Luka and the Fire of Life (15 page)

‘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.’

Luka couldn’t help noticing that the Heart of Magic was in some disrepair. The Egyptians’ pyramids were crumbling, and in the Nordic quarter a gigantic ash tree lay on its side, its three huge roots clutching at the sky. And if those meadows over in that direction were really the Elysian Fields, where the souls of great heroes lived on for ever, why was the grass so brown? ‘These places are in really bad shape,’ Luka said, and Soraya nodded sadly. ‘Magic is fading from the universe,’ she said. ‘We aren’t needed any more, or that’s what you all think, with your High Definitions and low expectations. One of these days you’ll wake up and we’ll be gone, and then you’ll find out what it’s like to live without even the idea of Magic. But Time moves on, and there isn’t a thing we can do about it. Would you like,’ she said, brightening, ‘to see the Battle of the Beauties? I believe this is the right time of day.’

The carpet began to fly down towards a great pavilion topped by seven golden, onion-shaped domes, all shining in the morning
sun. ‘Shouldn’t we stay out of these gods’ and goddesses’ way, though?’ Luka objected. ‘Surely we don’t want them to see us, to know we’re here? We are thieves, after all.’

‘They can’t see you,’ Soraya answered. ‘If you’re from the Real World, they are blind to your existence. You don’t exist for them, just as they no longer exist for you. You can walk right up to any number of gods or goddesses, say “boo” and pinch their noses, and they’ll act as if nothing happened, or as if they’re being bothered by a fly. As for persons from the general neighbourhood, like myself, they don’t care about us. We aren’t part of their stories, so they think we don’t count. Stupid of them, but that’s the way they are.’

‘Then it’s a sort of ghost town,’ Luka thought, ‘and these supposed almighties are sort of sleepwalkers, or echoes of themselves. It’s like a mythological theme park here – you could call it Godland – only there are no visitors, except for us, and we’ve come to pilfer a piece of their most precious possession.’ To Soraya he said, ‘But if they can’t see us, won’t it be easy to steal the Fire of Life? In which case, shouldn’t we just hurry up and do it?’

‘In the Heart of the Heart, which is to say inside the Circular Sea, where the Lake of Wisdom is bathed in the Eternal Dawn,’ said Soraya, ‘things are very different. There are none of these moronic sleepwalking sacked gods in there. That is the Country of the Aalim – the Three Jos – who watch over the whole of Time. They are the Ultimate Guardians of the Fire, and they don’t miss a thing.’

‘The Three Jos?’ asked Luka.

‘Jo-Hua, Jo-Hai and Jo-Aiga,’ Soraya answered, and she was
whispering now. ‘What Was, What Is and What Will Come. The Past, the Present and the Future. The Possessors of All Knowledge. The Aalim: the Trinity of Time.’

The golden onion domes were right below them now, but Luka was thinking only of the Fire of Life. ‘So how do we get past the Jos, then?’ he whispered back to Soraya, and she spread her arms with a shrug and a rueful smile. ‘You knew from the start,’ she said, ‘that no one has ever done it. But there’s somebody who usually skulks around here, who may be able to help us. He usually lies pretty low, but this is the best place to find him. When the Beauties battle, he likes to watch.’

She landed the flying carpet behind a spreading thicket of rhododendrons, large enough to conceal the
Argo
. ‘Few magical creatures ever approach a rhododendron,’ she told Luka, ‘because they believe them to be poisonous. If there were any Yetis in the neighbourhood they would devour them, of course, but this is not Abominable Snowman country, and so the
Argo
will be safe enough here for a while.’ Then she folded up the carpet, put it in her pocket, and marched towards the onion-domed building. The four Changers shape-shifted into metal sows, and, clanking a good deal, trotted along beside Soraya, Nobodaddy, Luka, the Memory Birds, Bear the dog and Dog the bear towards the Battle Pavilion, from which loud, angry noises could be heard: the sounds of goddesses at war.

