Chapter Thirty-Three Into the Red Building #2
Then Malcolm pointed out something that Lyra hadn’t noticed.
In the corner least lit by the high windows, chairs and tables had been neatly stacked.
Going over to look more closely, Malcolm the artificer was intrigued by the design of the chairs, which folded by means of a joint he’d never seen before so as to take up little room.
He picked one chair up and moved it this way and that, delighted by the cleverness of the craftsmanship and determined to make something like it himself if ever he returned to his own bench and his own tools.
“Oh, and look!” said Lyra. “This is what the tables and chairs are for!”
There, above the stacked furniture, the painting showed a view of the very interior they were standing in.
The tables and chairs had all been laid out, and a hundred or more figures were sitting, or standing, or moving from one place to another, and two or three or four people were sitting around each table, and…
“Bargaining? Trading?” said Lyra.
“Looks very like it. Buying and selling. This is an exchange, like a wool exchange or a corn exchange…This is where people come from our world to buy the oil.”
“But this picture…”
“It’s extraordinary. I know nothing like it, anywhere. Not just the size but the scope of it…If people in our world knew about it, they’d make pilgrimages to see it. I mean, this, where we are now, is still our world, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said with certainty. “But the picture shows the rose world, I’m sure.
The way there must be through the door at the other end.
But I don’t think artists from our world made this…
Malcolm, we’ve got to go on. But I want to spend hours here, days, looking at everything.
Copying parts of it. It’s got all their life in it, everything they ever do…
And they look happy, you know? As if everything is right and it all fits together and it all works…
It’s how things ought to be, don’t you think? ”
But she hadn’t got it quite right, she thought.
Everything she said about the picture was true, and it made her happy to look at it, happy because the people in the picture were happy; she was happy because it looked as if the painter had been happy with the work, and loved it, and was happy to know that other people would love it too.
And she was conscious that her attention to the painting was part of its effect, as if her gaze that was speeding here and there, resting for a moment to look at a detail, then darting elsewhere, and hovering, and soaring up again, and seeing how this young couple by the lake here were forming the same shape with their arms that a pair of swans were forming with their necks over there, and marveled at how the artist had seen it so clearly—as her attention did that, it seemed to her that her attention itself, her consciousness, was a bird flying through the landscape, in a place where it was completely at home.
Malcolm, watching her, saw how her involuntary smile dissolved the hard wariness that had been her natural expression since they had found themselves together again.
Her eyes brightened among tiny creases that one day would be laugh lines, and her lips moved silently, and he realized that she was talking to the Pantalaimon who’d left her.
The impression was so strong that he even found himself looking for the daemon in the painting, and in the patterns of sunlight and shade on the floor and the walls.
They moved along the length of the building towards the far door in its painted setting of a little marble temple or folly, with a copper dome surrounded by a balustrade.
A man and a woman, elegantly dressed, were painted there pointing at a little town on the lakeshore to the right, with an oratory and a campanile, a market square, a town hall, and a stone bridge.
“Ready?” Malcolm said.
“No, course not. I want to stay here for weeks. But yes, let’s go through. We’ve got to…No guards here, unless they’re outside.”
“Well, here goes,” he said.
He reached for the iron handle and turned it, and the door opened smoothly and silently, like the first one.
—
Light flooded in, bright daylight. They blinked and shaded their eyes. Asta ran through at once and stood still suddenly, her tail waving tensely. Malcolm followed and halted suddenly, just as she’d done.
“Well,” he said. “You were right. It’s a different world.”
Lyra came to stand beside him.
The door opened onto a little mound, so they were able to see for some distance. The air, the atmosphere of a different world, was spring-like and warm; the sun shone brightly in the clear sky, showing a million details on the ground.
But this was not like the world in the picture.
Wherever they looked the soil had been disturbed, and was being disturbed even more: great earthmoving machines were at work, digging, lifting, flattening, carrying, dumping, scooping out rocks and soil and the plants that had been growing there, tearing huge ragged wounds in the ground and rolling back and forth along a wide road of crushed stone.
