This got Luka’s attention. The notion of gods behaving badly was an odd one. Weren’t gods supposed to set an example to the people whose gods they were? “Not in the Olden Days,” Rashid said. “These Olden, and now Jobless, gods usually behaved as badly as people, or actually much worse, because, being gods, they could behave badly on a bigger scale. They were selfish, rude, meddlesome, vain, bitchy, violent, spiteful, lustful, gluttonous, greedy, lazy, dishonest, tricky, and stupid, and all of it exaggerated to the maximum, because they had those superpowers. When they were greedy they could swallow a city, and when they were angry they could drown the world. When they meddled in human lives they broke hearts, stole women, and started wars. When they were lazy they slept for a thousand years, and when they played their little tricks other people suffered and died. Sometimes a god would even kill another god by knowing his weak spot and going for it, the way a wolf goes for the throat of its prey.”
“Maybe it’s a good thing they faded away,” Luka said, “but it must make the Heart of Magic a peculiar sort of place.”
“Nowhere more peculiar in the universe,” Rashid replied.
“And what about the gods people still believe in?” Luka asked. “Are they in the Heart of Magic as well?”
“Oh, dear me, no,” said Rashid Khalifa. “They’re all still right here with us.”
The memory of Rashid faded away, and Luka found himself flying over a phantasmagoric landscape dotted with broken columns and statuary, with creatures out of fable and legend walking, running, and flying among them. There—over there!—were two vast and trunkless legs of stone, the last remaining echoes of Ozymandias, King of Kings. Here, slouching toward them, was an immense rough beast, sphinx-like, only male, and spotted, a man with a hyena’s body and its hideous laugh as well, destroying whatever house or temple, hill or tree it passed, by the sheer force of its ecstatic, ruinous laughter. And there!—yes, right there!—was the Sphinx herself! Yes, surely that was she! The Lion with the Woman’s Head! See how she stopped strangers and insisted on talking to them.… “It’s too bad,” said Soraya. “She keeps asking everyone the same old riddle, and nobody can be bothered to answer, because everybody has known it forever. She really needs to get a new act.”
A gigantic egg walked by below them on long, yolk-colored legs. A winged unicorn flew past. A curious three-part creature—a crocodile, lion, and hippopotamus combined—shuffled its way toward the Circular Sea. The sight of a small god in the shape of a dog excited Bear. “That is Xolotl,” warned Soraya. “Stay away from him. He’s the god of bad luck.” That disappointed Bear, the dog, a good deal. “Why does Bad Luck turn out to be a dog?” he complained. “In the Real World, a faithful dog is very good luck for its owner. No wonder these bad-luck gods are done for.”
Luka couldn’t help noticing that the Heart of Magic was in some disrepair. The Egyptians’ pyramids were crumbling, and in the Nordic quarter a gigantic ash tree lay on its side, its three huge roots clutching at the sky. And if those meadows over in that direction were really the Elysian Fields, where the souls of great heroes lived on forever, why was the grass so brown? “These places are in really bad shape,” Luka said, and Soraya nodded sadly. “Magic is fading from the universe,” she said. “We aren’t needed anymore, or that’s what you all think, with your High Definitions and low expectations. One of these days you’ll wake up and we’ll be gone, and then you’ll find out what it’s like to live without even the idea of Magic. But Time moves on, and there isn’t a thing we can do about it. Would you like,” she said, brightening, “to see the Battle of the Beauties? I believe this is the right time of day.”
The Carpet began to fly down toward a great pavilion topped by seven golden onion-shaped domes, all shining in the morning sun. “Shouldn’t we stay out of these gods’ and goddesses’ way, though?” Luka objected. “Surely we don’t want them to see us, to know we’re here? We are thieves, after all.”
“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 neighborhood, 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 Jo’s—who watch over the whole of Time. They are the Ultimate Guardians of the Fire, and they don’t miss a thing.”
“The Three Jo’s?” 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 Jo’s, 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 neighborhood 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 toward the onion-domed buildings. 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, toward 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 that
would have utterly astounded Luka just a few days ago, but that 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 favorite, 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.”
The victor, Aphrodite, passed through the crowd, waving graciously, but a little robotically. She was within a few feet of Luka at one point, and he saw that her eyes were oddly glazed, and focused on infinity. “No wonder she can’t see anyone Real,” he thought. “She has eyes only for herself.”
He looked around for Soraya, but she had disappeared. “She probably got bored,” said Nobodaddy. “We’ll find her outside.” As they left the Battle Hall, he pointed out some of the more remarkable audience members to Luka. The Humbaba of Assyria was a naked, scaly giant with a horned head and lion’s paws. His tail was a living snake with a little, flicking forked tongue. “And so is his willy,” Luka noted with delight. “That’s quite something, a willy-snake, that’s a thing I’ve never seen before.” And close behind this brand-new sight was a group of Central Asian Boramez, who looked like baby lambs, except that their legs were made of two different varieties of long, fleshy roots, like sweet potatoes and parsnips. “Lamb chops and two veg,” Luka thought. “Yum! These creatures would make a complete, nourishing meal.” There were several three-headed trolls in the crowd, and many disappointed Valkyries, who had been hoping for their girl, Freya, to come out on top. “Nev-er mind,” they told one another in their singsong, phlegmatic, good-natured Nordic way. “To-morr-ow is an-oth-er day.”
