Chapter Eleven Mount Damāvand #3
A long, wide stone passageway, smooth underfoot but with rugged walls, lit at intervals by naphtha lamps on brackets, led to a great gallery open at one side to the sky, its roof supported by pillars carved out of the rock.
It might have been a room for ceremonies or great occasions of state, Malcolm thought, because of the splendor of the proportions and the calm austerity of the bare rock walls, the ice-fringed gallery, and the blue sky beyond.
Around the walls were half a dozen alcoves cut in the rock, in which fires were burning—fires that seemed to come directly out of the substance of the mountain, and to burn something invisible: not wood, not coal.
Malcolm was intensely curious, and wanted to know more, but the vizier moved on, and led them down a smaller passage set with similar alcoves and smaller fires, to a doorway, and a surprise.
A man, a human being wearing a simple white robe and a turban, stood beside the door, bowing.
His desert-rat daemon hid behind his leg.
Gulya said something quickly to the vizier, who inclined his head to Malcolm—still not looking him in the face—and withdrew.
“This man is your servant,” Gulya said. “His name is Darius. He will supply anything you need. He will not speak, because his tongue was removed, but he can hear and understand your language.”
Darius opened the door, which was made of heavy wood, perfectly jointed and hung, but plain and undecorated.
Malcolm and Pan went in, but Gulya waited on the threshold.
“I shall escort you to the Queen when you are ready,” she said. She added something in her own language to Darius, and then left. He bowed and shut the door after she’d gone.
“Darius, do you understand me when I speak like this?” Malcolm said.
The servant nodded. He was about fifty years old, Malcolm thought, lean, scarred, and melancholy. His daemon was hiding her head away, unwilling to communicate.
“Are you a captive of the gryphons?” Malcolm asked.
Darius shook his head.
“You’re a free man, then?”
The servant shook his head again, but more slowly. His situation was too complex for yes-no answers; Malcolm thought he’d return to it later.
He looked around. The room was very simply furnished: a chair, a table, and a neat pile of furs and animal skins on the floor for a bed.
Everything was clean, though, and the chair and table were skillfully made from a wood that Malcolm didn’t recognize: perhaps a kind of maple.
On the table there was an oil lamp, a dish of grapes and apples, and a jug of water with two fine glasses.
The air was cold, but a small fire was burning in an alcove—another fire with no fuel.
“Darius, what is burning in there?” Malcolm said.
The servant gestured all around, as if to imply it was the mountain itself that was on fire.
“The rock? The earth?”
Darius nodded, and pointed emphatically to the floor.
“The fire comes from under the earth?”
Another nod.
The one opening in the wall was set with glazed windows, with a heavy curtain that could be pulled across to keep the worst drafts out.
The windows gave on to a view over the whole mountain range.
Darius beckoned, and Malcolm looked where he pointed, and saw little fires on the flanks of other mountains nearby.
“The whole world’s aflame,” said Pan. “But it’s all under control.”
“Is there somewhere I can wash?” Malcolm asked.
Darius turned and gestured for Malcolm to follow. In the next room there was a marble basin, into which a trickle of water was flowing constantly, to drain out into a pipe through the floor.
“Thank you, Darius. Could you come back in fifteen minutes, and then we shall be glad to meet the Queen.”
The servant bowed and left.
“They like their visitors to be cold but clean,” Malcolm said when he came back from the bathroom.
“Look, there’s a wooden chest in the corner.”
“So there is—I hadn’t noticed that.”
The chest was plainly constructed, and made of cedar.
As he lifted the lid, Malcolm smelled the fragrance, and inhaled it deeply, transported at once back to the workshop of Mr. Taphouse, the handyman at Godstow Priory, when he was helping the old man make a cupboard for the vestments worn at special ceremonies.
I made a coffin out of cedar once, Mr. Taphouse had told him. This old boy wanted to keep the moths out of his grave. Well, the customer’s always right, Malcolm, even when he’s wrong.
“What’s that?” said Pan, perching on the edge and looking down at the folded cloth inside.
Malcolm held it up and found a robe, several in fact, of heavy velvets and brocades, as well as shawls of silk. He took the largest robe and put it on. It was deep blue velvet, and only just big enough.
“That’s a bit warmer. I wonder who it used to belong to.”
“There’s a hat as well.”
It was a cap of astrakhan. Malcolm tried it on, and put it back.
“Later, maybe. We’ll have to decide what to do about this man-of-gold business. Who thought of that? Was that you, or was it Gulya?”
“Not guilty,” said Pan. “She brought it up first. I just thought it might be useful if they saw you as valuable rather than…not.”
“You said she was under a spell.”
“Yes. She’s small because a sorcerer put a curse on her—she’d normally be the same size as the others. If she kills him, the curse will be lifted.”
“Who is this sorcerer?”
“A man called Sorush.”
“A man, not a gryphon?”
“A man, or…something else. A devil, perhaps. He has gryphon slaves, who can’t leave because he cuts their wings off when they’re young and small. He’s hoarded immense quantities of gold, so all gryphons know about him, and they all hate and fear him, but they don’t know how to fight him.”
“Does he live among these mountains?”
“I don’t know…Why do you want to know about him?”
“Thinking ahead.”
“Oh…Where is this mountain, Damāvand, anyway? Have you heard of it?”
“I think it’s just south of the Caspian Sea,” Malcolm said. “But I’m sure of very little. I’d like to talk to Gulya, though.”
