Chapter Nineteen Arctic Healing #2
“The blood came from inside you anyway, and what is not blood is krovlishaynik, which will do you good.”
Pan brought her a horn cup, and she scooped out a little of the water. He sat up as best he could and drank it down at once, and was nearly sick. It was foul, bitter, with a metallic taint.
“Keep still,” she said.
He swallowed and controlled his impulse to vomit, breathing deeply.
“What did you talk about with the Queen?” he said.
“Royal matters. They choose their queens as we do.”
“Always a queen gryphon, not a king?”
“They have kings. This time they chose a queen.”
“But the other matter, the one you came here to talk about…”
“Yes. They are angry without knowing more than they do now. They want nothing to change, but the world is changing around them, and they know it and fear it. So we agree, and make alliance.”
“You did? Congratulations.”
“Need to act soon too. I’ve sent for my sisters.”
“Do you know what the Magisterium is doing?”
“Not in detail. Those explosions, for one thing. And separately they are moving large numbers of soldiers eastward, by rail, by road. Not by air. We shall command the sky, witches and gryphons together.”
“Eastward? You know where, exactly?”
“We hear rumors about a desert and a moving lake.”
“Lop Nor. Half swamp, half desert, with streams that change their courses overnight.”
“You been there?”
“Yes, once. Very hard to navigate, and nothing to see on the other side, or so I thought.”
“Other side?”
“An arid desert with a building at the heart of it. I guess that’s where the Magisterium forces are heading. Can you tell me more about the places where these explosions happen?”
“Mostly no, because they happen on the ground, in forests or mountains, where witches seldom go. Always wild places.”
“Are they holy places for you? Magic places?”
“For us, not always. For men and women on the ground, maybe.”
“And always in wild places? Never in a city or a village?”
“Maybe. There are many of them, it seems. What you told us—the information from your Oakley commander—brought it all together for me and for Queen Shahrnavāz. I shall speak to her again at sunrise, and you will come with me. Now you sleep.”
Perhaps it was the bloodmoss, perhaps it was the shock his body had undergone during the witch’s surgery, but something was weighing heavily on Malcolm’s eyelids, and he had no desire to remain awake. He pulled one of the furs over himself and closed his eyes.
—
Pan watched it all with his heart beating fast. When it was over and the witch was sitting between him and Malcolm on the furs, he said to her, “Is your daemon still out in the sky?”
“He’s gone to fetch my sisters,” she said quietly. “He will return to me soon.”
“When you’re apart, can you think together?”
“No more than you can.”
“I don’t know any people who can separate, apart from Malcolm.”
“Neither do I, apart from all the witches.”
“Do you know…” He hesitated, because he wasn’t sure whether there was a rule of courtesy that forbade such questions, but he went on, “Do you know a witch called Serafina Pekkala?”
“I did, but she is dead now.”
“No…” It struck Pan hard. He felt breathless and faint. “When?” he whispered.
“Seventeen moons ago. She was killed by a missionary.”
“A missionary? In the Arctic?”
“The Magisterium is becoming more aggressive. All their intentions are bad.”
Pan thought: I must tell Lyra before she hears it from anyone else. And Farder Coram…
“When a witch dies, do you bury her?” he said, and then, “I’m sorry to be inquisitive. But Lyra and I loved Serafina Pekkala very much. If there’s a grave, she’d want to visit and say goodbye.”
“No graves in the far north. The soil is frozen. We leave her in a high place and the birds of the air clean her bones. I loved her too.”
“What happened to the missionary?”
“Her clan killed him and everyone with him.”
“Why did he kill her in the first place?”
“What I heard, and I believe it to be true, is that he knew that witches take human lovers, and proposed such an arrangement between himself and Serafina Pekkala. She refused him in disgust, and told her clan to avoid him and impede his work, and he took the first chance he could and shot her.”
They sat silently for a while. The only sounds were those of the wind buffeting the mountain and rattling the shutters, and the soft hiss of the earth-fire burning in the alcove.
“Does your Lyra love this man?” said Tilda Vasara quietly, looking at the sleeping Malcolm.
“I think she might. But it would be love of a strange kind. When we were young, he was her teacher for a short time, and she behaved badly. Even I could see that. He was patient and clever and agreed that he should withdraw and someone else should teach her. But she behaved badly with them too. I could see it and I didn’t like it but she didn’t listen to me.
