La Belle Sauvage, Page 36

  "You know who they were?"

  "No."

  "They want to catch that baby and...I don't know what. Probably kill her."

  She looked down where he was pointing at the sleeping Lyra, the sleeping Alice.

  "Is she the baby's mother?"

  "No, no," said Malcolm. "Just...we're just...looking after her. But why did the people in the boat turn away when they got close, if they can't see the island?"

  "They don't know why. It doesn't matter. They're gone now. Where are you going?"

  "To find the baby's father."

  "How will you do that?"

  "I know his address, at least. I don't know how we'll find it. But we'll have to."

  The white bird flew up to her shoulder. He was of a kind Malcolm didn't know, with a white body and wings and a black head.

  "What kind of bird is your daemon?" Asta asked.

  "Arctic tern," she answered. "All our daemons are birds."

  Malcolm said, "Why are you here, so far out of the north?"

  "I was looking for something. Now that I've found it, I shall go home."

  "Oh. Well, thank you for hiding me."

  The moonlight shone full onto her face. He'd thought she was young, or no older than Mrs. Coulter, who he supposed was about thirty; her body was slim and lithe, and there were no lines or wrinkles on her face, and her hair was thick and black, with no gray; but somehow the witch's expression made him think she must be indescribably ancient, perhaps as old as the giant under the water. She looked calm and even friendly, but at the same time she looked merciless. And she was curious about him, as he was about her. For a few moments they looked into each other's eyes with complete frankness.

  The witch turned away and bent to pick up the pine branch that lay on the ground beside her. She looked back at him once, and again he had that sense of perfect openness, as if they knew each other very well and there were no secrets between them. Then she sprang into the air, holding the branch in her left hand, as her daemon skimmed down low over Malcolm and Asta in farewell; and then they were gone. For a long time he looked up as her dark shape grew smaller and smaller against the stars. Then there was nothing to show she had ever been there.

  He crouched by the canoe and pulled the blanket higher over Alice's shoulders, tucking it around Lyra's head, making sure she could breathe. Pan was curled up like a dormouse between cat Ben's paws, both fast asleep.

  "Are you tired?" he said to Asta.

  "Sort of. More than tired. Out the other side of tired."

  "Me too."

  The island was about the size of two tennis courts side by side, and no part of it rose higher than the height of Malcolm's waist above the flood. It was utterly bare: a platform of tumbled rocks with not a blade of grass to be seen, no tree, no bush, nor any moss or lichen. It might have been a part of the moon. Malcolm and Asta walked all round it in little more than a minute, and that was going slowly.

  "I can't see any other land either," he said. "It's like the middle of the sea."

  "Except that the water's flowing. This is still the flood."

  They sat on a rock and watched it go past, a great black sheet of glass full of stars, with the moon shining both above and below.

  "I liked that witch," Malcolm said. "I don't suppose we'll ever see another one. She had a bow and arrows."

  "When she said she'd found what she was looking for, d'you reckon that was us?"

  "What, she came all this way just to look for us? No. She must've had bigger things than that to do. She was a queen. I wish she'd stopped a little longer. We could've asked her all kinds of things."

  They sat for a while, and gradually Malcolm found his eyes closing. The night was quiet and the world was calm, and he realized that whatever he and Asta had said to each other a minute before, he felt more tired than ever before in his life, and what he wanted to do most of all was lose consciousness.

  "Better get in the canoe," said Asta.

  They settled themselves in the boat, having checked that Alice and Lyra were safe and comfortable, and they fell asleep in a moment.

  That night, he dreamed of the wild dogs again, his savage dogs, with bloodstained muzzles and torn ears and broken teeth, with wild eyes and slavering jaws and scarred flanks, howling and barking as they raced around him, surging up to lick his face, thrusting themselves at his hands, rubbing themselves against his legs, a tumult of canine fury, with him at its heart and center, humbling themselves before cat-formed Asta; and as before, he felt no fear, he felt nothing but savage exhilaration and boundless delight.

