Haroun and the Sea of Stories Page 10

  How this sight would have horrified Mali, Haroun thought; perhaps Mali most of all. But of the Floating Gardener there was still no trace. ‘Probably trussed up like us in another Web of Night,’ Haroun guessed. ‘But O, what wouldn’t I give to see his gnarled old root-body running along beside us now, and to hear that soft flowery voice speaking such rough and infrequent words.’

  The poisoned waters lapped at Butt the Hoopoe’s sides—and then splashed suddenly higher, as the Web of Night was brought to an abrupt halt. Iff and Haroun, acting by reflex, jerked their feet away from the splashing liquid, and one of the Water Genie’s attractively embroidered and twirly-pointed slippers fell (from, to be precise, his left foot) into the Ocean; where, quick as a blink, with a fizz and a hiss and a burble and a gurgle, it was instantly eaten away, right down to the tip of its twirly toe. Haroun was impressed, in a horrified way. ‘The poison is so concentrated here that it behaves like a powerful acid,’ he remarked. ‘Hoopoe, you must be made of tough stuff. Iff, you’re lucky it was just your slipper that fell in, and not you.’

  ‘Don’t sound too pleased,’ Butt the Hoopoe said moodily without moving its beak. ‘Who knows what’s in store for us, up ahead?’

  ‘Well, thanks very much,’ Haroun rejoined. ‘Another happy notion from you.’

  But he was worrying about Mali. The Floating Gardener had actually been walking over the surface of this concentrated poison. He was a tough old creature, but could he withstand its acid-like power? Haroun had an awful mental image of Mali sinking slowly into the Ocean, where with a fizz and a hiss and a burble and a gurgle … he shook his head. No time for such negative thoughts now.

  The Web of Night was pulled away, and as the faint twilight returned Haroun saw that they had reached a large clearing in the weed-jungle. Just a short distance away was what looked like a wall of night. ‘That must be the beginning of the Perpetual Darkness,’ Haroun thought. ‘We must be at the very edge of it now.’

  Only a few roots and weeds, most of them badly burned and corroded by the poison-acid, floated on the surface of the Ocean here. There was still no sign of Mali, and Haroun continued to fear the worst.

  A party of thirteen Chupwalas had surrounded Butt the Hoopoe, and pointed menacing-looking weapons at Iff and Haroun. They all had the same strange reversed eyes, with white pupils instead of black ones, bland grey irises instead of coloured ones, and blackness where the whites should have been, which Haroun had first seen on the face of Mudra. But, unlike the Shadow Warrior, these Chupwalas were scrawny, snivelling, weaselly-looking types wearing black hooded cloaks adorned with the special insignia of Cultmaster Khattam-Shud’s personal guards—that is, the Sign of the Zipped Lips. ‘They look like a gang of office clerks in fancy dress,’ Haroun thought. ‘But they’re not to be underestimated; they are dangerous, no question about it at all.’

  The Chupwalas clustered around Butt the Hoopoe and stared curiously at Haroun, which was annoying. They were riding what looked like large, dark sea-horses, which seemed to be just as puzzled by the Earth boy’s presence as their riders. ‘For information only,’ Butt the Hoopoe revealed, ‘these dark horses are machines also. But a dark horse, as is well known, is unreliable, and not to be trusted.’

  Haroun wasn’t listening.

  He had just seen that the wall of night, which he had thought to be the beginning of the Perpetual Darkness, was no such thing. It was in fact a colossal ship, a vast ark-like vessel standing at anchor in the clearing. ‘That’s where they’ll be taking us,’ he understood with a sinking heart. ‘It must be the flagship of the Cultmaster, Khattam-Shud.’ But when he opened his mouth to say as much to Iff, he found that fear had dried his throat and all that came out of his mouth was a strange croaking noise:

  ‘Ark,’ he croaked, pointing to the dark ship. ‘Ark, ark.’

