His Dark Materials 02 - The Subtle Knife

by Philip Pullman

  And Lee saw him mistily, one soldier of the Imperial Guard creeping away from his company’s defeat.

  “I cain’t shoot a man in the back,” Lee said.

  “Shame to die with one bullet left, though.”

  So he took aim with his last bullet at the zeppelin itself, still roaring and straining to rise with its one engine, and the bullet must have been red-hot, or maybe a burning brand from the forest below was wafted to the airship on an updraft; for the gas suddenly billowed into an orange fireball, and the envelope and the metal skeleton rose a little way and then tumbled down very slowly, gently, but full of a fiery death.

  And the man creeping away and the six or seven others who were the only remnant of the Guard, and who hadn’t dared come closer to the man holding the ravine, were engulfed by the fire that fell on them.

  Lee saw the fireball and heard through the roar in his ears Hester saying, “That’s all of ’em, Lee.”

  He said, or thought, “Those poor men didn’t have to come to this, nor did we.”

  She said, “We held ’em off. We held out. We’re a-helping Lyra.”

  Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.

  FIFTEEN

  BLOODMOSS

  On, said the alethiometer. Farther, higher.

  So on they climbed. The witches flew above to spy out the best routes, because the hilly land soon gave way to steeper slopes and rocky footing, and as the sun rose toward noon, the travelers found themselves in a tangled land of dry gullies, cliffs, and boulder-strewn valleys where not a single green leaf grew, and where the stridulation of insects was the only sound.

  They moved on, stopping only for sips of water from their goatskin flasks, and talking little. Pantalaimon flew above Lyra’s head for a while until he tired of that, and then he became a little sure-footed mountain sheep, vain of his horns, leaping among rocks while Lyra scrambled laboriously alongside. Will moved on grimly, screwing up his eyes against the glare, ignoring the worsening pain from his hand, and finally reaching a state in which movement alone was good and stillness bad, so that he suffered more from resting than from toiling on. And since the failure of the witches’ spell to stop his bleeding, he thought they were regarding him with fear, too, as if he was marked by some curse greater than their own powers.

  At one point they came to a little lake, a patch of intense blue scarcely thirty yards across among the red rocks. They stopped there to drink and refill their flasks, and to soak their aching feet in the icy water. They stayed a few minutes and moved on, and soon afterward, when the sun was at its highest and hottest, Serafina Pekkala darted down to speak to them. She was agitated.

  “I must leave you for a while,” she said. “Lee Scoresby needs me. I don’t know why. But he wouldn’t call if he didn’t need my help. Keep going, and I’ll find you.”

  “Mr. Scoresby?” said Lyra, excited and anxious. “But where—”

  But Serafina was gone, speeding out of sight before Lyra could finish the question. Lyra reached automatically for the alethiometer to ask what had happened to Lee Scoresby, but she let her hand drop, because she’d promised to do no more than guide Will.

  She looked across to him. He was sitting nearby, his hand held loosely on his knee and still slowly dripping blood, his face scorched by the sun and pale under the burning.

  “Will,” she said, “d’you know why you have to find your father?”

  “It’s what I’ve always known. My mother said I’d take up my father’s mantle. That’s all I know.”

  “What does that mean, taking up his mantle? What’s a mantle?”

  “A task, I suppose. Whatever he’s been doing, I’ve got to carry on. It makes as much sense as anything else.”

  He wiped the sweat out of his eyes with his right hand. What he couldn’t say was that he longed for his father as a lost child yearns for home. That comparison wouldn’t have occurred to him, because home was the place he kept safe for his mother, not the place others kept safe for him. But it had been five years now since that Saturday morning in the supermarket when the pretend game of hiding from the enemies became desperately real, such a long time in his life, and his heart craved to hear the words “Well done, well done, my child; no one on earth could have done better; I’m proud of you. Come and rest now . . . . ”

  Will longed for that so much that he hardly knew he did. It was just part of what everything felt like. So he couldn’t express that to Lyra now, though she could see it in his eyes, and that was new for her, too, to be quite so perceptive. The fact was that where Will was concerned, she was developing a new kind of sense, as if he were simply more in focus than anyone she’d known before. Everything about him was clear and close and immediate.

