And Luka found that he did know. He looked around him. Dog the bear and Bear the dog had already started work. Bear was digging up the whole neighbourhood, and sure enough there were bones to be found everywhere, little crunchy bones, worth one life, that Bear could grind up and swallow in a trice, and bigger bones that took some hauling out of the earth and quite a lot of crunching up, that were worth between ten and one hundred lives apiece. Meanwhile, Dog the bear was off in the trees lining the Bund, looking for the hundred-life beehives hidden among the branches, and, on the way, swatting down and gobbling up any number of golden, single-life bees. Lives were everywhere, in everything, disguised as stones, vegetables, bushes, insects, flowers, or abandoned candy bars or bottles of pop; a rabbit scurrying in front of you could be a life and so might a feather blowing in the breeze right in front of your nose. Easily found, easily gathered, lives were the small change of this world, and if you lost a few, it didn’t matter; there were always more.
Luka began to hunt. He used his favourite tricks. Kicking tree stumps and rustling bushes were always good. Jumping into the air and landing hard on both feet shook lives down from the trees, and even made them tumble, like rain, out of the empty air. Best of all, Luka discovered, was punching the peculiar, round-bottomed, ninepin-like creatures who were hopping idly around the high Strand, the elegant, tree-shaded walkway on top of the Bund. These creatures did not fall over when you kicked them, but wobbled violently from side to side instead, giggling and shrieking with pleasure, and crying out in a kind of ecstasy, ‘More! More!’ while the lives Luka was looking for scurried out of them like shiny bugs. (When the Punchbottoms had run out of life-bugs, they said mournfully, ‘No more, no more,’ hung their little heads, and bounced shamefacedly away.)
When the lives Luka found landed on the Bund, they took the form of little golden wheels and immediately began to race away, and Luka had to chase them down, taking care not to fall off the Strand into the Waters of Time. He grabbed lives in great handfuls and stuffed them into his pockets, whereupon, with a little ting, they dissolved, and became a part of himself; and this was when he noticed the change in his eyesight. A little three-digit counter had somehow become lodged in the top left-hand corner of his field of vision; it was there, in the same place, no matter where he looked or how hard he rubbed his eyes; and the numbers kept going up as he swallowed, or absorbed, his many lives, making, he was sure, a low whirring noise as they did so. He found that he could accept this new phenomenon easily enough. He would need to be able to keep score, because if he ran out of lives, well, the game would be over, and maybe also that other kind of life, the real one, the one he would need as and when he got back to the real world, where his real father lay asleep, desperately needing his help.
He had collected 315 lives (because of the three-digit counter in the top left of his personal screen, he guessed that the maximum number he could collect was probably 999) when the Old Man of the River came up on to the Strand again, with his Terminator in his hand. Luka looked around panicked for somewhere to hide, and at the same time tried desperately to remember what his father had told him about the Old Man, who, it seemed, was not just one of Rashid Khalifa’s inventions after all – or else he was here in the World of Magic because Rashid Khalifa had made him up. Luka remembered the way his father told the tale:‘The Old Man of the River has a beard like a river,
It flows right down to his feet.
He stands on the Strand with a gun in his hand,
The nastiest Old Man you could meet.’
And here indeed was that very Old Man with his long white river-beard and his enormous blaster, coming out onto the riverbank, climbing up the Bund to the Strand. Luka did his very best to summon back the memory of what else the Shah of Blah had told him about this malevolent river-demon. Something about asking the Old Man questions. No, riddles, that was it! Rashid loved riddles; he had tormented Luka with riddles day after day, night after night, year after year, until Luka had become good enough to torment him back. Rashid would sit each evening in his favourite squashy armchair and Luka would jump onto his lap, even though Soraya scolded him, warning that the chair wasn’t strong enough to take their combined weight. Luka didn’t care, he wanted to sit there, and the chair had never broken, or not yet, anyway, and all that riddling was about to come in handy after all.
Yes! The Old Man of the River was a riddler, that was what Rashid had said about him; he was addicted to riddling the way gamblers were addicted to gambling or drunkards to drink, and that was how to beat him. The problem was how to get close enough to the Old Man to say anything when he had that Terminator in his hand and looked determined to shoot on sight.
Luka dodged from side to side, but the Old Man kept coming right at him, and even though first Bear the dog and then Dog the bear tried to get in the way, a couple of BLLLAAARRRTTs blew them to pieces and obliged them to wait until their bodies regrouped; and a moment later, Luka, too, had been blasted again, and had to go through the whole business of flying apart into a million shiny fragments and joining up again, making those little sucking noises, feeling relieved that losing a life wasn’t the same thing as dying. Then it was back to life-gathering, but this time Luka had made a note of the exact point on the Bund where the Old Man came into view before he hopped up onto the Strand; and once he was up to six hundred lives he stopped collecting, positioned himself, and waited.
No sooner had the Old Man’s head come in to view than Luka yelled at the top of his voice, ‘Riddle-me-riddle-me-ree!’ Which, he knew from his evenings with Rashid, was the time-honoured way of challenging a riddler to a battle. The Old Man of the River stopped in his tracks, and then a big, nasty smile spread across his face. ‘Who calls me?’ he said in a cawing cackle of a voice. ‘Who thinks he can outplay the Rätselmeister, the Roi des Énigmes, the Pahelian-ka-Padishah, the Lord of the Riddles? – do you know what you risk? – do you understand the wager? – the stakes are high! could not be higher! – look at you, you’re nothing, you’re a child; I don’t even know if I want to face you – no, I won’t face you, you are not worthy – oh, very well, if you insist – and if you lose, child, then all your lives are mine – do you understand? – all your lives are mine. The final Termination. Here, at the beginning, you will meet your End.’
And this is what Luka could have said in reply, but did not, preferring to remain silent: ‘And what you don’t understand, you horrible Old Man, is that, in the first place, it’s my father who is the Riddle King, and he taught me everything he knew. What you further don’t understand is that our riddle battles went on for hours and days and weeks and months and years, and therefore I have a supply of tough brain-twisters that will never run out. And what you don’t understand most of all is that I’ve worked out something important, namely that this World I’m in, this World of Magic, is not just any old Magical World, but the one my father created. And because this is his Magic World and nobody else’s, I know secrets about everything in it, including, O terrible Old Man, about you.’
What he actually said aloud was this: ‘And if you lose, Old Man, then you will have to Terminate yourself, not just temporarily, but once and for all.’
How the Old Man laughed! He guffawed until he wept, not only from his eyes but through his nose as well. He held his sides and leapt from side to side, and his long white beard cracked in the air like a whip. ‘That’s a good one,’ he said finally, panting for breath. ‘If I lose. That’s priceless. Let’s begin.’ But Luka wasn’t going to be fooled that easily. Riddlers are tricksters, he knew that much, and you had to nail down the deal before you began the battle, or they would try to wriggle out of it later on. ‘And if you lose, you will do as I have said,’ he insisted. The Old Man of the River made a peevish face. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he replied. ‘If I lose I will Self-Terminate. Auto- Terminate. Termination of Me by Me will Occur. Hee, hee, hee. I’ll blast myself to bits.’ ‘Permanently,’ Luka said firmly. ‘Once and for all.’ The Old Man grew serious and his face coloured unpleasantly. ‘Very well,’ he barked. ‘Yes. Permanent Termination if I lose; in a word, Permination! But as you are about to discover, child, I’m not the one who is about to lose all his lives.’