Nineteen

Arctic Healing

“I want to look at your wound,” said Tilda Vasara.

They were in Malcolm’s chamber again, and the witch had just arrived from a long private discussion with Queen Shahrnavāz, which he was eager to hear about. It was not exactly at the forefront of his mind, though: he had just put down the lodestone, and the last words that Lyra had written had vanished from the stone, but not from his thoughts.

Night had enveloped the mountain, and the wind was still wild. The heavy curtains stirred in the drafts; the lamplight flared and flickered; the fire in the alcove burned steadily, but did little to warm the room; and Pan, who was normally indifferent to the temperature, sat on the table with a silk shawl around him.

“Why?” said Malcolm, rather stupidly, as he realized at once.

Tilda Vasara said, “Because I want to see if I can cure it, of course. Show me now.”

He stood up stiffly and unbuckled his belt. The bullet fired by the nurse had hit him in the hip, chipping the bone and lodging painfully in the muscle. When he stayed so briefly at the villa with the orange tree, the Embassy had sent a doctor to look at him, but all he’d done was bandage the wound and give him some painkillers. It was hurting more and more, and was probably infected; Malcolm didn’t like to examine it, but he knew that someone should.

“Go on,” said Pan. “Don’t be silly.”

Standing by the table, he lowered his trousers and lifted the edge of his shirt. Tilda Vasara moved the oil lamp closer and unfastened the bandage, crouching to see the damage.

She touched the flesh around the wound, which was swollen and red. Malcolm caught his breath.

“Bad” was all she said. “Need to cut it out.”

“Can you do that?”

“Yes. Can you bear it?”

“I’ll have to.”

“Yes, you will. I need a bowl of water.”

“I’ll call Darius,” said Pan, and jumped down from the table. “Hot water?”

“Makes no difference to me, but it might to him,” said Tilda Vasara.

Pan leapt up and clung to the bellpull that was their way of summoning the servant. The bell jangled, and a few seconds later Darius came in from the corridor, a little rumpled from the pile of blankets where he slept.

“Darius, we need a bowl of hot water,” Malcolm said to him, and added to the witch, “Anything else?”

“I have everything I need.”

Darius bowed and left.

“What are you going to do?” Pan asked her.

“There is something in his flesh that should not be there, so I’m going to cut it out. Then I shall clean the wound with bloodmoss.”

She was unfastening a small pouch at her waist. Malcolm watched as she took out a small iron knife with a wooden handle, its blade as long as his forefinger, and a bundle of dried herbs tied with string.

“Bloodmoss?” he said. “What is that?”

“You would say antiseptic, analgesic. Other things too. Lie down, please.”

Malcolm lay on the pile of furs, on his left side so that the wound was uppermost. It felt hot, even in the cold air.

“They give you any medicine for this?” she said.

“Some pills to subdue the pain.”

“Any good?”

“Not much.”

“Bloodmoss will work.”

The door opened, and Darius came in with a ceramic bowl. Tilda Vasara indicated that he should put it on the floor beside her, and he did so, looking wide-eyed at Malcolm’s wound as he left. The witch moved the lamp to the edge of the table so that it shone on his leg, and sat cross-legged to unfasten the string around the herbs before separating out three or four stems and a dusty bundle of dried moss.

Then she said, “Take out your belt.”

Malcolm removed the leather belt from his trousers, thinking that she was going to use it as a tourniquet, but she took it and flexed it this way and that before folding it in half and then in half again. Then she handed it back.

“What’s this for?”

“You bite it. Stop you squawking.”

“I see.”

Pan, watching closely, said, “Is there anything I can do?”

“Just keep the lamp good. The wick needs to come up a little.”

Without fingers and hands, Pan had to duck under the glass shade and grasp the knob in his teeth. It was extremely hot, and he knew that if he flinched or moved carelessly and knocked the lamp over, it could set fire to the whole room. He managed to turn up the wick, and withdrew with what he thought was the smell of his own fur burning.

“That’s better,” said the witch.

She took the little knife. Malcolm watched with his lifelong curiosity about tools, and said, “Can I see that?”

She handed it to him, and he turned it around, feeling the weight of it, testing the edge against his thumbnail.

“Sharp,” he said.

“Not enough yet.”

She took it back and rose to her feet before moving to the windowsill, feeling along the stone for a patch that was smoother than the rest. She spat on the blade and sharpened it on the stone, moving it as if she was slicing a layer of atoms off the surface, testing the edge till she was satisfied.

