His Dark Materials 02 - The Subtle Knife

by Philip Pullman

  “So I want to reach those hills and make a landing. I can see some forest now; we can hide among the trees for a spell, maybe a long time.

  “And meanwhile the sun’s going down. We have about three hours to sunset, by my calculation. And it’s hard to say, but I think those zeppelins will have closed on us halfway by that time, and we should have gotten to the far shore of this bay.

  “Now, you understand what I’m saying. I’m going to take us up into those hills and then land, because anything else is certain death. They’ll have made a connection now between this ring I showed them and the Skraeling I killed on Nova Zembla, and they ain’t chasing us this hard to say we left our wallet on the counter.

  “So sometime tonight, Dr. Grumman, this flight’s gonna be over. You ever landed in a balloon?”

  “No,” said the shaman. “But I trust your skill.”

  “I’ll try and get as high up that range as I can. It’s a question of balance, because the farther we go, the closer they’ll be behind us. If I land when they’re too close behind, they’ll be able to see where we go, but if I take us down too early, we won’t find the shelter of those trees. Either way, there’s going to be some shooting before long.”

  Grumman sat impassively, moving a magical token of feathers and beads from one hand to the other in a pattern that Lee could see had some purposeful meaning. His eagle dæmon’s eyes never left the pursuing zeppelins.

  An hour went by, and another. Lee chewed an unlit cigar and sipped cold coffee from a tin flask. The sun settled lower in the sky behind them, and Lee could see the long shade of evening creep along the shore of the bay and up the lower flanks of the hills ahead while the balloon itself, and the mountaintops, were bathed in gold.

  And behind them, almost lost in the sunset glare, the little dots of the zeppelins grew larger and firmer. They had already overtaken the other balloon and could now be easily seen with the naked eye: four of them in line abreast. And across the wide silence of the bay came the sound of their engines, tiny but clear, an insistent mosquito whine.

  When they were still a few minutes from making the shore at the foot of the hills, Lee noticed something new in the sky behind the zeppelins. A bank of clouds had been building, and a massive thunderhead reared thousands of feet up into the still-bright upper sky. How had he failed to notice? If a storm was coming, the sooner they landed the better.

  And then a dark green curtain of rain drifted down and hung from the clouds, and the storm seemed to be chasing the zeppelins as they were chasing Lee’s balloon, for the rain swept along toward them from the sea, and as the sun finally vanished, a mighty flash came from the clouds, and several seconds later a crash of thunder so loud it shook the very fabric of Lee’s balloon, and echoed back for a long time from the mountains.

  Then came another flash of lightning, and this time the jagged fork struck down direct from the thunderhead at one of the zeppelins. In a moment the gas was alight. A bright flower of flame blossomed against the bruise-dark clouds, and the craft drifted down slowly, ablaze like a beacon, and floated, still blazing, on the water.

  Lee let out the breath he’d been holding. Grumman was standing beside him, one hand on the suspension ring, with lines of exhaustion deep in his face.

  “Did you bring that storm?” said Lee.

  Grumman nodded.

  The sky was now colored like a tiger; bands of gold alternated with patches and stripes of deepest brown-black, and the pattern changed by the minute, for the gold was fading rapidly as the brown-black engulfed it. The sea behind was a patchwork of black water and phosphorescent foam, and the last of the burning zeppelin’s flames were dwindling into nothing as it sank.

  The remaining three, however, were flying on, buffeted hard but keeping to their course. More lightning flashed around them, and as the storm came closer, Lee began to fear for the gas in his own balloon. One strike could have it tumbling to earth in flames, and he didn’t suppose the shaman could control the storm so finely as to avoid that.

  “Right, Dr. Grumman,” he said. “I’m going to ignore those zeppelins for now and concentrate on getting us safe into the mountains and on the ground. What I want you to do is sit tight and hold on, and be prepared to jump when I tell you. I’ll give you warning, and I’ll try to make it as gentle as I can, but landing in these conditions is a matter of luck as much as skill.”

  “I trust you, Mr. Scoresby,” said the shaman.

