Haroun and the Sea of Stories (16 page)

‘I’ve connected it up wrong, and I’ve sent it insane,’ Haroun panicked. Aloud he said: ‘Hoopoe, be quiet,
please
.’

‘Look, look! A mouse. Peace, peace! This piece of toasted cheese will do it,’ ranted Butt the Hoopoe, nonsensically. ‘
No problem
.’

Hurriedly, Haroun disconnected the three leads, and changed them round. This time Butt the Hoopoe began to buck and bounce like a wild horse, and Haroun jerked the leads out to prevent himself from being bucked off into the Ocean. ‘Third time lucky, I hope,’ he thought, and with a deep breath, reconnected the leads again.

‘So what took you so long?’ said Butt in its famiiar voice. ‘All fixed up now. Let’s go. Va-va-voom!’

‘Hold your horses, Hoopoe,’ Haroun whispered. ‘You just sit there and pretend you’re still brainless. I’ve got something else to do.’

And now, at last, he reached into his other nightshirt pocket, and drew out a small bottle made of many-faceted crystal, with a little golden cap. The bottle was still half-full of the magical golden liquid which Iff the Water Genie had offered him what seemed like years earlier:
Wishwater
. ‘The harder you wish, the better it works,’ Iff had told him. ‘Do serious business, and the Wishwater will do serious business for you.’

‘This may take more than eleven minutes,’ Haroun whispered to Butt the Hoopoe, ‘but I’m going to do it all right. Hoopoe, you just watch me try.’ And so saying, he unscrewed the golden lid and drank the Wishwater down to the last drop.

All he could see was a golden light, which had wrapped itself around him like a shawl … ‘I wish,’ thought Haroun Khalifa, squeezing his eyes tightly shut, wishing with every fibre of his being, ‘I wish this Moon, Kahani, to turn, so that it’s no longer half in light and half in darkness … I wish it to turn, this very instant, in such a way that the sun shines down on the Dark Ship, the full, hot, noonday sun.’

‘That’s some wish,’ said Butt the Hoopoe’s voice admiringly. ‘This will be pretty interesting. It’s your willpower against the Processes Too Complicated To Explain.’

~ ~ ~

The minutes passed: one, two, three, four, five. Haroun lay stretched out on the back of Butt the Hoopoe, oblivious of time, oblivious of everything except his wish. In the weed-jungle, the Chupwala searchers decided they were looking in the wrong place, and turned back towards the Dark Ship. Their ‘darkbulbed’ torches sent probing beams of darkness through the twilight. By chance, none of these beams fell upon Butt the Hoopoe. More minutes passed: six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

Eleven minutes passed.

Haroun remained stretched out, with his eyes shut tight, concentrating.

A dark beam from the torch of a Chupwala searcher picked him out. The hisses of the search-party foamed across the waters. On their dark sea-horses, they galloped towards Butt the Hoopoe as fast as they could go.

And then, with a mighty shuddering and a mighty juddering, Haroun Khalifa’s wish came true.

The Moon Kahani turned—quickly, because as Haroun had specified during his wishing, there was little time to be lost—and the sun rose, at high speed, and zoomed up into the sky until it was directly overhead; where it remained.

If Haroun had been in Gup City at that moment, he might have enjoyed witnessing the consternation of the Eggheads in P2C2E House. The immense super-computers and gigantic gyroscopes that had controlled the behaviour of the Moon, in order to preserve the Eternal Daylight and the Perpetual Darkness and the Twilight Strip in between, had simply gone crazy, and finally blown themselves apart. ‘Whatever is doing this,’ the Eggheads reported to the Walrus in consternation, ‘possesses a force beyond our power to imagine, let alone control.’

But Haroun was not in Gup City—whose citizens had rushed open-mouthed into the streets, as night fell over Gup for the first time that anybody could remember, and the stars of the Milky Way Galaxy filled the sky. No, Haroun was on the back of Butt the Hoopoe, opening his eyes to find brilliant sunlight beating down on the waters of the Ocean and on the Dark Ship. ‘What do you know?’ he said. ‘I did it! I actually managed to get it done.’

‘Never doubted you for a moment,’ replied Butt the Hoopoe without moving its beak. ‘Move the whole Moon by will-power? Mister, I thought,
no problem
.’

