His Dark Materials Omnibus (26 page)

She had seldom considered herself before, and found the experience interesting but uncomfortable, very like riding the bear, in fact. Iorek Byrnison was pacing swiftly, moving both legs on one side of his body at the same time, and rocking from side to side in a steady powerful rhythm. She found she couldn’t just sit: she had to ride actively.

They had been traveling for an hour or more, and Lyra was stiff and sore but deeply happy, when Iorek Byrnison slowed down and stopped.

“Look up,” he said.

Lyra raised her eyes and had to wipe them with the inside of her wrist, for she was so cold that tears were blurring them. When she could see clearly, she gasped at the sight of the sky. The Aurora had faded to a pallid trembling
glimmer, but the stars were as bright as diamonds, and across the great dark diamond-scattered vault, hundreds upon hundreds of tiny black shapes were flying out of the east and south toward the north.

“Are they birds?” she said.

“They are witches,” said the bear.

“Witches! What are they doing?”

“Flying to war, maybe. I have never seen so many at one time.”

“Do you know any witches, Iorek?”

“I have served some. And fought some, too. This is a sight to frighten Lord Faa. If they are flying to the aid of your enemies, you should all be afraid.”

“Lord Faa wouldn’t be frightened. You en’t afraid, are you?”

“Not yet. When I am, I shall master the fear. But we had better tell Lord Faa about the witches, because the men might not have seen them.”

He moved on more slowly, and she kept watching the sky until her eyes splintered again with tears of cold, and she saw no end to the numberless witches flying north.

Finally Iorek Byrnison stopped and said, “There is the village.”

They were looking down a broken, rugged slope toward a cluster of wooden buildings beside a wide stretch of snow as flat as could be, which Lyra took to be the frozen lake. A wooden jetty showed her she was right. They were no more than five minutes from the place.

“What do you want to do?” the bear asked.

Lyra slipped off his back, and found it hard to stand. Her face was stiff with cold and her legs were shaky, but she clung to his fur and stamped until she felt stronger.

“There’s a child or a ghost or something down in that village,” she said, “or maybe near it, I don’t know for certain. I want to go and find him and bring him back to Lord Faa and the others if I can. I thought he was a ghost, but the symbol reader might be telling me something I can’t understand.”

“If he is outside,” said the bear, “he had better have some shelter.”

“I don’t think he’s dead,” said Lyra, but she was far from sure. The alethiometer had indicated something uncanny and unnatural, which was alarming; but who was she? Lord Asriel’s daughter. And who was under her command? A mighty bear. How could she possibly show any fear?

“Let’s just go and look,” she said.

She clambered on his back again, and he set off down the broken slope, walking steadily and not pacing any more. The dogs of the village smelled or heard or sensed them coming, and began to howl frightfully; and the reindeer
in their enclosure moved about nervously, their antlers clashing like dry sticks. In the still air every movement could be heard for a long way.

As they reached the first of the houses, Lyra looked to the right and left, peering hard into the dimness, for the Aurora was fading and the moon still far from rising. Here and there a light flickered under a snow-thick roof, and Lyra thought she saw pale faces behind some of the windowpanes, and imagined their astonishment to see a child riding a great white bear.

At the center of the little village there was an open space next to the jetty, where boats had been drawn up, mounds under the snow. The noise of the dogs was deafening, and just as Lyra thought it must have wakened everyone, a door opened and a man came out holding a rifle. His wolverine dæmon leaped onto the woodstack beside the door, scattering snow.

Lyra slipped down at once and stood between him and Iorek Byrnison, conscious that she had told the bear there was no need for his armor.

The man spoke in words she couldn’t understand. Iorek Byrnison replied in the same language, and the man gave a little moan of fear.

“He thinks we are devils,” Iorek told Lyra. “What shall I say?”

“Tell him we’re not devils, but we’ve got friends who are. And we’re looking for … Just a child. A strange child. Tell him that.”

As soon as the bear had said that, the man pointed to the right, indicating some place further off, and spoke quickly.

Iorek Byrnison said, “He asks if we have come to take the child away. They are afraid of it. They have tried to drive it away, but it keeps coming back.”

“Tell him we’ll take it away with us, but they were very bad to treat it like that. Where is it?”

The man explained, gesticulating fearfully. Lyra was afraid he’d fire his rifle by mistake, but as soon as he’d spoken he hastened inside his house and shut the door. Lyra could see faces at every window.

“Where is the child?” she said.

“In the fish house,” the bear told her, and turned to pad down toward the jetty.

Lyra followed. She was horribly nervous. The bear was making for a narrow wooden shed, raising his head to sniff this way and that, and when he reached the door he stopped and said: “In there.”

Lyra’s heart was beating so fast she could hardly breathe. She raised her hand to knock at the door and then, feeling that that was ridiculous, took a deep breath to call out, but realized that she didn’t know what to say. Oh, it was so dark now! She should have brought a lantern.…

There was no choice, and anyway, she didn’t want the bear to see her being afraid. He had spoken of mastering his fear: that was what she’d have to do. She lifted the strap of reindeer hide holding the latch in place, and tugged hard against the frost binding the door shut. It opened with a snap. She had to kick aside the snow piled against the foot of the door before she could pull it open, and Pantalaimon was no help, running back and forth in his ermine shape, a white shadow over the white ground, uttering little frightened sounds.

“Pan, for God’s sake!” she said. “Be a bat. Go and
look
for me.…”

But he wouldn’t, and he wouldn’t speak either. She had never seen him like this except once, when she and Roger in the crypt at Jordan had moved the dæmon-coins into the wrong skulls. He was even more frightened than she was. As for Iorek Byrnison, he was lying in the snow nearby, watching in silence.

“Come out,” Lyra said as loud as she dared. “Come out!”

