His Dark Materials Omnibus (122 page)

“They
 …” said Lyra helplessly, then stopped: it wasn’t fair to point out that the other three didn’t have to give anything up.

Will was watching her anxiously. She looked all around, at the lake, at the jetty, at the rough path, the stagnant puddles, the dead and sodden bushes … Her Pan, alone here: how could he live without her? He was shaking inside her shirt, against her bare flesh, his fur needing her warmth. Impossible! Never!

“He must stay here if you are to come,” the boatman said again.

The Lady Salmakia flicked the rein, and her dragonfly skimmed away from Lyra’s shoulder to land on the gunwale of the boat, where Tialys joined her. They said something to the boatman. Lyra watched as a condemned prisoner watches the stir at the back of the courtroom that might be a messenger with a pardon.

The boatman bent to listen and then shook his head.

“No,” he said. “If she comes, he has to stay.”

Will said, “That’s not right. We don’t have to leave part of ourselves behind. Why should Lyra?”

“Oh, but you do,” said the boatman. “It’s her misfortune that she can see and talk to the part she must leave. You will not know until you are on the water, and then it will be too late. But you all have to leave that part of yourselves here. There is no passage to the land of the dead for such as him.”

No, Lyra thought, and Pantalaimon thought with her: We didn’t go through Bolvangar for this, no; how will we ever find each other again?

And she looked back again at the foul and dismal shore, so bleak and blasted with disease and poison, and thought of her dear Pan waiting there
alone, her heart’s companion, watching her disappear into the mist, and she fell into a storm of weeping. Her passionate sobs didn’t echo, because the mist muffled them, but all along the shore in innumerable ponds and shallows, in wretched broken tree stumps, the damaged creatures that lurked there heard her full-hearted cry and drew themselves a little closer to the ground, afraid of such passion.

“If he could come—” cried Will, desperate to end her grief, but the boatman shook his head.

“He can come in the boat, but if he does, the boat stays here,” he said.

“But how will she find him again?”

“I don’t know.”

“When we leave, will we come back this way?”

“Leave?”

“We’re going to come back. We’re going to the land of the dead and we are going to come back.”

“Not this way.”

“Then some other way, but we will!”

“I have taken millions, and none came back.”

“Then we shall be the first. We’ll find our way out. And since we’re going to do that, be kind, boatman, be compassionate, let her take her dæmon!”

“No,” he said, and shook his ancient head. “It’s not a rule you can break. It’s a law like this one …” He leaned over the side and cupped a handful of water, and then tilted his hand so it ran out again. “The law that makes the water fall back into the lake, it’s a law like that. I can’t tilt my hand and make the water fly upward. No more can I take her dæmon to the land of the dead. Whether or not
she
comes, he must stay.”

Lyra could see nothing: her face was buried in Pantalaimon’s cat fur. But Will saw Tialys dismount from his dragonfly and prepare to spring at the boatman, and he half-agreed with the spy’s intention; but the old man had seen him, and turned his ancient head to say:

“How many ages do you think I’ve been ferrying people to the land of the dead? D’you think if anything could hurt me, it wouldn’t have happened already? D’you think the people I take come with me gladly? They struggle and cry, they try to bribe me, they threaten and fight; nothing works. You can’t hurt me, sting as you will. Better comfort the child; she’s coming; take no notice of me.”

Will could hardly watch. Lyra was doing the cruelest thing she had ever done, hating herself, hating the deed, suffering for Pan and with Pan and
because of Pan; trying to put him down on the cold path, disengaging his cat claws from her clothes, weeping, weeping. Will closed his ears: the sound was too unhappy to bear. Time after time she pushed her dæmon away, and still he cried and tried to cling.

She
could
turn back.

She could say no, this is a bad idea, we mustn’t do it.

She could be true to the heart-deep, life-deep bond linking her to Pantalaimon, she could put that first, she could push the rest out of her mind—

But she couldn’t.