Extraordinary things had begun to happen around them. The Chupwala searchers, racing towards Haroun on their dark sea-horses, began to shriek and hiss as the sunlight hit them; and then both Chupwalas and horses grew fuzzy at the edges, and began, as it seemed, to
melt
… into the poisoned, lethally acid Ocean they sank, turning into ordinary shadows, and then sizzling away altogether …‘Look,’ yelled Haroun. ‘Look what’s happening to the ship!’

The sunlight had undone the black magic of the Cultmaster Khattam-Shud. Shadows could not remain solid in that brightness; and the huge ship itself had started to melt, had started losing its shape, as if it were a mountain of ice-cream left out in the sun by mistake.

‘Iff! Mali!’ shouted Haroun, and in spite of Butt’s warnings he rushed up the gangway (which was becoming softer by the minute) towards the heaving deck.

~ ~ ~

By the time he reached the deck it was so sticky-soft that Haroun felt he was walking through fresh tar, or perhaps glue. Chupwala soldiers were screeching and rushing about madly, dissolving before Haroun’s eyes into pools of shadow, and then vanishing altogether, because once the sorcery of Khattam-Shud had been destroyed by the sunlight, no shadow could survive without someone or something to be attached to, to be the shadow
of
. The Cultmaster, or to be precise his Shadow-Self, was nowhere to be seen.

Poison was evaporating from the cauldrons on deck; the cauldrons themselves were growing flabby and melting like dark butter. Even the gigantic crane, to which the Plug was attached by huge chains, was tilting and lolling in the shocking light of day.

The Water Genie and the Floating Gardener had been suspended over two of the poison-cauldrons by ropes which had been looped around their middles and then fastened to the smaller cranes that stood by each of the poison tanks. Just as Haroun spotted them, the ropes broke (they were woven out of shadows, too); and Iff and Mali plunged out of sight into the evil cauldrons. Haroun gave an anguished cry.

But the poison in the cauldrons had been boiled dry by the sun; and the cauldrons themselves had grown so soft that, as Haroun watched, Iff and Mali pulled away great sections with their bare hands, creating holes huge enough for them to step through. The cauldrons had been reduced to the consistency of melting cheese; and so had the deck itself. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Haroun suggested. The others followed him down the melting, rubbery gangway; Iff and Haroun leapt aboard Butt the Hoopoe, and Mali stepped on to the water beside them.

‘Mission accomplished,’ cried Haroun, joyfully. ‘Hoopoe, full speed ahead!’

‘Varoom,’ agreed Butt the Hoopoe without moving its beak. It began moving rapidly away from the Dark Ship, towards the channel which Mali had cut in the weed-jungle; and then there was an unhealthy-sounding noise, and a slight smell of burning from the Hoopoe’s brain-cavity, and they came to a halt.

‘He’s blown a fuse,’ Iff pointed out. Haroun was mortified. ‘I guess I didn’t make the right connections after all,’ he said. ‘And I thought I’d been so good; now he’s ruined, he’ll never work again!’

‘The great thing about a mechanical brain,’ Iff consoled him, ‘is that it can be fixed up, overhauled, even replaced. There’s always a spare at the Service Station in Gup City. If we could get the Hoopoe back there, it would be as right as rain, hunky-dory, first class.’

‘If we could get any of us back to anywhere,’ Haroun said. They were adrift in the Old Zone, with no prospect of help. After everything they had been through, Haroun thought, it just didn’t seem fair.

‘I’ll push for a while,’ Mali offered, and had just begun to do so when, with a strange, sad, sucking sound, the Dark Ship of Cultmaster Khattam-Shud finally melted right away. And the Plug, incomplete as it was, fell harmlessly on to the ocean-bed, leaving the Source of Stories entirely unblocked-up. Fresh stories would go on pouring out of it, and so, one day, the Ocean would be clean again, and all the stories, even the oldest ones, would taste as good as new.

~ ~ ~

Mali could push them no further; he fell across the Hoopoe’s back, exhausted. It was mid-afternoon now (the Moon Kahani had settled down to a ‘normal’ speed of rotation), and they drifted across the Southern Polar Ocean, not knowing what to do next.

