“Now ride again,” said the leader.
There wasn’t far to go. Will and Lyra climbed up once more, and the other creatures looked closely at their balance and checked the stirrups with their trunks, as if to make sure they were safe.
Then they set off, beating the road with their lateral limbs, and urging themselves forward down the slope until they were moving at a terrific pace. Will and Lyra clung tight with hands and knees. They felt the air whip past their faces, flinging their hair back and pressing on their eyeballs. The thundering of the wheels, the rush of the grassland on either side, the sure and powerful lean into the broad curve ahead, the clearheaded rapture of speed—the creatures loved this, and Will and Lyra felt their joy and laughed in happy response.
They stopped in the center of the village, and the others, who had seen them coming, gathered around raising their trunks and speaking words of welcome.
And then Lyra cried, “Dr. Malone!”
Mary had come out of one of the huts, her faded blue shirt, her stocky figure, her warm, ruddy cheeks both strange and familiar.
Lyra ran and embraced her, and the woman hugged her tight, and Will stood back, careful and doubtful.
Mary kissed Lyra warmly and then came forward to welcome Will. And then came a curious little mental dance of sympathy and awkwardness, which took place in a second or less.
Moved by compassion for the state they were in, Mary first meant to embrace him as well as Lyra. But Mary was grown up, and Will was nearly grown, and she could see that that kind of response would have made a child of him, because while she might have embraced a child, she would never have done that to a man she didn’t know; so she drew back mentally, wanting above all to honor this friend of Lyra’s and not cause him to lose face.
So instead she held out her hand and he shook it, and a current of understanding and respect passed between them, so powerful that it became liking at once and each of them felt that they had made a lifelong friend, as indeed they had.
“This is Will,” said Lyra, “he’s from your world—remember, I told you about him—”
“I’m Mary Malone,” she said, “and you’re hungry, the pair of you, you look half-starved.”
She turned to the creature by her side and spoke some of those singing, hooting sounds, moving her arm as she did so.
At once the creatures moved away, and some of them brought cushions and rugs from the nearest house and laid them on the firm soil under a tree nearby, whose dense leaves and low-hanging branches gave a cool and fragrant shade.
And as soon as they were comfortable, their hosts brought smooth wooden bowls brimming with milk, which had a faint lemony astringency and was wonderfully refreshing; and small nuts like hazels, but with a richer buttery taste; and salad plucked fresh from the soil, sharp, peppery leaves mingled with soft, thick ones that oozed a creamy sap, and little cherry-sized roots tasting like sweet carrots.
But they couldn’t eat much. It was too rich. Will wanted to do justice to their generosity, but the only thing he could easily swallow, apart from the drink, was some flat, slightly scorched floury bread like chapatis or tortillas. It was plain and nourishing, and that was all Will could cope with. Lyra tried some of everything, but like Will she soon found that a little was quite enough.
Mary managed to avoid asking any questions. These two had passed through an experience that had marked them deeply; they didn’t want to talk about it yet.
So she answered their questions about the mulefa, and told them briefly how she had arrived in this world; and then she left them under the shade of the tree, because she could see their eyelids drooping and their heads nodding.
“You don’t have to do anything now but sleep,” she said.
The afternoon air was warm and still, and the shade of the tree was drowsy and murmurous with crickets. Less than five minutes after they’d swallowed the last of the drink, both Will and Lyra were fast asleep.
They are of two sexes? said Atal, surprised. But how can you tell?
It’s easy, said Mary. Their bodies are different shapes. They move differently.
They are not much smaller than you. But they have less sraf. When will that come to them?
I don’t know, Mary said. I suppose sometime soon. I don’t know when it happens to us.
No wheels, said Atal sympathetically.
They were weeding the vegetable garden. Mary had made a hoe to save having to bend down; Atal used her trunk, so their conversation was intermittent.
But you knew they were coming, said Atal.
Yes.
Was it the sticks that told you?
No, said Mary, blushing. She was a scientist; it was bad enough to have to admit to consulting the I Ching, but this was even more embarrassing. It was a night picture, she confessed.
The mulefa had no single word for dream. They dreamed vividly, though, and took their dreams very seriously.
You don’t like night pictures, Atal said.
Yes, I do. But I didn’t believe them until now. I saw the boy and the girl so clearly, and a voice told me to prepare for them.
What sort of voice? How did it speak if you couldn’t see it?
It was hard for Atal to imagine speech without the trunk movements that clarified and defined it. She’d stopped in the middle of a row of beans and faced Mary with fascinated curiosity.
Well, I did see it, said Mary. It was a woman, or a female wise one, like us, like my people. But very old and yet not old at all.
Wise one was what the mulefa called their leaders. She saw that Atal was looking intensely interested.
How could she be old and also not old? said Atal.
It is a make-like, said Mary.
Atal swung her trunk, reassured.
Mary went on as best she could: She told me that I should expect the children, and when they would appear, and where. But not why. I must just look after them.
They are hurt and tired, said Atal. Will they stop the sraf leaving?
