Salman Rushdie - Luka and the Fire of Life

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.

‘Two and two make four, not five.

The world is round, not flat.

Your Boss is the Smallest Fry alive.

We do not Respect the Rat!

O, we do not Respect the Rat!’

Splat! Baf! Whack! It was getting to be a terrible, messy scene. The battered Rats in the streets jumped in the air and flailed their claws uselessly above their heads, but the Insultana and her cohorts were far above them, out of reach.

‘And upside down is the wrong way round,

And black is black, not white,

And a squeak is by far the creepiest of sounds,

No, we do not respect your Right,

We do not respect your Right.’

‘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:

‘Ai-yi,

Ai-yi,

We all moan ai-yi-yi.

You’re fools and you’re bullies,

Your thinking is woolly.

Respect? You’re not serious?

Your effect’s deleterious!

We laugh at you, ai-yi-yi-yi-yi,

We laugh at you, ai-yi-yi.’

‘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?’

‘Maybe they would,’ Nobodaddy replied, ‘if the Respectorate wasn’t growing so fast. Those scary Respecto-Rats roam far beyond their own borders trying to force everyone into line. If things continue as they are, the whole World of Magic is in danger of being strangled by an excess of respect.’

‘That’s as may be,’ Luka gasped, ‘but when you’re on the receiving end of the attack, it’s hard to be sympathetic, to be honest with you. And look at the condition of my dog and my bear. I don’t think they like Otters very much right now, either.’

‘Sometimes,’ Nobodaddy reflected, almost as though he were talking to himself, ‘the solution is to run towards the problem, not away from it.’

‘I am trying to run towards -’ began Luka, and then he stopped. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see what you’re saying. Not the golden ball. That’s not the problem, is it?’

‘Not at present,’ Nobodaddy agreed.

Luka squinted up into the sky. There she was, the Insultana, the Fairy Queen of the Otters, monarch of the skies, riding on King Solomon’s Carpet. She looked sixteen or seventeen but she was probably really thousands of years old, he thought, the way magical creatures were. ‘What’s her name?’ he wondered.