The Rose Field, page 54
“Anyway, it wasn’t actually Rusakov who discovered it,” Malcolm said.
“Really?”
“He wasn’t a true scientist—he was a lackey for the Muscovite government. It was discovered by a colleague of his, and Rusakov claimed the credit.”
“Cheat! Then he shouldn’t have a field named after him. It should be called the Rose Field.”
“All right, the Rose Field it is. From now on.”
“But we still need to know about Dust.”
“What did your Ionides say about it?”
She shifted her position and sat up. “He’s not my Ionides. He’s a scholar as well as a servant and a vagabond. He’ll have his own answer…I can’t guess what it would be, but it would clarify things a bit. Like he did with the field idea for the secret commonwealth.”
“Come to think of it…He did tell me something. Under an orange tree in Aleppo. He said the Rusakov field was…How did he put it? Associated with consciousness. We’ll ask him to tell us more, if we ever see him again.”
“Oh, we’ll see him again. He’s immortal.”
Malcolm ran his hand through his hair. The sunlight lay across his face, and lit up the golden bristles on his chin and cheeks.
“D’you want a bit more coat?” Lyra said.
“No, I’m fine, thanks.”
His eyelashes were golden too, she noticed. He turned his face away from the blazing sun, and saw her watching him, and smiled.
“Lyra,” he said, “why did Pan say he was going to look for your imagination, d’you think? Why was it that in particular he thought was missing?”
“Perhaps he was right. Perhaps I had lost it. I was reading a couple of books that he hated…They both disparaged it in different ways.”
“Simon Talbot? The Something Pretender?”
“The Constant Deceiver. Yes, he was one. He made me feel sick, as if there was nothing solid underfoot.”
“And you say that, while flying through the air on the back of a gryphon!”
“I know. I can’t think what he’d make of this. He’d have to deny his own senses. The other book was by Gottfried Brande.”
“The Hyperchorasmians. I couldn’t read it.”
“The Hypercolonics, as Pan called it.” She smiled. “He was right about those books, and I just didn’t listen to him. They were both…iniquitous.”
She looked down. She was sitting cross-legged, with her hands entwined in her lap. She opened them and looked at her left hand, the palm and the back, still swollen, still bruised, and then at her right. That was just grubby. She put them together again.
“I wonder what he thinks now,” said Malcolm.
“Pan? I’m not sure,” she said. “But it must have something to do with those openings. Maybe the imagination is a sort of wind that blows through all the worlds.”
Malcolm looked out to left and right. “It’s a good image,” he said.
“It sometimes feels like that. As if it’s true. It shows us true things.”
Lyra looked at her hands again. There was something she wanted to say, and it would only come if she tried hard and honestly to find it.
“We haven’t been in the same place, me and you, with enough time, before now,” she said after a moment. “There’s so much I haven’t told you. These openings…For me they have a complicated meaning. I’ve seen them being opened. You had to cut them with a special knife. I met a boy from another world, a boy called Will, and he and I found ourselves in the city where the subtle knife was made. He had to fight someone who’d stolen it…He didn’t want to; the whole story is too long to tell, even here, even now. But he had to, and he became the knife-bearer, and the old man who had been a previous knife-bearer told him how to cut through the air and open another world, and how to close it again. So in order to escape from danger we did that, and I’ve been in I don’t know how many different worlds, all right here, as close as this”—and she swept her hand through the air, like Serafina Pekkala’s goose dæmon sweeping his wing to illustrate the same thing ten years before—“and we can’t reach them except with the subtle knife.”
“Where’s the knife now?”
“With Will, in his own world. Unreachable. We were warned by an angel, when it was all nearly over, that it was dangerous to open other worlds, because bad things came out of the gaps between one world and another. She said we had to close all the windows we knew about and any others we found, and live only in our own worlds, because we could only be strong and healthy in our own worlds. We had to be content where we were. We couldn’t travel to other worlds, except in our imagination. We didn’t know what she meant by that, but we believed everything she said, and went back to our own worlds, and…Years went by. And then a few months ago Pan and I quarreled and that made him think my imagination had left me, or I’d lost it, or something. So he went to look for it. And I was left to wonder whether he was right, or whether he was mistaken, and what the imagination was anyway, and what the angel had meant…And that’s why I set off to follow him, wherever he went.”
Malcolm was silent, sitting still, listening closely.
“And just a few nights ago,” she went on, “on the ferry from Baku, I saw an angel again. I thought she was the same one as before, till she spoke. And I asked her what she thought the imagination meant, and the answer she gave showed me that she knew nothing about it either, nothing at all.”
“What did she say?” said Malcolm.
“She said that the imagination was just our minds making things up, bits of fantasy jumbled together, like a dream. But she was wrong. You see, angels…They don’t know what dreams are. They don’t make poetry or art. They don’t play. What Pan said, the thing he said I’d lost—he was right. It’s something fundamental. And I had lost it. So on that ferry from Baku I saw a bit more about what it was. It’s not something to do with good and evil, or good and bad, either. Angels might be good, and the Magisterium might do evil things, but they’re both wrong about this. Just…wrong. Like in the Arctic, when Pan and I saw that Dust must be good in spite of everyone saying it was bad. Here it was again, the same idea in a different form. It’s a sort of…” She clenched her hands, trying to find the right words. “They think that things can only be true or not true. But what you learn when you play, or tell stories, or in a dream, is that things can be both true and not true.”
