Chapter Fifteen An Island in the Flood
Fifteen
An Island in the Flood
Malcolm and Pan were at the worktable in their quarters.
They had an oil light burning on the table because the sky was dark with heavy restless clouds, and gusts of wind made the shutters shake and the lamp flame shiver.
Malcolm, a rug around his shoulders for warmth, was making progress with the alethiometer; he had taken the mechanism out, with great difficulty because the case was so distorted, and he was surprised to find it quite uncomplicated.
The three wheels were connected to the three hands on the dial with simple gears that were luckily still intact.
He could find no mechanism that moved the needle, but since the needle was missing, the matter was irrelevant for the moment.
“When she moved the hands,” he said to Pan, “did the needle move at all?”
“No. It just sort of hung there. If the glass hadn’t been there, it looked as if you could just blow on it and it would turn around.
It only moved when she thought about the question and when the hands were in the right positions to ask it.
Then it looked as if—well, it looked as if it moved all by itself, without any machinery.
It didn’t wobble or drift or swing loose.
It always looked alive to us, the way a clock doesn’t look alive. Is there no mechanism for it?”
“No. It seems to have swung freely. Maybe there’s something missing, but I can’t even see a place for any missing mechanism to go. Is there a piece of silk in the cedar chest? A scarf, a shawl, something like that?”
Pan jumped into the chest and rummaged among the things there. “Here you are. Black too, like the cloth Lyra always used to wrap it in.” He leapt back up to the table.
“I’m going to keep the mechanism aside,” Malcolm explained, wrapping it carefully in the cloth. “Not mention it to the Queen. It’s not gold, so she wouldn’t be interested anyway. Later on I’ll study it more closely, but for the moment—”
“Look,” said Pan. “Words again.”
He was looking at the resonating lodestone, which was lying next to the tools on the table. Glenys Godwin’s words were appearing as they watched. Malcolm picked it up, and Pan came to perch next to his arm and read it under the lamplight.
“ ‘Betrayed…’ ” Malcolm read aloud. “That’s bad. Damn it! If she had time to write this, she must have got away, but…And here I am stuck on a bloody mountain. ‘Straighten up and fly right’? What’s that mean?”
“It’s a song about a buzzard and a monkey. She must mean us and the gryphons.”
“She’s going to pass her stone on to someone else. I hope to hell she manages to…”
Malcolm closed his eyes. His temples were throbbing, and he could sense the anbaric crackle and flicker just under the threshold of perception that often announced the appearance of the spangled ring, his migraine aurora, as he’d once thought it was called.
Perhaps it was because they were so high on the mountain, but the pressure of the atmosphere seemed to have dropped rapidly.
Then Pan said, “There’s a storm coming.”
He’d jumped up onto the parapet, where the wind raised his fur with invisible fingers.
Malcolm joined him, wrapping the rug around himself against the bitter cold, and watched as clouds like mountains darkened and loomed over the high horizon, and theatrical beams of sunlight flared and burst free for a few moments to touch this snowy summit or that one so that they glared and vanished like signal lights.
A powerful blast of wind reached their eyrie, shockingly sudden, and threatened to topple Pan from the balustrade. Malcolm’s hand reached out at once and held him for a moment, and then he took it away. Neither of them mentioned it.
Lightning, with a thousand forks and rivulets, lashed the black air ahead of them; and three seconds later the thunder exploded, making the mountains ring with echoes and shaking the very substance of the earth.
Pan usually loved storms, and Malcolm enjoyed them too, as long as he was not on the water in a boat, and the immense mass of Damāvand should have been a mighty enough shelter.
But they both felt the walls of their little room shudder and tremble when the next roll of thunder came, this time simultaneously with the dazzle of the lightning.
“What are they doing?” Pan cried, and he had to cry out or not be heard at all, because a monsoon’s worth of rain had begun to pelt the mountain, with the sound of a hundred thousand hooves on hard ground.
“What? Who?” Malcolm shouted back, trying to see where Pan was pointing.
“Gryphons! Flying out into the storm!”
