ he said. ‘You’ve made the wait so much more enjoyable. I really have to thank you for that.’

‘It’s all been just a game to you,’ Luka shouted, but Nobodaddy wagged the half-finger at him. ‘No, no,’ he said reprovingly. ‘Never
just a game
. It’s a matter of life and death.’

Dog the bear stood up on his hind legs and growled, ‘I can’t stand this fellow any more. Let me at him.’ But Nobodaddy was out of Dog’s reach up there on his rampart, and there seemed to be no way up. Then, in his deep, deep voice, the Titan spoke, the scarred Old Boy himself. ‘Leave him to me,’ he said, and got up from his kneeling position behind Soraya; and rose; and rose; and rose. When a Titan grows to his full size the Universe trembles. (The Universe also tries to look away, because nakedness enlarged in this way is much, much bigger than regular-sized nakedness, and harder to ignore.) Long ago, the Old Boy’s uncle had risen up like this and destroyed the sky itself. After that the battle of the Greek gods against the Twelve Titans had shaken the earth as the colossi fought and fell. The Old Boy, a veteran and hero of that war, scorning clothes as Greek Heroes and Ancients always had, rose up and grew so big that Soraya had to hurry to enlarge the flying carpet to its maximum size, before they were all pushed off it by the Old Boy’s enlarging feet. Luka was pleased to note the look of fear on Nobodaddy’s face as the Titan reached out an enormous left hand, grabbed him, and held him fast. ‘Let me go,’ squealed Nobodaddy – his voice was sounding inhuman
now, Luka thought, it was goblinish, demonic, and, at this precise moment, it was shriekingly scared.

‘Unhand me,’ shrieked Nobodaddy. ‘You have no right to do this!’

The Old Boy grinned a grin the size of a stadium. ‘Ah, but I have a left,’ he said, ‘and we left-handers stick together, you know.’

With that, he drew back his hand as far as it would go, with Nobodaddy kicking and squeaking in his grip, and then he hurled that dreadful, deceiving, life-sucking creature far, far away, up into the sky, howling all the way to the edge of the atmosphere and then out beyond the Kármán Line, where the world ended and the blackness of outer space began.

‘We’re still trapped,’ Dog the bear pointed out grouchily, because he felt a little upstaged by the Titan’s titanic effort. Then, too loudly, and in too challenging a manner, he added, ‘Where are these Aalim, anyway? Let them show themselves, unless they’re too scared to face us.’

‘Be careful what you wish for,’ said Soraya hurriedly, but it was too late.

‘
It is not known
,’ said Rashid Khalifa, ‘
if the Aalim have actual physical form. Perhaps they do have bodies, or perhaps they can simply take on bodily shapes when they need to, and at other times they are disembodied entities, spreading out through space – because Time is everywhere, after all; there’s nowhere that doesn’t have its Yesterdays, that doesn’t live in a Today, that doesn’t hope for a good Tomorrow. Anyway, the Aalim are known for their extreme reluctance to appear in public, preferring to work in silence and behind the scenes. When they have been glimpsed, they have always been hidden inside hooded
cloaks, like monks. Nobody has ever seen their faces, and everyone is afraid of their passing – except for a few particular children …’

‘A few particular children,’ Luka said aloud, remembering, ‘who can defy Time’s power just by being born, and make us all young again.’ It had been his mother who had said that first, or something very like it – he knew this because she had made a point of telling him so – but soon enough the idea became a part of Rashid’s inexhaustible storehouse of tall stories. ‘Yes,’ he admitted to Luka with a shameless grin, ‘I stole that from your ma. Don’t forget: if you’re going to be a thief, steal the good stuff.’

‘Well,’ thought Luka the Thief of the Fire of Life, ‘I acted on your advice, Dad, and look what I stole, and you see where it’s got me now.’