  And she might have said that to him, but at that moment a witch flew down.

  “I can see people behind us,” she said. “They’re a long way back, but they’re moving quickly. Shall I go closer and look?”

  “Yes, do,” said Lyra, “but fly low, and hide, and don’t let them see you.”

  Will and Lyra got painfully to their feet again and clambered on.

  “I been cold plenty of times,” Lyra said, to take her mind off the pursuers, “but I en’t been this hot, ever. Is it this hot in your world?”

  “Not where I used to live. Not normally. But the climate’s been changing. The summers are hotter than they used to be. They say that people have been interfering with the atmosphere by putting chemicals in it, and the weather’s going out of control.”

  “Yeah, well, they have,” said Lyra, “and it is. And we’re here in the middle of it.”

  He was too hot and thirsty to reply, and they climbed on breathlessly in the throbbing air. Pantalaimon was a cricket now, and sat on Lyra’s shoulder, too tired to leap or fly. From time to time the witches would see a spring high up, too high to climb to, and fly up to fill the children’s flasks. They would soon have died without water, and there was none where they were; any spring that made its way into the air was soon swallowed again among the rocks.

  And so they moved on, toward evening.

  The witch who flew back to spy was called Lena Feldt. She flew low, from crag to crag, and as the sun was setting and drawing a wild blood-red out of the rocks, she came to the little blue lake and found a troop of soldiers making camp.

  But her first glimpse of them told her more than she wanted to know; these soldiers had no dæmons. And they weren’t from Will’s world, or the world of Cittàgazze, where people’s dæmons were inside them, and where they still looked alive; these men were from her own world, and to see them without dæmons was a gross and sickening horror.

  Then out of a tent by the lakeside came the explanation. Lena Feldt saw a woman, a short-life, graceful in her khaki hunting clothes and as full of life as the golden monkey who capered along the water’s edge beside her.

  Lena Feldt hid among the rocks above and watched as Mrs. Coulter spoke to the officer in charge, and as his men put up tents, made fires, boiled water.

  The witch had been among Serafina Pekkala’s troop who rescued the children at Bolvangar, and she longed to shoot Mrs. Coulter on the spot; but some fortune was protecting the woman, for it was just too far for a bowshot from where she was, and the witch could get no closer without making herself invisible. So she began to make the spell. It took ten minutes of deep concentration.

  Confident at last, Lena Feldt went down the rocky slope toward the lake, and as she walked through the camp, one or two blank-eyed soldiers glanced up briefly, but found what they saw too hard to remember, and looked away again. The witch stopped outside the tent Mrs. Coulter had gone into, and fitted an arrow to her bowstring.

  She listened to the low voice through the canvas and then moved carefully to the open flap that overlooked the lake.

  Inside the tent Mrs. Coulter was talking to a man Lena Feldt hadn’t seen before: an older man, gray-haired and powerful, wit
h a serpent dæmon twined around his wrist. He was sitting in a canvas chair beside hers, and she was leaning toward him, speaking softly.

  “Of course, Carlo,” she was saying, “I’ll tell you anything you like. What do you want to know?”

  “How do you command the Specters?” the man said. “I didn’t think it possible, but you have them following you like dogs . . . . Are they afraid of your bodyguard? What is it?”

  “Simple,” she said. “They know I can give them more nourishment if they let me live than if they consume me. I can lead them to all the victims their phantom hearts desire. As soon as you described them to me, I knew I could dominate them, and so it turns out. And a whole world trembles in the power of these pallid things! But, Carlo,” she whispered, “I can please you, too, you know. Would you like me to please you even more?”

  “Marisa,” he murmured, “it’s enough of a pleasure to be close to you . . . . ”

  “No, it isn’t, Carlo; you know it isn’t. You know I can please you more than this.”

  Her dæmon’s little black horny hands were stroking the serpent dæmon. Little by little the serpent loosened herself and began to flow along the man’s arm toward the monkey. Both the man and the woman were holding glasses of golden wine, and she sipped hers and leaned a little closer to him.

