‘As you see,’ Nobodaddy said to Luka, ‘Fire Bugs’ temperament is, well, a little heated. Nevertheless, they do perform a minor, useful function, spreading warmth wherever they go.’
The Fire Bug flared up at that. ‘You want to know what bugs me?’ it said indignantly. ‘Nobody’s friendly about fire. Oh, it’s fine in its place, people say, it makes a nice glow in a room, but keep an eye on it in case it gets out of control, and always put it out before you leave. Never mind how much it’s needed; a few forests burned by wildfires, the occasional volcanic eruption, and there goes our reputation. Water, on the other hand! – hah! – there’s no limit to the praise Water gets. Floods, rains, burst pipes, they make no difference. Water is everyone’s favourite. And when they call it the Fountain of Life! – bah! – well, that just bugs me to bits.’ The Fire Bug dissolved briefly into a little cloud of angry, buzzing sparks, then came together again. ‘Fountain of Life, indeed,’ it hissed. ‘What an idea. Life is not a drip. Life is a flame. What do you imagine the sun is made of? Raindrops? I don’t think so. Life is not wet, young man. Life burns.’
‘We must be going now,’ Nobodaddy interjected, ushering Luka, Bear and Dog along the riverbank. To the Fire Bug he said, politely, ‘Farewell, bright spirit.’
‘Not so fast,’ the Fire Bug blazed. ‘I sense something smouldering here, under the surface. Somebody here, namely that individual there –’ and it pointed a little finger of flame at Luka – ‘said something about a certain Fire whose very existence is supposed to be a Secret, and somebody else here, namely myself, wants to know how this other Somebody found out about it, and what this Somebody’s plans might be.’
Nobodaddy placed himself between Luka and the Bug. ‘That will do, you Insignificant Inflammation,’ he said in an altogether sterner voice. ‘Be off with you! Sizzle till you fizzle!’ He took off his panama hat and waved it in the incandescent insect’s direction. The Fire Bug flared up, offended. ‘Don’t trifle with me,’ it cried. ‘Don’t you know you’re playing with Fire?’ Then it burst into a bright cloud, singed Luka’s eyebrows slightly, and vanished.
‘Well, that hasn’t made things any easier,’ said Nobodaddy. ‘All we need is for that dratted Bug to raise the Fire Alarm.’
‘The Fire Alarm?’ asked Luka. Nobodaddy shook his head. ‘If they know you’re coming, your goose is cooked, that’s all.’
‘That’s not good,’ said Luka, looking so dejected that Nobodaddy actually put an arm around his shoulder. ‘The better news is that Fire Bugs don’t last long,’ he consoled the young fellow. ‘They blaze brightly, but they burn out young. Also, they blow with the wind. This way, that way; it’s in their nature. No constancy of purpose. So it isn’t very likely that he’d make it all the way to warn,’ and here Nobodaddy’s voice trailed off into silence.
‘To warn whom?’ Luka insisted.
‘The forces that must not be warned,’ Nobodaddy replied. ‘The flame-breathing monsters and fire-starter maniacs who wait upriver. The ones you have to get past, or be destroyed.’
‘Oh,’ said Luka bitterly. ‘Is that all? I thought you meant there might be a serious problem.’
The River of Time, which had been flowing silently along when Luka first set eyes on it, was now bustling with activity. All manner of strange creatures seemed to be afloat upon it and bobbing up from below the surface – strange, but familiar to Luka from his father’s stories: long, fat, blind, whitish Worms who, as Nobodaddy reminded him, were capable of making Holes in the very fabric of Time itself, diving below the surface of the Present to re-emerge at an impossibly distant point in the Past or Future, those mist-shrouded zones which Luka’s gaze could not penetrate; and pale, deadly Sickfish, who fed upon the lifelines of the diseased.
Running along the bank was a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and looking worriedly at a clock. Appearing and disappearing at various points on both banks was a dark blue British police telephone booth, out of which a perplexed-looking man holding a screwdriver would periodically emerge. A group of dwarf bandits could be seen disappearing into a hole in the sky. ‘Time travellers,’ said Nobodaddy in a voice of gentle disgust. ‘They’re everywhere these days.’