“Pan, no one’s done this before,” she whispered shiveringly, “but Will says we’re coming back and I
swear
, Pan, I love you, I
swear
we’re coming back—I will—take care, my dear—you’ll be safe—we will come back, and if I have to spend every minute of my life finding you again, I will, I won’t stop, I won’t rest, I won’t—oh, Pan—dear Pan—I’ve got to, I’ve got to …”

And she pushed him away, so that he crouched bitter and cold and frightened on the muddy ground.

What animal he was now, Will could hardly tell. He seemed to be so young, a cub, a puppy, something helpless and beaten, a creature so sunk in misery that it was more misery than creature. His eyes never left Lyra’s face, and Will could see her making herself not look away, not avoid the guilt, and he admired her honesty and her courage at the same time as he was wrenched with the shock of their parting. There were so many vivid currents of feeling between them that the very air felt electric to him.

And Pantalaimon didn’t ask why, because he knew; and he didn’t ask whether Lyra loved Roger more than him, because he knew the true answer to that, too. And he knew that if he spoke, she wouldn’t be able to resist; so the dæmon held himself quiet so as not to distress the human who was abandoning him, and now they were both pretending that it wouldn’t hurt, it wouldn’t be long before they were together again, it was all for the best. But Will knew that the little girl was tearing her heart out of her breast.

Then she stepped down into the boat. She was so light that it barely rocked at all. She sat beside Will, and her eyes never left Pantalaimon, who stood trembling at the shore end of the jetty; but as the boatman let go of the iron ring and swung his oars out to pull the boat away, the little dog dæmon trotted helplessly out to the very end, his claws clicking softly on the soft planks, and stood watching, just watching, as the boat drew away and the jetty faded and vanished in the mist.

Then Lyra gave a cry so passionate that even in that muffled, mist-hung
world it raised an echo, but of course it wasn’t an echo, it was the other part of her crying in turn from the land of the living as Lyra moved away into the land of the dead.

“My
heart
, Will …” she groaned, and clung to him, her wet face contorted with pain.

And thus the prophecy that the Master of Jordan College had made to the Librarian, that Lyra would make a great betrayal and it would hurt her terribly, was fulfilled.

But Will, too, found an agony building inside him, and through the pain he saw that the two Gallivespians, clinging together just as he and Lyra were doing, were moved by the same anguish.

Part of it was physical. It felt as if an iron hand had gripped his heart and was pulling it out between his ribs, so that he pressed his hands to the place and vainly tried to hold it in. It was far deeper and far worse than the pain of losing his fingers. But it was mental, too: something secret and private was being dragged into the open, where it had no wish to be, and Will was nearly overcome by a mixture of pain and shame and fear and self-reproach, because he himself had caused it.

And it was worse than that. It was as if he’d said, “No, don’t kill me, I’m frightened; kill my mother instead; she doesn’t matter, I don’t love her,” and as if she’d heard him say it, and pretended she hadn’t so as to spare his feelings, and offered herself in his place anyway because of her love for him. He felt as bad as that. There was nothing worse to feel.

So Will knew that all those things were part of having a dæmon, and that whatever his dæmon was, she, too, was left behind, with Pantalaimon, on that poisoned and desolate shore. The thought came to Will and Lyra at the same moment, and they exchanged a tear-filled glance. And for the second time in their lives, but not the last, each of them saw their own expression on the other’s face.

Only the boatman and the dragonflies seemed indifferent to the journey they were making. The great insects were fully alive and bright with beauty even in the clinging mist, shaking their filmy wings to dislodge the moisture; and the old man in his sacking robe leaned forward and back, forward and back, bracing his bare feet against the slime-puddled floor.

The journey lasted longer than Lyra wanted to measure. Though part of her was raw with anguish, imagining Pantalaimon abandoned on the shore, another part was adjusting to the pain, measuring her own strength, curious to see what would happen and where they would land.

Will’s arm was strong around her, but he, too, was looking ahead, trying to peer through the wet gray gloom and to hear anything other than the dank splash of the oars. And presently something did change: a cliff or an island lay ahead of them. They heard the enclosing of the sound before they saw the mist darken.

The boatman pulled on one oar to turn the boat a little to the left.

“Where are we?” said the voice of the Chevalier Tialys, small but strong as ever, though there was a harsh edge to it, as if he, too, had been suffering pain.

