Chapter Thirty-Three Into the Red Building
Thirty-Three
Into the Red Building
The diary of Roderick Hassall, which Lyra had read so long ago, it seemed to her now, had spoken of a bare sandy desert that he and Brynmor Strauss had had to cross to reach the red building.
And Gulya had flown above long stretches of sand, it was true, but as they flew, it seemed that the empty desert was losing ground to vegetation.
When Lyra woke up in the very early morning, what lay below them was more like a forest.
Among the green-gray treetops that stretched ahead in the early light as far as they could see, Lyra made out a single spot of red.
She pointed it out to Malcolm, and over the next few minutes they watched it resolve from a point of scarlet light in the glow of the rising sun to a roof of red tiles with turned-up eaves in the Chinese manner over a long rectangular building of brick, with a row of small windows under the eaves, but no windows at ground level.
As Gulya flew around above, looking for somewhere to land, they saw a clear space at one end of the building, where a flagstoned area surrounded a flight of seven wide steps up to a portico.
Two guards, soldiers in simple uniforms of dark red cotton, stood in front of the portico, blocking the way to the door behind the massive red-painted wooden columns.
They carried spears. They looked up as Gulya flew above them, and watched with subdued alarm as she landed and Lyra and Malcolm stepped down off her back.
“This is where Strauss had to speak Latin, isn’t it?” said Malcolm.
Lyra watched. The guards didn’t move. They held their spears pointing forward, and stood with one foot ahead of the other, as still as the columns behind them, as if this was something they had long trained for.
Malcolm stretched to loosen his limbs, and Lyra did the same, finding it strange to feel firm ground underfoot.
Malcolm asked Gulya to pass on a message of gratitude to Queen Shahrnavāz, saying that never had an artificer from the realms of gold worked for a wiser or more generous sovereign.
Lyra thanked her too, and Gulya would have said several things in return, but her friendship had been first and always with Pan, and she was clearly anxious about him; and besides, she needed to be going back to Prince Keshvād and her people.
So their farewells were heartfelt, but brief.
Lyra and Malcolm shaded their eyes to watch the gryphon fly up and away, and then turned back to the guards. They hadn’t moved an inch.
All the time Lyra was conscious of the immense bulk of the red building.
She didn’t have to look at it directly; it pervaded her vision even when she looked away from it, because the sun just rising struck the bricks and tiles like a gong and brought out their deep and sonorous crimson to color the air all around.
The sky was clear; it was going to be a hot day, in this world at least.
“Well,” Malcolm said, “let’s try.”
Together they climbed the seven steps till they were on a level with the guards, who kept the spears pointing at them.
The soldiers looked more Persian than Chinese: Lyra remembered Strauss saying something like that in his journal.
She saw, too, that if they had daemons, they were well hidden; and that they seemed healthy and fit, though their faces were lined and their eyes were tired.
Their uniforms were old and worn at the seams.
“May we enter this building?” she said in English, slowly and clearly.
They looked at her and said nothing.
Then the taller guard said, “Akterrakeh.”
Malcolm turned to Lyra. She realized that she hadn’t told him her discovery of what it meant, and said, “They’re asking if we came by water and by land. Because…I’ll tell you why later.”
“Akterrakeh—Oh, I see. Aqua terraque. Latin it is.” He thought for a moment, his eyes half closed, and then said to the guards, “Neque per aquam, neque per terram, sed per alas.”
Lyra looked at him and raised her eyebrows, and he murmured, “Not by water nor by land, but by wings.”
The guards were nonplussed: this man was clearly speaking the truth, because they had seen the gryphon land and fly away again, but how could they reconcile that with the clear instructions they were bound to obey?
Lyra wanted to say more, but she sensed Malcolm’s silent confidence and said nothing. After a minute’s urgent discussion, the tall guard raised his spear and stood aside. The other guard did the same, leaving the way clear to the door.
Malcolm nodded and put his hand to his breast in a gesture he hoped would convey respect and thanks.
Lyra remembered from the diary that the guards Hassall and Strauss had faced had asked for money, but these two, she thought, looked too weary to make any further challenge.
