La Belle Sauvage, Page 35

  "When we came through that cataract," said Asta.

  "Must've hit a rock. Bugger."

  He knelt on the grass and looked at it closely. One of the cedar planks that formed the skin of the canoe had split, and the paint around it was scraped. The split didn't look very serious, but Malcolm knew that the skin of the canoe flexed a little when it was moving, and no doubt it would go on letting in water till he mended it.

  "What do we need?" said Asta, cat-shaped.

  "Another plank, best of all. Or some canvas and glue. But we haven't got any of them either."

  "The rucksack's made of canvas."

  "Yeah. It is. I suppose I could cut a bit off the flap...."

  "And look over there," she said.

  She was pointing to a great cedar, one of the few coniferous trees among the rest. Partway up the trunk, a branch had broken off, and the wound was leaking golden resin.

  "That'll do," he said. "Let's cut a bit of canvas."

  The flap of the rucksack was quite long and could easily spare a patch of the right size. Malcolm wondered whether the canvas was really necessary, because the actual waterproofing would be done by the resin, but then he thought of Alice and Lyra as the water slowly came in, and of himself trying more and more desperately to find somewhere to land....He should repair it as well as he could, as well as Mr. Taphouse would. He opened his knife and began to saw at the thick, stiff fabric, cutting out a piece a bit longer than the split in the hull. It was hard work.

  "I never thought canvas was so tough," he said. "I should have sharpened the knife."

  Asta, now bird-formed, had been sitting on a branch as high as she could get and keeping watch all around. She flew down to his shoulder.

  "Let's not be too long," she said quietly.

  "Is something wrong?"

  "There's something I can't see. Not wrong, exactly, but...Just get the resin and we'll go."

  Malcolm cut through the last strands of the canvas and set off. Asta darted ahead a little way, becoming a hawk and getting to the tree just before he did. The resin was too high for him to reach without climbing, but he was happy to do that; the massive wide branches, sweeping low over the grass, made it feel totally secure.

  He pressed the little piece of canvas into the resin and let it soak up as much as it could. Then he looked out of the tree and across the great lawns and flower beds as far as the terrace and the house beyond it: gracious and comfortable, splendid and generous. He thought that one day he'd come here by right, and be made welcome, and stroll among these gardens with happy companions and feel at ease with life and death.

  Then he looked the other way, across the little river. And he was high enough in the tree to see over the top of the fog bank, which only extended upwards for a few feet, as he now discovered; and beyond it he saw a desolation, a wilderness of broken buildings, burned houses, heaps of rubble, crude shanties made of shattered plywood and tar paper, coils of rusty barbed wire, puddles of filthy water whose surfaces gleamed with the toxic shimmer of chemical waste, where children with sores on their arms and legs were throwing stones at a dog tied to a post.

  He cried out before he could help it. But so did Asta, and she glided to his shoulder and said, "Bonneville! It's him! On the terrace--"

  He turned to look. It was too far to see distinctly, but there was a stir, and people were running towards someone in a chair--a carriage of some kind--a wheelchair--

  "What are they doing?" he said.

  He was aware of her attention, of the straightness and speed of it like a lance from her brilliant eyes. He tugged the canvas away from the resin with trembling fingers.

  "They're looking this way--they're pointing at where Alice is, at the canoe--they're moving towards the steps--"

  Now he could see clearly, and at the center of this activity was Gerard Bonneville. He was directing everyone. They began to carry his wheelchair down the steps of the terrace.

  "Take this," Malcolm said, and held out the canvas. It was abominably sticky. Asta pulled it away in her beak and hovered close to the tree as Malcolm clambered down. Once on the ground, he ran to the canoe as fast as he could, and Asta swooped down and laid the resin-soaked canvas where he directed her.

  "Will this do by itself?" she said.

  "I'll put some tacks in it. It won't be easy--my fingers are too sticky."

  Alice had heard them and opened her eyes sleepily.

  "What you doing?" she said.

