Luka and the Fire of Life (5 page)

At this point Luka’s feet began to feel as if somebody was gently tickling their soles. Then the silver sun rose above the horizon, and something quite unprecedented began to happen to the neighbourhood, the neighbourhood that wasn’t Luka’s real neighbourhood, or not quite. Why was the sun silver, for one thing? And why was everything too brightly coloured, too smelly, too noisy? The sweetmeats on the street vendor’s barrow at the corner looked like they might taste odd, too. The fact that Luka was able to look at the street vendor’s barrow at all was a part of the strange situation, because the barrow was always positioned at the crossroads, just out of sight of his house, and yet here it was, right in front of him, with those oddly coloured, oddly tasting sweetmeats all over it, and those oddly coloured, oddly buzzing flies buzzing oddly all around it. How was this possible? Luka wondered. After all, he hadn’t moved a step, and there was the street vendor asleep under the barrow, so the barrow obviously hadn’t moved either; and how did the crossroads arrive as well, um, that was to say, how had he arrived at the crossroads?

He needed to think. He remembered the golden rule that one of his schoolteachers, the science master Mr Sherlock, a man with a pipe and a magnifying glass who always dressed too warmly for the climate, had taught him:
eliminate the impossible, and what remains, however improbable, is the truth
. ‘But,’ thought Luka, ‘what do I do when it’s the impossible that remains,
when the impossible is the only explanation?’ He answered his own question according to Mr Sherlock’s golden rule. ‘Then the impossible must be the truth.’ And the impossible explanation, in this case, was that
if he wasn’t moving through the world then the world must be moving past him
. He looked down at his ticklish feet. It was true! The ground was slipping along beneath his bare feet, tickling him gently as it went by. Already he had left the street vendor far behind.

He looked at Dog and Bear, who had started behaving as if they were on an ice rink without skates on, slipping and sliding on the moving roadway and making loud, surprised protesting noises. Luka turned to Nobodaddy. ‘You’re doing this, aren’t you?’ he accused him, and Nobodaddy widened his eyes, spread his arms, and replied innocently, ‘What? Excuse me? Is there a difficulty? I thought we were in a hurry.’

The worst, or maybe the best, thing about Nobodaddy was that he always behaved exactly like Rashid Khalifa. He had Rashid’s facial movements and hand gestures and laugh, and he even acted innocent when he knew perfectly well he wasn’t, just the way Rashid did when he was clumsy or wrong or planning a special surprise. His voice was Rashid’s voice and his wobbly tummy was Rashid’s stomach and he was even beginning to treat Luka with a spoiling affection that was totally Rashid-like. All his life Luka had known that his mother was the one who laid down the law and had to be handled with care, while Rashid was, quite frankly, a bit soft. Was it possible that Rashid’s character had crept into his would-be nemesis, Nobodaddy? Was that why this scary anti-Rashid seemed actually to be trying to help Luka out?

‘Okay, stop the world,’ Luka commanded Nobodaddy. ‘There are some things we need to get absolutely clear before anyone goes anywhere with you.’

He thought he heard, high up and far away, the noise of machinery grinding to a halt with a distant screeching noise, and his feet stopped being tickled, and Dog and Bear stopped sliding about. They had gone quite some distance from home already, and were standing, by chance (or not by chance), on more or less the exact spot where Luka had been on the day he shouted at Captain Aag while he and Rashid were watching the sad parade of the circus animals in their cages. The city was waking up. Smoke rose from roadside canteens where strong, sweet milky tea was being brewed. A few early-rising shopkeepers were taking down their shutters and revealing long narrow caverns filled with fabrics, foodstuffs and pills. A policeman with a long stick yawned as he walked by in dark blue shorts. Cows were still sleeping on the pavement, and so were people, but bicycles and motor scooters were already busying the street. A jam-packed bus went past taking people to the industrial zone, where the sadness factories used to stand. Things had changed in Kahani, and sadness was no longer the city’s principal export, as it had been when Luka’s brother Haroun was young. The demand for glumfish had fallen away, and people preferred to eat better-tasting produce from further away, the grinning eels of the south, the meat of the northern hope-deer, and, more and more, the vegetarian and non-vegetarian foods available from the Cheery Orchard stores that were opening everywhere you looked. People wanted to feel good even when there wasn’t that much to feel good about, and so the sadness
factories had been shut down and turned into Obliviums, giant malls where everyone went to dance, shop, pretend and forget. Luka, however, was not in the mood for self-deception. He wanted answers.

