Salman Rushdie - Luka and the Fire of Life

Her sisters on the flying carpet flapped their wings experimentally; and found, to their great pleasure, that they could fly again. ‘We too will help you,’ said Badlo-Badlo the Changer, and Bahut-Sara and Gyara-Jinn nodded their assent. The Insultana Soraya clapped her hands in delight. ‘That’s more like it,’ she rejoiced. ‘We’ve got an army now.’

In all the excitement nobody noticed a small fiery Bug rushing away from them as quickly as it could fly, making its way deep into the Heart of Magic, whooshing along as quickly as a wildfire running before a helpful wind.

Nobodaddy was acting strangely, Luka thought. He was fidgety, scratching constantly at his panama hat’s scorched brim. He seemed irritable, pacing up and down and rubbing his hands together and speaking in monosyllables, when he spoke at all. Sometimes he seemed almost transparent and at other times almost solid, so plainly Rashid Khalifa at home in Kahani was struggling for life and health, and maybe that struggle was having a bad effect on Nobodaddy’s mood. But Luka began to have other suspicions. Maybe Nobodaddy had just been humouring him, toying with him for his own warped amusement. Who knew what sort of twisted sense of humour such a creature might have? Maybe he had never expected Luka to get this far, and in fact didn’t like the idea that they were now flying towards the Fire of Life itself. Maybe he hadn’t been honest, and didn’t want the quest to succeed. He’d need watching carefully, Luka decided, in case he tried to sabotage everything at the last moment. He looked, walked and talked like the Shah of Blah, but that didn’t make him Luka’s father. Maybe Bear and Dog had been right: Nobodaddy was not to be trusted an inch. Or maybe there was an argument raging inside him, maybe the Rashid-ness he had absorbed was at war with the death-creature that did the absorbing. Maybe dying was always like this: an argument between death and life.

‘Who wins that argument is a matter for another day,’ Luka thought. ‘Right now, I’ve got to stop thinking of him as my dad.’

Soraya’s flying carpet was aloft again, after briefly landing to allow all the travellers, and the Argo of course, to come aboard. Jaldi, Sara, Badlo and Jinn, the four Changers, in their dragon shapes, flew in strict formation around the Resham , one on each of the carpet’s four sides, protecting it against any possible attack. Luka looked down and saw below him the River of Time flowing from the distant, and invisible, Lake of Wisdom at the Heart of the Heart (which was still too far away to be seen) – the River flowing into, and then out of, the immense Circle of the Circular Sea, at the bottom of which, he knew, slept the giant Worm Bottomfeeder, who coiled his body all the way around the Circle just so that his head could nibble at his tail. Outside the Circle, directly beneath the flying carpet at that moment, were the vast territories of the Badly Behaved Gods – the gods in whom nobody believed any longer, except as stories that people once liked to tell.

‘They don’t have any power in the Real World any more,’ Rashid Khalifa used to say, sitting in his favourite squashy armchair, with Luka curled up on his lap, ‘so there they all are in the World of Magic, the ancient gods of the North, the gods of Greece and Rome, the South American gods, and the gods of Sumeria and Egypt long ago. They spend their time, their infinite, timeless time, pretending they are still divine, playing all their old games, fighting their ancient wars over and over again, and trying to forget that nobody really cares about them these days, or even remembers their names.’

‘That’s pretty sad,’ Luka said to his father. ‘To be honest with you, the Heart of Magic sounds a lot like an old folks’ home for washed-up superheroes.’

‘Don’t let them hear you say that,’ Rashid Khalifa replied, ‘because they all look gorgeous and youthful and luminous and, well, perfect. Being divine, or even ex-divine, has its perks. And inside the Magic World they still have the use of their superpowers. It’s in the Real World that their thunderbolts and enchantments no longer have any effect.’

‘It must be awful for them,’ Luka said, ‘to have been worshipped and adored for so long, and then just discarded, like last year’s unfashionable clothes.’

‘Particularly for the Aztec deities from Mexico,’ Rashid said, putting on his scary voice. ‘Because they were used to receiving human sacrifices; the throats of living people were cut and their lifeblood flowed into the gods’ stone goblets. Now there’s no blood for those disused gods to drink. You’ve heard of vampires? Most of them are blood-thirsty, long-in-the-tooth, undead Aztec gods. Huitzilopochtli! Tezcatlipoca! Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli! Macuilcoz-cacuauhtli! Itztlacoliuhqui-Ixquimilli -’

‘Stop, stop,’ Luka begged. ‘No wonder people stopped worshipping them. Nobody could pronounce their names.’

‘Or it may be because they all behaved so badly,’ Rashid said.

This got Luka’s attention. The notion of gods behaving badly was an odd one. Weren’t gods supposed to set an example to the people whose gods they were? ‘Not in the Olden Days,’ Rashid said. ‘These Olden, and now Jobless, gods usually behaved as badly as people, or actually much worse, because, being gods, they could behave badly on a bigger scale. They were selfish, rude, meddlesome, vain, bitchy, violent, spiteful, lustful, gluttonous, greedy, lazy, dishonest, tricky and stupid, and all of it exaggerated to the maximum, because they had those superpowers. When they were greedy they could swallow a city, and when they were angry they could drown the world. When they meddled in human lives they broke hearts, stole women and started wars. When they were lazy they slept for a thousand years, and when they played their little tricks other people suffered and died. Sometimes a god would even kill another god by knowing his weak spot and going for it, the way a wolf goes for the throat of its prey.’

‘Maybe it’s a good thing they faded away,’ Luka said, ‘but it must make the Heart of Magic a peculiar sort of place.’

‘Nowhere more peculiar in the universe,’ Rashid replied.

‘And what about the gods people still believe in?’ Luka asked. ‘Are they in the Heart of Magic as well?’

‘Oh, dear me, no,’ said Rashid Khalifa. ‘They’re all still right here with us.’

The memory of Rashid faded away, and Luka found himself flying over a phantasmagoric landscape dotted with broken columns and statuary, with creatures out of fable and legend walking, running and flying among them. There – over there! – were two vast and trunkless legs of stone, the last remaining echoes of Ozymandias, King of Kings. Here, slouching towards them, was an immense rough beast, Sphinx-like, only male, and spotted, a man with a hyena’s body and its hideous laugh as well, destroying whatever house or temple, hill or tree it passed, by the sheer force of its ecstatic, ruinous laughter. And there! – yes, right there! – was the Sphinx herself! Yes, surely that was she! The Lion with the Woman’s Head! See how she stopped strangers and insisted on talking to them… ‘It’s too bad,’ said Soraya. ‘She keeps asking everyone the same old riddle, and nobody can be bothered to answer, because everybody has known it for ever. She really needs to get a new act.’

A gigantic egg walked by below them on long, yolk-coloured legs. A winged unicorn flew past. A curious three-part creature – a crocodile, lion and hippopotamus combined – shuffled its way towards the Circular Sea. The sight of a small god in the shape of a dog excited Bear. ‘That is Xolotl,’ warned Soraya. ‘Stay away from him. He’s the god of bad luck.’ That disappointed Bear the dog a good deal. ‘Why does Bad Luck turn out to be a dog?’ he complained. ‘In the Real World, a faithful dog is very good luck for its owner. No wonder these bad-luck gods are done for.’