Twenty-Eight
Double Thunder
In making their unprecedented alliance, both witches and gryphons had borne in mind their particular strengths. For example, witches flew very fast. They weren’t part of an army, stratified in ranks and constrained by orders and hamstrung by a strategic plan concocted somewhere far from the battlefield. Each of them was free to act on her own, and they fought fearlessly and without mercy.
And they had the strengths and the weaknesses of that freedom. They could move like spies, alone and unseen in the darkness of the night, and they could range further and faster in the air than a horde of warriors on the ground; and when the power of an army was needed, they could gather like a swarm of hornets and terrify any enemy. The idea of fighting strategically, however, was foreign to them; they threw everything they had into every battle, and never thought of withdrawing here to fight better there, or holding a force in reserve to take an enemy by surprise.
The gryphons were different in many ways: great predatory monsters, invincible in single combat in the air or on the earth. They could glide on the invisible currents of the atmosphere, and with the twitch of a wing tip they could wheel and circle and then plunge into a dive, lion claws extended, and destroy any air creature or flying machine in a single devastating smash. An entire army of gryphons, disciplined, trained, well-led, would have been a match for any army on the ground. The gryphons didn’t shrink from war, but they didn’t provoke it either. At the root of all their activities, all their desires, was gold—gold, and the compulsion to maintain the integrity of their two kingdoms, the outer one from the Black Sea to Kamchatka and from the Himmaleh to the Arctic, and the inner kingdom, the one that included the sun and the moon and the stars.
Prince Keshvād ordered his troops to range wide over the steppes before they reached the mountains of the Tien Shan, and to provision themselves from as many different herds as possible. They were not humans, who robbed and murdered without thought, and cared nothing if they extinguished entire clans. The gryphons needed food: of course they did. Taking a little from many was better for everyone than taking everything from one or two. The nomadic herdspeople regarded it as a form of tax, which they grumbled about but agreed to pay.
The alliance was something new to both sides, intriguing to all of them. They portioned out the various tasks according to mutual agreement, the gryphons ranging high and wide by day, the witches exploring more closely at night. And they all knew that great dangers lay ahead—not least those posed by the murder-birds, the oghâb-gorgs of the Tien Shan. With that in mind, one group of witches set about scouting the foothills of the Tien Shan, and agreed to let one witch fly ahead to see what she could discover about the troops of the Magisterium.
Her name was Sala Riikola. This was the sort of task she loved—exploring alone in a wilderness, dark and silent. She was intent on discovery, not violence; that would come later. At first she flew in the middle airs, watching the mountains and valleys below for movement on the ground. As far as she knew, the only danger in the air would be from the birds, and there was little sign of them in this part of the range.
On the ground, she could see the cooking fires of scattered villages and the temporary settlements of nomadic shepherds and goatherds. For many miles those were the only lights she could see, but there was a glow ahead, further up into the foothills, almost like the lights of a town or a city, and she flew towards it to investigate.
She came on it sooner than she expected. It wasn’t a town: it was an immense body of soldiers and all their equipment, camping for the night. Tents were ranged in ordered ranks, fires blazed under spitted oxen or camels, the aroma of which rose high into the sky. The smell of roasting meat drifted a long way downwind.
At the edge of the widely spread camp, engineers were making fires too. Sala Riikola saw men using great machinery, repairing axles, hammering iron rims around cartwheels, welding metals for purposes she didn’t understand; altogether it signified detailed organization and great power.
Near the center of the camp (and she took a risk here by flying low) was a larger tent than the rest, with messengers coming and going, sentries on guard, a flag hanging in the still air from a flagpole above it. She couldn’t see any symbol on the flag, but she didn’t need to. The fact that it was there told her that this was the command center. They had some kind of apparatus set up outside it, a series of metal posts linked by wire: all that occurred to her was the word anbaric. It would mean something to the man Malcolm, no doubt, and the woman Lyra.
Sala flew up high and further towards the high mountains, because she could see a light or lights flickering in that direction. As she got closer, the smell of the roasting meat from the camp faded, and another smell took its place—something rank and putrid; faint at first, but unmistakably the smell of death and corruption.
