Chapter Twenty-Nine Kilkenny Aflame #2
He watched the way she rode the air. There was something birdlike about it, the apparently unconscious leaning this way or dipping down for a moment, raising her shoulders for a brief change of angle that caught the wind and lifted them up; gliding, never straining.
The wind did the work. He felt her grip on the branch as well, now twisting a degree or two, now pulling up a little, now pushing it forward and down—not much—just enough to take advantage of a current or an updraft, and all done with as little rational thought, it seemed, as a fish darting through the sea.
The witch and the pine together were the flying being, not either separately.
She explained to him once that it benefited the pine too, because its seeds were dispersed by the wind, and flying was the best way to make sure it spread widely.
Pan remembered Lyra telling him something similar about the world of the mulefa, who rode on wheels that were giant seedpods that could only germinate if they were shaken out by the hard riding—or something. He’d tell her soon.
Sometime later, as they were flying down into the foothills of the southern edge of the Tien Shan, Pan fell asleep and let go of the branch.
The first he knew about it was a scream from the witch’s daemon, the tern, who was flying beside them. He woke at once with a sense of shame and terror, and cried out, but after only a moment he felt himself scooped into the witch’s arm.
“Wake up, stupid,” she said.
“Oh, I’m awake now. Did I…”
“Just don’t sleep in the air.”
“I’m sorry…”
“You holding tight?”
“Yes. Thank you, Tilda.”
“You got your eyes open now?”
“Wide open.”
“Look ahead at the mountain with the round top. Not a high mountain—more of a hill. See the little patch of green past the left shoulder?”
“Yes…I think so. Yes.”
“That’s where we want to go. Soon be there, so stay awake, idiot.”
“I will.”
“Next time, I let you go.”
“Quite right.”
They were already nearly out of the mountains.
The view ahead, beyond the hill with the round top, was one of an infinite expanse of sand: brown-yellow-white-buff in waves and ridges and dunes and hollows too far away to make out, but extending to the far-distant horizon; and just before it began, that little area of green, which as they came closer and flew lower resolved itself into a village of wooden huts and beyond it the buildings of the research station of Tashbulak.
Pan had never seen a picture of it, but there was no mistake.
“Can we stop on the side of the hill?” he called.
“Down here? Whatever you like.”
She glided downwards. The cluster of once white-painted buildings that had been the research station looked shabby and neglected at first, the planted areas untidy and overgrown, the greenhouses shattered.
“You want to fly closer?”
“No. Just land on the hillside.”
The thin grass was being grazed by a few scrawny sheep, which looked up once and then moved away as Tilda landed.
Pan jumped down too quickly and staggered, feeling dizzy, unanchored, almost affected by vertigo.
The fall earlier had shaken something loose in his sense of where he was and how his body was related to the earth beneath him, how he could move and balance, how gravity kept him secure; it felt now as if he might have to relearn everything he’d known about movement and stillness, about feeling safe in the world.
As for Tilda, she simply lay down on her back under a nearby tamarisk bush and flung an arm over her eyes, asleep at once.
Once he felt less nervous, he examined the research station more carefully.
The first impression of desertion and emptiness was wrong, he soon realized.
There were half a dozen vehicles parked around it, including two large cargo lorries, and men were moving in and out of the buildings, some in uniform, some looking more like local workmen or villagers.
His eye was caught by a plume of dust or sand moving closer, coming out of the desert, which he soon saw was thrown up by an armored car or something of the sort.
It trundled off the sand and onto the paved area behind the buildings.
The cluster of houses closer to where he was watching from was quiet and still.
Thin lines of smoke rose from a few of them; some kind of small oxen stood in a corral; a narrow stream came down from the hills to feed a pond; a woman hoed a vegetable patch.
The only other human activity he could see was going on at the research station, and it was clearly directed by whatever organization owned the trucks and the other vehicles parked near the buildings.
There was some kind of identifying flag or corporation symbol on the vehicles, but they were too far away for him to make it out.
The Magisterium? But it wasn’t that. Thuringia Potash? Not that either.
He sat looking down at the place for some time, while endless possibilities revolved in his mind. If only he knew where Lyra was, and what she was doing!
