Chapter Twenty The Sermon #3
He thought of his old friend the General, standing in the forest listening with longing to the bells and the songs of fairyland.
The noise from the congregation had risen; everyone seemed to be voicing a strong opinion, or asking an urgent question, or hurrying to get outside and tell this astonishing news to family or friends or a wide readership.
“I wonder if the Council will be summoned to discuss this business,” said Duclos. “It’s a declaration of war, but war against…who? What? Are we supposed to support it?”
“We don’t need to be summoned,” Parmentier pointed out. “All of us are here now, as far as I can see. But…”
He wasn’t sure what he could say next, and in any case the moment was lost. Around them the congregation was alive with voices, and movement, and small groups gathered in fierce discussion or anxious speculation were holding up those who simply wanted to get out.
Parmentier tried to look along to the aisle, peering to both sides and standing on tiptoe in order to see what his fellow Council members were doing, but it was no good; the press was too great.
“What shall we do?” he whispered to his daemon as she perched on his shoulder.
“Just go home,” she said. “Concentrate on getting outside and then go straight to the station.”
He’d already lost sight of Mariette Seidel, and by now the professor of classical ethics was some way off towards the main door, his gaunt bald head visible as he moved steadily through the crowd.
He might make a good ally, thought Parmentier, and decided to write to him, if he could remember which university he belonged to.
Slowly and steadily, though with many holdups and apologies and a certain amount of jostling, Parmentier reached the main doors and left for the station.
—
Malcolm read Pan’s note with a little shock of disappointment, but no sense of betrayal.
He knew Pan had to continue his quest, but he’d grown used to his companionship, the sharp observations he made, the tone of his affectionate half-teasing that was so like the Lyra Malcolm had just begun to know before she left Oxford…
Of course, because they were one being. And now he was on his own.
He got up and moved around for the sake of exercise.
His leg was painful, but less stiff. Before she left, Tilda Vasara had given him her few remaining shreds of bloodmoss and left a note instructing him to keep moving and not stay too long in one position; but he wanted to finish his gold-working, and—well, now he’d have to remind himself to stand up and walk about every half hour or so.
He had taken the crumpled remains of the alethiometer’s case and beaten it flat, and after another visit to the indentured goldsmith and the loan of a few more tools, he had begun to work it into a circlet.
The metal was pure and highly malleable; beating it and twisting it was easier than he’d anticipated.
Gulya liked to sit and watch as the gold spread finely under his hammer; she was naturally curious about where Pan and Tilda Vasara had gone, but she was a gryphon, after all, and the sight of the metal held her mesmerized.
Malcolm watched her without seeming to, and one day when she was held fast he said, “Gulya, tell me about the sorcerer and why he put a spell on you.”
The little gryphon said, “Ah. It is my shame and my sorrow. He has a forge in the mountains—in a cavern—a place where rubies grow. I found my way there when I was young and stupid. I thought I could take his gold, knowing the rumors about the immense hoard he’d gathered, and realizing that if he harvested rubies he would also need the gold that is the best setting for them.
I thought I could fight him and carry off his gold to present to Queen Shahrnavāz, but I was not strong enough.
He defeated me with the aid of a magic mirror and bound me in cords of djinn-fire.
Then he asked me about the defenses of this mountain and the Queen’s palace, but I would say nothing.
“I lay there bound for three days and nights. He drew the cords tighter and tighter, and compressed my body till it was the size you see now. I am still bound. All the fire-spirits in the cavern were laughing at me, mocking, jeering, as my heart burned and my body shrank, and the poor wingless slaves could only watch in pity. They too were bound, or they would have torn him to pieces and set me free.”
“Did you see his gold?” said Malcolm.
“Yes, uncountable numbers of ingots, coins, medallions, chains…Gold of the finest quality. It is the richest treasury I have ever seen, apart from our Queen’s.”
“Does the Queen know about it?”
“Yes. They are old enemies, but neither can defeat the other. They keep a distance.”
“And where is his cavern?”
“North of Baku, in the Caucasus.”
“Could you find it again?”
