The Amber Spyglass (40 page)

At the foot of the hill, it ran into the little wood of silver-barked trees.

Father Gomez watched from the top of the ridge. It hadn’t been hard to follow them; despite Mary’s confidence in the open savanna, there was plenty of concealment in the grass and the occasional thickets of string-wood and sap-lacquer bushes. The two young people had spent a lot of time earlier looking all around as if they thought they were being followed. He had had to keep some distance away, but as the morning passed, they became more and more absorbed in each other and paid less attention to the landscape.

The one thing he didn’t want to do was hurt the boy. He had a horror of harming an innocent person. The only way to make sure of his target was to get close enough to see her clearly, which meant following them into the wood.

Quietly and cautiously he moved down the course of the stream. His dæmon the green-backed beetle flew overhead, tasting the air; her eyesight was less good than his, but her sense of smell was acute, and she caught the scent of the young people’s flesh very clearly. She would go a little ahead, perch on a stem of grass, and wait for him, then move on again; and as she caught the trail in the air that their bodies left behind, Father Gomez found himself praising God for his mission, because it was clearer than ever that the boy and the girl were walking into mortal sin.

He watched them go in among the trees. They hadn’t looked back once since coming over the top of the ridge, but he still kept low, moving down the stream at a crouch, holding the rifle in one hand, balancing with the other.

He was so close to success now that for the first time he found himself speculating on what he would do afterward, and whether he would please the Kingdom of Heaven more by going back to Geneva or staying to evangelize this world. The first thing to do here would be to convince the four-legged creatures, who seemed to have the rudiments of reason, that their habit of riding on wheels was abominable and Satanic, and contrary to the will of God. Break them of that, and salvation would follow.

He reached the foot of the slope, where the trees began, and laid the rifle down silently.

He gazed into the silver-green-gold shadows, and listened, with both hands behind his ears to catch and focus any quiet voices through the insect chirping and the trickle of the stream. Yes: there they were. They’d stopped.

He bent to pick up the rifle—

And found himself uttering a hoarse and breathless gasp, as something clutched his dæmon and pulled her away from him.

But there was nothing there! Where was she? The pain was atrocious. He heard her crying, and cast about wildly to left and right, looking for her.

“Keep still,” said a voice from the air, “and be quiet. I have your dæmon in my hand.”

“But—where are you? Who are you?”

“My name is Balthamos,” said the voice.

Will and Lyra followed the stream into the wood, walking carefully, saying little, until they were in the very center.

There was a little clearing in the middle of the grove, which was floored with soft grass and moss-covered rocks. The branches laced across overhead, almost shutting out the sky and letting through little moving spangles and sequins of sunlight, so that everything was dappled with gold and silver.

And it was quiet. Only the trickle of the stream, and the occasional rustle of leaves high up in a little curl of breeze, broke the silence.

Will put down the package of food; Lyra put down her little rucksack. There was no sign of the dæmon shadows anywhere. They were completely alone.

They took off their shoes and socks and sat down on the mossy rocks at the edge of the stream, dipping their feet in the cold water and feeling the shock of it invigorate their blood.

“I’m hungry,” Will said.

“Me too,” said Lyra, though she was also feeling more than that, something subdued and pressing and half-happy and half-painful, so that she wasn’t quite sure what it was.

They unfolded the cloth and ate some bread and cheese. For some reason their hands were slow and clumsy, and they hardly tasted the food, although the bread was floury and crisp from the hot baking-stones, and the cheese was flaky and salty and very fresh.

Then Lyra took one of those little red fruits. With a fast-beating heart, she turned to him and said, “Will . . .”

And she lifted the fruit gently to his mouth.

She could see from his eyes that he knew at once what she meant, and that he was too joyful to speak. Her fingers were still at his lips, and he felt them tremble, and he put his own hand up to hold hers there, and then neither of them could look; they were confused; they were brimming with happiness.

Like two moths clumsily bumping together, with no more weight than that, their lips touched. Then before they knew how it happened, they were clinging together, blindly pressing their faces toward each other.

“Like Mary said,” he whispered, “you know straight away when you like someone—when you were asleep, on the mountain, before she took you away, I told Pan—”

“I heard,” she whispered, “I was awake and I wanted to tell you the same and now I know what I must have felt all the time: I love you, Will, I love you—”

The word
love
set his nerves ablaze. All his body thrilled with it, and he answered her in the same words, kissing her hot face over and over again, drinking in with adoration the scent of her body and her warm, honey-fragrant hair and her sweet, moist mouth that tasted of the little red fruit.

Around them there was nothing but silence, as if all the world were holding its breath.