‘It’s so idiotic,’ Soraya said. ‘They fight over which of them is the loveliest, as if it mattered. Beauty goddesses are the worst. They have been flattered and spoiled for thousands of years, mortals and immortals have sacrificed their lives for them, and as a result you wouldn’t believe the things they believe they
are entitled to. Nothing but the best will do for them, and if it belongs to someone else, so what? They are sure they deserve it more than its owner, whether it’s a jewel or a palace or a man. But now here they are in the junkyard of their power, and their beauty no longer launches warships or makes men die for love, so there’s nothing left to do but fight each other over a hollow crown, a title that means nothing:
the loveliest of them all
.’

‘But that’s you – you are the loveliest of them all,’ Luka wanted to tell her. ‘See how your red hair flies in the wind, and then there’s the perfection of your eyes, your face, and I even enjoy it when you’re insulting people, and I don’t like it when you sound sad.’ Unfortunately he was too shy to say such embarrassing words out loud, and then a great burst of cheering began, and grew louder and louder, so she wouldn’t have been able to hear anything anyway.

The crowd in the pavilion was the sort of gathering of fantastic creatures out of fables and legends which would have utterly astounded Luka just a few days ago, but which he had, by now, almost begun to expect. ‘Oh, look, there are fauns here – horned, goat-eared and goat-hoofed – and proud centaurs stamping their feet,’ he thought, and was surprised by how unsurprising the World of Magic was starting to feel. ‘And winged men – would those be
angels
? – angels watching women fight? – that doesn’t sound right. And presumably all these other battle fans are the lower orders of the various god gangs, the gods’ servants and children and pets, out for a morning’s fun.’

Just then, the first goddess was ejected from the fray. She came tumbling head over heels through the air, right over Luka’s
head, screaming her rage as she went by, and turning from a palely powdered, geisha-like beauty into a hideous long-toothed harridan and then back into the geisha again. She crashed through the swing doors of the fight hall and was gone. ‘I believe that was the Japanese
rasetsu
, Kishimojin,’ said Nobodaddy, with the air of a goddess-fight connoisseur. (Being at the battle had clearly improved his mood.) ‘A
rasetsu
is more demon than goddess, really, as you saw from her transformations just then. Out of her class in this company, one feels; you’d expect her to be the first one to be knocked out.’

As Kishimojin retreated from the pavilion, Luka could still hear her high-pitched cursing. ‘
May your heads split into seven pieces like the flower of the basil shrub
.’ ‘The so-called Arjaka curse,’ Nobodaddy explained to Luka. ‘Terrifying in the Real World, but pathetically ineffective against these formidable females.’

Luka couldn’t see much of the fight, but didn’t like to ask any of his companions to lift him up. Over the heads of the crowd he saw thunderbolts being hurled and loud explosions lighting up the fighting area. He saw huge clouds of butterflies and flocks of birds, apparently also at war with one another. ‘There’s a little side battle going on between Mylitta, the moon goddess of ancient Sumer, and the Aztec vampire queen Xochiquetzal,’ Nobodaddy reported. ‘They don’t like it that they both have bird and butterfly entourages – beauty goddesses always want to be unique! – so they usually go at each other right away, and so do their flapping friends. Usually the two ladies knock each other out and leave the field clear for the top girls.’

The Roman love goddess, Venus, was eliminated early, staggering from the hall, reattaching her severed arms as she went.
‘The Romans are low down in the rankings here in the Heart of Magic,’ Nobodaddy shouted over the din. ‘For a start, they are homeless. Their followers never came up with an Olympus or Valhalla for them, so they wander around the place looking, to be frank, like vagrants. Also, everybody knows they are just imitations of the Greeks, and who wants to watch second-rate remakes when you can see the original movies for free?’

Luka shouted back that he didn’t know there was a divine pecking order. ‘Who’s at the top of it, then?’ he yelled. ‘Which bunch of ex-gods are the Top Gods?’ ‘I’ll tell you which ones are the snootiest,’ Nobodaddy shouted. ‘The Egyptians, for sure. And in these battles their girl Hathor often comes out on top.’