The Amber Spyglass: His Dark Materials Page 11

  Finally Iorek came to Will and said, “This other edge. It does something you have not told me about. What is it, and how does it work?”

  “I can’t show you here,” said Will, “because the boat is moving. As soon as we stop, I’ll show you.”

  “I can think of it,” said the bear, “but not understand what I am thinking. It is the strangest thing I have ever seen.”

  And he gave it back to Will, with a disconcerting, unreadable long stare out of his deep black eyes.

  The river by this time had changed color, because it was meeting the remains of the first floodwaters that had swept down out of the Arctic. The convulsions had affected the earth differently in different places, Will saw; village after village stood up to its roofs in water and hundreds of dispossessed people tried to salvage what they could with rowboats and canoes. The earth must have sunk a little here, because the river broadened and slowed, and it was hard for the skipper to trace his true course through the wide and turbid streams. The air was hotter, and the sun higher in the sky, and the bears found it hard to keep cool; some of them swam alongside as the steamer made its way, tasting their native waters in this foreign land.

  But eventually the river narrowed and deepened again, and soon ahead of them began to rise the mountains of the great central Asian plateau. Will saw a rim of white on the horizon one day and watched as it grew and grew, separating itself into different peaks and ridges and passes between them, and so high that it seemed that they must be close at hand—only a few miles. But they were far off still; it was just that the mountains were immense, and with every hour that they came closer, they seemed yet more inconceivably high.

  Most of the bears had never seen mountains, apart from the cliffs on their own island of Svalbard, and fell silent as they looked up at the giant ramparts, still so far off.

  “What will we hunt there, Iorek Byrnison?” said one. “Are there seals in the mountains? How shall we live?”

  “There is snow and ice,” was the king’s reply. “We shall be comfortable. And there are wild creatures there in plenty. Our lives will be different for a while. But we shall survive, and when things return to what they should be, and the Arctic freezes once more, we shall still be alive to go back and claim it. If we had stayed there, we would have starved. Be prepared for strangeness and for new ways, my bears.”

  Eventually the steamer could sail no farther, because at this point the riverbed had narrowed and become shallow. The skipper brought the vessel to a halt in a valley bottom that normally would have been carpeted with grass and mountain flowers, where the river would have meandered over gravel beds; but the valley was now a lake, and the captain insisted that he dared not go past it. Beyond this point, he explained, there would be not enough depth below the keel, even with the massive flood from the north.

  So they drew up to the edge of the valley, where an outcrop of rock formed a sort of jetty, and disembarked.

  “Where are we now?” said Will to the captain, whose English was limited.

  The captain found a tattered old map and jabbed at it with his pipe, saying, “This valley here, we now. You take, go on.”

  “Thank you very much,” Will said, and wondered if he ought to offer to pay; but the captain had turned away to supervise the unloading.

  Before long all thirty or so bears and all their armor were on the narrow shore. The captain shouted an order, and the vessel began to turn ponderously against the current, maneuvering out into midstream and giving a blast on the whistle that echoed for a long time around the valley.

  Will sat on a rock, reading the map. If he was right, the valley where Lyra was captive, according to the shaman, lay some way to the east and the south, and the best way there led through a pass called Sungchen.

  “Bears, mark this place,” said Iorek Byrnison to his subjects. “When the time comes for us to move back to the Arctic, we shall assemble here. Now go your ways, hunt, feed, and live. Do not make war. We are not here for war. If war threatens, I shall call for you.”

  The bears were solitary creatures for the most part, and they only came together in times of war or emergency. Now that they were at the edge of a land of snow, they were impatient to be off, each of them, exploring on their own.

  “Come, then, Will,” said Iorek Byrnison, “and we shall find Lyra.”

  Will lifted his rucksack and they set off.

