The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage

Twenty-three Ancientry

Alice couldn’t see why they’d stopped, and twisted round to look.

“Ah,” she sighed helplessly.

“Maybe we can open them. There must be a way,” said Malcolm, peering as closely as he could to right and left. But there was nothing to be seen but clustering bushes and water weeds and low-hanging boughs of yew. They had left the light from the trees behind, and the darkness here seemed to be not just the absence of light but a positive presence, something exuded from the vegetation and the moisture.

Malcolm listened. The only sounds were those of water dripping, lapping, trickling, and perhaps it was the river making its way through the gaps in the ancient gates, where the wood had rotted away, or perhaps it was the endless drops falling from the leaves all around. There was no sound from behind them.

He brought the canoe tight against the gates and stood carefully to feel how high they were. Too high anyway: he could neither see nor reach any top to them. Nor could he see whether they rolled apart to open, or swung slowly round against the resistance of the water, or even lifted up out of it altogether. But the river was still flowing against them, so it must be going underneath, and if there was any mechanism, it must be controlled from the bank.

Still standing up, with his hands on the cold and slimy wood of the doors, Malcolm looked towards the right-hand bank—

— and had such a shock that he started back, swaying the canoe, almost losing his balance, making Alice cry out in alarm.

“What? What?” she said.

She was clutching Lyra tight, trying to peer through the murk, and Malcolm was shakily sitting down.

“There,” he said, and pointed at the thing he’d seen.

Thing? It was the head of a man, but huge, emerging from the water among the reeds. He must have been a giant. His hair was tangled with weeds and seemed to be growing through a rusty crown; his skin was greenish, and his long beard trailed over his throat and down into the water. He was looking at them with mild and peaceful interest. As he stood up higher, they saw that his left hand was clasping the shaft of a— What was it? A spear? No, a trident, as Malcolm saw by looking upwards into the darkness, where three points of reflected light shone dimly.

He looked at the giant’s face and thought he could see a glimmer of benevolence there.

“Sir,” he said, “we’d like to go through these gates, if you please, because we need to escape from someone who’s following us. Can you open them for us?”

“Oh, no, I can’t do that,” said the giant.

“But they’re made to be opened, and we need to go through!”

“Well, I can’t do that. Them gates en’t bin opened for thousands of years. They’re for use only in the case of drought in the daily world.”

“But if we could just get through — it would only take a couple of seconds!”

“You don’t know how deep them gates go, boy. It might be just a couple of seconds to you, but there en’t enough numbers to calculate how much water’d get through them in a couple of seconds.”

“The flood can’t get any worse than it is already. Please, mister—”

“What you got in there? Is that a babby?”

“Yeah, it’s the Princess Lyra,” said Alice. “We’re taking her to her father, the king, and there are enemies after us.”

“King of where? What king?”

“King of England.”

“England?”

“Albion,” said Malcolm desperately, remembering something the fairy woman had said.

“Oh, Albion,” said the giant. “Well, why didn’t you say?”

“Can you open them, then?”

“No. I got me instructions, and that’s that.”

“Who gave you those instructions?”

“Old Father Thames hisself.”

Malcolm thought he could hear the hyena’s laugh, and from the way Alice’s eyes opened wide, he knew she could too.

“Anyway,” he said, “I shouldn’t have asked you, because you probably en’t strong enough.”

“What d’ye mean by that?” said the giant. “I can open them gates, all right. I done it thousands of times.”

“What would make you open them again?”

“Orders, that’s what.”

“Well, as it happens,” said Malcolm, fumbling with trembling hands in the rucksack, “we’ve got these orders from the king’s ambassador in Oxford, kind of a passport, so’s we can have safe passage. Look.”

He pulled a sheet of paper out of one of the cardboard folders and held it up for the giant to see. It was covered in mathematical formulae. The giant peered down at it.

“Hold it up higher,” he said. “And it’s the wrong way up. Turn it the other way.”

It wasn’t, but Malcolm did as he said. He was so close that Malcolm could smell his skin, which was redolent of mud, and fishes, and weeds. The giant peered closer still, mouthing something, as if he was reading it, and then nodded.

“Yes, I see,” he said. “That’s undeniable. I can’t argue with that. Let me see the babby.”

Malcolm stuffed the paper back in the rucksack and took Lyra from Alice, holding her high so the giant could see. Lyra looked up at him solemnly.

“Ah,” said the giant. “I can see she’s a princess, all right, bless her. Can I hold her?”

He held out his great left hand.

“Mal,” said Alice quietly, “careful.”

