Chapter Thirty-Six An Incident by the Lake at the Moon Festival
Thirty-Six
An Incident by the Lake at the Moon Festival
Lyra fell backwards, and Pan fell with her, and then they were kissing and kissing, just as Nur Huda had told her they must do.
Asta was somewhere close, and so was Malcolm, but for her there was only Pan, and she loved him, the daemon of her heart, the missing part of her she’d crossed the world to find.
She tried to say the words clearly, but couldn’t. “Are you hurt?”
“No—just knocked sideways—are you safe?”
“Yes—and is that still our world in there?”
“Yes. But the red building—it’s in pieces. So much has changed, Lyra—”
“It’s changing here too. It’s all…I must make that opening bigger. So we can get back, and all kinds of reasons—”
“Is that Malcolm? Is he here?”
“Pan,” said Malcolm from close by, “what’s happening now? Who’s there?”
“The soldiers are dead. Delamare is dead. Olivier…”
“Bonneville?” said Lyra. “Was he there?”
“Yes, but he’s gone, I think. Lyra, I don’t know how to begin. I found out so much that’s surprising—things we never suspected—it’s hard to believe now, some of it. What are they doing here? Building roads? What is this place?”
“It’s all changing. Everything’s changing, Pan. I can’t think clearly.”
“There’s so much to say. Who’s that? Do you know them?”
He was looking down the slope at two figures, a man and a woman, who were walking up towards them: Abdel Ionides and Leila Pervani.
Lyra cried his name with pleasure and tried to run towards them, but found all her limbs so weak it was hard to balance. Ionides caught her before she fell.
—
Olivier Bonneville had been dazed by the explosion, but not knocked unconscious.
His senses came back to him, mostly, as he held his wounded daemon to his heart and felt along the bloodied floor trying to work out which way was upright.
His daemon shrieked with all her power and alerted him to the great landscape that was about to fall on his head.
He looked up and scrambled away to a bare space somewhere in the middle of where the building had been, where the sun shone in through the bare rafters on his bloodied hands and his gasping throat.
He coughed and spat and wiped his mouth and then saw the blood. He must have wiped it all over his face. Where was Delamare? Dead, dead, gone. Everything was over.
His daemon was crying somewhere behind him.
“All right, sweetheart, all right, my love, I’m here…I’m coming…”
The explosion had hurt her too, and she was already wounded.
He tried to stand up, and found more blood trickling down his face: his own, it must be.
What was hurting? Was he cut somewhere? Yes, his scalp was torn, and when he realized it, the pain redoubled.
So the blood—was it his after all? He wiped it out of his eyes with a wrist.
He reached out a trembling arm, and the hawk daemon clawed her way up to his shoulder. It was enough to feel her there; they didn’t need to talk.
He listened…For what? For any sign of life. Voices, he thought, there would be voices if anyone was alive, but he couldn’t hear any. The tumbled wooden walls creaked and settled here and there. There was even some kind of bird singing outside.
He tried to remember exactly what had happened.
He had cut Delamare’s throat. The man had looked him full in the face, but his power had flowed away with the blood; it was just a mask that watched him, and Bonneville had laughed.
Meanwhile, that preposterous colonel figure with his absurd imperial beard had blown himself and his clockwork soldiers to smithereens, and good riddance.
But the girl…Was she inside the building when it blew up, or outside?
There was a moment—maybe he’d dreamed it in a temporary coma—when he seemed to see her and that polecat daemon hugging and kissing.
The sun was shining on them: so outside, probably.
And the daemon had been in the building a minute earlier.
Damn it, they’d come part of the way together.
So he must have gotten out, and therefore Colonel Puffgutz’s bomb must have worked, and blown a hole between the worlds.
Carefully, so as not to fall over, and to avoid setting off a minor avalanche in the shattered walls, Bonneville picked his way towards where he thought the door had been.
—
Lyra’s head was ringing. Everything she tried to hear was muffled; the air was still thick with the dust from the explosion.
She held Pan close as explanations flew back and forth between Malcolm and Ionides and Leila; it was easier not to listen, so she and Pan whispered murmurs of love and relief and silly happiness.
