"Luka and the Fire of Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rushdie Salman)

4 The Insultana of Ott

The Mists of Time were getting closer when the Argo passed a strange, sad land on the River’s right bank. Its territory was barred to River travellers by high barbed-wire fences, and when Luka did finally see a scary-looking border post, with its floodlights on high pylons and its tall reconnaissance towers containing lookout guards wearing mirrored sunglasses and carrying powerful military binoculars and automatic weapons, he was struck by a large sign reading YOU ARE AT THE FRONTIER OF THE RESPECTORATE OF I. MIND YOUR MANNERS. ‘What kind of a place is this?’ he asked Nobodaddy. ‘It doesn’t look very Magical to me.’

Nobodaddy’s expression contained a familiar mixture of amusement and scorn. ‘I’m sorry to say that the World of Magic is not immune to Infestations,’ he said. ‘And this part of it has been overrun, in recent times, by Rats.’

‘Rats?’ Luka cried in alarm, and now he realised what was wrong with those lookouts and border guards. They weren’t people at all, but giant rodents! Dog the bear growled angrily, but Bear the dog, who was a gentle-hearted soul, looked upset. ‘Let’s move on,’ he suggested quietly, but Luka shook his head. ‘I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m starving,’ he said. ‘Rats or no Rats, we have to go ashore, because we all need something to eat. Well, all of us except you,’ he added to Nobodaddy in an aside. Nobodaddy shrugged Rashid Khalifa’s familiar shrug and smiled Rashid Khalifa’s familiar smile and said, ‘Very well, if we must, we must. It’s been a while since I passed through the O-Fence.’ He saw Luka’s frown and explained, ‘This barbed-wire contraption. The O-Fence goes all around the Respectorate of I – it gives the place, you could say, its I-dentity – and, as the sign warns you, many of its present occupants take Offence very sharply indeed.’

‘We don’t plan to be rude,’ Luka said. ‘We just want lunch.’

The four travellers entered the border post, leaving the Argo in the care of the Elephant Drake and Elephant Duck, who passed the time diving for Eddyfish and other morsels. Inside the border post, standing at a counter behind a locked metal grille, was a large grey Rat in uniform: a Border Rat. ‘Papers,’ it said in a squeaky, Ratty voice. ‘We don’t have any papers,’ Luka honestly replied. The Border Rat went into a frenzy of screeches and squawks. ‘Absurd!’ it finally yelled. ‘Everybody has papers of some sort. Turn out your pockets.’ And so Luka emptied his pockets and found there, among the usual clutter of marbles, swap cards, elastic bands and game chips, three sweets still in their wrappers and two small, folded paper airplanes. ‘I never heard anything so rude,’ the Border Rat cried. ‘First he says he has no papers. Then it turns out he has papers. You’re lucky I’m the understanding kind. Hand over your papers and be grateful I’m in such a good mood.’ Nobodaddy nudged Luka, who regretfully handed over the swap cards, the airplanes and the orange sweets in their transparent wrapping. ‘Will that do?’ he asked.’ ‘Only because I’m the forgiving type,’ the Border Rat replied, pocketing the objects carefully. He unlocked the grille and allowed the travellers to pass through to the other side. ‘A word of warning,’ he said. ‘Here in the Respectorate we expect visitors to behave. We’re very thin-skinned. If you prick us, we bleed, and then we make you bleed double: is that clear?’

‘Absolutely clear,’ said Luka politely.

‘Absolutely clear what?’ the Border Rat screeched.

‘Absolutely clear, sir,’ Nobodaddy answered. ‘Don’t worry, sir. We will most definitely mind our p’s and q’s. Sir.’

‘What about the other twenty-four letters of the alphabet?’ asked the Border Rat. ‘You can do a lot of damage with those, and never use a q or a p.’

‘We’ll mind the other letters also,’ said Luka, adding, quickly, ‘sir.’

‘Are any of you female?’ the Border Rat abruptly demanded. ‘That dog, is she a bitch? That bear, is she a… bearess? A bearina? A bearette?’

‘Bearina indeed,’ said Dog the bear. ‘Now I’m the one that’s offended.’

‘And I,’ said Bear the dog. ‘Not that I have anything against bitches.’

