His words fell into Lyra’s mind like heavy stones, and Will, too, felt the deadly weight of them.
“How should we do that?” he said.
“You’ve only got to wish for it, and the thing is done.”
“Wait,” said Tialys.
Every eye turned to him, and those deaths lying on the floor sat up to turn their blank, mild faces to his tiny, passionate one. He was standing close by Salmakia, his hand on her shoulder. Lyra could see what he was thinking: he was going to say that this had gone too far, they must turn back, they were taking this foolishness to irresponsible lengths.
So she stepped in. “Excuse me,” she said to the man Peter, “but me and our friend the Chevalier, we’ve got to go outside for a minute, because he needs to talk to his friends in the moon through my special instrument. We won’t be long.”
And she picked him up carefully, avoiding his spurs, and took him outside into the dark, where a loose piece of corrugated iron roofing was banging in the cold wind with a melancholy sound.
“You must stop,” he said as she set him on an upturned oil drum, in the feeble light of one of those anbaric bulbs that swung on its cable overhead. “This is far enough. No more.”
“But we made an agreement,” Lyra said.
“No, no. Not to these lengths.”
“All right. Leave us. You fly on back. Will can cut a window into your world, or any world you like, and you can fly through and be safe, that’s all right, we don’t mind.”
“Do you realize what you’re doing?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t. You’re a thoughtless, irresponsible, lying child. Fantasy comes so easily to you that your whole nature is riddled with dishonesty, and you don’t even admit the truth when it stares you in the face. Well, if you can’t see it, I’ll tell you plainly: you cannot, you must not risk your death. You must come back with us now. I’ll call Lord Asriel and we can be safe in the fortress in hours.”
Lyra felt a great sob of rage building up in her chest, and stamped her foot, unable to keep still.
“You don’t know,” she cried, “you just don’t know what I got in my head or my heart, do you? I don’t know if you people ever have children, maybe you lay eggs or something, I wouldn’t be surprised, because you’re not kind, you’re not generous, you’re not considerate—you’re not cruel, even—that would be better, if you were cruel, because it’d mean you took us serious, you didn’t just go along with us when it suited you… Oh, I can’t trust you at all now! You said you’d help and we’d do it together, and now you want to stop us—you’re the dishonest one, Tialys!”
“I wouldn’t let a child of my own speak to me in the insolent, high-handed way you’re speaking, Lyra—why I haven’t punished you before—”
“Then go ahead! Punish me, since you can! Take your bloody spurs and dig ’em in hard, go on! Here’s my hand—do it! You got no idea what’s in my heart, you proud, selfish creature—you got no notion how I feel sad and wicked and sorry about my friend Roger—you kill people just like that”—she snapped her finger—“they don’t matter to you—but it’s a torment and a sorrow to me that I never said good-bye to him, and I want to say sorry and make it as good as I can—you’d never understand that, for all your pride, for all your grown-up cleverness—and if I have to die to do what’s proper, then I will, and be happy while I do. I seen worse than that. So if you want to kill me, you hard man, you strong man, you poison bearer, you Chevalier, you do it, go on, kill me. Then me and Roger can play in the land of the dead forever, and laugh at you, you pitiful thing.”
What Tialys might have done then wasn’t hard to see, for he was ablaze from head to foot with a passionate anger, shaking with it; but he didn’t have time to move before a voice spoke behind Lyra, and they both felt a chill fall over them. Lyra turned around, knowing what she’d see and dreading it despite her bravado.
The death stood very close, smiling kindly, his face exactly like those of all the others she’d seen; but this was hers, her very own death, and Pantalaimon at her breast howled and shivered, and his ermine shape flowed up around her neck and tried to push her away from the death. But by doing that, he only pushed himself closer, and realizing it, he shrank back toward her again, to her warm throat and the strong pulse of her heart.
Lyra clutched him to her and faced the death directly. She couldn’t remember what he’d said, and out of the corner of her eye, she could see Tialys quickly preparing the lodestone resonator, busy.
“You’re my death, en’t you?” she said.
“Yes, my dear,” he said.
“You en’t going to take me yet, are you?”
“You wanted me. I am always here.”
“Yes, but… I did, yes, but… I want to go to the land of the dead, that’s true. But not to die. I don’t want to die. I love being alive, and I love my dæmon, and… Dæmons don’t go down there, do they? I seen ’em vanish and just go out like candles when people die. Do they have dæmons in the land of the dead?”
“No,” he said. “Your dæmon vanishes into the air, and you vanish under the ground.”
“Then I want to take my dæmon with me when I go to the land of the dead,” she said firmly. “And I want to come back again. Has it ever been known, for people to do that?”
“Not for many, many ages. Eventually, child, you will come to the land of the dead with no effort, no risk, a safe, calm journey, in the company of your own death, your special, devoted friend, who’s been beside you every moment of your life, who knows you better than yourself—”
“But Pantalaimon is my special and devoted friend! I don’t know you, Death, I know Pan and I love Pan and if he ever—if we ever—”
The death was nodding. He seemed interested and kindly, but she couldn’t for a moment forget what he was: her very own death, and so close.
