The Rose Field, page 55
Two guards, soldiers in simple uniforms of dark red cotton, stood in front of the portico, blocking the way to the door behind the massive red-painted wooden columns. They carried spears. They looked up as Gulya flew above them, and watched with subdued alarm as she landed and Lyra and Malcolm stepped down off her back.
“This is where Strauss had to speak Latin, isn’t it?” said Malcolm.
Lyra watched. The guards didn’t move. They held their spears pointing forward, and stood with one foot ahead of the other, as still as the columns behind them, as if this was something they had long trained for.
Malcolm stretched to loosen his limbs, and Lyra did the same, finding it strange to feel firm ground underfoot. Malcolm asked Gulya to pass on a message of gratitude to Queen Shahrnavāz, saying that never had an artificer from the realms of gold worked for a wiser or more generous sovereign. Lyra thanked her too, and Gulya would have said several things in return, but her friendship had been first and always with Pan, and she was clearly anxious about him; and besides, she needed to be going back to Prince Keshvād and her people. So their farewells were heartfelt, but brief.
Lyra and Malcolm shaded their eyes to watch the gryphon fly up and away, and then turned back to the guards. They hadn’t moved an inch.
All the time Lyra was conscious of the immense bulk of the red building. She didn’t have to look at it directly; it pervaded her vision even when she looked away from it, because the sun just rising struck the bricks and tiles like a gong and brought out their deep and sonorous crimson to color the air all around. The sky was clear; it was going to be a hot day, in this world at least.
“Well,” Malcolm said, “let’s try.”
Together they climbed the seven steps till they were on a level with the guards, who kept the spears pointing at them. The soldiers looked more Persian than Chinese: Lyra remembered Strauss saying something like that in his journal. She saw, too, that if they had dæmons, they were well hidden; and that they seemed healthy and fit, though their faces were lined and their eyes were tired. Their uniforms were old and worn at the seams.
“May we enter this building?” she said in English, slowly and clearly.
They looked at her and said nothing.
Then the taller guard said, “Akterrakeh.”
Malcolm turned to Lyra. She realized that she hadn’t told him her discovery of what it meant, and said, “They’re asking if we came by water and by land. Because…I’ll tell you why later.”
“Akterrakeh—Oh, I see. Aqua terraque. Latin it is.” He thought for a moment, his eyes half closed, and then said to the guards, “Neque per aquam, neque per terram, sed per alas.”
Lyra looked at him and raised her eyebrows, and he murmured, “Not by water nor by land, but by wings.”
The guards were nonplussed: this man was clearly speaking the truth, because they had seen the gryphon land and fly away again, but how could they reconcile that with the clear instructions they were bound to obey?
Lyra wanted to say more, but she sensed Malcolm’s silent confidence and said nothing. After a minute’s urgent discussion, the tall guard raised his spear and stood aside. The other guard did the same, leaving the way clear to the door.
Malcolm nodded and put his hand to his breast in a gesture he hoped would convey respect and thanks. Lyra remembered from the diary that the guards Hassall and Strauss had faced had asked for money, but these two, she thought, looked too weary to make any further challenge. Their responsibility weighed heavily on them; they looked like the last soldiers left to guard a civilization, their uniforms thin and ragged in places, but clean and pressed; and she found herself admiring them if only for that.
The door was heavy, but it opened easily, swinging silently on oiled hinges. The sunlight fell through onto the wooden floor.
Lyra went in first, with Asta at her heels and Malcolm following. Her first impression was of the enormous size of the place. They had seen that from outside, of course, but whereas from outside they could only see part of the whole building, inside they could see all of it. It was one great hall, and its proportions were somehow perfect; if the ceiling were any higher, or the breadth of the place any less, it would have felt uncomfortable. Lyra had no idea why, but she was certain of it.
The floor was made of oak boards, worn and a little bowed in places, but it felt solid to walk on. The only light in the space came through the door behind them, and from the row of windows high up in the walls—too high for them to see anything outside but the sky. The sunlight lay in bright parallelograms on the floor and made the swirling particles of dust in the beams glow like specks of gold. But it was what lay all around that made Lyra and Malcolm gasp and clutch each other’s hand in wonder.
Every inch of the walls from end to end and from floor to ceiling was covered with an immense picture of a landscape.
It surrounded them completely. The door they’d come in through was at one end of the building, and a long way off at the other end there was another door, and both had a plaster surround that made them look like part of a classical painting. The door ahead was depicted as if it stood in a small marble folly, a temple or belvedere perhaps, in some immense garden where lawns ran down past it to a broad lake in the distance, and the one they’d just come through seemed to be the entrance to a grotto, among rough massive rocks overhung with ferns and mosses.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, anywhere,” Lyra said quietly. “Have you?”
Malcolm shook his head. He seemed to be struck silent, and stood gazing all around, slowly, attentively, taking it all in.
