Philip Pullman_His Dark Materials 03 Page 4

  “But as for what we discovered in the Clouded Mountain, we can’t tell you the heart of it. We swore to each other that the first to hear should be Lord Asriel himself.”

  “Then tell me what you can. Don’t keep me in the dark.”

  “We found our way into the Clouded Mountain,” said Baruch, and at once went on: “I’m sorry; we use these terms too easily. It’s sometimes called the Chariot. It’s not fixed, you see; it moves from place to place. Wherever it goes, there is the heart of the Kingdom, his citadel, his palace. When the Authority was young, it wasn’t surrounded by clouds, but as time passed, he gathered them around him more and more thickly. No one has seen the summit for thousands of years. So his citadel is known now as the Clouded Mountain.”

  “What did you find there?”

  “The Authority himself dwells in a chamber at the heart of the Mountain. We couldn’t get close, although we saw him. His power—”

  “He has delegated much of his power,” Balthamos interrupted, “to Metatron. You’ve seen what he’s like. We escaped from him before, and now he’s seen us again, and what is more, he’s seen you, and he’s seen the knife. I did say—”

  “Balthamos,” said Baruch gently, “don’t chide Will. We need his help, and he can’t be blamed for not knowing what it took us so long to find out.”

  Balthamos looked away.

  Will said, “So you’re not going to tell me this secret of yours? All right. Tell me this, instead: what happens when we die?”

  Balthamos looked back, in surprise.

  Baruch said, “Well, there is a world of the dead. Where it is, and what happens there, no one knows. My ghost, thanks to Balthamos, never went there; I am what was once the ghost of Baruch. The world of the dead is just dark to us.”

  “It is a prison camp,” said Balthamos. “The Authority established it in the early ages. Why do you want to know? You will see it in time.”

  “My father has just died, that’s why. He would have told me all he knew, if he hadn’t been killed. You say it’s a world—do you mean a world like this one, another universe?”

  Balthamos looked at Baruch, who shrugged.

  “And what happens in the world of the dead?” Will went on.

  “It’s impossible to say,” said Baruch. “Everything about it is secret. Even the churches don’t know; they tell their believers that they’ll live in Heaven, but that’s a lie. If people really knew…”

  “And my father’s ghost has gone there.”

  “Without a doubt, and so have the countless millions who died before him.”

  Will found his imagination trembling.

  “And why didn’t you go directly to Lord Asriel with your great secret, whatever it is,” he said, “instead of looking for me?”

  “We were not sure,” said Balthamos, “that he would believe us unless we brought him proof of our good intentions. Two angels of low rank, among all the powers he is dealing with—why should he take us seriously? But if we could bring him the knife and its bearer, he might listen. The knife is a potent weapon, and Lord Asriel would be glad to have you on his side.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” said Will, “but that sounds feeble to me. If you had any confidence in your secret, you wouldn’t need an excuse to see Lord Asriel.”

  “There’s another reason,” said Baruch. “We knew that Metatron would be pursuing us, and we wanted to make sure the knife didn’t fall into his hands. If we could persuade you to come to Lord Asriel first, then at least—”

  “Oh, no, that’s not going to happen,” said Will. “You’re making it harder for me to reach Lyra, not easier. She’s the most important thing, and you’re forgetting her completely. Well, I’m not. Why don’t you just go to Lord Asriel and leave me alone? Make him listen. You could fly to him much more quickly than I can walk, and I’m going to find Lyra first, come what may. Just do that. Just go. Just leave me.”

  “But you need me,” said Balthamos stiffly, “because I can pretend to be your dæmon, and in Lyra’s world you’d stand out otherwise.”

  Will was too angry to speak. He got up and walked twenty steps away through the soft, deep sand, and then stopped, for the heat and humidity were stunning.

  He turned around to see the two angels talking closely together, and then they came up to him, humble and awkward, but proud, too.

  Baruch said, “We are sorry. I shall go on my own to Lord Asriel and give him our information, and ask him to send you help to find his daughter. It will be two days’ flying time, if I navigate truly.”

  “And I shall stay with you, Will,” said Balthamos.

  “Well,” said Will, “thank you.”

  The two angels embraced. Then Baruch folded his arms around Will and kissed him on both cheeks. The kiss was light and cool, like the hands of Balthamos.

  “If we keep moving toward Lyra,” Will said, “will you find us?”

  “I shall never lose Balthamos,” said Baruch, and stepped back.

  Then he leapt into the air, soared swiftly into the sky, and vanished among the scattered stars. Balthamos was looking after him with desperate longing.

  “Shall we sleep here, or should we move on?” he said finally, turning to Will.

  “Sleep here,” said Will.

  “Then sleep, and I’ll watch out for danger. Will, I have been short with you, and it was wrong of me. You have the greatest burden, and I should help you, not chide you. I shall try to be kinder from now on.”

  So Will lay down on the warm sand, and somewhere nearby, he thought, the angel was keeping watch; but that was little comfort.

  get us out of here, Roger, I promise. And Will’s coming, I’m sure he is!”

  He didn’t understand. He spread his pale hands and shook his head.