  "Mending a hole. Then we got to get away quick. Bonneville's up there by the house. Here, can you open the toolbox for me? And hand me a tack out of the smokeleaf tin in there?"

  She scrambled up to do it. He took it stickily and touched the point of the little nail to a corner of the canvas. One tap of the hammer and it stayed in place while he hit it home, and so did the other five he put in.

  "Right, let's turn her over," he said, and while he did that, Alice stood on tiptoe to look up at the activity on the terrace, and Malcolm found himself gazing at her slim, tense legs, her slender waist, the slight swell of her hips. He looked away with a silent groan in his chest. What had happened to him? But there was no time to think about that. He tore his mind away and slid the boat down and into the water. Asta was still in her hawk shape, hovering as high above him as she could get and staring fixedly at the terrace.

  "What are they doing now?" Malcolm said as Alice threw the blankets into the canoe. Lyra was awake and interested, and Pan was buzzing around her head as a bee.

  "They're moving him towards the steps," said Asta in the air above. "I can't see exactly....There's a big crowd around him now, and more people joining them...."

  "What we going to do?" said Alice, settling herself into the bow with Lyra on her lap.

  "Only thing we can," said Malcolm. "Can't go up a waterfall. Have to see what happens at the other end...."

  He pushed away from the landing and watched the resin-mended patch with feverish curiosity.

  La Belle Sauvage was moving swiftly over the water, and Malcolm dug the paddle in deep and hard as Asta glided to the gunwale. Alice's Ben was a bird as well, and he too flew down to the safety of her shoulder.

  "Shush, honey," Alice said, because Lyra was starting to complain. "Soon be away. Shush now."

  They were going past a patch of lawn where there were no trees, and Malcolm felt horribly exposed. There was nothing between them and the house, and as he glanced up, he could see the crowd of people moving towards them, with something in the center of them, a small carriage, and people pointing at them, and a distant laugh: "Haa! Haa! Haaa! Haa-haaa!"

  "Oh, God," Alice murmured.

  "Nearly there," said Malcolm, because they had come to a group of trees that cut off their view of the house, and the garden was behind them. Vegetation clustered thickly on both banks, and the light that came from the tree lanterns was fading quickly the further away they got, so that almost everything ahead was dark.

  Almost everything. But there was enough light still in the air for Malcolm to see ahead of them a great pair of iron-bound doors, heavy with age and draped in moss and weeds, emerging from the stream like the gates of a lock, completely shutting off their escape. There was no way out by water.

  Alice couldn't see why they'd stopped, and twisted round to look.

  "Ah," she sighed helplessly.

  "Maybe we can open them. There must be a way," said Malcolm, peering as closely as he could to right and left. But there was nothing to be seen but clustering bushes and water weeds and low-hanging boughs of yew. They had left the light from the trees behind, and the darkness here seemed to be not just the absence of light but a positive presence, something exuded from the vegetation and the moisture.

  Malcolm listened. The only sounds were those of water dripping, lapping, trickling, and perhaps it was the river making its way through the gaps in the ancient gates, where the wood had rotted away, or perhaps it was the endless drops falling from the leaves all around. There was no sound from
behind them.

  He brought the canoe tight against the gates and stood carefully to feel how high they were. Too high anyway: he could neither see nor reach any top to them. Nor could he see whether they rolled apart to open, or swung slowly round against the resistance of the water, or even lifted up out of it altogether. But the river was still flowing against them, so it must be going underneath, and if there was any mechanism, it must be controlled from the bank.

  Still standing up, with his hands on the cold and slimy wood of the doors, Malcolm looked towards the right-hand bank--

  --and had such a shock that he started back, swaying the canoe, almost losing his balance, making Alice cry out in alarm.

  "What? What?" she said.

  She was clutching Lyra tight, trying to peer through the murk, and Malcolm was shakily sitting down.

  "There," he said, and pointed at the thing he'd seen.

