At long last the siren of the Fire Alarm died down, but the hysterical activity all around them became, if anything, even more frenzied. Soraya dragged Luka behind the rhododendron bushes. ‘When the Fire Alarm sounds it means two things,’ she said. ‘It means that the Aalim know that someone is trying to steal the Fire of Life. And it means that all the residents of the Heart of Magic are rendered capable of seeing intruders until the All-Clear, which doesn’t sound until the thief is caught.’
‘You mean everyone can see me now?’ Luka said in horror. ‘And Bear and Dog as well?’ When they heard that, the dog and the bear ran and hid behind the rhododendrons as well. Soraya nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s only one course of action. You must abandon your plan, and climb aboard Resham, and I will fly as high as I can rise and as fast as I can ride and I will try to get you back to the Starting Point before they find you, because if they catch you they may Perminate all three of you on the spot, without asking for an explanation of your presence or giving a reason for their drastic measures. Or else they’ll put you on trial and Perminate you after that. The adventure is over, Luka Khalifa. It’s time to go home.’
Luka was silent for a long moment. Then he said simply, ‘No.’
Soraya smacked her forehead with the palm of her hand. ‘Backchat he’s giving me now. “No,” he says. Tell me your grand plan, hero boy. No, no! Let me guess! You’re going to take on all the gods and monsters of the Heart of Magic, with a dog, a bear and four dragons as the sum total of your attack force; and you’re going to steal what has never been stolen, what nobody has tried to steal for hundreds of years, and then you’re going to get home? How? I’m supposed to wait around and give you a ride, is that it? Well, by all means. Go right ahead. That masterly scheme sounds like it will definitely work.’
‘You’re almost right,’ Luka said. ‘But you forgot I’ll have Coyote’s decoy run helping me as well.’
Hold it, chico, said Coyote, looking alarmed. Hold it there one minute. Didn I say the game jus changed? That offer aint no longer on the table.
‘Listen,’ said Luka. ‘What do thieves do when the Fire Alarm sounds?’
They run for their life. Aint nobody done it for hunnerds of years but that’s what they done then. Warnt no use. Even the old Titan back in the day, he got taken an tied to a rock and an old vulture started chewin –
‘Eagle,’ said Luka. ‘You said it was an eagle.’
’Pinions differ as to the species of bird. Aint no doubt about the chewin.
‘So,’ said Luka determinedly, ‘running isn’t any use, unless you run in an unexpected direction. And, now that the Fire Alarm has sounded, which is the one direction in which nobody will expect us to flee?’
Nobodaddy was the one who answered Luka’s question. ‘Towards the Fire of Life,’ he said. ‘Into the Heart of the Heart. Towards the danger. You’re right.’
‘Then,’ said Luka, ‘that’s the way we’re going.’
7
The Fire of Life
The whole World of Magic was on Red Alert. Jackal-headed Egyptian deities, fierce scorpion- and jaguar-men, giant one-eyed, man-eating Cyclopes, flute-playing centaurs, whose pipes could entice strangers into cracks in rocks where they would be imprisoned for all time, Assyrian treasure-nymphs made of gold and jewels, whose precious bodies could tempt thieves into their poisoned whipcord nets, flying griffins with lethal claws, flightless basilisks glaring in all directions with their deadly eyes, Valkyries on cloud-horses in the sky, bull-headed minotaurs, slithering snake-women; and huge rocs – larger than the one that bore Sinbad the Sailor to its nest – charged wildly across the land and through the air, answering the Fire Alarm, hunting, hunting. In the Circular Sea, after the Alarm sounded, mermaids rose from the waters singing siren songs to lure the foul intruders to their doom. Enormous island-sized creatures – krakens, zaratans and monstrous rays – hung motionless on the Sea’s surface; if an intruder were to pause on the back of one of the beasts for a rest, it would dive and drown him, or flip over to reveal its giant mouth and its sharp triangular teeth, and swallow the trespasser down in bite-sized chunks. And most terrible of all was the gigantic Worm Bottomfeeder, who rose blind and roaring from the Sea’s usually silent depths, in a rage to consume the scoundrels who had triggered the Fire Alarm and disturbed its two-thousand-year sleep.