  He sat back in a corner of the basket while his dæmon perched on the suspension ring, her claws dug deep in the leather binding.

  The wind was blowing them hard now, and the great gasbag swelled and billowed in the gusts. The ropes creaked and strained, but Lee had no fear of their giving way. He let go some more ballast and watched the altimeter closely. In a storm, when the air pressure sank, you had to offset that drop against the altimetric reading, and very often it was a crude rule-of-thumb calculation. Lee ran through the figures, double-checked them, and then released the last of his ballast. The only control he had now was the gas valve. He couldn’t go higher; he could only descend.

  He peered intently through the stormy air and made out the great bulk of the hills, dark against the dark sky. From below there came a roaring, rushing sound, like the crash of surf on a stony beach, but he knew it was the wind tearing through the leaves on the trees. So far, already! They were moving faster than he’d thought.

  And he shouldn’t leave it too long before he brought them down. Lee was too cool by nature to rage at fate; his manner was to raise an eyebrow and greet it laconically. But he couldn’t help a flicker of despair now, when the one thing he should do—namely, fly before the storm and let it blow itself out—was the one thing guaranteed to get them shot down.

  He scooped up Hester and tucked her securely into his breast, buttoning the canvas coat up close to keep her in. Grumman sat steady and quiet; his dæmon, wind-torn, clung firmly with her talons deep in the basket rim and her feathers blown erect.

  “I’m going to take us down, Dr. Grumman,” Lee shouted above the wind. “You should stand and be ready to jump clear. Hold the ring and swing yourself up when I call.”

  Grumman obeyed. Lee gazed down, ahead, down, ahead, checking each dim glimpse against the next, and blinking the rain out of his eyes; for a sudden squall had brought heavy drops at them like handfuls of gravel, and the drumming they made on the gasbag added to the wind’s howl and the lash of the leaves below until Lee could hardly even hear the thunder.

  “Here we go!” he shouted. “You cooked up a fine storm, Mr. Shaman.”

  He pulled at the gas-valve line and lashed it around a cleat to keep it open. As the gas streamed out of the top, invisible far above, the lower curve of the gasbag withdrew into itself, and a fold, and then another, appeared where there had been a bulging sphere only a minute before.

  The basket was tossing and lurching so violently it was hard to tell if they were going down, and the gusts were so sudden and wayward that they might easily have been blown a long way skyward without knowing; but after a minute or so Lee felt a sudden snag and knew the grapnel had caught on a branch. It was only a temporary check, so the branch had broken, but it showed how close they were.

  He shouted, “Fifty feet above the trees—”

  The shaman nodded.

  Then came another snag, more violent, and the two men were thrown hard against the rim of the basket. Lee was used to it and found his balance at once, but the force took Grumman by surprise. However, he didn’t lose his grip on the suspension ring, and Lee could see him safely poised, ready to swing himself clear.

  A moment later came the most jolting shock of all as the grapnel found a branch that held it fast. The basket tilted at once and a second later was crashing into the treetops, and amid the lashing of wet leaves and the snapping of twigs and the creak of tormented branches it jolted to a precarious halt.

  “Still there, Dr. Grumman?” Lee called, for it was impossible to see anything.


  “Still here, Mr. Scoresby.”

  “Better keep still for a minute till we see the situation clearly,” said Lee, for they were wildly swaying in the wind, and he could feel the basket settling with little jerks against whatever was holding them up.

  There was still a strong sideways pull from the gasbag, which was now nearly empty, but which as a result was catching the wind like a sail. It crossed Lee’s mind to cut it loose, but if it didn’t fly away altogether, it would hang in the treetops like a banner and give their position away; much better to take it in, if they could.

  There came another lightning flash, and a second later the thunder crashed. The storm was nearly overhead. The glare showed Lee an oak trunk, with a great white scar where a branch had been torn away, but torn only partially, for the basket was resting on it near the point where it was still attached to the trunk.

  “I’m going to throw out a rope and climb down,” he shouted. “As soon as our feet touch the ground, we can make the next plan.”

