Luka and the Fire of Life Read online

  There was a man standing in the lane outside the Khalifa residence, wearing a familiar vermilion-colored bush shirt and a recognizably battered Panama hat, and plainly watching the house. Luka was just about to call out, and maybe even send Bear and Dog to chase the stranger away, when the man threw back his head and looked him right in the eye.

  It was Rashid Khalifa! It was his father, standing out there, saying nothing, but looking wide awake!

  But if Rashid was outside in the lane, then who was sleeping in his bed? And if Rashid was sleeping in his bed, then how could he be outside? Luka’s head was whirling and his brain had no idea what to think; his feet, however, had started to run. Pursued by his bear and his dog, Luka ran as fast as he could to where his father was waiting for him. He charged downstairs barefoot, stumbled slightly, took a step to the right, felt oddly giddy for a moment, regained his balance, and hurtled on through the front door. This was wonderful, Luka thought. Rashid Khalifa had woken up and somehow slipped outside for a walk. Everything was going to be all right.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Nobodaddy

  AS HE RAN OUT the front door with Dog and Bear, Luka had the strangest feeling, as if they had crossed an invisible boundary. As if a secret level had been unlocked and they had passed through the gateway that allowed them to explore it. He shivered a little, and the bear and the dog shivered, too, although it was not a cold dawn. The colors of the world were strange, the sky too blue, the dirt too brown, the house pinker and greener than normal … and his father was not his father, not unless Rashid Khalifa had somehow become partly transparent. This Rashid Khalifa looked exactly like the famous Shah of Blah; he was wearing his Panama hat and his vermilion bush shirt, and when he walked and talked it became obvious that his voice was Rashid’s voice, and the way he moved was an exact copy of the original, too; but this Rashid Khalifa could be seen through, not clearly but murkily, as if he were half real and half a trick of the light. As the first whispers of dawn murmured in the sky above, the figure’s transparency became even more obvious. Luka’s head began to spin. Had something happened to his father? Was this see-through father some sort of … some sort of …

  “Are you some sort of ghost?” he asked in a weak voice. “You are certainly something peculiar and surprising, to say the very least.”

  “Am I wearing a white sheet? Am I clanking chains? Do I look ghoulish to you?” demanded the phantom dismissively. “Am I scary? Okay, don’t answer that. The truth is that there are no such things as ghosts or specters and therefore I am not one. And may I point out that right now I am just as surprised as you?”

  Bear’s hair was standing on end, and Dog was shaking his head in a puzzled way, as if he had just begun to remember something.

  “Why are you so surprised?” Luka asked, trying to sound confident. “You’re not the one who can see through me, after all.” The see-through Rashid Khalifa came closer and Luka had to force himself not to run away. “I’m not here for you,” he said. “So it is, hmm, unusual for you to have crossed over when you’re in perfect health. And your dog and bear, too, by the by. The whole thing is exceedingly irregular. The Frontier is not supposed to be this easily ignored.”

  “What do you mean?” Luka demanded. “What Frontier? Who are you here for?” The moment he asked the second question, he knew the answer, and it drove the first question out of his mind. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. Then is my father …”

  “Not yet,” said the see-through Rashid. “But I’m the patient type.”

  “Go away,” Luka said. “You’re not wanted around here, Mr. … what is your name, anyway?”

  The see-through Rashid smiled a friendly smile that somehow wasn’t entirely friendly. “I,” he began to explain, in a kindly voice that somehow didn’t feel completely kind, “I am your father’s dea—”

  “Don’t say that word!” Luka shouted.

  “The point I’m trying to make, if I may be allowed to continue,” the phantom insisted, “is that everyone’s dea—”

  “Don’t say it!” Luka yelled.

  “—is different,” the phantom said. “No two are alike. Each living being is an individual unlike all others; their lives have unique and personal beginnings, personal and unique middles, and consequently, at the end, it follows that everyone has their own unique and personal dea—”

  “Don’t!” screamed Luka.

  “—and I am your father’s, or I will be soon enough, and at that time you will no longer be able to see through me, because then I will be the real thing and he, I’m sorry to say, will no longer be at all.”