‘The nerve!’ squeaked the Border Rat. ‘That you say you are offended, insults me mortally. And if you insult one Rat mortally, you offend all Rats gravely. And a grave offence to all Rats is a funeral crime, a crime punishable by -’

‘We apologise, sir,’ said Nobodaddy hurriedly. ‘May we go now?’

‘Oh, very well,’ said the Border Rat, subsiding. ‘But mind your manners. I don’t want to have to send for the Respecto- Rats.’ Luka didn’t like the sound of those.

They came through the border post and found themselves in a grey street: the houses, the curtains at the windows, the clothing worn by Rats and people alike (yes, there were people here, Luka was relieved to see), all grey. The Rats were grey too and the people had acquired a greyish pallor. Overhead, grey clouds allowed a neutral sunlight to filter through. ‘They developed a Colour Problem here a little while ago,’ Nobodaddy said. ‘The Rats who hated the colour yellow because of its, well, cheesiness were confronted by the Rats who disliked the colour red because of its similarity to blood. In the end all colours, being offensive to someone or other, were banned by the Rathouse – that’s the parliament, by the way, although nobody votes for it, it votes for itself, and it basically does what the Over-Rat says.’

‘And who chooses the Over-Rat?’ Luka asked.

‘He chooses himself,’ said Nobodaddy. ‘Actually he chooses himself over and over again, he does it more or less every day, because he likes doing it so much. It’s known as being Over- Rat-ed.’

‘Overrated sounds about right,’ said Dog the bear with a snort, and a number of passing Rats looked round sharply. ‘Be careful,’ Nobodaddy warned. ‘Everyone’s looking for trouble around here.’

Just then Luka caught sight of a giant billboard bearing a much-larger-than-life black-and-white portrait of what could only be the Over-Rat in person. ‘Oh, my goodness,’ he said, because the thought struck him that if the Over-Rat ever turned into a human being – if the Over-Rat could be reincarnated as a horrible twelve-year-old schoolboy from Kahani, to be precise – then he would look exactly like… that is, really exactly like…

‘Ratshit,’ Luka whispered. ‘But it’s impossible.’ Bear the dog stared at the billboard as well. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said. ‘Let’s just hope he’s not your enemy in the Magic World as well.’

Here was a place to eat! The sign over the door read ALICE’S RESTAU-RAT, which was, unfortunately, not a spelling mistake. Luka looked through the window and was reassured to see that the cooks and staff were all people, though many of the guests were Rats. He was worried, though. How would he and his friends pay for their food? ‘Don’t fret about that,’ Nobodaddy said. ‘There’s no money in the World of Magic.’

Luka was relieved. ‘But then how does anyone, well, buy anything? How do things work? It’s very odd.’ Nobodaddy gave Rashid Khalifa’s shrug again. ‘It’s,’ he replied in his own, mysterious fashion, ‘a P2C2E.’ A surge of excitement coursed through Luka’s body. ‘I know what that is,’ he said. ‘My brother told me. They had those on his adventure, too.’

‘Processes Too Complicated To Explain,’ said Nobodaddy, a little too grandly, as he led the way into the Restau-Rat, ‘are at the heart of the Mystery of Life. They are everywhere, in the Real World as well as the Magical One. Nothing anywhere would work without them. Don’t get so excited, Professor. You look like you just discovered Electricity, or China, or Pythagoras’ Theorem.’

‘Sometimes,’ Luka replied, ‘it’s obvious that you aren’t my father.’

The food was surprisingly tasty, and Luka, Dog and Bear all ate very well and too quickly. However, they were aware that all the Rats in the place were watching them closely, staring with particular hostility at Bear the dog and Dog the bear, and that was an uneasy feeling. There was a lot of muttering at the other tables in what Luka thought must be Rattish, and then, finally, one particular Rat, a narrow-eyed, suspicious creature wearing a grey kepi, got up on its hind legs and walked over. He had clearly been chosen by his friends as the newcomers’ interrogator. ‘Ssso, ssstrangers,’ said the Inquisitor Rat without preamble, ‘may I asssk what you think of our great Resssspectorate of I?’

‘I, I, sir, I, I, sir,’ all the Rats in the Restau-Rat chorused.

‘We love our country,’ the Inquisitor Rat said coldly. ‘And you? Do you love our country, too?’

‘It’s very nice,’ Luka said carefully, ‘and the food is excellent.’

