Chapter Eleven Mount Damāvand
Eleven
Mount Damāvand
Pan lay asleep beside Malcolm on the gryphon’s back, but not fast asleep; he was dreaming in a troubled way, and little convulsions shook his limbs from time to time, and quiet cries broke from his throat.
Naturally Malcolm couldn’t touch him. Instead, he whispered: “Hush, Pan, don’t be troubled.
She’s on her way, just as we are. Somewhere down there on the earth, she’ll be moving east like us.
She’ll be safe. She’s strong and brave and clever and she wants you more than anything in the world.
And Asta’s with her. Who could have thought that that would happen?
When you wake up, we can talk about everything and decide what we’re going to do when we meet the gryphon queen. ”
The little daemon was quieter now. The immense wings of Prince Keshvād rose and fell, beating in the darkness, tireless and regular; and Malcolm would have slept, but for the ache in his hip and the constant unease of being several hundred feet in the air with nothing to hold on to.
And it was savagely cold. He watched the stars, and every so often, with the greatest care, he shifted his position to ease the stiffness in all his joints, the gnawing pain in his hip, and felt a little relief; but there was nothing to make it any warmer.
Time passed; he did sleep a little, unwittingly; and he woke with a half-dreaming shock to find Pan curled up against his chest, as if the daemon had instinctively sought the only warmth there was. So he drew his coat around them both and let his eyes fall shut again.
Then he heard Pan say, “Malcolm, when you saw the gryphons in that garden…had you seen them before?”
“Something like them…Pan, can you feel if anything’s happened to Lyra?”
“Just generally. Not specifically. We’re still one being, obviously, but…What was it you saw that was like the gryphons?”
“When Alice and I were traveling down the Thames with you and Lyra, when you were very young, I saw—well, Alice and I both saw—an old river god. A giant from under the water. He was there in the water close to us. In fact, he held Lyra in the palm of his hand and then he kissed his fingertip and pressed it to her forehead.”
“What did I do?”
“You just lay there with her and watched. And then later we saw a fairy. She wanted to steal Lyra away, but we tricked her. She fed Lyra, though; she suckled her. Anyway, the point is that the river god and the fairy were both strange like these gryphons. As if they came from the same order of beings.”
They said nothing for a few minutes, as the gryphons flew steadily onwards, and the stars wheeled slowly round the sky. Then Pan spoke again.
“Malcolm, what do you think the imagination is?”
“I think you probably know more than I do about that. Didn’t you set off to find Lyra’s imagination? You must have had some idea of what you were looking for.”
“I spoke…I wrote that when I was angry, and…I thought Lyra had changed. She’d read these books…
they seemed to be scoffing at everything she used to be.
Well, one of them was. Just empty, knowing laughter, as if nothing mattered at all.
And the other one, The Hyperchorasmians…
That was just full of cold hatred for things like the imagination. ”
“She didn’t take it seriously, though, did she?”
“She did. It made her hard and contemptuous.”
“Surely not Lyra!”
“It wasn’t anything else. It was that book. I went—when I left Oxford—I went to find the author, and I did.”
“Did you? Gottfried Brande himself?”
“Yes. In Wittenberg. He was just like his book. He had a daughter living with him and she was very unhappy. I don’t think he knew how to like anyone, or anything either.
It comes through in his book. When Lyra read it, it was as if something left her.
Something interested and curious and…open-minded.
Not intolerant. It was as if the philosopher, Brande, as if he was her father and she was trying to please him.
But I was—I was…I was so cruel to Lyra. I reminded her of something she’d done—when we separated for the first time—and I accused her of betraying me; I know she didn’t really, but it felt… ”
He was overcome. He couldn’t speak, and Malcolm thought he might have been sobbing, but the little daemon made no sound and lay stiff and still inside the warmth of Malcolm’s coat.
“Not long before the old Master died, the Master of Jordan,” Malcolm said, “he told me something about Lyra that I don’t think he’d told anyone else.
It was when I was teaching her privately, and I wasn’t doing it very well.
I told the Master I thought I should stop, he should find a different tutor, and he told me things about when she was younger, when she went away to the Arctic…
Remember, I’d taken her to Jordan College in the first place, with Alice, so the Master knew I’d been involved in her life, but I knew nothing about that voyage to the north.
