Luka and the Fire of Life Read Online Free PDF

intense feeling of giddiness. Was that when he crossed the line? And had he stumbled to the right or the left? It must have been the right, mustn’t it? So this must be the Right-HandPath, must it not? But was that the best Path for him? Shouldn’t he, as a left-handed person, have stumbled to the left? … He realised that he had no idea what he meant. Why was he on any sort of Path at all, and not just in the lane outside his house? Where might such a Path lead, and should he even think of going down it? Should he be thinking about just getting away from this alarming Nobodaddy and finding his way back to the safety of his bedroom? All this talk of Magic was much too much for him.
    Of course Luka knew all about the World of Magic. He had grown up hearing about it from his father every day, and he had believed in it, he had even drawn maps and painted pictures of it – the Torrent of Words flowing into the Lake of Wisdom, the Mountain of Knowledge and the Fire of Life, all that stuff; but he hadn’t believed in it in the way that he believed in dining tables, or streets, or stomach upsets. It hadn’t been real in the way that love was real, or unhappiness, or fear. It was only real in the way that stories were real while you were reading them, or heat mirages before you got too close to them, or dreams while you were dreaming.
    ‘Is this a dream, then?’ he wondered, and the see-through Rashid who called himself Nobodaddy nodded slowly in a thoughtful way. ‘That would certainly explain the situation,’ he replied agreeably. ‘Why not put it to the test? If this is indeed a dream, then maybe your dog and your bear would no longer be dumb animals. I know your secret fantasy, you see. You’d like them to be able to talk, wouldn’t you? – to speak to you in your own language and tell you their stories. I’m sure they have extremely interesting stories to tell.’
    ‘How do you know that?’ asked Luka, shocked, and again the answer arrived in his head as soon as the question was out. ‘Oh. You know because my father knows. I talked to my father about it once, and he said he would make up a story about a talking dog and bear.’
    ‘Quite so,’ said Nobodaddy calmly. ‘Everything that your father has been, and known, and said and done, is slowly crossing over into me. But I mustn’t hog the conversation,’ he went on. ‘I do believe your friends are trying to get your attention.‘
    Luka looked round and saw to his astonishment that Bear the dog had risen up on his hind legs and was clearing his throat like a tenor at the opera. Then he began to sing – not in barks, howls or dog-yaps this time, but in plain, understandable words. He sang with a slight foreign accent, Luka noticed, as if he were a visitor from another country, but the words were clear enough, although the tale they told was bewildering.
    ‘O I am Barak of the It-Barak,
The Immortal Dog Men of yore,
Born from the egg of a magic hawk,
We could sing and fight and love and talk
And could never, ever be slain.
    Yes, I am Barak of the It-Barak,
A thousand years old and more,
I ate black pearls and I wed human girls,
I ruled my world like an earl in curls,
And I sang with angelic disdain.
    And this is the song of the It-Barak,
A thousand years old, it’s true,
But we were unmade by a Chinese curse,
Were turned into pooches and pye-dogs and curs,
And the Kingdom of Dogs became quicksand and bogs,
We no longer sang, but could only bark,
And we went on four legs, not two.
Now we go on four legs, not two.’
    Then it was the turn of Dog the bear, who also rose up on his hind legs, and folded his paws in front of him like a schoolboy at a public-speaking contest. Then he spoke in clear, human language, and his voice sounded remarkably like Luka’s brother Haroun’s, and Luka almost fell over when he heard it. Nobodaddy saved him by stretching out a protective arm, exactly as if he were the real Rashid Khalifa. ‘O mighty pintsized liberator,’