Balthamos was terrified.

He moved up the stream and away from the wood, holding the scratching, stinging, biting insect dæmon, and trying to conceal himself as much as he could from the man who was stumbling after them.

He mustn’t let him catch up. He knew that Father Gomez would kill him in a moment. An angel of his rank was no match for a man, even if that angel was strong and healthy, and Balthamos was neither of those; besides which, he was crippled by grief over Baruch and shame at having deserted Will before. He no longer even had the strength to fly.

“Stop, stop,” said Father Gomez. “Please keep still. I can’t see you—let’s talk, please—don’t hurt my dæmon, I beg you—”

In fact, the dæmon was hurting Balthamos. The angel could see the little green thing dimly through the backs of his clasped hands, and she was sinking her powerful jaws again and again into his palms. If he opened his hands just for a moment, she would be gone. Balthamos kept them closed.

“This way,” he said, “follow me. Come away from the wood. I want to talk to you, and this is the wrong place.”

“But who are you? I can’t see you. Come closer—how can I tell what you are till I see you? Keep still, don’t move so quickly!”

But moving quickly was the only defense Balthamos had. Trying to ignore the stinging dæmon, he picked his way up the little gully where the stream ran, stepping from rock to rock.

Then he made a mistake: trying to look behind him, he slipped and put a foot into the water.

“Ah,” came a whisper of satisfaction as Father Gomez saw the splash.

Balthamos withdrew his foot at once and hurried on—but now a wet print appeared on the dry rocks each time he put his foot down. The priest saw it and leapt forward, and felt the brush of feathers on his hand.

He stopped in astonishment: the word
angel
reverberated in his mind. Balthamos seized the moment to stumble forward again, and the priest felt himself dragged after him as another brutal pang wrenched his heart.

Balthamos said over his shoulder, “A little farther, just to the top of the ridge, and we shall talk, I promise.”

“Talk here! Stop where you are, and I swear I shan’t touch you!”

The angel didn’t reply: it was too hard to concentrate. He had to split his attention three ways: behind him to avoid the man, ahead to see where he was going, and on the furious dæmon tormenting his hands.

As for the priest, his mind was working quickly. A truly dangerous opponent would have killed his dæmon at once, and ended the matter there and then; this antagonist was afraid to strike.

With that in mind he let himself stumble, and uttered little moans of pain, and pleaded once or twice for the other to stop—all the time watching closely, moving nearer, estimating how big the other was, how quickly he could move, which way he was looking.

“Please,” he said brokenly, “you don’t know how much this hurts—I can’t do you any harm—please can we stop and talk?”

He didn’t want to move out of sight of the wood. They were now at the point where the stream began, and he could see the shape of Balthamos’s feet very lightly pressing the grass. The priest had watched every inch of the way, and he was sure now where the angel was standing.

Balthamos turned around. The priest raised his eyes to the place where he thought the angel’s face would be, and saw him for the first time: just a shimmer in the air, but there was no mistaking it.

The angel wasn’t quite close enough to reach in one movement, though, and in truth the pull on his dæmon had been painful and weakening. Maybe he should take another step or two . . .

“Sit down,” said Balthamos. “Sit down where you are. Not a step closer.”

“What do you want?” said Father Gomez, not moving.

“What do I want? I want to kill you, but I haven’t got the strength.”

“But are you an angel?”

“What does it matter?”

“You might have made a mistake. We might be on the same side.”

“No, we’re not. I have been following you. I know whose side you’re on—no, no, don’t move. Stay there.”

“It’s not too late to repent. Even angels are allowed to do that. Let me hear your confession.”

“Oh, Baruch, help me!” cried Balthamos in despair, turning away.

And as he cried out, Father Gomez leapt for him. His shoulder hit the angel’s, and knocked Balthamos off balance; and in throwing out a hand to save himself, the angel let go of the insect dæmon. The beetle flew free at once, and Father Gomez felt a surge of relief and strength. In fact, it was that which killed him, to his great surprise. He hurled himself so hard at the faint form of the angel, and he expected so much more resistance than he met, that he couldn’t keep his balance. His foot slipped; his momentum carried him down toward the stream; and Balthamos, thinking of what Baruch would have done, kicked aside the priest’s hand as he flung it out for support.

Father Gomez fell hard. His head cracked against a stone, and he fell stunned with his face in the water. The cold shock woke him at once, but as he choked and feebly tried to rise, Balthamos, desperate, ignored the dæmon stinging his face and his eyes and his mouth, and used all the little weight he had to hold the man’s head down in the water, and he kept it there, and kept it there, and kept it there.