  “I dunno who that is, and he won’t come here,” he said, “and if he does, he won’t know me.”

  “He’s coming to me,” she said, “and me and Will, oh, I don’t know how, Roger, but I swear we’ll help. And don’t forget there’s others on our side. There’s Serafina and there’s Iorek, and

  THREE

  SCAVENGERS

  The knight’s bones are dust,

  And his good sword rust;—

  His soul is with the saints, I trust.

  • S. T. COLERIDGE •

  Serafina Pekkala, the clan queen of the witches of Lake Enara, wept as she flew through the turbid skies of the Arctic. She wept with rage and fear and remorse: rage against the woman Coulter, whom she had sworn to kill; fear of what was happening to her beloved land; and remorse… She would face the remorse later.

  Meanwhile, looking down at the melting ice cap, the flooded lowland forests, the swollen sea, she felt heartsick.

  But she didn’t stop to visit her homeland, or to comfort and encourage her sisters. Instead, she flew north and farther north, into the fogs and gales around Svalbard, the kingdom of Iorek Byrnison, the armored bear.

  She hardly recognized the main island. The mountains lay bare and black, and only a few hidden valleys facing away from the sun had retained a little snow in their shaded corners; but what was the sun doing here anyway, at this time of year? The whole of nature was overturned.

  It took her most of a day to find the bear-king. She saw him among the rocks off the northern edge of the island, swimming fast after a walrus. It was harder for bears to kill in the water: when the land was covered in ice and the great sea-mammals had to come up to breathe, the bears had the advantage of camouflage and their prey was out of its element. That was how things should be.

  But Iorek Byrnison was hungry, and even the stabbing tusks of the mighty walrus couldn’t keep him at bay. Serafina watched as the creatures fought, turning the white sea-spray red, and saw Iorek haul the carcass out of the waves and onto a broad shelf of rock, watched at a respectful distance by three ragged-furred foxes, waiting for their turn at the feast.

  When the bear-king had finished eating, Serafina flew down to speak to him. Now was the time to
face her remorse.

  “King Iorek Byrnison,” she said, “please may I speak with you? I lay my weapons down.”

  She placed her bow and arrows on the wet rock between them. Iorek looked at them briefly, and she knew that if his face could register any emotion, it would be surprise.

  “Speak, Serafina Pekkala,” he growled. “We have never fought, have we?”

  “King Iorek, I have failed your comrade, Lee Scoresby.”

  The bear’s small black eyes and bloodstained muzzle were very still. She could see the wind ruffling the tips of the creamy white hairs along his back. He said nothing.

  “Mr. Scoresby is dead,” Serafina went on. “Before I parted from him, I gave him a flower to summon me with, if he should need me. I heard his call and flew to him, but I arrived too late. He died fighting a force of Muscovites, but I know nothing of what brought them there, or why he was holding them off when he could easily have escaped. King Iorek, I am wretched with remorse.”

  “Where did this happen?” said Iorek Byrnison.

  “In another world. This will take me some time to tell.”

  “Then begin.”

  She told him what Lee Scoresby had set out to do: to find the man who had been known as Stanislaus Grumman. She told him about how the barrier between the worlds had been breached by Lord Asriel, and about some of the consequences—the melting of the ice, for example. She told of the witch Ruta Skadi’s flight after the angels, and she tried to describe those flying beings to the bear-king as Ruta had described them to her: the light that shone on them, the crystalline clarity of their appearance, the richness of their wisdom.

  Then she described what she had found when she answered Lee’s call.

  “I put a spell on his body to preserve it from corruption,” she told him. “It will last until you see him, if you wish to do that. But I am troubled by this, King Iorek. Troubled by everything, but mostly by this.”

  “Where is the child?”

  “I left her with my sisters, because I had to answer Lee’s call.”

  “In that same world?”

  “Yes, the same.”

  “How can I get there from here?”

  She explained. Iorek Byrnison listened expressionlessly, and then said, “I shall go to Lee Scoresby. And then I must go south.”

  “South?”

  “The ice has gone from these lands. I have been thinking about this, Serafina Pekkala. I have chartered a ship.”

  The three little foxes had been waiting patiently. Two of them were lying down, heads on their paws, watching, and the other was still sitting up, following the conversation. The foxes of the Arctic, scavengers that they were, had picked up some language, but their brains were so formed that they could only understand statements in the present tense. Most of what Iorek and Serafina said was meaningless noise to them. Furthermore, when they spoke, much of what they said was lies, so it didn’t matter if they repeated what they’d heard: no one could sort out which parts were true, though the credulous cliff-ghasts often believed most of it, and never learned from their disappointment. The bears and the witches alike were used to their conversations being scavenged as well as the meat they’d finished with.

  “And you, Serafina Pekkala?” Iorek went on. “What will you do now?”

  “I’m going to find the gyptians,” she said. “I think they will be needed.”

  “Lord Faa,” said the bear, “yes. Good fighters. Go well.”

  He turned away and slipped into the water without a splash, and began to swim in his steady, tireless paddle toward the new world.