But Malcolm trusted him. He laid Lyra on the enormous palm, and she gazed up at the giant with perfect confidence, and Pantalaimon sang like a nightingale.

The giant kissed his right forefinger and touched it to Lyra’s head before handing her back, very delicately, to Malcolm.

“Can we go through, then?” said Malcolm, who could hear the hyena again, even closer.

“All right, since you let me hold the princess, I’ll open the gates for you.”

“And then close them again and not let anyone else through?”

“Unless they got orders like what you have.”

“Before you do,” said Malcolm, “what is that place back there? That garden?”

“That’s the place where people go when they forget. You seen the fog on the other side?”

“Yes. And I saw what was behind it.”

“That fog’s hiding everything they ought to remember. If it ever cleared away, they’d have to take stock of theirselves, and they wouldn’t be able to stay in the garden no more. Back off a bit and give me room.”

Malcolm gave Lyra to Alice and backed the canoe a few feet, and the giant stuck his trident in the muddy bank and took a deep breath before sinking under the water. A moment later the gates began to stir, creaking, dripping, and slowly, slowly opening against the current, making the water seethe and churn. As soon as the gap was wide enough, Malcolm drove La Belle Sauvage forward and through, and into the darkness beyond. The last thing they heard from the garden under the ground was the hyena’s distant laughter dying away as the gates closed behind them.

The tunnel to the outside world took about five minutes to paddle through, but it was pitch-dark, so Malcolm had to go slowly, feeling his way from bump to bump. Finally they came to a mass of hanging vegetation, and the fresh smell of the world outside, and after a brief struggle they were through into the open air of the night.

“I don’t get it,” said Alice.

“What?”

“We went down into that tunnel with the rapids, what led us in there, so we should have had to come up to get out of it. But this is the same level.”

“Still,” said Malcolm. “We’re out.”

“Yeah. Suppose so. And who was he?”

“Dunno. Maybe he’s the god of a little tributary, like Old Father Thames is the god of the main river, perhaps. That would make sense. George Boatwright said he’d seen Old Father Thames.”

“What was it you said Lyra’s father was the king of?”

“Albion. It was something the fairy woman said.”

“Good thing you remembered it, then.”

He paddled on under the moon. The night was quiet and the flood was as wide as the horizon. Little by little Alice subsided into sleep, and Malcolm wondered about pulling the blanket higher around her shoulders, but it wasn’t cold.

After half an hour or so he saw an island ahead, just a low, flat piece of land with no trees or buildings, no cliffs, no bushes — not even any grass, by the look of things. He stopped paddling and let the canoe float gently towards it. Perhaps he could tie up here and lie down and rest, though it did seem horribly exposed. The canopy was ideal for concealing the canoe among vegetation, but against bare rocks it would be visible for miles.

But there was nothing he could do about that. He was aching for sleep. He moved La Belle Sauvage towards the shore and found a place where a little beach of bare earth lay between the rocks. He let the bow slide up on the soil, and the canoe came to rest. Alice and Lyra lay fast asleep.

Malcolm laid the paddle down and clambered out stiffly. It was only then that he remembered the hole in the hull, the resin patch, and with a heartbeat of anxiety he bent to look, but it was as dry inside as the rest of the hull. The patch had held.

“It’s safe,” said a voice from behind him.

He nearly fell over from fear. He spun round at once, ready to fight, and then found Asta, cat-formed, springing into his arms, deadly afraid. Looking at them was the strangest woman they had ever seen. She was about the same age as Lyra’s mother, to judge by the look of her in the moonlight, and she wore a little coronet of flowers around her head. Her hair was long and black, and she was dressed in black too, or partially dressed, because she seemed to be wearing clustered ribbons of black silk and very little else. She was looking at him as if she’d expected him, and then he realized that there was something missing: she had no dæmon. On the ground beside her lay a branch of pine. Could her dæmon have that form? He felt a shiver of cold run down his spine.

“Who are you?” he said.

“My name is Tilda Vasara. I am the queen of the witches in the Onega region.”

“I don’t know where that is.”

“It’s in the north.”

“You weren’t here a second ago. Where’d you come from?”

“From the sky.”

He caught a slight movement in the corner of his eye and turned to the canoe, where he saw a white bird whispering into the ear of Alice’s dæmon, Ben. It was the witch’s dæmon, there after all.

“They will sleep for the rest of the night now,” said Tilda Vasara. “And the people on that boat will not see you.”