“Now we make it hot,” she said. “That fire—where does it come from?”

The fire in the alcove was burning steadily, as it always did.

“From inside the mountain,” he said.

“Earth fire. Good. All the conveniences.”

She held the knife blade in the flame, turning it and twisting it until it began to glow. Malcolm could smell the heated iron, and Pan crouched tightly at his side, terrified for him, dreading the prospect of the next minute, but not turning away, because he knew that Lyra wouldn’t.

“Belt,” said the witch.

Malcolm lay back and put the folded end of the belt between his teeth, and bit hard.

“Sisu,” she said as she sat, and leaned forward to make the first cut.

Malcolm’s entire spine flexed upwards as his skull slammed back against the fur-covered floor. He felt a keening in his own throat, and smelled his skin and muscle burning, and heard the sizzle as the hairs on his leg crisped and charred.

“Good. Another cut coming.”

The second time was worse. She seemed to be digging deeper, or cutting further, and twisting and wrenching, or something, and he heard as well as felt it when the knife scraped bone.

“Worst coming now,” she said.

He could barely hear her. There was a drumming of blood in his ears, and his teeth were gripping the belt so hard that his jaw was nearly cracking.

“Sisu,” she said again, and the knife twisted deeper, and then something happened in his hip, and a fierce guttural bear grunt forced its way out of his throat as a sharp, bright clink somewhere outside him told of the bullet falling against the bowl.

Malcolm didn’t know where his hands were, except that the nails were gouging at the palms, but he felt Pan licking one hand, and didn’t know which. His senses were scrambled in a kaleidoscopic synesthesia, all shot through with blazing blood-red pain.

The witch’s hand gently removed the belt from his mouth, and he felt that his teeth had embedded themselves in the tough hide, reluctant to let it go. He breathed deeply and quickly. Tilda Vasara was doing something else now; he heard her hands moving in the bowl of water, squeezing water out of a cloth, stirring the liquid, raising water in a cupped hand and letting it fall back.

“Dæmon,” she said. “Bring me that silk from the table.”

Malcolm dimly saw Pan spring up off the floor, snatch the shawl in his teeth, and dive down again, the silk flowing through the air behind him.

“Lay it flat beside him.”

Pan moved again. Malcolm felt something touch his wound and nearly flinched, but held himself still. Every nerve seemed open to the air, which played on the flesh like a blowlamp.

“What are you doing?” he managed to say.

“Making a poultice of bloodmoss. It will penetrate to every part of the wound and kill the infection and soothe the pain. You can’t believe it now, but it will. Just keep still.”

Liquid fell onto the wound, scalding, acid, lacerating. He forced himself to hold still and focused on the calm voice in which she spoke.

“More coming,” she said.

This time he was used to it, or he was expecting it, or it was cooler.

“What is bloodmoss?” he said.

“It grows in the tundra. I don’t know what other people call it, but that’s our name for it: krovlishaynik. Bloodmoss. Maybe not moss exactly, but close enough. We know it when we see it. Dæmon, is there another piece of silk in that chest?”

Malcolm realized that his eyes were closed. He opened them and blinked hard, to see Pan springing up and into the cedar chest, and then out again with a silken cloth in his teeth. He propped himself up on an elbow and watched as Tilda Vasara took the cloth and wadded it into a small bundle.

“What are you doing now?” he said.

“Cleaning the wound. Who shot you?”

“A liar.”

“You kill him?”

“Her. She shot herself before I could stop her.”

“Lover, huh?”

“In this case, no.”

“Just crazy, then.”

She was dipping the silk into the water and dabbing gently at the wound, which was bleeding freely.

“What do you do with the bloodmoss?”

“Two things. I put some directly into the wound. It dissolves in three days and purifies the blood. The other thing, I make an infusion that you drink. Bad taste but makes you strong boy. Look, see how it works.”

She took a small piece of the sodden moss, about the size of the top joint of her thumb, and laid it on the edge of the wound. In less than a minute the bleeding stopped, and the pain subsided to a warm numbness.

“That hurt still?”

“Much less.”

“All right, now I put some inside. Hold tight.”

She squeezed a little water out of the dark green handful, and then packed it, a pinch at a time, into the wound itself. The numbing helped; he had no doubt about how much it would hurt otherwise, and compared to the knifepoint of a few minutes before it was almost blessedly gentle.

“You got a cup? Something to drink from?”

Pan said, “I’ll get it. Do you need some more hot water?”