‘No more mystification,’ he said firmly. ‘Straight answers to straight questions, please.’ Now he had to fight to control his voice, but he succeeded, and fought down the dreadful feelings that were filling his whole body. ‘Number one,’ he cried, ‘who sent you? Where do you come from? Where –’ and here Luka paused, because the question was a terrifying one – ‘… when your … work … is done … if it’s done, that is … which it won’t be … but if it was done … where do you plan to go?’

‘That is numbers one, two and three, to be exact,’ said Nobodaddy, as, to the watching Luka’s horrified astonishment, a strolling cow walked
right through him
and went on about its business, ‘but let’s not quibble.’ Then he thought deeply for a long, silent moment. ‘Are you familiar,’ he said finally, ‘with the Bang?’

‘The
Big
Bang?’ Luka asked. ‘Or some other Bang I don’t know about?’

‘There was only one Bang,’ said Nobodaddy, ‘so the adjective
Big
is redundant and meaningless. The Bang would only be Big if there was at least one other Little or Medium-Sized or even Bigger Bang to compare it with, and to differentiate it from.’

Luka didn’t want to waste time arguing. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it,’ he said.

‘Then tell me,’ said Nobodaddy, ‘what was there before the Bang?’

Now this was one of those Enormous Questions that Luka
had often tried to answer, without having any real success. ‘What was it that had gone Bang anyway?’ he asked himself. ‘And how could everything go off with a Bang if there was nothing there to begin with?’ It made his head hurt to think about the Bang and so, of course, he didn’t think about it very much.

‘I know what the answer is supposed to be,’ he said. ‘It’s supposed to be “Nothing”, but I don’t really get that, to be honest with you. And anyway,’ he added as sternly as he could manage, ‘that has nothing to do with the subject under discussion.’

Nobodaddy wagged a finger under his nose. ‘On the contrary, young would-be assassin,’ he said, ‘it has everything to do with it. Because if the whole universe could just explode out of Nothing and then just Be, don’t you see that the opposite could also be true? That it’s possible to
im
plode and
Un
-Be as well as to
ex
plode and
Be?
That all human beings, Napoleon Bonaparte, for example, or the Emperor Akbar, or Angelina Jolie, or your father, could simply return to Nothing once they’re … done? In a sort of Little, by which I mean personal, Un-Bang?’

‘Un-Bang?’ Luka repeated, in some confusion.

‘Exactly,’ said Nobodaddy. ‘Not a spreading out but a closing in.’

‘Are you telling me,’ Luka said, feeling an anger rise in him, ‘that my father is about to implode into Nothing? Is that what you’re trying to say?’

Nobodaddy did not answer.

‘Then what about life after dea—’ Luka began, then stopped himself, slapped himself on the head and rephrased the question. ‘What about Paradise?’

Nobodaddy said nothing.

‘Are you trying to say that it doesn’t exist?’ Luka demanded. ‘Because if that’s what you are trying to say, I know a lot of people in this town who will give you a pretty heated argument.’

Not a word from Nobodaddy.

‘You’re suddenly very silent,’ Luka said crossly. ‘Maybe you don’t know as many answers as you pretend you do either. Maybe you’re not as big a deal as you think.’

‘Ignore him,’ said Dog the bear in an oddly big-brotherly way. ‘You really should go home now.’

‘Your mother will be worrying,’ said Bear the dog.

Luka was still not used to the animals’ new powers of speech. ‘I want an answer before I go,’ he said stubbornly.

Nobodaddy nodded, slowly, as if a conversation he had been having with someone invisible had just come to an end. ‘I can tell you this,’ he said. ‘That when my work is done, when I have absorbed your father’s … well, never mind what I will have absorbed,’ he added hastily, seeing the look on Luka’s face, ‘then I – yes, I, myself! – will implode. I will collapse into myself, and simply cease to Be.’

Luka was astounded. ‘You? You’re the one who’s going to die?’

‘Un-Be,’ Nobodaddy corrected him. ‘That’s the technical term. And as I have answered your third question first, I should add that, one, nobody sent me, but somebody did send
for
me, and, two, I don’t exactly come from somewhere, but I do come from some
one
. And if you think about it for a moment, you will know who that somebody and that someone are, especially
as they are one and the same, and I am the spitting image of them Both, who are only One.’

