His Dark Materials Omnibus (62 page)

“You sure this is the one you saw?” she said.

“Oh, yes. And if they’re all so frightened of cats, there wouldn’t be many in this world anyway. She probably couldn’t find her way back.”

“They were just crazy,” Lyra said. “They would have killed her. I never seen kids being like that.”

“I have,” said Will.

But his face had closed; he didn’t want to talk about it, and she knew better than to ask. She knew she wouldn’t even ask the alethiometer.

She was very tired, so presently she went to bed and slept at once.

A little later, when the cat had curled up to sleep, Will took a cup of coffee and the green leather writing case, and sat on the balcony. There was enough light coming through the window for him to read by, and he wanted to look at the papers.

There weren’t many. As he’d thought, they were letters, written on airmail
paper in black ink. These very marks were made by the hand of the man he wanted so much to find; he moved his fingers over and over them, and pressed them to his face, trying to get closer to the essence of his father. Then he started to read.

Will found his head ringing.

His father was describing exactly what he himself had found under the hornbeam trees. He, too, had found a window—he even used the same word for it! So Will must be on the right track. And this knowledge was what the men had been searching for … So it was dangerous, too.

Will had been just a baby when that letter was written. Seven years after that had come the morning in the supermarket when he realized his mother was in terrible danger, and he had to protect her; and then slowly in the months that followed came his growing realization that the danger was in her mind, and he had to protect her all the more.

And then, brutally, the revelation that not all the danger had been in her mind after all. There really was someone after her—after these letters, this information.

He had no idea what it meant. But he felt deeply happy that he had something so important to share with his father; that John Parry and his son Will had each, separately, discovered this extraordinary thing. When they met, they could talk about it, and his father would be proud that Will had followed in his footsteps.

The night was quiet and the sea was still. He folded the letters away and fell asleep.

“Grumman?” said the black-bearded fur trader. “From the Berlin Academy? Reckless. I met him five years back over at the northern end of the Urals. I thought he was dead.”

Sam Cansino, an old acquaintance and a Texan like Lee Scoresby, sat in the naphtha-laden, smoky bar of the Samirsky Hotel and tossed back a shot glass of bitingly cold vodka. He nudged the plate of pickled fish and black bread toward Lee, who took a mouthful and nodded for Sam to tell him more.

“He’d walked into a trap that fool Yakovlev laid,” the fur trader went on, “and cut his leg open to the bone. Instead of using regular medicines, he insisted on using the stuff the bears use—bloodmoss—some kind of lichen, it ain’t a true moss. Anyway, he was lying on a sledge alternately roaring with pain and calling out instructions to his men—they were taking star sights, and they had to get the measurements right or he’d lash them with his tongue, and boy, he had a tongue like barbed wire. A lean man, tough, powerful, curious about everything. You know he was a Tartar, by initiation?”

“You don’t say,” said Lee Scoresby, tipping more vodka into Sam’s glass. His dæmon, Hester, crouched at his elbow on the bar, eyes half-closed as usual, ears flat along her back.

Lee had arrived that afternoon, borne to Nova Zembla by the wind the witches had called up, and once he’d stowed his equipment he’d made straight for the Samirsky Hotel, near the fish-packing station. This was a place where many Arctic drifters stopped to exchange news or look for employment or leave messages for one another, and Lee Scoresby had spent several days there in the past, waiting for a contract or a passenger or a fair wind, so there was nothing unusual in his conduct now.

And with the vast changes they sensed in the world around them, it was natural for people to gather and talk. With every day that passed came more news: the river Yenisei was free of ice, and at this time of year, too; part of the
ocean had drained away, exposing strange regular formations of stone on the seabed; a squid a hundred feet long had snatched three fishermen out of their boat and torn them apart.…

And the fog continued to roll in from the north, dense and cold and occasionally drenched with the strangest imaginable light, in which great forms could be vaguely seen, and mysterious voices heard.

Altogether it was a bad time to work, which was why the bar of the Samirsky Hotel was full.

“Did you say Grumman?” said the man sitting just along the bar, an elderly man in seal hunter’s rig, whose lemming dæmon looked out solemnly from his pocket. “He was a Tartar all right. I was there when he joined that tribe. I saw him having his skull drilled. He had another name, too—a Tartar name; I’ll think of it in a minute.”

“Well, how about that,” said Lee Scoresby. “Let me buy you a drink, my friend. I’m looking for news of this man. What tribe was it he joined?”

“The Yenisei Pakhtars. At the foot of the Semyonov Range. Near a fork of the Yenisei and the—I forget what it’s called—a river that comes down from the hills. There’s a rock the size of a house at the landing stage.”

“Ah, sure,” said Lee. “I remember it now. I’ve flown over it. And Grumman had his skull drilled, you say? Why was that?”

“He was a shaman,” said the old seal hunter. “I think the tribe recognized him as a shaman before they adopted him. Some business, that drilling. It goes on for two nights and a day. They use a bow drill, like for lighting a fire.”

“Ah, that accounts for the way his team was obeying him,” said Sam Cansino. “They were the roughest bunch of scoundrels I ever saw, but they ran around doing his bidding like nervous children. I thought it was his cursing that did it. If they thought he was a shaman, it’d make even more sense. But you know, that man’s curiosity was as powerful as a wolf’s jaws; he would
not
let go. He made me tell him every scrap I knew about the land thereabouts, and the habits of wolverines and foxes. And he was in some pain from that damn trap of Yakovlev’s; leg laid open, and he was writing the results of that bloodmoss, taking his temperature, watching the scar form, making notes on every damn thing.… A strange man. There was a witch who wanted him for a lover, but he turned her down.”

“Is that so?” said Lee, thinking of the beauty of Serafina Pekkala.

“He shouldn’t have done that,” said the seal hunter. “A witch offers you her love, you should take it. If you don’t, it’s your own fault if bad things happen
to you. It’s like having to make a choice: a blessing or a curse. The one thing you can’t do is choose neither.”

“He might have had a reason,” said Lee.

“If he had any sense, it will have been a good one.”

“He was headstrong,” said Sam Cansino.

“Maybe faithful to another woman,” Lee guessed. “I heard something else about him; I heard he knew the whereabouts of some magic object, I don’t know what it might be, that could protect anyone who held it. Did you ever hear that story?”

“Yes, I heard that,” said the seal hunter. “He didn’t have it himself, but he knew where it was. There was a man who tried to make him tell, but Grumman killed him.”

“His dæmon, now,” said Sam Cansino, “that was curious. She was an eagle, a black eagle with a white head and breast, of a kind I’d never set eyes on, and I didn’t know how she might be called.”

“She was an osprey,” said the barman, listening in. “You’re talking about Stan Grumman? His dæmon was an osprey. A fish eagle.”