  ~ ~ ~

  Gangways with railings slanted down along the side of the Dark Ship. The Chupwalas brought them to the foot of one such gangway, and here Haroun and Iff had to leave Butt the Hoopoe behind and begin the long climb to the deck. As Haroun climbed, he heard a piteous cry, and turned to see the Hoopoe protesting, without moving its beak, ‘But but but that you must not take—no, you can’t—it’s my brain!’ Two cloaked Chupwalas were on Butt’s back, unscrewing the top of the Hoopoe’s head. From the head cavity they removed a small, dully gleaming metal box, emitting, as they did so, a series of short, satisfied hisses. And then they simply left Butt the Hoopoe floating there, its circuits disconnected, its memory cells and command module removed. It looked like a broken toy. ‘Oh, Hoopoe,’ Haroun thought, ‘I’m sorry I ever teased you about being only a machine! You’re the best and bravest machine that ever there was, and I’ll get your brain back for you, just see if I don’t.’ But he knew it was an empty promise, because after all he had troubles of his own.

  They climbed on. Then Iff, who was behind Haroun, stumbled badly, seemed on the verge of falling, and grabbed Haroun’s hand, apparently to steady himself. Haroun felt the Water Genie pushing something small and hard into his palm. He closed his fist over it.

  ‘A little emergency something, courtesy of P2C2E House,’ Iff whispered. ‘Maybe you’ll get a chance to use it.’

  The Chupwalas were ahead of them and behind as well. ‘What is it?’ Haroun muttered in his lowest voice.

  ‘Bite the end off,’ Iff whispered, ‘and it gives you two full minutes of bright, bright light. So it’s called a Bite-a-Lite, for obvious reasons. Hide it under your tongue.’

  ‘What about you?’ Haroun whispered back. ‘Have you got one as well?’ But Iff did not reply, and Haroun understood that the Water Genie had given Haroun the only such device he possessed. ‘I can’t take it, it’s not fair,’ Haroun whispered, but now one of the Chupwalas hissed at him so terrifyingly that he decided he’d better keep quiet for a while. Up, up they climbed, wondering what the Cultmaster had in mind.

  They climbed past a row of portholes, and Haroun let out an astonished gasp, because pouring out of the portholes came darkness—darkness glowing in the twilight the way light does from a window in the evening. The Chupwalas had invented artificial darkness, just as other people had artificial light! Inside the Dark Ship, Haroun guessed, there must be lightbulbs—except they’d have to be called ‘darkbulbs’—producing this strange darkness, so that the reversed eyes of the Chupwalas (which would be blinded by brightness) could see properly (although he, Haroun, would be unable to see anything at all). ‘Darkness you can switch on and off,’ Haroun marvelled. ‘What a notion, I swear.’

  They reached the deck.

  Now Haroun realized just how enormous the ship was. In that dim light it seemed that the deck was literally infinite; certainly Haroun could not see clearly all the way to the bow, or indeed to the stern. ‘It must be a mile long!’ he exclaimed, and if it was a mile long, then it was probably at least half a mile wide.

  ‘Outsize, super-colossal, big,’ Iff morosely agreed.

  Arranged in a sort of chequerboard pattern on the deck were great numbers of gigantic black tanks or cauldrons, each with its own team of maintenance operatives. Pipes and ducts led into and out of each of these, and there were ladders up their sides. Small mechanical cranes were positioned by each cauldron, too, with buckets hanging from maliciously sharp-looking hooks. Those must be the poison tanks,’ Haroun guessed; and he was right. The cauldrons were brim-full of the black poisons that were murdering the Ocean of Stories—poisons in their most potent, pure, undiluted form. ‘It’s a factory ship,’ Haroun thought with a shudder, ‘and what it makes is far, far worse than the sadness factories back home.’

  The largest object on the deck of the Dark Ship was another crane. This one towered above the deck like a tall building, and from its mighty arm Haroun saw immense chains descending into the waters. Whatever hung at the end of these chains, down below the Ocean’s surface, must indeed be of astonishing size and weight; but Haroun had no idea of what it was.

  What struck
Haroun first about the Dark Ship and everything upon it was a quality of what he could only call shadowiness. In spite of the mammoth scale of the ship itself, and the terrifying size and number of the poison tanks and the giant crane, Haroun kept having the notion that the whole affair was somehow impermanent, that there was something not quite fixed or certain about it all, as if some great sorcerer had somehow managed to build the whole thing out of shadows—to give shadows a solidity that Haroun had no idea they could possess. ‘But this is all too fanciful for words,’ he told himself. ‘A boat made out of shadows? A shadow-ship? Don’t be nuts.’ But the idea kept nagging at him, and wouldn’t let go. Look at the edges of everything here, said a voice in his head. The edges of the poison tanks, the crane, the ship itself. Don’t they look, well, fuzzy? That’s what shadows are like; even when they’re sharp, they’re never as sharp-edged as real, substantial things.

