Luka and the Fire of Life (20 page)

‘What on earth was
that
?’ asked Bear the dog.

‘He’s speaking Hieroglyph,’ said Nuthog, ‘and what he says is, “Okay, this had better be good.”’

‘Start dancing,’ murmured Bear the dog to Dog the bear. ‘And dance as you’ve never danced before.’

‘And you start singing,’ growled Dog the bear to Bear the dog. ‘Sing as if your life depended upon it.’

‘Which, in point of fact, it does,’ chorused Nuthog, Sara, Badlo and Jinn. ‘And ours too, by the way,’ Nuthog added. ‘No pressure, though. Break a leg.’

So Dog the bear began to dance, first a soft-shoe shuffle, then a rhythm tap, and then the African Gumboot Dance. Once
he had warmed up, he went into the Broadway Style and at last his show-stopping speciality, the Caribbean Juba, the most energetic tap dance of them all. The audience went crazy. He had them right where he wanted them; as his feet tapped, so did the feet of the ex-gods; as his hands clapped, so the junked deities clapped along; and when he twirled the Juba Twirl, well, those ancient relics discovered they could still get down and boogie! Ra the Supreme clapped right along with everyone else. ‘
,’ he roared, and Gyara-Jinn translated, ‘He says, “You make my pants want to get up and dance.”’ Dog the bear shook his head in wonder. ‘But he isn’t wearing any pants,’ he pointed out. ‘Just that little loincloth sort of thing which doesn’t exactly hide very much,’ agreed Bear the dog, ‘but let’s not argue.’

‘Your turn now,’ said Dog the bear to Bear the dog, and the dog murmured back, ‘Let’s try a little flat-out flattery. After all, it’s been a while since anyone worshipped these folks properly.’ Then he cleared his throat and burst into howlful melody, singing a series of honeyed odes to the gods of Babylon, Egypt, Asgard, Greece and Rome, improvised from less specifically reverential tunes: ‘When I Wish upon Ishtar’, ‘It’s a Beautiful Frey’, ‘Long-winded Adulation Goes to Memphis on the Nile’, and so on. The show seemed to go well, and as he launched into his big finish, the metal sows oohed and clanged behind him.

‘
You’re dee-vine
,’ sang Bear the dog, and the Clangers chorused, ‘
Ooh (clang), ooh (clang), ooh (clang).
’

‘
You’re Level Nine
,’ sang Bear the dog. ‘
Ooh (clang), ooh (clang).
’

Bear was interrupted by an angry roar and a golden blaze of light. Ra the Supreme broke the spell of the music, rose into the sky, glowing furiously, and shot like a bullet towards the summit of Mount Knowledge. All the other ex-gods soared after him, looking like the grandest fireworks display in world history. Bear the dog looked disconsolate. ‘I lost my audience,’ he said sadly. Dog the bear comforted him. ‘It wasn’t you. Something just happened up there,’ he said. ‘Maybe it was something good. Let’s hope we bought young Luka enough time.’

An enormous white horse with eight legs galloped towards them, snorting angrily. ‘Let’s go and see if you did, shall we?’ he said. ‘By which I mean, you’re both under arrest.’ This was the real Slippy, King of the Horses, and he didn’t look at all pleased to see them. ‘As for you and your sisters,’ he said to Gyara-Jinn and the other Changers, ‘you should consider
yourselves seized as well. We’ll decide what to do about you later, but treason, may I remind you, is not a minor offence.’

When Luka saw the rhyming Abysm of Time ahead of him he didn’t slow down, because now, at last, he could feel the ghostly pressure on his left shoulder that told him the Left- Hand Dimension was
right there, right beside him
, so he ran even faster, and then, at the very edge of the Abysm, he hurled himself to the left …

… and fell into the Bottomless Pit, and, as he plummeted through the blackness, flew apart into a million shiny fragments. When he came to his senses, his life-counter had subtracted one hundred lives, and he was running at the Abysm again; and again throwing himself left at that area of soft pressure; and again toppling into blackness and disintegrating.

