Salman Rushdie: Luka and the Fire of Life

‘And the Fire of Life can save my father,’ he said.

‘If you can steal it for him,’ said Nobodaddy, ‘then, yes, without a doubt.’

‘And it will give Dog and Bear back their real lives as well.’

‘It will.’

‘And what will happen to you then? If we succeed?’

Nobodaddy did not reply.

‘You won’t have to implode, will you? You won’t Un-Be.’

‘That is so,’ Nobodaddy said. ‘It won’t be my time.’

‘So you’ll go away.’

‘Yes,’ said Nobodaddy.

‘You’ll go away and never come back.’

‘“Never” is a long word,’ said Nobodaddy.

‘Okay… but you won’t come back for a long time.’

Nobodaddy inclined his head in agreement.

‘A long, long time,’ Luka insisted.

Nobodaddy pursed his lips and spread out his arms in a kind of surrender.

‘A long, long, long -’

‘Don’t push your luck,’ Nobodaddy said sharply.

‘And that’s why you’re trying to help us, isn’t it?’ Luka concluded. ‘You don’t want to implode. You’re trying to save your own skin.’

‘I don’t have skin,’ said Nobodaddy.

‘I don’t trust him,’ said Bear the dog.

‘I don’t like him,’ said Dog the bear.

‘I don’t believe a word he says,’ said Bear the dog.

‘I don’t think for one moment that he’ll just go away,’ said Dog the bear.

‘It’s a trick,’ said Bear the dog.

‘It’s a trap,’ said Dog the bear.

‘There’s a catch,’ said Bear the dog.

‘There must be a catch,’ said Dog the bear.

‘Ask him,’ said Bear the dog.

Nobodaddy took off his panama hat, scratched his bald head, lowered his eyes and sighed.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’s a catch.’

Actually, there were two catches. The first, according to Nobodaddy, was that nobody in the entire recorded history of the World of Magic had ever successfully stolen the Fire of Life , which was protected in so many ways that, according to Nobodaddy, there wasn’t enough time to list one-tenth of them. The dangers were almost infinite, the risks dizzying, and only the most fool-hardy adventurer would even think of attempting such a feat.

‘It’s never been done?’ Luka asked.

‘Never successfully,’ Nobodaddy replied.

‘What happened to the people who tried?’ Luka demanded.

Nobodaddy looked grim. ‘You don’t want to know,’ he said.

‘Okay,’ said Luka, ‘so what’s the second catch?’

Darkness fell – not everywhere, but just around Luka, Dog, Bear and their strange companion. It was as if a cloud had covered the sun, except that the sun could still be seen shining in the eastern sky. Nobodaddy seemed to darken, too. The temperature dropped. The noises of the day faded away. Finally Nobodaddy spoke in a low, heavy voice.

‘Somebody has to die,’ he said.

Luka was angry, confused and frightened all at the same time. ‘What do you mean?’ he shouted. ‘What sort of a catch is that?’

‘Once someone like me has been summoned,’ said Nobodaddy, ‘someone alive must pay for that summons with a life. I’m sorry, but that’s the rule.’

‘That’s a stupid rule, to be honest with you,’ said Luka, as powerfully as he could, even though his stomach was churning. ‘Who made a stupid rule like that?’

‘Who made the Laws of Gravity, or Motion, or Thermodynamics?’ Nobodaddy asked. ‘Maybe you know who discovered them, but that’s not the same thing, is it? Who invented Time or Love or Music? Some things just Are, according to their own Principles, and you can’t do a thing about it, and neither can I.’

Slowly, slowly, the darkness that had encircled the four of them faded away and the silver sunlight touched their faces.

Luka realised with horror that Nobodaddy wasn’t as see-through as he had been before: which could only mean that Rashid Khalifa had grown weaker in his Sleep. That settled it. They didn’t have time to waste on chit-chat. ‘Will you show me the way to the Mountain?’ Luka asked Nobodaddy, who grinned a grin that wasn’t at all humorous, and then nodded his head. ‘Okay,’ said Luka. ‘Then let’s go.’

The River Silsila was not a beautiful river, in Luka’s opinion. Maybe it started out prettily enough up in the mountains somewhere, as a shining, skipping stream rushing over smooth stones, but down here in the coastal plains it had grown fat, lazy and dirty. It slopped from side to side in wide, snaky curves, and it was mostly a pale brown colour, except that in places it looked green and slimy, and then there were purple oil slicks on the surface here and there, and the occasional dead cows floating sadly out to sea. It was a dangerous river, too, because it ran at different speeds; it could accelerate without warning and sweep your boat away, or it could bog you down in a slowly swirling eddy and you would be stuck there for hours, calling uselessly for help. There were treacherous shallows that could maroon you on a sandbank, or sink a large vessel, a ferry boat or a barge, if it hit an underwater rock. There were murky depths in which Luka imagined that almost anything ugly, unclean and glutinous might be living, and certainly there was not, anywhere in all the filthy flow, anything worth catching to eat. If you fell into the Silsila you were supposed to go to the hospital to be cleaned up, and you were given tetanus shots as well.

The only good thing about the river was that over the course of thousands of years it had pushed up high embankments of earth, called Bunds, on both banks, so that it was hidden from view unless you actually climbed up on top of those dykes and looked down at the liquid serpent as it flowed along, and smelled its horrid smell. And thanks to the Bunds the river never flooded, not even in the rainy season when its level rose and rose, so the city was spared the nightmare of that brown, green and purple water full of nameless slimy monsters and dead cattle pouring down into its streets.

The Silsila was a working river; it transported grain and cotton and wood and fuel from the countryside through the city to the sea, but the bargees handling the freight on the long, flat lighters were renowned for their foul tempers; they spoke to you rudely, they shouldered you out of their way on the pavement, and Rashid Khalifa liked to say that the Old Man of the River had cursed them and made them dangerous and bad, like the river itself. The citizens of Kahani tried to ignore the river as much as possible, but now Luka found himself standing right beside its left, that was to say its southern, Bund, wondering how he had arrived there without moving a muscle. Dog the bear and Bear the dog were right beside him, looking as puzzled as he was, and of course Nobodaddy was there, too, grinning his mysterious grin, which looked exactly like Rashid Khalifa’s grin, but wasn’t.

‘What are we doing here?’ Luka demanded.

‘Your wish was my command,’ said Nobodaddy, folding his arms across his chest. ‘“Let’s go,” you said, so we went. Shazam!’

‘As if he’s some sort of genie from some kind of lamp,’ snorted Dog the bear in Haroun’s loud voice. ‘As if we don’t know that the true Wonderful Lamp belongs to Prince Aladdin and his princess, Badr al-Budur, and is therefore not in this place.’

‘Um,’ said Bear the dog, who was the soft-spoken, practical type, ‘how many wishes exactly is he offering? And can anyone wish?’

‘He’s no genie,’ Dog the bear said bearishly. ‘Nobody rubbed anything.’

Luka was still puzzled. ‘What’s the point of coming to the River Stinky, anyway?’ he asked. ‘It just goes out into the sea, so, to be honest with you, it wouldn’t be any use to us even if it wasn’t the Stinky, which it is.’