When the dæmon suddenly vanished, Balthamos let go. The man was dead. As soon as he was sure, Balthamos hauled the body out of the stream and laid it carefully on the grass, folding the priest’s hands over his breast and closing his eyes.
Then Balthamos stood up, sick and weary and full of pain.
“Baruch,” he said, “oh, Baruch, my dear, I can do no more. Will and the girl are safe, and everything will be well, but this is the end for me, though truly I died when you did, Baruch, my beloved.”
A moment later, he was gone.
In the bean field, drowsy in the late afternoon heat, Mary heard Atal’s voice, and she couldn’t tell excitement from alarm: had another tree fallen? Had the man with the rifle appeared?
Look! Look! Atal was saying, nudging Mary’s pocket with her trunk, so Mary took the spyglass and did as her friend said, pointing it up to the sky.
Tell me what it’s doing! said Atal. I can feel it is different, but I can’t see.
The terrible flood of Dust in the sky had stopped flowing. It wasn’t still, by any means; Mary scanned the whole sky with the amber lens, seeing a current here, an eddy there, a vortex farther off; it was in perpetual movement, but it wasn’t flowing away anymore. In fact, if anything, it was falling like snowflakes.
She thought of the wheel trees: the flowers that opened upward would be drinking in this golden rain. Mary could almost feel them welcoming it in their poor parched throats, which were so perfectly shaped for it, and which had been starved for so long.
The young ones, said Atal.
Mary turned, spyglass in hand, to see Will and Lyra returning. They were some way off; they weren’t hurrying. They were holding hands, talking together, heads close, oblivious to everything else; she could see that even from a distance.
She nearly put the spyglass to her eye, but held back, and returned it to her pocket. There was no need for the glass; she knew what she would see; they would seem to be made of living gold. They would seem the true image of what human beings always could be, once they had come into their inheritance.
The Dust pouring down from the stars had found a living home again, and these children-no-longer-children, saturated with love, were the cause of it all.
THIRTY-SIX
THE BROKEN ARROW
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And alwaies crouds it self betwixt.
• ANDREW MARVELL •
The two dæmons moved through the silent village, in and out of the shadows, padding cat-formed across the moonlit gathering-floor, pausing outside the open door of Mary’s house.
Cautiously they looked inside and saw only the sleeping woman; so they withdrew and moved through the moonlight again, toward the shelter tree.
Its long branches trailed their fragrant corkscrew leaves almost down to the ground. Very slowly, very careful not to rustle a leaf or snap a fallen twig, the two shapes slipped in through the leaf curtain and saw what they were seeking: the boy and the girl, fast asleep in each other’s arms.
They moved closer over the grass and touched the sleepers softly with nose, paw, whiskers, bathing in the life-giving warmth they gave off, but being infinitely careful not to wake them.
As they checked their people (gently cleaning Will’s fast-healing wound, lifting the lock of hair off Lyra’s face), there was a soft sound behind them.
Instantly, in total silence, both dæmons sprang around, becoming wolves: mad light eyes, bare white teeth, menace in every line.
A woman stood there, outlined by the moon. It was not Mary, and when she spoke, they heard her clearly, though her voice made no sound.
“Come with me,” she said.
Pantalaimon’s dæmon heart leapt within him, but he said nothing until he could greet her away from the sleepers under the tree.
“Serafina Pekkala!” he said joyfully. “Where have you been? Do you know what’s happened?”
“Hush. Let’s fly to a place where we can talk,” she said, mindful of the sleeping villagers.
Her branch of cloud-pine lay by the door of Mary’s house, and as she took it up, the two dæmons changed into birds—a nightingale, an owl—and flew with her over the thatched roofs, over the grasslands, over the ridge, and toward the nearest wheel tree grove, as huge as a castle, its crown looking like curds of silver in the moonlight.
There Serafina Pekkala settled on the highest comfortable branch, among the open flowers drinking in the Dust, and the two birds perched nearby.
“You won’t be birds for long,” she said. “Very soon now your shapes will settle. Look around and take this sight into your memory.”
“What will we be?” said Pantalaimon.
“You’ll find out sooner than you think. Listen,” said Serafina Pekkala, “and I’ll tell you some witch-lore that none but witches know. The reason I can do that is that you are here with me, and your humans are down there, sleeping. Who are the only people for whom that is possible?”
“Witches,” said Pantalaimon, “and shamans. So . . .”
“In leaving you both on the shores of the world of the dead, Lyra and Will did something, without knowing it, that witches have done since the first time there were witches. There’s a region of our north land, a desolate, abominable place, where a great catastrophe happened in the childhood of the world, and where nothing has lived since. No dæmons can enter it. To become a witch, a girl must cross it alone and leave her dæmon behind. You know the suffering they must undergo. But having done it, they find that their dæmons were not severed, as in Bolvangar; they are still one whole being; but now they can roam free, and go to far places and see strange things and bring back knowledge.