Gulya looked at him. It was never easy to make out the play of expression on a gryphon’s face: incredulity looked like anger, which looked like scorn, which looked like laughter, which looked like sorrow, which looked like…
“Of course,” she said. “He’s not hiding. It’s easy to see where his forge is. You can see it blazing from miles around, from the sky, from the ground, from the sea.”
“And you won’t be free from this curse till you kill him, is that right?”
“That’s right. But what are you thinking?”
“I don’t know yet,” he admitted. “Gathering information, that’s all. This magic mirror—tell me about that, Gulya.”
In the little gryphon’s mind her own story had already assumed the proportions of a myth.
“He wears it like a shield,” she told him.
“You try to look at him, and all you see is yourself. But he can bend it to make you seem very small and pitiable or very large and…also pitiable. Ridiculous. You seem to be fighting yourself. Remember, I was young but I was full-grown. It would have been hard to fight him, and I might not have won, but it was not impossible. I was bewildered by my own reflection, and too inexperienced to overcome it, and so he and his koruskati caught me and bound me with djinn-fire.”
“What are these koruskati?” Malcolm asked.
“Little imp-things like sparks. They sting and bite and fly too quickly to catch.”
“And the sorcerer, did he ever put down his magic shield?”
“Yes, but there was nothing to see. He is invisible.”
“What was his name?”
“Sorush,” said Gulya.
“Ah,” Malcolm said, sounding satisfied.
He turned to rummage in his rucksack until he found the tattered copy of the poem Jahan and Rukhsana and sat down on the pile of furs to look through it.
He was intent on finding a passage in the story where Rukhsana had to defeat a sorcerer, or a fire-god, whose name…Yes! There it was: Sorush. Malcolm smiled with pleasure, and read on.
In the story, Rukhsana had been abandoned as a baby by her wicked father, who left her on a mountainside because an astrologer had told him falsely that his wife would bear a son.
The child would have died, but the great bird the Simurgh, who lived for several thousand years and knew all the wisdom in the world, heard her crying and carried the baby away, intending to feed her chicks on the child’s flesh; but when she dropped Rukhsana in her nest, the chicks and the Simurgh herself all cried out in wonder at her beauty.
The great bird enfolded the baby in her wings and suckled her, for she was part mammal.
Rukhsana grew up with the Simurgh’s chicks as her brothers and sisters.
When she was grown, one of her sister chicks was stolen by the sorcerer Sorush.
Because Rukhsana had promised to look after her, she went in search of the villain, and found him in his cavernous lair in the Caucasus, which was filled with all manner of gold and precious stones and blazing with the fire of his forge.
Sorush was invulnerable to everything on the earth or under it, but the light of the moon would weaken him at once, so he took endless precautions to stay away from it.
Rukhsana, knowing this, had made an amulet out of silver in the shape of the crescent moon, and engraved it with magic words. Holding this, she managed to overcome the fire-fiend and return her sister chick to the Simurgh before returning to her quest to find Jahan.
Malcolm looked up.
“Gulya,” he said, “has your queen got any silver in her treasury?”
She had. The gryphons didn’t care for it; it tarnished, it was the wrong color, it was second-best. But some of the gold they had acquired was in the form of alloys, either naturally occurring or human-made, and one of the commonest was a gold-silver mixture called electrum.
The indentured jeweler, Tamaz Khuroshvili, told Malcolm about it.
Speaking through Gulya, and with the extra difficulty caused by the loss of his tongue, Khuroshvili explained that in the time before trade was invented the gryphons threw the silver away, finding it merely ugly.
But when they realized that human beings found the silver desirable, they began to exchange it for work or for services that men and women could perform, or for goods they couldn’t make themselves.
All the building work in the mountain, the tunneling, the plumbing, the fire-channels, had been paid for with silver.
So the metal did have a value for them, and they wouldn’t part with it carelessly.
Malcolm explained what he wanted: enough silver to make a small amulet in the form of the crescent moon—small, but big enough to be seen clearly from a fighting distance, and with fixings for a chain or a cord.