The Rose Field, page 19
“She…It was…” Pan was finding it difficult to speak.
“It’s all right. You don’t have to tell me.”
“No, but…It was foretold?”
“That’s what the Master said. I don’t know if the alethiometer can foretell things exactly, but…”
“More like a sort of likelihood, or possibility, perhaps…Lyra asked Dr. Relf that once. But not in connection with…We never knew anything about that. About the betrayal prediction.”
“Would it have made a difference, just before you left? When you were quarreling?”
“Yes, I think…I don’t know. Oh, probably. But if it was something she had to do, to keep a promise…”
“I think if it was like that, it wouldn’t count as a betrayal.”
“Did he say anything else? The Master?”
“He told me not to take my failure to teach her—teach you—personally.”
“We both knew she was behaving badly. We were very unhappy about that, and about other things…There was a boy we’d come across, in…We never told you about other worlds, did we?”
“No,” said Malcolm. “I’d hoped she might tell me things like that, one day, if…”
“If I hadn’t gone away.”
“Well, yes.”
“She would. She was getting to like you, a lot. But the boy, Will. Will Parry. He came from a world like ours, but very different. He didn’t know he had a dæmon, at first. She and Will, they went somewhere I wasn’t allowed to go, into the world of the dead, and it must have been just as painful for him because his dæmon couldn’t go there either, and she—I—his dæmon sort of appeared, sort of came to herself on the edge of the world of the dead, and there was only me there…I had to teach her everything. We comforted each other. I don’t know, I’d have gone mad with fear and loneliness if it hadn’t been for…But Lyra didn’t go there on a whim. She had to. She’d made a promise to rescue someone and she was keeping the promise, and it was just that to do so she had to leave me behind. It was horrible, horrible for us both. But I had Will’s dæmon and she had Will himself, so we weren’t quite alone. Anyway, at the end, we found that he had to go back to his own world, and we had to say goodbye. Forever. So part of her and me will always be in love with them, and they’re out of reach forever. She didn’t tell the Master that, and she hasn’t told anyone else ever. You’re the only person who knows…”
The little voice was muffled. He didn’t finish the sentence. Malcolm was powerfully curious, but nothing would make him pry.
“I think we should have told the Master,” Pan said eventually. “About what happened, and why. It might have meant that we could talk to each other about it.”
“Didn’t you?”
“Not properly. Hardly at all, really. It was just so difficult.”
“Well, when we find her…”
“D’you think we will?”
“I’m determined we will.”
A minute went by, and then another. Then Malcolm went on, “When we find her, we’ll talk about everything.”
“Good.”
“The Master told me something else.”
“What was that?”
“About me, actually. Something I didn’t know. He said that something I did—something I’d done—when I was young would determine the whole course of my life.”
“What was it? What did you do?”
“It was when Alice and I took Lyra and you away on the river in La Belle Sauvage. In my canoe. To keep you safe.”
“Did the Master know that from the alethiometer?”
“He didn’t say. But I don’t take it very seriously. Every decision we make, anything we do, anything at all, determines what’ll happen after it.”
“But some consequences are bigger than others.”
“Well, yes. But I was also skeptical because…We don’t like to think that things can be foretold. We prefer to think we’re free. So I resisted believing what the Master said about that, because it seemed to bind me into a future I hadn’t chosen.”
“To bind you to Alice?”
That came as a shock.
“Bind me to Jordan College,” Malcolm said carefully.
They flew on. Malcolm could smell something different in the air, something cold and clean, possibly snow. The night was just at that point when the darkness was full of little momentary swirling points of slightly-less-darkness, not even anything like the first gray of dawn, but perhaps the closest we come to seeing individual photons. The dark was leaching out of the sky; above them, a thousand brilliant points of starlight were being absorbed into the greater background luminosity of the dawn. Malcolm let his mind spread out beyond his senses, and he heard Pan whisper, or thought he did, and he thought he answered, but he had no idea what either of them said. In his semi-dream state he saw a bird high above them: a white bird with sharply angled wings, maybe an Arctic tern, a great traveler on its annual migration.
Then, with a suddenness that was almost audible, the first rays of the sun struck them. They were flying directly towards it, and in the dazzle Malcolm felt as if he were actually inside one of his auroras, as he called them, the spangled ring grown sky-sized and all-enveloping.
The gryphon’s wings stopped beating, and the regular, tireless up-and-forward muscular thrust stilled to a level glide. Malcolm lifted himself up a little and looked out and down to a wild landscape of mountains and jagged ridges and dark valleys, snow-covered, still in the shadow of night; but as he looked, the sun climbed higher and touched the very topmost peaks, so they blazed like a hundred fires.
From somewhere close in the sky another gryphon cried, a scream that was nearly a roar, and was answered by several others from further away; and then Prince Keshvād himself uttered a scream that was louder and longer than all the rest, shaking his body so powerfully that Malcolm’s hands instinctively gripped the great feathers, and clung even tighter as the gryphon tilted slightly to the left.