When the dæmon suddenly vanished, Balthamos let go. The man was dead. As soon as he was sure, Balthamos hauled the body out of the stream and laid it carefully on the grass, folding the priest’s hands over his breast and closing his eyes.

Then Balthamos stood up, sick and weary and full of pain.

“Baruch,” he said, “oh, Baruch, my dear, I can do no more. Will and the girl are safe, and everything will be well, but this is the end for me, though truly I died when you did, Baruch, my beloved.”

A moment later, he was gone.

In the bean field, drowsy in the late afternoon heat, Mary heard Atal’s voice, and she couldn’t tell excitement from alarm: had another tree fallen? Had the man with the rifle appeared?

Look! Look!
Atal was saying, nudging Mary’s pocket with her trunk, so Mary took the spyglass and did as her friend said, pointing it up to the sky.

Tell me what it’s doing!
said Atal.
I can feel it is different, but I can’t see.

The terrible flood of Dust in the sky had stopped flowing. It wasn’t still, by any means; Mary scanned the whole sky with the amber lens, seeing a current here, an eddy there, a vortex farther off; it was in perpetual movement, but it wasn’t flowing away anymore. In fact, if anything, it was falling like snowflakes.

She thought of the wheel trees: the flowers that opened upward would be drinking in this golden rain. Mary could almost feel them welcoming it in their poor parched throats, which were so perfectly shaped for it, and which had been starved for so long.

The young ones,
said Atal.

Mary turned, spyglass in hand, to see Will and Lyra returning. They were some way off; they weren’t hurrying. They were holding hands, talking together, heads close, oblivious to everything else; she could see that even from a distance.

She nearly put the spyglass to her eye, but held back, and returned it to her pocket. There was no need for the glass; she knew what she would see; they would seem to be made of living gold. They would seem the true image of what human beings always could be, once they had come into their inheritance.

The Dust pouring down from the stars had found a living home again, and these children-no-longer-children, saturated with love, were the cause of it all.

THIRTY-SIX

THE BROKEN ARROW

The two dæmons moved through the silent village, in and out of the shadows, padding cat-formed across the moonlit gathering-floor, pausing outside the open door of Mary’s house.

Cautiously they looked inside and saw only the sleeping woman; so they withdrew and moved through the moonlight again, toward the shelter tree.

Its long branches trailed their fragrant corkscrew leaves almost down to the ground. Very slowly, very careful not to rustle a leaf or snap a fallen twig, the two shapes slipped in through the leaf curtain and saw what they were seeking: the boy and the girl, fast asleep in each other’s arms.

They moved closer over the grass and touched the sleepers softly with nose, paw, whiskers, bathing in the life-giving warmth they gave off, but being infinitely careful not to wake them.

As they checked their people (gently cleaning Will’s fast-healing wound, lifting the lock of hair off Lyra’s face), there was a soft sound behind them.

Instantly, in total silence, both dæmons sprang around, becoming wolves: mad light eyes, bare white teeth, menace in every line.

A woman stood there, outlined by the moon. It was not Mary, and when she spoke, they heard her clearly, though her voice made no sound.

“Come with me,” she said.

Pantalaimon’s dæmon heart leapt within him, but he said nothing until he could greet her away from the sleepers under the tree.

“Serafina Pekkala!” he said joyfully. “Where have you been? Do you know what’s happened?”

“Hush. Let’s fly to a place where we can talk,” she said, mindful of the sleeping villagers.

Her branch of cloud-pine lay by the door of Mary’s house, and as she took it up, the two dæmons changed into birds—a nightingale, an owl—and flew with her over the thatched roofs, over the grasslands, over the ridge, and toward the nearest wheel tree grove, as huge as a castle, its crown looking like curds of silver in the moonlight.

There Serafina Pekkala settled on the highest comfortable branch, among the open flowers drinking in the Dust, and the two birds perched nearby.

“You won’t be birds for long,” she said. “Very soon now your shapes will settle. Look around and take this sight into your memory.”

“What will we be?” said Pantalaimon.

“You’ll find out sooner than you think. Listen,” said Serafina Pekkala, “and I’ll tell you some witch-lore that none but witches know. The reason I can do that is that you are here with me, and your humans are down there, sleeping. Who are the only people for whom that is possible?”

“Witches,” said Pantalaimon, “and shamans. So . . .”