Their responsibility weighed heavily on them; they looked like the last soldiers left to guard a civilization, their uniforms thin and ragged in places, but clean and pressed; and she found herself admiring them if only for that.
The door was heavy, but it opened easily, swinging silently on oiled hinges. The sunlight fell through onto the wooden floor.
Lyra went in first, with Asta at her heels and Malcolm following.
Her first impression was of the enormous size of the place.
They had seen that from outside, of course, but whereas from outside they could only see part of the whole building, inside they could see all of it.
It was one great hall, and its proportions were somehow perfect; if the ceiling were any higher, or the breadth of the place any less, it would have felt uncomfortable.
Lyra had no idea why, but she was certain of it.
The floor was made of oak boards, worn and a little bowed in places, but it felt solid to walk on.
The only light in the space came through the door behind them, and from the row of windows high up in the walls—too high for them to see anything outside but the sky.
The sunlight lay in bright parallelograms on the floor and made the swirling particles of dust in the beams glow like specks of gold.
But it was what lay all around that made Lyra and Malcolm gasp and clutch each other’s hand in wonder.
Every inch of the walls from end to end and from floor to ceiling was covered with an immense picture of a landscape.
It surrounded them completely. The door they’d come in through was at one end of the building, and a long way off at the other end there was another door, and both had a plaster surround that made them look like part of a classical painting.
The door ahead was depicted as if it stood in a small marble folly, a temple or belvedere perhaps, in some immense garden where lawns ran down past it to a broad lake in the distance, and the one they’d just come through seemed to be the entrance to a grotto, among rough massive rocks overhung with ferns and mosses.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, anywhere,” Lyra said quietly. “Have you?”
Malcolm shook his head. He seemed to be struck silent, and stood gazing all around, slowly, attentively, taking it all in.
“I can’t find the words,” Malcolm said after a minute. “It’s just overwhelming. Whoever painted this has seen pictures from everywhere—seventeenth-century France, eighteenth-century England, ancient Rome, ancient Greece…”
“Cathay too—see the pagoda over there?”
“And the New Danish transcendentalists—look at those cliffs over the river…”
“That little bridge is pure Nipponese. Isn’t it? And the lady with her umbrella in the puff of wind…”
“And her daemon snapping at a butterfly.”
As well as the scenes that reminded them of their own world, there were buildings and landscapes that were unfamiliar.
But every part of the picture showed human activity in one form or another: men and women were walking to and fro, carrying parasols to keep the sun at bay or working in gardens where roses grew, watering the beds or gathering the blooms or planting new bushes, or unloading carts full of the flower heads into a barge drawn up at the shore of the lake.
Wherever they looked, some productive or enjoyable human activity was being carried on.
Here some musicians were playing to an audience seated on a lawn; there some carpenters were putting up the framework of a graceful little temple under the direction of an architect consulting a paper in his hand; somewhere else children were dancing in a ring; in another corner gardeners were tending to espaliered orange trees against a brick wall.
Lyra and Malcolm wandered from place to place, taking in only a fraction of the hundreds of details, marveling at the harmony of the whole panorama, moved by the vision of happiness and prosperity embodied in wood and plaster and paint.
Lyra felt her breath catch in her chest. Something—one of the scenes—reminded her powerfully of something, and she saw that Asta was looking at it too.
Suddenly Asta said, “That’s a scene from the Myriorama—look! That girl reading a book with her fingers—and here’s another one—the people loading the carts with roses!”
“Yes! So it is! And there’s another—the little café at night…They’re probably all here, if we looked. I just can’t believe it.”
Malcolm saw a corner of the wall that looked as if it was illustrating the poem of Jahan and Rukhsana: two lovers hand in hand entering a garden.
“Is it a picture of the rose world, d’you think?” he said. “Of what’s outside here, I mean?”
“We’ll see in a minute. Oh, Malcolm, it’s lovely…”
“And they have daemons in that world,” said Asta.
And Lyra could see the daemons everywhere, helping with the work, talking to their people, playing with children.