Luka and the Fire of Life (6 page)

The River Silsila was not a beautiful river, in Luka’s opinion. Maybe it started out prettily enough up in the mountains somewhere, as a shining, skipping stream rushing over smooth stones, but down here in the coastal plains it had grown fat, lazy and dirty. It slopped from side to side in wide, snaky curves, and it was mostly a pale brown colour, except that in places it looked green and slimy, and then there were purple oil slicks on the surface here and there, and the occasional dead cows floating sadly out to sea. It was a dangerous river, too, because it ran at different speeds; it could accelerate without warning and sweep your boat away, or it could bog you down in a slowly swirling eddy and you would be stuck there for hours, calling uselessly for help. There were treacherous shallows that could maroon you on a sandbank, or sink a large vessel, a ferry boat or a barge, if it hit an underwater rock. There were murky depths in which Luka imagined that almost anything ugly, unclean and glutinous might be living, and certainly there was not, anywhere in all the filthy flow, anything worth catching to eat. If you fell into the Silsila you were supposed to go to
the hospital to be cleaned up, and you were given tetanus shots as well.

The only good thing about the river was that over the course of thousands of years it had pushed up high embankments of earth, called Bunds, on both banks, so that it was hidden from view unless you actually climbed up on top of those dykes and looked down at the liquid serpent as it flowed along, and smelled its horrid smell. And thanks to the Bunds the river never flooded, not even in the rainy season when its level rose and rose, so the city was spared the nightmare of that brown, green and purple water full of nameless slimy monsters and dead cattle pouring down into its streets.

The Silsila was a working river; it transported grain and cotton and wood and fuel from the countryside through the city to the sea, but the bargees handling the freight on the long, flat lighters were renowned for their foul tempers; they spoke to you rudely, they shouldered you out of their way on the pavement, and Rashid Khalifa liked to say that the Old Man of the River had cursed them and made them dangerous and bad, like the river itself. The citizens of Kahani tried to ignore the river as much as possible, but now Luka found himself standing right beside its left, that was to say its southern, Bund, wondering how he had arrived there without moving a muscle. Dog the bear and Bear the dog were right beside him, looking as puzzled as he was, and of course Nobodaddy was there, too, grinning his mysterious grin, which looked exactly like Rashid Khalifa’s grin, but wasn’t.

‘What are we doing here?’ Luka demanded.

‘Your wish was my command,’ said Nobodaddy, folding his arms across his chest. ‘“Let’s go,” you said, so we went. Shazam!’

‘As if he’s some sort of genie from some kind of lamp,’ snorted Dog the bear in Haroun’s loud voice. ‘As if we don’t know that the true Wonderful Lamp belongs to Prince Aladdin and his princess, Badr al-Budur, and is therefore not in this place.’

‘Um,’ said Bear the dog, who was the soft-spoken, practical type, ‘how many wishes exactly is he offering? And can anyone wish?’

‘He’s no genie,’ Dog the bear said bearishly. ‘Nobody rubbed anything.’

Luka was still puzzled. ‘What’s the point of coming to the River Stinky, anyway?’ he asked. ‘It just goes out into the sea, so, to be honest with you, it wouldn’t be any use to us even if it wasn’t the Stinky, which it is.’

‘Are you sure about that?’ Nobodaddy asked. ‘Don’t you want to climb up to the top of the Bund and have a look?’

So Luka climbed, and Dog and Bear climbed with him, and Nobodaddy was somehow waiting at the top when they got there, looking cool as cola on the rocks. But right then Luka wasn’t interested in how Nobodaddy got to the top of the Bund because he was looking at something that was literally out of this world.
The river flowing where the stinky Silsila should have been was a completely different river
.

The new river was shining in the silver sunlight, shining like money, like a million mirrors tilted towards the sky, like a new hope. And as Luka looked into the water and saw there the thousand thousand thousand and one different strands of liquid, flowing together, twining around and around one another, flowing in and out of one another, and turning into a different
thousand thousand thousand and one strands of liquid, he suddenly understood what he was seeing. It was the same enchanted water his brother, Haroun, had seen in the Ocean of the Streams of Story eighteen years earlier, and it had tumbled down in a Torrent of Words from the Sea of Stories into the Lake of Wisdom and flowed out to meet him. So this was – it had to be – what Rashid Khalifa had called it: the River of Time itself, and the whole history of everything was flowing along before his very eyes, transformed into shining, mingling, multicoloured story streams. He had accidentally taken a stumbling step to the right and entered a World that was not his own, and in this World there was no River Stinky but this miraculous water instead.