Sooner or later he was going to have to go down to the station and investigate. Better do that after dark, he thought. Better sleep now, in that case, and safely too, on the ground. Tilda was deeply asleep; he joined her in the shade of the tamarisk, and closed his eyes.
—
During the day after the experiment with the tonnerre double, the oghab-gorgs attacked in full force.
The Magisterial army was following one of the trade passes a hundred miles to the north.
A small number of witches were shadowing them, to warn the gryphons if they began to move south, but the majority were flying with the gryphons along the southern edge of the mountains.
They were talking together closely that morning, which was unusual for witches; their voices were carried clearly on the winds, and although they spoke in their own languages, their excitement was easy to hear.
“Any idea what they’re saying?” Malcolm said to Lyra.
“None. I was never in the north for long enough to learn a single word.”
“They sound as if they’re looking forward to something.”
“To a fight, perhaps.”
They were flying on Gulya’s back, and they could sense that she was excited too, or agitated.
It was hard to talk to her when they were flying, but she was calling to Prince Keshvād, and he replied, though the gryphons’ language was impossible to understand.
Besides, they were buffeted by strong winds, which sometimes carried their words away.
“You know,” Malcolm said, “you cried out in your sleep several times. Were you having a dream?”
“Nothing I can remember. Except a general feeling of being anxious about Pan. I thought he was falling at one point and I couldn’t catch him.”
“He’s safe,” said Asta. “Safer than we are, probably.”
There was a group of witches, a dozen or so, flying close by. Lyra saw them suddenly move at the same time, a sort of flinching back in the air, and then she realized why. So did Malcolm.
“The birds,” he said.
Lyra smelled it a moment later. Just a waft, but it was enough to make her draw her head back in disgust.
“There they are,” said Asta, standing up on Gulya’s back and sweeping her tail from side to side.
Ahead of them a cloud of smoke was rising from a valley between two rocky cliffs.
But it wasn’t smoke: it was an immense flock of the oghab-gorgs, miles ahead yet but gathering high in the air as if they were being directed and swept up and forward by giant invisible hands.
Other smoke-clouds joined them from similar valleys nearby, none of them yet resolvable into individual birds, but all seeming to be impelled by the same will.
“This is real trouble,” Lyra said. “Have the gryphons got a plan to deal with them?”
“I don’t know, but the witches might.”
The birds were closer now—not overhead yet, but within a minute they would be, and already their screaming was painful to the ears.
Asta leapt up to Malcolm’s shoulder, and Lyra held his arm tightly.
It was getting darker: the birds were blotting out the sun, covering the earth with a shrieking twilight.
All her senses were confused; it seemed as if it was the sound of their thousands of wings making the sky dark, and the darkness that was stinking—because the carrion-stench of the oghab-gorgs filled the air around them and ahead of them, thick and foul and rotten.
The leading line of gryphons had climbed high to face them. In close formation they hung still, and seemed about to dive, but “Look!” cried Malcolm, pointing at the last remaining patch of clear sky.
A witch—it was Sala Riikola—was speeding across the narrowing stretch of clear sky towards the great dark wave of the oncoming birds. Behind her came another two witches, and three, and then a dozen, and more. Beside the massive power of the gryphons they seemed frail, like cutout shapes of paper.
“What can they do?” said Malcolm.
“I don’t know, but they’ll manage,” said Lyra.
Sala and her companions were flying directly at the oghab-gorgs, and that seemed to disconcert the leading birds, some of which parted to let the witches through, while others turned in confusion and started tearing at one another.
“I wish we could see it from above,” Lyra said. “They’ve got a plan, but it’s hard to make out from underneath.”
And as Lyra watched the shrieking, flapping, screaming darkness that was now overhead, she could make out the shapes of Sala Riikola and her sisters racing through the mass in a wide counterclockwise curve that took them from one side of the sky to the other and back again in half a minute.
They were screaming themselves, human voices lashing the flock with commands and encouragement: “Faster! Faster! Round and round!”
“It’s working!” cried Malcolm. “Your dragonfly story—the swallows over Port Meadow—”