Luka and the Fire of Life (9 page)

Just then Luka caught sight of a giant billboard bearing a much-larger-than-life black-and-white portrait of what could only be the Over-Rat in person. ‘Oh, my goodness,’ he said, because the thought struck him that if the Over-Rat ever turned into a
human being – if the Over-Rat could be reincarnated as a horrible twelve-year-old schoolboy from Kahani, to be precise – then he would look exactly like … that is, really
exactly like
…

‘Ratshit,’ Luka whispered. ‘But it’s impossible.’ Bear the dog stared at the billboard as well. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said. ‘Let’s just hope he’s not your enemy in the Magic World as well.’

Here was a place to eat! The sign over the door read
ALICE’S RESTAU-RAT
,
which was, unfortunately, not a spelling mistake. Luka looked through the window and was reassured to see that the cooks and staff were all people, though many of the guests were Rats. He was worried, though. How would he and his friends pay for their food? ‘Don’t fret about that,’ Nobodaddy said. ‘There’s no money in the World of Magic.’

Luka was relieved. ‘But then how does anyone, well, buy anything? How do things work? It’s very odd.’ Nobodaddy gave Rashid Khalifa’s shrug again. ‘It’s,’ he replied in his own, mysterious fashion, ‘a P2C2E.’ A surge of excitement coursed through Luka’s body. ‘I know what that is,’ he said. ‘My brother told me. They had those on his adventure, too.’

‘Processes Too Complicated To Explain,’ said Nobodaddy, a little too grandly, as he led the way into the Restau-Rat, ‘are at the heart of the Mystery of Life. They are everywhere, in the Real World as well as the Magical One. Nothing anywhere would work without them. Don’t get so excited, Professor. You look like you just discovered Electricity, or China, or Pythagoras’ Theorem.’

‘Sometimes,’ Luka replied, ‘it’s obvious that you aren’t my father.’

* * *

The food was surprisingly tasty, and Luka, Dog and Bear all ate very well and too quickly. However, they were aware that all the Rats in the place were watching them closely, staring with particular hostility at Bear the dog and Dog the bear, and that was an uneasy feeling. There was a lot of muttering at the other tables in what Luka thought must be Rattish, and then, finally, one particular Rat, a narrow-eyed, suspicious creature wearing a grey kepi, got up on its hind legs and walked over. He had clearly been chosen by his friends as the newcomers’ interrogator. ‘Ssso, ssstrangers,’ said the Inquisitor Rat without preamble, ‘may I asssk what you think of our great Resssspectorate of I?’

‘I, I, sir, I, I, sir,’ all the Rats in the Restau-Rat chorused.

‘We love our country,’ the Inquisitor Rat said coldly. ‘And you? Do you love our country, too?’

‘It’s very nice,’ Luka said carefully, ‘and the food is excellent.’

The Inquisitor scratched his chin. ‘Why am I not entirely convinced?’ he asked, as if talking to himself. ‘Why do I suspect there may be something insulting lurking beneath your superficial charm?’

‘We must be going,’ Luka said hastily, standing up. ‘It was good to meet –’ But the Inquisitor extended a claw-tipped arm and grasped Luka by the shoulder. ‘Tell me this,’ he demanded roughly. ‘Do you believe that two and two make five?’

Luka hesitated, unsure of how to answer – whereupon, to his immense surprise, the Inquisitor leapt up onto the dining table, scattering plates and glasses in all directions, and burst into loud, hissy, tuneless song:

And now all the Rats in the Restau-Rat leapt up on their hind legs, placed their claws upon their chests, and sang the chorus:

‘That’s just nonsense!’ The words burst out of Luka before he could stop them. The Rats froze in their various poses, and then slowly, slowly, all their heads turned to look at Luka, and all their eyes glittered, and all their teeth were bared. ‘This isn’t good,’ Luka thought, and Bear and Dog drew close to him, prepared to fight for their lives. Even Nobodaddy seemed, for once, nonplussed. The Rats faced Luka, and slowly, little Rat-step by little Rat-step, they closed in around him.