  “I’ll follow you, Mr. Scoresby,” said Grumman. “My dæmon tells me the ground is forty feet down.”

  And Lee was aware of a powerful flutter of wingbeats as the eagle dæmon settled again on the basket rim.

  “She can go that far?” he said, surprised, but put that out of his mind and made the rope secure, first to the suspension ring and then to the branch, so that even if the basket did fall, it wouldn’t fall far.

  Then, with Hester secure in his breast, he threw the rest of the rope over and clambered down till he felt solid ground beneath his feet. The branches grew thick around the trunk; this was a massive tree, a giant of an oak, and Lee muttered a thank-you to it as he tugged on the rope to signal to Grumman that he could descend.

  Was there another sound in the tumult? He listened hard. Yes, the engine of a zeppelin, maybe more than one, some way above. It was impossible to tell how high, or in which direction it was flying; but the sound was there for a minute or so, and then it was gone.

  The shaman reached the ground.

  “Did you hear it?” said Lee.

  “Yes. Going higher, into the mountains, I think. Congratulations on landing us safely, Mr. Scoresby.”

  “We ain’t finished yet. I want to git that gasbag under the canopy before daybreak, or it’ll show up our position from miles away. You up to some manual labor, Dr. Grumman?”

  “Tell me what to do.”

  “All right. I’m going back up the rope, and I’ll lower some things down to you. One of them’s a tent. You can git that set up while I see what I can do up there to hide the balloon.”

  They labored for a long time, and in peril at one point, when the branch that had been supporting the basket finally broke and pitched Lee down with it; but he didn’t fall far, since the gasbag still trailed among the treetops and held the basket suspended.

  The fall in fact made concealing the gasbag easier, since the lower part of it had been pulled down through the canopy; and working by flashes of lightning, tugging and wrenching and hacking, Lee managed to drag the whole body of the balloon down among the lower branches and out of sight.

  The wind was still beating the treetops back and forth, but the worst of the rain had passed by the time he decided he could do no more. He clambered down and found that the shaman had not only pitched the tent but had conjured a fire into being, and was brewing some coffee.

  “This done by magic?” said Lee, soaked and stiff, easing himself down into the tent and taking the mug Grumman handed him.

  “No, you can thank the Boy Scouts for this,” said Grumman. “Do they have Boy Scouts in your world? ‘Be prepared.’ Of all the ways of starting a fire, the best is dry matches. I never travel without them. We could do worse than this as a campsite, Mr. Scoresby.”

  “You heard those zeppelins again?”

  Grumman held up his hand. Lee listened, and sure enough, there was that engine sound, easier to make out now that the rain had eased a little.

  “They’ve been over twice now,” said Grumman. “They don’t know where we are, but they know we’re here somewhere.”

  And a minute later a flickering glow came from somewhere in the direction the zeppelin had flown. It was less bright than lightning, but it was persistent, and Lee knew it for a flare.

  “Best put out the fire, Dr. Grumman,” he said, “sorry as I am to do without it. I think that canopy’s thick, but you never know. I’m going to sleep now, wet through or not.”

  “You will be dry by the morning,” said the shaman.

  He took a handful of wet earth and pressed it down over the flames, and Lee struggled to lie down in the little tent and closed his eyes.

  He had strange and powerful dreams. At one point he was convinced he had awoken to see the shaman sitting cross-legged, wreathed in flames, and the flames were rapidly consuming his flesh to leave only a white skeleton behind, still seated in a mound of glowing ash. Lee looked for Hester in alarm, and found her sleeping, which never happened, for when he was awake, so was she. So when he found her asleep, his laconic, whip-tongued dæmon looking so gentle and vulnerable, he was moved by the strangeness of it, and he lay down uneasily beside her, awake in his dream, but really asleep, and he dreamed he lay awake for a long time.