The silver sun brightened in the east. Dog and Bear looked agitated. It was definitely time for Luka to be at home getting ready for the school day. Soraya would be beside herself with worry. Maybe she had sent Haroun out to search the neighbourhood streets. When Luka got home for breakfast he was going to be in nineteen different kinds of trouble. But Luka wasn’t thinking about breakfast, or about school. This was not the time for cereal, Ratshit or geography. He was thinking about things he had hardly ever thought about in his life. He was thinking about Life and Dea— well, Un-Life. He still couldn’t bear that other, incomplete word.

‘And the Fire of Life can save my father,’ he said.

‘If you can steal it for him,’ said Nobodaddy, ‘then, yes, without a doubt.’

‘And it will give Dog and Bear back their real lives as well.’

‘It will.’

‘And what will happen to you then? If we succeed?’

Nobodaddy did not reply.

‘You won’t have to implode, will you? You won’t Un-Be.’

‘That is so,’ Nobodaddy said. ‘It won’t be my time.’

‘So you’ll go away.’

‘Yes,’ said Nobodaddy.

‘You’ll go away and never come back.’

‘“Never” is a long word,’ said Nobodaddy.

‘Okay … but you won’t come back for a long time.’

Nobodaddy inclined his head in agreement.

‘A long, long time,’ Luka insisted.

Nobodaddy pursed his lips and spread out his arms in a kind of surrender.

‘A long, long, long –’

‘Don’t push your luck,’ Nobodaddy said sharply.

‘And that’s why you’re trying to help us, isn’t it?’ Luka concluded. ‘You don’t want to implode. You’re trying to save your own skin.’

‘I don’t have skin,’ said Nobodaddy.

‘I don’t trust him,’ said Bear the dog.

‘I don’t like him,’ said Dog the bear.

‘I don’t believe a word he says,’ said Bear the dog.

‘I don’t think for one moment that he’ll just go away,’ said Dog the bear.

‘It’s a trick,’ said Bear the dog.

‘It’s a trap,’ said Dog the bear.

‘There’s a catch,’ said Bear the dog.

‘There must be a catch,’ said Dog the bear.

‘Ask him,’ said Bear the dog.

Nobodaddy took off his panama hat, scratched his bald head, lowered his eyes and sighed.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’s a catch.’

Actually, there were two catches. The first, according to Nobodaddy, was that
nobody in the entire recorded history of the World of Magic had ever successfully stolen the Fire of Life
, which was protected in so many ways that, according to Nobodaddy, there wasn’t enough time to list one-tenth of them. The dangers were almost infinite, the risks dizzying, and only the most fool-hardy adventurer would even think of attempting such a feat.

‘It’s
never
been done?’ Luka asked.

‘Never successfully,’ Nobodaddy replied.

‘What happened to the people who tried?’ Luka demanded.

Nobodaddy looked grim. ‘You don’t want to know,’ he said.

‘Okay,’ said Luka, ‘so what’s the second catch?’

Darkness fell – not everywhere, but just around Luka, Dog, Bear and their strange companion. It was as if a cloud had covered the sun, except that the sun could still be seen shining in the eastern sky. Nobodaddy seemed to darken, too. The temperature dropped. The noises of the day faded away. Finally Nobodaddy spoke in a low, heavy voice.

‘Somebody has to die,’ he said.

Luka was angry, confused and frightened all at the same time. ‘What do you mean?’ he shouted. ‘What sort of a catch is that?’

‘Once someone like me has been summoned,’ said Nobodaddy, ‘someone alive must pay for that summons with a life. I’m sorry, but that’s the rule.’

‘That’s a stupid rule, to be honest with you,’ said Luka, as powerfully as he could, even though his stomach was churning. ‘Who made a stupid rule like that?’

‘Who made the Laws of Gravity, or Motion, or Thermodynamics?’ Nobodaddy asked. ‘Maybe you know who discovered them, but that’s not the same thing, is it? Who invented Time or Love or Music? Some things just Are, according to their own Principles, and you can’t do a thing about it, and neither can I.’

Slowly, slowly, the darkness that had encircled the four of them faded away and the silver sunlight touched their faces.

Luka realised with horror that Nobodaddy wasn’t as see-through as he had been before: which could only mean that Rashid Khalifa had grown weaker in his Sleep. That settled it. They didn’t have time to waste on chit-chat. ‘Will you show me the way to the Mountain?’ Luka asked Nobodaddy, who grinned a grin that wasn’t at all humorous, and then nodded his head. ‘Okay,’ said Luka. ‘Then let’s go.’