“In leaving you both on the shores of the world of the dead, Lyra and Will did something, without knowing it, that witches have done since the first time there were witches. There’s a region of our north land, a desolate, abominable place, where a great catastrophe happened in the childhood of the world, and where nothing has lived since. No dæmons can enter it. To become a witch, a girl must cross it alone and leave her dæmon behind. You know the suffering they must undergo. But having done it, they find that their dæmons were not severed, as in Bolvangar; they are still one whole being; but now they can roam free, and go to far places and see strange things and bring back knowledge.

“And you are not severed, are you?”

“No,” said Pantalaimon. “We are still one. But it was so painful, and we were so frightened . . .”

“Well,” said Serafina, “the two of them will not fly like witches, and they will not live as long as we do; but thanks to what they did, you and they are witch in all but that.”

The two dæmons considered the strangeness of this knowledge.

“Does that mean we shall be birds, like witches’ dæmons?” said Pantalaimon.

“Be patient.”

“And how can Will be a witch? I thought all witches were female.”

“Those two have changed many things. We are all learning new ways, even witches. But one thing hasn’t changed: you must help your humans, not hinder them. You must help them and guide them and encourage them toward wisdom. That’s what dæmons are for.”

They were silent. Serafina turned to the nightingale and said, “What is your name?”

“I have no name. I didn’t know I was born until I was torn away from his heart.”

“Then I shall name you Kirjava.”

“Kirjava,” said Pantalaimon, trying the sound. “What does it mean?”

“Soon you will see what it means. But now,” Serafina went on, “you must listen carefully, because I’m going to tell you what you should do.”

“No,” said Kirjava forcefully.

Serafina said gently, “I can hear from your tone that you know what I’m going to say.”

“We don’t want to hear it!” said Pantalaimon.

“It’s too soon,” said the nightingale. “It’s much too soon.”

Serafina was silent, because she agreed with them, and she felt sorrowful. She was the wisest one there, and she had to guide them to what was right; but she let their agitation subside before she went on.

“Where did you go, in your wanderings?” she said.

“Through many worlds,” said Pantalaimon. “Everywhere we found a window, we went through. There are more windows than we thought.”

“And you saw—”

“Yes,” said Kirjava, “we looked closely, and we saw what was happening.”

“We saw many other things. We met an angel,” said Pantalaimon quickly. “And we saw the world where the little people come from, the Gallivespians. There are big people there, too, who try and kill them.”

They told the witch more of what they’d seen, and they were trying to distract her, and she knew it; but she let them talk, because of the love each one had for the other’s voice.

But eventually they ran out of things to tell her, and they fell silent. The only sound was the gentle, endless whisper of the leaves, until Serafina Pekkala said:

“You have been keeping away from Will and Lyra to punish them. I know why you’re doing that; my Kaisa did just the same after I came through the desolate barrens. But he came to me eventually, because we loved each other still. And they will need you soon to help them do what has to be done next. Because you have to tell them what you know.”

Pantalaimon cried aloud, a pure, cold owl cry, a sound never heard in that world before. In nests and burrows for a long way around, and wherever any small night creature was hunting or grazing or scavenging, a new and unforgettable fear came into being.

Serafina watched from close by, and felt nothing but compassion until she looked at Will’s dæmon, Kirjava the nightingale. She remembered talking to the witch Ruta Skadi, who had asked, after seeing Will only once, if Serafina had looked into his eyes; and Serafina had replied that she had not dared to. This little brown bird was radiating an implacable ferocity as palpable as heat, and Serafina was afraid of it.

Finally Pantalaimon’s wild screaming died away, and Kirjava said:

“And we have to tell them.”

“Yes, you do,” said the witch gently.

Gradually the ferocity left the gaze of the little brown bird, and Serafina could look at her again. She saw a desolate sadness in its place.

“There is a ship coming,” Serafina said. “I left it to fly here and find you. I came with the gyptians, all the way from our world. They will be here in another day or so.”

The two birds sat close, and in a moment they had changed their forms, becoming two doves.

Serafina went on: “This may be the last time you fly. I can see a little ahead; I can see that you will both be able to climb this high as long as there are trees this size; but I think you will not be birds when your forms settle. Take in all that you can, and remember it well. I know that you and Lyra and Will are going to think hard and painfully, and I know you will make the best choice. But it is yours to make, and no one else’s.”

They didn’t speak. She took her branch of cloud-pine and lifted away from the towering treetops, circling high above, feeling on her skin the coolness of the breeze and the tingle of the starlight and the benevolent sifting of that Dust she had never seen.

She flew down to the village once more and went silently into the woman’s house. She knew nothing about Mary except that she came from the same world as Will, and that her part in the events was crucial. Whether she was fierce or friendly, Serafina had no way of telling; but she had to wake Mary up without startling her, and there was a spell for that.