The Inquisitor scratched his chin. ‘Why am I not entirely convinced?’ he asked, as if talking to himself. ‘Why do I suspect there may be something insulting lurking beneath your superficial charm?’

‘We must be going,’ Luka said hastily, standing up. ‘It was good to meet -’ But the Inquisitor extended a claw-tipped arm and grasped Luka by the shoulder. ‘Tell me this,’ he demanded roughly. ‘Do you believe that two and two make five?’

Luka hesitated, unsure of how to answer – whereupon, to his immense surprise, the Inquisitor leapt up onto the dining table, scattering plates and glasses in all directions, and burst into loud, hissy, tuneless song:

‘Do you believe two and two make five?

Do you agree the world is flat?

Do you know our Bossss is the Biggest Cheese alive?

Do you Ressspect the Rat?

O, do you Ressspect the Rat?

If I sssay upside down is the right way round,

If I insissst that black is white,

If I claim that a sssqueak is the sssweetest sssound,

Do you ressspect my Right?

Say, do you Ressspect my Right?

Do you agree nothing’s better than I?

Do you approve of my hat?

Will you please ssstop asking what, how and why?

Do you Ressspect the Rat?

Do you, don’t you, don’t you, do you,

Do you Ressspect the Rat?’

And now all the Rats in the Restau-Rat leapt up on their hind legs, placed their claws upon their chests, and sang the chorus:

‘I, I, sir,

I, I, sir,

We all say I, I, I.

There’s no need to argue, no need to sussspect,

No need to think when you’ve got Ressspect,

We all say I, I, I.’

‘That’s just nonsense!’ The words burst out of Luka before he could stop them. The Rats froze in their various poses, and then slowly, slowly, all their heads turned to look at Luka, and all their eyes glittered, and all their teeth were bared. ‘This isn’t good,’ Luka thought, and Bear and Dog drew close to him, prepared to fight for their lives. Even Nobodaddy seemed, for once, nonplussed. The Rats faced Luka, and slowly, little Rat-step by little Rat-step, they closed in around him.

‘Nonsenssse, you say,’ mused the Inquisitor Rat. ‘But, as it happens, it is also our National Sssong. Would you say, my fellow rodentsss, that this young rascal’s Manners have been Minded? Or does he deserve – hmmm – a Black Mark?’

‘Black Mark!’ the Rats screeched, all together, and bared their terrible claws. And perhaps the story of Luka Khalifa’s quest for the Fire of Life would have ended then and there at Alice’s Restau-Rat, and maybe Dog the bear and Bear the dog would have been lost, too, though they would certainly have gone down fighting and taken many Rats with them; and then Nobodaddy would have returned to Kahani to wait until the life of Rashid Khalifa had filled him up completely… and how sad all of that would have been! Instead, however, there was a cry from the street outside, and enormous quantities of red gloop and what looked like gigantic amounts of egg yolk and, following that, a hail of rotten vegetables began to descend from the sky, and all the Rats forgot entirely about Luka and his cry of ‘Nonsense!’ and charged out into the street yelling, ‘It’s the Otters!’ and, more simply, ‘It’s her again!’ because the Respectorate of I was under attack from above, and leading her aerial squadrons in the attack, swooping high and low and left and right, standing upright and unafraid on her famous flying carpet, Resham, which is to say, the Green Silk Flying Rug of King Solomon the Wise, was the feared, the fabled, the ferocious, the fabulous Insultana of Ott, shouting out, through a powerful megaphone, her blood-curdling battlecry: ‘We expectorate on the Respectorate!’

‘What’s going on?’ Luka shouted to Nobodaddy over the rising din, as the four travellers fled the Restau-Rat, just in case the Rats whom they had offended returned to finish them off. Outside in the street all was commotion and confusion and red gloop and egg and vegetables raining from above. They took shelter under the awning of a bakery down the road, its windows full of stale bread and unappetising-looking buns covered in grey icing. ‘Over in that direction, Over The Top of those mountains,’ Nobodaddy shouted back, pointing to a snow-capped range on the northern horizon, ‘is the unusual land of Oh-Tee-Tee, a land ringed by bright waters, whose denizens, the Otters, are devoted to all forms of excess. They talk too much, eat too much, drink too much, sleep too much, swim too much, chew too much betel nut, and they are without any question the rudest creatures in the world. But it’s an equal-opportunity impoliteness; the Otters all lay into one another without discrimination, and as a result they have all grown so thick-skinned that nobody minds what anyone else says. It’s a funny place, everyone laughs all the time while they call one another the worst things in the world. That lady up there is the Sultana, their Queen, but because she’s the most brilliant and sharp-tongued abuser of them all, everyone calls her the “Insult-ana”. It was her idea to take the battle to the Respectorate, because she respects nobody and nothing. You could almost call Ott the “Disrespectorate”, and dissing is unquestionably what they do best – Look at her!’ he broke off, admiring the Queen. ‘Isn’t she gorgeous when she’s angry?’