  And some time later, Iorek Byrnison stepped through the blackened undergrowth and the heat-split rocks at the edge of a burned forest. The sun was glaring through the smoky haze, but he ignored the heat as he ignored the charcoal dust that blackened his white fur and the midges that searched in vain for skin to bite.

  He had come a long way, and at one point in his journey, he had found himself swimming into that other world. He noticed the change in the taste of the water and the temperature of the air, but the air was still good to breathe, and the water still held his body up, so he swam on, and now he had left the sea behind and he was nearly at the place Serafina Pekkala had described. He cast around, his black eyes gazing up at the sun-shimmering rocks and the wall of limestone crags above him.

  Between the edge of the burned forest and the mountains, a rocky slope of heavy boulders and scree was littered with scorched and twisted metal: girders and struts that had belonged to some complex machine. Iorek Byrnison looked at them as a smith as well as a warrior, but there was nothing in these fragments he could use. He scored a line with a mighty claw along a strut less damaged than most, and feeling a flimsiness in the quality of the metal, turned away at once and scanned the mountain wall again.

  Then he saw what he was looking for: a narrow gully leading back between jagged walls, and at the entrance, a large, low boulder.

  He clambered steadily toward it. Beneath his huge feet, dry bones snapped loudly in the stillness, because many men had died here, to be picked clean by coyotes and vultures and lesser creatures; but the great bear ignored them and stepped up carefully toward the rock. The going was loose and he was heavy, and more than once the scree shifted under his feet and carried him down again in a scramble of dust and gravel. But as soon as he slid down, he began to move up once more, relentlessly, patiently, until he reached the rock itself, where the footing was firmer.

  The boulder was pitted and chipped with bullet marks. Everything the witch had told him was true. And in confirmation, a little Arctic flower, a purple saxifrage, blossomed improbably where the witch had planted it as a signal in a cranny of the rock.

  Iorek Byrnison moved around to the upper side. It was a good shelter from an enemy below, but not good enough; for among the hail of bullets that had chipped fragments off the rock had been a few that had found their targets and lay where they had come to rest, in the body of the man lying stiff in the shadow.

  He was a body still, and not a skeleton, because the witch had laid a spell to preserve him from corruption. Iorek could see the face of his old comrade drawn and tight with the pain of his wounds, and see the jagged holes in his garments where the bullets had entered. The witch’s spell did not cover the blood that must have spilled, and insects and the sun and the wind had dispersed it completely. Lee Scoresby looked not asleep, nor at peace—he looked as if he had died in battle—but he looked as if he knew that his fight had been successful.

  And because the Texan aeronaut was one of the very few humans Iorek had ever esteemed, he accepted the man’s last gift to him. With deft movements of his claws, he ripped aside the dead man’s clothes, opened the body with one slash, and began to feast on the flesh and blood of his old friend. It was his first meal for days, and he was hungry.

  But a complex web of thoughts was weaving itself in the bear-king’s mind, with more strands in it than hunger and satisfaction. There was the memory of the little girl Lyra, whom he had named Silvertongue, and whom he had last seen crossing the fragile snow bridge across a crevasse in his own island of Svalbard. Then there was the agitation among the witches, the rumors of pacts and alliances and war; and then there was the surpassingly strange fact of this new world itself, and the witch’s insistence that there were many more such worlds, and that the fate of them all hung somehow on the fate of the child.

  And then there was the melting of the ice. He and his people lived on the ice; ice was their home; ice was their citadel. Since the vast disturbances in the Arctic, the ice had begun to disappear, and Iorek knew that he had to find an icebound fastness for his kin, or they would perish. Lee had told him that there were mountains in the south so high that even his balloon could not fly over them, and they were crowned with snow and ice all year round. Exploring those mountains was his next task.

  But for now, something simpler possessed his heart, something bright and hard and unshakable: vengeance. Lee Scoresby, who had
rescued Iorek from danger in his balloon and fought beside him in the Arctic of his own world, had died. Iorek would avenge him. The good man’s flesh and bone would both nourish him and keep him restless until blood was spilled enough to still his heart.

  The sun was setting as Iorek finished his meal, and the air was cooling down. After gathering the remaining fragments of Lee’s body into a single heap, the bear lifted the flower in his mouth and dropped it in the center of them, as humans liked to do. The witch’s spell was broken now; the rest of the body was free to all who came. Soon it would be nourishing a dozen different kinds of life.

  Then Iorek set off down the slope toward the sea again, toward the south.

  Cliff-ghasts were fond of fox, when they could get it. The little creatures were cunning and hard to catch, but their meat was tender and rank.

  Before he killed this one, the cliff-ghast let it talk, and laughed at its silly babble.

  “Bear must go south! Swear! Witch is troubled! True! Swear! Promise!”

  “Bears don’t go south, lying filth!”

  “True! King bear must go south! Show you walrus—fine fat good—”

  “King bear go south?”

  “And flying things got treasure! Flying things—angels—crystal treasure!”

  “Flying things—like cliff-ghasts? Treasure?”

  “Like light, not like cliff-ghast. Rich! Crystal! And witch troubled—witch sorry—Scoresby dead—”