Luka and the Fire of Life

by Salman Rushdie

  “Do you know her name, then,” Luka said impatiently, “or are you going on and on in this way to hide the fact that you don’t?”

  “Ooh, that stings,” said Nobodaddy languidly, fanning himself with his hat. “What a sharp little tongue! You’d make a good Otter. As a matter of fact,” he went on hastily, seeing Luka open his mouth again, “I’ve narrowed it down. After much thought and analysis, I’ve got it down to half a dozen. Six of the best. I’m pretty sure it’s one of those.”

  “ ‘Pretty sure’ isn’t very impressive,” Luka said.

  “I haven’t had a chance to try them out,” Nobodaddy replied, sounding indignant. “But why don’t you have a go right now and we’ll settle the matter once and for all?”

  So Luka called out the names Nobodaddy gave him, one by one. “Bilqis! Makeda! Saba! Kandaka! Nicaula!” The woman on the Flying Carpet ignored them all. Nobodaddy, looking crestfallen, suggested a few more names, but with decreasing conviction. Luka tried them, too. “Meroë! Nana! Um … what did you say?”

  “Chalchiuhtlicue,” Nobodaddy repeated doubtfully.

  “Chalchi—,” Luka began, then stopped.

  “—uhtlicue,” Nobodaddy prompted.

  “Chalchiuhtlicue!” Luka shouted, triumphantly.

  “It means ‘the woman in the jade skirt,’ ” Nobodaddy explained.

  “I don’t care what it means,” said Luka, “because it’s having no effect, so it obviously isn’t her name.”

  For a moment Luka fell into a terrible sadness. He would never be able to get out of this mess, never be able to find the Fire of Life or save his father. This strange version of his father, Nobodaddy, was the only father he had now, and he wouldn’t have him for long either. He would lose his father and his father’s fatal copy; it was time to get used to that horrible fact. All he would have left was his mother, and her beautiful voice.…

  “I know the Insultana’s name,” he said suddenly, and stepping out from the shadow of the awning, he called in a loud, clear voice, “Soraya!”

  Time stopped. The descending jets of betel juice, the rotten tomatoes, the egg missiles froze in mid-flight; the Rats became motionless, like photographs of themselves; in the sky the Otters stood still on their carpets in attitudes of war, and the flying rugs, as if turned to stone, no longer flapped in the breeze; even Bear, Dog, and Nobodaddy were as stiff as waxworks. In all that timeless universe only two people moved. One was Luka; the other, swooping down on King Solomon’s Carpet, Resham, and coming to a halt right in front of him, was the brilliant and slightly frightening Insultana of Ott. Except that Luka wasn’t scared of her. This was his father’s World of Magic, and therefore it was to be expected that this young queen, the most important female person in that world, had the same name as Luka’s mother, the most important woman in his, and his father’s, world. “You summoned me,” she said. “You guessed my name, which stopped Time, so here I am. What do you want?”

  There are moments in life—not enough of them, but they do occur—when even young boys find exactly the right words to say at exactly the right time; when, like a gift, the right idea occurs to you just when you most need it. This, for Luka, was one such moment. He found himself saying to the great ruler of Ott, without fully knowing where in his head he had found the words, “I believe we can help each other, Insultana Soraya. There is something I need you to help me with, urgently, and in return I have an idea for you that might just win you this war.”

  Soraya leaned forward. “Just tell me what you want from me,” she commanded, in her rough Otter way, and Luka, his usually fluent tongue paralyzed, pointed to the golden ball atop the Rathouse dome. “Yes, I see,” said Soraya of Ott, “and afterward, my young milord, no doubt you will wish to return to the River and be on your way.” Luka nodded dumbly, not even surprised by how much the Insultana knew. “That is nothing,” she said, and motioned Luka to come aboard the Flying Carpet, revealing a kinder nature than her sharp words implied.

  An instant later the Carpet took off, with Luka, caught off balance, lying flat on his back upon it; and an instant after that, they were at the golden ball, and Luka was able to get up and thump it, and heard the satisfying ding of a level being saved, and saw in the upper right-hand corner of his field of vision the single-digit number climbing to 2. And then they were down on the ground again, next to Nobodaddy and Dog and Bear, all of whom were still frozen in time, and Soraya was saying, “Now it’s your turn. Or was that just big talk? Boys like you—you’re all mouth and no trousers, as the saying goes.”

