The new river was shining in the silver sunlight, shining like money, like a million mirrors tilted toward the sky, like a new hope. And as Luka looked into the water and saw there the thousand thousand thousand and one different strands of liquid, flowing together, twining around and around one another, flowing in and out of one another, and turning into a different thousand thousand thousand and one strands of liquid, he suddenly understood what he was seeing. It was the same enchanted water his brother, Haroun, had seen in the Ocean of the Streams of Story eighteen years earlier, and it had tumbled down in a Torrent of Words from the Sea of Stories into the Lake of Wisdom and flowed out to meet him. So this was—it had to be—what Rashid Khalifa had called it: the River of Time itself, and the whole history of everything was flowing along before his very eyes, transformed into shining, mingling, multicolored story streams. He had accidentally taken a stumbling step to the right and entered a World that was not his own, and in this World there was no River Stinky but this miraculous water instead.
He looked in the direction the river was flowing, but a mist sprang up near the horizon and obscured his view. “I can’t see the future, and that feels right,” Luka thought, and turned to look the other way, where the visibility was good for some distance, almost as far as he could see, but the mist was back there, too, he knew that; he had forgotten some of his own past and didn’t know that much about the universe’s. In front of him flowed the Present, brilliant, mesmerizing, and he was so busy staring at it that he didn’t see the Old Man of the River until the long-bearded fellow came right up in front of him holding a Terminator, an enormous science-fiction–type blaster, and shot him right in the face.
BLLLAAARRRTT!
It was interesting, Luka thought as he flew apart into a million shiny fragments, that he could still think. He hadn’t thought that thinking would be a thing you would be able to do when you had just been disintegrated by a giant science-fiction-type blaster. And now the million shiny fragments had somehow gathered together in a little heap, with Bear, the dog, and Dog, the bear, crying out in anguish beside it, and now the million fragments were joining up again, making little shiny sucking noises as they did so, and now—pop!—here he was, back in one piece, himself again, standing on the Bund next to Nobodaddy, who was looking amused, and the Old Man of the River was nowhere to be seen.
“Luckily for you,” said Nobodaddy pensively, “I gave you a few courtesy lives to start you off. You’d better collect some more before he returns, and you’d better work out what to do about him, too. He’s a bad-tempered old man, but there are ways around him. You know how this goes.”
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 neighborhood, 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 favorite 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 River 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 onto the Strand again, with his Terminator in his hand. Luka looked around panickedly 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 favorite 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 sto
pped collecting, positioned himself, and waited.
No sooner had the Old Man’s head come into 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-honored 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 colored 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.”
Bear and Dog were in a state of high agitation, but now Luka and the Old Man were circling each other, staring each other down, and it was the Old Man who spoke first, in a hard greedy voice pushing roughly through teeth that seemed hungry to eat up little Luka’s life.
“What goes around and around the wood but never goes into it?”
“The bark of the tree,” said Luka at once, and shot back, “It stands on one leg with its heart in its head.”
“Cabbage,” snapped the Old Man. “What is it that you can keep after giving it to someone else?”
“Your word. I have a little house and I live in it alone. It has no doors or windows, and to go out I must break through the wall.”
“Egg. What do you call a fish without an eye?”
“A fsh. What do sea monsters eat?”
“Fish and ships. Why was six afraid of seven?”
“Because seven eight nine. What has been there for millions of years but is never more than a month old?”
“The moon. When you don’t know what it is then it’s something, but when you know what it is then it’s nothing.”
“That’s easy,” Luka said, badly out of breath. “A riddle.”
They had been circling faster and faster, and the riddles had been coming at greater and greater speed. This was just the beginning, Luka knew; soon the number riddles would start, and the story riddles. The difficult stuff still lay ahead. He wasn’t sure if he could last the course, so the thing was not to let the Old Man dictate the pace and manner of the contest. It was time to play the joker in the pack.
He stopped circling and put on his grimmest expression. “What,” he asked, “goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?”
The Old Man of the River stopped circling, too, and for the first time there was a weakness in his voice and a tremble in his limbs. “What are you playing at?” he demanded feebly. “That’s the most famous riddle in the world.”
“Yes, it is,” said Luka, “but you’re stalling for time. Answer me.”
