His Dark Materials 02 - The Subtle Knife

by Philip Pullman

  And he had the knife, and they had no weapons at all.

  Will stepped up the lead, away from the old man, crouching, ready to jump or fight or leap out of the way.

  The young man sprang forward and slashed at him with the knife—left, right, left, coming closer and closer, making Will back away till he was trapped in the angle where two sides of the tower met.

  Lyra was scrambling toward the man from behind, with the loose rope in her hand. Will darted forward suddenly, just as he’d done to the man in his house, and with the same effect: his antagonist tumbled backward unexpectedly, falling over Lyra to crash onto the lead. It was all happening too quickly for Will to be frightened. But he did have time to see the knife fly from the man’s hand and sink at once into the lead some feet away, point first, with no more resistance than if it had fallen into butter. It plunged as far as the hilt and stopped suddenly.

  And the young man twisted over and reached for it at once, but Will flung himself on his back and seized his hair. He had learned to fight at school; there had been plenty of occasion for it, once the other children had sensed that there was something the matter with his mother. And he’d learned that the object of a school fight was not to gain points for style but to force your enemy to give in, which meant hurting him more than he was hurting you. He knew that you had to be willing to hurt someone else, too, and he’d found out that not many people were, when it came to it; but he knew that he was.

  So this wasn’t unfamiliar to him, but he hadn’t fought against a nearly grown man armed with a knife before, and at all costs he must keep the man from picking it up now that he’d dropped it.

  Will twisted his fingers into the young man’s thick, damp hair and wrenched back as hard as he could. The man grunted and flung himself sideways, but Will hung on even tighter, and his opponent roared with pain and anger. He pushed up and then threw himself backward, crushing Will between himself and the parapet, and that was too much; all the breath left Will’s body, and in the shock his hands loosened. The man pulled free.

  Will dropped to his knees in the gutter, winded badly, but he couldn’t stay there. He tried to stand—and in doing so, he thrust his foot through one of the drainage holes. His fingers scraped desperately on the warm lead, and for a horrible second he thought he would slide off the roof to the ground. But nothing happened. His left leg was thrust out into empty space; the rest of him was safe.

  He pulled his leg back inside the parapet and scrambled to his feet. The man had reached his knife again, but he didn’t have time to pull it out of the lead before Lyra leaped onto his back, scratching, kicking, biting like a wildcat. But she missed the hold on his hair that she was trying for, and he threw her off. And when he got up, he had the knife in his hand.

  Lyra had fallen to one side, with Pantalaimon a wildcat now, fur raised, teeth bared, beside her. Will faced the man directly and saw him clearly for the first time. There was no doubt: he was Angelica’s brother, all right, and he was vicious. All his mind was focused on Will, and the knife was in his hand.

  But Will wasn’t harmless either.

  He’d seized the rope when Lyra dropped it, and now he wrapped it around his left hand for protection against the knife. He moved sideways between the young man and the sun, so that his antagonist had to squint and blink. Even better, the glass structure threw brilliant reflections into his eyes, and Will could see that for a moment he was almost blinded.

  He leaped to the man’s left, away from the knife, holding his left hand high, and kicked hard at the man’s knee. He’d taken care to aim, and his foot connected well. The man went down with a loud grunt and twisted away awkwardly.

  Will leaped after him, kicking again and again, kicking whatever parts he could reach, driving the man back and back toward the glass house. If he could get him to the top of the stairs . . .

  This time the man fell more heavily, and his right hand with the knife in it came down on the lead at Will’s feet. Will stamped on it at once, hard, crushing the man’s fingers between the hilt and the lead, and then wrapped the rope more tightly around his hand and stamped a second time. The man yelled and let go of the knife. At once Will kicked it away, his shoe connecting with the hilt, luckily for him, and it spun across the lead and came to rest in the gutter just beside a drainage hole. The rope had come loose around his hand once more, and there seemed to be a surprising amount of blood from somewhere sprinkled on the lead and on his own shoes. The man was pulling himself up—

  “Look out!” shouted Lyra, but Will was ready.

