‘and the food is excellent.’
The Inquisitor scratched his chin. ‘Why am I not entirely convinced?’ he asked, as if talking to himself. ‘Why do I suspect there may be something insulting lurking beneath your superficial charm?’
‘We must be going,’ Luka said hastily, standing up. ‘It was good to meet –’ But the Inquisitor extended a claw-tipped arm and grasped Luka by the shoulder. ‘Tell me this,’ he demanded roughly. ‘Do you believe that two and two make five?’
Luka hesitated, unsure of how to answer – whereupon, to his immense surprise, the Inquisitor leapt up onto the dining table, scattering plates and glasses in all directions, and burst into loud, hissy, tuneless song:
‘Do you believe two and two make five?
Do you agree the world is flat?
Do you know our Bossss is the Biggest Cheese alive?
Do you Ressspect the Rat?
O, do you Ressspect the Rat?
If I sssay upside down is the right way round,
If I insissst that black is white,
If I claim that a sssqueak is the sssweetest sssound,
Do you ressspect my Right?
Say, do you Ressspect my Right?
Do you agree nothing’s better than I?
Do you approve of my hat?
Will you please ssstop asking what, how and why?
Do you Ressspect the Rat?
Do you, don’t you, don’t you, do you,
Do you Ressspect the Rat?’
And now all the Rats in the Restau-Rat leapt up on their hind legs, placed their claws upon their chests, and sang the chorus:
‘I, I, sir,
I, I, sir,
We all say I, I, I.
There’s no need to argue, no need to sussspect,
No need to think when you’ve got Ressspect,
We all say I, I, I.’
‘That’s just nonsense!’ The words burst out of Luka before he could stop them. The Rats froze in their various poses, and then slowly, slowly, all their heads turned to look at Luka, and all their eyes glittered, and all their teeth were bared. ‘This isn’t good,’ Luka thought, and Bear and Dog drew close to him, prepared to fight for their lives. Even Nobodaddy seemed, for once, nonplussed. The Rats faced Luka, and slowly, little Rat-step by little Rat-step, they closed in around him.
‘Nonsenssse, you say,’ mused the Inquisitor Rat. ‘But, as it happens, it is also our National Sssong. Would you say, my fellow rodentsss, that this young rascal’s Manners have been Minded? Or does he deserve – hmmm – a Black Mark?’
‘Black Mark!’ the Rats screeched, all together, and bared their terrible claws. And perhaps the story of Luka Khalifa’s quest for the Fire of Life would have ended then and there at Alice’s Restau-Rat, and maybe Dog the bear and Bear the dog would have been lost, too, though they would certainly have gone down fighting and taken many Rats with them; and then Nobodaddy would have returned to Kahani to wait until the life of Rashid Khalifa had filled him up completely … and how sad all of that would have been! Instead, however, there was a cry from the street outside, and enormous quantities of red gloop and what looked like gigantic amounts of egg yolk and, following that, a hail of rotten vegetables began to descend from the sky, and all the Rats forgot entirely about Luka and his cry of ‘Nonsense!’ and charged out into the street yelling, ‘It’s the Otters!’ and, more simply, ‘It’s her again!’ because the Respectorate of I was under attack from above, and leading her aerial squadrons in the attack, swooping high and low and left and right, standing upright and unafraid on her famous flying carpet, Resham, which is to say, the Green Silk Flying Rug of King Solomon the Wise, was the feared, the fabled, the ferocious, the fabulous Insultana of Ott, shouting out, through a powerful megaphone, her blood-curdling battlecry: ‘We expectorate on the Respectorate!’
‘What’s going on?’ Luka shouted to Nobodaddy over the rising din, as the four travellers fled the Restau-Rat, just in case the Rats whom they had offended returned to finish them off. Outside in the street all was commotion and confusion and red gloop and egg and vegetables raining from above. They took shelter under the awning of a bakery down the road, its windows full of stale bread and unappetising-looking buns covered in grey icing. ‘Over in that direction, Over The Top of those mountains,’ Nobodaddy shouted back, pointing to a snow-capped range on the northern horizon, ‘is the unusual land of Oh-Tee-Tee, a land ringed by bright waters, whose denizens, the Otters, are devoted to all forms of excess. They talk too much, eat too much, drink