In the middle of the river all sorts of bizarre contraptions – some with bat-like wings that didn’t seem to fly, others with giant metal machineries aboard like the innards of an old Swiss watch – were circling uselessly, to the rage of the men and women aboard them. ‘Time machines are not as easily built as people seem to think,’ Nobodaddy explained. ‘As a result many of those would-be intrepid explorers just get stuck in Time. Also, on account of the odd relationship between Time and Space, the people who do manage to time-jump sometimes space-jump at the same time and end up’ – and here his voice grew darkly disapproving – ‘in places where they simply don’t belong. Over there, for example,’ he said as a raucous DeLorean sports car roared into view from nowhere, ‘is that crazy American professor who can’t seem to stay put in one time, and, I must say, there is an absolute plague of killer robots from the Future being sent to change the Past. Sleeping there under that banyan tree’ – he jerked a thumb to indicate which tree he meant – ‘is a certain Hank Morgan of Hartford, Connecticut, who was accidentally transported one day back to King Arthur’s Court, and stayed there until the wizard Merlin put him to sleep for thirteen hundred years. He was supposed to wake up back in his own time, but look at the lazy fellow! He’s still snoring away, and has missed his Slot. Goodness knows how he will get home now.’
Luka noticed that Nobodaddy was not as transparent as he had been a while earlier, and also that he was sounding and acting more and more like the over-talkative Rashid Khalifa, whose head was always full of all sorts of nonsense. ‘Time,’ he was singing under his breath, ‘like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away …’ That did it. That was all Luka was prepared to hear. As if it wasn’t bad enough that this, this creature from the Nether World was slowly filling up with more and more of his beloved father, which meant, of course, that Rashid Khalifa, Asleep in his bed at home, was getting emptier and emptier; and that as Nobodaddy’s Rashid-ness increased Luka was confusingly filled with emotions of fondness for him, even of love; but now the strange entity in his father’s vermilion bush shirt and panama hat had actually started singing in Rashid’s unbearable singing voice, the second-worst singing voice in the known world, second only to the fabled tuneless tones of Princess Batcheat of Gup. And what a song to choose! ‘They fly forgotten, as a dream –’
‘We’re wasting Time,’ Luka interrupted Nobodaddy angrily. ‘Instead of singing that stupid hymn, how about suggesting a way for us to travel up into the Fog of the Past and find what we’re here to find … i.e. the Dawn of Time, the Lake of Wisdom, the Mountain of Knowledge, and the –’
‘Shh,’ said Bear the dog and Dog the bear together. ‘Don’t say it aloud.’ Luka flushed a deep red at his near-mistake. ‘You know what I mean,’ he finished, much less commandingly than he had intended.
‘Hmm,’ said Nobodaddy thoughtfully. ‘Why don’t we use, for example, that incredibly powerful-looking, off-the-road-worthy, river-worthy, strong-as-a-tank, and possibly even jet-propelled, eight-wheeled-slash-flat-bottomed amphibian vehicle moored to that little pier over there?’
‘That wasn’t there a minute ago,’ said Dog the bear.
‘I don’t know how he did it,’ said Bear the dog, ‘but I don’t like the look of it.’
Luka knew that he couldn’t afford to pay attention to his friends’ worries, and marched down to the enormous craft, whose name, written in bold letters on the stern, was the Argo. His father was fading as Nobodaddy solidified, and as a result the quest had become even more urgent than before. Luka’s head was full of questions to which he did not know the answers, difficult questions about the nature of Time itself. If Time was a River, eternally flowing – and here it was, here was the River of Time! – did that mean that the Past would always be there and the Future, too, already existed? True, he couldn’t see them, because they were wreathed in mists – which could also be clouds, or fog, or smoke – but surely they had to be there, otherwise how could the River exist? But on the other hand, if Time flowed like a River, then surely the Past would have flowed away already, in which case how could he go back into it to find the Fire of Life which burned in the Mountain of Knowledge which stood by the Lake of Wisdom which was illumined by the Dawn of Days? And if the Past had flowed away, then what was back there at the River’s source? And if the Future already existed, then perhaps it didn’t matter what he, Luka, did next, because no matter how hard he was trying to save his father’s life, maybe Rashid Khalifa’s fate had already been decided. But if the Future could be shaped, in part, by his own actions, then would the River change its course depending on what he did? What would happen to the story streams it contained? Would they start telling different stories? And which was true: (a) that people made history, and the River of Time in the World of Magic recorded their achievements, or (b) that the River made history, and people in the Real World were pawns in its eternal game? Which World was more real? Who was finally in charge? Oh, and one more question, maybe the most pressing one of alclass="underline" how was he going to control the Argo? He was a twelve-year-old boy who had never driven a car or stood at the helm of a motorboat; and Dog and Bear were no use, and Nobodaddy had stretched out on the deck, put his panama hat over his face, and closed his eyes.