She was just unhappy. Confused about everything.
And then we met Malcolm again in different circumstances. She began to see him differently.”
“And how does he feel?”
“Well, he hasn’t talked about it at all, though we’ve hardly had the chance for that sort of conversation. He might not want to tell me. I think Malcolm might feel…very careful. If he loved Lyra, he’d never say it, because she’s so much younger.”
“How much younger?”
“Eleven years, I think.”
“Do you know how absurd that sounds, to a witch four hundred years old? Smaller than the clipping of a fingernail. I’ve been in love many times, and each time with a man centuries younger than myself, who lived no longer than a mayfly; and each time I wished no more than to be a mayfly too, and grow old and die at the same pace as my lover.
In the end the sorrow wears us out. This Malcolm and your Lyra are close enough.
Why did you say that their love would be of a strange kind? ”
“Because neither of them would want to be the first to declare it. They would feel very formal. I think they respect each other a lot.”
“There are no rules. Love can grow even when people respect each other. But they should remember that even if they live for another sixty years, that is not a long time.”
“Are there no men witches, who age as slowly as you do?”
“Not in this world. Now take this.” She reached up to the coronet of little yellow flowers, and took one from the rest, and handed it to him. “You will meet trouble,” she said. “Keep this somewhere safe, and when you need help, take it out and hold it up to the sky.”
Pan took it, and immediately an idea came to him, stark and clear and blazing like a comet. And he held up the flower.
“You want my help now?”
“Yes. Could you fly me if I clung to your pine branch?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Can you fly me to Tashbulak?”
“You mean the research station in the desert?”
“Yes, in case Lyra’s arrived there. And then on to the red building.”
Tilda said nothing for a minute. Pan thought she was going to ignore him, as if he was a child wanting a sweet.
Then: “When?” she said.
“Now.”
“You going to tell him?” She looked at the sleeping Malcolm.
“No. He’ll guess.”
“You think? Don’t betray him. You must leave a message.”
Pan saw that was true, and although his paws weren’t formed for holding a pencil, he did his best. He crouched over a piece of paper on the table and wrote:
MALCOLM.
SORRY BUT GONE WITH TILDA VASARA TO TASHBULAK AND RED BUILDING.
GULYA WILL HELP.
PAN
The witch wrote her own note and then took up her branch of cloud-pine, torn from the trunk at one end, thick with cones and needles at the other, and held it out. Pan sprang onto it and clung tight, and a few moments later they were in the buffeting air above the mountain, and flying east.
—
And Lyra was awake. The tempest that was howling around the mountains at the south of the Caspian Sea had a number of offspring further to the north, born from a sudden collapse in the air pressure over the whole region—storms lesser in size but even more intense, which lashed the water and hurled the waves against the shore, against one another, against the rain-filled air, against every vessel whose skipper was reckless enough to take to the water, and in particular, battering the Transcaspian Modern Ferry as it crossed the narrowest part of the sea between Baku and Krasnovodsk.
Lyra lay in her bunk, suffering the rolling and plunging of the boat, the constant rumble of the engines, and the smash of the waves as they broke against the porthole of her little cabin.
The movement took her back to the first sea voyage she’d ever made, with the gyptians to Trollesund, and to her discomfort in the German Ocean.
Pan shared it then, though it didn’t seem that Asta did now.
Perhaps Pan was suffering elsewhere. She remembered how much better she’d felt on that first journey when she went out on deck, and after a particularly sickly plunge now she thought she’d try the same remedy, so she wrapped herself up as warmly as she could and left Asta to guard the cabin while she went out to let the winds blow her unease away.
Odd, she thought, how she hadn’t felt that sort of discomfort on the ferry from King’s Lynn.
Perhaps the winds were fiercer here in the Caspian.
They certainly felt it. At any rate, she was the only passenger on deck, and she found a bench near the lifeboats where she could sit fairly comfortably and watch the white-capped waves and the occasional shudder of lightning in the heavy clouds.
She hadn’t sat there long when she felt rather than saw another presence on the bench beside her.
And she wasn’t startled, and she felt no fear. The presence wasn’t a person, or a night-ghast, or a memory, or a dream: she felt a calm certainty that the presence was benevolent, that it knew who she was, and that she could trust it completely.
“Who are you?” she said.