Could it be coming from the small group of men and horses moving steadily up into the mountains? No. They smelled like what they were: men and horses. This was a wilder smell. It could only be the oghâb-gorgs. Did they make nests? Did they roost on the bare rocks? She didn’t know, but those were things she had to find out. She flew higher, where a cold wind from the heights scattered the stench of decay and carried the freshness of snow instead.
She flew along following the men and watched them at work. Why they were doing this at night, when they could surely see very little beyond their lamps, she had no idea; but she knew that people did things in the dark that they were ashamed to do in daylight, and she flew a little closer, and landed among the rocks outside a little ravine, and settled down to watch.
There were ten or a dozen men, in thick mountain uniform, wearing what looked like gas masks. There was one other man too, in chains, who had no mask. He seemed to be half asleep, or drugged, because he made little effort to struggle or get away. He must have been cold, because he wore nothing but trousers of thin cotton and an open shirt, but perhaps he was near death anyway.
Sala saw the men tie him down to a boulder, under the instructions of an officer. And now he did try to fight back, but he had no strength, and they subdued him easily and made sure he was unable to move.
Then some of the men laid small boxes around the boulder, a couple of steps away from it, and began to join wires between them.
Something was stirring in the air far above. Sala heard the sound of beating wings, and an occasional screech almost too high to be heard; but she was a witch, and she heard it. Almost at the same time came the first full thick drift of the stench: rotting flesh, poisoned blood, gangrene—the oghâb-gorgs, of course, it could be the smell of nothing else, as if the doors had opened on a feast in a charnel house.
The men had heard something too. Some of them looked up, to be snapped at by the officer and told to concentrate on their task. They bent over and moved more quickly, and he had to shout at them again and make them take care.
The birds had come much lower now, and their screeching had a note of excitement in it; if they were human, it would have sounded like hysteria. Sala could see them whirling, diving, snatching, snapping—none close enough to threaten any of the men, but showing more and more interest in the prisoner. The lamplight that played on him revealed a glimpse of a claw or a wing or a tail when one of them came low enough, and the officer was now running around to check each of the little boxes, and ordering the men to retreat away from the prisoner on the rock.
They needed telling only once. The stink of the birds was enough to make them want to withdraw, despite the gas masks, and Sala felt that she’d stayed too long already. She wanted to fly up and away as fast as she could, but she had come to spy, and—
One of the birds dared to swoop down and tear at the prisoner. It slashed a deep gash in his exposed chest, and flew off at once, to be followed by another and another—and within seconds she could see the poor man no more: a mass of birds fought over him, tearing and rending and screeching, until he seemed to be merely a mass of blood and black feathers, a heaving pile of murder—
Without any warning all the boxes exploded. First a silent bloom of red fire extending out and up from each box, growing immediately to join all the others until a canopy of scarlet cloud covered the rock, and the prisoner, and the feasting birds; and then came the tonnerre double—a rush of air in towards the center, with a crack so loud it might have been the mountain splitting, and a blaze of light that left a trace in Sala’s eyes for minutes afterwards. She watched appalled as white and red and black roiled and tumbled into and beyond and through the space where the poor prisoner had been.
And all around the birds screamed and beat their wings, some hurled upwards, some dashed against the ground, some flung far out from the center of the explosion.
Sala could hear the officer speaking, giving orders, but none of the men moved except to back away from the victim, now nothing more than a mass of blood and flesh, and the birds that lay dead or dying around him.
In fact, there weren’t very many of them—a dozen or so, Sala estimated, still blinking to clear her eyes. The majority of the birds had either been thrown away from the explosion or escaped into the air, and within less than a minute, they returned. Screeching and jeering, they dived downwards right onto the victim’s body, and those who couldn’t get to it feasted with just as much tearing greed on the bodies of the fallen birds, some of them still alive.