  Another dream focused on Grumman, too. Lee seemed to see the shaman shaking a feather-trimmed rattle and commanding something to obey him. The something, Lee saw with a touch of nausea, was a Specter, like the ones they’d seen from the balloon. It was tall and nearly invisible, and it invoked such a gut-churning revulsion in Lee that he nearly woke in terror. But Grumman was directing it fearlessly, and coming to no harm either, because the thing listened closely to him and then drifted upward like a soap bubble until it was lost in the canopy.

  Then his exhausting night took another turn, for he was in the cockpit of a zeppelin, watching the pilot. In fact, he was sitting in the copilot’s seat, and they were cruising over the forest, looking down at the wildly tossing treetops, a wild sea of leaf and branch. Then that Specter was in the cabin with them.

  Pinioned in his dream, Lee could neither move nor cry out, and he suffered the terror of the pilot as the man became aware of what was happening to him.

  The Specter was leaning over the pilot and pressing what would be its face to his. His dæmon, a finch, fluttered and shrieked and tried to pull away, only to fall half-fainting on the instrument panel. The pilot turned his face to Lee and put out a hand, but Lee had no power of movement. The anguish in the man’s eyes was wrenching. Something true and living was being drained from him, and his dæmon fluttered weakly and called in a wild high call, but she was dying.

  Then she vanished. But the pilot was still alive. His eyes became filmy and dull, and his reaching hand fell back with a limp thud against the throttle. He was alive but not alive; he was indifferent to everything.

  And Lee sat and watched helplessly as the zeppelin flew on directly into a scarp of the mountains that rose up before them. The pilot watched it rear up in the window, but nothing could interest him. Lee pushed back against the seat in horror, but nothing happened to stop it, and at the moment of impact he cried, “Hester!”

  And woke.

  He was in the tent, safe, and Hester nibbled his chin. He was sweating. The shaman was sitting cross-legged, but a shiver passed over Lee as he saw that the eagle dæmon was not there near him. Clearly this forest was a bad place, full of haunting phantasms.

  Then he became aware of the light by which he was seeing the shaman, because the fire was long out, and the darkness of the forest was profound. Some distant flicker picked out the tree trunks and the undersides of dripping leaves, and Lee knew at once what it was: his dream had been true, and a zeppelin pilot had flown into the hillside.

  “Damn, Lee, you’re twitching like an aspen leaf. What’s the matter with you?” Hester grumbled, and flicked her long ears.

  “Ain’t you dreaming too, Hester?” he muttered.

  “You ain’t dreami
ng, Lee, you’re seeing. If I’da known you was a seer, I’da cured you a long while back. Now, you cut it out, you hear?”

  He rubbed her head with his thumb, and she shook her ears.

  And without the slightest transition he was floating in the air alongside the shaman’s dæmon, Sayan Kötör the osprey. To be in the presence of another man’s dæmon and away from his own affected Lee with a powerful throb of guilt and strange pleasure. They were gliding, as if he too were a bird, on the turbulent updrafts above the forest, and Lee looked around through the dark air, now suffused with a pallid glow from the full moon that occasionally glared through a brief rent in the cloud cover and made the treetops ring with silver.

  The eagle dæmon uttered a harsh scream, and from below came in a thousand different voices the calls of a thousand birds: the too-whoo of owls, the alarm shriek of little sparrows, the liquid music of the nightingale. Sayan Kötör was calling them. And in answer they came, every bird in the forest, whether they had been gliding in the hunt on silent wings or roosting asleep; they came fluttering upward in their thousands through the tumbling air.

  And Lee felt whatever bird nature he was sharing respond with joy to the command of the eagle queen, and whatever humanness he had left felt the strangest of pleasures: that of offering eager obedience to a stronger power that was wholly right. And he wheeled and turned with the rest of the mighty flock, a hundred different species all turning as one in the magnetic will of the eagle, and saw against the silver cloud rack the hateful dark regularity of a zeppelin.

  They all knew exactly what they must do. And they streamed toward the airship, the swiftest reaching it first, but none so swiftly as Sayan Kötör; the tiny wrens and finches, the darting swifts, the silent-winged owls—within a minute the craft was laden with them, their claws scrabbling for purchase on the oiled silk or puncturing it to gain a hold.