Luka looked up through the cascade of gloop, egg and vegetables. The Otter Queen was not an animal, but a green-eyed girl wearing a green-and-gold cloak, her fiery red hair streaming in the wind, no more than sixteen or seventeen years old. ‘She’s so young,’ Luka said in surprise. Nobodaddy grinned Rashid Khalifa’s grin. ‘Young people can dish it out and take it better than old folks,’ he said. ‘They can forgive and forget. People my age… well, sometimes they bear grudges.’ Luka frowned. ‘Your age?’ he said. ‘But I thought…’ Nobodaddy looked agitated. ‘Your father’s age, I meant. His age, obviously. Just a slip of the tongue.’ This scared Luka a good deal. He noticed that Nobodaddy had almost stopped being transparent. Time was in shorter supply than he had hoped.

‘We expectorate on the Respectorate!’ the Insultana yelled again, and her yell unleashed even more of the red rain. Perhaps fifty other flying carpets were arrayed in battle formation around the Insultana above the streets of the Respectorate, all flapping gently in the breeze, and on each of them stood a tall, sleek, betel-nut-chewing Otter, spitting long, livid jets of red betel juice down upon the Respectorate, covering grey houses, grey streets and the grey populace with splashes of scarlet contempt. Rotten eggs, too, were being hurled by the Otters in enormous quantities, and the stink of sulphur dioxide filled the air. And after the rotten eggs, the decomposing veggies. It really was quite an assault, but what hurt most of all was the version of the ‘National Song of I’ that poured down on the Respectorate through the Insultana’s megaphone. The Insultana sang in a high, clear voice – a voice that Luka thought oddly familiar, though he couldn’t, for the moment, understand why.

‘Two and two make four, not five.

The world is round, not flat.

Your Boss is the Smallest Fry alive.

We do not Respect the Rat!

O, we do not Respect the Rat!’

Splat! Baf! Whack! It was getting to be a terrible, messy scene. The battered Rats in the streets jumped in the air and flailed their claws uselessly above their heads, but the Insultana and her cohorts were far above them, out of reach.

‘And upside down is the wrong way round,

And black is black, not white,

And a squeak is by far the creepiest of sounds,

No, we do not respect your Right,

We do not respect your Right.’

‘We’ve got to get away!’ shouted Luka, and ran out into the street. But the Border Post beyond which the Argo was moored was some little distance down the street, and before Luka had gone ten yards he was covered in betel juice and rotten eggs, and a rotten tomato had landed on his head. He noticed, too, that with each aerial strike the life-counter in the top left-hand corner of his field of vision went down by one. He was just deciding to make a run for it anyway when Nobodaddy grabbed him by the collar and dragged him back under the awning. ‘Silly boy,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘Brave, but silly. That idea isn’t going to fly. And besides, now that you’ve chosen the most difficult route, don’t you want to save your progress?’

‘Where’s the saving point?’ Luka asked, wiping the muck from his eyes and trying to get the tomato out of his hair. Nobodaddy pointed. ‘There,’ he said. Luka looked in the direction of Nobodaddy’s pointing finger, and saw, arriving at the double, a phalanx of the largest and most ferocious rodents he had ever seen, armed to the teeth and firing their Ratapults furiously into the sky. These were the Respecto-Rats, of course, the most feared of the Respectorate’s troops, and at their rear – ‘leading from behind, that shows you what kind of a Rat he is,’ Luka thought – was the Over-Rat himself, the one who looked exactly like… ‘well, never mind that now,’ Luka told himself. And some distance behind this advancing army stood the grey Rathouse, and at the apex of its grey dome, glistening in the sun, the one golden object in this world of grey, was a little Orb. ‘That’s it?’ Luka cried. ‘That’s it all the way up there? How am I ever going to get to it?’