I didn’t know her really at all till I taught her for those few weeks.
Anyway, the Master told me about the childhood she’d had at the college, and about how her mother had come to take her away, much against the wishes of the Master himself, and about how he’d given her the alethiometer… ”
“I remember that. He told us to keep it secret from Mrs. Coulter. We used to pore over it for hours trying to understand it.”
“And he told me, the Master told me, that the alethiometer had predicted—remember, this was before she had it, when she was only, what was it, eleven or so—it had predicted that she would be involved in a great betrayal, and that she herself would be the betrayer, and that the experience would be terrible. But of course she must never know about the prediction. And the Master thought that something like that must have happened when she, when you both were away in the north, because you were changed when you came back—sadder, he said, you’d both suffered.
He never asked her about it, and he only told me because he thought it might help me understand her and why she was finding things difficult. ”
“She…It was…” Pan was finding it difficult to speak.
“It’s all right. You don’t have to tell me.”
“No, but…It was foretold?”
“That’s what the Master said. I don’t know if the alethiometer can foretell things exactly, but…”
“More like a sort of likelihood, or possibility, perhaps…Lyra asked Dr. Relf that once. But not in connection with…We never knew anything about that. About the betrayal prediction.”
“Would it have made a difference, just before you left? When you were quarreling?”
“Yes, I think…I don’t know. Oh, probably. But if it was something she had to do, to keep a promise…”
“I think if it was like that, it wouldn’t count as a betrayal.”
“Did he say anything else? The Master?”
“He told me not to take my failure to teach her—teach you—personally.”
“We both knew she was behaving badly. We were very unhappy about that, and about other things…There was a boy we’d come across, in…We never told you about other worlds, did we?”
“No,” said Malcolm. “I’d hoped she might tell me things like that, one day, if…”
“If I hadn’t gone away.”
“Well, yes.”
“She would. She was getting to like you, a lot. But the boy, Will. Will Parry. He came from a world like ours, but very different. He didn’t know he had a daemon, at first. She and Will, they went somewhere I wasn’t allowed to go, into the world of the dead, and it must have been just as painful for him because his daemon couldn’t go there either, and she—I—his daemon sort of appeared, sort of came to herself on the edge of the world of the dead, and there was only me there…
I had to teach her everything. We comforted each other.
I don’t know, I’d have gone mad with fear and loneliness if it hadn’t been for…
But Lyra didn’t go there on a whim. She had to.
She’d made a promise to rescue someone and she was keeping the promise, and it was just that to do so she had to leave me behind.
It was horrible, horrible for us both. But I had Will’s daemon and she had Will himself, so we weren’t quite alone.
Anyway, at the end, we found that he had to go back to his own world, and we had to say goodbye.
Forever. So part of her and me will always be in love with them, and they’re out of reach forever.
She didn’t tell the Master that, and she hasn’t told anyone else ever. You’re the only person who knows…”
The little voice was muffled. He didn’t finish the sentence. Malcolm was powerfully curious, but nothing would make him pry.
“I think we should have told the Master,” Pan said eventually. “About what happened, and why. It might have meant that we could talk to each other about it.”
“Didn’t you?”
“Not properly. Hardly at all, really. It was just so difficult.”
“Well, when we find her…”
“D’you think we will?”
“I’m determined we will.”
A minute went by, and then another. Then Malcolm went on, “When we find her, we’ll talk about everything.”
“Good.”
“The Master told me something else.”
“What was that?”
“About me, actually. Something I didn’t know. He said that something I did—something I’d done—when I was young would determine the whole course of my life.”
“What was it? What did you do?”
“It was when Alice and I took Lyra and you away on the river in La Belle Sauvage. In my canoe. To keep you safe.”
“Did the Master know that from the alethiometer?”
“He didn’t say. But I don’t take it very seriously. Every decision we make, anything we do, anything at all, determines what’ll happen after it.”
“But some consequences are bigger than others.”
“Well, yes. But I was also skeptical because…We don’t like to think that things can be foretold. We prefer to think we’re free. So I resisted believing what the Master said about that, because it seemed to bind me into a future I hadn’t chosen.”
“To bind you to Alice?”
That came as a shock.