  “Nobody is going to take my father away,” Luka cried. “Not even you, Mr. … whatever your name is … with your scary tales.”

  “Nobody,” said the see-through Rashid. “Yes, you can call me that. That’s who I am. Nobody is going to take your father away: that is exactly right, and I am the Nobody in question. I am your, you might say, Nobodaddy.”

  “That’s nonsense,” said Luka.

  “No, no,” the see-through Rashid corrected him. “I’m afraid that Nonsense is not involved. You will discover that I am a no-Nonsense kind of guy.”

  Luka sat down on the front step of the house and put his head in his hands. Nobodaddy. He understood what the see-through Rashid was telling him. As his father faded away, the phantom Rashid would grow stronger, and in the end there would be only this Nobodaddy and no father at all. But he was very sure of one thing: he was not ready to do without a father. He would never be ready for that. The certainty of this knowledge grew in him and gave him strength. There was only one thing for it, he told himself. This, this Nobodaddy had to be stopped, and he had to think of a way to stop him.

  “To be fair,” said Nobodaddy, “and in a spirit of full disclosure, I should repeat that you have already achieved something extraordinary—by crossing the line, I mean—so perhaps you are capable of further extraordinary things. Maybe you are even capable of bringing about the thing you are even now dreaming up; maybe—ha! ha!—you will succeed in bringing about my destruction. An adversary! How enjoyable! How positively … darling. I’m so excited.”

  Luka looked up. “What do you mean exactly, ‘crossing the line’?” he asked.

  “Here, where you are, is not there, where you were,” explained Nobodaddy helpfully. “This, all of this that you see, is not that which you saw before. This lane is not that lane, this house is not that house, and this daddy, as I have explained, is not that one. If the whole of your world took half a step to the right, then it would bump into this world. If it took half a step to the left … well, let’s not go into that just now. Don’t you see how much more brightly colored everything is here than it is back home? This, you see … I shouldn’t even tell you, really … this is the World of Magic.”

  Luka remembered his stumble in the doorway, and his brief but intense feeling of giddiness. Was that when he crossed the line? And had he stumbled to the right or the left? It must have been the right, mustn’t it? So this must be the Right-Hand Path, must it not? But was that the best Path for him? Shouldn’t he, as a left-handed person, have stumbled to the left? … He realized that he had no idea what he meant. Why was he on any sort of Path at all, and not just in the lane outside his house? Where might such a Path lead, and should he even think of going down it? Should he be thinking about just getting away from this alarming Nobodaddy and finding his way back to the safety of his bedroom? All this talk of Magic was much too much for him.

  Of course Luka knew all about the World of Magic. He had grown up hearing about it from his father every day, and he had believed in it, he had even drawn maps and painted pictures of it—the Torrent of Words flowing into the Lake of Wisdom, the Mountain of Knowledge and the Fire of Life, all that stuff; but he hadn’t believed in it in the way that he believed in dining tables, or streets, or stomach upsets. It hadn’t been real in the way that love was real, or unhappiness, or fear. It was only real in the way that stories were real while you were rea
ding them, or heat mirages before you got too close to them, or dreams while you were dreaming.

  “Is this a dream, then?” he wondered, and the see-through Rashid who called himself Nobodaddy nodded slowly in a thoughtful way. “That would certainly explain the situation,” he replied agreeably. “Why not put it to the test? If this is indeed a dream, then maybe your dog and your bear would no longer be dumb animals. I know your secret fantasy, you see. You’d like them to be able to talk, wouldn’t you—to speak to you in your own language and tell you their stories? I’m sure they have extremely interesting stories to tell.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Luka, shocked, and again the answer arrived in his head as soon as the question was out. “Oh. You know because my father knows. I talked to my father about it once, and he said he would make up a story about a talking dog and bear.”

  “Quite so,” said Nobodaddy calmly. “Everything that your father has been, and known, and said and done, is slowly crossing over into me. But I mustn’t hog the conversation,” he went on. “I do believe your friends are trying to get your attention.”

