The Amber Spyglass: His Dark Materials Read online

  The lizard dragged the priest’s body back to her nest, and her children feasted very well. As for the rifle, it lay in the grass where Father Gomez had laid it down, quietly turning to rust.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE DUNES

  My soul, do not seek eternal life, but exhaust the realm

  of the possible.

  • PINDAR •

  Next day Will and Lyra went out by themselves again, speaking little, eager to be alone with each other. They looked dazed, as if some happy accident had robbed them of their wits; they moved slowly; their eyes were not focused on what they looked at.

  They spent all day on the wide hills, and in the heat of the afternoon, they visited their gold-and-silver grove. They talked, they bathed, they ate, they kissed, they lay in a trance of happiness murmuring words whose sound was as confused as their sense, and they felt they were melting with love.

  In the evening they shared the meal with Mary and Atal, saying little, and because the air was hot they thought they’d walk down to the sea, where there might be a cool breeze. They wandered along the river until they came to the wide beach, bright under the moon, where the low tide was turning.

  They lay down in the soft sand at the foot of the dunes, and then they heard the first bird calling.

  They both turned their heads at once, because it was a bird that sounded like no creature that belonged to the world they were in. From somewhere above in the dark came a delicate trilling song, and then another answered it from a different direction. Delighted, Will and Lyra jumped up and tried to see the singers, but all they could make out was a pair of dark skimming shapes that flew low and then darted up again, all the time singing and singing in rich, liquid bell tones an endlessly varied song.

  And then, with a flutter of wings that threw up a little fountain of sand in front of him, the first bird landed a few yards away.

  Lyra said, “Pan . . . ?”

  He was formed like a dove, but his color was dark and hard to tell in the moonlight; at any rate, he showed up clearly on the white sand. The other bird still circled overhead, still singing, and then she flew down to join him: another dove, but pearl white, and with a crest of dark red feathers.

  And Will knew what it was to see his dæmon. As she flew down to the sand, he felt his heart tighten and release in a way he never forgot. Sixty years and more would go by, and as an old man he would still feel some sensations as bright and fresh as ever: Lyra’s fingers putting the fruit between his lips under the gold-and-silver trees; her warm mouth pressing against his; his dæmon being torn from his unsuspecting breast as they entered the world of the dead; and the sweet rightfulness of her coming back to him at the edge of the moonlit dunes.

  Lyra made to move toward them, but Pantalaimon spoke.

  “Lyra,” he said, “Serafina Pekkala came to us last night. She told us all kinds of things. She’s gone back to guide the gyptians here. Farder Coram’s coming, and Lord Faa, and they’ll be here—”

  “Pan,” she said, distressed, “oh, Pan, you’re not happy—what is it? What is it?”

  Then he changed, and flowed over the sand to her as a snow-white ermine. The other dæmon changed, too—Will felt it happen, like a little grip at his heart—and became a cat.

  Before she moved to him, she spoke. She said, “The witch gave me a name. I had no need of one before. She called me Kirjava. But listen, listen to us now . . .”

  “Yes, you must listen,” said Pantalaimon. “This is hard to explain.”

  Between them, the dæmons managed to tell them everything Serafina had told them, beginning with the revelation about the children’s own natures: about how, without intending it, they had become like witches in their power to separate and yet still be one being.

  “But that’s not all,” Kirjava said.

  And Pantalaimon said, “Oh, Lyra, forgive us, but we have to tell you what we found out . . .”

  Lyra was bewildered. When had Pan ever needed forgiving? She looked at Will, and saw his puzzlement as clear as her own.

  “Tell us,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “It’s about Dust,” said the cat dæmon, and Will marveled to hear part of his own nature telling him something he didn’t know. “It was all flowing away, all the Dust there was, down into the abyss that you saw. Something’s stopped it flowing down there, but—”

  “Will, it was that golden light!” Lyra said. “The light that all flowed into the abyss and vanished . . . And that was Dust? Was it really?”

  “Yes. But there’s more leaking out all the time,” Pantalaimon went on. “And it mustn’t. It mustn’t all leak away. It’s got to stay in the world and not vanish, because otherwise everything good will fade away and die.”

  “But where’s the rest leaving from?” said Lyra.

  Both dæmons looked at Will, and at the knife.

  “Every time we made an opening,” said Kirjava—and again Will felt that little thrill: She’s me, and I’m her—“every time anyone made an opening between the worlds, us or the old Guild men, anyone, the knife cut into the emptiness outside. The same emptiness there is down in the abyss. We never knew. No one knew, because the edge was too fine to see. But it was quite big enough for Dust to leak out of. If they closed it up again at once, there wasn’t time for much to leak out, but there were thousands that they never closed up. So all this time, Dust has been leaking out of the worlds and into nothingness.”

  The understanding was beginning to dawn on Will and Lyra. They fought it, they pushed it away, but it was just like the gray light that seeps into the sky and extinguishes the stars: it crept past every barrier they could put up and under every blind and around the edges of every curtain they could draw against it.

  “Every opening,” Lyra said in a whisper.

  “Every single one—they must all be closed?” said Will.

  “Every single one,” said Pantalaimon, whispering like Lyra.