She pointed past his shoulder, just as he saw a different light catching her eyes. Malcolm turned to look and saw the searchlight on a boat that was either the same CCD vessel that nearly caught them before or a similar one. It was moving steadily towards the island, and Malcolm had to hold himself still because he longed to fling himself to the ground and hide behind anything: a rock, the canoe, the witch. The boat came nearer, the searchlight sweeping to left and right, almost on course to hit the island, but at the last minute it turned a little to starboard and moved past. In the minute or so when it was coming closer, the light became fiercer and brighter, and he saw the witch’s face, quite calm, almost amused, and utterly fearless.

“Why didn’t they see us?” he said when it had gone.

“We can make ourselves invisible. Their vision slides over us and over anything nearby. You were quite safe. They can’t even see the island.”

“You know who they were?”

“No.”

“They want to catch that baby and… I don’t know what. Probably kill her.”

She looked down where he was pointing at the sleeping Lyra, the sleeping Alice.

“Is she the baby’s mother?”

“No, no,” said Malcolm. “Just… we’re just… looking after her. But why did the people in the boat turn away when they got close, if they can’t see the island?”

“They don’t know why. It doesn’t matter. They’re gone now. Where are you going?”

“To find the baby’s father.”

“How will you do that?”

“I know his address, at least. I don’t know how we’ll find it. But we’ll have to.”

The white bird flew up to her shoulder. He was of a kind Malcolm didn’t know, with a white body and wings and a black head.

“What kind of bird is your dæmon?” Asta asked.

“Arctic tern,” she answered. “All our dæmons are birds.”

Malcolm said, “Why are you here, so far out of the north?”

“I was looking for something. Now that I’ve found it, I shall go home.”

“Oh. Well, thank you for hiding me.”

The moonlight shone full onto her face. He’d thought she was young, or no older than Mrs. Coulter, who he supposed was about thirty; her body was slim and lithe, and there were no lines or wrinkles on her face, and her hair was thick and black, with no gray; but somehow the witch’s expression made him think she must be indescribably ancient, perhaps as old as the giant under the water. She looked calm and even friendly, but at the same time she looked merciless. And she was curious about him, as he was about her. For a few moments they looked into each other’s eyes with complete frankness.

The witch turned away and bent to pick up the pine branch that lay on the ground beside her. She looked back at him once, and again he had that sense of perfect openness, as if they knew each other very well and there were no secrets between them. Then she sprang into the air, holding the branch in her left hand, as her dæmon skimmed down low over Malcolm and Asta in farewell; and then they were gone. For a long time he looked up as her dark shape grew smaller and smaller against the stars. Then there was nothing to show she had ever been there.

He crouched by the canoe and pulled the blanket higher over Alice’s shoulders, tucking it around Lyra’s head, making sure she could breathe. Pan was curled up like a dormouse between cat Ben’s paws, both fast asleep.

“Are you tired?” he said to Asta.

“Sort of. More than tired. Out the other side of tired.”

“Me too.”

The island was about the size of two tennis courts side by side, and no part of it rose higher than the height of Malcolm’s waist above the flood. It was utterly bare: a platform of tumbled rocks with not a blade of grass to be seen, no tree, no bush, nor any moss or lichen. It might have been a part of the moon. Malcolm and Asta walked all round it in little more than a minute, and that was going slowly.

“I can’t see any other land either,” he said. “It’s like the middle of the sea.”

“Except that the water’s flowing. This is still the flood.”

They sat on a rock and watched it go past, a great black sheet of glass full of stars, with the moon shining both above and below.

“I liked that witch,” Malcolm said. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever see another one. She had a bow and arrows.”

“When she said she’d found what she was looking for, d’you reckon that was us?”

“What, she came all this way just to look for us? No. She must’ve had bigger things than that to do. She was a queen. I wish she’d stopped a little longer. We could’ve asked her all kinds of things.”

They sat for a while, and gradually Malcolm found his eyes closing. The night was quiet and the world was calm, and he realized that whatever he and Asta had said to each other a minute before, he felt more tired than ever before in his life, and what he wanted to do most of all was lose consciousness.

“Better get in the canoe,” said Asta.

They settled themselves in the boat, having checked that Alice and Lyra were safe and comfortable, and they fell asleep in a moment.

That night, he dreamed of the wild dogs again, his savage dogs, with bloodstained muzzles and torn ears and broken teeth, with wild eyes and slavering jaws and scarred flanks, howling and barking as they raced around him, surging up to lick his face, thrusting themselves at his hands, rubbing themselves against his legs, a tumult of canine fury, with him at its heart and center, humbling themselves before cat-formed Asta; and as before, he felt no fear, he felt nothing but savage exhilaration and boundless delight.