  They were tired, they were hungry, they were cold, they were filthy, and they were followed everywhere by a shadow. Heavy clouds filled the sky again. Over the gray waste of water Malcolm paddled all the next day while Lyra cried fretfully and Alice lay indifferently in the bow. Whenever they saw a hilltop or a roof rising above the water, Malcolm stopped, tied up, built a fire, and one or the other of them attended to Lyra. Sometimes Malcolm didn't know whether it was him doing it or it was Alice.

  And everywhere they went, something went with them, behind, just beyond the edge of eyesight, something that flickered and vanished and then appeared again when they looked at something else. They both saw it. It was the only thing they talked about, and neither could see it fully.

  "If it was night," said Malcolm, "it'd be a night-ghast."

  "Well, it en't. Night, I mean."

  "I hope it's gone by the time it gets dark."

  "Shut up. I didn't want to think about that. Thanks for nothing."

  She sounded like the old Alice, the first Alice, scornful and bitter. Malcolm had hoped that that Alice had gone for good, but there she was again, sprawling and scowling and sneering; and he couldn't look at her now anyway without an electric tension in his body that he only part understood, and part delighted in, and part feared. And he couldn't talk to Asta about it because they were all so close together in the canoe; and in any case, he felt that his daemon was in thrall to it too, whatever it was, this bewitchment.

  The landscape was changing as they got further down the great flood towards London. Scenes of devastation began to emerge: the shells of houses, their roofs torn off, furniture and clothing strewn all around or caught in bushes and trees; and the trees themselves, stripped of their branches and sometimes of their bark, standing stark and dead under the gray sky; an oratory, its tower lying full-length on the sodden ground, with enormous bronze bells scattered beside it, their mouths full of mud and leaves.

  And all the time, never quite forgotten, never fully seen, the shadow.

  Malcolm tried to catch it by turning suddenly to the left or to the right, but all he saw was the swift movement that showed where it had been a moment before. Asta watched behind, but she had just the same experience: whenever she looked, it had just moved away.

  "Wouldn't matter if it felt friendly," Malcolm muttered to her.

  But it didn't. It felt as if it was hunting them.

  Seated as they were, with Alice in the bow looking back over the stern, she was more aware of things behind them than Malcolm was, and two or three times during the day she'd seen something else to worry about.

  "Is that them?" she said. "The CCD? Is that their boat?"

  Malcolm tried to turn and look, but he was so stiff from paddling that it hurt to twist his body, and besides, the heavy gray of the sky and the dark gray of the wind-whipped water made it hard to see anything. Once he thought he could distinguish the CCD colors of navy blue and ocher, and Asta became a wolf cub and uttered an involuntary little howl, but the boat, if that was what it was, soon faded into the murky haze.

  Late in the afternoon the clouds darkened, and they heard a rumble of thunder. It was going to rain.

  "We'd better stop next place we see," said Malcolm. "We'll put the tarpaulin up."

  "Yeah," said Alice wearily. And then, alarmed: "Look. It's them again."

  This time when Malcolm turned round, he saw the beam of a searc
hlight, brilliant against the gloomy sky, sweeping from left to right.

  "They just switched it on," Alice said. "They'll see us any minute now. They're coming fast."

  Malcolm dug the paddle into the water with limbs that were trembling with fatigue. There was no point in trying to outpace the CCD boat; they'd have to hide, and the only hiding place in sight was a wooded hill with an overgrown grassy space just above the waterline. Malcolm made for it as quickly as he could. It was getting darker rapidly, and the first big drops of rain splashed onto his head and hands.

  "Not here," said Alice. "I hate this place. I dunno what it is, but it's horrible."

  "There's nowhere else!"

  "No. I know. But it's horrible."

  Malcolm brought the canoe up onto the lank and sodden grass under a yew tree, tied the painter urgently to the nearest branch, and hastened to fix the hoops into their brackets. Lyra, feeling raindrops on her face, woke up and protested, but Alice ignored her, pulling the coal silk over the hoops and fastening it as Malcolm instructed her. The sound of the engine grew louder and closer.