‘I didn’t say it would be easy,’ Nobodaddy replied. ‘But you still have nine hundred and nine lives left.’

Up in the sky the Otters on their flying carpets were dodging the Respecto-Rats’ missiles with contemptuous ease, and they all sang together as they flew left and right and high and low, and swaying from side to side:

‘Ai-yi,

Ai-yi,

We all moan ai-yi-yi.

You’re fools and you’re bullies,

Your thinking is woolly.

Respect? You’re not serious?

Your effect’s deleterious!

We laugh at you, ai-yi-yi-yi-yi,

We laugh at you, ai-yi-yi.’

‘All right then,’ said Luka, ‘I’m tired of this place. If that’s the button I have to push up there, then I’d better get up there now.’ And without waiting for an answer, he began to run as fast as he could through the war-torn streets.

Even with Bear and Dog running interference for him, the task proved to be almost impossible. The assault of the Otters had reached a sort of climax, and Luka’s losses of lives were alarming. Dodging the Respecto-Rats was tough, too, even though they weren’t really thinking about him; their armoured gun carriers and motorbikes kept mowing him down as he ran. The Over-Rat, it became plain, was the only Rat who was watching out for Luka, as if he had some personal reason for being interested in the traveller’s progress; and on those rare occasions when Luka managed to dodge the life-eating rain from the sky and avoid the Respecto-Rat forces, the Over-Rat zapped him without fail. And each time he was run over by an armoured car or bombed from the sky or zapped by the Over-Rat, whom he couldn’t help picturing as Ratshit from school stuck in a really Ratty body, he lost a life and found himself back at his starting point, so he was getting nowhere fast, he was losing lives by the bushel, and being completely covered in rotten eggs and tomatoes and betel juice while he did so. After a long, long, frustrating time, he rested under the baker’s shop awning, panting, soaked, smelly and with only 616 lives left, and complained to Nobodaddy, ‘This is too hard. And why are those Otters so aggressive, anyway? Why can’t they just live and let live?’

‘Maybe they would,’ Nobodaddy replied, ‘if the Respectorate wasn’t growing so fast. Those scary Respecto-Rats roam far beyond their own borders trying to force everyone into line. If things continue as they are, the whole World of Magic is in danger of being strangled by an excess of respect.’

‘That’s as may be,’ Luka gasped, ‘but when you’re on the receiving end of the attack, it’s hard to be sympathetic, to be honest with you. And look at the condition of my dog and my bear. I don’t think they like Otters very much right now, either.’

‘Sometimes,’ Nobodaddy reflected, almost as though he were talking to himself, ‘the solution is to run towards the problem, not away from it.’

‘I am trying to run towards -’ began Luka, and then he stopped. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see what you’re saying. Not the golden ball. That’s not the problem, is it?’

‘Not at present,’ Nobodaddy agreed.

Luka squinted up into the sky. There she was, the Insultana, the Fairy Queen of the Otters, monarch of the skies, riding on King Solomon’s Carpet. She looked sixteen or seventeen but she was probably really thousands of years old, he thought, the way magical creatures were. ‘What’s her name?’ he wondered.

Nobodaddy looked pleased in the way that Rashid Khalifa looked pleased when Luka did well at mathematical calculation. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Knowing a magic creature’s name gives you power over it, yes it does! If you knew her name you could call her and she would have to come. Unfortunately, she is known by dozens of names, and maybe none of them are the real one. Keep your own name secret, that’s my advice. Because if they know your name in the Magic World, who knows what they might do with it.’

‘Do you know her name, then,’ Luka said impatiently, ‘or are you going on and on in this way to hide the fact that you don’t?’

‘Ooh, that stings,’ said Nobodaddy languidly, fanning himself with his hat. ‘What a sharp little tongue! You’d make a good Otter. As a matter of fact,’ he went on hastily, seeing Luka open his mouth again, ‘I’ve narrowed it down. After much thought and analysis, I’ve got it down to half a dozen. Six of the best. I’m pretty sure it’s one of those.’

‘“Pretty sure” isn’t very impressive,’ Luka said.

‘I haven’t had a chance to try them out,’ Nobodaddy replied, sounding indignant. ‘But why don’t you have a go right now and we’ll settle the matter once and for all?’