  It was good walking for the first part of their journey. The sun was warm, but the pines and the rhododendrons kept the worst of the heat off their shoulders, and the air was fresh and clear. The ground was rocky, but the rocks were thick with moss and pine needles, and the slopes they climbed were not precipitous. Will found himself relishing the exercise. The days he had spent on the boat, the enforced rest, had built up his strength. When he had come across Iorek, he had been at the very last of it. He didn’t know that, but the bear did.

  And as soon as they were alone, Will showed Iorek how the other edge of the knife worked. He opened a world where a tropical rain forest steamed and dripped, and where vapors laden with heavy scent drifted out into the thin mountain air. Iorek watched closely, and touched the edge of the window with his paw, and sniffed at it, and stepped through into the hot, moist air to look around in silence. The monkey shrieks and birdcalls, the insect scrapings and frog croakings, and the incessant drip-drip of condensing moisture sounded very loud to Will, outside it.

  Then Iorek came back and watched Will close the window, and asked to see the knife again, peering so closely at the silver edge that Will thought he was in danger of cutting his eye. He examined it for a long time and handed it back with hardly a word, only saying, “I was right: I could not have fought this.”

  They moved on, speaking little, which suited them both. Iorek Byrnison caught a gazelle and ate most of it, leaving the tender meat for Will to cook; and once they came to a village, and while Iorek waited in the forest, Will exchanged one of his gold coins for some flat, coarse bread and some dried fruit, and for boots of yak leather and a waistcoat of a kind of sheepskin, for it was becoming cold at night.

  He also managed to ask about the valley with the rainbows. Balthamos helped by assuming the form of a crow, like the dæmon of the man Will was speaking to; he made the passage of understanding easier between them, and Will got directions, which were helpful and clear.

  It was another three days’ walk. Well, they were getting there.

  And so were others.

  Lord Asriel’s force, the squadron of gyropters and the zeppelin fuel tanker, had reached the opening between the worlds: the breach in the sky above Svalbard. They had a very long way to go still, but they flew without pause except for essential maintenance, and the commander, the Afric King Ogunwe, kept in twice-daily touch with the basalt fortress. He had a Gallivespian lodestone operator aboard his gyropter, and through him he was able to learn as quickly as Lord Asriel himself about what was going on elsewhere.

  The news was disconcerting. The little spy, the Lady Salmakia, had watched from the shadows as the two powerful arms of the Church, the Consistorial Court of Discipline and the Society of the Work of the Holy Spirit, agreed to put their differences aside and pool their knowledge. The Society had a swifter and more skillful alethiometrist than Fra Pavel, and thanks to him, the Consistorial Court now knew exactly where Lyra was, and more: they knew that Lord Asriel had sent a force to rescue her. Wasting no time, the Court commandeered a flight of zeppelins, and that same day a battalion of the Swiss Guard began to embark aboard the zeppelins waiting in the still air beside the Lake of Geneva.

  So each side was aware that the other was also making its way toward the cave in the mountains. And they both knew that whoever got there first would have the advantage, but there wasn’t much in it: Lord Asriel’s gyropters were faster than the zeppelins of the Consistorial Court, but they had farther to fly, and they were limited by the speed of their own zeppelin tanker.

  And there was another consideration: whoever seiz
ed Lyra first would have to fight their way out against the other force. It would be easier for the Consistorial Court, because they didn’t have to consider getting Lyra away safely. They were flying there to kill her.

  The zeppelin carrying the President of the Consistorial Court was carrying other passengers as well, unknown to him. The Chevalier Tialys had received a message on his lodestone resonator, ordering him and the Lady Salmakia to smuggle themselves aboard. When the zeppelins arrived at the valley, he and the Lady were to go ahead and make their way independently to the cave where Lyra was held, and protect her as well as they could until King Ogunwe’s force arrived to rescue her. Her safety was to come above every other consideration.