“Look!” said Pan. He slipped out of Malcolm’s coat and stood upright, staring ahead past the gryphon’s head, his face brilliant in the sun.
Directly ahead of them a mountain reared higher than all the rest, entirely covered in snow, majestic and sharp-peaked and symmetrical. Around them in the dawn sky the other gryphons were making their way towards it with them, like a squadron of great ships, an armada, borne on the wind towards the palace of Shahrnavāz.
* * *
—
The battery in the little anbaric truck was fully charged: good for a hundred miles on a decent road, Alice thought. Whether they could make it to a decent road was another matter. Bashing along a footpath in the woods, forcing its way past bushes and through streams, was taking up a lot of energy.
From time to time she stopped, and she and Ben listened hard for the sounds of any pursuit, but heard nothing and moved on.
“We’ll have to leave it before long,” said Ben.
“Dunno about ‘before long.’ Best to get as far as the battery’ll take us.”
“Yeah, but it’s not as if we’re going to be very hard to follow. There’s only one path, and we’re on it. And they’ll know where the path leads. They could be waiting at the end for us to turn up.”
“Hmm,” she said. “What d’you suggest, then?”
“Leave it on the path to block it, then…”
She stopped the truck. She’d heard something. He turned his head to catch what it was.
“Voices,” she whispered. “Two men. Up ahead.”
He could hear them too.
“Out,” she whispered. “Over that way, quick.”
She indicated left, where the undergrowth was thick. Leaving the key in the ignition, she slipped out of the cab and moved as quietly as she could into the bushes until she was just out of sight of the truck, and then lay down, pulling a low branch across in front of her. Beside her Ben lay down too, and they kept perfectly still while the voices approached.
“Hey, what’s that truck doing there?”
“The key’s still in it. Look.”
“What’s in the back?”
“Spade, rake…bucket, bag of gravel…”
“Mending potholes. Why’d they leave it here?”
“Maybe someone nicked it.”
Alice heard the truck door opening.
“Well…” said the first voice. “What d’you reckon?”
“Can’t leave it here. Blocking the path, innit?”
“Might as well…Go on, jump in.”
More door noises, some scraping of branches, a startled laugh as the little truck lurched forward, the sound of wheels moving away on rough ground, and then silence again.
“Now what?” said Ben.
“Now we find a road and beg a lift.”
Alice crawled fastidiously from the bushes and brushed herself down. Ben was sniffing the air and listening hard.
“That way,” he said, indicating a direction left of the path.
“How far?”
“Twenty minutes if we don’t stop.”
“Not much to stop for. Come on, then.”
And thirty-five minutes later, they were in a van heading for Oxford.
* * *
—
A palace for the queen of creatures who could fly would not squat heavily on the ground, even when that ground was fifteen thousand feet in the sky. Terraces, colonnades, arches, ledges, balconies, bridges, beacon platforms, dizzying cliff-like rock faces studded with graceful caverns, broad elegant walkways, spires and pinnacles both natural and artificial, all grew like an icy immensity of ancient coral over the peak of the mountain. As Prince Keshvād wheeled and turned in the sky before landing, Malcolm could see the extent of the gryphons’ achievement, and two details caught his eye: firstly, every structure was functional, none merely decorative; and secondly, nowhere, in the whole massive complexity towering into the thin air above every other mountain in the range, was there a single guardrail or protective wall. It was not built for creatures who feared heights.
And it was busy. Work was going on. Gryphons, and other flying creatures too, were coming and going like bees, whether carrying things or not Malcolm couldn’t tell; a section of the mountain was being hollowed out, or so it seemed, with the sound of massive hammers beating, though there was nothing to see behind an immense buttress of snow and ice and rock that led down for thousands of feet from the summit. Other gryphons, wearing plumes of scarlet on their eagle heads, leapt off the palace ledges and soared up high towards the incoming flight, screaming a welcome that sounded like a challenge. Yet more formed themselves into ranks on the broadest terrace on the eastern side of the mountain, in the full blaze of the rising sun, and stood fierce and still.
Down towards them Prince Keshvād glided, and then beat his mighty wings inwards to slow his flight, and extended his lion forepaws to meet the ground. Malcolm clung firmly to the lion fur on the gryphon’s back as they landed, and with Pan holding on to his coat, he raised himself stiffly as the prince came to a halt.
“Remember,” Pan whispered, “be gold.”
Malcolm’s hip was burning with pain, but he managed to step down to the rocky floor without stumbling. The first thing he did then was to move around to face the prince, and then bow as low as he could, hoping the gesture would convey the proper degree of respect and appreciation. The gryphon’s face wasn’t formed to express any human feeling; Malcolm had to hope that the stiff, impassive ferocity glaring back at him would understand his courtesy. It was rather like trying to communicate with a coat of arms. Then the gryphon prince bowed his head in response.
And there was Gulya herself, shaking with fatigue, but eager to explain and mediate.
“Pantalaimon, Mr. Malcolm, the official who is coming out of the mountain now is the vizier to Her Majesty. You address him as ‘Your Honor.’ He will escort you at once to the Throne Room, where the Queen will—”
Pan said, “Wait. Too fast. We are not prisoners, nor are we supplicants to be told what to do.”