  “Itching powder,” Luka said humbly, thinking that it didn’t sound like such an impressive idea. But the Insultana was listening hard now, so Luka went ahead and told her, shyly and with considerable embarrassment, about his own military history, and the victory over the Imperial Highness Army in the Great Playground Wars. Soraya gave the impression of hanging on his every word, and when he had finished she gave a low, impressed whistle.

  “Itching-powder bombs,” she said, mostly to herself. “Why did we never think of that? Those could work. Rats hate itches! Those should work. Yes! They will work!” To Luka’s amazement and secret delight, she leaned down and kissed him three times, on the left cheek, then the right, and then the left again. “Thank you,” she said. “You are a man of your word.”

  It was said of the Flying Carpet of King Solomon that it could carry any number of people, no matter how large that number might be, and any weight of goods, no matter how heavy that weight, and that it could grow until it was immensely large, as much as sixty miles long and sixty miles wide. When the weather called for shade, an army of birds would gather above it like a parasol, and the wind would blow it wherever it wanted to go, as fast as the blinking of an eye. But these were only stories, and what Luka saw next he saw with his own eyes: the Insultana Soraya spread her arms wide, and the wind leapt up at her bidding. Then she quite simply disappeared, and, no more than ninety seconds later, reappeared; but this time the Carpet was much larger and on it were literally tens of thousands of small paper airplanes. It was obvious that the ruler of Ott was capable of getting things done pretty quickly. An instant after her reappearance, the paper airplanes had taken flight and distributed themselves among all the members of her personal air force, which was still frozen in time like everything else as far as Luka could see. In the whole observable world only he and the Insultana and the armada of paper planes were moving. Also the green and gold Carpet of King Solomon, which, after passing out its cargo, returned to the size of a largish domestic rug.

  “How did you do that?” Luka asked, and then added, “Never mind,” knowing the answer before it was given. “I know. A P2C2E, and the itching-powder bombs were made at superspeed by M2C2Ds. Machines Too Complicated to Describe.”

  “I’m willing to bet,” said the Insultana, “that you didn’t learn that at school.”

  Many things make rats feel like scratching themselves, and there is nothing as unhappy as an itchy rodent. Rats get parasites—lice and mites and fleas—and these tiny bugs lay eggs at the base of the rats’ hairs, and they itch. Rats lead rough lives in dirty places and they get cuts and the cuts get infected and become sores and then the sores itch. Rats’ hair falls out and that makes their skin itch. Their skin gets dry, and they suffer from dandruff, and that’s itchy as well. Rats eat all kinds of garbage, and so they suffer from food allergies and eating too much of one thing and not enough of another, and all that makes them itch like crazy. Rats suffer from eczema and ringworm, and they get scabs and rashes and they can’t resist scratching them, even if the scratching makes things worse. And whatever could be said of rats in general was magnified in the case of the giant Rats of the Respectorate, the famously thin-skinned Rats of I. And however itchy the Respectorate rodents might have been in the past, they had never experienced anything like the itchiness that was unleashed upon them by the Otter Queen and her air force.

  “Before I unfreeze everyone,” the Insultana instructe
d Luka, “take your friends indoors and wait until I tell you it’s safe to come out.” Her tone had changed completely, Luka noted; no trace of sharpness remained. In fact, it was positively friendly, even affectionate.

  Luka did as the Insultana told him, hustling his little party into the gray bakery and then pressing up against the glass windowpane; so he and Dog and Bear and Nobodaddy saw only a little bit of the large-scale destruction that followed. The Insultana waved an imperious arm and the Respectorate unfroze. Now Luka watched the Otters swooping and diving around the city streets, unleashing their enchanted paper planes, which seemed to be equipped with Rat-seeking homing devices and chased the Rats wherever they went, indoors and outdoors, under their bedsheets or up on roofs, and it wasn’t long before the attack succeeded, and had the Rats on the run. Betel juice and eggs and rotten vegetables had been effective as insults, but the itching powder didn’t just hurt the Rats’ feelings and ruin their clothes and make them smell even worse than they did already. Luka saw even the nastiest-looking giant Rats, the mirrored-shade-wearing, heavily armed, supernasty Respecto-Rats of I, running in circles and screaming as the paper planes chased them and poured itching powder on their heads and down the backs of their necks. He saw them tearing at themselves with their long angry claws and ripping great lumps off their own bodies as they tried to stop the itching. The air was full of Rat shrieks, growing louder and louder, so loud that Luka had to cover his ears because it was almost too much to bear.

