When Sattamax was ready to speak, the rest of the crowd fell silent. Mary stood close to the mound, with Atal nearby for reassurance; but she sensed all their eyes on her and felt as if she were a new girl at school.
Sattamax began to speak. His voice was deep, the tones rich and varied, the gestures of his trunk low and graceful.
We have all come together to greet the stranger Mary. Those of us who know her have reason to be grateful for her activities since she arrived among us. We have waited until she had some command of our language. With the help of many of us, but especially the zalif Atal, the stranger Mary can now understand us.
But there was another thing she had to understand, and that was sraf. She knew about it, but she could not see it as we can, until she made an instrument to look through.
And now she has succeeded, she is ready to learn more about what she must do to help us.
Mary, come here and join me.
She felt dizzy, self-conscious, bemused, but she did as she had to and stepped up beside the old zalif. She thought she had better speak, so she began:
You have all made me feel I am a friend. You are kind and hospitable. I came from a world where life is very different, but some of us are aware of sraf, as you are, and I’m grateful for your help in making this glass, through which I can see it. If there is any way in which I can help you, I will be glad to do it.
She spoke more awkwardly than she did with Atal, and she was afraid she hadn’t made her meaning clear. It was hard to know where to face when you had to gesture as well as speak, but they seemed to understand.
Sattamax said, It is good to hear you speak. We hope you will be able to help us. If not, I cannot see how we will survive. The tualapi will kill us all. There are more of them than there ever were, and their numbers are increasing every year. Something has gone wrong with the world. For most of the thirty-three thousand years that there have been mulefa, we have taken care of the earth. Everything balanced. The trees prospered, the grazers were healthy, and even if once in a while the tualapi came, our numbers and theirs remained constant.
But three hundred years ago the trees began to sicken. We watched them anxiously and tended them with care and still we found them producing fewer seedpods, and dropping their leaves out of season, and some of them died outright, which had never been known. All our memory could not find a cause for this.
To be sure, the process was slow, but so is the rhythm of our lives. We did not know that until you came. We have seen butterflies and birds, but they have no sraf. You do, strange as you seem; but you are swift and immediate, like birds, like butterflies. You realize there is a need for something to help you see sraf and instantly, out of the materials we have known for thousands of years, you put together an instrument to do so. Beside us, you think and act with the speed of a bird. That is how it seems, which is how we know that our rhythm seems slow to you.
But that fact is our hope. You can see things that we cannot, you can see connections and possibilities and alternatives that are invisible to us, just as sraf was invisible to you. And while we cannot see a way to survive, we hope that you may. We hope that you will go swiftly to the cause of the trees’ sickness and find a cure; we hope you will invent a means of dealing with the tualapi, who are so numerous and so powerful.
And we hope you can do so soon, or we shall all die.
There was a murmur of agreement and approval from the crowd. They were all looking at Mary, and she felt more than ever like the new pupil at a school where they had high expectations of her. She also felt a strange flattery: the idea of herself as swift and darting and birdlike was new and pleasant, because she had always thought of herself as dogged and plodding. But along with that came the feeling that they’d got it terribly wrong, if they saw her like that; they didn’t understand at all; she couldn’t possibly fulfill this desperate hope of theirs.
But equally, she must. They were waiting.
Sattamax, she said, mulefa, you put your trust in me and I shall do my best. You have been kind and your life is good and beautiful and I will try very hard to help you, and now I have seen sraf, I know what it is that I am doing. Thank you for trusting me.
They nodded and murmured and stroked her with their trunks as she stepped down. She was daunted by what she had agreed to do.
At that very moment in the world of Cittàgazze, the assassin-priest Father Gomez was making his way up a rough track in the mountains between the twisted trunks of olive trees. The evening light slanted through the silvery leaves and the air was full of the noise of crickets and cicadas.
Ahead of him he could see a little farmhouse sheltered among vines, where a goat bleated and a spring trickled down through the gray rocks. There was an old man attending to some task beside the house, and an old woman leading the goat toward a stool and a bucket.
In the village some way behind, they had told him that the woman he was following had passed this way, and that she’d talked of going up into the mountains; perhaps this old couple had seen her. At least there might be cheese and olives to buy, and springwater to drink. Father Gomez was quite used to living frugally, and there was plenty of time.
EIGHTEEN
THE SUBURBS OF THE DEAD
O that it were possible we might
But hold some two days’ conference with the dead …
• JOHN WEBSTER •
Lyra was awake before dawn, with Pantalaimon shivering at her breast, and she got up to walk about and warm herself up as the gray light seeped into the sky. She had never known such silence, not even in the snow-blanketed Arctic; there was not a stir of wind, and the sea was so still that not the tiniest ripple broke on the sand; the world seemed suspended between breathing in and breathing out.
Will lay curled up fast asleep, with his head on the rucksack to protect the knife. The cloak had fallen off his shoulder, and she tucked it around him, pretending that she was taking care to avoid his dæmon, and that she had the form of a cat, curled up just as he was. She must be here somewhere, Lyra thought.
Carrying the still sleepy Pantalaimon, she walked away from Will and sat down on the slope of a sand dune a little way off, so their voices wouldn’t wake him.