The vizier, a silver-feathered gryphon with the bearing of a dignified councillor of state, had come close enough to hear. He stood nearby and listened as Pan continued. Malcolm was impressed by the little dæmon’s effrontery, but the gryphons were all gazing at him and not at Pan, as the morning sun shone full in his face.
Pan went on, “We are honored guests from the realms of gold. Before we meet the Queen we must have time to clean ourselves and rest from the rigors of the journey. We are hungry and thirsty. Once we are refreshed we shall be glad to bring our greetings in person to Her Majesty.”
The vizier bowed his head. “There is a suite of rooms prepared for you,” he said. “We do have traffic with the human world, and ambassadors from every realm of any importance are received here. You are most welcome to all the comforts and necessities we can provide. May we know, to begin with, how we are to address you?”
“My name is Malcolm. That will do. My companion and adviser is Pan.”
The vizier inclined his head, and turned to lead the way into the mountain. Gulya hurried to walk alongside Pan, and they both followed Malcolm.
It wasn’t possible to see how the gryphons, with their lion claws, could have carved these tunnels or excavated the great caverns they led to. Malcolm was eager to know—he was eager to ask a thousand questions—but the grave and solemn vizier didn’t seem the right person to ask.
A long, wide stone passageway, smooth underfoot but with rugged walls, lit at intervals by naphtha lamps on brackets, led to a great gallery open at one side to the sky, its roof supported by pillars carved out of the rock. It might have been a room for ceremonies or great occasions of state, Malcolm thought, because of the splendor of the proportions and the calm austerity of the bare rock walls, the ice-fringed gallery, and the blue sky beyond. Around the walls were half a dozen alcoves cut in the rock, in which fires were burning—fires that seemed to come directly out of the substance of the mountain, and to burn something invisible: not wood, not coal.
Malcolm was intensely curious, and wanted to know more, but the vizier moved on, and led them down a smaller passage set with similar alcoves and smaller fires, to a doorway, and a surprise. A man, a human being wearing a simple white robe and a turban, stood beside the door, bowing. His desert-rat dæmon hid behind his leg.
Gulya said something quickly to the vizier, who inclined his head to Malcolm—still not looking him in the face—and withdrew.
“This man is your servant,” Gulya said. “His name is Darius. He will supply anything you need. He will not speak, because his tongue was removed, but he can hear and understand your language.”
Darius opened the door, which was made of heavy wood, perfectly jointed and hung, but plain and undecorated.
Malcolm and Pan went in, but Gulya waited on the threshold.
“I shall escort you to the Queen when you are ready,” she said. She added something in her own language to Darius, and then left. He bowed and shut the door after she’d gone.
“Darius, do you understand me when I speak like this?” Malcolm said.
The servant nodded. He was about fifty years old, Malcolm thought, lean, scarred, and melancholy. His dæmon was hiding her head away, unwilling to communicate.
“Are you a captive of the gryphons?” Malcolm asked.
Darius shook his head.
“You’re a free man, then?”
The servant shook his head again, but more slowly. His situation was too complex for yes-no answers; Malcolm thought he’d return to it later.
He looked around. The room was very simply furnished: a chair, a table, and a neat pile of furs and animal skins on the floor for a bed. Everything was clean, though, and the chair and table were skillfully made from a wood that Malcolm didn’t recognize: perhaps a kind of maple. On the table there was an oil lamp, a dish of grapes and apples, and a jug of water with two fine glasses.
The air was cold, but a small fire was burning in an alcove—another fire with no fuel.
“Darius, what is burning in there?” Malcolm said.
The servant gestured all around, as if to imply it was the mountain itself that was on fire.
“The rock? The earth?”
Darius nodded, and pointed emphatically to the floor.
“The fire comes from under the earth?”
Another nod.
The one opening in the wall was set with glazed windows, with a heavy curtain that could be pulled across to keep the worst drafts out. The windows gave on to a view over the whole mountain range. Darius beckoned, and Malcolm looked where he pointed, and saw little fires on the flanks of other mountains nearby.
“The whole world’s aflame,” said Pan. “But it’s all under control.”
“Is there somewhere I can wash?” Malcolm asked.
Darius turned and gestured for Malcolm to follow. In the next room there was a marble basin, into which a trickle of water was flowing constantly, to drain out into a pipe through the floor.
“Thank you, Darius. Could you come back in fifteen minutes, and then we shall be glad to meet the Queen.”
The servant bowed and left.
“They like their visitors to be cold but clean,” Malcolm said when he came back from the bathroom.
“Look, there’s a wooden chest in the corner.”
“So there is—I hadn’t noticed that.”
The chest was plainly constructed, and made of cedar. As he lifted the lid, Malcolm smelled the fragrance, and inhaled it deeply, transported at once back to the workshop of Mr. Taphouse, the handyman at Godstow Priory, when he was helping the old man make a cupboard for the vestments worn at special ceremonies.
