His Dark Materials Omnibus (70 page)

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 was 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 if 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.

They watched together as Will’s body stopped trembling. No less intense, he was focused differently now, and the knife looked different too. Perhaps it was those cloudy colors along the blade, or perhaps it was the way it sat so naturally in Will’s hand, but the little movements he was making with the tip now looked purposeful instead of random. He felt this way, then turned the knife over and felt the other, always feeling with the silvery edge; and then he seemed to find some little snag in the empty air.

“What’s this? Is this it?” he said hoarsely.

“Yes. Don’t force it. Come back now, come back to yourself.”

Lyra imagined she could see Will’s soul flowing back along the blade to his hand, and up his arm to his heart. He stood back, dropped his hand, blinked.

“I felt something there,” he said to Giacomo Paradisi. “The knife was just slipping through the air at first, and then I felt it …”

“Good. Now do it again. This time, when you feel it, slide the knife in and along. Make a cut. Don’t hesitate. Don’t be surprised. Don’t drop the knife.”

Will had to crouch and take two or three deep breaths and put his left hand under his other arm before he could go on. But he was intent on it; he stood up again after a couple of seconds, the knife held forward already.

This time it was easier. Having felt it once, he knew what to search for again, and he felt the curious little snag after less than a minute. It was like delicately searching out the gap between one stitch and the next with the point of a scalpel. He touched, withdrew, touched again to make sure, and then did as the old man had said, and cut sideways with the silver edge.

It was a good thing that Giacomo Paradisi had reminded him not to be surprised. He kept careful hold of the knife and put it down on the table before giving in to his astonishment. Lyra was on her feet already, speechless, because there in the middle of the dusty little room was a window just like the one under the hornbeam trees: a gap in midair through which they could see another world.

And because they were high in the tower, they were high above north Oxford. Over a cemetery, in fact, looking back toward the city. There were the hornbeam trees a little way ahead of them; there were houses, trees, roads, and in the distance the towers and spires of the city.

If they hadn’t already seen the first window, they would have thought this was some kind of optical trick. Except that it wasn’t only optical; air was coming through it, and they could smell the traffic fumes, which didn’t exist in the world of Cittàgazze. Pantalaimon changed into a swallow and flew through, delighting in the open air, and then snapped up an insect before darting back through to Lyra’s shoulder again.

Giacomo Paradisi was watching with a curious, sad smile. Then he said, “So much for opening. Now you must learn to close.”

Lyra stood back to give Will room, and the old man came to stand beside him.

“For this you need your fingers,” he said. “One hand will do. Feel for the edge as you felt with the knife to begin with. You won’t find it unless you put
your soul into your fingertips. Touch very delicately; feel again and again till you find the edge. Then you pinch it together. That’s all. Try.”

But Will was trembling. He couldn’t get his mind back to the delicate balance he knew it needed, and he got more and more frustrated. Lyra could see what was happening.

She stood up and took his right arm and said, “Listen, Will, sit down, I’ll tell you how to do it. Just sit down for a minute, ’cause your hand hurts and it’s taking your mind off it. It’s bound to. It’ll ease off in a little while.”

The old man raised both his hands and then changed his mind, shrugged, and sat down again.