TWENTY-THREE
NO WAY OUT
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
? ST. JOHN ?
“Will,” said Lyra, “what d’you think the harpies will do when we let the ghosts out?”
Because the creatures were getting louder and flying closer, and there were more and more of them all the time, as if the gloom were gathering itself into little clots of malice and giving them wings. The ghosts kept looking up fearfully.
“Are we getting close?” Lyra called to the Lady Salmakia.
“Not far now,” she called down, hovering above them. “You could see him if you climbed that rock.”
But Lyra didn’t want to waste time. She was trying with all her heart to put on a cheerful face for Roger, but every moment in front of her mind’s eye was that terrible image of the little dog-Pan abandoned on the jetty as the mist closed around him, and she could barely keep from howling. She must, though; she must be hopeful for Roger; she always had been.
When they did come face to face, it happened quite suddenly. In among the press of all the ghosts, there he was, his familiar features wan but his expression as full of delight as a ghost could be. He rushed to embrace her.
But he passed like cold smoke through her arms, and though she felt his little hand clutch at her heart, it had no strength to hold on. They could never truly touch again.
But he could whisper, and his voice said, “Lyra, I never thought I’d ever see you again—I thought even if you did come down here when you was dead, you’d be much older, you’d be a grownup, and you wouldn’t want to speak to me—”
“Why ever not?”
“Because I done the wrong thing when Pan got my d?mon away from Lord Asriel’s! We should’ve run, we shouldn’t have tried to fight her! We should’ve run to you! Then she wouldn’t have been able to get my d?mon again, and when the cliff fell away, my d?mon would’ve still been with me!”
“But that weren’t your fault, stupid!” Lyra said. “It was me that brung you there in the first place, and I should’ve let you go back with the other kids and the gyptians. It was my fault. I’m so sorry, Roger, honest, it was my fault, you wouldn’t’ve been here otherwise . . .”
“Well,” he said, “I dunno. Maybe I would’ve got dead some other way. But it weren’t your fault, Lyra, see.”
She felt herself beginning to believe it; but all the same, it was heartrending to see the poor little cold thing, so close and yet so out of reach. She tried to grasp his wrist, though her fingers closed in the empty air; but he understood and sat down beside her.
The other ghosts withdrew a little, leaving them alone, and Will moved apart, too, to sit down and nurse his hand. It was bleeding again, and while Tialys flew fiercely at the ghosts to force them away, Salmakia helped Will tend to the wound.
But Lyra and Roger were oblivious to that.
“And you en’t dead,” he said. “How’d you come here if you’re still alive? And where’s Pan?”
“Oh, Roger—I had to leave him on the shore—it was the worst thing I ever had to do, it hurt so much—you know how it hurts—and he just stood there, just looking, oh, I felt like a murderer, Roger—but I had to, or else I couldn’t have come!”
“I been pretending to talk to you all the time since I died,” he said. “I been wishing I could, and wishing so hard . . . Just wishing I could get out, me and all the other dead ’uns, ’cause this is a terrible place, Lyra, it’s hopeless, there’s no change when you’re dead, and them bird-things . . . You know what they do? They wait till you’re resting—you can’t never sleep properly, you just sort of doze—and they come up quiet beside you and they whisper all the bad things you ever did when you was alive, so you can’t forget ’em. They know all the worst things about you. They know how to make you feel horrible, just thinking of all the stupid things and bad things you ever did. And all the greedy and unkind thoughts you ever had, they know ’em all, and they shame you up and they make you feel sick with yourself . . . But you can’t get away from ’em.”
“Well,” she said, “listen.”
Dropping her voice and leaning closer to the little ghost, just as she used to do when they were planning mischief at Jordan, she went on:
“You probably don’t know, but the witches—you remember Serafina Pekkala—the witches’ve got a prophecy about me. They don’t know I know—no one does. I never spoke to anyone about it before. But when I was in Trollesund, and Farder Coram the gyptian took me to see the Witches’ Consul, Dr. Lanselius, he gave me like a kind of a test. He said I had to go outside and pick out the right piece of cloud-pine out of all the others to show I could really read the alethiometer.
