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 Waters 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 on to the Strand again, with his Terminator in his hand. Luka looked around panicked 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 favourite 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