  They got the canopy fixed and sat still, Alice holding Lyra tight and whispering to keep her quiet, Malcolm hardly daring to breathe. The searchlight shone through the thin coal silk, illuminating every corner of their little enclosed world, and Malcolm imagined the canoe from the outside, hoping passionately that the regular green shape wouldn't show up in the mass of irregular shadows. Lyra looked around solemnly, and their three daemons clung together on the thwart. The searchlight shone directly at them for seconds that felt like minutes, but then it swung away and the engine noise changed as the steersman opened the throttle and moved off along the flood. Malcolm could hardly hear it over the rain hammering on the canopy.

  Alice opened her eyes and breathed out.

  "I wish we'd stopped somewhere else," she said. "You know what this place is?"

  "What?"

  "It's a graveyard. It's got one of them little houses where they bury people."

  "A mausoleum," said Malcolm, who had seen the word but never heard it, and pronounced it to rhyme with linoleum.

  "Is that what it is? Well, I don't like it."

  "Me neither. But there wasn't anywhere else. We'll just have to keep tight in the canoe and go as soon as we can."

  "How are we going to feed her, then?" said Alice. "Or wash her? You gonna build a fire in the boat?"

  "We'll have to wash her in cold water and--"

  "Don't be stupid. We can't do that. She's got to have a hot bottle anyway."

  "What's the matter? Why are you angry?"

  "Everything. What d'you think?"

  He shrugged. There was nothing he could do about everything. He didn't want to argue. He wanted the searchlight to go away and never come back. He wanted to talk about the garden under the ground, and wonder with her what it meant; he wanted to tell her what he'd seen beyond the fog bank. He wanted to tell her about the witch and the wild dogs, and wonder what they meant. He wanted to talk about the shadow they felt was following them, and agree that it was nothing and laugh about it. He wanted her to admire him for mending the crack in the hull. He wanted her to call him Mal. He wanted Lyra to feel warm and clean and happy and well fed. But none of that was going to happen.

  The rain beat on the coal silk with more force every minute. It was so loud that he didn't even notice Lyra crying until Alice leaned forward and picked her up. Even when she was cross with him, she was always patient with Lyra, he thought.

  Maybe there'd be some dry wood under the trees. If he went out now, he could get it inside the boat before it got too wet. Maybe the rain would stop soon.

  Presently there came another crack of thunder, but further away, and shortly after that the rain did stop coming down so hard; and then it eased off until the only drops falling on the tarpaulin were what dripped down from the branches above.

  Malcolm lifted the edge of the canopy. Everything around was still dripping, and the air was as wet as a sodden sponge, full of the smells of dank vegetation, of rot, of earth crawling with worms. Nothing but earth and water and air, and all he wanted was fire.

  "I'm going to look for some wood," he said.

  "Don't go too far!" she said, alarmed at once.

  "No. But we've got to have some if we want a fire."

  "Just don't go out of sight, all right? You got the torch?"

  "Yes. The battery's nearly dead, though. I can't keep it on all the time."

  The moon was still large and the clouds thin as they raced away after the storm, so there was some light from the sky; but under the yew trees it was horribly dark. Malcolm stumbled more than once on gravestones that had half sunk into the soil or were simply hidden in the long grass, and all the time kept an eye on that little building of stone, where bodies were laid to rot without being buried.

  And everything was saturated, whether with rain or dew or the remains of the flood; everything he touched was heavy and soaked and rotten. His heart was just like that. He would never manage to light any of it.

  But behind the mausoleum, in the dim light of the torch, he found a stack of old fence posts. They were soaking wet, but when he broke one over his knee--with great effort--he found that, inside, it was dry. He could shave some tinder off it, and there were always Bonneville's notes, five volumes of them.

  "Don't think of doing that," whispered Asta. She was a lemur perching on his shoulder, her eyes wide.

  "They'd burn well."

  But he knew he wouldn't do that, not even if they were desperate.

  He gathered up half a dozen of the fence posts and brought them around to the front of the mausoleum, where a thought struck him. He shone the torch at the door; it was closed with a padlock.

  "What d'you think?" he whispered to Asta. "Dry wood..."

  "They can't hurt us if they're dead," she whispered back.