“Well, I done that, and then I came in quickly, because it was cold and it only took a second, it was easy. The Consul was talking to Farder Coram, and they didn’t know I could hear ’em. He said the witches had this prophecy about me, I was going to do something great and important, and it was going to be in another world . . .
“Only I never spoke of it, and I reckon I must have even forgot it, there was so much else going on. So it sort of sunk out of my mind. I never even talked about it with Pan, ’cause he would have laughed, I reckon.
“But then later on Mrs. Coulter caught me and I was in a trance, and I was dreaming and I dreamed of that, and I dreamed of you. And I remembered the gyptian boat mother, Ma Costa—you remember—it was their boat we got on board of, in Jericho, with Simon and Hugh and them—”
“Yes! And we nearly sailed it to Abingdon! That was the best thing we ever done, Lyra! I won’t never forget that, even if I’m down here dead for a thousand years—”
“Yes, but listen—when I ran away from Mrs. Coulter the first time, right, I found the gyptians again and they looked after me and . . . Oh, Roger, there’s so much I found out, you’d be amazed—but this is the important thing: Ma Costa said to me, she said I’d got witch-oil in my soul, she said the gyptians were water people but I was a fire person.
“And what I think that means is she was sort of preparing me for the witch-prophecy. I know I got something important to do, and Dr. Lanselius the Consul said it was vital I never found out what my destiny was till it happened, see—I must never ask about it . . . So I never did. I never even thought what it might be. I never asked the alethiometer, even.
“But now I think I know. And finding you again is just a sort of proof. What I got to do, Roger, what my destiny is, is I got to help all the ghosts out of the land of the dead forever. Me and Will—we got to rescue you all. I’m sure it’s that. It must be. And because Lord Asriel, because of something my father said . . . ‘Death is going to die,’ he said. I dunno what’ll happen, though. You mustn’t tell ’em yet, promise. I mean you might not last up there. But—”
He was desperate to speak, so she stopped.
“That’s just what I wanted to tell you!” he said. “I told ’em, all the other dead ’uns, I told them you’d come! Just like you came and rescued the kids from Bolvangar! I says, Lyra’ll do it, if anyone can. They wished it’d be true, they wanted to believe me, but they never really did, I could tell.
“For one thing,” he went on, “every kid that’s ever come here, every single one, starts by saying, ‘I bet my dad’ll come and get me,’ or ‘I bet my mum, as soon as she knows where I am, she’ll fetch me home again.‘ If it en’t their dad or mum, it’s their friends, or their grandpa, but someone’s going to come and rescue ’em. Only they never do. So no one believed me when I told ’em you’d come. Only I was right!”
“Yeah,” she said, “well, I couldn’t have done it without Will. That’s Will over there, and that’s the Chevalier Tialys and the Lady Salmakia. There’s so much to tell you, Roger . . .”
“Who’s Will? Where’s he come from?”
Lyra began to explain, quite unaware of how her voice changed, how she sat up straighter, and how even her eyes looked different when she told the story of her meeting with Will and the fight for the subtle knife. How could she have known? But Roger noticed, with the sad, voiceless envy of the unchanging dead.
Meanwhile, Will and the Gallivespians were a little way off, talking quietly.
“What are you going to do, you and the girl?” said Tialys.
“Open this world and let the ghosts out. That’s what I’ve got the knife for.”
He had never seen such astonishment on any faces, let alone those of people whose good opinion he valued. He’d acquired a great respect for these two. They sat silent for a few moments, and then Tialys said:
“This will undo everything. It’s the greatest blow you could strike. The Authority will be powerless after this.”
“How would they ever suspect it?” said the Lady. “It’ll come at them out of nowhere!”
“And what then?” Tialys asked Will.