“I know it’ll be an effort to go on now,” she said more steadily, “and dangerous, but I want to, Death, I do truly. And so does Will. We both had people taken away too soon, and we need to make amends, at least I do.”
“Everyone wishes they could speak again to those who’ve gone to the land of the dead. Why should there be an exception for you?”
“Because,” she began, lying, “because there’s something I’ve got to do there, not just seeing my friend Roger, something else. It was a task put on me by an angel, and no one else can do it, only me. It’s too important to wait till I die in the natural way, it’s got to be done now. See, the angel commanded me. That’s why we came here, me and Will. We got to.”
Behind her, Tialys put away his instrument and sat watching the child plead with her own death to be taken where no one should go.
The death scratched his head and held up his hands, but nothing could stop Lyra’s words, nothing could deflect her desire, not even fear: she’d seen worse than death, she claimed, and she had, too.
So eventually her death said:
“If nothing can put you off, then all I can say is, come with me, and I will take you there, into the land of the dead. I’ll be your guide. I can show you the way in, but as for getting out again, you’ll have to manage by yourself.”
“And my friends,” said Lyra. “My friend Will and the others.”
“Lyra,” said Tialys, “against every instinct, we’ll go with you. I was angry with you a minute ago. But you make it hard…”
Lyra knew that this was a time to conciliate, and she was happy to do that, having gotten her way.
“Yes,” she said, “I am sorry, Tialys, but if you hadn’t got angry, we’d never have found this gentleman to guide us. So I’m glad you were here, you and the Lady, I’m really grateful to you for being with us.”
So Lyra persuaded her own death to guide her and the others into the land where Roger had gone, and Will’s father, and Tony Makarios, and so many others; and her death told her to go down to the jetty when the first light came to the sky, and prepare to leave.
But Pantalaimon was
trembling and shivering, and nothing Lyra could do could soothe him into stillness, or quiet the soft little moan he couldn’t help uttering. So her sleep was broken and shallow, on the floor of the shack with all the other sleepers, and her death sat watchfully beside her.
TWENTY
CLIMBING
I gained it so—
By Climbing slow—
By Catching at the Twigs that grow—
Between the Bliss—and me—
• EMILY DICKINSON •
The mulefa made many kinds of rope and cord, and Mary Malone spent a morning inspecting and testing the ones Atal’s family had in their stores before choosing what she wanted. The principle of twisting and winding hadn’t caught on in their world, so all the cords and ropes were braided; but they were strong and flexible, and Mary soon found exactly the sort she wanted.
What are you doing? said Atal.
The mulefa had no term for climb, so Mary had to do a lot of gesturing and roundabout explaining. Atal was horrified.
To go into the high part of the trees?
I must see what is happening, Mary explained. Now you can help me prepare the rope.
Once in California, Mary had met a mathematician who spent every weekend climbing among the trees. Mary had done a little rock climbing, and she’d listened avidly as he had talked about the techniques and equipment. She had decided to try it herself as soon as she had the chance. Of course she’d never expected to be climbing trees in another universe, and climbing solo didn’t greatly appeal, either, but there was no choice about that. What she could do was make it as safe as possible beforehand.
She took a coil long enough to reach over one of the branches of a high tree and back down to the ground, and strong enough to bear several times her weight. Then she cut a large number of short pieces of a smaller but very tough cord and made slings with them: short loops tied with a fisherman’s knot, which could make hand- and footholds when she tied them to the main line.
Then there was the problem of getting the rope over the branch in the first place. An hour or two’s experimenting with some fine tough cord and a length of springy branch produced a bow; the Swiss Army knife cut some arrows, with stiff leaves in place of feathers to stabilize them in flight; and finally, after a day’s work, Mary was ready to begin. But the sun was setting, and her hands were tired, and she ate and slept, preoccupied, while the mulefa discussed her endlessly in their quiet, musical whispers.
First thing in the morning, she set off to shoot an arrow over a branch. Some of the mulefa gathered to watch, anxious for her safety. Climbing was so alien to creatures with wheels that the very thought of it horrified them.
Privately Mary knew how they felt. She swallowed her nervousness and tied an end of the thinnest, lightest line to one of her arrows, and sent it flying upward from the bow.
She lost the first arrow: it stuck in the bark partway up and wouldn’t come out. She lost the second because, although it did clear the branch, it didn’t fall far enough to reach the ground on the other side, and pulling it back, she caught it and snapped it. The long line fell back attached to the broken shaft, and she tried again with the third and last, and this time it worked.
Pulling carefully and steadily so as not to snag the line and break it, she hauled the prepared rope up and over until both ends were on the ground. Then she tied them both securely to a massive buttress of one of the roots, as thick around as her own hips. So it should be fairly solid, she thought. It had better be. What she couldn’t tell from the ground, of course, was what kind of branch the whole thing, including her, would be depending on. Unlike climbing on rock, where you could fasten the rope to pitons on the cliff face every few yards so you never had far to fall, this business involved one very long free length of rope, and one very long fall if anything went wrong. To make herself a little more secure, she braided together three small ropes into a harness, and passed it around both hanging ends of the main rope with a loose knot that she could tighten the moment she began to slip.