“Those little people,” Pantalaimon said.
“I don’t like ’em,” said Lyra decisively. “I think we should get away from ’em as soon as we can. I reckon if we trap ’em in a net or something, Will can cut through and close up and that’s it, we’ll be free.”
“We haven’t got a net,” he said, “or something. Anyway, I bet they’re cleverer than that. He’s watching us now.”
Pantalaimon was a hawk as he said that, and his eyes were keener than hers. The darkness of the sky was turning minute by minute into the palest ethereal blue, and as she looked across the sand, the first edge of the sun just cleared the rim of the sea, dazzling her. Because she was on the slope of the dune, the light reached her a few seconds before it touched the beach, and she watched it flow around her and along toward Will; and then she saw the hand-high figure of the Chevalier Tialys, standing by Will’s head, clear and wide awake and watching them.
“The thing is,” said Lyra, “they can’t make us do what they want. They got to follow us. I bet they’re fed up.”
“If they got hold of us,” said Pantalaimon, meaning him and Lyra, “and got their stings ready to stick in us, Will’d have to do what they said.”
Lyra thought about it. She remembered vividly the horrible scream of pain from Mrs. Coulter, the eye-rolling convulsions, the ghastly, lolling drool of the golden monkey as the poison entered her bloodstream . . . And that was only a scratch, as her mother had recently been reminded elsewhere. Will would have to give in and do what they wanted.
“Suppose they thought he wouldn’t, though,” she said, “suppose they thought he was so coldhearted he’d just watch us die. Maybe he better make ’em think that, if he can.”
She had brought the alethiometer with her, and now that it was
light enough to see, she took the beloved instrument out and laid it on its black velvet cloth in her lap. Little by little, Lyra drifted into that trance in which the many layers of meaning were clear to her, and where she could sense intricate webs of connectedness between them all. As her fingers found the symbols, her mind found the words: How can we get rid of the spies?
Then the needle began to dart this way and that, almost too fast to see, and some part of Lyra’s awareness counted the swings and the stops and saw at once the meaning of what the movement said.
It told her: Do not try, because your lives depend on them.
That was a surprise, and not a happy one. But she went on and asked: How can we get to the land of the dead?
The answer came: Go down. Follow the knife. Go onward. Follow the knife.
And finally she asked hesitantly, half-ashamed: Is this the right thing to do?
Yes, said the alethiometer instantly. Yes.
She sighed, coming out of her trance, and tucked the hair behind her ears, feeling the first warmth of the sun on her face and shoulders. There were sounds in the world now, too: insects were stirring, and a very slight breeze was rustling the dry grass stems growing higher up the dune.
She put the alethiometer away and wandered back to Will, with Pantalaimon as large as he could make himself and lion-shaped, in the hope of daunting the Gallivespians.
The man was using his lodestone apparatus, and when he’d finished, Lyra said:
“You been talking to Lord Asriel?”
“To his representative,” said Tialys.
“We en’t going.”
“That’s what I told him.”
“What did he say?”
“That was for my ears, not yours.”
“Suit yourself,” she said. “Are you married to that lady?”
“No. We are colleagues.”
“Have you got any children?”
“No.”
Tialys continued to pack the lodestone resonator away, and as he did so, the Lady Salmakia woke up nearby, sitting up graceful and slow from the little hollow she’d made in the soft sand. The dragonflies were still asleep, tethered with cobweb-thin cord, their wings damp with dew.
“Are there big people on your world, or are they all small like you?” Lyra said.
“We know how to deal with big people,” Tialys replied, not very helpfully, and went to talk quietly to the Lady. They spoke too softly for Lyra to hear, but she enjoyed watching them sip dewdrops from the marram grass to refresh themselves. Water must be different for them, she thought to Pantalaimon: imagine drops the size of your fist! They’d be hard to get into; they’d have a sort of elastic rind, like a balloon.
By this time Will was waking, too, wearily. The first thing he did was to look for the Gallivespians, who looked back at once, fully focused on him.
He looked away and found Lyra.
“I want to tell you something,” she said. “Come over here, away from—”
“If you go away from us,” said Tialys’s clear voice, “you must leave the knife. If you won’t leave the knife, you must talk to each other here.”
“Can’t we be private?” Lyra said indignantly. “We don’t want you listening to what we say!”
“Then go away, but leave the knife.”
There was no one else nearby, after all, and certainly the Gallivespians wouldn’t be able to use it. Will rummaged in the rucksack for the water bottle and a couple of biscuits, and handing one to Lyra, he went with her up the slope of the dune.
“I asked the alethiometer,” she told him, “and it said we shouldn’t try and escape from the little people, because they were going to save our lives. So maybe we’re stuck with ’em.”
“Have you told them what we’re going to do?”
“No! And I won’t, either. ’Cause they’ll only tell Lord Asriel on that speaking-fiddle and he’d go there and stop us—so we got to just go, and not talk about it in front of them.”
“They are spies, though,” Will pointed out. “They must be good at listening and hiding. So maybe we better not mention it at all. We know where we’re going. So we’ll just go and not talk about it, and they’ll have to put up with it and come along.”