He looked in the direction the river was flowing, but a mist sprang up near the horizon and obscured his view. ‘I can’t see the future, and that feels right,’ Luka thought, and turned to look the other way, where the visibility was good for some distance, almost as far as he could see, but the mist was back there, too, he knew that; he had forgotten some of his own past and didn’t know that much about the universe’s. In front of him flowed the Present, brilliant, mesmerising, and he was so busy staring at it that he didn’t see the Old Man of the River until the long-bearded fellow came right up in front of him holding a Terminator, an enormous science-fiction-type blaster, and shot him right in the face.

BLLLAAARRRTT!

It was interesting, Luka thought as he flew apart into a million shiny fragments, that he could still think. He hadn’t thought that thinking would be a thing you would be able to do when
you had just been disintegrated by a giant science-fiction-type blaster. And now the million shiny fragments had somehow gathered together in a little heap, with Bear the dog and Dog the bear crying out in anguish beside it, and now the million fragments were joining up again, making little shiny sucking noises as they did so, and now – pop! – here he was, back in one piece, himself again, standing on the Bund next to Nobodaddy, who was looking amused, and the Old Man of the River was nowhere to be seen.

‘Luckily for you,’ said Nobodaddy pensively, ‘I gave you a few courtesy lives to start you off. You’d better collect some more before he returns, and you’d better work out what to do about him, too. He’s a bad-tempered old man, but there are ways round him. You know how this goes.’

And Luka found that he did know. He looked around him. Dog the bear and Bear the dog had already started work. Bear was digging up the whole neighbourhood, and sure enough there were bones to be found everywhere, little crunchy bones, worth one life, that Bear could grind up and swallow in a trice, and bigger bones that took some hauling out of the earth and quite a lot of crunching up, that were worth between ten and one hundred lives apiece. Meanwhile, Dog the bear was off in the trees lining the Bund, looking for the hundred-life beehives hidden among the branches, and, on the way, swatting down and gobbling up any number of golden, single-life bees. Lives were everywhere, in everything, disguised as stones, vegetables, bushes, insects, flowers, or abandoned candy bars or bottles of pop; a rabbit scurrying in front of you could be a life and so might a feather blowing in the breeze right in front of your
nose. Easily found, easily gathered, lives were the small change of this world, and if you lost a few, it didn’t matter; there were always more.

Luka began to hunt. He used his favourite tricks. Kicking tree stumps and rustling bushes were always good. Jumping into the air and landing hard on both feet shook lives down from the trees, and even made them tumble, like rain, out of the empty air. Best of all, Luka discovered, was punching the peculiar, round-bottomed, ninepin-like creatures who were hopping idly around the high Strand, the elegant, tree-shaded walkway on top of the Bund. These creatures did not fall over when you kicked them, but wobbled violently from side to side instead, giggling and shrieking with pleasure, and crying out in a kind of ecstasy, ‘More! More!’ while the lives Luka was looking for scurried out of them like shiny bugs. (When the Punchbottoms had run out of life-bugs, they said mournfully, ‘No more, no more,’ hung their little heads, and bounced shamefacedly away.)

When the lives Luka found landed on the Bund, they took the form of little golden wheels and immediately began to race away, and Luka had to chase them down, taking care not to fall off the Strand into the Waters of Time. He grabbed lives in great handfuls and stuffed them into his pockets, whereupon, with a little
ting
, they dissolved, and became a part of himself; and this was when he noticed the change in his eyesight. A little three-digit counter had somehow become lodged in the top left-hand corner of his field of vision; it was there, in the same place, no matter where he looked or how hard he rubbed his eyes; and the numbers kept going up as he swallowed, or
absorbed, his many lives, making, he was sure, a low whirring noise as they did so. He found that he could accept this new phenomenon easily enough. He would need to be able to keep score, because if he ran out of lives, well, the game would be over, and maybe also that other kind of life, the real one, the one he would need as and when he got back to the real world, where his real father lay asleep, desperately needing his help.