  At the moment when the man was off balance, he threw himself at him, crashing as hard as he could into the man’s midriff. The man fell backward into the glass, which shattered at once, and the flimsy wooden frame went too. He sprawled among the wreckage half over the stairwell, and grabbed the doorframe, but it had nothing to support it anymore, and it gave way. He fell downward, and more glass fell all around him.

  And Will darted back to the gutter, and picked up the knife, and the fight was over. The young man, cut and battered, clambered up the step, and saw Will standing above him holding the knife; he stared with a sickly anger and then turned and fled.

  “Ah,” said Will, sitting down. “Ah.”

  Something was badly wrong, and he hadn’t noticed it. He dropped the knife and hugged his left hand to himself. The tangle of rope was sodden with blood, and when he pulled it away—

  “Your fingers!” Lyra breathed. “Oh, Will—”

  His little finger and the finger next to it fell away with the rope.

  His head swam. Blood was pulsing strongly from the stumps where his fingers had been, and his jeans and shoes were sodden already. He had to lie back and close his eyes for a moment. The pain wasn’t that great, and a part of his mind registered that with a dull surprise. It was like a persistent, deep hammer thud more than the bright, sharp clarity when you cut yourself superficially.

  He’d never felt so weak. He supposed he had gone to sleep for a moment. Lyra was doing something to his arm. He sat up to look at the damage, and felt sick. The old man was somewhere close by, but Will couldn’t see what he was doing, and meanwhile Lyra was talking to him.

  “If only we had some bloodmoss,” she was saying, “what the bears use, I could make it better, Will, I could. Look, I’m going to tie this bit of rope around your arm, to stop the bleeding, cause I can’t tie it around where your fingers were, there’s nothing to tie it to. Hold still.”

  He let her do it, then looked around for his fingers. There they were, curled like a bloody quotation mark on the lead. He laughed.

  “Hey,” she said, “stop that. Get up now. Mr. Paradisi’s got some medicine, some salve, I dunno what it is. You got to come downstairs. That other man’s gone—we seen him run out the door. He’s gone now. You beat him. Come on, Will—come on—”

  Nagging and cajoling, she urged him down the steps, and they picked their way through the shattered glass and splintered wood and into a small, cool room off the landing. The walls were lined with shelves of bottles, jars, pots, pestles and mortars, and chemists’ balances. Under the dirty window was a stone sink, where the old man was pouring something with a shaky hand from a large bottle into a smaller one.

  “Sit down and drink this,” he said, and filled a small glass with a dark golden liquid.

  Will sat down and took the glass. The first mouthful hit the back of his throat like fire. Lyra took the glass to stop it from falling as Will gasped.

  “Drink it all,” the old man commanded.

  “What is it?”

  “Plum brandy. Drink.”

  Will sipped it more cautiously. Now his hand was really beginning to hurt.

  “Can you heal him?” said Lyra, her voice desperate.

  “Oh, yes, we have medicines for everything. You, girl, open that drawer in the table and bring out a bandage.”

  Will saw the knife lying on the table in the center of the room, but before he could pick it up the old man w
as limping toward him with a bowl of water.

  “Drink again,” the old man said.

  Will held the glass tightly and closed his eyes while the old man did something to his hand. It stung horribly, but then he felt the rough friction of a towel on his wrist, and something mopping the wound more gently. Then there was a coolness for a moment, and it hurt again.

  “This is precious ointment,” the old man said. “Very difficult to obtain. Very good for wounds.”

  It was a dusty, battered tube of ordinary antiseptic cream, such as Will could have bought in any pharmacy in his world. The old man was handling it as if it were made of myrrh. Will looked away.