  Getting themselves aboard the zeppelin was hazardous for the spies, not least because of the equipment they had to carry. Apart from the lodestone resonator, the most important items were a pair of insect larvae, and their food. When the adult insects emerged, they would be more like dragonflies than anything else, but they were not like any kind of dragonfly that the humans of Will’s world, or Lyra’s, would have seen before. They were very much larger, for one thing. The Gallivespians bred these creatures carefully, and each clan’s insects differed from the rest. The Chevalier Tialys’s clan bred powerful red-and-yellow-striped dragonflies with vigorous and brutal appetites, whereas the one the Lady Salmakia was nurturing would be a slender, fast-flying creature with an electric blue body and the power of glowing in the dark.

  Every spy was equipped with a number of these larvae, which, by feeding them carefully regulated amounts of oil and honey, they could either keep in suspended animation or bring rapidly to adulthood. Tialys and Salmakia had thirty-six hours, depending on the winds, to hatch these larvae now—because that was about the time the flight would take, and they needed the insects to emerge before the zeppelins landed.

  The Chevalier and his colleague found an overlooked space behind a bulkhead, and made themselves as safe as they could while the vessel was loaded and fueled; and then the engines began to roar, shaking the light structure from end to end as the ground crew cast off and the eight zeppelins rose into the night sky.

  Their kind would have regarded the comparison as a mortal insult, but they were able to conceal themselves at least as well as rats. From their hiding place, the Gallivespians could overhear a good deal, and they kept in hourly touch with Lord Roke, who was aboard King Ogunwe’s gyropter.

  But there was one thing they couldn’t learn any more about on the zeppelin, because the President never spoke of it: and that was the matter of the assassin, Father Gomez, who had been absolved already of the sin he was going to commit if the Consistorial Court failed in their mission. Father Gomez was somewhere else, and no one was tracking him at all.

  TEN

  WHEELS

  There ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.

  • I KINGS •

  “Yeah,” said the red-haired girl, in the garden of the deserted casino. “We seen her, me and Paolo both seen her. She come through here days ago.”

  Father Gomez said, “And do you remember what she looked like?”

  “She look hot,” said the little boy. “Sweaty in the face, all right.”

  “How old did she seem to be?”

  “About . . .” said the girl, considering, “I suppose maybe forty or fifty. We didn’t see her close. She could be thirty, maybe. But she was hot, like Paolo said, and she was carrying a big rucksack, much bigger than yours, this big . . .”

  Paolo whispered something to her, screwing up his eyes to look at the priest as he did so. The sun was bright in his face.

  “Yeah,” said the girl impatiently, “I know. The Specters,” she said to Father Gomez, “she wasn’ afraid of the Specters at all. She just walked through the city and never worried a bit. I ain’ never seen a grownup do that before, all right. She looked like she didn’ know about them, even. Same as you,” she added, looking at him with a challenge in her eyes.

  “There’s a lot I don’t know,” said Father Gomez mildly.

  The little boy plucked at her sleeve and whispered again.

  “Paolo says,” she told the priest, “he thinks you’re going to get the knife back.”

  Father Gomez felt his skin bristle. He remembered the testimony of Fra Pavel in the inquiry at the Consistorial Court: this must be the knife he meant.

  “If I can,” he said, “I shall. The knife comes from here, does it?”

  “From the Torre degli Angeli,” said the girl, pointing at the square stone tower over the red-brown rooftops. It shimmered in the midday glare. “And the boy who stole it, he kill our brother, Tullio. The Specters got him, all right. You want to kill that boy, that’s okay. And the girl—she was a liar, she was as bad as him.”

  “There was a girl, too?” said the priest, trying not to seem too interested.

  “Lying filth,” spat the red-haired child. “We nearly killed them both, but then there came some women, flying women—”

  “Witches,” said Paolo.

  “Witches, and we couldn’ fight them. They took them away, the girl and boy. We don’ know where they went. But the woman, she came later. We thought maybe she got some kind of knife, to keep the Specters away, all right. And maybe you have, too,” she added, lifting her chin to stare at him boldly.