The officer in charge was making notes in a small book. The other soldiers were cautiously trying to get to the boxes that had held the explosives, but the crowd of birds prevented them. Their savage greed had been roused to a state of uncontrollable madness; drunk with blood, they snapped and tore and rent apart every shred of flesh and bone on the rocks around them, more interested at that point in dead flesh and blood than in living, which might fight back.
The soldiers were passing around a bottle. Sala had seen enough; she took her cloud-pine in hand and soared up high, where the air was cleaner. When she could breathe more easily she oriented herself in all the ways witches knew, and set off back to the gryphons.
“He was bait?” said Malcolm.
“Exactly what he was,” said Sala.
Prince Keshvād’s expression couldn’t change, but the way he drew himself up and back was enough to express his disgust.
“What were they trying to do, though?” he said. “Not just set up an ingenious way to kill some poor prisoner?”
“It was an experiment,” said Malcolm. “To see if that explosive was any use against the birds.”
“And it wasn’t,” said Lyra.
Sala Riikola and some other witches were sitting nearby. She said, “The officer in charge had precise orders. After the explosion he was beginning to measure how far out the blast had been effective, by counting the dead birds. But the other birds kept attacking him and he had to retreat with the rest of the men.”
“Did they tie the man down inside the ravine, or outside it?” Malcolm asked.
“Just outside.”
“I think they’ll try again, and next time do it further in. Exploding a bomb like that in the open air wouldn’t hurt a flock of birds as much as doing it in a narrow gully.”
“We don’t need to see them do it again,” said Gulya.
“Did the birds have a particular way of attacking?” said Lyra. “Did they follow particular leaders, or were they just a mob?”
“They were just a mob. They followed the strongest, as in any mob,” said Sala. “But no regular plan of attack. Biggest and strongest got to the prey first and ate most.”
“But they did follow, if they were led?”
“I think they did,” said Sala.
“What are you thinking?” said Malcolm to Lyra.
“I’m thinking of one afternoon on Port Meadow last year. The swallows were gathering to fly south. There were hundreds of them in a great flock, and they were excited by the sense of soon flying away, I suppose…Anyway, as we watched them wheeling round and round over the river, Pan saw something odd. I didn’t believe him at first, but then I saw it too. In the middle of the swallows, flying with them, wheeling around just as fast, there was a dragonfly. I couldn’t see what sort—it was going too fast—but it was certainly a dragonfly and not a swallow. Normally you’d expect the nearest swallow to snap it up at once, but they were all caught up in the excitement. Pan said it looked as if the dragonfly was leading them, but I thought it just looked as if it had forgotten it was a dragonfly. And…that’s what I was thinking. That’s all. I don’t know why.”
The gryphons were silent. They had the habit of remaining absolutely still, like stone carvings; they never seemed under any compulsion to talk. The witches, on the other hand, had listened closely to what Lyra said, and then began to talk among themselves, in their own languages, as busily as swallows in a barn. Her story had clearly described something familiar.
Prince Keshvād said to Lyra, “You said the explosive didn’t work.”
“If they were trying to find a way of dealing with the birds, then that way wasn’t it. They could only kill a few at a time, and the rest just flew out of the way and came back.”
“This must be the explosive they developed to destroy the openings, the windows into other worlds,” said Malcolm. “And it does seem to have worked for that, up to a point.”
“Further back I saw thousands of soldiers,” said Sala Riikola. “They must have recruited them from every country. Even if the birds attack them all the way through the mountains, there will be many left.”
“Can we fly high above them?” said Gulya.
But no one knew the answer to that. One by one, gryphons began to withdraw and sleep. Groups of witches still sat together, talking quietly.
Malcolm and Lyra sat where they were for a minute or so.
“Are you cold?” he said.
“Yes, a little.”
“It’ll get colder. We’ll need to sleep close together.”
“I’d thought of that.”
“How did you manage in the Arctic?”
“I had the best clothing you could get. The gyptians made sure of it, and then Mr. Scoresby helped. He was a balloonist. He’d flown all over the Arctic. I think they’d have laughed at what we’re wearing here.”
“It can’t be helped.”
Asta said, “Get as close as you can. It’s the only thing to do.”
“My coat’s big enough to wrap around us both,” said Malcolm.