“What then? Well, then we’ll have to get out ourselves, and find our d?mons, I suppose. Don’t think of then. It’s enough to think of now. I haven’t said anything to the ghosts, in case . . . in case it doesn’t work. So don’t you say anything, either. Now I’m going to find a world I can open, and those harpies are watching. So if you want to help, you can go and distract them while I do that.”
Instantly the Gallivespians urged their dragonflies up into the murk overhead, where the harpies were as thick as blowflies. Will watched the great insects charging fearlessly up at them, for all the world as if the harpies were flies and they could snap them up in their jaws, big as they were. He thought how much the brilliant creatures would love it when the sky was open and they could skim about over bright water again.
Then he took up the knife. And instantly there came back the words the harpies had thrown at him—taunts about his mother—and he stopped. He put the knife down, trying to clear his mind.
He tried again, with the same result. He could hear them clamoring above, despite the ferocity of the Gallivespians; there were so many of them that two fliers alone could do little to stop them.
Well, this was what it was going to be like. It wasn’t going to get any easier. So Will let his mind relax and become disengaged, and just sat there with the knife held loosely until he was ready again.
This time the knife cut straight into the air—and met rock. He had opened a window in this world into the underground of another. He closed it up and tried again.
And the same thing happened, though he knew it was a different world. He’d opened windows before to find himself above the ground of another world, so he shouldn’t have been surprised to find he was underground for a change, but it was disconcerting.
Next time he felt carefully in the way he’d learned, letting the tip search for the resonance that revealed a world where the ground was in the same place. But the touch was wrong wherever he felt. There was no world anywhere he could open into; everywhere he touched, it was solid rock.
Lyra had sensed that something was wrong, and she jumped up from her close conversation with Roger’s ghost to hurry to Will’s side.
“What is it?” she said quietly.
He told her, and added, “We’re going to have to move somewhere else before I can find a world we can open into. And those harpies aren’t going to let us. Have you told the ghosts what we were planning?”
“No. Only Roger, and I told him to keep it quiet. He’ll do whatever I tell him. Oh, Will, I’m scared, I’m so scared. We might not ever get out. Suppose we get stuck here forever?”
“The knife can cut through rock. If we need to, we’ll just cut a tunnel. It’ll take a long time, and I hope we won’t have to, but we could. Don’t worry.”
“Yeah. You’re right. Course we could.”
But she thought he looked so ill, with his face drawn in pain and with dark rings around his eyes, and his hand was shaking, and his fingers were bleeding again; he looked as sick as she felt. They couldn’t go on much longer without their d?mons. She felt her own ghost quail in her body, and hugged her arms tightly, aching for Pan.
Meanwhile, the ghosts were pressing close, poor things, and the children especially couldn’t leave Lyra alone.
“Please,” said one girl, “you won’t forget us when you go back, will you?”
“No,” said Lyra, “never.”
“You’ll tell them about us?”
“I promise. What’s your name?”
But the poor girl was embarrassed and ashamed: she’d forgotten. She turned away, hiding her face, and a boy said:
“It’s better to forget, I reckon. I’ve forgotten mine. Some en’t been here long, and they still know who they are. There’s some kids been here thousands of years. They’re no older than us, and they’ve forgotten a whole lot. Except the sunshine. No one forgets that. And the wind.”
“Yeah,” said another, “tell us about that!”
And more and more of them clamored for Lyra to tell them about the things they remembered, the sun and the wind and the sky, and the things they’d forgotten, such as how to play; and she turned to Will and whispered, “What should I do, Will?”
“Tell them.”
“I’m scared. After what happened back there—the harpies—”
“Tell them the truth. We’ll keep the harpies off.”
She looked at him doubtfully. In fact, she felt sick with apprehension. She turned back to the ghosts, who were thronging closer and closer.
“Please!” they were whispering. “You’ve just come from the world! Tell us, tell us! Tell us about the world!”
There was a tree not far away—just a dead trunk with its bone white branches thrusting into the chilly gray air—and because Lyra was feeling weak, and because she didn’t think she could walk and talk at the same time, she made for that so as to have somewhere to sit. The crowd of ghosts jostled and shuffled aside to make room.