  As for the Chupwalas, all of whom belonged to the Union of the Zipped Lips, and were the Cultmaster’s most devoted servants—well, Haroun kept being struck by how ordinary they were, and how monotonous was the work they had been given. There were hundreds of them in their Zipped Lips cloaks and hoods, attending to the tanks and cranes on the deck, performing a series of mindless, routine jobs: checking dials, tightening joints, switching the tanks’ stirring mechanisms on and off again, swabbing the decks. It was all as boring as could be; and yet—as Haroun kept having to remind himself—what these scurrying, cloaked, weaselly, scrawny, snivelling clerical types were actually up to was nothing less than the destruction of the Ocean of the Streams of Story itself! ‘How weird,’ Haroun said to Iff, ‘that the worst things of all can look so normal and, well, dull.’

  ‘Normal, he calls this,’ Iff sighed. ‘The boy is crazy, bananas, out to lunch.’

  Their captors pushed them towards a large hatchway in which were set two tall black doors bearing the Zipped Lips symbol of Khattam-Shud. All this was done in total silence, except for the eerie hissing sound that the Chupwalas used instead of speech; and when they were a few feet away from the double doors, they were stopped, and held by the arms. The double doors opened. This is it,’ Haroun told himself.

  Through the doors came a skinny, scrawny, measly, weaselly, snivelling clerical type, exactly like all the others. But also unlike: because as soon as he appeared, every Chupwala in sight began to bow and scrape as energetically as possible; for this unimpressive creature was none other than the notorious and terrifying Cultmaster of Bezaban, Khattam-Shud, the big bogeyman himself!

  ‘That’s him? That’s him?’ Haroun thought, with a kind of disappointment. ‘This little minging fellow? What an anticlimax.’

  Now came another surprise: the Cultmaster began to speak. Khattam-Shud neither hissed like his minions, nor croaked and gurgled like Mudra the Shadow Warrior, but spoke clearly, in a dull, inflexionless voice, a voice nobody would ever have remembered if it hadn’t belonged to so powerful and terrifying a Personage. ‘Spies,’ said Khattam-Shud dully. ‘What a tiresome melodrama. A Water Genie from Gup City, and something more unusual: a young fellow from, if I’m not mistaken, down there.’

  ‘So much for all your Silence nonsense,’ said Iff with considerable courage. ‘Isn’t it typical, couldn’t you have guessed it, wouldn’t you have known: the Grand Panjandrum himself does exactly what he wants to forbid everyone else to do. His followers sew up their lips and he talks and talks like billy-o.’

  Khattam-Shud pretended to ignore these remarks. Haroun stared at him, looking particularly at the edges of the Cultmaster’s body, and finally he was sure: it was there, that same fuzziness, that wobbliness he had spotted in the Dark Ship itself: shadowiness, he had called it, and he’d been right. ‘No doubt about it,’ he decided. This is the Cultmaster’s Shadow, which he learnt how to detach. He has sent the Shadow here, and remains in the Citadel of Chup.’ Where the Guppee forces, along with Haroun’s father Rashid, must be heading even now.

  If he was right, and this really was the shadow-become-human rather than the man-grown-shadowy, then Khattam-Shud’s sorcery was very powerful indeed; for the figure of the Cultmaster was entirely three-dimensional, with eyes moving visibly in its head. ‘I never in my life saw such a shadow,’ Haroun had to admit; but his conviction that it was, indeed, the Cultmaster’s Shadow-Self that had come to the Old Zone in this Dark Ship continued to grow.

  The Chupwala who had removed Butt the Hoopoe’s brain-box stepped forward and gave it to Khattam-Shud with a bow of the head. The Cultmaster commenced tossing the little metal cube lightly into the air, murmuring, ‘Now we shall see about their Processes Too Complicated To Explain. Once this is taken apart, I’ll explain those processes, never fear.’

  Just then Haroun had a notion that made his head spin. Khattam-Shud reminded him of someone. ‘I know him,’ he thought in utter amazement. ‘I’ve met him somewhere before. It’s impossible, but there it is: he’s very, very familiar.’