Maybe everything was difficult and dangerous, but for the moment she was content to rejoice in her daemon again.
The others were speculating about whether it would be safe to go through back to their own world; perhaps they should prepare for danger there, and stay away from the opening till it was clear what was on the other side.
And here in the rose world, the sun was shining and the machines were silent.
A few workmen or supervisors were moving around, taking measurements, making calculations, writing notes.
But citizens of the place were out as well, children clambering over the heaps of earth and gravel, parents keeping them away from the still machines, pointing to this or that mountain or boat on the lake or meadow that had changed since they last saw it.
Down in the town itself, preparations were being made for a carnival or a festival of some kind: flags flown from the public buildings, chairs and tables set out on the sidewalks where there had been none the day before, strings of lights laced through the branches of the trees growing by the roadsides.
At the harbor, people were building some temporary structure, but it was too soon to see what it was going to be.
As the land heated under the warm sun, cool air from the lake began to move gently up the slope of the hill and bring with it something of the festival atmosphere of the town.
Lyra and Pan felt it clearly, and so did Leila; Malcolm and Ionides were deep in conversation about politics, possibly, or maybe they were talking about physics.
They all wandered downwards, drawn by the sounds of voices and hammering and laughter.
—
Olivier Bonneville looked around, curious and careful. They were tearing up the ground everywhere he looked. Somebody was making money from this, and no mistake.
But there wasn’t much he could tell from earthmoving machines: they were the same everywhere.
The only problem here was why they’d stopped.
He needed to look at people, and walk around among them, if he wanted to find things out.
He was good at reading faces and characters.
He could get information from people without their knowing it—as in the Café Cosmopolitain in Geneva, where he’d first discovered the close family connection between Delamare and Lyra and—he now realized—himself.
He thought about the skillful way he’d questioned those three journalists drinking after the Magisterial Congress, and smiled with pleasure.
He’d be able to find out a great deal about this place, and with very little trouble.
Down there in the town, people were building a low platform by the harbor, with seats around it and chairs and some other things being set out.
He took a few minutes before he recognized the “other things”: music stands.
It was a dancing floor. And strings of flags were being hung up, and cables with colored lights.
From up here on the hill, Bonneville couldn’t tell very much: he needed to go and mingle, talk, find something to eat and drink.
Nobody seemed particularly interested in the wooden building, or in the explosion that had destroyed it. A few individuals had made their way up to look at it, or were making their way now, but with a desultory sort of air, as if it had never been all that interesting even before it was blown up.
“He never said anything about this place to us,” said the sparrowhawk daemon. “I suppose he didn’t know much, mind you. If no one was allowed through.”
“Anybody’d think we were invisible here,” said Bonneville. “No one’s looking at us, even.”
“They might be afraid of us. You’ve got blood all over your face.”
“Shit! You should have told me.” He felt his face with hands that were bloody too.
“Don’t do that! You’re making it worse. Look, there’s a stream…”
A little trickle of more-or-less clear water ran under the road through a culvert. Bonneville scrambled down and splashed his face and cleaned all the blood he could see off his hands.
“Is that better?”
“Under your jaw, there…That’s better.”
It would dry soon. They moved on and passed an inn, or some kind of drinking place, with a bench outside where two old men were smoking and talking.
“Good day,” Bonneville said. “Bonjour. Guten Tag.”
“Good day to you, my boy!” one of the old men replied. The other raised his beer glass in greeting.
“Excuse my ignorance, but I’m a traveler who’s come a long way, and I’m interested to see what’s going on. People seem to be preparing for some kind of celebration, is that right?”
“Absolutely correct!”
“Don’t they celebrate the full moon where you come from?” said a man with a long clay pipe.
“The full moon…I see. Well, no, as a matter of fact. This is new to me. Music and dancing, by the look of things.”
“Where are you from, then?” said the other man.
“Basel. Switzerland.”
“Come to buy rose oil? You’re out of luck, if you are.”
“No, just traveling, looking at things, writing a bit.”
He looked at the daemons of the two old men. One was an aged poodle, gray and bony, asleep on the bench. She raised an eyelid to look at Bonneville and then closed it again. Another was a starling, head drooping on the man’s shoulder.