“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?”
“Not in the way you want. I can see what you’ve been talking about. Your sorrow has left traces in the air. This is no comfort, but believe me, every single being who knows of your dilemma wishes things could be otherwise; but there are fates that even the most powerful have to submit to. There is nothing I can do to help you change the way things are.”
“Why—” Lyra began, and found her voice weak and trembling—“why can’t I read the alethiometer anymore? Why can’t I even do that? That was the one thing I could do really well, and it’s just not there anymore—it just vanished as if it had never come…”
“You read it by grace,” said Xaphania, looking at her, “and you can regain it by work.”
“How long will that take?”
“A lifetime.”
“That long…”
“But your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding. Grace attained like that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore, once you’ve gained it, it will never leave you.”
“You mean a full lifetime, don’t you?” Lyra whispered. “A whole long life? Not… not just… a few years…”
“Yes, I do,” said the angel.
“And must all the windows be closed?” said Will. “Every single one?”
“Understand this,” said Xaphania: “Dust is not a constant. There’s not a fixed quantity that has always been the same. Conscious beings make Dust—they renew it all the time, by thinking and feeling and reflecting, by gaining wisdom and passing it on.
“And if you help everyone else in your worlds to do that, by helping them to learn and understand about themselves and each other and the way everything works, and by showing them how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious… Then they will renew enough to replace what is lost through one window. So there could be one left open.”
Will trembled with excitement, and his mind leapt to a single point: to a new window in the air between his world and Lyra’s. And it would be their secret, and they could go through whenever they chose, and live for a while in each other’s worlds, not living fully in either, so their dæmons would keep their health; and they could grow up together and maybe, much later on, they might have children, who would be secret citizens of two worlds; and they could bring all the learning of one world into the other, they could do all kinds of good—
But Lyra was shaking her head.
“No,” she said in a quiet wail, “we can’t, Will—”
And he suddenly knew her thought, and in the same anguished tone, he said, “No, the dead—”
“We must leave it open for them! We must!”
“Yes, otherwise…”
“And we must make enough Dust for them, Will, and keep the window open—”
She was trembling. She felt very young as he held her to his side.
“And if we do,” he said shakily, “if we live our lives properly and think about them as we do, then there’ll be something to tell the harpies about as well. We’ve got to tell people that, Lyra.”
“The true stories, yes,” she said, “the true stories the harpies want to hear in exchange. Yes. So if people live their whole lives and they’ve got nothing to tell about it when they’ve finished, then they’ll never leave the world of the dead. We’ve got to tell them that, Will.”
“Alone, though…”
“Yes,” she said, “alone.”
And at the word alone, Will felt a great wave of rage and despair moving outward from a place deep within him, as if his mind were an ocean that some profound convulsion had disturbed. All his life he’d been alone, and now he must be alone again, and this infinitely precious blessing that had come to him must be taken away almost at once. He felt the wave build higher and steeper to darken the sky, he felt the crest tremble and begin to spill, he felt the great mass crashing down with the whole weight of the ocean behind it against the iron-bound coast of what had to be. And he found himself gasping and shaking and crying aloud with more anger and pain than he had ever felt in his life, and he found Lyra just as helpless in his arms. But as the wave expended its force and the waters withdrew, the bleak rocks remained; there was no arguing with fate; neither his despair nor Lyra’s had moved them a single inch.
How long his rage lasted, he had no idea. But eventually it had to subside, and the ocean was a little calmer after the convulsion. The waters were still agitated, and perhaps they would never be truly calm again, but the great force had gone.
They turned to the angel and saw she had understood, and that she felt as sorrowful as they did. But she could see farther than they could, and there was a calm hope in her expression, too.
Will swallowed hard and said, “All right. I’ll show you how to close a window. But I’ll have to open one first, and make another Specter. I never knew about them, or else I’d have been more careful.”
“We shall take care of the Specters,” said Xaphania.
Will took the knife and faced the sea. To his surprise, his hands were quite steady. He cut a window into his own world, and they found themselves looking at a great factory or chemical plant, where complicated pipe work ran between buildings and storage tanks, where lights glowed at every corner, where wisps of steam rose into the air.
“It’s strange to think that angels don’t know the way to do this,” Will said.
“The knife was a human invention.”
“And you’re going to close them all except one,” Will said. “All except the one from the world of the dead.”
“Yes, that is a promise. But it is conditional, and you know the condition.”
“Yes, we do. Are there many windows to close?”
“Thousands. There is the terrible abyss made by the bomb, and there is the great opening Lord Asriel made out of his own world. They must both be closed, and they will. But there are many smaller openings, too, some deep under the earth, some high in the air, which came about in other ways.”
