Salman Rushdie - Luka and the Fire of Life

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.’

What he actually said aloud was this: ‘And if you lose, Old Man, then you will have to Terminate yourself, not just temporarily, but once and for all.’

How the Old Man laughed! He guffawed until he wept, not only from his eyes but through his nose as well. He held his sides and leapt from side to side, and his long white beard cracked in the air like a whip. ‘That’s a good one,’ he said finally, panting for breath. ‘ If I lose . That’s priceless. Let’s begin.’ But Luka wasn’t going to be fooled that easily. Riddlers are tricksters, he knew that much, and you had to nail down the deal before you began the battle, or they would try to wriggle out of it later on. ‘And if you lose, you will do as I have said,’ he insisted. The Old Man of the River made a peevish face. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he replied. ‘If I lose I will Self-Terminate. Auto- Terminate. Termination of Me by Me will Occur. Hee, hee, hee. I’ll blast myself to bits.’ ‘Permanently,’ Luka said firmly. ‘Once and for all.’ The Old Man grew serious and his face coloured unpleasantly. ‘Very well,’ he barked. ‘Yes. Permanent Termination if I lose; in a word, Permination ! But as you are about to discover, child, I’m not the one who is about to lose all his lives.’

Bear and Dog were in a state of high agitation, but now Luka and the Old Man were circling each other, staring each other down, and it was the Old Man who spoke first, in a hard greedy voice pushing roughly through teeth that seemed hungry to eat up little Luka’s life.

‘What goes round and round the wood but never goes into it?’

‘The bark of the tree,’ said Luka at once, and shot back, ‘It stands on one leg with its heart in its head.’

‘Cabbage,’ snapped the Old Man. ‘What is it that you can keep after giving it to someone else?’

‘Your word. I have a little house and I live in it alone. It has no doors or windows, and to go out I must break through the wall.’

‘Egg. What do you call a fish without an eye?’

‘A fsh. What do sea monsters eat?’

‘Fish and ships. Why was six afraid of seven?’

‘Because seven eight nine. What has been there for millions of years but is never more than a month old?’

‘The moon. When you don’t know what it is then it’s something, but when you know what it is then it’s nothing.’

‘That’s easy,’ Luka said, badly out of breath. ‘A riddle.’

They had been circling faster and faster, and the riddles had been coming at greater and greater speed. This was just the beginning, Luka knew; soon the number riddles would start, and the story riddles. The difficult stuff still lay ahead. He wasn’t sure if he could last the course, so the thing was not to let the Old Man dictate the pace and manner of the contest. It was time to play the joker in the pack.

He stopped circling and put on his grimmest expression. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?’

The Old Man of the River stopped circling, too, and for the first time there was a weakness in his voice and a tremble in his limbs. ‘What are you playing at?’ he demanded feebly. ‘That’s the most famous riddle in the world.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Luka, ‘but you’re stalling for time. Answer me.’

‘Four legs, two legs, three legs,’ said the Old Man of the River. ‘Everyone knows this one. Ha! It’s the Oldest One in the Book.’

(‘The she-monster known as the Sphinx,’ Rashid Khalifa used to tell Luka, ‘sat outside the city of Thebes and challenged all the travellers who passed by to solve her riddle. When they failed, she killed them. Then one day a hero came by and knew the answer.’ ‘And what did the Sphinx do then?’ Luka asked his father. ‘She destroyed herself,’ Rashid replied.

‘And what was the answer to the riddle?’ Luka asked. But Rashid Khalifa had to admit that, no matter how many times he learned the blasted story, he could never remember the solution to the riddle. ‘So that old Sphinx,’ he said, not very sadly, ‘she’d have eaten me up for sure.’)

‘Come on,’ Luka said to the Old Man of the River. ‘Your time’s up.’

The Old Man of the River looked around in panic. ‘I could just blast you anyway,’ he said.

Luka shook his head. ‘You know you can’t do that,’ he said. ‘Not now. Not any more.’ Then Luka allowed his expression to become a little dreamy. ‘My father could never remember the answer, either,’ he said. ‘And this is my father’s World of Magic, and you are his Riddle Man. So you can’t know what he couldn’t recall. And now you and the Sphinx must share the same fate.’

‘Permination,’ the Old Man of the River said softly. ‘Yes. That is just.’ And without more ado, and quite unsentimentally, he lifted his Terminator, set the dial on maximum, pointed the weapon at himself, and fired.