“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 offense to all Rats is a funeral crime, a crime punishable by—”
“We apologize, 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 gray 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 gray. The Rats were gray, too, and the people had acquired a grayish pallor. Overhead, gray clouds allowed a neutral sunlight to filter through. “They developed a Color Problem here a little while ago,” Nobodaddy said. “The Rats who hated the color yellow because of its, well, cheesiness were confronted by the Rats who disliked the color red, because of its similarity to blood. In the end all colors, 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 around 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’s 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 gray képi, got up onto 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 around,
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 onto 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 gi
gantic 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 Carpet of King Solomon the Wise, was the feared, the fabled, the ferocious, the fabulous Insultana of Ott, shouting out, through a powerful megaphone, her bloodcurdling battle cry: “We expectorate on the Respectorate!”
“What’s going on?” Luka shouted to Nobodaddy over the rising din, as the four travelers 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 unappetizing-looking buns covered in gray icing. “Over in that direction, Over the Top of those mountains,” Nobodaddy shouted back, pointing to a snowcapped range on the northern horizon, “is the unusual land of Oh-tee-tee, Ott, 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 gray houses, gray streets, and the gray 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!
Oh, 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 around,
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 on 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 gray Rathouse, and at the apex of its gray dome, glistening in the sun, the one golden object in this world of gray, 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 armored 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 traveler’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 armored 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 toward the problem, not away from it.”
“I am trying to run toward—,” 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.”
Luka and the Fire of Life Page 7