Not a sound came in answer. She pulled the door a little wider, and Pantalaimon leaped up into her arms, pushing and pushing at her in his cat form, and said, “Go away! Don’t stay here! Oh, Lyra, go now! Turn back!”

Trying to hold him still, she was aware of Iorek Byrnison getting to his feet, and turned to see a figure hastening down the track from the village, carrying a lantern. When he came close enough to speak, he raised the lantern and held it to show his face: an old man with a broad, lined face, and eyes nearly lost in a thousand wrinkles. His dæmon was an arctic fox.

He spoke, and Iorek Byrnison said:

“He says that it’s not the only child of that kind. He’s seen others in the forest. Sometimes they die quickly, sometimes they don’t die. This one is tough, he thinks. But it would be better for him if he died.”

“Ask him if I can borrow his lantern,” Lyra said.

The bear spoke, and the man handed it to her at once, nodding vigorously. She realized that he’d come down in order to bring it to her, and thanked him, and he nodded again and stood back, away from her and the hut and away from the bear.

Lyra thought suddenly: what if the child is Roger? And she prayed with all her force that it wouldn’t be. Pantalaimon was clinging to her, an ermine again, his little claws hooked deep into her anorak.

She lifted the lantern high and took a step into the shed, and then she saw what it was that the Oblation Board was doing, and what was the nature of the sacrifice the children were having to make.

The little boy was huddled against the wood drying rack where hung row upon row of gutted fish, all as stiff as boards. He was clutching a piece of fish to him as Lyra was clutching Pantalaimon, with her left hand, hard, against her heart; but that was all he had, a piece of dried fish; because he had no dæmon at all. The Gobblers had cut it away. That was
intercision
, and this was a severed child.

Her first impulse was to turn and run, or to be sick. A human being with no dæmon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out: something unnatural and uncanny that belonged to the world of night-ghasts, not the waking world of sense.

So Lyra clung to Pantalaimon and her head swam and her gorge rose, and cold as the night was, a sickly sweat moistened her flesh with something colder still.

“Ratter,” said the boy. “You got my Ratter?”

Lyra was in no doubt what he meant.

“No,” she said in a voice as frail and frightened as she felt. Then, “What’s your name?”

“Tony Makarios,” he said. “Where’s Ratter?”

“I don’t know …” she began, and swallowed hard to govern her nausea. “The Gobblers …” But she couldn’t finish. She had to go out of the shed and sit down by herself in the snow, except that of course she wasn’t by herself, she was never by herself, because Pantalaimon was always there. Oh, to be cut from him as this little boy had been parted from his Ratter! The worst thing in the world! She found herself sobbing, and Pantalaimon was whimpering too, and in both of them there was a passionate pity and sorrow for the half-boy.

Then she got to her feet again.

“Come on,” she called in a trembling voice. “Tony, come out. We’re going to take you somewhere safe.”

There was a stir of movement in the fish house, and he appeared at the door, still clutching his dried fish. He was dressed in warm enough garments, a thickly padded and quilted coal-silk anorak and fur boots, but they had a secondhand look and didn’t fit well. In the wider light outside that came from the faint trails of the Aurora and the snow-covered ground he looked more
lost and piteous even than he had at first, crouching in the lantern light by the fish racks.

The villager who’d brought the lantern had retreated a few yards, and called down to them.

Iorek Byrnison interpreted: “He says you must pay for that fish.”

Lyra felt like telling the bear to kill him, but she said, “We’re taking the child away for them. They can afford to give one fish to pay for that.”

The bear spoke. The man muttered, but didn’t argue. Lyra set his lantern down in the snow and took the half-boy’s hand to guide him to the bear. He came helplessly, showing no surprise and no fear at the great white beast standing so close, and when Lyra helped him to sit on Iorek’s back, all he said was:

“I dunno where my Ratter is.”

“No, nor do we, Tony,” she said. “But we’ll … we’ll punish the Gobblers. We’ll do that, I promise. Iorek, is it all right if I sit up there too?”

“My armor weighs far more than children,” he said.

So she scrambled up behind Tony and made him cling to the long stiff fur, and Pantalaimon sat inside her hood, warm and close and full of pity. Lyra knew that Pantalaimon’s impulse was to reach out and cuddle the little half-child, to lick him and gentle him and warm him as his own dæmon would have done; but the great taboo prevented that, of course.

They rose through the village and up toward the ridge, and the villagers’ faces were open with horror and a kind of fearful relief at seeing that hideously mutilated creature taken away by a girl and a great white bear.

In Lyra’s heart, revulsion struggled with compassion, and compassion won. She put her arms around the skinny little form to hold him safe. The journey back to the main party was colder, and harder, and darker, but it seemed to pass more quickly for all that. Iorek Byrnison was tireless, and Lyra’s riding became automatic, so that she was never in danger of falling off. The cold body in her arms was so light that in one way he was easy to manage, but he was inert; he sat stiffly without moving as the bear moved, so in another way he was difficult too.

From time to time the half-boy spoke.

“What’s that you said?” asked Lyra.

“I says is she gonna know where I am?”

“Yeah, she’ll know, she’ll find you and we’ll find her. Hold on tight now, Tony. It en’t far from here.…”

The bear loped onward. Lyra had no idea how tired she was until they
caught up with the gyptians. The sledges had stopped to rest the dogs, and suddenly there they all were, Farder Coram, Lord Faa, Lee Scoresby, all lunging forward to help and then falling back silent as they saw the other figure with Lyra. She was so stiff that she couldn’t even loosen her arms around his body, and John Faa himself had to pull them gently open and lift her off.

“Gracious God, what is this?” he said. “Lyra, child, what have you found?”

“He’s called Tony,” she mumbled through frozen lips. “And they cut his dæmon away. That’s what the Gobblers do.”