Most of the plants that were now being carried through the air, their roots still embedded in great masses of soil, were rosebushes with blooms as red as blood.
There was enough of the landscape left for them to see what had been there before the earthmoving began.
The painting had shown the landscape exactly, and the bones of it were there still—the mountains on the horizon, the lake at the foot of the slope in front of them, the little town on the lakeshore—but how completely it was being changed!
“What are they doing?” said Lyra.
Asta heard her and turned to them, and then she stopped: she seemed to see something, and turned away at once and ran to Malcolm, springing up into his arms. Lyra felt a little lurch in her heart: she wanted Pan more than ever, she wanted him to run to her and leap up just like that—but something was badly wrong here.
Malcolm was listening closely as Asta whispered something. He looked at Lyra and said, “Be careful where you look.”
“Why? What…?”
Then she saw what Asta had seen: the body of a jackdaw. Of course Lyra had seen dead birds before, but the sight of this one hit her in the pit of the stomach. It was the body of a daemon. It was a daemon, dead.
She gripped Malcolm’s hand.
No one had ever seen the body of a daemon. A daemon was alive, or it was nowhere—or rather everywhere: when the person died, the daemon dissolved into the air. Lyra had seen death; she had traveled through the world of the dead; but she had never seen a daemon that was no longer alive.
“Oh, Malcolm,” she whispered.
Asta was pressing her face into Malcolm’s neck. Lyra longed for that sort of closeness, and for Pan—Oh! And a chill as she thought: If Pan came here by himself, and had to see things like that, and she wasn’t there for him…
All the different implications of the word betrayal came clustering around her, again.
“But what is this place? What are they doing?” Malcolm said.
“They’re tearing up the roses…”
“They’re changing everything. Look at the river over there.”
In the middle distance a river had been flowing in a series of short curves towards the lake.
Excavating machines were tearing into the banks and swinging their bucketloads of soil high in the air before dumping them in a waiting line of trucks, which drove a little way and tipped their loads on the bare earth where a field had been.
Other machines built the soil up into a straight embankment.
“They’re changing the course of it…” Lyra said, and then, “But why? For irrigation? What would be the point, with the river already there?”
The more they looked, the more evidence they saw of wholesale change.
If the new embankment showed the future course of the river, then it would run directly towards the place where a bridge was being built to span it: two steel towers where suspension cables would carry a wide roadway.
Machines whose details were too far away to see were in place at each end of the bridge.
The noise they made was loud enough for Malcolm and Lyra to hear it clearly in the morning air.
“Cable-spinning machines,” said Malcolm. “Machines and engineering and people building great structures…I used to love that sort of thing. But this is all wrong, somehow.”
“Is the dead daemon…” Lyra began, and went on, “I don’t know what I was going to ask. That’s part of it. Obviously. Is that a town over there?”
The air was shimmering a little now, as the sun rose higher.
“It looks like the town in the picture. We’ll have to go there if we want to know any more.”
There was no one nearby to ask, apart from the workers operating the machines, and they were busy.
Lyra looked back at the door they’d come through, and found that the great red building had vanished (of course: it was in their world, not this one).
In its place was a much smaller wooden structure, with the tall black door and its decorated frame set into it like a piece of stage scenery.
Behind it stood a little copse, green leaves against the bright blue sky.
Turning round again, she saw that the hill where they were standing swept down to the lake, just as the painting had shown, but now workers with their machines were busy constructing a road leading up towards the building.
“Look,” Malcolm said. “All this activity—it’s all going on because of the opening, the window, the doorway, whatever we call it.
It’s all centered on here. Look, see what they’re doing to this road—it’s going to lead right up to where we’re standing, and then from the junction down there it’ll go away to the east and west.”
“How can you tell? It’s just a jumble to me.”