So Luka called out the names Nobodaddy gave him, one by one. ‘Bilqis! Makeda! Saba! Kandaka! Nicaula!’ The woman on the flying carpet ignored them all. Nobodaddy, looking crestfallen, suggested a few more names, but with decreasing conviction. Luka tried them too. ‘Meroë! Nana! Um… what did you say?’

‘Chalchiuhtlicue,’ Nobodaddy repeated doubtfully.

‘Chalchi…’ Luka began, then stopped.

‘… uhtlicue,’ Nobodaddy prompted.

‘Chalchiuhtlicue,’ Luka shouted, triumphantly.

‘It means “the woman in the jade skirt”,’ Nobodaddy explained.

‘I don’t care what it means,’ said Luka, ‘because it’s having no effect, so it obviously isn’t her name.’

For a moment Luka fell into a terrible sadness. He would never be able to get out of this mess, never be able to find the Fire of Life or save his father. This strange version of his father, Nobodaddy, was the only father he had now, and he wouldn’t have him for long, either. He would lose his father and his father’s fatal copy; it was time to get used to that horrible fact. All he would have left was his mother, and her beautiful voice…

‘I know the Insultana’s name,’ he said suddenly, and stepping out from the shadow of the awning, he called in a loud, clear voice, ‘Soraya!’

Time stopped. The descending jets of betel juice, the rotten tomatoes, the egg missiles froze in mid-flight; the Rats became motionless, like photographs of themselves; in the sky the Otters stood still on their carpets in attitudes of war, and the flying rugs, as if turned to stone, no longer flapped in the breeze; even Bear, Dog and Nobodaddy were as stiff as waxworks. In all that timeless universe only two people moved. One was Luka; the other, swooping down on King Solomon’s Carpet, Resham, and coming to a halt right in front of him, was the brilliant and slightly frightening Insultana of Ott. Except that Luka wasn’t scared of her. This was his father’s World of Magic, and therefore it was to be expected that this young Queen, the most important female person in that world, had the same name as Luka’s mother, the most important woman in his, and his father’s, world. ‘You summoned me,’ she said. ‘You guessed my name, which stopped Time, so here I am. What do you want?’

There are moments in life – not enough of them, but they do occur – when even young boys find exactly the right words to say at exactly the right time; when, like a gift, the right idea occurs to you just when you most need it. This, for Luka, was one such moment. He found himself saying to the great ruler of Ott, without fully knowing where in his head he had found the words, ‘I believe we can help each other, Insultana Soraya. There is something I need you to help me with, urgently, and in return I have an idea for you that might just win you this war.’

Soraya leaned forward. ‘Just tell me what you want from me,’ she commanded, in her rough Otter way, and Luka, his usually fluent tongue paralysed, pointed to the golden ball atop the Rathouse dome. ‘Yes, I see,’ said Soraya of Ott, ‘and afterwards, my young milord, no doubt you will wish to return to the River and be on your way.’ Luka nodded dumbly, not even surprised by how much the Insultana knew. ‘That is nothing,’ she said, and motioned Luka to come aboard the flying carpet, revealing a kinder nature than her sharp words implied.

An instant later the carpet took off, with Luka, caught off balance, lying flat on his back upon it; and an instant after that, they were at the golden ball, and Luka was able to get up and thump it, and heard the satisfying ding of a level being saved, and saw in the upper right-hand corner of his field of vision the single-digit number climbing to 2. And then they were down on the ground again, next to Nobodaddy and Dog and Bear, all of whom were still frozen in time, and Soraya was saying, ‘Now it’s your turn. Or was that just big talk? Boys like you – you’re all mouth and no trousers, as the saying goes.’

‘Itching powder,’ Luka said humbly, thinking that it didn’t sound like such an impressive idea. But the Insultana was listening hard now, so Luka went ahead and told her, shyly and with considerable embarrassment, about his own military history, and the victory over the Imperial Highness Army in the Great Playground Wars. Soraya gave the impression of hanging on his every word, and when he had finished she gave a low, impressed whistle.

‘Itching-powder bombs,’ she said, mostly to herself. ‘Why did we never think of that? Those could work. Rats hate itches! Those should work. Yes! They will work!’ To Luka’s amazement and secret delight, she leaned down and kissed him three times, on the left cheek, then the right, and then the left again. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You are a man of your word.’