When she and Will were nearly at the tree, Tialys landed on Will’s hand and indicated that he should bend his head to listen.
“They’re coming back,” he said quietly, “those harpies. More and more of them. Have your knife ready. The Lady and I will hold them off as long as we can, but you might need to fight.”
Without worrying Lyra, Will loosened the knife in its sheath and kept his hand close to it. Tialys took off again, and then Lyra reached the tree and sat down on one of the thick roots.
So many dead figures clustered around, pressing hopefully, wide-eyed, that Will had to make them keep back and leave room; but he let Roger stay close, because he was gazing at Lyra, listening with a passion.
And Lyra began to talk about the world she knew.
She told them the story of how she and Roger had climbed over Jordan College roof and found the rook with the broken leg, and how they had looked after it until it was ready to fly again; and how they had explored the wine cellars, all thick with dust and cobwebs, and drunk some canary, or it might have been Tokay, she couldn’t tell, and how drunk they had been. And Roger’s ghost listened, proud and desperate, nodding and whispering, “Yes, yes! That’s just what happened, that’s true all right!”
Then she told them all about the great battle between the Oxford townies and the clayburners.
First she described the claybeds, making sure she got in everything she could remember, the wide ocher-colored washing pits, the dragline, the kilns like great brick beehives. She told them about the willow trees along the river’s edge, with their leaves all silvery underneath; and she told how when the sun shone for more than a couple of days, the clay began to split up into great handsome plates, with deep cracks between, and how it felt to squish your fingers into the cracks and slowly lever up a dried plate of mud, trying to keep it as big as you could without breaking it. Underneath it was still wet, ideal for throwing at people.
And she described the smells around the place, the smoke from the kilns, the rotten-leaf-mold smell of the river when the wind was in the southwest, the warm smell of the baking potatoes the clayburners used to eat; and the sound of the water slipping slickly over the sluices and into the washing pits; and the slow, thick suck as you tried to pull your foot out of the ground; and the heavy, wet slap of the gate paddles in the clay-thick water.
As she spoke, playing on all their senses, the ghosts crowded closer, feeding on her words, remembering the time when they had flesh and skin and nerves and senses, and willing her never to stop.
Then she told how the clayburners’ children always made war on the townies, but how they were slow and dull, with clay in their brains, and how the townies were as sharp and quick as sparrows by contrast; and how one day all the townies had swallowed their differences and plotted and planned and attacked the claybeds from three sides, pinning the clayburners’ children back against the river, hurling handfuls and handfuls of heavy, claggy clay at one another, rushing their muddy castle and tearing it down, turning the fortifications into missiles until the air and the ground and the water were all mixed inextricably together, and every child looked exactly the same, mud from scalp to sole, and none of them had had a better day in all their lives.
When she’d finished, she looked at Will, exhausted. Then she had a shock.
As well as the ghosts, silent all around, and her companions, close and living, there was another audience, too: the branches of the tree were clustered with those dark bird forms, their women’s faces gazing down at her, solemn and spellbound.
She stood up in sudden fear, but they didn’t move.
“You,” she said, desperate, “you flew at me before, when I tried to tell you something. What’s stopping you now? Go on, tear at me with your claws and make a ghost out of me!”
“That is the least we shall do,” said the harpy in the center, who was No-Name herself. “Listen to me. Thousands of years ago, when the first ghosts came down here, the Authority gave us the power to see the worst in every one, and we have fed on the worst ever since, till our blood is rank with it and our very hearts are sickened.
“But still, it was all we had to feed on. It was all we had. And now we learn that you are planning to open a way to the upper world and lead all the ghosts out into the air—”
And her harsh voice was drowned by a million whispers, as every ghost who could hear cried out in joy and hope; but all the harpies screamed and beat their wings until the ghosts fell silent again.
“Yes,” cried No-Name, “to lead them out! What will we do now? I shall tell you what we will do: from now on, we shall hold nothing back. We shall hurt and defile and tear and rend every ghost that comes through, and we shall send them mad with fear and remorse and self-hatred. This is a wasteland now; we shall make it a hell!”