“If it’s not X, it’s got to be Y?” said Malcolm. “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.”
“Yes, just like that. There’s no room for any other answer.”
“It’s a sort of binary absolutism.”
“Exactly. But some things are both X and Y. Or like when someone says, ‘Art is nothing more than pretty patterns.’ But the truth is that it’s pretty patterns as well as lots of other things. And what that means…Well, what it means is that we must keep the windows open. Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it—we need it.”
“Good so far. Go on.”
“Well…” She felt unsure, and also that she was trembling on the edge of a discovery. “I think the Rose Field, the truth about things, isn’t just out there, it’s in here as well. And the imagination isn’t just in here, it’s out there too…The Rose Field needs what we have as much as we need what it has. What matters is that it must be free to flow through all the worlds. There was something Asta said once—incompleteness or something…A theorem…Someone’s theorem. In any system, there are things you know are true, but you can’t prove that they are if you only use arguments from inside the system. Something like that.”
“Gödel’s theorem. How does that fit in?”
“Well, if that’s true, then it means that if you find a system that seems perfect and complete, where you can prove everything—then you’re wrong. You’re not looking properly. Because we need the gaps, you see? We need the holes where one world opens up to another. A system isn’t complete unless there’s a hole in it. We need the things we can’t explain, things we can’t prove, or else we die of suffocation. The secret commonwealth. The Rose Field. They’re necessary, and so are all the windows and doors and openings, to let the wind blow through all the worlds…I can see it at last, Malcolm, I can see what it all means. That’s why all the authorities want to block up the openings, and that’s why we must fight to the death to stop them.”
“I think I always believed that,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of it like that, though. I just felt it was true.”
“Were you ever troubled about it? About that sort of thing?”
“No. About that sort of thing, as you put it, I never had any doubts. You’re much more complicated than I am, Lyra. I’m lucky to be plain and straightforward. When I see how much it troubles people—I mean, when they feel that something’s wrong with the world they live in, I feel sorry for them, but I can’t do much to help. I had a friend when I was an undergraduate who worried himself to death, literally; he killed himself. He was tormented by the question of whether he was real, and where his responsibility lay if he was unreal, and why he felt responsible if the world was empty of meaning, and what he could do about it…His dæmon stopped talking and just lay down, and then he did the same, and within a week he was dead. I felt so sorry for him, but I couldn’t understand anything about it. I was simple, and he was complicated, and I saw that that was a fundamental difference between us. I accepted the world as it was, and he didn’t. He was unhappy, and I was happy.”
After a few moments she said, “Are you still happy?”
“Yes. If that means do I feel at home in the world, then yes, I do, and I am happy.”
“I am too sometimes. And you’re not simple at all. You can’t be an artificer from the realms of gold if you’re simple.”
Lyra’s mind was full of that edge-of-possibility feeling. There was something that lay just out of sight, and the prospect of it thrilled her…No, nothing so definite as a prospect. You could see prospects, but she felt this with a different sense: she felt it tremor like a mirage with delight.
She lay back and covered her eyes with the sleeve of Malcolm’s coat, holding the thought close to her like a happy dream. The gryphon flew on towards the east.
* * *
—
Pan could tell, even from a distance, that Olivier Bonneville was no great horseman. In fact, it looked as though he would very much rather get off and walk. It didn’t take long for Pan to find him, even with the disadvantage of having to look through the grass, but there were occasional shrubs of juniper or tamarisk he could climb up and spy from, and the ground wasn’t completely flat. He followed throughout the day, stopping whenever Bonneville did and being careful not to doze off and lose him.
Despite his uncertain progress (stopping to adjust the saddle or to tighten the girth or to sit down and rest or to fill his water bottle or to look at one of the horse’s hooves or to look slowly all around the horizon), it was obvious that Bonneville had a clear idea of where he was going. Late in the afternoon he stopped again, and this time he looked intently in one direction ahead of him, persuading the horse to stand still, rising uncertainly in the stirrups to see a little further through some binoculars, and unfolding a map to peer at it closely.
Pan watched from a small willow a couple of hundred yards behind him as the sun was going down, and saw the boy dismount stiffly before stretching and bending and then taking off the saddle and hitching the horse to a broken tree. His dæmon, the hawk with the broken wing, was still clutching the saddle; Bonneville lifted her off and settled her tenderly on the tree.
There must have been a stream or a pond nearby. Bonneville loosened the rein and the horse bent to drink. Was he going to camp for the night? It was getting dark quickly; so yes, he was. Pan moved down from his willow and padded silently through the grass till he was near enough to hear the conversation between Bonneville and the dæmon.
