Chapter Eighteen Noli Me Tangere #3
The dial’s broken, but I’ve taken it out together with the movement and I’m beating the gold case into another shape. The Queen’s only interested in the gold. I’ll keep the important parts and set it all in another case later.
And I’ve got the needle and the glass!
As she wrote the words she heard the ferry’s whistle sound, and felt a slight motion as the engines began to turn the screw. She looked out through the porthole and saw the quayside and the buildings beyond seem to move slowly away as the ferry steamed out into the open sea.
More words appeared in her stone:
Ionides—is he with you?
Yes. So much to tell you I don’t know where to start. Do you know him, then?
He came to me in Aleppo and then took me to the embassy garden, where you were asleep.
The day the gryphons took you.
Yes.
Was Pan with you then?
No. Already with the gryphons.
He was in al Khan al—can’t spell it, just before I was there. When the gryphon snatched up the man holding the alethiometer and flew away. It’s been stolen and stolen again and again.
I stole it from Bonneville in the flood.
Of course you did! And then gave it to me!
Asta said, “Ask him how he’s going to get away.”
Lyra wrote: Asta wants to know how you’re going to get away. So do I.
The answer came. On the back of a gryphon. Pan knows how to talk to them. Krasno—where?
Krasnovodsk. Other side of the Caspian. When will you finish the gold beating?
Another day or so. Oh—and a witch is here. She is trying to make an alliance between her people and the gryphons, first time ever. To fight the Magisterium, because their troops are already moving east.
Lyra paused to take that in.
There’s just so much, she wrote, and stopped. But I’m holding you up. You must make that gold thing. Isn’t it wonderful to talk, though? This stone won’t suddenly stop working, will it?
I don’t think so, and yes, it’s wonderful. The stones are called “resonating lodestones,” apparently. Glenys Godwin of Oakley St. sent mine to me. No idea where they come from originally.
A bell rang in Lyra’s mind. The Gallivespians—the world of the dead—they had devices like this to talk to their commander, who was somewhere else—
I think I know, she wrote. But later. She hesitated and then wrote: Be careful and work well. Love, Lyra.
Perhaps that was too much. But it was too late; the words were already fading. The ferry gathered speed as it sailed out onto the Caspian Sea.
—
Georges Parmentier, the parish priest from the eastern end of the lake, was so exceedingly modest that even his shrew daemon sometimes found him timid.
When she said so, his response was to apologize, which irritated her; but she was too good-natured to reproach him for it.
He couldn’t help it, and she understood that.
The life they lived in the modest parish house in a quiet suburb was orderly, chaste, and simple.
He had little idea how much his parishioners liked and valued him, how much his superiors trusted him, how far his reputation reached.
He had been profoundly taken aback to find himself first on the High Council, and now in the small faction that seemed to have formed itself almost chemically to oppose whatever the President was doing—if he understood it rightly.
His capacity for understanding things was something else he was modest about.
“What should we do, Sylvie?” he said as he sipped his morning tisane in the little garden. It wasn’t summer yet, but the day was already sunny and the warmth under the walnut tree was very pleasant.
“Find things out,” said his daemon. “Of course.”
“Yes, yes, no doubt about that. But where to start? What to ask about first?”
“What do we dislike most?”
“The Council. I should never have agreed to join.”
“No, you shouldn’t have. You didn’t want to, so you did it in order to feel that you were sacrificing yourself again.”
“Oh, no, no, don’t exaggerate. It was something I felt I should do, in spite of the discomfort.”
“I know. But you did have the choice.”
“And now this…group.”
“They asked you to join. They wanted you.”
“And already they’re plotting against the President.”
“Now you’re exaggerating.”
“I don’t think so.”
She climbed down his trouser leg and probed the grass for insects. She snapped up an ant and said, “You felt uneasy with him, and now you feel uneasy against him?”
“Yes, I did. I do. This business with an explosion—I don’t understand it, and I want to know why it’s happening. Like the others yesterday.”
“Go and see the General.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
She scampered back up his leg and confronted him sternly from his knee. “No, you hoped I’d say that,” she snapped. “Finish your tisane—it’s cold now anyway—and go and see him at once.”
This must be what living in a marriage is like, in a small kind of way, he thought for the thousandth time, washing and drying his teacup.
Celibacy was not a requirement under the Magisterium, but it was implied very clearly during his training for ordination that marriage was a second-best way of living.
Even a humble parish priest would be better able to serve the Authority without the complications and distractions of a wife and children.
But it wasn’t a natural way of living, he thought very secretly; the stern fondness between him and his daemon was the most important thing in his life, but a kindly woman, warm and gentle and understanding, soft-fleshed…
Enough of that. He had to see the General. Sylvie had said so.
—
“It’s about a military matter,” he said to the maidservant who answered his knock.
She had never learned his name. She viewed him with contempt because he had never been a soldier.
“The General’s busy,” she said, as she did every time he called.
“I expect he is. I won’t take up much of his time.”
She stood aside grudgingly. Her weasel daemon scowled at him from her apron pocket.
He wiped his feet and followed her down the unlit corridor to the study door.
“Send him in,” the General called before she knocked.
The maid opened the door and let Parmentier go in, watching him as if he were a vagabond.
“Saw you coming up the drive,” said the old man, standing up to shake hands. “How are you, Padre?”
He was dressed stiffly, in a thick tweed suit and polished brogues, tight collar and regimental tie.
Parmentier was fond of him; General Ravignac was a respecter of traditions and duties and persons.
His bulky, wheezy spaniel daemon opened an eye from her armchair and thumped her tail twice on the cushion before closing the eye again.