They moved together. Lyra thought he was thinner than he used to be, but he was still…Burly? Was that the word? He was warm, anyway, and that was what mattered most. She felt shy, of all things.
“Did you…” she began, but then stopped, because she thought he was going to say something, but he didn’t.
“Did I what?”
“I don’t know. Sorry.”
He shifted position to give her more space, and wrapped the big coat around her. She felt wide awake, but warm. Perhaps the vivid consciousness of his body close to hers would fade a little, and then she’d be able to sleep.
“Where’s the strangest place you’ve ever slept?” he said.
“In a balloon, above the Arctic. I mean, in the basket thing underneath it, not in the—you know. What about you?”
“In a grave, in the Gobi desert.”
“A grave? Why?”
“There was a sandstorm and it was there. Not a very deep grave, and the tenant had left long before. Were you nervous in the balloon? Or in the basket thing?”
“No…I was perfectly confident. Pan was with me, and the balloonist Mr. Scoresby was…Well, he just made me confident because he knew what he was doing. And besides, Iorek Byrnison was with us. The armored bear. I must have told you about him.”
“Sounds like a full load.”
“Well, I was young then. Lighter, I expect.”
“Will you tell me the whole story one day?”
“If you tell me everything about the flood.”
“I thought I had.”
“In that case I want to hear it again, including everything you left out. Like…Alice.”
“Alice certainly was in the story. You forgotten already?”
“No. But…Were you…I mean, before this began…Were you in love with Alice?”
“What a question, here in the foothills of the Tien Shan! Why do you ask that?”
“I’ve been wondering it for a while.”
“Have you? Well, since you ask, I was in love with her twice.”
“Twice?”
“Yes. The first time I fell in love with her was in a garden under the ground, when the flood took us into a tunnel and then into the garden of a great palace, or that’s what it looked like, with lights in all the trees and people walking about, talking and laughing and drinking wine. Alice was on the bank looking after you while I mended the canoe. And she fell asleep, and I looked at her face, because it had changed…She always had a little frown, and kept her lips pressed together, looking fierce; but I’d never seen her asleep before, and her expression was relaxed and almost happy, and she was smiling, and she looked so lovely I fell in love with her and I wanted to kiss her but I was afraid she’d wake up, so I didn’t.”
“She might not have done.”
“It wouldn’t have been right, anyway.”
“Did you stay in love with her?”
“Yes. You have to remember I was only eleven or something. And I’d always sort of hated her because she was a bully and she had a temper. It was just seeing her like that…It changed me. I never told her or let her think…But we were friends after that. Besides, she was older than me.”
“The difference probably means more at that age, though.”
“Anyway…I said nothing about it.”
“But you said twice.”
“Yes, I did.”
They were whispering now. The silence around them was full of fields, Lyra thought. Crosscurrents and different pressures, areas of intensity and of calm; fields of meaning, and whirlpools and vortices weak and strong.
“When was the other time?” Lyra whispered.
“After her husband died. She married when she was eighteen, I think. A lovely man called Roger Lonsdale—a builder. They were exactly right for each other. He was calm and she was fiery, and she was really in love with him, passionately. They were very happy. And then he died. Some scaffolding hadn’t been properly fixed and he fell and broke his neck. She changed at once—again—this time back to the old Alice, cynical, hard, cold. All her friends tried to comfort her, but she said nothing, nothing at all to anyone about it. It must have been when I was sixteen. I didn’t know how to help her. A year or so went by and then one day she took me to her bed. Without saying a word, just desperate and urgent. I…It was seeing her like that, fierce and passionate and generous…It happened again. I fell in love with her. Just holding her was enough to make that happen. It was the first time I’d ever kissed anyone like that; the first time for everything. It was wonderful and I loved her.”
“I’d never have imagined…” There it was again: her failure of imagination. “I mean, I must have been quite young.”
“Very young. All I knew was that looking after you was Alice’s job, really. I never saw much of you.”
“Did she love you? What happened?”