Every single harpy shrieked and jeered, and many of them flew up off the tree and straight at the ghosts, making them scatter in terror. Lyra clung to Will’s arm and said, “They’ve given it away now, and we can’t do it. They’ll hate us—they’ll think we betrayed them! We’ve made it worse, not better!”
“Quiet,” said Tialys. “Don’t despair. Call the harpies back and make them listen to us.”
So Will cried out, “Come back! Come back, every one of you! Come back and listen!”
One by one the harpies, their faces eager and hungry and suffused with the lust for misery, turned and flew back to the tree, and the ghosts drifted back as well. The Chevalier left his dragonfly in the care of Salmakia, and his little tense figure, green-clad and dark-haired, leapt to a rock where they could all see him.
“Harpies,” he said, “we can offer you something better than that. Answer my questions truly, and hear what I say, and then judge. When Lyra spoke to you outside the wall, you flew at her. Why did you do that?”
“Lies!” the harpies all cried. “Lies and fantasies!”
“Yet when she spoke just now, you all listened, every one of you, and you kept silent and still. Again, why was that?”
“Because it was true,” said No-Name. “Because she spoke the truth. Because it was nourishing. Because it was feeding us. Because we couldn’t help it. Because it was true. Because we had no idea that there was anything but wickedness. Because it brought us news of the world and the sun and the wind and the rain. Because it was true.”
“Then,” said Tialys, “let’s make a bargain with you. Instead of seeing only the wickedness and cruelty and greed of the ghosts that come down here, from now on you will have the right to ask all the ghosts to tell you the stories of their lives, and they will have to tell the truth about what they’ve seen and touched and heard and loved and known in the world. Every one of these ghosts has a story; every single one that comes down in the future will have true things to tell you about the world. And you’ll have the right to hear them, and they will have to tell you.”
Lyra marveled at the nerve of the little spy. How did he dare speak to these creatures as if he had the power to give them rights? Any one of them could have snapped him up in a moment, wrenched him apart in her claws or carried him high and then hurled him down to the ground to smash in pieces. And yet there he stood, proud and fearless, making a bargain with them! And they listened, and conferred, their faces turning to one another, their voices low.
All the ghosts watched, fearful and silent.
Then No-Name turned back.
“That’s not enough,” she said. “We want more than that. We had a task under the old dispensation. We had a place and a duty. We fulfilled the Authority’s commands diligently, and for that we were honored. Hated and feared, but honored, too. What will happen to our honor now? Why should the ghosts take any notice of us, if they can simply walk out into the world again? We have our pride, and you should not let that be dispensed with. We need an honorable place! We need a duty and a task to do, one that will bring us the respect we deserve!”
They shifted on the branches, muttering and raising their wings. But a moment later Salmakia leapt up to join the Chevalier, and called out:
“You are quite right. Everyone should have a task to do that’s important, one that brings them honor, one they can perform with pride. So here is your task, and it’s one that only you can do, because you are the guardians and the keepers of this place. Your task will be to guide the ghosts from the landing place by the lake all the way through the land of the dead to the new opening out into the world. In exchange, they will tell you their stories as a fair and just payment for this guidance. Does that seem right to you?”
No-Name looked at her sisters, and they nodded. She said:
“And we have the right to refuse to guide them if they lie, or if they hold anything back, or if they have nothing to tell us. If they live in the world, they should see and touch and hear and learn things. We shall make an exception for infants who have not had time to learn anything, but otherwise, if they come down here bringing nothing, we shall not guide them out.”
“That is fair,” said Salmakia, and the other travelers agreed.
So they made a treaty. And in exchange for the story of Lyra’s that they’d already heard, the harpies offered to take the travelers and their knife to a part of the land of the dead where the upper world was close. It was a long way off, through tunnels and caves, but they would guide them faithfully, and all the ghosts could follow.