  Thing? It was the head of a man, but huge, emerging from the water among the reeds. He must have been a giant. His hair was tangled with weeds and seemed to be growing through a rusty crown; his skin was greenish, and his long beard trailed over his throat and down into the water. He was looking at them with mild and peaceful interest. As he stood up higher, they saw that his left hand was clasping the shaft of a-- What was it? A spear? No, a trident, as Malcolm saw by looking upwards into the darkness, where three points of reflected light shone dimly.

  He looked at the giant's face and thought he could see a glimmer of benevolence there.

  "Sir," he said, "we'd like to go through these gates, if you please, because we need to escape from someone who's following us. Can you open them for us?"

  "Oh, no, I can't do that," said the giant.

  "But they're made to be opened, and we need to go through!"

  "Well, I can't do that. Them gates en't bin opened for thousands of years. They're for use only in the case of drought in the daily world."

  "But if we could just get through--it would only take a couple of seconds!"

  "You don't know how deep them gates go, boy. It might be just a couple of seconds to you, but there en't enough numbers to calculate how much water'd get through them in a couple of seconds."

  "The flood can't get any worse than it is already. Please, mister--"

  "What you got in there? Is that a babby?"

  "Yeah, it's the Princess Lyra," said Alice. "We're taking her to her father, the king, and there are enemies after us."

  "King of where? What king?"

  "King of England."

  "England?"

  "Albion," said Malcolm desperately, remembering something the fairy woman had said.

  "Oh, Albion," said the giant. "Well, why didn't you say?"

  "Can you open them, then?"

  "No. I got me instructions, and that's that."

  "Who gave you those instructions?"

  "Old Father Thames hisself."

  Malcolm thought he could hear the hyena's laugh, and from the way Alice's eyes opened wide, he knew she could too.

  "Anyway," he said, "I shouldn't have asked you, because you probably en't strong enough."

  "What d'ye mean by that?" said the giant. "I can open them gates, all right. I done it thousands of times."

  "What would make you open them again?"

  "Orders, that's what."

  "Well, as it happens," said Malcolm, fumbling with trembling hands in the rucksack, "we've got these orders from the king's ambassador in Oxford, kind of a passport, so's we can have safe passage. Look."

  He pulled a sheet of paper out of one of the cardboard folders and held it up for the giant to see. It was covered in mathematical formulae. The giant peered down at it.

  "Hold it up higher," he said. "And it's the wrong way up. Turn it the other way."

  It wasn't, but Malcolm did as he said. He was so close that Malcolm could smell his skin, which was redolent of mud, and fishes, and weeds. The giant peered closer still, mouthing something, as if he was reading it, and then nodded.

  "Yes, I see," he said. "That's undeniable. I can't argue with that. Let me see the babby."

  Malcolm stuffed the paper back in the rucksack and took Lyra from Alice, holding her high so the giant could see. Lyra looked up at him solemnly.

  "Ah," said the giant. "I can see she's a princess, all right, bless her. Can I hold her?"

  He held out his great left hand.

  "Mal," said Alice quietly, "careful."

  But Malcolm trusted him. He laid Lyra on the enormous palm, and she gazed up at the giant with perfect confidence, and Pantalaimon sang like a nightingale.

  The giant kissed his right forefinger and touched it to Lyra's head before handing her back, very delicately, to Malcolm.

  "Can we go through, then?" said Malcolm, who could hear the hyena again, even closer.

  "All right, since you let me hold the princess, I'll open the gates for you."

  "And then close them again and not let anyone else through?"

  "Unless they got orders like what you have."

  "Before you do," said Malcolm, "what is that place back there? That garden?"

  "That's the place where people go when they forget. You seen the fog on the other side?"

  "Yes. And I saw what was behind it."

  "That fog's hiding everything they ought to remember. If it ever cleared away, they'd have to take stock of theirselves, and they wouldn't be able to stay in the garden no more. Back off a bit and give me room."

  Malcolm gave Lyra to Alice and backed the canoe a few feet, and the giant stuck his trident in the muddy bank and took a deep breath before sinking under the water. A moment later the gates began to stir, creaking, dripping, and slowly, slowly opening against the current, making the water seethe and churn. As soon as the gap was wide enough, Malcolm drove La Belle Sauvage forward and through, and into the darkness beyond. The last thing they heard from the garden under the ground was the hyena's distant laughter dying away as the gates closed behind them.