And the third time, the same thing happened
again
. This time, when the shiny fragments of himself re-formed, and he saw that a total of three hundred lives had evaporated in just these few instants, leaving him with only 165, he lost his temper. ‘That’s pathetic, Luka Khalifa, to be honest with you,’ he scolded himself. ‘If you can’t be serious now, after coming so far, then you deserve the Final Permination you are about to receive.’

Just then a red squirrel ran across his path from right to left, at the very edge of the Abysm, and simply disappeared into thin air. ‘Oh, my goodness,’ Luka thought, ‘I don’t even know if there are such things as left-handed – left-footed? – squirrels, – but if there are, then this was surely one of them, and it’s amazing how easily it hopped across onto the Left-Hand path, without
even trying. Obviously when you really and truly believe it’s there you can scurry across onto it without the slightest difficulty, whenever you feel the urge.’ Whereupon, following the squirrel’s example, Luka Khalifa simply turned to the left and took a step, and, without even needing to stumble, stepped into the left-handed version of the Magic World …

… in which the Mountain was completely different!
As a matter of fact, it was no longer a Mountain at all, but a low green hill dotted with oaks and elms and chinar trees and stands of poplars, and flower bushes around which honeybees buzzed, hummingbirds hummed and larks warbled melodiously, while crested orange hoopoes strutted like princes on the grass; and there was a pretty path curling around it to the left, a path which looked like it might take Luka all the way to the top.

‘I always knew the Left-Hand World would be much easier for me to handle than the Right-Hand one, if I could just find my way there,’ Luka thought happily. ‘I bet you that if there was a doorknob anywhere around here, it would turn to the left. It seems that even Knowledge itself is not such a huge, frightening Mountain when the world is arranged to suit us lefties for a change.’

The red squirrel was waiting for him on a low tree stump, nibbling at an acorn. ‘Greetings from Queen Soraya,’ she said, bowing formally. ‘Ratatat’s the name. Oh yes. Her Majesty the Insultana thought you might appreciate a little guidance.’

‘She certainly has friends everywhere,’ Luka marvelled.

‘We redheads like to stick together,’ said Ratatat, bristling with pleasure. ‘And some of us (I don’t want to boast, but there it is) are Honorary Otters of long standing – oh yes! – members
of the highly confidential Ott List, the Insultana’s emergency undercover squadron – sleeper agents, if you will, lurking in our secret Ott Beds and available to the lady twenty-four/seven on her personal Ott Line, just in case she needs to activate us. But, much as I’d like to stop and chat about these Ott Topics, I do believe you might be in something of a hurry. So,’ she went on quickly, noticing that Luka had opened his mouth to reply, and obliging him to shut it again, ‘let’s Ott-foot it up this so-called Mountain while we can.’

Luka almost skipped up that hill, so great was his determination and joy. He had Jumped to the Left, from a Mountain of Difficulty to a Hill of Ease, and the Fire of Life lay within his grasp. Soon he would be rushing home as fast as he could go, to pour the Fire into his father’s mouth, and then Rashid Khalifa would surely Awake, and there would be new stories told, and Soraya his mother would sing – ‘You do know,’ said Ratatat the squirrel, ‘that there will be guards?’

‘Guards?’ Luka stopped dead in his tracks and almost shrieked the word, because somehow he hadn’t been expecting to encounter any further obstacles – not here in the Left-Hand Dimension, surely not! Happiness drained from him like blood from a wound.

‘You wouldn’t expect the Fire of Life to be left unguarded, would you?’ said Ratatat sternly, as if lecturing a slightly dim-witted student.

‘Are there Fire Gods in this Magic World, too?’ asked Luka, and then felt so foolish he actually blushed. ‘Well, yes, I suppose there must be – but aren’t they all somewhere else right now,
guarding the Rainbow Bridge or searching for … well, for me, I suppose?’

‘As well as Fire Gods,’ said Ratatat, ‘there are Fire Guards. Oh yes.’