It was said of the Flying Carpet of King Solomon that it could carry any number of people, no matter how large that number might be, and any weight of goods, no matter how heavy that weight, and that it could grow until it was immensely large, as much as sixty miles long and sixty miles wide. When the weather called for shade, an army of birds would gather above it like a parasol, and the wind would blow it wherever it wanted to go, as fast as the blinking of an eye. But these were only stories, and what Luka saw next he saw with his own eyes: the Insultana Soraya spread her arms wide, and the wind leapt up at her bidding. Then she quite simply disappeared, and, no more than ninety seconds later, reappeared; but this time the carpet was much larger and on it were literally tens of thousands of small paper airplanes. It was obvious that the ruler of Ott was capable of getting things done pretty quickly. An instant after her reappearance, the paper airplanes had taken flight and distributed themselves among all the members of her personal air force, which was still frozen in time like everything else as far as Luka could see. In the whole observable world only he and the Insultana and the armada of paper planes were moving. Also the green-and-gold Carpet of King Solomon, which, after passing out its cargo, returned to the size of a largish domestic rug.

‘How did you do that?’ Luka asked, and then added, ‘Never mind,’ knowing the answer before it was given. ‘I know. A P2C2E, and the itching-powder bombs were made at super-speed by M2C2Ds. Machines Too Complicated To Describe.’

‘I’m willing to bet,’ said the Insultana, ‘that you didn’t learn that at school.’

Many things make rats feel like scratching themselves, and there is nothing as unhappy as an itchy rodent. Rats get parasites – lice and mites and fleas – and these tiny bugs lay eggs at the base of the rats’ hairs, and they itch. Rats lead rough lives in dirty places and they get cuts and the cuts get infected and become sores and then the sores itch. Rats’ hair falls out and that makes their skin itch. Their skin gets dry, and they suffer from dandruff, and that’s itchy as well. Rats eat all kinds of garbage and so they suffer from food allergies and eating too much of one thing and not enough of another and all that makes them itch like crazy. Rats suffer from eczema and ringworm and they get scabs and rashes and they can’t resist scratching them, even if the scratching makes things worse. And whatever could be said of rats in general was magnified in the case of the giant Rats of the Respectorate, the famously thinskinned Rats of I. And however itchy the Respectorate rodents might have been in the past, they had never experienced anything like the itchiness that was unleashed upon them by the Otter Queen and her air force.

‘Before I unfreeze everyone,’ the Insultana instructed Luka, ‘take your friends indoors and wait until I tell you it’s safe to come out.’ Her tone had changed completely, Luka noted; no trace of sharpness remained. In fact, it was positively friendly, even affectionate.

Luka did as the Insultana told him, hustling his little party into the grey bakery and then pressing up against the glass windowpane; so he and Dog and Bear and Nobodaddy only saw a little bit of the large-scale destruction that followed. The Insultana waved an imperious arm and the Respectorate unfroze. Now Luka watched the Otters swooping and diving around the city streets unleashing their enchanted paper planes, which seemed to be equipped with Rat-seeking homing devices and chased the Rats wherever they went, indoors and outdoors, under their bed sheets or up on roofs, and it wasn’t long before the attack succeeded and had the Rats on the run. Betel juice and eggs and rotten vegetables had been effective as insults, but the itching powder didn’t just hurt the Rats’ feelings and ruin their clothes and make them smell even worse than they did already. Luka saw even the nastiest-looking giant Rats – the mirror-shade-wearing, heavily armed, super-nasty Respecto-Rats of I – running in circles and screaming as the paper planes chased them and poured itching powder on their heads and down the backs of their necks. He saw them tearing at themselves with their long angry claws and ripping great lumps off their own bodies as they tried to stop the itching. The air was full of Rat shrieks, growing louder and louder, so loud that Luka had to cover his ears because it was almost too much to bear.

‘If that powder is what I think it is,’ Nobodaddy said at last, in a voice filled with wonder, ‘if that is indeed made, as I believe it may be, from the deadly Asian Khujli plant, mixed up, I don’t doubt, with powder from the seeds of Alifbay’s own, overpowering, though rare, Gudgudi flower… and if the Insultana has included material from the Sickening Yuckbone or Magic Itch Bean of Germany, spores from the Demonic Abraxas of Egypt, the Kachukachu of Peru, and whirligigs from Africa’s Fatal Pipipi, then we may be witnessing the end of the Rat Infestation of the Magical World. What is interesting about the formula which I believe the Insultana may have used is that ordinary people are immune to these occult powders; rodents alone are affected. Yes, she asked you to take shelter, but that was to protect the dog and the bear, as a precautionary measure; and above all, I surmise, to save us all from the Rats possessed of their last and lethal Frenzy.’

