"Then Baruch would be proud of you," said Will, shivering.
"Shall I fly ahead now and see where we are?"
"Yes," said Will, "fly high, and tell me what the land’s like farther on. Walking on this marshland is going to take forever."
Balthamos took to the air. He hadn’t told Will everything he was anxious about, because he was trying to do his best and not worry him; but he knew that the angel Metatron, the Regent, from whom they’d escaped so narrowly, would have Will’s face firmly imprinted on his mind. And not only his face, but everything about him that angels were able to see, including parts of which Will himself was not aware, such as that aspect of his nature Lyra would have called his daemon. Will was in great danger from Metatron now, and at some time Balthamos would have to tell him; but not quite yet. It was too difficult.
Will, reckoning that it would be quicker to get warm by walking than by gathering fuel and waiting for a fire to catch, simply slung the rucksack over his shoulders, wrapped the cloak around everything, and set off toward the south. There was a path, muddy and rutted and potholed, so people did sometimes come this way; but the flat horizon was so far away on every side that he had little sense of making progress.
Sometime later, when the light was brighter, Balthamos’s voice spoke beside him.
"About half a day’s walk ahead, there is a wide river and a town, where there’s a wharf for boats to tie up. I flew high enough to see that the river goes a long way directly south and north. If you could get a passage, then you could move much more quickly."
"Good," said Will fervently. "And does this path go to the town?"
"It goes through a village, with a church and farms and orchards, and then on to the town."
"I wonder what language they speak. I hope they don’t lock me up if I can’t speak theirs."
"As your daemon," said Balthamos, "I shall translate for you. I have learned many human languages; I can certainly understand the one they speak in this country."
Will walked on. The toil was dull and mechanical, but at least he was moving, and at least every step took him closer to Lyra.
The village was a shabby place: a huddle of wooden buildings, with paddocks containing reindeer, and dogs that barked as he approached. Smoke crept out of the tin chimneys and hung low over the shingled roofs. The ground was heavy and dragged at his feet, and there had obviously been a recent flood: walls were marked with mud to halfway up the doors, and broken beams of wood and loose-hanging sheets of corrugated iron showed where sheds and verandas and outbuildings had been swept away.
But that was not the most curious feature of the place. At first he thought he was losing his balance—it even made him stumble once or twice—for the buildings were two or three degrees out of the vertical, all leaning the same way. The dome of the little church had cracked badly. Had there been an earthquake?
Dogs were barking with hysterical fury, but not daring to come close. Balthamos, being a daemon, had taken the form of a large snow white dog with black eyes, thick fur, and tight-curled tail, and he snarled so fiercely that the real dogs kept their distance. They were thin and mangy, and the few reindeer Will could see were scabby-coated and listless.
Will paused in the center of the little village and looked around, wondering where to go, and as he stood there, two or three men appeared ahead and stood staring at him. They were the first people he had ever seen in Lyra’s world. They wore heavy felt coats, muddy boots, and fur hats, and they didn’t look friendly.
The white dog changed into a sparrow and flew to Will’s shoulder. No one blinked an eye at this: each of the men had a daemon, Will saw, dogs, most of them, and that was how things happened in this world. On his shoulder, Balthamos whispered: "Keep moving. Don’t look them in the eye. Keep your head down. That is the respectful thing to do."
Will kept walking. He could make himself inconspicuous; it was his greatest talent. By the time he got to them, the men had already lost interest in him. But then a door opened in the biggest house in the road, and a voice called something loudly.
Balthamos said softly, "The priest. You will have to be polite to him. Turn and bow."
Will did so. The priest was an immense, gray-bearded man, wearing a black cassock, with a crow daemon on his shoulder. His restless eyes moved over Will’s face and body, taking everything in. He beckoned.
Will went to the doorway and bowed again.
The priest said something, and Balthamos murmured, "He’s asking where you come from. Say whatever you like."
"I speak English," Will said slowly and clearly. "I don’t know any other languages."
"Ah, English!" cried the priest gleefully in English. "My dear young man! Welcome to our village, our little no-longer-perpendicular Kholodnoye! What is your name, and where are you going?"
"My name is Will, and I’m going south. I have lost my family, and I’m trying to find them again."
"Then you must come inside and have some refreshment," said the priest, and put a heavy arm around Will’s shoulders, pulling him in through the doorway.
The man’s crow daemon was showing a vivid interest in Balthamos. But the angel was equal to that: he became a mouse and crept into Will’s shirt as if he were shy.
The priest led him into a parlor heavy with tobacco smoke, where a cast-iron samovar steamed quietly on a side table.
"What was your name?" said the priest. "Tell me again."
"Will Parry. But I don’t know what to call you."
"Otyets Semyon," said the priest, stroking Will’s arm as he guided him to a chair. "Otyets means Father. I am a priest of the Holy Church. My given name is Semyon, and the name of my father was Boris, so I am Semyon Borisovitch. What is your father’s name?"
"John Parry."
"John is Ivan. So you are Will Ivanovitch, and I am Father Semyon Borisovitch. Where have you come from, Will Ivanovitch, and where are you going?"