“I can’t find the words,” Malcolm said after a minute. “It’s just overwhelming. Whoever painted this has seen pictures from everywhere—seventeenth-century France, eighteenth-century England, ancient Rome, ancient Greece…”
“Cathay too—see the pagoda over there?”
“And the New Danish transcendentalists—look at those cliffs over the river…”
“That little bridge is pure Nipponese. Isn’t it? And the lady with her umbrella in the puff of wind…”
“And her dæmon snapping at a butterfly.”
As well as the scenes that reminded them of their own world, there were buildings and landscapes that were unfamiliar. But every part of the picture showed human activity in one form or another: men and women were walking to and fro, carrying parasols to keep the sun at bay or working in gardens where roses grew, watering the beds or gathering the blooms or planting new bushes, or unloading carts full of the flower heads into a barge drawn up at the shore of the lake. Wherever they looked, some productive or enjoyable human activity was being carried on. Here some musicians were playing to an audience seated on a lawn; there some carpenters were putting up the framework of a graceful little temple under the direction of an architect consulting a paper in his hand; somewhere else children were dancing in a ring; in another corner gardeners were tending to espaliered orange trees against a brick wall.
Lyra and Malcolm wandered from place to place, taking in only a fraction of the hundreds of details, marveling at the harmony of the whole panorama, moved by the vision of happiness and prosperity embodied in wood and plaster and paint.
Lyra felt her breath catch in her chest. Something—one of the scenes—reminded her powerfully of something, and she saw that Asta was looking at it too.
Suddenly Asta said, “That’s a scene from the Myriorama—look! That girl reading a book with her fingers—and here’s another one—the people loading the carts with roses!”
“Yes! So it is! And there’s another—the little café at night…They’re probably all here, if we looked. I just can’t believe it.”
Malcolm saw a corner of the wall that looked as if it was illustrating the poem of Jahan and Rukhsana: two lovers hand in hand entering a garden.
“Is it a picture of the rose world, d’you think?” he said. “Of what’s outside here, I mean?”
“We’ll see in a minute. Oh, Malcolm, it’s lovely…”
“And they have dæmons in that world,” said Asta.
And Lyra could see the dæmons everywhere, helping with the work, talking to their people, playing with children.
Then Malcolm pointed out something that Lyra hadn’t noticed. In the corner least lit by the high windows, chairs and tables had been neatly stacked. Going over to look more closely, Malcolm the artificer was intrigued by the design of the chairs, which folded by means of a joint he’d never seen before so as to take up little room. He picked one chair up and moved it this way and that, delighted by the cleverness of the craftsmanship and determined to make something like it himself if ever he returned to his own bench and his own tools.
“Oh, and look!” said Lyra. “This is what the tables and chairs are for!”
There, above the stacked furniture, the painting showed a view of the very interior they were standing in. The tables and chairs had all been laid out, and a hundred or more figures were sitting, or standing, or moving from one place to another, and two or three or four people were sitting around each table, and…
“Bargaining? Trading?” said Lyra.
“Looks very like it. Buying and selling. This is an exchange, like a wool exchange or a corn exchange…This is where people come from our world to buy the oil.”
“But this picture…”
“It’s extraordinary. I know nothing like it, anywhere. Not just the size but the scope of it…If people in our world knew about it, they’d make pilgrimages to see it. I mean, this, where we are now, is still our world, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said with certainty. “But the picture shows the rose world, I’m sure. The way there must be through the door at the other end. But I don’t think artists from our world made this…Malcolm, we’ve got to go on. But I want to spend hours here, days, looking at everything. Copying parts of it. It’s got all their life in it, everything they ever do…And they look happy, you know? As if everything is right and it all fits together and it all works…It’s how things ought to be, don’t you think?”
But she hadn’t got it quite right, she thought. Everything she said about the picture was true, and it made her happy to look at it, happy because the people in the picture were happy; she was happy because it looked as if the painter had been happy with the work, and loved it, and was happy to know that other people would love it too. And she was conscious that her attention to the painting was part of its effect, as if her gaze that was speeding here and there, resting for a moment to look at a detail, then darting elsewhere, and hovering, and soaring up again, and seeing how this young couple by the lake here were forming the same shape with their arms that a pair of swans were forming with their necks over there, and marveled at how the artist had seen it so clearly—as her attention did that, it seemed to her that her attention itself, her consciousness, was a bird flying through the landscape, in a place where it was completely at home.
Malcolm, watching her, saw how her involuntary smile dissolved the hard wariness that had been her natural expression since they had found themselves together again. Her eyes brightened among tiny creases that one day would be laugh lines, and her lips moved silently, and he realized that she was talking to the Pantalaimon who’d left her. The impression was so strong that he even found himself looking for the dæmon in the painting, and in the patterns of sunlight and shade on the floor and the walls.