Soraya was waiting in front of the rhododendron bushes, looking innocent, which was such an unusual look for her that Luka immediately suspected she was up to something. “What’s going on?” he began, then changed tack. “Never mind,” he continued. “We’re wasting time. Let’s get going, okay?”
“Once upon a time,” said Soraya dreamily, “there was an Indian tribe called the Karaoke. They didn’t have Fire, so they were sad and cold and never sang a note.”
“This is no time for fairy tales,” said Luka, but Soraya ignored him and continued. “Fire had been created by a god-type creature named Ekoarak,” she said in the same dreamy, musical voice, which Luka had to admit was a beautiful voice, a voice exactly like his mother’s voice, which made it comforting to listen to. “But he had hidden it in a music box and given it, for safekeeping, to two old witches, with instructions that on no account were they to give it to the Karaoke—”
“There’s a point in here somewhere, I hope,” Luka interrupted, a little rudely, but that only made the Insultana smile, for after all it was the Otter way.
“Coyote was the one who decided he would steal the Fire,” she said. Bear, the dog, perked up. “This is a story about a heroic prairie dog?” he said hopefully. Soraya ignored him. “He got the Lion, the Big Bear, the Little Bear, the Wolf, the Squirrel, and the Frog to help him. They spaced themselves out between the witches’ tent and the Karaoke village and waited. Coyote told one Karaoke Indian to visit the witches and attack their tent. When he did so they came out with their broomsticks and ran after him to chase him away. Coyote ran inside, opened the box with his nose, stole the burning firebrand, and ran. When the witches saw him running with the fire they forgot about the Indian and chased Coyote instead. Coyote ran like the wind, and when he was tired he passed the burning wood to the Lion, who ran as far as the Big Bear, who ran on to the Little Bear, and so on. Finally the Frog swallowed the Fire and dived under the river where the witches couldn’t follow him, and then he jumped out on the far bank of the river and spat the Fire out onto dry wood in the Karaoke village, and the Fire crackled and burned and the flames rose high into the sky, and everybody cheered. Soon afterward, the Indian returned, having gone into the witches’ tent (while they were chasing Coyote) and stolen the whole music box, and after that the Karaoke village was warm, and everyone sang all the time, because the magical music box never stopped playing its selection of popular songs.”
“Okay-y-y,” said Luka doubtfully. “It’s a nice enough story, but—”
Coyote strolled out from behind the rhododendron bushes, looking Wild and Western and ready for trouble. Buenas dias, kid, he said, in a cool, slanting sort of way. My friend here, thats the Insultana, indicated you could probly
use some help. You ask me, I reckon you need all the help you can git. He gave a confident, wolfish laugh. Hear this, fire thief. Aint nobody got more sperience than me in the fire-stealin line, xceptin maybe one individual—big individual he was, too—but after what happen to him last time aroun, he aint available. Caint be helped. Reckon he lost his nerve.
“What happened?” Luka asked, not really wanting to know.
Taken, said Coyote bluntly. Got his big self tied down on a rock. Si señor. Spread-eagled on there at the mercy of the merciless. Eagle got to chewin on his liver all day, which liver then done fix itself up an grow back ever night on account of 3-J magic, so that Eagle he could jus go on munchin till the end of time. You want more?
“No, thank you,” Luka said, thinking, not for the first time, that he was a long, long way out of his depth. But he made his voice sound a lot braver than he felt and went on. “Also,” he said, “I’m smelling a rat, to be honest with you. Everybody has been telling me all along that the Fire has never been stolen in the whole history of the World of Magic. Now you tell me that you stole it, Coyote, and apparently this old-timer you’re talking about stole it, too? So what’s the truth? Has everyone been lying to me this whole time, and it’s actually easier to steal the Fire than anyone has admitted?”
Soraya replied, “We should have explained things better to you. Nobodaddy should have done it right at the outset, and so should’ve I. You’re right to feel aggrieved. So this is the truth of it. The World of Magic has taken many forms in different times and places, and it has had many different names. It has changed its location, its geography, and its laws, as the history of the Real World has moved from age to age. In several of those times and places, it’s true, Fire Thieves did make successful runs at the Fire of the Gods. But nobody has succeeded since the Heart of Magic assumed its current shape and form, in this place, in this time, here and now. That’s the truth. The Aalim have always been around—after all, there’s no escape from the Past, the Present, and the Future, is there?—but for a long time they left the management of things to the gods of the period, the same ex-gods you see here, inefficient deities who didn’t always do such a good job. Now the Aalim have taken control of matters themselves. Everything has been reordered. The Fire of Life is impregnably defended. The Three Jo’s know everything. Jo-Hua knows even the smallest details of the Past, Jo-Hai can see even the smallest incident in the Present, and Jo-Aiga can foretell the Future. Nobody has managed to steal the Fire since they took charge.”