‘Nonsenssse, you say,’ mused the Inquisitor Rat. ‘But, as it happens, it is also our National Sssong. Would you say, my fellow rodentsss, that this young rascal’s Manners have been Minded? Or does he deserve – hmmm – a Black Mark?’

‘Black Mark!’ the Rats screeched, all together, and bared their terrible claws. And perhaps the story of Luka Khalifa’s quest for the Fire of Life would have ended then and there at Alice’s Restau-Rat, and maybe Dog the bear and Bear the dog would have been lost, too, though they would certainly have gone down fighting and taken many Rats with them; and then Nobodaddy would have returned to Kahani to wait until the life of Rashid Khalifa had filled him up completely … and how sad all of that would have been! Instead, however, there was a cry from the street outside, and enormous quantities of red gloop and what looked like gigantic amounts of egg yolk and, following that, a hail of rotten vegetables began to descend from the sky, and all the Rats forgot entirely about Luka and his cry of ‘Nonsense!’ and charged out into the street yelling, ‘It’s the Otters!’ and, more simply, ‘It’s her again!’ because the Respectorate of I was under attack from above, and leading her aerial squadrons in the attack, swooping high and low and
left and right, standing upright and unafraid on her famous flying carpet,
Resham
, which is to say, the Green Silk Flying Rug of King Solomon the Wise, was the feared, the fabled, the ferocious, the fabulous Insultana of Ott, shouting out, through a powerful megaphone, her blood-curdling battlecry: ‘
We expectorate on the Respectorate!
’

‘What’s going on?’ Luka shouted to Nobodaddy over the rising din, as the four travellers fled the Restau-Rat, just in case the Rats whom they had offended returned to finish them off. Outside in the street all was commotion and confusion and red gloop and egg and vegetables raining from above. They took shelter under the awning of a bakery down the road, its windows full of stale bread and unappetising-looking buns covered in grey icing. ‘Over in that direction, Over The Top of those mountains,’ Nobodaddy shouted back, pointing to a snow-capped range on the northern horizon, ‘is the unusual land of Oh-Tee-Tee, a land ringed by bright waters, whose denizens, the Otters, are devoted to all forms of excess. They talk too much, eat too much, drink too much, sleep too much, swim too much, chew too much betel nut, and they are without any question the rudest creatures in the world. But it’s an equal-opportunity impoliteness; the Otters all lay into one another without discrimination, and as a result they have all grown so thick-skinned that nobody minds what anyone else says. It’s a funny place, everyone laughs all the time while they call one another the worst things in the world. That lady up there is the Sultana, their Queen, but because she’s the most brilliant and sharp-tongued abuser of them all, everyone calls her the “Insult-ana”. It was her idea to take the battle to the Respectorate, because she respects nobody
and nothing. You could almost call Ott the “Disrespectorate”, and dissing is unquestionably what they do best – Look at her!’ he broke off, admiring the Queen. ‘Isn’t she gorgeous when she’s angry?’

Luka looked up through the cascade of gloop, egg and vegetables. The Otter Queen was not an animal, but a green-eyed girl wearing a green-and-gold cloak, her fiery red hair streaming in the wind, no more than sixteen or seventeen years old. ‘She’s so young,’ Luka said in surprise. Nobodaddy grinned Rashid Khalifa’s grin. ‘Young people can dish it out and take it better than old folks,’ he said. ‘They can forgive and forget. People my age … well, sometimes they bear grudges.’ Luka frowned. ‘
Your
age?’ he said. ‘But I thought …’ Nobodaddy looked agitated. ‘Your father’s age, I meant. His age, obviously. Just a slip of the tongue.’ This scared Luka a good deal. He noticed that Nobodaddy had almost stopped being transparent. Time was in shorter supply than he had hoped.

