His Dark Materials Omnibus (93 page)

Between the edge of the burned forest and the mountains, a rocky slope of heavy boulders and scree was littered with scorched and twisted metal: girders and struts that had belonged to some complex machine. Iorek Byrnison looked at them as a smith as well as a warrior, but there was nothing in these fragments he could use. He scored a line with a mighty claw along a strut less damaged than most, and feeling a flimsiness in the quality of the metal, turned away at once and scanned the mountain wall again.

Then he saw what he was looking for: a narrow gully leading back between jagged walls, and at the entrance, a large, low boulder.

He clambered steadily toward it. Beneath his huge feet, dry bones snapped
loudly in the stillness, because many men had died here, to be picked clean by coyotes and vultures and lesser creatures; but the great bear ignored them and stepped up carefully toward the rock. The going was loose and he was heavy, and more than once the scree shifted under his feet and carried him down again in a scramble of dust and gravel. But as soon as he slid down, he began to move up once more, relentlessly, patiently, until he reached the rock itself, where the footing was firmer.

The boulder was pitted and chipped with bullet marks. Everything the witch had told him was true. And in confirmation, a little Arctic flower, a purple saxifrage, blossomed improbably where the witch had planted it as a signal in a cranny of the rock.

Iorek Byrnison moved around to the upper side. It was a good shelter from an enemy below, but not good enough; for among the hail of bullets that had chipped fragments off the rock had been a few that had found their targets and lay where they had come to rest, in the body of the man lying stiff in the shadow.

He was a body still, and not a skeleton, because the witch had laid a spell to preserve him from corruption. Iorek could see the face of his old comrade drawn and tight with the pain of his wounds, and see the jagged holes in his garments where the bullets had entered. The witch’s spell did not cover the blood that must have spilled, and insects and the sun and the wind had dispersed it completely. Lee Scoresby looked not asleep, nor at peace—he looked as if he had died in battle—but he looked as if he knew that his fight had been successful.

And because the Texan aeronaut was one of the very few humans Iorek had ever esteemed, he accepted the man’s last gift to him. With deft movements of his claws, he ripped aside the dead man’s clothes, opened the body with one slash, and began to feast on the flesh and blood of his old friend. It was his first meal for days, and he was hungry.

But a complex web of thoughts was weaving itself in the bear-king’s mind, with more strands in it than hunger and satisfaction. There was the memory of the little girl Lyra, whom he had named Silvertongue, and whom he had last seen crossing the fragile snow bridge across a crevasse in his own island of Svalbard. Then there was the agitation among the witches, the rumors of pacts and alliances and war; and then there was the surpassingly strange fact of this new world itself, and the witch’s insistence that there were many more such worlds, and that the fate of them all hung somehow on the fate of the child.

And then there was the melting of the ice. He and his people lived on the ice; ice was their home; ice was their citadel. Since the vast disturbances in
the Arctic, the ice had begun to disappear, and Iorek knew that he had to find an icebound fastness for his kin, or they would perish. Lee had told him that there were mountains in the south so high that even his balloon could not fly over them, and they were crowned with snow and ice all year round. Exploring those mountains was his next task.

But for now, something simpler possessed his heart, something bright and hard and unshakable: vengeance. Lee Scoresby, who had rescued Iorek from danger in his balloon and fought beside him in the Arctic of his own world, had died. Iorek would avenge him. The good man’s flesh and bone would both nourish him and keep him restless until blood was spilled enough to still his heart.

The sun was setting as Iorek finished his meal, and the air was cooling down. After gathering the remaining fragments of Lee’s body into a single heap, the bear lifted the flower in his mouth and dropped it in the center of them, as humans liked to do. The witch’s spell was broken now; the rest of the body was free to all who came. Soon it would be nourishing a dozen different kinds of life.

Then Iorek set off down the slope toward the sea again, toward the south.

Cliff-ghasts were fond of fox, when they could get it. The little creatures were cunning and hard to catch, but their meat was tender and rank.

Before he killed this one, the cliff-ghast let it talk, and laughed at its silly babble.

“Bear must go south! Swear! Witch is troubled! True! Swear! Promise!”

“Bears don’t go south, lying filth!”

“True! King bear must go south! Show you walrus—fine fat good—”

“King bear go south?”

“And flying things got treasure! Flying things—angels—crystal treasure!”

“Flying things—like cliff-ghasts? Treasure?”

“Like light, not like cliff-ghast. Rich! Crystal! And witch troubled—witch sorry—Scoresby dead—”

“Dead? Balloon man dead?” The cliff-ghast’s laugh echoed around the dry cliffs.

“Witch kill him—Scoresby dead, king bear go south—”

“Scoresby dead! Ha, ha, Scoresby dead!”

The cliff-ghast wrenched off the fox’s head, and fought his brothers for the entrails.

Ama, the herdsman’s daughter, carried the image of the sleeping girl in her memory: she could not stop thinking about her. She didn’t question for a moment the truth of what Mrs. Coulter had told her. Sorcerers existed, beyond a doubt, and it was only too likely that they would cast sleeping spells, and that a mother would care for her daughter in that fierce and tender way. Ama conceived an admiration amounting almost to worship for the beautiful woman in the cave and her enchanted daughter.