  “I have no knife,” said Father Gomez. “But I have a sacred task. Maybe that is protecting me against these—Specters.”

  “Yeah,” said the girl, “maybe. Anyway, you want her, she went south, toward the mountains. We don’ know where. But you ask anyone, they know if she go past, because there ain’ no one like her in Ci’gazze, not before and not now. She be easy to find.”

  “Thank you, Angelica,” said the priest. “Bless you, my children.”

  He shouldered his pack, left the garden, and set off through the hot, silent streets, satisfied.

  After three days in the company of the wheeled creatures, Mary Malone knew rather more about them, and they knew a great deal about her.

  That first morning they carried her for an hour or so along the basalt highway to a settlement by a river, and the journey was uncomfortable; she had nothing to hold on to, and the creature’s back was hard. They sped along at a pace that frightened her, but the thunder of their wheels on the hard road and the beat of their scudding feet made her exhilarated enough to ignore the discomfort.

  And in the course of the ride she became more aware of the creatures’ physiology. Like the grazers’ skeletons, theirs had a diamond-shaped frame, with a limb at each of the corners. Sometime in the distant past, a line of ancestral creatures must have developed this structure and found it worked, just as generations of long-ago crawling things in Mary’s world had developed the central spine.

  The basalt highway led gradually downward, and after a while the slope increased, so the creatures could freewheel. They tucked their side legs up and steered by leaning to one side or the other, and hurtled along at a speed Mary found terrifying—though she had to admit that the creature she was riding never gave her the slightest feeling of danger. If only she’d had something to hold on to, she would have enjoyed it.

  At the foot of the mile-long slope, there was a stand of the great trees, and nearby a river meandered on the level grassy ground. Some way off, Mary saw a gleam that looked like a wider expanse of water, but she didn’t spend long looking at that, because the creatures were making for a settlement on the riverbank, and she was burning with curiosity to see it.

  There were twenty or thirty huts, roughly grouped in a circle, made of—she had to shade her eyes against the sun to see—wooden beams covered with a kind of wattle-and-daub mixture on the walls and thatch on the roofs. Other wheeled creatures were working: some repairing a roof, others hauling a net out of the river, others bringing brushwood for a fire.

  So they had language, and they had fire, and they had society. And about then she found an adjustment being made in her mind, as the word creat
ures became the word people. These beings weren’t human, but they were people, she told herself; it’s not them, they’re us.

  They were quite close now, and seeing what was coming, some of the villagers looked up and called to each other to look. The party from the road slowed to a halt, and Mary clambered stiffly down, knowing that she would ache later on.

  “Thank you,” she said to her . . . her what? Her steed? Her cycle? Both ideas were absurdly wrong for the bright-eyed amiability that stood beside her. She settled for—friend.

  He raised his trunk and imitated her words:

  “Anku,” he said, and again they laughed, in high spirits.

  She took her rucksack from the other creature (“Anku! Anku!”) and walked with them off the basalt and on to the hard-packed earth of the village.

  And then her absorption truly began.

  In the next few days she learned so much that she felt like a child again, bewildered by school. What was more, the wheeled people seemed to be just as wonderstruck by her. Her hands, to begin with. They couldn’t get enough of them: their delicate trunks felt over every joint, searching out thumbs, knuckles, and fingernails, flexing them gently, and they watched with amazement as she picked up her rucksack, conveyed food to her mouth, scratched, combed her hair, washed.

  In return, they let her feel their trunks. They were infinitely flexible, and about as long as her arm, thicker where they joined the head, and quite powerful enough to crush her skull, she guessed. The two finger-like projections at the tip were capable of enormous force and great gentleness; the creatures seemed to be able to vary the tone of their skin on the underside, on their equivalent of fingertips, from a soft velvet to a solidity like wood. As a result, they could use them for both a delicate task like milking a grazer and the rough business of tearing and shaping branches.