‘They can’t see you,’ Soraya answered. ‘If you’re from the Real World, they are blind to your existence. You don’t exist for them, just as they no longer exist for you. You can walk right up to any number of gods or goddesses, say “boo” and pinch their noses, and they’ll act as if nothing happened, or as if they’re being bothered by a fly. As for persons from the general neighbourhood, like myself, they don’t care about us. We aren’t part of their stories, so they think we don’t count. Stupid of them, but that’s the way they are.’
‘Then it’s a sort of ghost town,’ Luka thought, ‘and these supposed almighties are sort of sleepwalkers, or echoes of themselves. It’s like a mythological theme park here – you could call it Godland – only there are no visitors, except for us, and we’ve come to pilfer a piece of their most precious possession.’ To Soraya he said, ‘But if they can’t see us, won’t it be easy to steal the Fire of Life? In which case, shouldn’t we just hurry up and do it?’
‘In the Heart of the Heart, which is to say inside the Circular Sea, where the Lake of Wisdom is bathed in the Eternal Dawn,’ said Soraya, ‘things are very different. There are none of these moronic sleepwalking sacked gods in there. That is the Country of the Aalim – the Three Jos – who watch over the whole of Time. They are the Ultimate Guardians of the Fire, and they don’t miss a thing.’
‘The Three Jos?’ asked Luka.
‘Jo-Hua, Jo-Hai and Jo-Aiga,’ Soraya answered, and she was whispering now. ‘What Was, What Is and What Will Come. The Past, the Present and the Future. The Possessors of All Knowledge. The Aalim: the Trinity of Time.’
The golden onion domes were right below them now, but Luka was thinking only of the Fire of Life. ‘So how do we get past the Jos, then?’ he whispered back to Soraya, and she spread her arms with a shrug and a rueful smile. ‘You knew from the start,’ she said, ‘that no one has ever done it. But there’s somebody who usually skulks around here, who may be able to help us. He usually lies pretty low, but this is the best place to find him. When the Beauties battle, he likes to watch.’
She landed the flying carpet behind a spreading thicket of rhododendrons, large enough to conceal the Argo. ‘Few magical creatures ever approach a rhododendron,’ she told Luka, ‘because they believe them to be poisonous. If there were any Yetis in the neighbourhood they would devour them, of course, but this is not Abominable Snowman country, and so the Argo will be safe enough here for a while.’ Then she folded up the carpet, put it in her pocket, and marched towards the onion-domed building. The four Changers shape-shifted into metal sows, and, clanking a good deal, trotted along beside Soraya, Nobodaddy, Luka, the Memory Birds, Bear the dog and Dog the bear towards the Battle Pavilion, from which loud, angry noises could be heard: the sounds of goddesses at war.
‘It’s so idiotic,’ Soraya said. ‘They fight over which of them is the loveliest, as if it mattered. Beauty goddesses are the worst. They have been flattered and spoiled for thousands of years, mortals and immortals have sacrificed their lives for them, and as a result you wouldn’t believe the things they believe they are entitled to. Nothing but the best will do for them, and if it belongs to someone else, so what? They are sure they deserve it more than its owner, whether it’s a jewel or a palace or a man. But now here they are in the junkyard of their power, and their beauty no longer launches warships or makes men die for love, so there’s nothing left to do but fight each other over a hollow crown, a title that means nothing: the loveliest of them all.’
‘But that’s you – you are the loveliest of them all,’ Luka wanted to tell her. ‘See how your red hair flies in the wind, and then there’s the perfection of your eyes, your face, and I even enjoy it when you’re insulting people, and I don’t like it when you sound sad.’ Unfortunately he was too shy to say such embarrassing words out loud, and then a great burst of cheering began, and grew louder and louder, so she wouldn’t have been able to hear anything anyway.
The crowd in the pavilion was the sort of gathering of fantastic creatures out of fables and legends which would have utterly astounded Luka just a few days ago, but which he had, by now, almost begun to expect. ‘Oh, look, there are fauns here – horned, goat-eared and goat-hoofed – and proud centaurs stamping their feet,’ he thought, and was surprised by how unsurprising the World of Magic was starting to feel. ‘And winged men – would those be angels? – angels watching women fight? – that doesn’t sound right. And presumably all these other battle fans are the lower orders of the various god gangs, the gods’ servants and children and pets, out for a morning’s fun.’
Just then, the first goddess was ejected from the fray. She came tumbling head over heels through the air, right over Luka’s head, screaming her rage as she went by, and turning from a palely powdered, geisha-like beauty into a hideous long-toothed harridan and then back into the geisha again. She crashed through the swing doors of the fight hall and was gone. ‘I believe that was the Japanese rasetsu, Kishimojin,’ said Nobodaddy, with the air of a goddess-fight connoisseur. (Being at the battle had clearly improved his mood.) ‘A rasetsu is more demon than goddess, really, as you saw from her transformations just then. Out of her class in this company, one feels; you’d expect her to be the first one to be knocked out.’
As Kishimojin retreated from the pavilion, Luka could still hear her high-pitched cursing. ‘May your heads split into seven pieces like the flower of the basil shrub.’ ‘The so-called Arjaka curse,’ Nobodaddy explained to Luka. ‘Terrifying in the Real World, but pathetically ineffective against these formidable females.’
Luka couldn’t see much of the fight, but didn’t like to ask any of his companions to lift him up. Over the heads of the crowd he saw thunderbolts being hurled and loud explosions lighting up the fighting area. He saw huge clouds of butterflies and flocks of birds, apparently also at war with one another. ‘There’s a little side battle going on between Mylitta, the moon goddess of ancient Sumer, and the Aztec vampire queen Xochiquetzal,’ Nobodaddy reported. ‘They don’t like it that they both have bird and butterfly entourages – beauty goddesses always want to be unique! – so they usually go at each other right away, and so do their flapping friends. Usually the two ladies knock each other out and leave the field clear for the top girls.’
The Roman love goddess, Venus, was eliminated early, staggering from the hall, reattaching her severed arms as she went. ‘The Romans are low down in the rankings here in the Heart of Magic,’ Nobodaddy shouted over the din. ‘For a start, they are homeless. Their followers never came up with an Olympus or Valhalla for them, so they wander around the place looking, to be frank, like vagrants. Also, everybody knows they are just imitations of the Greeks, and who wants to watch second-rate remakes when you can see the original movies for free?’
Luka shouted back that he didn’t know there was a divine pecking order. ‘Who’s at the top of it, then?’ he yelled. ‘Which bunch of ex-gods are the Top Gods?’ ‘I’ll tell you which ones are the snootiest,’ Nobodaddy shouted. ‘The Egyptians, for sure. And in these battles their girl Hathor often comes out on top.’
On this occasion, however, it was the Greek Cypriot, Aphrodite, who was the last goddess standing. After Ishtar of Babylon and Freya, Queen of the Valkyries, had beaten each other unconscious in the mud-wrestling ring, the betting favourite, cow-eared Hathor – a shape-shifter like Jaldi and her sisters, only far more powerful, capable of turning herself into clouds and stones – had made the mistake of turning briefly into a fig tree, which had allowed Aphrodite to chop her down. So at the end of the battle it was Aphrodite who approached the great Mirror that was the Ultimate Arbiter of Beauty, and asked the famous question, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, and so on; Aphrodite it was who received the Mirror’s accolade, You are the loveliest, as was traditional. ‘Oh well,’ said Nobodaddy, ‘it’s good exercise, and they’ll all be back at it tomorrow. There’s not that much for them to do around here. It’s not as if they can stay home and watch TV, or go out to the gym.’