"I’m lost," Will said. "I was traveling with my family to the south. My father is a soldier, but he was exploring in the Arctic, and then something happened and we got lost. So I’m traveling south because I know that’s where we were going next."
The priest spread his hands and said, "A soldier? An explorer from England? No one so interesting as that has trodden the dirty roads of Kholodnoye for centuries, but in this time of upheaval, how can we know that he will not appear tomorrow? You yourself are a welcome visitor, Will Ivanovitch. You must stay the night in my house and we will talk and eat together. Lydia Alexandrovna!" he called.
An elderly woman came in silently. He spoke to her in Russian, and she nodded and took a glass and filled it with hot tea from the samovar. She brought the glass of tea to Will, together with a little saucer of jam with a silver spoon.
"Thank you," said Will.
"The conserve is to sweeten the tea," said the priest. "Lydia Alexandrovna made it from bilberries."
The result was that the tea was sickly as well as bitter, but Will sipped it, nonetheless. The priest kept leaning forward to look closely at him, and felt his hands to see whether he was cold, and stroked his knee. In order to distract him, Will asked why the buildings in the village sloped.
"There has been a convulsion in the earth," the priest said. "It is all foretold in the Apocalypse of St. John. Rivers flow backward… The great river only a short way from here used to flow north into the Arctic Ocean. All the way from the mountains of central Asia it flowed north for thousands and thousands of years, ever since the Authority of God the Almighty Father created the earth. But when the earth shook and the fog and the floods came, everything changed, and then the great river flowed south for a week or more before it turned again and went north. The world is turned upside down. Where were you when the great convulsion came?"
"A long way from here," Will said. "I didn’t know what was happening. When the fog cleared, I had lost my family and I don’t know where I am now. You’ve told me the name of this place, but where is it? Where are we?"
/> "Bring me that large book on the bottom shelf," said Semyon Borisovitch. "I will show you."
The priest drew his chair up to the table and licked his fingers before turning the pages of the great atlas.
"Here," he said, pointing with a dirty fingernail at a spot in central Siberia, a long way east of the Urals. The river nearby flowed, as the priest had said, from the northern part of the mountains in Tibet all the way to the Arctic. He looked closely at the Himalaya, but he could see nothing like the map Baruch had sketched.
Semyon Borisovitch talked and talked, pressing Will for details of his life, his family, his home, and Will, a practiced dissembler, answered him fully enough. Presently the housekeeper brought in some beetroot soup and dark bread, and after the priest had said a long grace, they ate.
"Well, how shall we pass our day, Will Ivanovitch?" said Semyon Borisovitch. "Shall we play at cards, or would you prefer to talk?"
He drew another glass of tea from the samovar, and Will took it doubtfully.
"I can’t play cards," he said, "and I’m anxious to get on and keep traveling. If I went to the river, for example, do you think I could find a passage on a steamer going south?"
The priest’s huge face darkened, and he crossed himself with a delicate flick of the wrist.
"There is trouble in the town," he said. "Lydia Alexandrovna has a sister who came here and told her there is a boat carrying bears up the river. Armored bears. They come from the Arctic. You did not see armored bears when you were in the north?"
The priest was suspicious, and Balthamos whispered so quietly that only Will could hear: "Be careful." And Will knew at once why he’d said it: his heart had begun to pound when Semyon Borisovitch mentioned the bears, because of what Lyra had told him about them. He must try to contain his feelings.
He said, "We were a long way from Svalbard, and the bears were occupied with their own affairs."
"Yes, that is what I heard," said the priest, to Will’s relief, "But now they are leaving their homeland and coming south. They have a boat, and the people of the town will not let them refuel. They are afraid of the bears. And so they should be—they are children of the devil. All things from the north are devilish. Like the witches—daughters of evil! The Church should have put them all to death many years ago. Witches—have nothing to do with them, Will Ivanovitch, you hear me? You know what they will do when you come to the right age? They will try to seduce you. They will use all the soft, cunning, deceitful ways they have, their flesh, their soft skin, their sweet voices, and they will take your seed—you know what I mean by that—they will drain you and leave you hollow! They will take your future, your children that are to come, and leave you nothing. They should be put to death, every one."
The priest reached across to the shelf beside his chair and took down a bottle and two small glasses.
"Now I am going to offer you a little drink, Will Ivanovitch," he said. "You are young, so not very many glasses. But you are growing, and so you need to know some things, like the taste of vodka. Lydia Alexandrovna collected the berries last year, and I distilled the liquor, and here in the bottle is the result, the only place where Otyets Semyon Borisovitch and Lydia Alexandrovna lie together!"
He laughed and uncorked the bottle, filling each glass to the rim. This kind of talk made Will hideously uneasy. What should he do? How could he refuse to drink without discourtesy?
"Otyets Semyon," he said, standing, "you have been very kind, and I wish I could stay longer to taste your drink and to hear you talk, because what you tell me has been very interesting. But you understand I am unhappy about my family, and very anxious to find them again, so I think I must move on, much as I would like to stay."
The priest pushed out his lips, in the thicket of his beard, and frowned; but then he shrugged and said, "Well, you shall go if you must. But before you leave, you must drink your vodka. Stand with me now! Take it, and down all in one, like this!"