“Plenty here.”

Malcolm looked at the murky, blood-tinged water. “You want me to drink that?”

“The blood came from inside you anyway, and what is not blood is krovlishaynik, which will do you good.”

Pan brought her a horn cup, and she scooped out a little of the water. He sat up as best he could and drank it down at once, and was nearly sick. It was foul, bitter, with a metallic taint.

“Keep still,” she said.

He swallowed and controlled his impulse to vomit, breathing deeply.

“What did you talk about with the Queen?” he said.

“Royal matters. They choose their queens as we do.”

“Always a queen gryphon, not a king?”

“They have kings. This time they chose a queen.”

“But the other matter, the one you came here to talk about…”

“Yes. They are angry without knowing more than they do now. They want nothing to change, but the world is changing around them, and they know it and fear it. So we agree, and make alliance.”

“You did? Congratulations.”

“Need to act soon too. I’ve sent for my sisters.”

“Do you know what the Magisterium is doing?”

“Not in detail. Those explosions, for one thing. And separately they are moving large numbers of soldiers eastward, by rail, by road. Not by air. We shall command the sky, witches and gryphons together.”

“Eastward? You know where, exactly?”

“We hear rumors about a desert and a moving lake.”

“Lop Nor. Half swamp, half desert, with streams that change their courses overnight.”

“You been there?”

“Yes, once. Very hard to navigate, and nothing to see on the other side, or so I thought.”

“Other side?”

“An arid desert with a building at the heart of it. I guess that’s where the Magisterium forces are heading. Can you tell me more about the places where these explosions happen?”

“Mostly no, because they happen on the ground, in forests or mountains, where witches seldom go. Always wild places.”

“Are they holy places for you? Magic places?”

“For us, not always. For men and women on the ground, maybe.”

“And always in wild places? Never in a city or a village?”

“Maybe. There are many of them, it seems. What you told us—the information from your Oakley commander—brought it all together for me and for Queen Shahrnavāz. I shall speak to her again at sunrise, and you will come with me. Now you sleep.”

Perhaps it was the bloodmoss, perhaps it was the shock his body had undergone during the witch’s surgery, but something was weighing heavily on Malcolm’s eyelids, and he had no desire to remain awake. He pulled one of the furs over himself and closed his eyes.

---

Pan watched it all with his heart beating fast. When it was over and the witch was sitting between him and Malcolm on the furs, he said to her, “Is your dæmon still out in the sky?”

“He’s gone to fetch my sisters,” she said quietly. “He will return to me soon.”

“When you’re apart, can you think together?”

“No more than you can.”

“I don’t know any people who can separate, apart from Malcolm.”

“Neither do I, apart from all the witches.”

“Do you know…” He hesitated, because he wasn’t sure whether there was a rule of courtesy that forbade such questions, but he went on, “Do you know a witch called Serafina Pekkala?”

“I did, but she is dead now.”

“No…” It struck Pan hard. He felt breathless and faint. “When?” he whispered.

“Seventeen moons ago. She was killed by a missionary.”

“A missionary? In the Arctic?”

“The Magisterium is becoming more aggressive. All their intentions are bad.”

Pan thought: I must tell Lyra before she hears it from anyone else. And Farder Coram…

“When a witch dies, do you bury her?” he said, and then, “I’m sorry to be inquisitive. But Lyra and I loved Serafina Pekkala very much. If there’s a grave, she’d want to visit and say goodbye.”

“No graves in the far north. The soil is frozen. We leave her in a high place and the birds of the air clean her bones. I loved her too.”

“What happened to the missionary?”

“Her clan killed him and everyone with him.”

“Why did he kill her in the first place?”

“What I heard, and I believe it to be true, is that he knew that witches take human lovers, and proposed such an arrangement between himself and Serafina Pekkala. She refused him in disgust, and told her clan to avoid him and impede his work, and he took the first chance he could and shot her.”

They sat silently for a while. The only sounds were those of the wind buffeting the mountain and rattling the shutters, and the soft hiss of the earth-fire burning in the alcove.

“Does your Lyra love this man?” said Tilda Vasara quietly, looking at the sleeping Malcolm.

“I think she might. But it would be love of a strange kind. When we were young, he was her teacher for a short time, and she behaved badly. Even I could see that. He was patient and clever and agreed that he should withdraw and someone else should teach her. But she behaved badly with them too. I could see it and I didn’t like it but she didn’t listen to me. She was just unhappy. Confused about everything. And then we met Malcolm again in different circumstances. She began to see him differently.”

