it would splash like an explosion into the Lake of Wisdom? Yet Rashid had always said that the Lake of Wisdom was calm and still, because Wisdom could absorb even the largest Rush of Words without being disturbed. There at the Lake it was always dawn. The long, pale fingers of the First Light rested quietly on the surface of the waters, and the silver sun peeped over the horizon but did not rise. The Aalim who controlled Time had chosen to live at the Beginning of it for ever. Luka could close his eyes and see it all, he could listen and hear his father’s voice describing the scene, but now that he was actually there it was very frustrating not to be able to take a look.
And where was Nobodaddy? ‘Still Noplace to be seen,’ thought Luka, who was surer with every passing minute that the missing phantom was up to no good, wherever he was. ‘I will have to face him before the end, I’m sure of that,’ he thought, ‘and it isn’t going to be easy, but if he thinks I’ll give up my dad to him without a fight, he’s going to be very much surprised.’ Then he was struck, as if by a powerful fist, by the worst thought in the world. ‘Had Nobodaddy gone because Rashid Khalifa had already … already … had finally … before Luka could save him … gone, too? Had the phantom who was absorbing his father vanished because its purpose had been achieved? Was all of this in vain?’ Luka began to tremble at the thought and his eyes grew wet and prickly and grief began to flood over him in great shuddering waves.
But then something happened. Luka became aware of a change within himself. He felt as if something more powerful than his own nature had taken control of him, some will stronger than his own that was refusing to accept the worst. No, Rashid’s life was not over. It could not be, therefore it was not. The will-stronger-than-Luka’s-own rejected that possibility. Nor would it allow Luka to give up, to flinch in the face of danger or cower in the face of terror. This new force that had gripped him was giving him the strength and courage he would need if he was going to do what needed to be done. It felt like something not-himself, something from outside, and yet he also knew that it was coming from within him, that it was his own strength, his own determination, his own refusal of defeat, his own strong will. For this, too, Rashid Khalifa’s storytelling, the Shah of Blah’s many tales of young heroes finding extra resources within themselves in the face of horrible adversity, had prepared him. ‘We don’t know the answers to the great questions of who we are and what we are capable of,’ Rashid liked to say, ‘until the questions are asked. Then and only then do we know if we can answer them, or not.’
And above and beyond Rashid’s stories lay the example of Luka’s brother Haroun, who had found such an answer in himself, afloat on the Sea of Stories, once upon a time. ‘I wish my brother was here to help me,’ Luka thought, ‘but he isn’t, not really, even though Dog the bear is speaking in his voice and trying to take care of me. So I’m going to do what he would have done. I’m not going to lose.’
‘The Aalim are set in their ways and dislike people who try to rock the boat,’ Rashid Khalifa had told the sleepy Luka one night. ‘Their view of Time is strict and inflexible: yesterday, then today, then tomorrow, tick, tock, tick. They are like robots marching along to the beat of the disappearing seconds. What Was, Jo-Hua, lives in the Past; What Is, Jo-Hai, simply is right now; and What Will Come, Jo-Aiga, belongs to a place we cannot go. Their Time is a prison, they are the jailers, and the seconds and minutes are its walls.
‘Dreams are the Aalim’s enemies, because in dreams the Laws of Time disappear. We know – don’t we know, Luka? – that the Aalim’s Laws do not tell the truth about Time. The time of our feelings is not the same as the time of the clocks. We know that when we are excited by what we are doing, Time speeds up, and when we are bored, it slows down. We know that