“Baruch and Balthamos told me that they used openings like that to travel between the worlds. Will angels no longer be able to do that? Will you be confined to one world as we are?”
“No; we have other ways of traveling.”
“The way you have,” Lyra said, “is it possible for us to learn?”
“Yes. You could learn to do it, as Will’s father did. It uses the faculty of what you call imagination. But that does not mean making things up. It is a form of seeing.”
“Not real traveling, then,” said Lyra. “Just pretend…”
“No,” said Xaphania, “nothing like pretend. Pretending is easy. This way is hard, but much truer.”
“And is it like the alethiometer?” said Will. “Does it take a whole lifetime to learn?”
“It takes long practice, yes. You have to work. Did you think you could snap your fingers, and have it as a gift? What is worth having is worth working for. But you have a friend who has already taken the first steps, and who could help you.”
Will had no idea who that could be, and at that moment he wasn’t in the mood to ask.
“I see,” he said, sighing. “And will we see you again? Will we ever speak to an angel once we go back to our own worlds?”
“I don’t know,” said Xaphania. “But you should not spend your time waiting.”
“And I should break the knife,” said Will.
“Yes.”
While they had been speaking, the window had been open beside them. The lights were glowing in the factory, the work was going on; machines were turning, chemicals were combining, p
eople were producing goods and earning their livings. That was the world where Will belonged.
“Well, I’ll show you what to do,” he said.
So he taught the angel how to feel for the edges of the window, just as Giacomo Paradisi had shown him, sensing them at his fingers’ ends and pinching them together. Little by little the window closed, and the factory disappeared.
“The openings that weren’t made by the subtle knife,” Will said, “is it really necessary to close them all? Because surely Dust only escapes through the openings the knife made. The other ones must have been there for thousands of years, and still Dust exists.”
The angel said, “We shall close them all, because if you thought that any still remained, you would spend your life searching for one, and that would be a waste of the time you have. You have other work than that to do, much more important and valuable, in your own world. There will be no travel outside it anymore.”
“What work have I got to do, then?” said Will, but went on at once, “No, on second thought, don’t tell me. I shall decide what I do. If you say my work is fighting, or healing, or exploring, or whatever you might say, I’ll always be thinking about it. And if I do end up doing that, I’ll be resentful because it’ll feel as if I didn’t have a choice, and if I don’t do it, I’ll feel guilty because I should. Whatever I do, I will choose it, no one else.”
“Then you have already taken the first steps toward wisdom,” said Xaphania.
“There’s a light out at sea,” said Lyra.
“That is the ship bringing your friends to take you home. They will be here tomorrow.”
The word tomorrow fell like a heavy blow. Lyra had never thought she would be reluctant to see Farder Coram, and John Faa, and Serafina Pekkala.
“I shall go now,” said the angel. “I have learned what I needed to know.”
She embraced each of them in her light, cool arms and kissed their foreheads. Then she bent to kiss the dæmons, and they became birds and flew up with her as she spread her wings and rose swiftly into the air. Only a few seconds later she had vanished.
A few moments after she had gone, Lyra gave a little gasp.
“What is it?” said Will.
“I never asked her about my father and mother—and I can’t ask the alethiometer, either, now… I wonder if I’ll ever know?”
She sat down slowly, and he sat down beside her.
“Oh, Will,” she said, “what can we do? Whatever can we do? I want to live with you forever. I want to kiss you and lie down with you and wake up with you every day of my life till I die, years and years and years away. I don’t want a memory, just a memory…”
“No,” he said, “memory’s a poor thing to have. It’s your own real hair and mouth and arms and eyes and hands I want. I didn’t know I could ever love anything so much. Oh, Lyra, I wish this night would never end! If only we could stay here like this, and the world could stop turning, and everyone else could fall into a sleep…”
“Everyone except us! And you and I could live here forever and just love each other.”
“I will love you forever, whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again…”
“I’ll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you… We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams… And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won’t just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be joined so tight…”
They lay side by side, hand in hand, looking at the sky.
“Do you remember,” she whispered, “when you first came into that café in Ci’gazze, and you’d never seen a dæmon?”
“I couldn’t understand what he was. But when I saw you, I liked you straightaway because you were brave.”
“No, I liked you first.”
“You didn’t! You fought me!”
“Well,” she said, “yes. But you attacked me.”
“I did not! You came charging out and attacked me.”
“Yes, but I soon stopped.”
“Yes, but,” he mocked softly.