Amid the chaos of that World the Fire Gods rose in all their majesty to defend Vibgyor, the One Bridge to the Heart of the Heart, the rainbow arch that crossed the sundering Sea and enabled the favoured few to enter the Aalim’s lands. Amaterasu, the Japanese sun goddess, emerged from the cave where she had sulked for two millennia after quarrelling with her brother, the storm god, with the magic sword Kusanagi in her hand, and rays of sunlight flying outwards from her head like spears. Beside her was the flaming child Kagutsuchi, whose burning birth had killed his mother, Izanami the Divine. And Surtr with his fiery sword and at his elbow his female companion, Sinmara, also bearing a lethal sword of fire. And Irish Bel. And Polynesian Mahuika with her fingernails of flame. And lame Hephaestus, the smith of Olympus, with his pale Roman echo Vulcan at his side. And Inti of the Incas, the Sun with the Human Face, and the Aztec Tonatiuh, thirsty for blood, Tonatiuh the former Lord of the Fifth World, to please whom twenty thousand people used to be sacrificed each year. And towering above them all like a giant pillar in the sky was falcon-headed Ra of Egypt, his piercingly sharp bird-eyes searching for the would-be thieves, with the Bennu bird sitting on his shoulder, the grey heron that was the Egyptian phoenix, and his mighty weapons, the wadjets, the disks of the sun, held urgently in his hands. These great colossi guarded the Bridge and waited with clouds at their foreheads and murder in their eyes.
Inhabitants of the Heart of Magic rushed freely across the Bridge in both directions, hunting, hunting; but for the hunted intruders, Luka thought, there appeared to be no way past the falcon eyes of Ra. Luka, hiding with his companions behind the rhododendron bushes, had the feeling that the thicket was shrinking, dwindling away and becoming a less and less adequate shelter. His heart was beating too rapidly. Things were definitely getting scary.
‘The good thing about all these ex-gods,’ said Soraya comfortingly, ‘is that they’re all stuck in their old stories. I’m sure the Fire Bug will have reported accurately to the Aalim – a boy, a dog, a bear, he will have said – but when the Fire Alarm goes off, everyone here inevitably starts hunting for the Usual Suspects.’
‘Who are the Usual Suspects?’ Luka wanted to know. He realised he was whispering, and that he wished Soraya would lower her voice as well.
‘Oh, the ones who were Fire Thieves in the times and places in which these gods were the gods,’ Soraya said, waving an arm airily. ‘You know. Or,’ she added, reverting to her old Insultana habits, ‘maybe you’re too ignorant. Maybe your father didn’t teach you as much as he should have. Maybe he didn’t know himself.’ Then, seeing the expression on Luka’s face, she softened her voice and relented. ‘The Algonquin Indians got Rabbit to steal Fire for them,’ she said, ‘and you know about Coyote already. Beaver and Nanabozho the Shape-Shifter did the same for other tribes. Possum tried and failed, but then Grandmother Spider stole Fire for the Cherokee in a clay urn, which reminds me’ – Soraya paused for a moment – ‘that you will need this.’
She was holding a little clay pot in her hands. Luka looked inside it. A small group of what looked like half a dozen black potatoes nestled on a bed of twigs. ‘This,’ said Soraya, ‘is one of the famous Ott Pots, and there inside it are a few of the famous Ott Potatoes. Once the Fire of Life touches them, they’ll burn brightly, and they won’t easily be put out.’ She hung the pot around his neck by its leather strap. ‘Where was I?’ She thought for a minute, then resumed. ‘Oh yes. Maui – that’s Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga to you – stole Fire from the fingernails of the fire goddess Mahuika and gave it to the Polynesians. She’ll definitely be on the lookout for him. And so on.’