The three hooded figures standing on the battlements of the Cloud Fortress of Baadal-Garh were neither large nor imposing. Their faces were invisible and their arms were crossed, as if they were cradling babies. They said nothing, but they didn’t need to. It was plain from the expression on Soraya’s face, and from Coyote’s cringing whine –
Madre de Dios, if I warnt on a carpet in the sky right now I’d jus make a run for it an take my chances
– and the quivering of the Elephant Birds – ‘Okay, maybe we don’t want to do stuff after all! Maybe we just want to live, and remember stuff, like we’re supposed to!’ – that their mere appearance struck terror into the people of the Magic World. Even the grizzled Old Boy, the great Titan himself, was fidgeting nervously. Luka knew that they were all thinking fearfully about Sniffelheim, about being imprisoned for ever in solid blocks of
ice. Or possibly they were worrying about liver-eating birds. ‘Hmm,’ he thought, ‘it looks like our Magic Friends aren’t going to be much use in this situation. It’s up to the Real World team to pull this off somehow.’

Then the Aalim spoke, in unison, three low, unearthly voices whose triple coldness felt steely, like three invincible swords. Even courageous Soraya quailed at the sound. ‘I never thought I would be forced to hear the Voices of Time,’ she cried, and put her hands over her ears. ‘Oh, oh! It’s unbearable! I can’t stand it!’ and she fell to her knees in pain. The other magic beings were similarly distressed and writhed around on the flying carpet in evident agony, except for the Old Boy, whose tolerance for pain was obviously very great after that eternity at the mercy of the liver-munching Bird of Zeus. Dog the bear looked unimpressed, however, and Bear the dog, whose hackles were up, bared his teeth in an angry snarl.

‘
You have taken us away from our Handloom
,’ the soft sword-voices said. ‘
We are Weavers, the three of us, and on the Loom of Days we weave the Threads of Time, weaving the whole of Becoming into the fabric of Being, the whole of Knowing into the cloth of the Known, the whole of Doing into the garment of the Done. Now you have taken us from our Loom and things are disorderly. Disorder displeases us. Displeasure displeases us also. Therefore we are doubly displeased
.’ And then, after a pause: ‘
Return what you have stolen and perhaps we will spare your lives.
’

‘Look at what’s happening around you,’ Luka shouted back. ‘Can’t you see it? The calamity of this whole World? Don’t you want to save it? That’s what I’m trying to do, and all you have to do is get out of my way and let me get home –’

‘
It is of no consequence to us whether this World lives or dies
,’ came the reply.

Luka was shocked. ‘You don’t care?’ he asked disbelievingly.

‘
Compassion is not our affair
,’ the Aalim replied. ‘
The ages go by heartlessly whether people wish them to do so or not. All things must pass. Only Time itself endures. If this World ends, another will continue. Happiness, friendship, love, suffering, pain are fleeting illusions, like shadows on a wall. The seconds march forward into minutes, the minutes into days, the days into years, unfeelingly. There is no “care”. Only this knowledge is Wisdom. This wisdom alone is Knowledge
.’

The seconds were indeed marching forward, and at home in Kahani Rashid Khalifa’s life was ebbing away. ‘The Aalim are my mortal enemies,’ he had said, and so they were. Passion rose up in Luka, and a scream of angry love burst out of him. ‘Then I curse you, just as I cursed Captain Aag!’ he yelled at the Three Jos. ‘He caged his animals, and treated them cruelly, and you’re exactly the same, to be honest with you. You think you have everyone in your cage and so you can ignore us and torment us and make us do what you want, and you don’t care about anything except yourselves. Well, curse you, all three of you! What are you, anyway? Jo-Hua, the Past has gone and will never return, and if it lives on, it’s only in our memories – and the memories of the Elephant Birds, of course – and it’s certainly not standing up there on the ramparts of this Cloud Fortress, wearing a stupid hood. As for you, Jo-Hai, the Present hardly exists, even a boy my age knows that. It vanishes into the Past every time I blink an eye, and nothing as, um,
temporary
as that has much power over me. And Jo-Aiga? The Future? Give me
a break. The Future is a dream, and nobody knows how it will turn out. The only sure thing is that we – Bear, Dog, my family, my friends and –
we
will make it whatever it is, good or bad, happy or sad, and we certainly don’t need you to tell us what it is. Time isn’t a trap, you phoneys. It’s just the road I’m on, and I’m in a real hurry right now, so get out of my way. Everyone here has been scared of you for too long. May they lose their fear and – and – and put
you
on ice for a change. Stop bothering me now. I – I snap my fingers at you.’