He felt her tremble, and then under his hands the delicate bones of her back began to rise and fall, and he heard her sob quietly. He stroked her warm hair, her tender shoulders, and then he kissed her face again and again, and presently she gave a deep, shuddering sigh and fell still.
The dæmons flew back down now, and changed again, and came toward them over the soft sand. Lyra sat up to greet them, and Will marveled at the way he could instantly tell which dæmon was which, never mind what form they had. Pantalaimon was now an animal whose name he couldn’t quite find: like a large and powerful ferret, red-gold in color, lithe and sinuous and full of grace. Kirjava was a cat again. But she was a cat of no ordinary size, and her fur was lustrous and rich, with a thousand different glints and shades of ink black, shadow gray, the blue of a deep lake under a noon sky, mist-lavender-moonlight-fog… To see the meaning of the word subtlety, you had only to look at her fur.
“A marten,” he said, finding the name for Pantalaimon, “a pine marten.”
“Pan,” Lyra said as he flowed up onto her lap, “you’re not going to change a lot anymore, are you?”
“No,” he said.
“It’s funny,” she said, “you remember when we were younger and I didn’t want you to stop changing at all… Well, I wouldn’t mind so much now. Not if you stay like this.”
Will put his hand on hers. A new mood had taken hold of him, and he felt resolute and peaceful. Knowing exactly what he was doing and exactly what it would mean, he moved his hand from Lyra’s wrist and stroked the red-gold fur of her dæmon.
Lyra gasped. But her surprise was mixed with a pleasure so like the joy that flooded through her when she had put the fruit to his lips that she couldn’t protest, because she was breathless. With a racing heart she responded in the same way: she put her hand on the silky warmth of Will’s dæmon, and as her fingers tightened in the fur, she knew that Will was feeling exactly what she was.
And she knew, too, that neither dæmon would change now, having felt a lover’s hands on them. These were their shapes for life: they would want no other.
So, wondering whether any lovers before them had made this blissful discovery, they lay together as the earth turned slowly and the moon and stars blazed above them.
THIRTY-EIGHT
THE BOTANIC GARDEN
The gyptians arrived on the afternoon of the following day. There was no harbor, of course, so they had to anchor the ship some way out, and John Faa, Farder Coram, and the captain came ashore in a launch with Serafina Pekkala as their guide.
Mary had told the mulefa everything she knew, and by the time the gyptians were stepping ashore onto the wide beach, there was a curious crowd waiting to greet them. Each side, of course, was on fire with curiosity about the other, but John Faa had learned plenty of courtesy and patience in his long life, and he was determined that these strangest of all people should receive nothing but grace and friendship from the lord of the western gyptians.
So he stood in the hot sun for some time while Sattamax, the old zalif, made a speech of welcome, which Mary translated as best she could; and John Faa replied, bringing them greetings from the Fens and the waterways of his homeland.
When they began to move up through the marshes to the village, the mulefa saw how hard it was for Farder Coram to walk, and at once they offered to carry him. He accepted gratefully, and so it was that they came to the gathering ground, where Will and Lyra came to meet them.
Such an age had gone past since Lyra had seen these dear men! They’d last spoken together in the snows of the Arctic, on their way to rescue
the children from the Gobblers. She was almost shy, and she offered her hand to shake, uncertainly; but John Faa caught her up in a tight embrace and kissed both her cheeks, and Farder Coram did the same, gazing at her before folding her tight to his chest.
“She’s growed up, John,” he said. “Remember that little girl we took to the north lands? Look at her now, eh! Lyra, my dear, if I had the tongue of an angel, I couldn’t tell you how glad I am to set eyes on you again.”
But she looks so hurt, he thought, she looks so frail and weary. And neither he nor John Faa could miss the way she stayed close to Will, and how the boy with the straight black eyebrows was aware every second of where she was, and made sure he never strayed far from her.
The old men greeted him respectfully, because Serafina Pekkala had told them something of what Will had done. For Will’s part, he admired the massive power of Lord Faa’s presence, power tempered by courtesy, and he thought that that would be a good way to behave when he himself was old; John Faa was a shelter and a strong refuge.
“Dr. Malone,” said John Faa, “we need to take on fresh water, and whatever in the way of food your friends can sell us. Besides, our men have been on board ship for a fair while, and we’ve had some fighting to do, and it would be a blessing if they could all have a run ashore so they can breathe the air of this land and tell their families at home about the world they voyaged to.”
“Lord Faa,” said Mary, “the mulefa have asked me to say they will supply everything you need, and that they would be honored if you could all join them this evening to share their meal.”
“It’ll be our great pleasure to accept,” said John Faa.
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