  “Oh, no,” said Lyra. “No, it can’t be true—”

  “And so we must leave our world to stay in Lyra’s,” said Kirjava, “or Pan and Lyra must leave theirs and come to stay in ours. There’s no other choice.”

  Then the full bleak daylight struck in.

  And Lyra cried aloud. Pantalaimon’s owl cry the night before had frightened every small creature that heard it, but it was nothing to the passionate wail that Lyra uttered now. The dæmons were shocked, and Will, seeing their reaction, understood why: they didn’t know the rest of the truth; they didn’t know what Will and Lyra themselves had learned.

  Lyra was shaking with anger and grief, striding up and down with clenched fists and turning her tear-streaming face this way and that as if looking for an answer. Will jumped up and seized her shoulders, and felt her tense and trembling.

  “Listen,” he said, “Lyra, listen: what did my father say?”

  “Oh,” she cried, tossing her head this way and that, “he said—you know what he said—you were there, Will, you listened, too!”

  He thought she would die of her grief there and then. She flung herself into his arms and sobbed, clinging passionately to his shoulders, pressing her nails into his back and her face into his neck, and all he could hear was, “No—no—no . . .”

  “Listen,” he said again, “Lyra, let’s try and remember it exactly. There might be a way through. There might be a loophole.”

  He disengaged her arms gently and made her sit down. At once Pantalaimon, frightened, flowed up onto her lap, and the cat dæmon tentatively came close to Will. They hadn’t touched yet, but now he put out a hand to her, and she moved her cat face against his fingers and then stepped delicately onto his lap.

  “He said—” Lyra began, gulping, “he said that people could spend a little time in other worlds without being affected. They could. And we have, haven’t we? Apart from what we had to do to go into the world of the dead, we’re still healthy, aren’t we?”

  “They can spend a little time, but not a long time
,” Will said. “My father had been away from his world, my world, for ten years. And he was nearly dying when I found him. Ten years, that’s all.”

  “But what about Lord Boreal? Sir Charles? He was healthy enough, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, but remember, he could go back to his own world whenever he liked and get healthy again. That’s where you saw him first, after all, in your world. He must have found some secret window that no one else knew about.”

  “Well, we could do that!”

  “We could, except that . . .”

  “All the windows must be closed,” said Pantalaimon. “All of them.”

  “But how do you know?” demanded Lyra.

  “An angel told us,” said Kirjava. “We met an angel. She told us all about that, and other things as well. It’s true, Lyra.”

  “She?” said Lyra passionately, suspicious.

  “It was a female angel,” said Kirjava.

  “I’ve never heard of one of them. Maybe she was lying.”

  Will was thinking through another possibility. “Suppose they closed all the other windows,” he said, “and we just made one when we needed to, and went through as quickly as we could and closed it up immediately—that would be safe, surely? If we didn’t leave much time for Dust to go out?”

  “Yes!”

  “We’d make it where no one could ever find it,” he went on, “and only us two would know—”

  “Oh, it would work! I’m sure it would!” she said.

  “And we could go from one to the other, and stay healthy—”

  But the dæmons were distressed, and Kirjava was murmuring, “No, no.”

  And Pantalaimon said, “The Specters . . . She told us about the Specters, too.”

  “The Specters?” said Will. “We saw them during the battle, for the first time. What about them?”

  “Well, we found out where they come from,” said Kirjava. “And this is the worst thing: they’re like the children of the abyss. Every time we open a window with the knife, it makes a Specter. It’s like a little bit of the abyss that floats out and enters the world. That’s why the Cittàgazze world was so full of them, because of all the windows they left open there.”

  “And they grow by feeding on Dust,” said Pantalaimon. “And on dæmons. Because Dust and dæmons are sort of similar; grown-up dæmons anyway. And the Specters get bigger and stronger as they do . . .”

  Will felt a dull horror at his heart, and Kirjava pressed herself against his breast, feeling it, too, and trying to comfort him.

  “So every time I’ve used the knife,” he said, “every single time, I’ve made another Specter come to life?”

  He remembered Iorek Byrnison, in the cave where he’d forged the knife again, saying, “What you don’t know is what the knife does on its own. Your intentions may be good. The knife has intentions, too.”

  Lyra’s eyes were watching him, wide with anguish.

  “Oh, we can’t, Will!” she said. “We can’t do that to people—not let other Specters out, not now we’ve seen what they do!”

  “All right,” he said, getting to his feet, holding his dæmon close to his breast. “Then we’ll have to—one of us will have to—I’ll come to your world and . . .”

  She knew what he was going to say, and she saw him holding the beautiful, healthy dæmon he hadn’t even begun to know; and she thought of his mother, and she knew that he was thinking of her, too. To abandon her and live with Lyra, even for the few years they’d have together—could he do that? He might be living with Lyra, but she knew he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.

  “No,” she cried, jumping up beside him, and Kirjava joined Pantalaimon on the sand as boy and girl clung together desperately. “I’ll do it, Will! We’ll come to your world and live there! It doesn’t matter if we get ill, me and Pan—we’re strong, I bet we last a good long time—and there are probably good doctors in your world—Dr. Malone would know! Oh, let’s do that!”

