at moments of great excitement or anticipation, at wonderful moments, Time can stand still.
‘Our dreams are the real truths – our fancies, the knowledge of our hearts. We know that Time is a River, not a clock, and that it can flow the wrong way, so that the world becomes more backward instead of less, and that it can jump sideways, so that everything changes in an instant. We know that the River of Time can loop and twist and carry us back to yesterday or forwards to the day after tomorrow.
‘There are places in the world where nothing ever happens, and Time stops moving altogether. There are those of us who go on being seventeen years old all our life, and never grow up. There are others who are miserable old wretches, maybe sixty or seventy years old, from the day they are born.
‘We know that when we fall in love, Time ceases to exist, and we also know that Time can repeat itself, so that you can be stuck in one day for the whole of your life.
‘We know that Time is not only Itself, but is an aspect of Movement and Space. Imagine two boys, let’s say you and young Ratshit, who both wear wristwatches that are perfectly synchronised, and that both keep perfect Time. Now imagine that that lazy rascal Ratshit sits in the same place, let’s say right here, for one hundred years, while you run, never resting, all the way to school and back here again, over and over, also for one hundred years. At the end of that century, both your watches would have kept perfect Time, but your watch would be six or seven seconds slower than his.
‘There are those of us who learn to live completely in the moment. For such people the Past vanishes and the Future loses meaning. There is only the Present, which means that two of the three Aalim are surplus to requirements. And then there are those of us who are trapped in yesterdays, in the memory of a lost love, or a childhood home, or a dreadful crime. And some people live only for a better tomorrow; for them the Past ceases to exist.
‘I’ve spent my life telling people that this is the truth about Time, and that the Aalim’s clocks tell lies. So naturally the Aalim are my mortal enemies, which is just fine, because as a matter of fact I am their deadly foe.’
The Changer Gyara-Jinn stopped galloping, slowed down to a walk, then stopped completely and began to change. The giant eight-legged horse started becoming smaller; its hairy skin vanished and was replaced by a smooth shiny surface; the smell of horse faded away and Luka’s nostrils were filled, instead, by the far less palatable odour of the pigpen. Finally the eight legs became four, so that Luka, Bear and Dog slipped out of their bindings and tumbled what was now only a short distance to the admittedly stony ground. Gyara-Jinn’s once-in-a-lifetime transformation into the King of Horses had come to an end, and she was a tin sow once again. But Luka wasn’t paying any attention to that dramatic Change, because he was staring open-mouthed at the heart-stopping sight he had come so far to see. He was standing at the foot of the vast massif of the Mountain of Knowledge, and just a few feet away, lapping at the Mountain’s feet, was the Lake of Wisdom itself, its water clear, pure and transparent in the pale, silvery light of the Dawn of Days, which never brightened into morning. Cool shadows stretched across the water, as always, caressing and smoothing it. It was a ghostly scene, at once haunted and haunting, and it was easy to imagine music in the air, a tinkling crystal melody: the legendary Music of the Spheres that had played when the World was born.
The Shah of Blah’s description of the Lake and its inhabitants, which Luka had heard so often that he knew it by heart, proved to be startlingly accurate. Shining schools of little canny-fish could be seen below the surface, as well as the brightly coloured smartipans, and the duller, deep-water shrewds. Flying low over the water’s surface were the hunter birds, the large pelican-billed scholarias and the bald, bearded, long-beaked guroos. Long tendrils of the lake-floor plant called sagacity were visible waving in the depths, and Luka recognised the Lake’s little groups of islands, too, the Theories with their wild, improbable growths, the