At first he thought they were speaking a language he didn’t know at all, but as he lay still he began to recognize a word here, a phrase there, and almost make sense of complete sentences now and then. It seemed to be a dialect of Italian, and then he thought it was mainly German, and then possibly a little French. However, what they said wasn’t very interesting; Bonneville mainly seemed to be grumbling, and the dæmon seemed to be agreeing.
Bonneville broke a branch off the tree and gathered a few sticks to make a fire, but without much success at first. He got through a lot of matches before it caught properly, and by that time the flames provided the only light, because the sun was fully set. Pan watched as he carried the dæmon to a lower branch and settled himself down to cook a piece of meat. The fire wasn’t hot enough, and the meat kept falling off his stick and into the ash. Pan remembered the deft and effortless way Tilda Vasara had cooked that rabbit in the mountains, and felt almost sorry for this urban boy, so clumsy and helpless; but he couldn’t help being impressed by his determination.
He waited till Bonneville and his dæmon were asleep. Then with great care he moved towards the dead tree and climbed up towards the dæmon, testing each claw-hold before putting his weight on it, making no noise at all.
He made his way very slowly along the branch, and stopped when he came close enough to reach out and touch her.
“Dæmon,” he whispered. “Dæmon of Olivier Bonneville.”
He’d done this before. It was sometimes possible to wake someone gently by waking their dæmon, but that wasn’t his intention now.
“Dæmon, what is your name?” he whispered.
“Arethusa,” she murmured, still asleep.
“Arethusa, I don’t want to wake Olivier. I just want to talk to you. Don’t wake him up.”
“No.” Her voice was low and tender.
Pan went on: “What does he want?”
“He wants his father.”
Pan was startled, but only for a moment. “His father the physicist?”
She stirred a little, but said nothing.
“And what does he want with Lyra?” said Pan.
“Sister.”
That shook Pan even more.
“Arethusa, I don’t know what you mean. Is Lyra his sister?”
“Yes. Half sister. Same mother.”
“Mrs. Coulter was his mother?”
“Of course.”
“Does he…Has he, have you always known that?”
“No. He realized it only recently. It shocked him to realize that Marcel Delamare was his uncle.”
“Marcel Delamare…”
“The President of the High Council of the Magisterium. Olivier’s mother was Delamare’s sister.”
Pan trembled. The connection with Lyra fired his curiosity. “So if Lyra’s his sister, Delamare is her uncle too,” he said.
“Yes.”
Pan was taken aback. “I don’t think she knows it,” he said slowly.
“Delamare does.”
“And what does he want?”
“To capture her for her grandmother to play with.”
That made Pan feel chilled at once, colder than he’d ever felt flying through the night sky. “Mrs. Coulter’s mother is still alive?”
“Only her malice keeps her alive. Death is afraid to come near her.” The hawk dæmon shifted on her perch. Olivier Bonneville turned over in his sleeping bag.
“Don’t wake up,” Pan whispered.
Bonneville murmured something that might have been a name.
Pan said quietly, “Does he know what happened to his father?”
“Undone by Delamare. Framed. All lies. So many lies.”
Well, Pan thought, what did that mean? But both boy and dæmon were restive now; it was time to leave. Without another word he turned away and climbed silently down into the grass again, and set off in the direction he remembered Bonneville heading, towards the red building. His mind was racing.
* * *
—
The witch Tilda Vasara flew on a long loop to the east. She was interested in the progress of the army Delamare had sent that way, knowing the unpredictable ways of the wandering lake. The only safe way to cross Lop Nor was through the air above it, and surely they knew that?
But evidently they didn’t. With the valor of fanaticism and the armor of righteousness, the soldiers of the Authority forced their way forward into the marshes, into the innumerable torrents and the new waterways and the old riverbeds, the mires and the quicksands.
Tilda Vasara flew above, watching it all with sorrow. Some of these men were brave and handsome, some of them were foolish or cowardly; some hoped for salvation, some hoped only for treasure; some were kindly and some were corrupt, but the lakes and the fens and the shades of death gave every one of them the same welcome. And the witch saw it all, with wonderment and pity.
Thirty-Three
Into the Red Building
The diary of Roderick Hassall, which Lyra had read so long ago, it seemed to her now, had spoken of a bare sandy desert that he and Brynmor Strauss had had to cross to reach the red building. And Gulya had flown above long stretches of sand, it was true, but as they flew, it seemed that the empty desert was losing ground to vegetation. When Lyra woke up in the very early morning, what lay below them was more like a forest.
Among the green-gray treetops that stretched ahead in the early light as far as they could see, Lyra made out a single spot of red. She pointed it out to Malcolm, and over the next few minutes they watched it resolve from a point of scarlet light in the glow of the rising sun to a roof of red tiles with turned-up eaves in the Chinese manner over a long rectangular building of brick, with a row of small windows under the eaves, but no windows at ground level. As Gulya flew around above, looking for somewhere to land, they saw a clear space at one end of the building, where a flagstoned area surrounded a flight of seven wide steps up to a portico.