  The Cultmaster came over and peered into Haroun’s face. ‘What brought you up here, eh?’ he asked in his dull, dull voice. ‘Stories, I suppose.’ He said the word ‘stories’ as if it were the rudest, most contemptible word in the language. ‘Well, look where stories have landed you now. You follow me? What starts with stories ends with spying, and that’s a serious charge, boy, no charge more serious. You’d have done better to keep your feet on the ground but you had your head in the air. You’d have done better to stick to Facts, but you were stuffed with stories. You’d have done better to have stayed home, but up you came. Stories make trouble. An Ocean of Stories is an Ocean of Trouble. Answer me this: what’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?’

  ‘I know you,’ Haroun shouted. ‘You’re him. You’re Mr Sengupta and you stole my mother and you left the fat lady behind and you’re a snivelling, drivelling, mingy, stingy, measly, weaselly clerk. Where are you hiding her? Maybe she’s a prisoner on this ship! Come on; hand her over.’

  Iff the Water Genie held Haroun kindly by the shoulders. He was shaking with anger and other emotions, and Iff waited until he had calmed down. ‘Haroun, lad, it’s not the same guy,’ Iff gently said. ‘Maybe he looks the same, the spitting image, the exact double; but, believe me, boy, this is the Cultmaster of Bezaban, Khattam-Shud.’

  Khattam-Shud, in his clerky way, seemed quite unperturbed. His right hand continued, absently, to toss Butt the Hoopoe’s brain-box into the air. Finally he spoke in that droning, sleepy-making voice of his. ‘Stories have warped the boy’s brain,’ he pronounced solemnly. ‘Now he daydreams and spouts rubbish. Insulting, abusive child. Why would I have the slightest interest in your mother? Stories have made you incapable of seeing who stands before you. Stories have made you believe that a Personage such as Cultmaster Khattam-Shud ought to look like … this.’

  Haroun and Iff both cried out in shock as Khattam-Shud changed his shape. The Cultmaster grew and grew before their appalled, astonished eyes, until he was one hundred and one feet tall, with one hundred and one heads, each of which had three eyes and a protruding tongue of flame; and a hundred and one arms, one hundred of which were holding enormous black swords, while the one hundred and first tossed Butt the Hoopoe’s brain-box casually into the air … and then, with a little sigh, Khattam-Shud shrank back into his earlier, clerkish form. ‘Showing off,’ he shrugged. ‘Stories go in for such displays, but they are unnecessary and inefficient, too. —Spies, spies,’ he mused. ‘Well, you must see what you came to see. Though obviously you will not be able to make your report.’

  He turned, and began to slink back towards the black doors. ‘Bring them,’ he commanded, and was gone. Chupwala soldiers surrounded Haroun and Iff, and pushed them through the doors. They found themselves at the head of a wide, black flight of stairs, which disappeared down and away into the pitch blackness of the interior of the ship.

  Chapter 10

  Haroun’s Wish

  As Haroun and Iff stood there at the top of the stairs, the absolute darkness created by
thousands of ‘darkbulbs’ suddenly disappeared, to be replaced by the dim twilight. Khattam-Shud had ordered the big switch-off, so that he could taunt his captives by showing them the extent of his power. Haroun and Iff could see their way now, and began to walk down into the belly of that immense ship. All around them, Chupwalas were putting on really rather fashionable wrap-around dark glasses, to help them see better in the increased level of light. ‘Now they look like office clerks pretending to be rock stars,’ thought Haroun.

  He could now see that, below decks, the Dark Ship was a single voluminous cavern, around which walkways ran at seven different levels, connected by stairways and ladders; and it was full of machinery. And what machines they were! ‘Far Too Complicated To Describe,’ Iff murmured. What a whirring of whirrers and stirring of stirrers, what ranks of lifters and banks of sifters, what a humming of squeezers and thrumming of freezers was there! Khattam-Shud waited for them on a high catwalk, tossing Butt the Hoopoe’s brain idly from hand to hand. No sooner had Haroun and Iff (and their guards, of course) reached him than he began, drily, to explain everything.

  Haroun forced himself to listen, even though the Cultmaster’s voice was boring enough to send a person to sleep in ten seconds flat. ‘These are the Poison Blenders,’ Khattam-Shud was saying. ‘We must make a great many poisons, because each and every story in the Ocean needs to be ruined in a different way. To ruin a happy story, you must make it sad. To ruin an action drama, you must make it move too slowly. To ruin a mystery you must make the criminal’s identity obvious even to the most stupid audience. To ruin a love story you must turn it into a tale of hate. To ruin a tragedy you must make it capable of inducing helpless laughter.’