  --

  The tunnel to the outside world took about five minutes to paddle through, but it was pitch-dark, so Malcolm had to go slowly, feeling his way from bump to bump. Finally they came to a mass of hanging vegetation, and the fresh smell of the world outside, and after a brief struggle they were through into the open air of the night.

  "I don't get it," said Alice.

  "What?"

  "We went down into that tunnel with the rapids, what led us in there, so we should have had to come up to get out of it. But this is the same level."

  "Still," said Malcolm. "We're out."

  "Yeah. Suppose so. And who was he?"

  "Dunno. Maybe he's the god of a little tributary, like Old Father Thames is the god of the main river, perhaps. That would make sense. George Boatwright said he'd seen Old Father Thames."

  "What was it you said Lyra's father was the king of?"

  "Albion. It was something the fairy woman said."

  "Good thing you remembered it, then."

  He paddled on under the moon. The night was quiet and the flood was as wide as the horizon. Little by little Alice subsided into sleep, and Malcolm wondered about pulling the blanket higher around her shoulders, but it wasn't cold.

  After half an hour or so he saw an island ahead, just a low, flat piece of land with no trees or buildings, no cliffs, no bushes--not even any grass, by the look of things. He stopped paddling and let the canoe float gently towards it. Perhaps he could tie up here and lie down and rest, though it did seem horribly exposed. The canopy was ideal for concealing the canoe among vegetation, but against bare rocks it would be visible for miles.

  But there was nothing he could do about that. He was aching for sleep. He moved La Belle Sauvage towards the shore and found a place where a little beach of bare earth lay between the rocks. He let the bow slide up on the soil, and the canoe came to rest. Alice and Lyra lay fast asleep.

  Malcolm laid the paddle down and clambered out stiffly. It was only then that he remembered the hole
in the hull, the resin patch, and with a heartbeat of anxiety he bent to look, but it was as dry inside as the rest of the hull. The patch had held.

  "It's safe," said a voice from behind him.

  He nearly fell over from fear. He spun round at once, ready to fight, and then found Asta, cat-formed, springing into his arms, deadly afraid. Looking at them was the strangest woman they had ever seen. She was about the same age as Lyra's mother, to judge by the look of her in the moonlight, and she wore a little coronet of flowers around her head. Her hair was long and black, and she was dressed in black too, or partially dressed, because she seemed to be wearing clustered ribbons of black silk and very little else. She was looking at him as if she'd expected him, and then he realized that there was something missing: she had no daemon. On the ground beside her lay a branch of pine. Could her daemon have that form? He felt a shiver of cold run down his spine.

  "Who are you?" he said.

  "My name is Tilda Vasara. I am the queen of the witches in the Onega region."

  "I don't know where that is."

  "It's in the north."

  "You weren't here a second ago. Where'd you come from?"

  "From the sky."

  He caught a slight movement in the corner of his eye and turned to the canoe, where he saw a white bird whispering into the ear of Alice's daemon, Ben. It was the witch's daemon, there after all.

  "They will sleep for the rest of the night now," said Tilda Vasara. "And the people on that boat will not see you."

  She pointed past his shoulder, just as he saw a different light catching her eyes. Malcolm turned to look and saw the searchlight on a boat that was either the same CCD vessel that nearly caught them before or a similar one. It was moving steadily towards the island, and Malcolm had to hold himself still because he longed to fling himself to the ground and hide behind anything: a rock, the canoe, the witch. The boat came nearer, the searchlight sweeping to left and right, almost on course to hit the island, but at the last minute it turned a little to starboard and moved past. In the minute or so when it was coming closer, the light became fiercer and brighter, and he saw the witch's face, quite calm, almost amused, and utterly fearless.

  "Why didn't they see us?" he said when it had gone.

  "We can make ourselves invisible. Their vision slides over us and over anything nearby. You were quite safe. They can't even see the island."