“Near the island,” said the boatman. “Another five minutes, we’ll be at the landing stage.”

“What island?” said Will. He found his own voice strained, too, so tight it hardly seemed his.

“The gate to the land of the dead is on this island,” said the boatman. “Everyone comes here, kings, queens, murderers, poets, children; everyone comes this way, and none come back.”

“
We
shall come back,” whispered Lyra fiercely.

He said nothing, but his ancient eyes were full of pity.

As they moved closer, they could see branches of cypress and yew hanging down low over the water, dark green, dense, and gloomy. The land rose steeply, and the trees grew so thickly that hardly a ferret could slip between them, and at that thought Lyra gave a little half-hiccup-half-sob, for Pan would have shown her how well he could do it; but not now, maybe not ever again.

“Are we dead now?” Will said to the boatman.

“Makes no difference,” he said. “There’s some that came here never believing they were dead. They insisted all the way that they were alive, it was a mistake, someone would have to pay; made no difference. There’s others who longed to be dead when they were alive, poor souls; lives full of pain or misery; killed themselves for a chance of a blessed rest, and found that nothing had changed except for the worse, and this time there was no escape; you can’t make yourself alive again. And there’s been others so frail and sickly, little infants, sometimes, that they’re scarcely born into the living before they come down to the dead. I’ve rowed this boat with a little crying baby on my lap many, many times, that never knew the difference between up there and down here. And old folk, too, the rich ones are the worst, snarling and savage and cursing me, railing and screaming: what did I think I was? Hadn’t they gathered and saved all the gold they could garner? Wouldn’t I take some now, to put them back ashore? They’d have the law on me, they had powerful
friends, they knew the Pope and the king of this and the duke of that, they were in a position to see I was punished and chastised … But they knew what the truth was in the end: the only position they were in was in my boat going to the land of the dead, and as for those kings and Popes, they’d be in here, too, in their turn, sooner than they wanted. I let ’em cry and rave; they can’t hurt me; they fall silent in the end.

“So if you don’t know whether you’re dead or not, and the little girl swears blind she’ll come out again to the living, I say nothing to contradict you. What you are, you’ll know soon enough.”

All the time he had been steadily rowing along the shore, and now he shipped the oars, slipping the handles down inside the boat and reaching out to his right for the first wooden post that rose out of the lake.

He pulled the boat alongside the narrow wharf and held it still for them. Lyra didn’t want to get out: as long as she was near the boat, then Pantalaimon would be able to think of her properly, because that was how he last saw her, but when she moved away from it, he wouldn’t know how to picture her anymore. So she hesitated, but the dragonflies flew up, and Will got out, pale and clutching his chest; so she had to as well.

“Thank you,” she said to the boatman. “When you go back, if you see my dæmon, tell him I love him the best of everything in the land of the living or the dead, and I swear I’ll come back to him, even if no one’s ever done it before, I swear I will.”

“Yes, I’ll tell him that,” said the old boatman.

He pushed off, and the sound of his slow oar strokes faded away in the mist.

The Gallivespians flew back, having gone a little way, and perched on the children’s shoulders as before, she on Lyra, he on Will. So they stood, the travelers, at the edge of the land of the dead. Ahead of them there was nothing but mist, though they could see from the darkening of it that a great wall rose in front of them.

Lyra shivered. She felt as if her skin had turned into lace and the damp and bitter air could flow in and out of her ribs, scaldingly cold on the raw wound where Pantalaimon had been. Still, she thought, Roger must have felt like that as he plunged down the mountainside, trying to cling to her desperate fingers.

They stood still and listened. The only sound was an endless
drip-drip-drip
of water from the leaves, and as they looked up, they felt one or two drops splash coldly on their cheeks.

“Can’t stay here,” said Lyra.

They moved off the wharf, keeping close together, and made their way to the wall. Gigantic stone blocks, green with ancient slime, rose higher into the mist than they could see. And now that they were closer, they could hear the sound of cries behind it, though whether they were human voices crying was impossible to tell: high, mournful shrieks and wails that hung in the air like the drifting filaments of a jellyfish, causing pain wherever they touched.