  Luka looked around and saw to his astonishment that Bear, the dog, had risen up on his hind legs and was clearing his throat like a tenor at the opera. Then he began to sing—not in barks, howls, or dog-yaps this time, but in plain, understandable words. He sang with a slight foreign accent, Luka noticed, as if he were a visitor from another country, but the words were clear enough, although the tale they told was bewildering.

  “O I am Barak of the It-Barak,

  The Immortal Dog Men of yore.

  Born from the egg of a magic hawk,

  We could sing and fight and love and talk

  And could never, ever be slain.

  “Yes, I am Barak of the It-Barak,

  A thousand years old and more.

  I ate black pearls and I wed human girls.

  I ruled my world like an earl in curls,

  And I sang with angelic disdain.

  “And this is the song of the It-Barak,

  A thousand years old, it’s true,

  But we were unmade by a Chinese curse,

  Were turned into pooches and pi-dogs and curs,

  And the Kingdom of Dogs became quicksand and bogs.

  We no longer sang, but could only bark,

  And we went on four legs, not two.

  Now we go on four legs, not two.”

  Then it was the turn of Dog, the bear, who also rose up on his hind legs, and folded his paws in front of him like a schoolboy at a public-speaking contest. Then he spoke in clear, human language, and his voice sounded remarkably like Luka’s brother, Haroun’s, and Luka almost fell over when he heard it. Nobodaddy saved him by stretching out a protective arm, exactly as if he were the real Rashid Khalifa. “O mighty pint-sized liberator,” the bear began grandly, but also, it seemed to Luka, a little uncertainly. “O incomparably cursing child, know that I was not always as you see me now, but the monarch of, um, a northern land of deep woods and shining snow, hidden behind a circular mountain range. My name was not ‘Dog’ then, but, er … Artha-Shastra, Prince of Qâf. In that cold, lovely place we danced to keep ourselves warm, and our dances became the stuff of legend, for as we stamped and leapt, the brilliance of our spinning wove the air around us into strands of silver and gold, and this became both our treasure and our glory. Yes! To twirl and to whirl was all our delight, and by whirling and twirling we came around right, and our golden land was a place of wonder and our clothes shone like the sun.”

  His voice strengthened, as if he had become more certain of the tale he was telling. “So we prospered,” he went on, “but we also aroused the envy of our neighbors, and one of them, the giant, bird-headed fairy prince called”—and here Dog, the bear, stumbled again—“um … ah … oh, yes, Bulbul Dev, the Ogre King of the East, who sang like a nightingale but danced like an oaf, was the most envious of all. He attacked us with his legion of giants, the … the … Thirty Birds, beaked monsters with spotted bodies, and we, a dancing, golden people, were too innocent and kindly to resist. But we were stubborn folk, too, and we did not give up the secrets of the dance. Yes, yes!” he exclaimed excitedly, and rushed on to the story’s end. “When the Bird Ogres realized that we would not teach them how to spin air into gold, that we would defend that great mystery with our lives, they set up a fluttering and a flapping and a screeching and a cawing so dreadfully terrifying that it was plain that Black Magic was afoot. Within moments the people of Qâf, shattered by the Ogres’ shrieks, began to crumble, to lose human form and become dumb animals—donkeys, marmosets, anteaters, and, yes, bears—while Bulbul Dev cried, ‘Try to dance your golden dance now, fools! Try to jig your silver jigs! What you would not share, you have lost forever, along with your humanity. Low, grubbing animals you will remain, unless—ha! ha!—you steal the Fire of Life itself to set you free!’ By which he meant, of course, that we would be trapped forever, for the Fire of Life is no more than a story, and even in stories it is impossible to steal. So I became a bear—a dancing bear, yes, but a golden dancer no more!—and as a bear I wandered the world until Captain Aag caught me for his circus, and so, young master, I found you.”