  He was shaking his head, and she saw the brilliance of tears on his cheeks.

  “D’you think I could bear that, Lyra?” he said. “D’you think I could live happily watching you get sick and ill and fade away and then die, while I was getting stronger and more grown-up day by day? Ten years . . . That’s nothing. It’d pass in a flash. We’d be in our twenties. It’s not that far ahead. Think of that, Lyra, you and me grown up, just preparing to do all the things we want to do—and then . . . it all comes to an end. Do you think I could bear to live on after you died? Oh, Lyra, I’d follow you down to the world of the dead without thinking twice about it, just like you followed Roger; and that would be two lives gone for nothing, my life wasted like yours. No, we should spend our whole lifetimes together, good, long, busy lives, and if we can’t spend them together, we . . . we’ll have to spend them apart.”

  Biting her lip, she watched him as he walked up and down in his distracted anguish.

  He stopped and turned, and went on: “D’you remember another thing he said, my father? He said we have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are. He said that for us there isn’t any elsewhere. That’s what he meant, I can see now. Oh, it’s too bitter. I thought he just meant Lord Asriel and his new world, but he meant us, he meant you and me. We have to live in our own worlds . . .”

  “I’m going to ask the alethiometer,” Lyra said. “That’ll know! I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”

  She sat down, wiping her cheeks with the palm of one hand and reaching for the rucksack with the other. She carried it everywhere; when Will thought of her in later years, it was often with that little bag over her shoulder. She tucked the hair behind her ears in the swift movement he loved and took out the black velvet bundle.

  “Can you see?” he said, for although the moon was bright, the symbols around the face were very small.

  “I know where they all are,” she said, “I got it off by heart. Hush now . . .”

  She crossed her legs, pulling the skirt over them to make a lap. Will lay on one elbow and watched. The bright moonlight, reflected off the white sand, lit up her face with a radiance that seemed to draw out some other radiance from inside her; her eyes glittered, and her expression was so serious and absorbed that Will could have fallen in love with her again if love didn’t already possess every fiber of his being.

  Lyra took a deep breath and began to turn the wheels. But after only a few moments, she stopped and turned the instrument around.

  “Wrong place,” she said briefly, and tried again.

  Will, watching, saw her beloved face clearly. And because he knew it so well, and he’d studied her expression in happiness and despair and hope and sorrow, he could tell that something was wrong; for there was no sign of the clear concentration she used to sink into so quickly. Instead, an unhappy bewilderment spread gradually over her: she bit her lower lip, she blinked more and more, and her eyes moved slowly from symbol to symbol, almost at random, instead of darting swiftly and certainly.

  “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head, “I don’t know what’s happening . . . I know it so well, but I can’t seem to see what it means . . .”

  She took a deep, shuddering breath and turned the instrument around. It looked strange and awkward in her hands. Pantalaimon, mouse-formed, crept into her lap and rested his black paws on the crystal, peering at one symbol after another. Lyra turned one wheel, turned another, turned the whole thing around, and then looked up at Will, stricken.

  “Oh, Will,” she cried, “I can’t do it! It’s left me!”

  “Hush,” he said, “don’t fret. It’s still there inside you, all that knowledge. Just be calm and let yourself find it. Don’t force it. Just sort of float down to touch it . . .”

  She gulped and nodded and angrily brushed her wrist across her eyes, and took several deep breaths; but he could see she was too tense, and he put his hands on her shoulders and then felt her trembling and hugged her tight. She pulled back and tried again. Once more she gazed at
the symbols, once more she turned the wheels, but those invisible ladders of meaning down which she’d stepped with such ease and confidence weren’t there. She just didn’t know what any of the symbols meant.

  She turned away and clung to Will and said desperately:

  “It’s no good—I can tell—it’s gone forever—it just came when I needed it, for all the things I had to do—for rescuing Roger, and then for us two—and now that it’s over, now that everything’s finished, it’s just left me . . . It’s gone, Will! I’ve lost it! It’ll never come back!”

  She sobbed with desperate abandon. All he could do was hold her. He didn’t know how to comfort her, because it was plain that she was right.

  Then both the dæmons bristled and looked up. Will and Lyra sensed it, too, and followed their eyes to the sky. A light was moving toward them: a light with wings.

  “It’s the angel we saw,” said Pantalaimon, guessing.

  He guessed correctly. As the boy and the girl and the two dæmons watched her approach, Xaphania spread her wings wider and glided down to the sand. Will, for all the time he’d spent in the company of Balthamos, wasn’t prepared for the strangeness of this encounter. He and Lyra held each other’s hands tightly as the angel came toward them, with the light of another world shining on her. She was unclothed, but that meant nothing. What clothes could an angel wear anyway? Lyra thought. It was impossible to tell if she was old or young, but her expression was austere and compassionate, and both Will and Lyra felt as if she knew them to their hearts.

  “Will,” she said, “I have come to ask your help.”

  “My help? How can I help you?”

  “I want you to show me how to close the openings that the knife makes.”

  Will swallowed. “I’ll show you,” he said, “and in return, can you help us?”