“They can’t hear us now. They’re too far off. Will, I asked how we get there, too. It said to follow the knife, just that.”
“Sounds easy,” he said. “But I bet it isn’t. D’you know what Iorek told me?”
“No. He said—when I went to say good-bye—he said it would be very difficult for you, but he thought you could do it. But he never told me why . . .”
“The knife broke because I thought of my mother,” he explained. “So I’ve got to put her out of my mind. But . . . it’s like when someone says don’t think about a crocodile, you do, you can’t help it . . .”
“Well, you cut through last night all right,” she said.
“Yeah, because I was tired, I think. Well, we’ll see. Just follow the knife?”
“That’s all it said.”
“Might as well go now, then. Except there’s not much food left. We ought to find something to take with us, bread and fruit or something. So first I’ll find a world where we can get food, and then we’ll start looking properly.”
“All right,” said Lyra, quite happy to be moving again, with Pan and Will, alive and awake.
They made their way back to the spies, who were sitting alertly by the knife, packs on their backs.
“We should like to know what you intend,” said Salmakia.
“Well, we’re not coming to Lord Asriel anyway,” said Will. “We’ve got something else to do first.”
“And will you tell us what that is, since it’s clear we can’t stop you from doing it?”
“No,” said Lyra, “because you’d just go and tell them. You’ll have to come along without knowing where we’re going. Of course you could always give up and go back to them.”
“Certainly not,” said Tialys.
“We want some kind of guarantee,” said Will. “You’re spies, so you’re bound to be dishonest, that’s your trade. We need to know we can trust you. Last night we were all too tired and we couldn’t think about it, but there’d be nothing to stop you waiting till we were asleep and then stinging us to make us helpless and calling up Lord Asriel on that lodestone thing. You could do that easily. So we need to have a proper guarantee that you won’t. A promise isn’t enough.”
The two Gallivespians trembled with anger at this slur on their honor.
Tialys, controlling himself, said, “We don’t accept one-sided demands. You must give something in exchange. You must tell us what your intentions are, and then I shall give the lodestone resonator into your care. You must let me have it when I want to send a message, but you will always know when that happens, and we shall not be able to use it without your agreement. That will be our guarantee. And now you tell us where you are going, and why.”
Will and Lyra exchanged a glance to confirm it.
“All right,” Lyra said, “that’s fair. So here’s where we’re going: we’re going to the world of the dead. We don’t know where it is, but the knife’ll find it. That’s what we’re going to do.”
The two spies were looking at her with openmouthed incredulity.
Then Salmakia blinked and said, “What you say doesn’t make sense. The dead are dead, that’s all. There is no world of the dead.”
“I thought that was true, as well,” said Will. “But now I’m not sure. At least with the knife we can find out.”
“But why?”
Lyra looked at Will and saw him nod.
“Well,” she said, “before I met Will, long before I was asleep, I led this friend into danger, and he was killed. I thought I was rescuing him, only I was making things worse. And while I was asleep I dreamed of him and I thought maybe I could make amends if I went where he’s gone and said I was sorry. And Will wants to find his father, who died just when he found him before. See, Lord Asrie
l wouldn’t think of that. Nor would Mrs. Coulter. If we went to him we’d have to do what he wants, and he wouldn’t think of Roger at all—that’s my friend who died—it wouldn’t matter to him. But it matters to me. To us. So that’s what we want to do.”
“Child,” said Tialys, “when we die, everything is over. There is no other life. You have seen death. You’ve seen dead bodies, and you’ve seen what happens to a dæmon when death comes. It vanishes. What else can there be to live on after that?”
“We’re going to go and find out,” said Lyra. “And now we’ve told you, I’ll take your resonator lodestone.”
She held out her hand, and leopard-Pantalaimon stood, tail swinging slowly, to reinforce her demand. Tialys unslung the pack from his back and laid it in her palm. It was surprisingly heavy—no burden for her, of course, but she marveled at his strength.
“And how long do you think this expedition will take?” said the Chevalier.
“We don’t know,” Lyra told him. “We don’t know anything about it, any more than you do. We’ll just go there and see.”
“First thing,” Will said, “we’ve got to get some water and some more food, something easy to carry. So I’m going to find a world where we can do that, and then we’ll set off.”
Tialys and Salmakia mounted their dragonflies and held them quivering on the ground. The great insects were eager for flight, but the command of their riders was absolute, and Lyra, watching them in daylight for the first time, saw the extraordinary fineness of the gray silk reins, the silvery stirrups, the tiny saddles.
Will took the knife, and a powerful temptation made him feel for the touch of his own world: he had the credit card still; he could buy familiar food; he could even telephone Mrs. Cooper and ask for news of his mother—
The knife jarred with a sound like a nail being drawn along rough stone, and his heart nearly stopped. If he broke the blade again, it would be the end.
After a few moments he tried again. Instead of trying not to think of his mother, he said to himself: Yes, I know she’s there, but I’m just going to look away while I do this . . .
The Amber Spyglass: His Dark Materials Page 22