“Four legs, two legs, three legs,” said the Old Man of the River. “Everyone knows this one. Ha! It’s the Oldest One in the Book.”
(“The she-monster known as the Sphinx,” Rashid Khalifa used to tell Luka, “sat outside the city of Thebes and challenged all the travelers who passed by to solve her riddle. When they failed, she killed them. Then one day a hero came by and knew the answer.” “And what did the Sphinx do then?” Luka asked his father. “She destroyed herself,” Rashid replied.
“And what was the answer to the riddle?” Luka asked. But Rashid Khalifa had to admit that, no matter how many times he learned the blasted story, he could never remember the solution to the riddle. “So that old Sphinx,” he said, not very sadly, “she’d have eaten me up for sure.”)
“Come on,” Luka said to the Old Man of the River. “Your time’s up.” The Old Man of the River looked around in panic. “I could just blast you anyway,” he said. Luka shook his head. “You know you can’t do that,” he said. “Not now. Not anymore.” Then Luka allowed his expression to become a little dreamy. “My father could never remember the answer either,” he said. “And this is my father’s World of Magic, and you are his Riddle Man. So you can’t know what he couldn’t recall. And now you and the Sphinx must share the same fate.”
“Permination,” the Old Man of the River said softly. “Yes. That is just.” And without more ado, and quite unsentimentally, he lifted his Terminator, set the dial on maximum, pointed the weapon at himself, and fired.
“The answer is a man,” Luka said to the empty air, as the tiny, shining smithereens of the Old Man blew away into nothingness, “who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks upright as a grown-up, and uses a stick when he’s old. That’s the answer: a man. Everyone knows that.”
The departure of the Gatekeeper at once unveiled the Gate. A trellised stone archway wreathed in bougainvillea flowers magically appeared on the edge of the Bund, and beyond it Luka could see an elegant flight of stairs leading down to the river’s edge. There was a golden button set in the archway’s left pillar. “I’d push that if I were you,” suggested Nobodaddy. “Why?” Luka asked. “Is it like ringing a doorbell to be invited in?” Nobodaddy shook his head. “No,” he said patiently. “It’s like saving your progress so that the next time you lose a life you don’t have to come back here and fight the Old Man of the River all over again. He may not fall for your little trick next time either.” Feeling a little stupid, Luka pushed the button, and there was a little answering piece of music, the flowers around the archway grew larger and more colorful, and a new counter appeared in Luka’s field of vision, this time in the top right-hand corner, a single-digit counter, reading “1.” He wondered how many levels he would have to surmount, but after his foolishness about the Save button, he decided this was not the moment to ask.
Nobodaddy led the boy, the dog, and the bear down the Bund to the left bank of the River of Time. Punchbottoms bounced up toward the travelers, hoping to be kicked—“Ooch! Ouch! Ooch!” they squeaked in happy anticipation—but everyone’s attention was elsewhere. Bear and Dog were both talking a
t once at the tops of their new voices, half excited, half terrified by Luka’s battle against, and victory over, the Old Man of the River, and there were so many hows and whats and wows and eeks in their chatter that Luka couldn’t begin to reply. And anyway, he was exhausted. “I need to sit down,” he said, and his legs gave way beneath him. He landed with a thump in the riverside dust, and it rose up around him in a little golden cloud, which quickly formed itself into a creature, like a tiny living flame with wings. “Feed me and I live,” it said hotly. “Give me water and I die.”
The answer was obvious. “Fire,” Luka said quietly, and the Fire Bug grew agitated. “Don’t say that!” it buzzed. “If you go shouting fire at the top of your voice somebody will probably come running with a hose. Too much water around here for my liking anyway. Time to be off.” “But wait a minute,” Luka said, excited in spite of being so tired. “Maybe you’re what I’ve been looking for. Your light is so beautiful,” he added, thinking that a little flattery might not hurt. “Are you … is this … could you be part of … a bearer of … the Fire of Life?”
“Don’t mention that,” said Nobodaddy quickly, but it was too late.
“How do you know about the Fire of Life?” the Fire Bug wanted to know, becoming cross. Then it turned its displeasure upon Nobodaddy. “And you, sir, as far as I can see, you should be somewhere else entirely, with something else entirely to do.”
“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 favorite. 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.”