He thought for a while, and then said, “I don’t think she was in love with me. I think she just needed someone to hold her and make love to her. So that’s what I did. And I couldn’t help falling in love with her, again. She was so beautiful.”
“Do you still love her?”
“Yes, in a complicated way.”
“Why complicated?”
“I’m not in love with her, not as I used to be. It’s unusual, or so I’ve discovered. Remaining close friends, I mean. Often there are jealousies and betrayals and resentments and unhappinesses…One person falls out of love before the other, that’s what it amounts to. But with us it was just a gradual, gentle sort of change. We stayed fond of each other without jealousy…We were lovers for maybe six months. It was a time of enormous growing up for me. I was so grateful to her that, well, it seemed natural for us to be close friends. She’s part of my life. I was very lucky.”
Lyra was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “I think she was too, probably. Thank you for telling me that. I wouldn’t ever have guessed…Did you notice how astonished I was that time at Jordan when you opened the door and came into her room?”
“Honestly, no, I didn’t. I was so struck by Asta’s reaction to Pan.”
“Oh, yes: she’d seen him alone and thought he’d stolen something. The murdered man’s wallet. He realized that in the same moment. He was thrown by that, and I was thrown by the thought of Dr. Polstead being close to Mrs. Lonsdale…and Alice was so embarrassed. You must have thought I was half-witted.”
“Never.”
Silence again for half a minute.
“I wonder where she is now,” Lyra said. “Alice, I mean.”
“I worry about that.”
“When we get back, we’ll make sure she’s safe.”
He moved a little, and pulled the big coat more tightly around them both. Lyra was aware of his body, the boy’s body that had learned to make love with Alice, the man’s body that lay beside her now, strong and competent and warm. Was that all? Not thrilling and intoxicating and beautiful? No, not…Not like Will, she thought. That moment in the little wood, in the world of the mulefa, when they kissed for the first time. Nothing like that would ever happen again.
They lay so still that she thought Malcolm must be asleep now. But Asta was purring, so she was still awake; and the grass was awake too, with a light wind moving through and making it whisper in response; and the air, as she’d felt earlier, was full of fields of intention and purpose and memory.
She felt so light that if only she let go of her body, she’d be carried away into the air, among all those fields, as insubstantial as a filament of down. She wanted to let go, but she didn’t want to; it was cold up there; she was warm and safe in Malcolm’s coat, in Malcolm’s arms. She remembered herself sleeping close to Asta, holding her in the same way. What did that mean? Only lovers let that happen. Did she love Malcolm? She was moved by what he’d told her. She thought well of Alice too, because of it. What kindness, and what good sense for them both to know that they were lovers only for a brief time, and to remain friends! And no, she wasn’t in love with Malcolm, but…
First the red building. Later everything else. She fell asleep.
Pan and Tilda flew along the northern edge of the Tien Shan range, without risking the heights where the oghâb-gorgs terrorized every living thing. The effort, for Pan, was extreme; he had to cling to the branch of cloud-pine without resting for a single second. Tilda Vasara said little as they flew. She was intent on covering the vast distance as quickly as possible, because she had caught some impression of anxiety and urgency from her sisters, and she felt bound to these short-lived humans, to Pan and Lyra and to Malcolm and Asta, because of the impulse that had drawn her, twenty years before, to the island in the flood, to the boy and the sleeping baby. To a witch, of course, twenty years were like the blink of an eye, but some things were still more important than others.
They flew down to sleep in the high mountains just north of the desert. Pan was nearly crazy with the desire to sleep, and Tilda was troubled by several thoughts that assailed her as they turned their course south over the heights. Her dæmon, the tern, skimmed alongside them and tried time and again to urge her to land, to sleep, to rest.
“The dæmon will fall,” he said in their language. “He can’t hold on for much longer. Land, Tilda, fly down, find a cave or any shelter at all. You’ll kill him, and then the girl will die too.”
She didn’t reply; she was exhausted, and she knew he was right.
“Going down to rest,” she called, and Pan heard her and nodded. He had no strength to call back.