Mary put her foot in the first sling and began to climb.
She reached the canopy in less time than she’d anticipated. The climbing was straightforward, the rope was kindly on her hands, and although she hadn’t wanted to think about the problem of getting on top of the first branch, she found that the deep fissures in the bark helped her to get a solid purchase and feel secure. In fact, only fifteen minutes after she’d left the ground, she was standing on the first branch and planning her route to the next.
She had brought two more coils of rope with her, intending to make a web of fixed lines to serve in place of the pitons and anchors and “friends” and other hardware she relied on when climbing a rock face. Tying them in place took her some minutes more, and once she’d secured herself, she chose what looked like the most promising branch, coiled her spare rope again, and set off.
After ten minutes’ careful climbing she found herself right in the thickest part of the canopy. She could reach the long leaves and run them through her hands; she found flower after flower, off-white and absurdly small, each growing the little coin-sized thing that would later become one of those great iron-hard seedpods.
She reached a comfortable spot where three branches forked, tied the rope securely, adjusted her harness, and rested.
Through the gaps in the leaves, she could see the blue sea, clear and sparkling as far as the horizon; and in the other direction over her right shoulder, she could see the succession of low rises in the gold-brown prairie, laced across by the black highways.
There was a light breeze, which lifted a faint scent out of the flowers and rustled the stiff leaves, and Mary imagined a huge, dim benevolence holding her up, like a pair of giant hands. As she lay in the fork of the great branches, she felt a kind of bliss she had only felt once before; and that was not when she made her vows as a nun.
Eventually she was brought back to her normal state of mind by a cramp in her right ankle, which was resting awkwardly in the crook of the fork. She eased it away and turned her attention to the task, still dizzy from the sense of oceanic gladness that surrounded her.
She’d explained to the mulefa how she had to hold the sap-lacquer plates a hand span apart in order to see the sraf; and at once they’d seen the problem and made a short tube of bamboo, fixing the amber-colored plates at each end like a telescope. This spyglass was tucked in her breast pocket, and she took it out now. When she looked through it, she saw those drifting golden sparkles, the sraf, the Shadows, Lyra’s Dust, like a vast cloud of tiny beings floating through the wind. For the most part they drifted randomly like dust motes in a shaft of sunlight, or molecules in a glass of water.
For the most part.
But the longer she looked, the more she began to see another kind of motion. Underlying the random drifting was a deeper, slower, universal movement, out from the land toward the sea.
Well, that was curious. Securing herself to one of her fixed ropes, she crawled out along a horizontal branch, looking closely at all the flower heads she could find. And presently she began to see what was happening. She watched and waited till she was perfectly sure, and then began the careful, lengthy, strenuous process of climbing down.
Mary found the mulefa in a fearful state, having suffered a thousand anxieties for their friend so far off the ground.
Atal was especially relieved, and touched her nervously all over with her trunk, uttering gentle whinnies of pleasure to find her safe, and carrying her swiftly down to the settlement along with a dozen or so others.
A soon as they came over the brow of the hill, the call went out among those in the village, and by the time they reached the speaking ground, the throng was so thick that Mary guessed there were many visitors from elsewhere, come to hear what she said. She wished she had better news for them.
The old zalif Sattamax mounted the platform and welcomed her warmly, and she responded with all the mulefa courtesy she could remember. As soon as the greetings were
over, she began to speak.
Haltingly and with many roundabout phrasings, she said:
My good friends, I have been into the high canopy of your trees and looked closely at the growing leaves and the young flowers and the seedpods.
I could see that there is a current of sraf high in the treetops, she went on, and it moves against the wind. The air is moving inland off the sea, but the sraf is moving slowly against it. Can you see that from the ground? Because I could not.
No, said Sattamax. That is the first we ever heard about that.
Well, she continued, the trees are filtering the sraf as it moves through them, and some of it is attracted to the flowers. I could see it happening: the flowers are turned upward, and if the sraf were falling straight down, it would enter their petals and fertilize them like pollen from the stars.
But the sraf isn’t falling down, it’s moving out toward the sea. When a flower happens to be facing the land, the sraf can enter it. That’s why there are still some seedpods growing. But most of them face upward, and the sraf just drifts past without entering. The flowers must have evolved like that because in the past all the sraf fell straight down. Something has happened to the sraf, not to the trees. And you can only see that current from high up, which is why you never knew about it.
So if you want to save the trees, and mulefa life, we must find out why the sraf is doing that. I can’t think of a way yet, but I will try.
She saw many of them craning to look upward at this drift of Dust. But from the ground you couldn’t see it: she looked through the spyglass herself, but the dense blue of the sky was all she could see.
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