  “If that powder is what I think it is,” Nobodaddy said at last, in a voice filled with wonder, “if that is indeed made, as I believe it may be, from the deadly Asian Khujli plant, mixed up, I don’t doubt, with powder from the seeds of Alifbay’s own overpowering, though rare, Gudgudi flower … and if the Insultana has included material from the Sickening Yuckbone or Magic Itch Bean of Germany, spores from the Demonic Abraxas of Egypt, the Kachu-kachu of Peru, and whirligigs from Africa’s Fatal Pipipi, then we may be witnessing the end of the Rat Infestation of the Magical World. What is interesting about the formula, which I believe the Insultana may have used, is that ordinary people are immune to these occult powders; rodents alone are affected. Yes, she asked you to take shelter, but that was to protect the dog and the bear, as a precautionary measure; and above all, I surmise, to save us all from the Rats possessed of their last and lethal Frenzy.”

  The Rats had indeed taken leave of their senses. Through the window of the gray bakery Luka witnessed their mounting insanity and their dying throes. The thin-skinned masters of the Respectorate were literally scratching themselves to bits, actually ripping themselves apart, until there was nothing left of them but lumps of mangy fur and gray, ugly meat. The shrieking of the Rats reached a terrible crescendo, and then slowly the air grew quieter, and silence fell. At the very end Luka saw the Over-Rat himself come running down the street toward the River of Time, slashing himself as he ran, and at the end of the street he leapt into the River with a terrible cry and, as he was the one Rat in the World of Magic who was unable to swim, because he had always been too lazy and spoiled to take the trouble to learn, he drowned in the Temporal Flow.

  And that was the end of that.

  Slowly, slowly, the non-Rat inhabitants of the Respectorate came out of their homes and understood that their ordeal was at an end, and then in great happiness they rushed to the fences that separated the Respectorate from the rest of the Magical World and tore them down and flung away the broken remnants of their prison walls forever. And if any Rats did survive the Great Itch-Bombing they were never seen again, but crawled back into the darkness behind the cracks of the world, which was where Rats belonged.

  Soraya of Ott on her green and gold Carpet landed outside the gray bakery as Luka and his companions emerged. “Luka Khalifa,” she said, and Luka didn’t even ask her how she knew his name, “you have done the World of Magic a great service. Aren’t you going to ask me for anything else in return? You guessed my name; that alone should get you at least the traditional three wishes, and you’ve only used up one. But for the idea of the Itch-Bombs! Who knows what’s a fair reward for that. Why don’t you just think of the biggest, most important wish you can come up with, and I’ll see if I can do anything to help.”

  And before Nobodaddy could stop him, Luka began to talk very fast, to tell this astonishing young girl who had the same name as his mother exactly why he was here in the World of Magic, and what he hoped to do, and why. By the end of his little speech the Insultana of Ott’s eyes had widened and her hand had risen to her mouth. “Perhaps, in my pride, I spoke too soon,” she said, and there was a note of awe in her voice. “It may be that you have asked me for a thing I cannot give.”

  But then she grinned a mischievous grin and clapped her hands like a child. “To steal the Fire of Life, which has never been done in the whole history of the Magical World! Why, that would be the most deliciously Disrespectful deed in All of Time! It would be outrageous, and wonderful. In a phrase, it would be completely Over the Top, and therefore it behooves any true Otter to help. My fellow warriors of the OAF, the Otter Air Force, must return home to Ott—but, Luka Khalifa, Thief of Fire, I, the Queen of the Otters, will do everything in my power to assist you to perpetrate your dreadful—and most noble, and most dangerous, and absolutely most enjoyable!—Crime.”

  “I’m in a sort of hurry,” said Luka bravely, “and you have this superfast carpet. Is there any way you could rush me past all the other levels and take me right to the Fire, where I need to be, and afterward get me back where I started from?”