“Where? Oh, yes—five or six of them—surely they can’t fly in this—”
But they were, struggling, beating their massive wings, surging up only to drop suddenly as if into an abyss, and then beating their way up again, like swimmers in a stormy sea, fighting with every breath and heartbeat.
“Where are they going?” Pan shouted.
It wasn’t unusual to see them flying around the mountain, keeping watch, or bearing messages, or bringing news from the outer kingdom, but it was unexpected to see them risking their lives—as they must have been—in such a storm as this.
Malcolm and Pan shaded their eyes from the dashing rain and followed the unsteady flight of the five or so gryphons past the cliffs and chasms of the storm, which had grown from a local darkening of the air to a vast convulsion in a matter of minutes.
Most of the light they saw by came from the frequent explosions of lightning, but from time to time a great rent would appear in the clouds, and as if from another planet a beam of sunlight would strike down into the roiling mass of vapor and darkness.
It was in the light of one such beam that Malcolm saw another figure, much smaller than the gryphons, speeding forward through the storm, making for the mountain, dropping down only to be borne up again on a wild current of air, sliding sideways and darting through the turbulence like a minnow in a stream.
“Look!” Malcolm shouted over the screaming of the wind.
In the same moment Pan saw, and cried, “A witch! A witch!”
Malcolm strained his eyes, frowning, squinting against the wind, dashing the rain away from his eyes.
“Yes—I can see her now—they’re going to attack her!”
The five or so gryphons were struggling in the air at least as much as the witch, because their great wings were more easily caught by the savage gusts of wind than the little figure on her cloud-pine branch, who was speeding like a swallow through the gulfs and canyons of the sky.
But they were powerful. She was riding on the storm, but they were smashing through it. And she was in their sights; she was their target.
“One of them…” said Pan, and Malcolm held his breath, because the first gryphon had flown close enough to reach out a claw and slash at her; but he had to rear back in the air to do it, and a gust of wind caught him and threw him aside.
The witch was reaching for something behind her shoulder—they could only see by the flashes of lightning—and then she had a bow in her hands, and shot an arrow at the next gryphon to rear up close.
He fell back. They could hear his scream of rage and pain, and then he fell, spiraling downwards towards a pinnacle of rock and smashing into it with a force they could almost feel.
Pan was clutching Malcolm’s arm, and neither of them knew it.
Instead, all the force of their attention was focused on the little figure of the witch, swooping up and diving down again to avoid the slashing claws of the gryphons, who were enraged now.
Arrow after arrow she shot, and most of them sailed harmlessly away in the wind; but another one found its target in the throat of a gryphon who tried to dive on her from above.
Screaming, he lost control of his flight and just missed her as he fell.
She twisted out of the way but then found the remaining gryphons closing in, and dropped her bow to seize the pine branch in both hands and wrench it up towards the summit—towards their window, with its glowing light—towards the parapet, with the three gryphons straining up after her, buffeted and bowled sideways but always behind her, always surging up, their mighty wings striking at the air and slamming it behind them, their eagle beaks wide to tear the flesh that was so close—
“This way! This way!” Pan cried, and Malcolm reached out over the precipice, clinging to the parapet, calling with Pan, and the witch was nearly close enough to grab his hand. Just below, just behind, those glaring eyes, monstrous and inhuman, and screams and roars of fury—
“Take my hand! Now!” Malcolm shouted, hurling his voice into the wind, and seized her outstretched right hand, pulling her up and over the parapet as the first gryphon reared up and snatched at the balustrade with giant claws, lion claws, but they slipped and lost their grip in the lashing rain, and the massive creature was blown aside by a rush of air as heavy as a tidal wave.
The witch and Malcolm both fell to the floor, and Pan caught her slender pine branch as the wind lifted it, and dragged it over the parapet and into the quiet of the room.
Malcolm’s wound was hurting badly: he had wrenched his hip as he pulled the witch to safety. He struggled up and turned to help her.
He was thinking: A witch…Such a strange being. He’d never been so close—never even seen…