‘We expectorate on the Respectorate!’ the Insultana yelled again, and her yell unleashed even more of the red rain. Perhaps fifty other flying carpets were arrayed in battle formation around the Insultana above the streets of the Respectorate, all flapping gently in the breeze, and on each of them stood a tall, sleek, betel-nut-chewing Otter, spitting long, livid jets of red betel juice down upon the Respectorate, covering grey houses, grey streets and the grey populace with splashes of scarlet contempt. Rotten eggs, too, were being hurled by the Otters in enormous quantities, and the stink of sulphur dioxide filled the air. And after the rotten eggs, the decomposing veggies. It really was quite an assault, but what hurt most of all was
the version of the ‘National Song of I’ that poured down on the Respectorate through the Insultana’s megaphone. The Insultana sang in a high, clear voice – a voice that Luka thought oddly familiar, though he couldn’t, for the moment, understand why.

‘We’ve got to get away!’ shouted Luka, and ran out into the street. But the Border Post beyond which the
Argo
was moored was some little distance down the street, and before Luka had gone ten yards he was covered in betel juice and rotten eggs, and a rotten tomato had landed on his head. He noticed, too, that with each aerial strike the life-counter in
the top left-hand corner of his field of vision went down by one. He was just deciding to make a run for it anyway when Nobodaddy grabbed him by the collar and dragged him back under the awning. ‘Silly boy,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘Brave, but silly. That idea isn’t going to fly. And besides, now that you’ve chosen the most difficult route, don’t you want to save your progress?’

‘Where’s the saving point?’ Luka asked, wiping the muck from his eyes and trying to get the tomato out of his hair. Nobodaddy pointed. ‘There,’ he said. Luka looked in the direction of Nobodaddy’s pointing finger, and saw, arriving at the double, a phalanx of the largest and most ferocious rodents he had ever seen, armed to the teeth and firing their Ratapults furiously into the sky. These were the Respecto-Rats, of course, the most feared of the Respectorate’s troops, and at their rear – ‘leading from behind, that shows you what kind of a Rat he is,’ Luka thought – was the Over-Rat himself, the one who looked exactly like … ‘well, never mind that now,’ Luka told himself. And some distance behind this advancing army stood the grey Rathouse, and at the apex of its grey dome, glistening in the sun, the one golden object in this world of grey, was a little Orb. ‘That’s it?’ Luka cried. ‘That’s it all the way up there? How am I ever going to get to it?’

‘I didn’t say it would be easy,’ Nobodaddy replied. ‘But you still have nine hundred and nine lives left.’

Up in the sky the Otters on their flying carpets were dodging the Respecto-Rats’ missiles with contemptuous ease, and they all sang together as they flew left and right and high and low, and swaying from side to side:

‘All right then,’ said Luka, ‘I’m tired of this place. If that’s the button I have to push up there, then I’d better get up there now.’ And without waiting for an answer, he began to run as fast as he could through the war-torn streets.

Even with Bear and Dog running interference for him, the task proved to be almost impossible. The assault of the Otters had reached a sort of climax, and Luka’s losses of lives were alarming. Dodging the Respecto-Rats was tough, too, even though they weren’t really thinking about him; their armoured gun carriers and motorbikes kept mowing him down as he ran. The Over-Rat, it became plain, was the only Rat who was watching out for Luka, as if he had some personal reason for being interested in the traveller’s progress; and on those rare occasions when Luka managed to dodge the life-eating rain from the sky and avoid the Respecto-Rat forces, the Over-Rat zapped him without fail. And each time he was run over by an armoured car or bombed from the sky or zapped by the Over-Rat, whom he couldn’t help picturing as Ratshit from school stuck in a really Ratty body, he lost a life and found
himself back at his starting point, so he was getting nowhere fast, he was losing lives by the bushel, and being completely covered in rotten eggs and tomatoes and betel juice while he did so. After a long, long, frustrating time, he rested under the baker’s shop awning, panting, soaked, smelly and with only 616 lives left, and complained to Nobodaddy, ‘This is too hard. And why are those Otters so aggressive, anyway? Why can’t they just live and let live?’