  “Ah,” said the man as the dæmon slipped slowly off his arm and let her weight into the golden monkey’s hands. The monkey raised her slowly to his face and ran his cheek softly along her emerald skin. Her tongue flicked blackly this way and that, and the man sighed.

  “Carlo, tell me why you’re pursuing the boy,” Mrs. Coulter whispered, and her voice was as soft as the monkey’s caress. “Why do you need to find him?”

  “He has something I want. Oh, Marisa—”

  “What is it, Carlo? What’s he got?”

  He shook his head. But he was finding it hard to resist; his dæmon was twined gently around the monkey’s breast, and running her head through and through the long, lustrous fur as his hands moved along her fluid length.

  Lena Feldt watched them, standing invisible just two paces from where they sat. Her bowstring was taut, the arrow nocked to it in readiness; she could have pulled and loosed in less than a second, and Mrs. Coulter would have been dead before she finished drawing breath. But the witch was curious. She stood still and silent and wide-eyed.

  But while she was watching Mrs. Coulter, she didn’t look behind her across the little blue lake. On the far side of it in the darkness a grove of ghostly trees seemed to have planted itself, a grove that shivered every so often with a tremor like a conscious intention. But they were not trees, of course; and while all the curiosity of Lena Feldt and her dæmon was directed at Mrs. Coulter, one of the pallid forms detached itself from its fellows and drifted across the surface of the icy water, causing not a single ripple, until it paused a foot from the rock on which Lena Feldt’s dæmon was perched.

  “You could easily tell me, Carlo,” Mrs. Coulter was murmuring. “You could whisper it. You could pretend to be talking in your sleep, and who could blame you for that? Just tell me what the boy has, and why you want it. I could get it for you . . . . Wouldn’t you like me to do that? Just tell me, Carlo. I don’t want it. I want the girl. What is it? Just tell me, and you shall have it.”

  He gave a soft shudder. His eyes were closed. Then he said, “It’s a knife. The subtle knife of Cittàgazze. You haven’t heard of it, Marisa? Some people call it teleutaia makhaira, the last knife of all. Others call it Æsahættr.”

  “What does it do, Carlo? Why is it special?”

  “Ah . . . It’s the knife that will cut anything. Not even its makers knew what it could do. Nothing, no one, matter, spirit, angel, air—nothing is invulnerable to the subtle knife. Marisa, it’s mine, you understand?”

  “Of course, Carlo. I promise. Let me fill your glass . . . ”

  And as the golden monkey slowly ran his hands along the emerald serpent again and again, squeezing just a little, lifting, stroking as Sir Charles sighed with pleasure, Lena Feldt saw what was truly happening: because while the man’s eyes were closed, Mrs. Coulter secretly tilted a few drops from a small flask into the glass before filling it again with wine.

  “Here, darling,” she whispered. “Let’s drink, to each other . . . . ”

  He was already intoxicated. He took the glass and sipped greedily, once, again, and again.

  And then, without any warning, Mrs. Coulter stood up and turned and looked Lena Feldt full in the face.

  “Well, witch,” she said, “did you think I don’t know how you make yourself invisible?”

  Lena Feldt was too surprised to move.

  Behind her, the man was struggling to breathe. His chest was heaving, his face was red, and his dæmon was limp and fainting in the monkey’s hands. The monkey shook her off in contempt.

  Lena Feldt tried to swing her bow up, but a fatal paralysis had touched her shoulder. She couldn’t make herself do it. This had never happened before, and she uttered a little cry.

  “Oh, it’s too late for that,” said Mrs. Coulter. “Look at the lake, witch.”

  Lena Feldt turned and saw her snow bunting dæmon fluttering and shrieking as if he were in a glass chamber that was being emptied of air; fluttering and falling, slumping, failing, his beak opening wide, gasping in panic. The Specter had enveloped him.

  “No!” she cried, and tried to move toward it, but was driven back by a spasm of nausea. Even in her sickened distress, Lena Feldt could see that Mrs. Coulter had more force in her soul than anyone she had ever seen. It didn’t surprise her to see that the Specter was under Mrs. Coulter’s power; no one could resist that authority. Lena Feldt turned back in anguish to the woman.

