Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie Page B

yourself, not just temporarily, but once and for all.’
    How the Old Man laughed! He guffawed until he wept, not only from his eyes but through his nose as well. He held his sides and leapt from side to side, and his long white beard cracked in the air like a whip. ‘That’s a good one,’ he said finally, panting for breath. ‘
If I lose
. That’s priceless. Let’s begin.’ But Luka wasn’t going to be fooled that easily. Riddlers are tricksters, he knew that much, and you had to nail down the deal before you began the battle, or they would try to wriggle out of it later on. ‘And if you lose, you will do as I have said,’ he insisted. The Old Man of the River made a peevish face. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he replied. ‘If I lose I will Self-Terminate. Auto- Terminate. Termination of Me by Me will Occur. Hee, hee, hee. I’ll blast myself to bits.’ ‘Permanently,’ Luka said firmly. ‘Once and for all.’ The Old Man grew serious and his face coloured unpleasantly. ‘Very well,’ he barked. ‘Yes. Permanent Termination if I lose; in a word,
Permination
! But as you are about to discover, child, I’m not the one who is about to lose all his lives.’
    Bear and Dog were in a state of high agitation, but now Luka and the Old Man were circling each other, staring each other down, and it was the Old Man who spoke first, in a hard greedy voice pushing roughly through teeth that seemed hungry to eat up little Luka’s life.
    ‘What goes round and round the wood but never goes into it?’
    ‘The bark of the tree,’ said Luka at once, and shot back, ‘It stands on one leg with its heart in its head.’
    ‘Cabbage,’ snapped the Old Man. ‘What is it that you can keep after giving it to someone else?’
    ‘Your word. I have a little house and I live in it alone. It has no doors or windows, and to go out I must break through the wall.’
    ‘Egg. What do you call a fish without an eye?’
    ‘A fsh. What do sea monsters eat?’
    ‘Fish and ships. Why was six afraid of seven?’
    ‘Because seven eight nine. What has been there for millions of years but is never more than a month old?’
    ‘The moon. When you don’t know what it is then it’s something, but when you know what it is then it’s nothing.’
    ‘That’s easy,’ Luka said, badly out of breath. ‘A riddle.’
    They had been circling faster and faster, and the riddles had been coming at greater and greater speed. This was just the beginning, Luka knew; soon the number riddles would start, and the story riddles. The difficult stuff still lay ahead. He wasn’t sure if he could last the course, so the thing was not to let the Old Man dictate the pace and manner of the contest. It was time to play the joker in the pack.
    He stopped circling and put on his grimmest expression. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?’
    The Old Man of the River stopped circling, too, and for the first time there was a weakness in his voice and a tremble inhis limbs. ‘What are you playing at?’ he demanded feebly. ‘That’s the most famous riddle in the world.’
    ‘Yes, it is,’ said Luka, ‘but you’re stalling for time. Answer me.’
    ‘Four legs, two legs, three legs,’ said the Old Man of the River. ‘Everyone knows this one. Ha! It’s the Oldest One in the Book.’
    (‘The she-monster known as the Sphinx,’ Rashid Khalifa used to tell Luka, ‘sat outside the city of Thebes and challenged all the travellers who passed by to solve her riddle. When they failed, she killed them. Then one day a hero came by and knew the answer.’ ‘And what did the Sphinx do then?’ Luka asked his father. ‘She destroyed herself,’ Rashid replied.
    ‘And what was the answer to the riddle?’ Luka asked. But Rashid Khalifa had to admit that, no matter how many times he learned the blasted story, he could never remember the solution to the riddle. ‘So that old Sphinx,’ he said, not very sadly,