Nowadays, the squirrel explained, the job of guarding the Fire of Life had been given to the most powerful Guard Spirits from all the world’s dead religions, aka mythologies. Spotted Kerberos, the fifty-headed dog of Greece and the former gatekeeper of the Underworld; Anzu, the Sumerian demon with the face and paws of a lion and an eagle’s claws and wings; the decapitated but still living head of the Nordic giant Mimir, which had been guarding the Fire for so long that it had grown into, and become part of, Mount Knowledge itself; Fafnir the superdragon, as big as the four Changers combined and a hundred times as powerful; and Argus Panoptes, the cowherd with the hundred eyes, who saw everything and missed nothing, were the five appointed guardians, each of them more ferocious than the last.

‘Ah,’ said Luka, feeling cross with himself. ‘Yes, I should have expected that. So, as you know everything, can you tell me how am I supposed to get around that little lot?’

‘Cunning,’ said Ratatat. ‘Do you have that? Because a good supply of that is what is recommended. Hermes, for example, tricked Argus once by cunningly singing him lullabies until all his hundred eyes closed and he fell asleep. Oh yes. To steal the Fire of Life, you’ll need to be the cunning, devious, sneaky, tricky, weirdly twisted type. Is that, by any chance, the type of type you are?’

‘No,’ said Luka disconsolately, and sat down on the grassy slope. ‘I’m sorry to say that I’m not.’

As he spoke the sky darkened; storm clouds, black and lightning-lit, thickened overhead. ‘
,’ said a terrifying voice emanating from the heart of the clouds, ‘
.’

‘“In that case,”’ little Ratatat translated through teeth that were chattering with fear, ‘“you might find this last step a trifle tough.”’

As the gods rose like a swarm of hornets towards the summit of Mount Knowledge, the Fire Alarm sounded the all-clear, announcing the capture of the Fire Thief to the whole Heart of Magic. Bear the dog and Dog the bear, who were being carried up to the top on the Horse King’s back, heard the triumphant notes of the siren and were plunged into gloom. Nuthog and her sisters were flying alongside them with their tails very much between their legs. ‘The jig is up, I’m sorry to say,’ Nuthog told Bear and Dog, confirming their fears. ‘It’s time to pay the piper.’

At that instant the entire swarm of gods swerved sharply to the left – and, to Bear and Dog’s amazement, actually tore through the blue sky itself, as if it were made of paper, and charged through into another sky, which was full of storm clouds. The Horse King and his prisoners followed the swarm through the gigantic rip into the Left-Hand World, and Bear and Dog saw for the first time the transformed version of Mount Knowledge, which they both immediately thought to be the loveliest of green hills, even though the sky was dark and menacing, and the moment so forlorn. At the summit of Knowledge was a flower-strewn meadow crowned by a fine,
spreading ash tree. In spite of the tree’s beauty, however, its name was the Tree of Terror, and under its boughs stood Luka Khalifa with a red squirrel on his shoulder and the Ott Pot hanging from his neck, guarded by his captor, Anzu the Sumerian thunder demon with his lion’s head and eagle’s body, who looked as if he was only just managing to restrain himself from ripping the boy to bits with his enormous claws. The rest of the Fire Guards – many-headed Kerberos, Mimir the head without a body, Fafnir the superdragon and Argus Panoptes of the hundred eyes – were also angrily at hand. And beside the great tree was a small, slender-columned marble temple, scarcely larger than a humble garden shed. Inside the Temple was a light that glowed with an almost shocking intensity, filling the air around the Temple with warmth, radiance and a crackle of energy, even in the thunderous mood of that time of failure, captivity and imminent judgement; and above the pillared entrance to the Temple stood a golden ball, the Saving Point at this impossible Level’s End. ‘That’s the glow of Fire of Life,’ Dog the bear growled quietly to Bear the dog. ‘What a simple home it has, at the end of such a grand journey; and how close we came, and how sad that we didn’t –’ Bear the dog interrupted sharply: ‘Don’t say that,’ he barked. ‘This isn’t over.’ But in his heart he believed it was.