“How are your memoirs coming along, General?”
The General waved a vague hand at the confusion of papers on his desk and came to join Parmentier by the fireside. “Too much of it,” he said. “Too many memories.”
“Then you’re fortunate. Some people have fewer and fewer.”
“Can’t decide what’s important, you see. Things that made an impression on me, things I managed to do…What should go in, what should stay out? I don’t know. You know my strongest memory?”
“Tell me.”
“Girl I failed to kiss. Even failed to say a word to her. Struck dumb, you see. Most beautiful girl I ever saw, or ever have seen since…I was, oh, eighteen. Dance at some big house—simply didn’t have the nerve.”
“Ah, regret. Somebody said it’s the things we don’t do that we regret most of all.”
“Well, I shall never know, unless there’s an afterlife. Maybe we’ll be punished more for the things we didn’t do than the things we did. Is there a theological view of that, Padre?”
“Almost certainly, but I don’t know what it might be. General, I wonder if you’ve ever come across an officer of the Guard who was seen recently in Les Diablerets. I think his name might be Schreiber, or possibly Schneider.”
The old man’s eyes widened very briefly. “You don’t mean the careless fool who killed the forester?”
“I didn’t know anyone was killed. Was there an explosion involved?”
The General sat forward. “Yes, there was. How do you know about it?”
Parmentier had anticipated the question. “I’m a member of the new Council, you know, the Magisterial President’s High Council. The matter came up in a subcommittee. I thought I should find out what’s behind it.”
“You couldn’t ask the chief?”
“Monsieur Delamare? I really want to save his time. What happened to this forester?”
“Blown to pieces, poor chap. Someone from the nearest village saw a man in a Bataillon Alpin beret coming down shortly afterwards.”
“And this was at Les Diablerets?”
“Somewhere in a steep bit of forest above the village.”
“Did anyone investigate?”
“No. There’s what they call an NMT order in place. Don’t touch me, you know.”
“NMT…Noli me tangere. Well! I’d never heard of that.”
“Few people have. It’s a thing they issue to journalists: don’t print anything about this. No one’s to speak about it, or write anything. I wouldn’t know about it, no one in the general public would, but the village policeman in Les Diablerets is an old chum, and he lets me know what’s going on.”
“That’s very interesting. Could this soldier have been testing a new kind of bomb?”
“That’s what I’d guess.”
“Was anything known about the spot where it went off?”
The General frowned. Parmentier didn’t want to tire the old man, who was looking distracted and anxious.
“All very troubling,” said the priest gently.
“Tell you one thing, though. A man came to see me a year or two ago—English fellow, Beaming, Beamish maybe—scholar of some sort. He came here because he’d heard I grew up near Les Diablerets, and he was looking for a particular spot—some geological formation, something like that.
Or was it the atmosphere? I didn’t really understand what he wanted, so I couldn’t help.
But you know, there always used to be a story when I was a boy—story about a door into fairyland up on the mountain, in the forest. Told him about it.
Lot of nonsense, of course—old women’s tales—never found it myself, nor met anyone who did. ”
“Did you look for it, when you were young?”
“Well, might have done once or twice. Never found it. You could hear something, though, on dark nights. Singing, and bells. Not from the village. Nothing like the church or the inn, nothing like the everyday sounds we knew. Infinitely distant, and…Excuse me…”
He shook out a well-ironed handkerchief and dabbed his eyes. The old soldier was weeping. Parmentier said nothing and waited till the General cleared his throat and put the handkerchief away.
“Damned old fool,” he muttered. “Sorry, Padre. Caught myself by surprise. The singing was unearthly beautiful. Couldn’t speak of it then; other boys would laugh.
I only heard it twice, and I longed to hear it again.
Like the girl at the ball. Same sort of feeling.
Almost as if everything beautiful was in another world, and there was a doorway, and if only I could find it… ”
Parmentier pictured his friend, the arthritis-crippled old soldier, the hero of the Siege of Monterrey, in his campaign tent on the eve of battle with the army sleeping around him; some of his men, no doubt, were praying, and others, no doubt, were drunk; and the young officer sleepless with longing for a girl whose beauty had stunned him into silence, and for singing voices and bells from another world, which had broken his heart.
The General cleared his throat again. “Sorry, old friend,” he said gruffly. “Not much help to you this morning.”
Parmentier said nothing for a minute or so, and then said, “You mentioned the soldier with the beret. Bataillon Alpin, you said?”
“There used to be a regiment called the Chasseurs Alpins. Had a particular kind of beret—unmistakable. Black. This chap was wearing one, apparently. He had a badge—I didn’t recognize it when the witness described it to me—a little Roman sort of lamp with a flame at the wick.
Probably engineers or something. Army’s all mixed up now; I don’t understand half of it. ”
“Ah, well…Do we know anything about the man who was killed? The forester?”
“No. They assume he’s dead; no body or anything. Just an explosion, and never seen again.”
“Perhaps he found the doorway into the land of the bells and the singing.”
The General grunted.
“Didn’t the police make any inquiries?” Parmentier went on.
“NMT.”
“Ah yes, I see…Who issues an NMT order, do you know?”
“It used to be a body called La Maison Juste. But now…” The General blew out his cheeks and made an elaborate shrug. “Better be careful,” he said. “The public’s not supposed to know about that kind of thing.”
La Maison Juste, thought the priest. Delamare.
He stood up stiffly and shook hands with the old man.
“Forgive me for not seeing you to the door, my friend,” the General said. “It’s always good to talk to you. Come again soon.”