  “Let him go! Please let him go!” she cried.

  “We’ll see. Is the child with you? The girl Lyra?”

  “Yes!”

  “And a boy, too? A boy with a knife?”

  “Yes—I beg you—”

  “And how many witches have you?”

  “Twenty! Let him go, let him go!”

  “All in the air? Or do some of you stay on the ground with the children?”

  “Most in the air, three or four on the ground always—this is anguish—let him go or kill me now!”

  “How far up the mountain are they? Are they moving on, or have they stopped to rest?”

  Lena Feldt told her everything. She could have resisted any torture but what was happening to her dæmon now. When Mrs. Coulter had learned all she wanted to know about where the witches were, and how they guarded Lyra and Will, she said, “And now tell me this. You witches know something about the child Lyra. I nearly learned it from one of your sisters, but she died before I could complete the torture. Well, there is no one to save you now. Tell me the truth about my daughter.”

  Lena Feldt gasped, “She will be the mother—she will be life—mother—she will disobey—she will—”

  “Name her! You are saying everything but the most important thing! Name her!” cried Mrs. Coulter.

  “Eve! Mother of all! Eve, again! Mother Eve!” stammered Lena Feldt, sobbing.

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Coulter.

  And she breathed a great sigh, as if the purpose of her life was clear to her at last.

  Dimly the witch saw what she had done, and through the horror that was enveloping her she tried to cry out: “What will you do to her? What will you do?”

  “Why, I shall have to destroy her,” said Mrs. Coulter, “to prevent another Fall . . . . Why didn’t I see this before? It was too large to see . . . . ”

  She clapped her hands together softly, like a child, wide-eyed. Lena Feldt, whimpering, heard her go on: “Of course. Asriel will make war on the Authority, and then . . . . Of course, of course. As before, so again. And Lyra is Eve. And this time she will not fall. I’ll see to that.”

  And Mrs. Coulter drew herself up, and snapped her fingers to the Specter feeding on the witch’s dæmon. The little snow buntin
g dæmon lay twitching on the rock as the Specter moved toward the witch herself, and then whatever Lena Feldt had undergone before was doubled and trebled and multiplied a hundredfold. She felt a nausea of the soul, a hideous and sickening despair, a melancholy weariness so profound that she was going to die of it. Her last conscious thought was disgust at life; her senses had lied to her. The world was not made of energy and delight but of foulness, betrayal, and lassitude. Living was hateful, and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe this was the first and last and only truth.

  Thus she stood, bow in hand, indifferent, dead in life.

  So Lena Feldt failed to see or to care about what Mrs. Coulter did next. Ignoring the gray-haired man slumped unconscious in the canvas chair and his dull-skinned dæmon coiled in the dust, the woman called the captain of the soldiers and ordered them to get ready for a night march up the mountain.

  Then she went to the edge of the water and called to the Specters.

  They came at her command, gliding like pillars of mist across the water. She raised her arms and made them forget they were earthbound, so that one by one they rose into the air and floated free like malignant thistledown, drifting up into the night and borne by the air currents toward Will and Lyra and the other witches; but Lena Feldt saw nothing of it.

  The temperature dropped quickly after dark, and when Will and Lyra had eaten the last of their dry bread, they lay down under an overhanging rock to keep warm and try to sleep. At least Lyra didn’t have to try; she was unconscious in less than a minute, curled tightly around Pantalaimon, but Will couldn’t find sleep, no matter how long he lay there. It was partly his hand, which was now throbbing right up to the elbow and uncomfortably swollen, and partly the hard ground, and partly the cold, and partly utter exhaustion, and partly his longing for his mother.

  He was afraid for her, of course, and he knew she’d be safer if he was there to look after her; but he wanted her to look after him, too, as she’d done when he was very small. He wanted her to bandage him and tuck him into bed and sing to him and take away all the trouble and surround him with all the warmth and softness and mother-kindness he needed so badly; and it was never going to happen. Part of him was only a little boy still. So he cried, but he lay very still as he did, not wanting to wake Lyra.