They moved along the length of the building towards the far door in its painted setting of a little marble temple or folly, with a copper dome surrounded by a balustrade. A man and a woman, elegantly dressed, were painted there pointing at a little town on the lakeshore to the right, with an oratory and a campanile, a market square, a town hall, and a stone bridge.
“Ready?” Malcolm said.
“No, course not. I want to stay here for weeks. But yes, let’s go through. We’ve got to…No guards here, unless they’re outside.”
“Well, here goes,” he said.
He reached for the iron handle and turned it, and the door opened smoothly and silently, like the first one.
* * *
—
Light flooded in, bright daylight. They blinked and shaded their eyes. Asta ran through at once and stood still suddenly, her tail waving tensely. Malcolm followed and halted suddenly, just as she’d done.
“Well,” he said. “You were right. It’s a different world.”
Lyra came to stand beside him.
The door opened onto a little mound, so they were able to see for some distance. The air, the atmosphere of a different world, was spring-like and warm; the sun shone brightly in the clear sky, showing a million details on the ground.
But this was not like the world in the picture.
Wherever they looked the soil had been disturbed, and was being disturbed even more: great earthmoving machines were at work, digging, lifting, flattening, carrying, dumping, scooping out rocks and soil and the plants that had been growing there, tearing huge ragged wounds in the ground and rolling back and forth along a wide road of crushed stone. Most of the plants that were now being carried through the air, their roots still embedded in great masses of soil, were rosebushes with blooms as red as blood.
There was enough of the landscape left for them to see what had been there before the earthmoving began. The painting had shown the landscape exactly, and the bones of it were there still—the mountains on the horizon, the lake at the foot of the slope in front of them, the little town on the lakeshore—but how completely it was being changed!
“What are they doing?” said Lyra.
Asta heard her and turned to them, and then she stopped: she seemed to see something, and turned away at once and ran to Malcolm, springing up into his arms. Lyra felt a little lurch in her heart: she wanted Pan more than ever, she wanted him to run to her and leap up just like that—but something was badly wrong here.
Malcolm was listening closely as Asta whispered something. He looked at Lyra and said, “Be careful where you look.”
“Why? What…?”
Then she saw what Asta had seen: the body of a jackdaw. Of course Lyra had seen dead birds before, but the sight of this one hit her in the pit of the stomach. It was the body of a dæmon. It was a dæmon, dead.
She gripped Malcolm’s hand.
No one had ever seen the body of a dæmon. A dæmon was alive, or it was nowhere—or rather everywhere: when the person died, the dæmon dissolved into the air. Lyra had seen death; she had traveled through the world of the dead; but she had never seen a dæmon that was no longer alive.
“Oh, Malcolm,” she whispered.
Asta was pressing her face into Malcolm’s neck. Lyra longed for that sort of closeness, and for Pan—Oh! And a chill as she thought: If Pan came here by himself, and had to see things like that, and she wasn’t there for him…
All the different implications of the word betrayal came clustering around her, again.
“But what is this place? What are they doing?” Malcolm said.
“They’re tearing up the roses…”
“They’re changing everything. Look at the river over there.”
In the middle distance a river had been flowing in a series of short curves towards the lake. Excavating machines were tearing into the banks and swinging their bucketloads of soil high in the air before dumping them in a waiting line of trucks, which drove a little way and tipped their loads on the bare earth where a field had been. Other machines built the soil up into a straight embankment.
“They’re changing the course of it…” Lyra said, and then, “But why? For irrigation? What would be the point, with the river already there?”
The more they looked, the more evidence they saw of wholesale change. If the new embankment showed the future course of the river, then it would run directly towards the place where a bridge was being built to span it: two steel towers where suspension cables would carry a wide roadway. Machines whose details were too far away to see were in place at each end of the bridge. The noise they made was loud enough for Malcolm and Lyra to hear it clearly in the morning air.
“Cable-spinning machines,” said Malcolm. “Machines and engineering and people building great structures…I used to love that sort of thing. But this is all wrong, somehow.”
“Is the dead dæmon…” Lyra began, and went on, “I don’t know what I was going to ask. That’s part of it. Obviously. Is that a town over there?”
The air was shimmering a little now, as the sun rose higher.
“It looks like the town in the picture. We’ll have to go there if we want to know any more.”
There was no one nearby to ask, apart from the workers operating the machines, and they were busy. Lyra looked back at the door they’d come through, and found that the great red building had vanished (of course: it was in their world, not this one). In its place was a much smaller wooden structure, with the tall black door and its decorated frame set into it like a piece of stage scenery. Behind it stood a little copse, green leaves against the bright blue sky.
Turning round again, she saw that the hill where they were standing swept down to the lake, just as the painting had shown, but now workers with their machines were busy constructing a road leading up towards the building.
“Look,” Malcolm said. “All this activity—it’s all going on because of the opening, the window, the doorway, whatever we call it. It’s all centered on here. Look, see what they’re doing to this road—it’s going to lead right up to where we’re standing, and then from the junction down there it’ll go away to the east and west.”