But before they could begin, a voice cried out, as loudly as a whisper could cry. It was the ghost of a thin man with an angry, passionate face, and he cried:
“What will happen? When we leave the world of the dead, will we live again? Or will we vanish as our d?mons did? Brothers, sisters, we shouldn’t follow this child anywhere till we know what’s going to happen to us!”
Others took up the question: “Yes, tell us where we’re going! Tell us what to expect! We won’t go unless we know what’ll happen to us!”
Lyra turned to Will in despair, but he said, “Tell them the truth. Ask the alethiometer, and tell them what it says.”
“All right,” she said.
She took out the golden instrument. The answer came at once. She put it away and stood up.
“This is what’ll happen,” she said, “and it’s true, perfectly true. When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your d?mons did. If you’ve seen people dying, you know what that looks like. But your d?mons en’t just nothing now; they’re part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they’ve gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They’ll never vanish. They’re just part of everything. And that’s exactly what’ll happen to you, I swear to you, I promise on my honor. You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.”
No one spoke. Those who had seen how d?mons dissolved were remembering it, and those who hadn’t were imagining it, and no one spoke until a young woman came forward. She had died as a martyr centuries before. She looked around and said to the other ghosts:
“When we were alive, they told us that when we died we’d go to Heaven. And they said that Heaven was a place of joy and glory and we would spend eternity in the company of saints and angels praising the Almighty, in a state of bliss. That’s what they said. And that’s what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew.
“Because the land of the dead isn’t a place of reward or a place of punishment. It’s a place of nothing. The good come here as well as the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom forever, with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep, or rest, or peace.
“But now this child has come offering us a way out and I’m going to follow her. Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.
“So I urge you: come with the child out to the sky!”
But her ghost was thrust aside by the ghost of a man who looked like a monk: thin and pale, with dark, zealous eyes even in his death. He crossed himself and murmured a prayer, and then he said:
“This is a bitter message, a sad and cruel joke. Can’t you see the truth? This is not a child. This is an agent of the Evil One himself! The world we lived in was a vale of corruption and tears. Nothing there could satisfy us. But the Almighty has granted us this blessed place for all eternity, this paradise, which to the fallen soul seems bleak and barren, but which the eyes of faith see as it is, overflowing with milk and honey and resounding with the sweet hymns of the angels. This is Heaven, truly! What this evil girl promises is nothing but lies. She wants to lead you to Hell! Go with her at your peril. My companions and I of the true faith will remain here in our blessed paradise, and spend eternity singing the praises of the Almighty, who has given us the judgment to tell the false from the true.”
Once again he crossed himself, and then he and his companions turned away in horror and loathing.
Lyra felt bewildered. Was she wrong? Was she making some great mistake? She looked around: gloom and desolation on every side. But she’d been wrong before about the appearance of things, trusting Mrs. Coulter because of her beautiful smile and her sweet-scented glamour. It was so easy to get things wrong; and without her d?mon to guide her, maybe she was wrong about this, too.
But Will was shaking her arm. Then he put his hands to her face and held it roughly.
“You know that’s not true,” he said, “just as well as you can feel this. Take no notice! They can all see he’s lying, too. And they’re depending on us. Come on, let’s make a start.”
She nodded. She had to trust her body and the truth of what her senses told her; she knew Pan would have.
So they set off, and the numberless millions of ghosts began to follow them. Behind them, too far back for the children to see, other inhabitants of the world of the dead had heard what was happening and were coming to join the great march. Tialys and Salmakia flew back to look and were overjoyed to see their own people there, and every other kind of conscious being who had ever been punished by the Authority with exile and death. Among them were beings who didn’t look human at all, beings like the mulefa, whom Mary Malone would have recognized, and stranger ghosts as well.
But Will and Lyra had no strength to look back; all they could do was move on after the harpies, and hope.
“Have we almost done it, Will?” Lyra whispered. “Is it nearly over?”
He couldn’t tell. But they were so weak and sick that he said, “Yes, it’s nearly over, we’ve nearly done it. We’ll be out soon.”