Just then there was a bubbling and a frothing in the water beside them; and Haroun recognized, with immense relief, the many smiling mouths of the Plentimaw Fishes.

‘Goopy! Bagha!’ he greeted them happily. They replied:

‘Have no worries! Have no fear!’

‘We’ll soon get you out of here!’

‘You’ve done enough! Throw down the reins!’

‘We’ll soon have you safe again!’

So Bagha and Goopy, taking the reins of Butt the Hoopoe in their mouths, towed the companions out of the Old Zone. ‘I wonder what became of Khattam-Shud,’ Haroun finally said. Iff gave a contented shrug. ‘Done for; I can vouch for that,’ he said. ‘No escape for the Cultmaster. He melted away like the rest of them. It’s curtains for him, he’s history, goodnight Charlie. I.e.: he’s
khattam-shud
.’

‘This was only the Shadow-Self, remember,’ Haroun pointed out soberly. ‘The other Cultmaster, the “real” one, is probably battling it out right now with General Kitab and the Pages, and Mudra, and my father—and Blabbermouth.’
Blabbermouth
, he thought privately.
I wonder if she missed me, just a little bit?

What had been the Twilight Strip was now bathed in the last light of the sun. ‘From now on, Kahani will be a sensible Moon,’ Haroun thought, ‘with sensible days and nights.’ In the distance, to the north-east, he saw, lit up by the evening sun for the first time in many an age, the coastline of the Land of Chup.

Chapter 11

Princess Batcheat

Now I must tell you quickly about everything that happened while Haroun was away in the Old Zone: Princess Batcheat Chattergy, you will remember, was being held prisoner in the topmost room of the topmost tower of the Citadel of Chup, the huge castle built entirely of black ice, which loomed over Chup City like an enormous Pterodactyl or Archaeopteryx. So it was to Chup City that the Guppee Army came, with General Kitab, Prince Bolo and Mudra the Shadow Warrior at its head.

Chup City was in the deep heart of the Perpetual Darkness, and the air was so cold that it would freeze into icicles on people’s noses, and hang there until it was broken off. For this reason, the Chupwalas who lived there wore little spherical nosewarmers that gave them the look of circus clowns, except that the nosewarmers were black.

Red nosewarmers were issued to the Pages of Gup as they marched into the Darkness. ‘Really, this is beginning to look like a war between buffoons,’ thought Rashid the storyteller as he put on his false red nose. Prince Bolo, who found the things distinctly undignified, knew that a frozen, icicle-dangling nose would be even worse. So he sulked terribly but stuck his nosewarmer on as well.

Then there were the helmets. The Pages of Gup had been allocated the oddest headgear Rashid had ever seen (by courtesy of the Walrus and Eggheads back at P2C2E House). Around the rim of each helmet was a sort of hatband that lit up brightly when the helmet was worn. This made the Pages of Gup look rather like a regiment of angels or saints, because they all had shining haloes around their heads. The combined wattage of all these ‘haloes’ would just about enable the Guppees to see their opponents, even in the Perpetual Darkness; while the Chupwalas, even with their fashionable wrap-around dark glasses on, might be somewhat dazzled by the glare.

‘This certainly is state-of-the-art warfare,’ thought Rashid ironically. ‘Neither army will even be able to see properly during the fight.’

Outside Chup City lay the battlefield, the wide plain of Bat-Mat-Karo, which had little hills at each end, where the rival commanders could pitch their tents and watch the battle’s course. General Kitab, Prince Bolo and Mudra were joined on the Guppee command hill by Rashid the storyteller (who was needed, because only he could translate Mudra’s Gesture Language to the others) and a detachment—or ‘Pamphlet’—of Pages, including Blabbermouth, to act as messengers and guards. The Guppee commanders, all looking slightly silly in their red noses, sat down to a light pre-battle dinner in their tent; and while they were eating a Chupwala rode up to meet them, a little clerky fellow wearing, on his hooded cloak, the Sign of the Zipped Lips, and carrying a white flag of truce.

‘Well, Chupwala,’ said Prince Bolo dashingly and rather foolishly, ‘what’s your business? My, my,’ he added, impolitely, ‘what a measly, weaselly, snivelling, drivelling sort of fellow you are.’