“And how does he feel?”

“Well, he hasn’t talked about it at all, though we’ve hardly had the chance for that sort of conversation. He might not want to tell me. I think Malcolm might feel…very careful. If he loved Lyra, he’d never say it, because she’s so much younger.”

“How much younger?”

“Eleven years, I think.”

“Do you know how absurd that sounds, to a witch four hundred years old? Smaller than the clipping of a fingernail. I’ve been in love many times, and each time with a man centuries younger than myself, who lived no longer than a mayfly; and each time I wished no more than to be a mayfly too, and grow old and die at the same pace as my lover. In the end the sorrow wears us out. This Malcolm and your Lyra are close enough. Why did you say that their love would be of a strange kind?”

“Because neither of them would want to be the first to declare it. They would feel very formal. I think they respect each other a lot.”

“There are no rules. Love can grow even when people respect each other. But they should remember that even if they live for another sixty years, that is not a long time.”

“Are there no men witches, who age as slowly as you do?”

“Not in this world. Now take this.” She reached up to the coronet of little yellow flowers, and took one from the rest, and handed it to him. “You will meet trouble,” she said. “Keep this somewhere safe, and when you need help, take it out and hold it up to the sky.”

Pan took it, and immediately an idea came to him, stark and clear and blazing like a comet. And he held up the flower.

“You want my help now?”

“Yes. Could you fly me if I clung to your pine branch?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Can you fly me to Tashbulak?”

“You mean the research station in the desert?”

“Yes, in case Lyra’s arrived there. And then on to the red building.”

Tilda said nothing for a minute. Pan thought she was going to ignore him, as if he was a child wanting a sweet.

Then: “When?” she said.

“Now.”

“You going to tell him?” She looked at the sleeping Malcolm.

“No. He’ll guess.”

“You think? Don’t betray him. You must leave a message.”

Pan saw that was true, and although his paws weren’t formed for holding a pencil, he did his best. He crouched over a piece of paper on the table and wrote:

MALCOLM.

SORRY BUT GONE WITH TILDA VASARA TO TASHBULAK AND RED BUILDING.

GULYA WILL HELP.

PAN

The witch wrote her own note and then took up her branch of cloud-pine, torn from the trunk at one end, thick with cones and needles at the other, and held it out. Pan sprang onto it and clung tight, and a few moments later they were in the buffeting air above the mountain, and flying east.

---

And Lyra was awake. The tempest that was howling around the mountains at the south of the Caspian Sea had a number of offspring further to the north, born from a sudden collapse in the air pressure over the whole region—storms lesser in size but even more intense, which lashed the water and hurled the waves against the shore, against one another, against the rain-filled air, against every vessel whose skipper was reckless enough to take to the water, and in particular, battering the Transcaspian Modern Ferry as it crossed the narrowest part of the sea between Baku and Krasnovodsk. Lyra lay in her bunk, suffering the rolling and plunging of the boat, the constant rumble of the engines, and the smash of the waves as they broke against the porthole of her little cabin. The movement took her back to the first sea voyage she’d ever made, with the gyptians to Trollesund, and to her discomfort in the German Ocean. Pan shared it then, though it didn’t seem that Asta did now. Perhaps Pan was suffering elsewhere. She remembered how much better she’d felt on that first journey when she went out on deck, and after a particularly sickly plunge now she thought she’d try the same remedy, so she wrapped herself up as warmly as she could and left Asta to guard the cabin while she went out to let the winds blow her unease away.

Odd, she thought, how she hadn’t felt that sort of discomfort on the ferry from King’s Lynn. Perhaps the winds were fiercer here in the Caspian. They certainly felt it. At any rate, she was the only passenger on deck, and she found a bench near the lifeboats where she could sit fairly comfortably and watch the white-capped waves and the occasional shudder of lightning in the heavy clouds.

She hadn’t sat there long when she felt rather than saw another presence on the bench beside her.

And she wasn’t startled, and she felt no fear. The presence wasn’t a person, or a night-ghast, or a memory, or a dream: she felt a calm certainty that the presence was benevolent, that it knew who she was, and that she could trust it completely.

“Who are you?” she said.

She tried looking at it, and found nothing to see except a slight thickening of the shadows. There was a bulkhead light further along the deck, but here in this corner by the lifeboats the only light came from the surging phosphorescence of the waves.

The presence moved, but very slightly, and Lyra heard a voice that might have spoken inside her own skull.