It was towards the end of a murky night; the peaks ahead of them and to east and west were covered in snow, and the dim light that clung to them was all Tilda had to see by. She flew in a wide circle, heading down towards what looked like a glacier. Mindful of the dæmon’s weariness, she didn’t spend much time looking for a comfortable valley: there was little chance of that anyway.
She found a narrow gully in a massive rock face on the western side of the glacier, and made for that. As soon as her feet touched the ice, Pan fell off the pine branch.
“I told you to hold tight,” she said quietly.
“I did.”
“Come to me.”
She knelt beside him and opened her arms. All the taboos had evaporated; there were no rules in the empire of the oghâb-gorgs. He crept painfully to her breast and she embraced him, and she was warm, and like Lyra, he fell asleep.
Olivier Bonneville was awake before the guard kicked him, so he was able to squirm aside and avoid the worst of it.
“What’s that for? What are you doing?” he shouted, clutching the thin blanket to himself at the end of the bed.
“Time to get up. We’re moving. Don’t hang about.”
“What? Where? What’s going on?”
The guard spat on the floor and went out, leaving the door open. A sour light leaked in from the corridor; there was no daylight yet, and the cell was thick with cold gray-black stuffy air. Bonneville hauled himself to his feet, shivering, and felt around for his trousers. His socks, still damp from the day before, hung over the bed rail. He grimaced as he pulled them on.
“What next?” he muttered. “Did you hear what they’re doing?”
His dæmon shook her tail and stretched her wings. Bonneville could see that her left wing was not yet healed. She said nothing.
“No, of course you didn’t. You heard what he said, though? Moving on?”
A shadow fell through the doorway, and a strong whiff of cologne preceded the brigadier, who stood there tapping a swagger stick against his leg.
“Hurry,” he said.
“Why? What’s happening?”
“You’re moving on.”
“Where?”
“East. That’s all I know. Come on, get dressed. Don’t waste time.”
“My clothes are damp. I can’t put them on quickly. This is ridiculous.”
“I can call for the sergeant and a couple of men to help you, if you like.”
Bonneville said nothing and went on struggling. Tap, tap, tap went the swagger stick. The hawk dæmon raised her wings again, which only emphasized her weakness. The brigadier looked at his watch.
“Where are you taking me?” said Bonneville, trying to maneuver one of the socks over his cold foot.
“Not taking you anywhere. Well, I’m not. I’d leave you to rot here. The President wants you to go with him.”
“But where?” said Bonneville, trying to sound impatient, but inwardly delighting.
Someone called from further down the corridor. The brigadier called back in the same language. Bonneville pulled up the sock and felt the flesh of his leg shrinking away from it.
“Hurry, boy!”
“Where are my possessions? Where is the rucksack you stole from me?”
“You haven’t got any possessions. You dressed yet?”
Well, Delamare will have the alethiometer, and I’ll soon get that back, Bonneville thought. He stood up. “Let me have a coat. And my shoes. If I die of cold, the President will hold you responsible.”
The brigadier indicated the way out with his swagger stick. Bonneville tried to saunter out, but he was shivering too much to make it look convincing.
The sergeant, or whatever he was, took hold of Bonneville’s arm and tugged him forward, nearly dislodging the hawk dæmon from his shoulder.
“Careful, you ugly fool! Where do they find shitheads like you? Do they breed them in the mountains?”
The sergeant looked at the brigadier and received a nod in response, so he punched Bonneville hard on the side of his head. This time his dæmon did fall. The sergeant’s dog dæmon growled as her wings fluttered in his face, and Bonneville snatched her up before they could fight.
“Enough of that, boy. Keep quiet and do as you’re told,” said the brigadier.
“I demand to speak to the President!”
This time the swagger stick came into action. The brigadier lashed at Bonneville’s arm, and the boy cried out in pain.
No one said anything else. All Bonneville could do was stumble out of the corridor, out of the lobby, out of the building, and into the back of a motor van, where he fell clumsily onto the cold metal floor as they slammed and locked the door behind him. The engine was already running, and within seconds the van was moving, and Bonneville was able to cry without anyone seeing his tears. Except his dæmon, and she didn’t count.