It was still strange, talking to Pan and not Asta; but it was easy too, as if they both felt the existence of a large body of shared understanding.
There was a knock at the door, and the servant Darius came in without waiting and bowed.
“We are ready,” said Malcolm. “You can take us to the Queen.”
Darius nodded, and stood aside to let them leave the room first. Outside the great hall they found the vizier waiting, and Gulya, and an attendant group of gryphon guards.
No one spoke. The vizier gave no sign of acknowledgment before stalking away along the corridor.
Malcolm and Pan followed, with Gulya, and the guards came behind them.
They entered the great hall, where the sunlight striking in through the pillared gallery lit up something that hadn’t been there before: a massive carpet covering almost the entire floor, glowing with reds and blues, yellows and greens, browns and blacks and creams in an intricate design that once again, to Malcolm, showed the work of human hands.
Pan was remembering another occasion, long before: when he and Lyra had entered the palace of Iofur Raknison, the usurper king of the armored bears.
It would be something to tell Malcolm about one day.
He’d had to hide in Lyra’s pocket then, in the shape of a mouse, because she had a plan to trick Iofur, and it was vital that Pan should keep out of sight.
But Iofur’s palace was grotesque and ugly, covered in meaningless decoration and filthy with the mess of thousands of birds, and it stank of dung and heavy perfume.
By contrast this palace was clean and austere, and it smelled of nothing but snow and mountain air.
The only colors they had seen were those on the carpet in the great hall, and the gryphons clearly had more interest in proportion than in the sort of extravagant decorative elaboration that Iofur Raknison was impressed by.
The carpet was all the more striking because of the contrast it made with everything else, and because it must have been rolled out and laid in the few minutes Malcolm and Pan had been on their own in the visitors’ suite.
They were both expecting some sort of ceremony to announce the Queen—a procession perhaps, or music, or a formal address—but that was because although neither of them had been in the presence of royalty in England, they were both creatures of Oxford, where little happened without ceremony.
But there was none of that here. One moment the Queen was nowhere in sight, and the next she stepped out of a passageway and into the brilliant sunlight on the carpet.
There was no doubt who she was. She was taller than most of them, and older, with some white feathers among the eagle-brown of her plumage, but it was mainly something in her bearing, a grandeur and confidence, a steady luminous authority that compelled their respect.
Malcolm realized at once that they would both have to be very careful indeed. Who had cut out the servant’s tongue?
He moved as if to make room for her, but in fact so as to stand fully in the sunlight. Then he bowed and said very clearly:
“Your Majesty, my name is Malcolm, and my companion is Pan. I offer you greetings from my land.”
“You did not come here to do that,” she said. Her voice was harsh, as an eagle’s would be, but rich with an almost human expressiveness. Again Malcolm thought: Careful.
“No, Your Majesty. Your people rescued me and my companion from great danger, for which we are deeply grateful. We are traveling eastwards far from our own country to look for something precious that was lost. I think we shall have much further to travel before we can find it.”
“My attendant Gulya has told me some things I find hard to understand. What is this precious thing that is lost?”
“Imagination,” said Malcolm.
“Explain that to me.”
“May I speak, Your Majesty?” said Pan.
The Queen turned to him. Gulya, standing nearby, was absolutely still, but Malcolm thought he could see in her wide eyes the terror she must have been feeling. Pan stepped forward into the sunlight next to Malcolm.
“Do you know what this imagination is, then?” the Queen said.
“I believe you have two kingdoms, Your Majesty, an outer kingdom and an inner one. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“We human beings—or some of us—believe the same. Some of us don’t, but many of us do. The way we move between the outer kingdom and the inner one is the imagination.”
The Queen seemed to be pondering this. Her head moved gently as she looked from Pan to Malcolm, to the courtiers around her, to the great mountains beyond the terrace.
Her gaze came back to Pan.
“You have all lost this thing?”
“No,” he said. “Just the human girl who is the other part of me. It’s her imagination we’re going to seek.”
Malcolm remembered the folded pages Ionides had given him under the orange tree of the villa: the speech Marcel Delamare had given, or was going to give, about The imagination, a false, seductive, and dangerous doctrine.
Did the gryphons really not know anything about the imagination? Or did they have another word for it?
The Queen spoke again. “And you want to continue this search?”
“More than anything else, Your Majesty.”
Another silence, as she looked at the vizier, and at Gulya, and at Pan, and back to Malcolm again.
“And I hear you are a craftsman,” she said. “An artificer.”
“In the realms of gold from which I come, the artificer is the highest-ranking person in the kingdom.”
She nodded slowly, seeming to consider the matter.
“That is right,” she said. “Well, Artificer Malcolm, you may stay here until you have performed a task for me. I have an item in my treasury that is damaged. You will work on it for me. Restore it to its original state, and we shall convey you anywhere in the world you wish to go. Until I am satisfied, you will remain here.”
She nodded, and the vizier stood aside for a man in a jeweler’s apron to come forward. He was holding something in a cloth. He laid it on the carpet and lifted the cloth aside, and both Pan and Malcolm felt a shock of surprise.
The object was about the size of Malcolm’s hand.
It was made of shining gold, crushed and twisted and torn.
There was a dial of ivory, cracked in half, and various wheels and cogs and levers, some loose and hanging out, and it was clear that it would never work again, but there was no doubt. It was—it had been—an alethiometer.