The Rats had indeed taken leave of their senses. Through the window of the grey bakery, Luka witnessed their mounting insanity and their dying throes. The thin-skinned masters of the Respectorate were literally scratching themselves to bits, actually ripping themselves apart, until there was nothing left of them but lumps of mangy fur and grey, ugly meat. The shrieking of the Rats reached a terrible crescendo, and then slowly the air grew quieter, and silence fell. At the very end Luka saw the Over-Rat himself come running down the street towards the River of Time, slashing himself as he ran, and at the end of the street he leapt into the River with a terrible cry and, as he was the one Rat in the World of Magic who was unable to swim, because he had always been too lazy and spoiled to take the trouble to learn, he drowned in the Temporal Flow.

And that was the end of that.

Slowly, slowly, the non-Rat inhabitants of the Respectorate came out of their homes and understood that their ordeal was at an end, and then in great happiness they rushed to the fences that separated the Respectorate from the rest of the Magical World and tore them down and flung away the broken remnants of their prison walls for ever. And if any Rats did survive the Great Itch Bombing they were never seen again, but crawled back into the darkness behind the cracks of the world, which was where Rats belonged.

Soraya of Ott on her green-and-gold carpet landed outside the grey bakery as Luka and his companions emerged. ‘Luka Khalifa,’ she said, and Luka didn’t even ask her how she knew his name, ‘you have done the World of Magic a great service. Aren’t you going to ask me for anything else in return? You guessed my name; that alone should get you at least the traditional three wishes, and you’ve only used up one. But for the idea of the Itch Bombs! Who knows what’s a fair reward for that. Why don’t you just think of the biggest, most important wish you can come up with, and I’ll see if I can do anything to help?’

And before Nobodaddy could stop him, Luka began to talk very fast, to tell this astonishing young girl who had the same name as his mother exactly why he was here in the World of Magic, and what he hoped to do, and why. By the end of his little speech the Sultana of Ott’s eyes had widened and her hand had risen to her mouth. ‘Perhaps, in my pride, I spoke too soon,’ she said, and there was a note of awe in her voice. ‘It may be that you have asked me for a thing I cannot give.’

But then she grinned a mischievous grin and clapped her hands like a child. ‘To steal the Fire of Life, which has never been done in the whole history of the Magical World! Why, that would be the most deliciously Disrespectful Deed in All of Time! It would be outrageous, and wonderful. In a phrase, it would be completely Over The Top, and therefore it behoves any true Otter to help. My fellow warriors of the OAF, the Otter Air Force, must return home to Ott – but, Luka Khalifa, Thief of Fire, I, the Queen of the Otters, will do everything in my power to assist you to perpetrate your dreadful – and most noble, and most dangerous, and absolutely most enjoyable! – Crime.’

‘I’m in a sort of hurry,’ said Luka bravely, ‘and you have this super fast carpet. Is there any way you could rush me past all the other levels and take me right to the Fire, where I need to be, and afterwards get me back where I started from?’

‘The River is long and deceptive,’ said Insultana Soraya, nodding thoughtfully. ‘And you still have to pass through the Mists of Time, where you can’t see a thing, and then there’s the Great Stagnation, where the River turns into a swamp and you can’t move, and the Inescapable Whirlpool, where Time spins round and round and you can’t escape, and the Trillion and One Forking Paths, where the River becomes a labyrinth – and you will certainly get lost in all those mazy waterways and never find the one single stream that is the true, continuous Path of Time. Very well,’ she said, in a voice that told Luka that a decision had been made, ‘I will join you in your adventure. There are at least those four stages – what did you call them? – “levels”? – four levels that I can enable you to skip. But after that we will just have to take things as they come.’

‘Why can’t you take me all the way?’ Luka blurted out, very disappointed.

‘Because, my sweet Luka,’ replied the Insultana of Ott, ‘this silken flying carpet given to me so long ago by King Solomon himself can do many wondrous things, but it cannot fly through the Great Rings of Fire.’