Mary looked up uneasily. She knew without having to check through the spyglass that the shadow particles were streaming away faster than ever.
I hope so, she said. But I don’t know how.
In the early evening, when the cooking fires were lit and the first stars were coming out, a group of strangers arrived. Mary was washing; she heard the thunder of their wheels and the agitated murmur of their talk, and hurried out of her house, drying herself.
Will and Lyra had been asleep all afternoon, and they were just stirring now, hearing the noise. Lyra sat up groggily to see Mary talking to five or six of the mulefa, who were surrounding her, clearly excited; but whether they were angry or joyful, she couldn’t tell.
Mary saw her and broke away.
“Lyra,” she said, “something’s happened—they’ve found something they can’t explain and it’s… I don’t know what it is… I’ve got to go and look. It’s an hour or so away. I’ll come back as soon as I can. Help yourself to anything you need from my house—I can’t stop, they’re too anxious—”
“All right,” said Lyra, still dazed from her long sleep.
Mary looked under the tree. Will was rubbing his eyes.
“I really won’t be too long,” she said. “Atal will stay with you.”
The leader was impatient. Mary swiftly threw her bridle and stirrups over his back, excusing herself for being clumsy, and mounted at once. They wheeled and turned and drove away into the dusk.
They set off in a new direction, along the ridge above the coast to the north. Mary had never ridden in the dark before, and she found the speed even more alarming than by day. As they climbed, she could see the glitter of the moon on the sea far off to the left, and its silver-sepia light seemed to envelop her in a cool, skeptical wonder. The wonder was in her, and the skepticism was in the world, and the coolness was in both.
She looked up from time to time and touched the spyglass in her pocket, but she couldn’t use it till they’d stopped moving. And
these mulefa were moving urgently, with the air of not wanting to stop for anything. After an hour’s hard riding they swung inland, leaving the stone road and moving slowly along a trail of beaten earth that ran between knee-high grass past a stand of wheel trees and up toward a ridge. The landscape glowed under the moon: wide, bare hills with occasional little gullies, where streams trickled down among the trees that clustered there.
It was toward one of these gullies that they led her. She had dismounted when they left the road, and she walked steadily at their pace over the brow of the hill and down into the gully.
She heard the trickling of the spring, and the night wind in the grass. She heard the quiet sound of the wheels crunching over the hard-packed earth, and she heard the mulefa ahead of her murmuring to one another, and then they stopped.
In the side of the hill, just a few yards away, was one of those openings made by the subtle knife. It was like the mouth of a cave, because the moonlight shone into it a little way, just as if inside the opening there were the inside of the hill; but it wasn’t. And out of it was coming a procession of ghosts.
Mary felt as if the ground had given way beneath her mind. She caught herself with a start, seizing the nearest branch for reassurance that there still was a physical world, and she was still part of it.
She moved closer. Old men and women, children, babes in arms, humans and other beings, too, more and more thickly they came out of the dark into the world of solid moonlight—and vanished.
That was the strangest thing. They took a few steps in the world of grass and air and silver light, and looked around, their faces transformed with joy—Mary had never seen such joy—and held out their arms as if they were embracing the whole universe; and then, as if they were made of mist or smoke, they simply drifted away, becoming part of the earth and the dew and the night breeze.
Some of them came toward Mary as if they wanted to tell her something, and reached out their hands, and she felt their touch like little shocks of cold. One of the ghosts—an old woman—beckoned, urging her to come close.
Then she spoke, and Mary heard her say:
“Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well. Just tell them stories.”
That was all, and then she was gone. It was one of those moments when we suddenly recall a dream that we’ve unaccountably forgotten, and back in a flood comes all the emotion we felt in our sleep. It was the dream she’d tried to describe to Atal, the night picture; but as Mary tried to find it again, it dissolved and drifted apart, just as these presences did in the open air. The dream was gone.
All that was left was the sweetness of that feeling, and the injunction to tell them stories.
She looked into the darkness. As far as she could see into that endless silence, more of these ghosts were coming, thousands upon thousands, like refugees returning to their homeland.
“Tell them stories,” she said to herself.
THIRTY-THREE
MARZIPAN
Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie …
• GEORGE HERBERT •
Next morning Lyra woke up from a dream in which Pantalaimon had come back to her and revealed his final shape; and she had loved it, but now she had no idea what it was.
The sun hadn’t long risen, and the air had a fresh bloom. She could see the sunlight through the open door of the little thatched hut she slept in, Mary’s house. She lay for a while listening. There were birds outside, and some kind of cricket, and Mary was breathing quietly in her sleep nearby.
Lyra sat up and found herself naked. She was indignant for a moment, and then she saw some clean clothes folded beside her on the floor: a shirt of Mary’s, a length of soft, light patterned cloth that she could tie into a skirt. She put them on, feeling swamped in the shirt, but at least decent.