She went as often as she could to the little valley, to run errands for the woman or simply to chatter and listen, for the woman had wonderful tales to tell. Again and again she hoped for a glimpse of the sleeper, but it had only happened once, and she accepted that it would probably never be allowed again.

And during the time she spent milking the sheep, or carding and spinning their wool, or grinding barley to make bread, she thought incessantly about the spell that must have been cast, and about why it had happened. Mrs. Coulter had never told her, so Ama was free to imagine.

One day she took some flat bread sweetened with honey and walked the three-hour journey along the trail to Cho-Lung-Se, where there was a monastery. By wheedling and patience, and by bribing the porter with some of the honey bread, she managed to gain an audience with the great healer Pagdzin
tulku
, who had cured an outbreak of the white fever only the year before, and who was immensely wise.

Ama entered the great man’s cell, bowing very low and offering her remaining honey bread with all the humility she could muster. The monk’s bat dæmon swooped and darted around her, frightening her own dæmon, Kulang, who crept into her hair to hide, but Ama tried to remain still and silent until Pagdzin
tulku
spoke.

“Yes, child? Be quick, be quick,” he said, his long gray beard wagging with every word.

In the dimness the beard and his brilliant eyes were most of what she could see of him. His dæmon settled on the beam above him, hanging still at last, so she said, “Please, Pagdzin
tulku
, I want to gain wisdom. I would like to know how to make spells and enchantments. Can you teach me?”

“No,” he said.

She was expecting that. “Well, could you tell me just one remedy?” she asked humbly.

“Maybe. But I won’t tell you what it is. I can give you the medicine, not tell you the secret.”

“All right, thank you, that is a great blessing,” she said, bowing several times.

“What is the disease, and who has it?” the old man said.

“It’s a sleeping sickness,” Ama explained. “It’s come upon the son of my father’s cousin.”

She was being extra clever, she knew, changing the sex of the sufferer, just in case the healer had heard of the woman in the cave.

“And how old is this boy?”

“Three years older than me, Pagdzin
tulku
,” she guessed, “so he is twelve years old. He sleeps and sleeps and can’t wake up.”

“Why haven’t his parents come to me? Why did they send you?”

“Because they live far on the other side of my village and they are very poor, Pagdzin
tulku
. I only heard of my kinsman’s illness yesterday and I came at once to seek your advice.”

“I should see the patient and examine him thoroughly, and inquire into the positions of the planets at the hour when he fell asleep. These things can’t be done in a hurry.”

“Is there no medicine you can give me to take back?”

The bat dæmon fell off her beam and fluttered blackly aside before she hit the floor, darting silently across the room again and again, too quickly for Ama to follow; but the bright eyes of the healer saw exactly where she went, and when she had hung once more upside down on her beam and folded her dark wings around herself, the old man got up and moved around from shelf to shelf and jar to jar and box to box, here tapping out a spoonful of powder, there adding a pinch of herbs, in the order in which the dæmon had visited them.

He tipped all the ingredients into a mortar and ground them up together, muttering a spell as he did so. Then he tapped the pestle on the ringing edge of the mortar, dislodging the final grains, and took a brush and ink and wrote
some characters on a sheet of paper. When the ink had dried, he tipped all the powder onto the inscription and folded the paper swiftly into a little square package.

“Let them brush this powder into the nostrils of the sleeping child a little at a time as he breathes in,” he told her, “and he will wake up. It has to be done with great caution. Too much at once and he will choke. Use the softest of brushes.”

“Thank you, Pagdzin
tulku
,” said Ama, taking the package and placing it in the pocket of her innermost shirt. “I wish I had another honey bread to give you.”

“One is enough,” said the healer. “Now go, and next time you come, tell me the whole truth, not part of it.”

The girl was abashed, and bowed very low to hide her confusion. She hoped she hadn’t given too much away.

Next evening she hurried to the valley as soon as she could, carrying some sweet rice wrapped in a heart-fruit leaf. She was bursting to tell the woman what she had done, and to give her the medicine and receive her praise and thanks, and eager most of all for the enchanted sleeper to wake and talk to her. They could be friends!

But as she turned the corner of the path and looked upward, she saw no golden monkey, no patient woman seated at the cave mouth. The place was empty. She ran the last few yards, afraid they had gone forever—but there was the chair the woman sat in, and the cooking equipment, and everything else.

Ama looked into the darkness farther back in the cave, her heart beating fast. Surely the sleeper hadn’t woken already: in the dimness Ama could make out the shape of the sleeping bag, the lighter patch that was the girl’s hair, and the curve of her sleeping dæmon.

She crept a little closer. There was no doubt about it—they had gone out and left the enchanted girl alone.

A thought struck Ama like a musical note: suppose she woke her before the woman returned …

But she had hardly time to feel the thrill of that idea before she heard sounds on the path outside, and in a shiver of guilt she and her dæmon darted behind a ridge of rock at the side of the cave. She shouldn’t be here. She was spying. It was wrong.

And now that golden monkey was squatting in the entrance, sniffing and turning his head this way and that. Ama saw him bare his sharp teeth, and felt her own dæmon burrow into her clothes, mouse-formed and trembling.