  The padlock didn't look very strong, and it was easy to thrust the end of a fence post behind it and pull down hard. The lock snapped and fell away. One push, and the door was open.

  Malcolm looked in cautiously. The air smelled of age and dry rot and damp, but of nothing worse than that. In the dimly flickering light, they saw rows of shelves, with coffins neatly placed on them, and the wood of the coffins was perfectly dry, as he found when he touched one.

  "I'm sorry," he whispered to the occupant of the first, "but I need your coffin. They'll give you another one, don't worry."

  The lid was screwed down, but the screws were brass, so they hadn't rusted tight, and he had his knife with him. Only a few minutes later he had the lid off and split into long pieces. The skeleton inside didn't worry him, he found, partly because he was expecting it, and anyway he'd seen worse than that. It must have been a woman, he thought, because around the neck--or where the flesh of the neck had been long ago--was a golden necklace, and there were gold rings on two of the bony fingers.

  Malcolm thought about it, and then lifted them all gently away and tucked them down beneath the frail velvet the skeleton was lying on.

  "To keep 'em safe," he whispered. "Sorry about your lid, ma'am, truly sorry, but we need it bad."

  He set the pieces of the lid against the stone shelf and splintered them with a series of kicks. The coffin's wood was as dry as its occupant, and perfect for burning.

  He closed the mausoleum and hung the broken padlock in place so that it looked, at a quick glance, as if nothing had happened. He turned back towards the canoe, signaling once with the torch to let Alice know he was there, and then he saw the shadow.

  It was formed like a man--he only saw it for a second and then it darted away--but he knew it at once: it wasn't a shadow at all. It was Bonneville. It had been crouching beside the boat. There was no one else it could have been. The shock was horrible, and he instantly felt even more vulnerable, not knowing where it had gone.

  "Did you see--" he whispered.

  "Yes!"

  He hurried across the gravestone-strewn grass, falling
twice, bashing his knee, with Asta darting beside him as a cat, stopping to help, encouraging, watching all around.

  Alice had been singing a nursery rhyme. She heard his panting, stumbling approach and stopped, and called, "Mal?"

  "Yeah--it's me--"

  He played the feeble torch beam on the canopy and then shone it all around on the dark yews, the dripping branches, the sodden ground.

  And of course saw no shadow, no Bonneville.

  "Did you find some wood?" said Alice from the canoe.

  "Yeah. A bit. Maybe enough."

  His voice was shaking, but he could do nothing about it.

  "What's the matter?" she said, lifting the canopy. "You see summing?"

  She was instantly terrified. She knew quite well what he'd seen, and he knew it.

  "No. It was just a mistake," he said.

  He looked around again, but it took courage: the shadow--Bonneville--could have been hiding among the darkness under any of the trees, behind any of the four columns at the entrance to the mausoleum, or, in the form of something small, behind any of the gravestones. And where was the hyena daemon? But no, he must be imagining it. They couldn't just paddle away, because this was the only land they'd seen, and it was dark, and out there on the water was the CCD boat, and Lyra needed food and warmth now. Malcolm breathed deeply and tried to stop himself shaking.

  "I'll make a fire here," he said.

  With the knife, he split some tinder from one of the splintered planks and set a fire on the grass. His hands were only just strong enough to do the work. But it caught at once, and soon one of their last bottles of water was heating in the little saucepan.

  He tried not to look up from the flames. The little flicker of the fire made the surrounding darkness even deeper, and made every shadow move.

  Lyra was crying steadily, a quiet lament of unhappiness. When Alice undressed her, she just lay there without even trying to move. Asta and Ben tried to comfort Pantalaimon, but he wriggled free; he wanted to be with the little pale form that could only weep and weep.

  The coffin lid burned well, and there was enough of it to warm Lyra's milk, but only just. As soon as Alice had her dressed and feeding, the last of the wood flared up in a single yellow flame and went out, and Malcolm kicked the ashes away and gladly got in the canoe. His arms ached, his back ached, his heart ached; the thought of setting off again over the unforgiving water was horrible, even if there'd been no CCD boat searching for them. Body, mind, and daemon longed for the oblivion of sleep.