“We have not spoken before,” it said. “But I know who you are. An angel called Xaphania told me about you.”

Lyra remembered with a shiver of fear: Xaphania was the angel who told her and Will that they could not live in the same world, and must separate, and that the only form of travel between worlds must take place in the imagination.

The imagination—

“Xaphania?” Lyra said. “You’ve really spoken to Xaphania?”

“Yes.”

“She told me when we last met that there was to be no traveling between worlds. Did you know that?”

“Of course.”

“And she said that we must close every opening between the worlds.”

“That is the truth.”

“But she said that we’d be able to travel in the imagination. What did she mean by the imagination?”

“You understood her then. Now you are grown up, and you’ve forgotten?”

The voice was perfectly clear inside her head, like those of the angels she’d spoken to at other times. What she couldn’t tell was whether it could be heard outside as well.

“I didn’t understand, and neither did the boy who was with me,” she said. “I want to know now more than ever: What is the imagination?”

“The power of making things up. Inventing things. Surely you know that?” said the voice.

“Am I imagining your voice now? Imagining what you’re saying to me?”

“No. I’m truly saying it, and you’re truly hearing it.”

“I’m hearing it, but I don’t believe it. And it wasn’t what Xaphania said before.”

“In telling things to children, we have to sweeten the truth. You wouldn’t believe the truth when you were young, because you didn’t want to, and you would have argued and demanded a truth that you liked instead of one you found unpalatable.”

“I was a child. I couldn’t argue with a being like her.”

“You argued with all the authorities of your world. You argued with every law you had ever known. You argued with everyone who told you that Dust was abominable, and had to be feared and rejected. Now you say you couldn’t argue with one angel?”

“I couldn’t argue then. But I can argue now. And something else: back then, she said the imagination wasn’t just making things up—it was a form of seeing. Was that true?”

“As I say, we need to tell children many things to console them. Human parents do that, and it’s kind to do so. There are times we need consolation more than accuracy.”

“So she told me a lie?”

“She consoled you.”

“All right, then,” Lyra said bitterly, “I’m grateful for that consolation. But I’m a grown woman now, and it’s about time I heard the truth. Because I know that whatever the imagination is, it isn’t just inventing things. Making things up and pretending they’re real is not enough.”

“It is enough for the great poets. For the storytellers and the artists of every kind. They take things as they are, things in the world, and play with them and change them about and make something new. Is that an activity to condemn as trivial?”

“That’s what you think poets and storytellers do?”

“Why, yes. What else?”

And Lyra didn’t know. She knew so little, herself; surely Pan was thinking of something more than that when he went in search of the great thing she had lost.

“But that’s what I did when I told lies,” she said. “I used to be a famous liar. I took things that were partly true and I made up other things out of them. But they were lies. I knew they weren’t true as I told them. You can’t mean that the imagination is the same thing as telling lies?”

“Where is the difference?”

“The difference…” Lyra began, and then thought carefully before going on: “There is no difference between lies and what you said the imagination was. Taking real things and changing them a bit. That’s exactly what liars do. That’s what I used to do, all the time. I can still do that, if I want to. I’m good at it. Pantalaimon knows that. Why would he go in search of something I still had?”

“Because he wants more. And in following him, you’re doing the same. You want more than there is to have.”

“I just want to know the truth.”

“And I’ve told you the truth.”

Lyra could barely speak. There was a turmoil in her heart at least the equal of the storm on the water, and she was afraid of her own anger even more than she was afraid of the seasickness. She sat still, squeezing her painful left hand to distract herself.

Finally she said, trembling, “I think you’re wrong.”

“Why?”

“I think you’re wrong, because I’ve learned things in the past ten years that I didn’t know when I spoke to Xaphania on that beach in another world half my life ago. I thought then that angels must speak the truth, because they know the truth and they wouldn’t lie. Well, I knew already that people can lie even if they know the truth, because that’s what I did. Lyra the liar. That’s what they called me in the world of the dead. I knew that. But I’ve learned something else too: older people, even people as old as angels, don’t know everything. They might give the impression of great wisdom, immense knowledge, the experience of thousands upon thousands of lifetimes, but they can still be wrong. There are still things they don’t know. They can speak with great confidence and still be wrong. They can be good and benevolent and kindly and, yes, wise too, but they can still get things wrong. There are things I know that you don’t—yes, there are. And when you talk like that about the thing my dæmon has risked his life—and mine—to go and find, when you describe something so important and precious in terms of making things up and pretending, I know you’ve got it wrong.”