  It was just the sort of story Haroun would have told, thought Luka, a tall tale straight from the great Story Sea. But, when at last it was over, Luka was overcome by a strong feeling of disappointment. “So you’re both people?” he asked regretfully. “You’re not really my bear and my dog, but enchanted princes in dog and bear suits? Am I supposed not to call you Dog and Bear but ‘Artha-whatever’ and ‘Barak’? And here I am, worried sick about my dad, and now I’m supposed to worry about how to get you guys turned back into your real selves as well? You do know, I hope, that I’m only twelve years old.”

  The bear came back down onto four legs. “It’s okay,” he said. “While I’m in bear-form you can go on calling me Dog.”

  “And while I’m a dog,” said the dog, “you can still call me Bear. But it’s true that, as long as we are here in the World of Magic, we would like to search for a way of breaking the spells that bind us.”

  Nobodaddy clapped his hands. “Oh, good,” he cried. “A quest! I do like a quest. And here we have a three-in-one! Because you’re on a quest, too, aren’t you, young fellow? Of course you are,” he went on before Luka could say a word. “You want to save your father, of course you do. You want me, your detested Nobodaddy, to fade away, while your father becomes himself again. You want to destroy me, don’t you, young fellow? You want to kill me and you don’t know how. Except, as a matter of fact, you do know how. You know the name of the only thing in any world, Real or Magical, that can do what you desire. And even if you had forgotten what it was, you have just been reminded by your friend the talking bear.”

  “You mean the Fire of Life,” said Luka. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it? The Fire of Life that burns at the top of the Mountain of Knowledge.”

  “Bingo! Bull’s-eye! Spot on!” cried Nobodaddy. “The Towering Inferno, the Third-Degree Burn, the Spontaneous Combustion. The Flame of Flames. Oh, yes.” He actually capered in delight, doing a soft-shoe shuffle with his feet, and juggling with his Panama hat. Luka had to admit that this little dance was exactly the sort of thing Rashid Khalifa did when he was a bit too pleased with himself. But it was odder when you could see through the dancer.

  “But that’s just a story,” said Luka faintly.

  “Just a story?” echoed Nobodaddy in what sounded like genuine horror. “Only a tale? My ears must be deceiving me. Surely, young whippersnapper, you can’t have made so foolish a remark. After all, you yourself are a little Drip from the Ocean of Notions, a short Blurt from the Shah of Blah. You of all boys should know that Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood. Do rats tell tales? Do porpoises have narrative purposes? Do elephants ele-phantasize? You know as well as I do that they do not. Man alone burns with books.”

  “But still, t
he Fire of Life … it is just a fairy tale,” insisted Dog, the bear, and Bear, the dog, together.

  Nobodaddy drew himself up indignantly. “Do I look,” he demanded, “like a fairy to you? Do I resemble, perhaps, an elf? Do gossamer wings sprout from my shoulders? Do you see even a trace of pixie dust? I tell you now that the Fire of Life is as real as I am, and that only that Unquenchable Blaze will do what you all wish done. It will turn bear into Man and dog into Dog-Man, and it will also be the End of Me. Luka! You little murderer! Your eyes light up at the very thought! How thrilling! I am amongst assassins! What are we waiting for, then? Are we starting now? Let’s be off! Tick, tock! There is no time to lose!”

  At this point Luka’s feet began to feel as if somebody were gently tickling their soles. Then the silver sun rose above the horizon, and something quite unprecedented began to happen to the neighborhood, the neighborhood that wasn’t Luka’s real neighborhood, or not quite. Why was the sun silver, for one thing? And why was everything too brightly colored, too smelly, too noisy? The sweetmeats on the street vendor’s barrow at the corner looked like they might taste odd, too. The fact that Luka was able to look at the street vendor’s barrow at all was a part of the strange situation, because the barrow was always positioned at the crossroads, just out of sight of his house, and yet here it was, right in front of him, with those oddly colored, oddly tasting sweetmeats all over it, and those oddly colored, oddly buzzing flies buzzing oddly all around it. How was this possible? Luka wondered. After all, he hadn’t moved a step, and there was the street vendor asleep under the barrow, so the barrow obviously hadn’t moved either; and how did the crossroads arrive as well, um, that was to say, how had he arrived at the crossroads?