She left the hut. Pantalaimon was nearby; she was sure of it. She could almost hear him talking and laughing. It must mean that he was safe, and they were still connected somehow. And when he forgave her and came back—the hours they’d spend just talking, just telling each other everything…
Will was still asleep under the shelter tree, the lazy thing. Lyra thought of waking him up, but if she was on her own, she could swim in the river. She happily used to swim naked in the river Cherwell with all the other Oxford children, but it would be quite different with Will, and she blushed even to think of it.
So she went down to the water alone in the pearl-colored morning. Among the reeds at the edge there was a tall, slender bird like a heron, standing perfectly still on one leg. She walked quietly and slowly so as not to disturb it, but the bird took no more notice of her than if she’d been a twig on the water.
“Well,” she said.
She left the clothes on the bank and slipped into the river. It was seawater coming in on the tide, and it was strange to Lyra, who had never swum in salt water before. She swam hard to keep warm, and then came out and huddled on the bank, shivering. Pan would help dry her, normally. Was he a fish, laughing at her from under the water? Or a beetle, creeping into the clothes to tickle her, or a bird? Or was he somewhere else entirely with the other dæmon, and with Lyra not on his mind at all?
The sun was warm now, and she was soon dry. She dressed in Mary’s loose shirt again and, seeing some flat stones by the bank, went to fetch her own clothes to wash them. But she found that someone had already done that: hers and Will’s, too, were laid over the springy twigs of a fragrant bush, nearly dry.
Will was stirring. She sat nearby and called him softly.
“Will! Wake up!”
“Where are we?” he said at once, and sat up, reaching for the knife.
“Safe,” she said, looking away. “And they washed our clothes, too, or Dr. Malone did. I’ll get yours. They’re nearly dry…”
She passed them in through the curtain of leaves and sat with her back to him till he was dressed.
“I swam in the river,” she said. “I went to look for Pan, but I think he’s hiding.”
“That’s a good idea. I mean a swim. I feel as if I’ve got years and years of dirt on me… I’ll go down and wash.”
While he was gone, Lyra wandered around the village, not looking too closely at anything in case she broke some code of politeness, but curious about everything she saw. Some of the houses were very old and some quite new, but they were all built in much the same way out of wood and clay and thatch. There was nothing crude about them; each door and window frame and lintel was covered in subtle patterns, but patterns that weren’t carved in the wood: it was as if they’d persuaded the wood to grow in that shape naturally.
The more she looked, the more she saw all kinds of order and carefulness in the village, like the layers of meaning in the alethiometer. Part of her mind was eager to puzzle it all out, to step lightly from similarity to similarity, from one meaning to another as she did with the instrument; but another part was wondering how long they’d be able to stay here before they had to move on.
Well, I’m not going anywhere till Pan comes back, she said to herself.
Presently Will came up from the river, and then Mary came out of her house and offered them breakfast; and soon Atal came along, too, and the village came to life around them. The young mulefa children, without wheels, kept peeping around the edges of their houses to stare, and Lyra would suddenly turn and look at them directly to make them jump and laugh with terror.
“Well, now,” Mary said when they’d eaten some bread and fruit and drunk a scalding infusion of something like mint. “Yesterday you were too tired and all you could do was rest. But you look a lot more lively today, both of you, and I think we need to tell each other everything we’ve found out. And it’ll take us a good long time, and we might as well keep our hands busy while we’re doing it, so we’ll make ourselves useful and mend some nets.”
They carried the pile of stiff tarry netting to the riverbank a
nd spread it out on the grass, and Mary showed them how to knot a new piece of cord where it was worn. She was wary, because Atal had told her that the families farther along the coast had seen large numbers of the tualapi, the white birds, gathering out at sea, and everyone was prepared for a warning to leave at once; but work had to go on in the meantime.
So they sat working in the sun by the placid river, and Lyra told her story, from the moment so long ago when she and Pan decided to look in the Retiring Room at Jordan College.
The tide came in and turned, and still there was no sign of the tualapi. In the late afternoon Mary took Will and Lyra along the riverbank, past the fishing posts where the nets were tied, and through the wide salt marsh toward the sea. It was safe to go there when the tide was out, because the white birds only came inland when the water was high. Mary led the way along a hard path above the mud; like many things the mulefa had made, it was ancient and perfectly maintained, more like a part of nature than something imposed on it.
“Did they make the stone roads?” Will said.
“No. I think the roads made them, in a way,” Mary said. “I mean they’d never have developed the use of the wheels if there hadn’t been plenty of hard, flat surfaces to use them on. I think they’re lava-flows from ancient volcanoes.
“So the roads made it possible for them to use the wheels. And other things came together as well. Like the wheel trees themselves, and the way their bodies are formed—they’re not vertebrates, they don’t have a spine. Some lucky chance in our worlds long ago must have meant that creatures with backbones had it a bit easier, so all kinds of other shapes developed, all based on the central spine. In this world, chance went another way, and the diamond frame was successful. There are vertebrates, to be sure, but not many. There are snakes, for example. Snakes are important here. The people look after them and try not to hurt them.
“Anyway, their shape, and the roads, and the wheel trees coming together all made it possible. A lot of little chances, all coming together. When did your part of the story begin, Will?”
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