The Rose Field, page 24
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Who is he? When did you see him before?”
“Two years ago in Bucharest. Then he called himself Dumitriu.”
“Did he know you? D’you think he’ll recognize you now?”
He shook his head. “No reason why he should. We never spoke then.”
“How did you know he was a Magisterium agent?”
“In Bucharest I saw him passing some papers to a man I knew was from the Magisterium. Later I saw them together with a third man. He was not being careful, which is why I noticed him.”
“Perhaps you’d better not go to your seat again. Stay in here.”
“No, Miss Silver. I can watch him from my seat. In about one hour we stop for ten minutes. I shall watch him especially then. You have your little stick?”
“Right here.”
“If you have to use it, strike him very hard.”
He listened at the door and then left and closed it quietly.
“Well,” Lyra said.
“It’s a bit strange,” said Asta. “I’d have thought we were moving out of the reach of the Magisterium. The Angelus bell, for one thing.”
“I didn’t really understand that.”
“It was one of the things that Calvin forbade when he became Pope. The last Pope. The Magisterium’s control has always been so complete that little flickers of dissent used to be put out at once. And in Pisidia, the murders at the rose growers’ meeting…Of course, you don’t know about that; we’re still catching up with each other.”
She told Lyra about the meeting in the theater and the attack by the men from the mountains, and how Malcolm had killed their leader.
“He just—killed him?”
“The man had already killed an innocent rose grower, and they would have killed more. It was the best thing to do. The only thing, really. It stopped everything in its tracks.”
“Has Malcolm…killed many people?”
“He killed one to keep you alive.”
“Oh…Bonneville. Yes.”
Lyra put her hand on the stick, Pequeno, and remembered Farder Coram saying that if good people wanted to defeat evil ones, they would have to be unscrupulous. Perhaps being unscrupulous might include killing people, sometimes. It wasn’t easy to think about.
She gathered together the Myriorama cards and then drew one out at random. It showed a young woman walking, as if lost in thought, along the bank of a river where a boy was fishing.
Asta saw what she was looking at. “Well, what does that mean?” she said.
“I suppose…that’s me, and the boy is Malcolm, and…”
“What’s he hoping to catch?”
“Truth. It’s the river of time. Truth is elusive, like a fish.”
“You’re making it up.”
“It’s true enough,” Lyra said.
OS to MP
In haste—bad news. I was betrayed, but they won’t find this. No more from me though for now. Straighten up and fly right.
Godwin
Fifteen
An Island in the Flood
Malcolm and Pan were at the worktable in their quarters. They had an oil light burning on the table because the sky was dark with heavy restless clouds, and gusts of wind made the shutters shake and the lamp flame shiver. Malcolm, a rug around his shoulders for warmth, was making progress with the alethiometer; he had taken the mechanism out, with great difficulty because the case was so distorted, and he was surprised to find it quite uncomplicated. The three wheels were connected to the three hands on the dial with simple gears that were luckily still intact. He could find no mechanism that moved the needle, but since the needle was missing, the matter was irrelevant for the moment.
“When she moved the hands,” he said to Pan, “did the needle move at all?”
“No. It just sort of hung there. If the glass hadn’t been there, it looked as if you could just blow on it and it would turn around. It only moved when she thought about the question and when the hands were in the right positions to ask it. Then it looked as if—well, it looked as if it moved all by itself, without any machinery. It didn’t wobble or drift or swing loose. It always looked alive to us, the way a clock doesn’t look alive. Is there no mechanism for it?”
“No. It seems to have swung freely. Maybe there’s something missing, but I can’t even see a place for any missing mechanism to go. Is there a piece of silk in the cedar chest? A scarf, a shawl, something like that?”
Pan jumped into the chest and rummaged among the things there. “Here you are. Black too, like the cloth Lyra always used to wrap it in.” He leapt back up to the table.
“I’m going to keep the mechanism aside,” Malcolm explained, wrapping it carefully in the cloth. “Not mention it to the Queen. It’s not gold, so she wouldn’t be interested anyway. Later on I’ll study it more closely, but for the moment—”
“Look,” said Pan. “Words again.”
He was looking at the resonating lodestone, which was lying next to the tools on the table. Glenys Godwin’s words were appearing as they watched. Malcolm picked it up, and Pan came to perch next to his arm and read it under the lamplight.
“ ‘Betrayed…’ ” Malcolm read aloud. “That’s bad. Damn it! If she had time to write this, she must have got away, but…And here I am stuck on a bloody mountain. ‘Straighten up and fly right’? What’s that mean?”
“It’s a song about a buzzard and a monkey. She must mean us and the gryphons.”
“She’s going to pass her stone on to someone else. I hope to hell she manages to…”
Malcolm closed his eyes. His temples were throbbing, and he could sense the anbaric crackle and flicker just under the threshold of perception that often announced the appearance of the spangled ring, his migraine aurora, as he’d once thought it was called. Perhaps it was because they were so high on the mountain, but the pressure of the atmosphere seemed to have dropped rapidly.
Then Pan said, “There’s a storm coming.”