  And while the man was dressing the wound, Lyra felt Pantalaimon calling to her silently to come and look out the window. He was a kestrel perching on the open window frame, and his eyes had caught a movement below. She joined him, and saw a familiar figure: the girl Angelica was running toward her elder brother, Tullio, who stood with his back against the wall on the other side of the narrow street waving his arms in the air as if trying to keep a flock of bats from his face. Then he turned away and began to run his hands along the stones in the wall, looking closely at each one, counting them, feeling the edges, hunching up his shoulders as if to ward off something behind him, shaking his head.

  Angelica was desperate, and so was little Paolo behind her, and they reached their brother and seized his arms and tried to pull him away from whatever was troubling him.

  And Lyra realized with a jolt of sickness what was happening: the man was being attacked by Specters. Angelica knew it, though she couldn’t see them, of course, and little Paolo was crying and striking at the empty air to try and drive them off; but it didn’t help, and Tullio was lost. His movements became more and more lethargic, and presently they stopped altogether. Angelica clung to him, shaking and shaking his arm, but nothing woke him; and Paolo was crying his brother’s name over and over as if that would bring him back.

  Then Angelica seemed to feel Lyra watching her, and she looked up. For a moment their eyes met. Lyra felt a jolt as if the girl had struck her a physical blow, because the hatred in her eyes was so intense, and then Paolo saw her looking and looked up too, and his little boy’s voice cried, “We’ll kill you! You done this to Tullio! We gonna kill you, all right!”

  The two children turned and ran, leaving their stricken brother; and Lyra, frightened and guilty, withdrew inside the room again and shut the window. The others hadn’t heard. Giacomo Paradisi was dabbing more ointment on the wounds, and Lyra tried to put what she’d seen out of her mind, and focused on Will.

  “You got to tie something around his arm,” Lyra said, “to stop the bleeding. It won’t stop otherwise.”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” said the old man, but sadly.

  Will kept his eyes averted while they did up a bandage, and drank the plum brandy sip by sip. Presently he felt soothed and distant, though his hand was hurting abominably.

  “Now,” said Giacomo Paradisi, “here you are, take the knife, it is yours.”

  “I don’t want it,” said Will. “I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  “You haven’t got the choice,” said the old man. “You are the bearer now.”

  “I thought you said you was,” said Lyra.

  “My time is over,” he said. “The knife knows when to leave one hand and settle in another, and I know how to tell. You don’t believe me? Look!”

  He held up his own left hand. The little finger and the finger next to it were missing, just like Will’s.

  “Yes,” he said, “me too. I fought and lost the same fingers, the badge of the bearer. And I did not know either, in advance.”

  Lyra sat down, wide-eyed. Will held on to the dusty table with his good hand. He struggled to find words.

  “But I—we only came here because—there was a man who stole something of Lyra’s, and he wanted the knife, and he said if we brought him that, then he’d—”

  “I know that man. He is a liar, a cheat. He won’t give you anything, make no mistake. He wants the knife, and once he has it, he will betray you. He will never be the bearer. The knife is yours by right.”

  With a heavy reluctance, Will turned to the knife itself. He pulled it toward him. It was an ordinary-looking dagger, with a double-sided blade of dull metal about eight inches long, a short crosspiece of the same metal, and a handle of rosewood. As he looked at it more closely, he saw that the rosewood was inlaid with golden wires, forming a design he didn’t recognize till he turned the knife around and saw an angel, with wings folded. On the other side was a different angel, with wings upraised. The wires stood out a little from the surface, giving a firm grip, and as he picked it up he felt that it was light in his hand and strong and beautifully balanced, and that the blade was not dull after all. In fact, a swirl of cloudy colors seemed to live just under the surface of the metal: bruise purples, sea blues, earth browns, cloud grays, the deep green under heavy-foliaged trees, the clustering shades at the mouth of a tomb as evening falls over a deserted graveyard . . . . If there was such a thing as shadow-colored, it was the blade of the subtle knife.

  But the edges were different. In fact, the two edges differed from each other. One was clear bright steel, merging a little way back into those subtle shadow-colors, but steel of an incomparable sharpness. Will’s eye shrank back from looking at it, so sharp did it seem. The other edge was just as keen, but silvery in color, and Lyra, who was looking at it over Will’s shoulder, said: “I seen that color before! That’s the same as the blade they was going to cut me and Pan apart with—that’s just the same!”