  “The River is long and deceptive,” said Insultana Soraya, nodding thoughtfully. “And you still have to pass through the Mists of Time, where you can’t see a thing, and then there’s the Great Stagnation, where the River turns into a swamp and you can’t move, and the Inescapable Whirlpool, where Time spins around and around and you can’t escape, and the Trillion and One Forking Paths, where the River becomes a labyrinth—and you will certainly get lost in all those mazy waterways and never find the one, single stream that is the true, continuous Path of Time. Very well,” she said, in a voice that told Luka that a decision had been made, “I will join you in your adventure. There are at least those four stages—what did you call them… ‘levels’?—four levels that I can enable you to skip. But after that we will just have to take things as they come.”

  “Why can’t you take me all the way?” Luka blurted out, very disappointed.

  “Because, my sweet Luka,” replied the Insultana of Ott, “this silken Flying Carpet given to me so long ago by King Solomon himself can do many wondrous things, but it cannot fly through the Great Rings of Fire.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Path to the

  Three Fiery Doughnuts

  IF YOU HAVE NOT yet flown on a magic carpet, you probably don’t know about the seasickness. A flying carpet makes a slow, rolling, wavelike movement as it passes through the air, not exactly as if it’s floating on air waves, but more as if the carpet itself has become a kind of silken air that can bear you aloft and take you wherever you want to go. It’s sad, but true, that your stomach may find this kind of travel disagreeable, at least for a while. And if you have never flown on a flying carpet accompanied by a nervous talking bear, an even more nervous talking dog, and an Elephant Duck and an Elephant Drake making the first flight of their otherwise flightless lives, to say nothing of a supernatural being who looks, acts, and talks like your own father, as well as an ancient Queen who looks, acts, and talks like a seventeen-year-old girl, and, in addition, a large amphibian boat-tank named Argo, then you will just have to imagine the confusion that reigned aboard the green and gold Resham as it took off to begin its journey toward the Mists of Time. The Flying Carpet had grown considerably in size to accommodate all its passengers and cargo, and this exaggerated the waviness of the flight.

  It was, it has to be said, a chaotic and noisy scene. There was a moaning and a howling and a groaning and a growling, and that honkin
g sound elephants (and ducks) make when they are in distress. Dog, the bear, kept saying that if bears had been meant to fly they would have grown wings, and he mentioned, too, that when bears sat on carpets it made them think of bearskin rugs, but mainly it was the flying thing that was the problem; and Bear, the dog, was babbling anxiously and without stopping as he rolled around the Rug, and his monologue went something like this: “I’m going to fall off, aren’t I, I am, don’t let me fall, am I going to fall off? I am, I can tell, I’m going to fall off, any second now, I’ll fall”; even though in fact the Carpet carefully curved itself upward whenever any of the travelers lurched too close to an edge, and deposited them safely back at, or near, the center.

  As for the Elephant Birds, they kept asking each other why they were there at all. In the excitement of the departure from the Respectorate, they had somehow been swept aboard along with the Argo, but they couldn’t remember being asked if they would actually like to come. “And if we can’t remember it, it didn’t happen,” said the Elephant Drake. They felt kidnapped, shanghaied, dragged along on an adventure that had nothing to do with them and was very probably extremely dangerous, and yes, they thought they might fall off the rug as well.

  Of course the Insultana Soraya abused the lot of them roundly, as it was in her nature to do, calling them babies and girls and boobies and not-ducks-but-geese; she told them they were scaredy-cats and namby-pambies, sissies and yellow bellies, milksops and milquetoasts and candy asses (a term with which Luka was not familiar, though he thought he could probably work out what it meant). She made chicken noises at them to call them cowards, and the worst part of all was when she squeaked at them contemptuously, which meant she was calling them mice.

  Nobodaddy, naturally, handled the Flying Carpet ride effortlessly, and stood coolly and with perfect assurance beside the Insultana, and that made Luka determined to find his “carpet legs” as soon as possible. After a while he did, and stopped falling over; and after a further while the four animals found their twelve legs as well, and then, at last, the moaning and groaning stopped and things settled down, and nobody had actually been sick.