He’d jumped up onto the parapet, where the wind raised his fur with invisible fingers. Malcolm joined him, wrapping the rug around himself against the bitter cold, and watched as clouds like mountains darkened and loomed over the high horizon, and theatrical beams of sunlight flared and burst free for a few moments to touch this snowy summit or that one so that they glared and vanished like signal lights.
A powerful blast of wind reached their eyrie, shockingly sudden, and threatened to topple Pan from the balustrade. Malcolm’s hand reached out at once and held him for a moment, and then he took it away. Neither of them mentioned it.
Lightning, with a thousand forks and rivulets, lashed the black air ahead of them; and three seconds later the thunder exploded, making the mountains ring with echoes and shaking the very substance of the earth. Pan usually loved storms, and Malcolm enjoyed them too, as long as he was not on the water in a boat, and the immense mass of Damāvand should have been a mighty enough shelter. But they both felt the walls of their little room shudder and tremble when the next roll of thunder came, this time simultaneously with the dazzle of the lightning.
“What are they doing?” Pan cried, and he had to cry out or not be heard at all, because a monsoon’s worth of rain had begun to pelt the mountain, with the sound of a hundred thousand hooves on hard ground.
“What? Who?” Malcolm shouted back, trying to see where Pan was pointing.
“Gryphons! Flying out into the storm!”
“Where? Oh, yes—five or six of them—surely they can’t fly in this—”
But they were, struggling, beating their massive wings, surging up only to drop suddenly as if into an abyss, and then beating their way up again, like swimmers in a stormy sea, fighting with every breath and heartbeat.
“Where are they going?” Pan shouted.
It wasn’t unusual to see them flying around the mountain, keeping watch, or bearing messages, or bringing news from the outer kingdom, but it was unexpected to see them risking their lives—as they must have been—in such a storm as this. Malcolm and Pan shaded their eyes from the dashing rain and followed the unsteady flight of the five or so gryphons past the cliffs and chasms of the storm, which had grown from a local darkening of the air to a vast convulsion in a matter of minutes.
Most of the light they saw by came from the frequent explosions of lightning, but from time to time a great rent would appear in the clouds, and as if from another planet a beam of sunlight would strike down into the roiling mass of vapor and darkness. It was in the light of one such beam that Malcolm saw another figure, much smaller than the gryphons, speeding forward through the storm, making for the mountain, dropping down only to be borne up again on a wild current of air, sliding sideways and darting through the turbulence like a minnow in a stream.
“Look!” Malcolm shouted over the screaming of the wind.
In the same moment Pan saw, and cried, “A witch! A witch!”
Malcolm strained his eyes, frowning, squinting against the wind, dashing the rain away from his eyes.
“Yes—I can see her now—they’re going to attack her!”
The five or so gryphons were struggling in the air at least as much as the witch, because their great wings were more easily caught by the savage gusts of wind than the little figure on her cloud-pine branch, who was speeding like a swallow through the gulfs and canyons of the sky.
But they were powerful. She was riding on the storm, but they were smashing through it. And she was in their sights; she was their target.
“One of them…” said Pan, and Malcolm held his breath, because the first gryphon had flown close enough to reach out a claw and slash at her; but he had to rear back in the air to do it, and a gust of wind caught him and threw him aside. The witch was reaching for something behind her shoulder—they could only see by the flashes of lightning—and then she had a bow in her hands, and shot an arrow at the next gryphon to rear up close.
He fell back. They could hear his scream of rage and pain, and then he fell, spiraling downwards towards a pinnacle of rock and smashing into it with a force they could almost feel.
Pan was clutching Malcolm’s arm, and neither of them knew it. Instead, all the force of their attention was focused on the little figure of the witch, swooping up and diving down again to avoid the slashing claws of the gryphons, who were enraged now. Arrow after arrow she shot, and most of them sailed harmlessly away in the wind; but another one found its target in the throat of a gryphon who tried to dive on her from above. Screaming, he lost control of his flight and just missed her as he fell.
She twisted out of the way but then found the remaining gryphons closing in, and dropped her bow to seize the pine branch in both hands and wrench it up towards the summit—towards their window, with its glowing light—towards the parapet, with the three gryphons straining up after her, buffeted and bowled sideways but always behind her, always surging up, their mighty wings striking at the air and slamming it behind them, their eagle beaks wide to tear the flesh that was so close—
“This way! This way!” Pan cried, and Malcolm reached out over the precipice, clinging to the parapet, calling with Pan, and the witch was nearly close enough to grab his hand. Just below, just behind, those glaring eyes, monstrous and inhuman, and screams and roars of fury—
“Take my hand! Now!” Malcolm shouted, hurling his voice into the wind, and seized her outstretched right hand, pulling her up and over the parapet as the first gryphon reared up and snatched at the balustrade with giant claws, lion claws, but they slipped and lost their grip in the lashing rain, and the massive creature was blown aside by a rush of air as heavy as a tidal wave.
The witch and Malcolm both fell to the floor, and Pan caught her slender pine branch as the wind lifted it, and dragged it over the parapet and into the quiet of the room.