He had collected 315 lives (because of the three-digit counter in the top left of his personal screen, he guessed that the maximum number he could collect was probably 999) when the Old Man of the River came up on to the Strand again, with his Terminator in his hand. Luka looked around panicked for somewhere to hide, and at the same time tried desperately to remember what his father had told him about the Old Man, who, it seemed, was not just one of Rashid Khalifa’s inventions after all – or else he was here in the World of Magic
because
Rashid Khalifa had made him up. Luka remembered the way his father told the tale:

‘The Old Man of the River has a beard like a river,
It flows right down to his feet.
He stands on the Strand with a gun in his hand,
The nastiest Old Man you could meet.’

And here indeed was that very Old Man with his long white river-beard and his enormous blaster, coming out onto the riverbank, climbing up the Bund to the Strand. Luka did his very best to summon back the memory of what else the Shah
of Blah had told him about this malevolent river-demon. Something about asking the Old Man questions. No,
riddles
, that was it! Rashid loved riddles; he had tormented Luka with riddles day after day, night after night, year after year, until Luka had become good enough to torment him back. Rashid would sit each evening in his favourite squashy armchair and Luka would jump onto his lap, even though Soraya scolded him, warning that the chair wasn’t strong enough to take their combined weight. Luka didn’t care, he wanted to sit there, and the chair had never broken, or not yet, anyway, and all that riddling was about to come in handy after all.

Yes! The Old Man of the River was a riddler, that was what Rashid had said about him; he was addicted to riddling the way gamblers were addicted to gambling or drunkards to drink, and that was how to beat him. The problem was how to get close enough to the Old Man to say anything when he had that Terminator in his hand and looked determined to shoot on sight.

Luka dodged from side to side, but the Old Man kept coming right at him, and even though first Bear the dog and then Dog the bear tried to get in the way, a couple of
BLLLAAARRRTT
s blew them to pieces and obliged them to wait until their bodies regrouped; and a moment later, Luka, too, had been blasted again, and had to go through the whole business of flying apart into a million shiny fragments and joining up again, making those little sucking noises, feeling relieved that losing a life wasn’t the same thing as dying. Then it was back to life-gathering, but this time Luka had made a note of the exact point on the Bund where the Old Man came into view
before he hopped up onto the Strand; and once he was up to six hundred lives he stopped collecting, positioned himself, and waited.

No sooner had the Old Man’s head come in to view than Luka yelled at the top of his voice, ‘Riddle-me-riddle-me-ree!’ Which, he knew from his evenings with Rashid, was the time-honoured way of challenging a riddler to a battle. The Old Man of the River stopped in his tracks, and then a big, nasty smile spread across his face. ‘Who calls me?’ he said in a cawing cackle of a voice. ‘Who thinks he can outplay the Rätselmeister, the Roi des Énigmes, the Pahelian-ka-Padishah, the Lord of the Riddles? – do you know what you risk? – do you understand the wager? – the stakes are high! could not be higher! – look at you, you’re nothing, you’re a child; I don’t even know if I want to face you – no, I won’t face you, you are not worthy – oh, very well, if you insist – and if you lose, child, then all your lives are mine – do you understand? –
all your lives are mine
. The final Termination. Here, at the beginning, you will meet your End.’

And this is what Luka could have said in reply, but did not, preferring to remain silent: ‘And what you don’t understand, you horrible Old Man, is that, in the first place, it’s my father who is the Riddle King, and he taught me everything he knew. What you further don’t understand is that our riddle battles went on for hours and days and weeks and months and years, and therefore I have a supply of tough brain-twisters that will never run out. And what you don’t understand most of all is that I’ve worked out something important, namely that this World I’m in, this World of Magic, is
not just any old Magical
World, but the one my father created
. And because this is
his
Magic World and nobody else’s, I know secrets about everything in it, including, O terrible Old Man, about you.’