She sat on the floor at the woman’s head and watched through half-closed eyes, breathing in and out in time with her. Presently her half-vision began to show her the pale forms that Mary was seeing in her dreams, and she adjusted her mind to resonate with them, as if she were tuning a string. Then with a further effort Serafina herself stepped in among them. Once she was there, she could speak to Mary, and she did so with the instant easy affection that we sometimes feel for people we meet in dreams.

A moment later they were talking together in a murmured rush of which Mary later remembered nothing, and walking through a silly landscape of reed beds and electrical transformers. It was time for Serafina to take charge.

“In a few moments,” she said, “you’ll wake up. Don’t be alarmed. You’ll find me beside you. I’m waking you like this so you’ll know it’s quite safe and there’s nothing to hurt you. And then we can talk properly.”

She withdrew, taking the dream-Mary with her, until she found herself in the house again, cross-legged on the earthen floor, with Mary’s eyes glittering as they looked at her.

“You must be the witch,” Mary whispered.

“I am. My name is Serafina Pekkala. What are you called?”

“Mary Malone. I’ve never been woken so quietly. Am I awake?”

“Yes. We must talk together, and dream talk is hard to control, and harder to remember. It’s better to talk awake. Do you prefer to stay inside, or will you walk with me in the moonlight?”

“I’ll come,” said Mary, sitting up and stretching. “Where are the others?”

“Asleep under the tree.”

They moved out of the house and past the tree with its curtain of all-concealing leaves, and walked down to the river.

Mary watched Serafina Pekkala with a mixture of wariness and admiration: she had never seen a human form so slender and graceful. She seemed younger than Mary herself, though Lyra had said she was hundreds of years old; the only hint of age came in her expression, which was full of a complicated sadness.

They sat on the bank over the silver-black water, and Serafina told her that she had spoken to the children’s dæmons.

“They went looking for them today,” Mary said, “but something else happened. Will’s never seen his dæmon. He didn’t know for certain that he had one.”

“Well, he has. And so have you.”

Mary stared at her.

“If you could see him,” Serafina went on, “you would see a black bird with red legs and a bright yellow beak, slightly curved. A bird of the mountains.”

“An Alpine chough . . . How can you see him?”

“With my eyes half-closed, I can see him. If we had time, I could teach you to see him, too, and to see the dæmons of others in your world. It’s strange for us to think you can’t see them.”

Then she told Mary what she had said to the dæmons, and what it meant.

“And the dæmons will have to tell them?” Mary said.

“I thought of waking them to tell them myself. I thought of telling you and letting you have the responsibility. But I saw their dæmons, and I knew that would be best.”

“They’re in love.”

“I know.”

“They’ve only just discovered it . . .”

Mary tried to take in all the implications of what Serafina had told her, but it was too hard.

After a minute or so Mary said, “Can you see Dust?”

“No, I’ve never seen it, and until the wars began, we had never heard of it.”

Mary took the spyglass from her pocket and handed it to the witch. Serafina put it to her eye and gasped.

“
That
is Dust . . . It’s beautiful!”

“Turn to look back at the shelter tree.”

Serafina did and exclaimed again. “
They
did this?” she said.

“Something happened today, or yesterday if it’s after midnight,” Mary said, trying to find the words to explain, and remembering her vision of the Dust flow as a great river like the Mississippi. “Something tiny but crucial . . . If you wanted to divert a mighty river into a different course, and all you had was a single pebble, you could do it, as long as you put the pebble in the right place to send the first trickle of water
that
way instead of
this.
Something like that happened yesterday. I don’t know what it was. They saw each other differently, or something . . . Until then, they hadn’t felt like that, but suddenly they did. And then the Dust was attracted to them, very powerfully, and it stopped flowing the other way.”

“So that was how it was to happen!” said Serafina, marveling. “And now it’s safe, or it will be when the angels fill the great chasm in the underworld.”

She told Mary about the abyss, and about how she herself had found out.

“I was flying high,” she explained, “looking for a landfall, and I met an angel: a female angel. She was very strange; she was old and young together,” she went on, forgetting that that was how she herself appeared to Mary. “Her name was Xaphania. She told me many things . . . She said that all the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity. She and the rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed. She gave me many examples from my world.”

“I can think of many from mine.”

“And for most of that time, wisdom has had to work in secret, whispering her words, moving like a spy through the humble places of the world while the courts and palaces are occupied by her enemies.”

“Yes,” said Mary, “I recognize that, too.”

“And the struggle isn’t over now, though the forces of the Kingdom have met a setback. They’ll regroup under a new commander and come back strongly, and we must be ready to resist.”