The angel said nothing. The thickened cluster of shadows that was all Lyra could see of her didn’t move. If she was angry, or contemptuous, she gave no sign.

Lyra thought: Am I talking to myself?

“I’m not sure if you can hear me,” she said, “so I’ll say something else, just in case you can. Xaphania told me and Will that we had to stay in our own worlds. That there should be no contact with other ones. She said every time the subtle knife cut through from one world to another, it left a gap that Specters could come out of. Again, we believed her then. But maybe that was something else she thought was true, except that it wasn’t. Or something she just said to—what was the word?—console us.”

Nothing but silence from the shadows.

“Because, you see, there’s something I’ve been thinking about. The rose oil that’s one of the ways people can see Dust—it comes from the desert of Karamakan, from a building there that the guards let no one enter. Well, I think there’s one of those openings there. Will and I used to call them windows. Between our world and the rose world, I mean. I’m going to go there and see if that’s true. Because if it is, and if the rose oil helps people to understand the truth about things, then I want to keep it open. I want to make sure other openings like that are protected. I want to make new ones. Can you hear what I’m saying?”

She felt a kind of shiver, as if she’d just said something she didn’t know, until then, that she believed.

“Yes, and it causes me sorrow,” the shadows whispered.

“Because of the Specters?”

“Because of a thousand things you know nothing about.”

“But in some ways I do know more than you.”

“You don’t know, you dream—”

“When you say ‘dream,’ tell me what you think that means. Truthfully.”

“A dream is your imagination working. A thing of fantasy. Your dreams are empty, gossamer, fragile, transitory. You have them only to forget them. Wishes, impossible things, horses that fly, clocks that walk about, trees that speak—nothing but fragments of cobweb. Trivial, childish, unimportant. You dream, and I see truly. That’s the difference.”

“That’s something else you’ve got wrong,” Lyra said.

“What’s that?” The angel’s tone was interested, not brusque.

“You think that what matters in a dream is the story, the information, the content, you could say, and that it’s meaningless, because it makes no sense and fades and disappears. Of course it does, because the information is not what’s important. What matters most in a dream is the emotion that comes with it. Dreams are soaked with emotion, with fear, or longing, or love, or excitement, or sadness. They come to give us intense feeling, not information, and it lasts a very long time, long after the information, or the story, is blown away like dry leaves. I know that some angels used to be human beings. Were you ever human?”

“No.”

“Do angels dream?”

“No.”

“Do angels make art? Do you write poetry or compose music or paint pictures?”

“No.”

“Then what do you know about dreams? About the imagination?”

“Let me ask you in return: Do you write poetry or compose music or paint pictures?”

“I tell stories.”

“By stories, you mean…”

“All right, lies, yes. I used to tell lies, till I realized how much other people were hurt when they found I wasn’t telling the truth. But I shaped them like stories. I timed the telling so that it satisfied something, some taste or other, some aesthetic sense, some sort of need. I prepared the way for a turn in the story, so that it seemed inevitable when it came even though you didn’t anticipate it. I gave the characters enough depth to seem real while they were in front of you, and for a while afterwards. I put in just the right amount of detail so the person listening could see what I was describing in their mind’s eye without being overwhelmed by things that didn’t matter. I was making art, you see, a cheap and shoddy sort, maybe, for a purpose that might be banal or underhand or greedy, but it was art. I was shaping things. Making patterns. I was just like someone thousands of years ago sitting under a tree carving crisscross lines on a stick with a sharp bit of flint because they enjoyed looking at it. Or another one cutting holes in a bone and blowing through it and making different notes because they enjoyed hearing it. Or beating a hollow log for people to dance to. Rhythms and patterns and…and resemblances. And things that led from them, like metaphors. Angels were never children, were they?”

“No.”

“You were never children, you never dream, and you don’t make art…Then I know some things you don’t. I understand them from the inside.”

Lyra was aware with all her senses of the lurch and surge and creak of the sea and the ship, the steady thud of the engines below and the howl of the winds through the rigging above, the all-pervasive ship-smell of fuel oil and stale cooking, but she heard not a word from the angel; and when she sheltered her eyes from the rain and peered closely into the shadows beside her on the bench, there was nothing there to see. The angel had gone.

And a little later, as she finally fell asleep in her bunk, the ferry captain made a public announcement: he was turning the ship around, because conditions were worsening and it was not safe to continue. They were returning to Baku.