Salman Rushdie - Luka and the Fire of Life

He heard Coyote’s voice in his head, saying, Put your best foot forward an make your glory run . And all around him were excited dragons and a barking dog and a roaring bear, and Nuthog was saying, ‘It’s now or never, young Luka, and if you can’t find the way Left, as you say, then you’d best let us fly you up there and take your chances. Move! This is the moment of Truth!’

‘Who are those monsters chasing Coyote?’ Luka needed to know. ‘If you don’t act fast,’ Nuthog harrumphed, panicked, ‘they’ll be chasing you instead, soon enough. Saturn’s out there, as savage and violent as any immortal. He eats children, by the way. He’s done it before, with his own. And the bearded fellow with the snake wound around him is Zurvan, the Persian time god – you don’t want that snake to get within snapping distance, let me tell you! There goes the Dagda, look, that wild Irish fellow with the enormous club! And Xiuhtecuhtli too, though he usually only roams about at night. And even Ling-pao T’ien-tsun – they got him out of the Gossamer Library for once! Looks like they really want to stop the Fire Thief, and when they find out that the fire in Coyote’s mouth is a fake – that it’s just fire, and not the Fire of Life – then they’ll know he was only a decoy, and they’ll come after the real Fire Thief in all their fury. So if you know how to climb up this Mountain under your own steam, it would be a good idea to get on with it.’

To decide to do a thing was decidedly not the same thing as actually doing the thing, Luka quickly understood. He really had no idea of exactly how he was supposed to take the little tumble to the left that would shift him into the Widdershins Dimension in which the whole world, including the World of Magic, would morph into Planet Wrongway, the left-handers’ home, the southpaw variation of Planet Earth. He tried falling, jumping and rolling to the left; he attempted to trip over his own feet; he asked Bear and Dog to knock him over; and finally, closing his eyes, he tried to feel the Left World pushing at his left shoulder, so that, by pushing back, he could fall through the invisible frontier and get to where he needed to be. None of it worked. His many falls left him considerably the worse for wear, bruised of shoulder and of hip, and with a battered and scratched left leg.

‘It beats me,’ he admitted, almost in despair.

‘The thing about the Left-Hand Path,’ said Nuthog gently, ‘is that you have to believe it’s going to be there.’

Just then a triumphant blast of the Fire Alarm announced the capture of the Fire Thief, followed by two blasts of renewed anguish that announced the hunt was still on. Nuthog whizzed off to investigate as soon as she heard the first blast, and returned to report that after the decoy fire had been passed from Coyote to Lion, and then all the way down the old relay team until it reached Frog, that doughty amphibian had swallowed it and dived into the Circular Sea; whereupon the enraged Worm Bottomfeeder had ended the carrera de distracción by swallowing Frog in a single greedy gulp. Four seconds later, Bottomfeeder spat the saliva-covered Frog out again, and roared with all its might to announce to the entire Magical World that this particular Fire Thief was a Common Fraud.

‘They’re all coming this way now,’ Nuthog panted, ‘and, to be frank, they’re mad as hell, so if you won’t let us fly you away from here, then at least run. Run for your life.’

‘Yes, I probably should start running,’ Luka thought. ‘After all, I was running before, when I stumbled the first time and took that magical step to the right.’ It was hard to be certain of the laws of Magical Physics; ordinary physics was difficult enough. But what was it Rashid had said? ‘ Time is not only Itself, but is an aspect of Movement and Space .’ That was the point, wasn’t it? ‘So, umm, errr,’ Luka thought, ‘if T is affected by M and S, then, ahhh, therefore, it follows – doesn’t it? – that S, which is to say Space, including the Space between the Right-Handed and the Left-Handed Dimensions, must – probably, right? – be an aspect of T and M, i.e. Time and Movement. Or, urrgghh, to put it in English, it makes a difference how long it takes you to make your move, or, in other words, how fast you run.’

The ground began to tremble. ‘Is it an earthquake?’ Luka cried. ‘No,’ said Nuthog sadly. ‘It’s much worse than that. It’s the sound of several hundred angry gods moving at speed. It will take a lot more than four dragons to stop that crowd.’

Dog the bear stepped forward with sudden resolution. ‘You go,’ he said to Luka. ‘Go this minute. Take off, bhag jao , amscray, vamoose. Go and do the deed. Bear and I can hold them up for quite a while.’

‘How?’ asked Nuthog sceptically.

‘By doing what we do best,’ said Dog the bear. ‘Are you ready, Bear?’

‘Ready,’ said Bear the dog.

Luka knew there was no time to discuss the matter. He turned to his left, tilted his left shoulder down a bit, put his left foot forward, and set off at a gallop, as if his life depended upon it. Which, in point of fact, it did.

He ran without looking back. He heard the noise behind him, already loud, getting closer, growing much louder and becoming deafening, like the sound of a thousand jet engines roaring next to his eardrums; he felt the ground beneath his feet, which had already been trembling, begin to shake as if it had been seized by an uncontrollable terror; he saw the sky above him darken, and white lightning begin to stab through the black clouds. ‘Okay, so they can put on a show, these gods,’ he told himself, to keep his courage up, ‘but remember, they aren’t gods of anywhere or anyone any more. They’re just circus animals, or caged creatures in a zoo.’ But a less confident voice whispered into his right ear, ‘That may be so, but even in a zoo you shouldn’t jump into the middle of the lions’ den.’ He shook this thought off, put his head down and sprinted harder. Nuthog’s advice was the only thing in his head. The thing about the Left-Hand Path is that you have to believe it’s going to be there . Then all at once the noise seemed to stop, the earth no longer shook, he felt as if he were floating at high speed rather than running, and that was when he saw the abyss.

‘Behind the Mountain of Knowledge,’ Rashid Khalifa used to say, ‘if you are very unlucky, you will find the Bottomless Pit known as the Abysm of Time. And that, by the by, is a rhyme. You pronounce it abime and it rhymes with rhyme , which also rhymes with time . But if you fall into that rhyming Abysm it isn’t rhyme that you’ll have on your mind.’

Meanwhile, the thundering herd of ex-gods arrived at Mount Knowledge, and found two of the brightest stars of the Great Rings of Fire, the defunct circus of Captain Aag, waiting for them as calmly as the experienced artistes they were, and gesturing courteously to their outside audience to settle down. Bear the singing dog and Dog the dancing bear had taken up their starting positions, along with their backing singers, the Changers, a quartet of giant metallic sows. The sight was unusual enough to stop the discarded deities in their tracks. Ra the Supreme held up his hand and all the ranks of all the former gods, Egyptian, Assyrian, Norse, Greek, Roman, Aztec, Inca and the rest, came clattering to a clumsy halt, full of screeches, collisions and oaths. The Cyclopes accidentally elbowed one another in the eye, the fire gods’ burning swords singed the hair of the treasure-nymphs, a basilisk glared at a griffin and accidentally turned it to stone. The beauty goddesses – Aphrodite, cow-eared Hathor and the rest – complained loudest. It appeared that the lower-ranked supernatural entities were taking advantage of the crowd of immortals to squeeze the Beauties’ bottoms, accidentally-on-purpose. Also, why exactly were minotaurs stepping on the Lovely Ladies’ feet? And, no, the Beauties absolutely did not appreciate snake-headed deities from rival mythological traditions looking up their togas. A little space, please, they demanded, a little respect. And shh, by the way, they hissed. There were performers here, and they were ready to begin.