He threw back the glass, swallowing it all at once, and then hauled his massive body up and stood very close to Will. In his fat, dirty fingers the glass he held out seemed tiny; but it was brimming with the clear spirit, and Will could smell the heady tang of the drink and the stale sweat and the food stains on the man’s cassock, and he felt sick before he began.
"Drink, Will Ivanovitch!" the priest cried, with a threatening heartiness.
Will lifted the glass and unhesitatingly swallowed the fiery, oily liquid in one gulp. Now he would have to fight hard to avoid being sick.
There was one more ordeal to come. Semyon Borisovitch leaned forward from his great height, and took Will by both shoulders.
"My boy," he said, and then closed his eyes and began to intone a prayer or a psalm. Vapors of tobacco and alcohol and sweat came powerfully from him, and he was close enough for his thick beard, wagging up and down, to brush Will’s face. Will held his breath.
The priest’s hands moved behind Will’s shoulders, and then Semyon Borisovitch was hugging him tightly and kissing his cheeks, right, left, right again. Will felt Balthamos dig tiny claws into his shoulder, and kept still. His head was swimming, his stomach lurching, but he didn’t move.
Finally it was over, and the priest stepped back and pushed him away.
"Go, then," he said, "go south, Will Ivanovitch. Go."
Will gathered his cloak and the rucksack, and tried to walk straight as he left the priest’s house and took the road out of the village. He walked for two hours, feeling the nausea gradually subside and a slow, pounding headache take its place. Balthamos made him stop at one point, and laid his cool hands on Will’s neck and forehead, and the ache eased a little; but Will made himself a promise that he would never drink vodka again.
And in the late afternoon the path widened and came out of the reeds, and Will saw the town ahead of him, and beyond it an expanse of water so broad it might have been a sea.
Even from some way off, Will could see that there was trouble. Puffs of smoke were erupting from beyond the roofs, followed a few seconds later by the boom of a gun.
"Balthamos," he said, "you’ll have to be a daemon again. Just keep near me and watch out for danger."
He walked into the outskirts of the scruffy little town, where the buildings leaned even more perilously than the village, and where the flooding had left its mud stains on the walls high above Will’s head. The edge of the town was deserted, but as he made his way toward the river, the noise of shouting, of screams, and of the crackle of rifle fire got louder.
And here at last there were people: some watching from upper-floor windows, some craning anxiously around the corners of buildings to look ahead at the waterfront, where the metal fingers of cranes and derricks and the masts of big vessels rose above the rooftops.
An explosion shook the walls, and glass fell out of a nearby window. People drew back and then peered around again, and more cries rose into the smoky air.
Will reached the corner of the street and looked along the waterfront. When the smoke and dust cleared a little, he saw one rusting vessel standing offshore, keeping its place against the flow of the river, and on the wharf a mob of people armed with rifles or pistols surrounding a great gun, which, as he watched, boomed again. A flash of fire, a lurching recoil, and near the vessel, a mighty splash.
Will shaded his eyes. There were figures in the boat, but—he rubbed his eyes, even though he knew what to expect—they weren’t human. They were huge beings of metal, or creatures in heavy armor, and on the foredeck of the vessel, a bright flower of flame suddenly bloomed, and the people cried out in alarm. The flame sped into the air, rising higher and coming closer and shedding sparks and smoke, and then fell with a great splash of fire near the gun. Men cried and scattered, and some ran in flames to the water’s edge and plunged in, to be swept along and out of sight in the current.
Will found a man close by who looked like a teacher, and said:
"Do you speak English?"
"Yes, yes, indeed—"
"What is happening?"
"The bears, they are attacking, and we try to fight them, but it is difficult, we have only one gun, and—"
The fire thrower on the boat hurled another gout of blazing pitch, and this time it landed even closer to the gun. Three big explosions almost immediately afterward showed that it had found the ammunition, and the gunners leapt away, letting the barrel swing down low.
"Ah," the man lamented, "it’s no good, they can’t fire—"
The commander of the boat brought the vessel’s head around and moved in toward the shore. Many people cried out in alarm and despair, especially when another great bulb of flame burst into being on the foredeck, and some of those with rifles fired a shot or two and turned to flee; but this time the bears didn’t launch the fire, and soon the vessel moved broadside on toward the wharf, engine beating hard to hold it against the current.
Two sailors (human, not bears) leapt down to throw ropes around the bollards, and a great hiss and cry of anger rose from the townsfolk at these human traitors. The sailors took no notice, but ran to lower a gangplank.
Then as they turned to go back on board, a shot was fired from somewhere near Will, and one of the sailors fell. His daemon—a seagull—vanished as if she’d been pinched out of existence like a candle flame.
The reaction from the bears was pure fury. At once the fire thrower was relit and hauled around to face the shore, and the mass of flame shot upward and then cascaded in a hundred spilling gouts over the rooftops. And at the top of the gangway appeared a bear larger than any of the others, an apparition of ironclad might, and the bullets that rained on him whined and clanged and thudded uselessly, unable to make the slightest dent in his massive armor.
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