Malcolm’s wound was hurting badly: he had wrenched his hip as he pulled the witch to safety. He struggled up and turned to help her.
He was thinking: A witch…Such a strange being. He’d never been so close—never even seen…
But he had. Out of the darkness of time, in all this urgency, a memory came: and there it was. All those years ago: the baby Lyra in the canoe asleep in Alice’s arms, Pan as a dormouse curled up between the paws of Alice’s dog dæmon Ben, the battered Belle Sauvage tied up and rocking softly, Malcolm exhausted but awake on the little island under the moon with the great flood sweeping blackly onwards all around them; and standing only a few feet away, the slender haughty figure of the woman from the far north, the delicate coronet of flowers around her hair, the branch of cloud-pine on the rocks at her feet: Tilda Vasara, queen of the witches in the—what region was it?
“Tilda Vasara? Is it you? Have I got your name right?”
She was drenched with rain, her hair was disordered, her black garments clung to her body; and she looked not a day older than the young woman whose beauty had dazed the little boy who’d come through the flood, even to the little coronet of yellow flowers around her head. He struggled up and gave her his hand, and then they both looked at the window, at which the gryphons were still flying and screaming and beating their wings.
He helped her up, and then went to lean out and close the shutters, ignoring the great creatures still scrabbling on the wet stone of the parapet. Pan took hold of one heavy curtain in his teeth and pulled it across, and Malcolm closed the other, so the sounds outside faded a little.
“I didn’t expect you to forget,” said the witch.
“No, I wouldn’t forget. Nor shall I forget this. Why have you come here?”
“To speak with the Queen. Once I knew that you were here, I thought my mission had a chance of success.”
“How did you know we were here?”
“My dæmon saw you on the back of the gryphon prince.”
Another memory: the Arctic tern he’d seen high in the sky above as dawn broke over Mount Damāvand—linked to a different memory: the white bird dæmon whispering to Alice’s Ben as he guarded the baby Lyra in the canoe.
“Where is he now?”
“Above the storm.”
Malcolm pushed back his hair, which was trailing over his forehead and dripping into his eyes. He took a deep breath.
“Will you sit down?” he said. “We can offer you a chair, or those furs. Are you cold?”
“Never cold, but thank you. The furs will do.”
She sat down, as she seemed to do everything, gracefully. Malcolm the man had a more complicated response to her than Malcolm the boy; even in this time of astonishment and his continuing sense of great danger, he couldn’t be unaware of her pale smooth skin, the supple muscles of her arms and shoulders, the way the wet silk clung to her flanks and her thighs. Put it out of your mind, he thought, permanently.
“Why do you want to talk to the Queen?” said Pantalaimon.
“I want her help for my people, and I want her to accept our help in return. I want to know if they are aware of the danger that faces all the people of the air.”
“They didn’t seem very keen to welcome you,” said Malcolm.
“Something is happening to make them fearful. In normal times we take no notice of them, and they of us. Our realms hardly touch. We have different concerns and different interests.”
Malcolm thought that he’d written almost exactly those words to Glenys Godwin only a day or so before. “But what’s happened to change that?” he said.
“The winds are failing. The air is bad. This will affect us all, and we need to talk about it.”
“The air is bad?” said Pan. “But it seems…And the wind outside is as strong as ever, surely?”
“Other winds. This will take some time to explain, and by the time—”
A loud knocking thundered at the door, almost drowning the storm outside.
“Let me speak,” said Malcolm to the witch. “Don’t say a word till we’re in the presence of the Queen.”
He opened the door wide and stood on the threshold. The vizier and three guards made as if to enter, but before they could move more than a step, Malcolm said firmly, “Why are you treating Queen Tilda Vasara, my guest, with such discourtesy?”
“She has shot and killed two of my guards!”
“And do you blame her? She came here in peace, to seek an audience with your Queen on a matter of profound importance to all the people of the air, and you send out a squadron of warriors to attack and kill her! Of course she defended herself. Now take us to Queen Shahrnavāz at once, and behave with the proper courtesy.”
The vizier was speechless. He didn’t move. Malcolm turned back to the witch and offered his hand to help her up; she got to her feet with that incomparable grace and took the cloud-pine branch that Pan held out for her as if it were a scepter. She was as much a queen as Shahrnavāz, and the vizier could see it. He stood aside for them to walk ahead of him, and all three proceeded without any haste into the corridor and towards the great chamber: the witch in the center, with Malcolm and Pan on either side of her.
As they went, they could hear voices raised in the chamber and beyond, and the sound of running feet, and the ringing of a deep gong some way off. The storm was still raging outside: even inside the mountain they could hear the howling of the wind and the crash of thunder.
“Where is your realm?” Malcolm said to the witch very quietly, and she replied, “Lake Onega.”
He nodded. The gryphon voices were raised in argument or command, as if they were debating something furiously. Malcolm hadn’t heard them speaking among themselves, and was curious about their language, but there was no time to think about that, for they had nearly arrived in the great chamber.
One good sign, he thought: the carpet had been laid. This was an occasion of state. They were not likely to be put to death just yet.