  “This edge,” said Giacomo Paradisi, touching the steel with the handle of a spoon, “will cut through any material in the world. Look.”

  And he pressed the silver spoon against the blade. Will, holding the knife, felt only the slightest resistance as the tip of the spoon’s handle fell to the table, cut clean off.

  “The other edge,” the old man went on, “is more subtle still. With it you can cut an opening out of this world altogether. Try it now. Do as I say—you are the bearer. You have to know. No one can teach you but me, and I have not much time left. Stand up and listen.”

  Will pushed his chair back and stood, holding the knife loosely. He felt dizzy, sick, rebellious.

  “I don’t want—” he began, but Giacomo Paradisi shook his head.

  “Be silent! You don’t want—you don’t want . . . you have no choice! Listen to me, because time is short. Now hold the knife out ahead of you—like that. It’s not only the knife that has to cut, it’s your own mind. You have to think it. So do this: Put your mind out at the very tip of the knife. Concentrate, boy. Focus your mind. Don’t think about your wound. It will heal. Think about the knife tip. That is where you are. Now feel with it, very gently. You’re looking for a gap so small you could never see it with your eyes, but the knife tip will find it, if you put your mind there. Feel along the air till you sense the smallest little gap in the world . . . . ”

  Will tried to do it. But his head was buzzing, and his left hand throbbed horribly, and he saw his two fingers again, lying on the roof, and then he thought of his mother, his poor mother . . . . What would she say? How would she comfort him? How could he ever comfort her? And he put the knife down on the table and crouched low, hugging his wounded hand, and cried. It was all too much to bear. The sobs racked his throat and his chest and the tears dazzled him, and he should be crying for her, the poor frightened unhappy dear beloved—he’d left her, he’d left her . . . .

  He was desolate. But then he felt the strangest thing, and brushed the back of his right wrist across his eyes to find Pantalaimon’s head on his knee. The dæmon, in the form of a wolfhound, was gazing up at him with melting, sorrowing eyes, and then he gently licked Will’s wounded hand again and again, and laid his head on Will’s knee once more.

  Will had no idea of the taboo in Lyra’s world preventing one person from touching another’s dæmon, and i
f he hadn’t touched Pantalaimon before, it was politeness that had held him back and not knowledge. Lyra, in fact, was breathtaken. Her dæmon had done it on his own initiative, and now he withdrew and fluttered to her shoulder as the smallest of moths. The old man was watching with interest but not incredulity. He’d seen dæmons before, somehow; he’d traveled to other worlds too.

  Pantalaimon’s gesture had worked. Will swallowed hard and stood up again, wiping the tears out of his eyes.

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll try again. Tell me what to do.”

  This time he forced his mind to do what Giacomo Paradisi said, gritting his teeth, trembling with exertion, sweating. Lyra was bursting to interrupt, because she knew this process. So did Dr. Malone, and so did the poet Keats, whoever he was, and all of them knew you couldn’t get it by straining toward it. But she held her tongue and clasped her hands.

  “Stop,” said the old man gently. “Relax. Don’t push. This is a subtle knife, not a heavy sword. You’re gripping it too tight. Loosen your fingers. Let your mind wander down your arm to your wrist and then into the handle, and out along the blade. No hurry, go gently, don’t force it. Just wander. Then along to the very tip, where the edge is sharpest of all. You become the tip of the knife. Just do that now. Go there and feel that, and then come back.”

  Will tried again. Lyra could see the intensity in his body, saw his jaw working, and then saw an authority descend over it, calming and relaxing and clarifying. The authority was Will’s own—or his dæmon’s, perhaps. How he must miss having a dæmon! The loneliness of it . . . No wonder he’d cried; and it was right of Pantalaimon to do what he’d done, though it had felt so strange to her. She reached up to her beloved dæmon, and, ermine-shaped, he flowed onto her lap.