La Belle Sauvage

  "Is there any of that candle left?" said Alice.

  "A bit, I think."

  He rummaged among the jumble of stuff they'd taken from the pharmacy so long ago, and found a piece of candle about as long as his thumb. He lit it, let a little molten wax gather around the wick, and tilted it out onto the thwart and set the candle upright in it.

  He could still do simple, everyday things, then. He hadn't lost the power to live from second to second and to take pleasure, even, in the warm yellow light that filled the canoe.

  Lyra twisted in Alice's arms and looked at the candle. Her thumb found her mouth and she gazed solemnly at the little yellow flame.

  "What did you see?" Alice whispered.

  "Nothing."

  "It was him, wasn't it?"

  "It might have...No. It just looked like him for a second."

  "Then what?"

  "Then nothing. It wasn't there. There was nothing there."

  "We should've made sure of him. Back there, when he nearly got us. We should've done him in proper."

  "When someone dies...," he said.

  "What?"

  "What happens to their daemon?"

  "They just vanish."

  "Don't talk about this!" said Asta, and Alice's terrier daemon, Ben, said, "Yeah, don't say those things."

  "Then when there's a ghost, or a night-ghast," Malcolm said, ignoring them, "is that the dead person's daemon?"

  "I dunno. And could someone's body move around, and do things, if their daemon was dead?"

  "You never get a person without a daemon. It's impossible because--"

  "Shut up!" said Ben.

  "--because it hurts too much when you try and pull apart."

  "But I've heard that in some places there can be people without daemons. Maybe they're just dead bodies walking around. But maybe--"

  "Don't! Stop talking about that!" said Asta, and became a terrier, like Ben, and they growled together. But her voice had been terrified.

  Then Lyra complained. Alice turned back to her.

  "Listen, darling, your milk's all gone. Special treat now, all right? I got a bag full of canopies."

  She reached into the bag and pulled out a bit of toast that had once had a quail's egg on it.

  "You eat the toast and I'll find the little egg. Little tiny egg. You'll like that."

  Lyra took the toast willingly enough and brought it to her mouth.

  "You get them from the garden?" said Malcolm stupidly.

  "I nicked a whole lot of stuff from the waiters that went past. They never noticed. There's enough for us an' all. Here y'are."

  She leaned forward, holding out something the size of Lyra's palm, brown and squashed. It turned out to be a miniature spicy fish cake.

  "I suppose," he said with his mouth full, "if she eats enough toast and stuff, it won't matter so much if we run out of--"

  He heard something from outside. But it wasn't "something"; it wasn't just an abstract noise, a sound with no meaning. It was the word Alice, and it was spoken softly in the voice of Bonneville.

  She froze. He couldn't help looking at her, just as children in a classroom can't help looking at the pupil whose name is spoken by a teacher in the tone that means trouble and punishment. He looked for a reaction, instinctively, and at once regretted it. She was terrified. Her face lost all its color, her eyes widened, she bit her lip. And he had stared at her like the child who was safe. He hated himself.

  "You don't have to--" he whispered.

  "Shut up! Keep quiet!"

  They both listened, sitting like statues, straining to hear. Lyra went on sucking and munching at her toast, unaware of anything wrong.

  And there was no voice, just the wind passing through the yew trees, just the occasional lapping of water against the hull.

  Something strange was happening to the candle. Its flame was burning, it was giving out light, but it had a shadow. The searchlight was back.

  Alice gasped and put her hand over her mouth, then immediately took it away and held it close to Lyra to stifle any cry from her. Malcolm saw it all clearly in the cold glare through the canopy, and he could hear the engine noise too. After a few moments the full beam swung away from them, but there was still light nearby, as if the searchers were looking more slowly along the edge, where the water met the graveyard.

  "Here," whispered Alice, "take Lyra, because I'm going to faint."

  Very carefully, avoiding the candle, she passed the child to him. Lyra came placidly enough, happy with her toast. Alice was pale, but she didn't look like fainting; he thought if she really felt faint, she wouldn't be able to say so; she'd just sink down into oblivion.

  Malcolm watched her closely. It wasn't only the light that had frightened her; there'd been that whisper of her name in Bonneville's voice. She looked at the very edge of terror. She sat back and suddenly turned to her left, the side closer to the bank. She was listening. Malcolm could hear a whisper. Her eyes grew wider, more full of horror, or loathing, and she didn't seem to be aware of him or of Lyra anymore, just of that insistent whisper through the coal silk at her side.

  "Alice--" he began again, desperate to help.

  "Shut up!"

  She put her hands over her ears. Ben, terrier-formed, was standing with his back legs on her lap, his forepaws on the gunwale, intent like her on the whisper, which Malcolm could hear now, though he couldn't distinguish the words.

  Expressions flitted over Alice's face like the shadows of swift clouds on an April morning; but these expressions were all fear, or disgust, or horror, and looking at her, Malcolm felt he would never see sunlight on a spring morning again, so deep was the anguish and loathing the girl was feeling.

  Then the tarpaulin rippled next to her, and Ben jumped back, and then a slit appeared in the coal-silk canopy as a knifepoint moved down it, and then a man's hand reached through and seized Alice by the throat.

  Alice tried to scream, but the grip on her throat choked her voice, and then the hand moved down her front, to her lap, searching for something else, feeling left and right--trying to find Lyra. Alice was moaning, struggling to get away from the loathsome touch, and Ben, terrier-formed, seized the man's wrist in his teeth, despite the disgust it must have caused him; and then, finding no Lyra, Bonneville's hand grabbed the little daemon and snatched him out through the slit in the canopy, out into the dark, away from Alice.

  "Ben! BEN!" Alice cried, and stumbled up and fell across the thwart and half out of the canoe and then scrambled up and was gone after them. Malcolm reached for her, meaning to hold her back, but she was gone before he could touch her. The hyena daemon laughed, just a couple of feet from Malcolm's ears, splitting the night with her "Haa! Haaaa! Haaa!" And there was an additional note in the laughter, like a scream of agony.

  Lyra, terrified by the sound, began to cry, and Malcolm rocked her closely while he called, "Alice! Alice!"

  Asta, cat-formed, put her paws on the gunwale and tried to look out from under the canopy, but Malcolm knew she could see nothing. Pantalaimon was fluttering here and there, a moth, landing on Lyra's hand for a moment and flying away again, blundering close to the candle flame and fleeing in fear, and finally settling on the child's damp hair.

  From the direction of the mausoleum there came a high, hopeless cry, not a scream, just a desperate wail of protest. Malcolm's heart clenched.

  Then there was just the sound of the baby crying in his arms, and the water lapping, and a soft, keening sob from Asta, a puppy, pressing herself against his side.

  I'm not old enough for this! Malcolm thought, almost aloud.

  He cuddled the child close and pulled the blanket up around her before setting her down among the cushions. Guilt and rage and fear fought one another in his mind. He thought he'd never been more awake in all his life; he thought he'd never sleep again; he thought this was the worst night he'd ever known.

  His head was full of thunder. He thought his skull would crack open.

  "Asta--" he
gasped. "I've got to go to Alice--but Lyra--can't leave her--"

  "Go!" she said. "Yes, go! I'll stay-- I won't leave her--"

  "It'll hurt so much--"

  "But we have to-- I'll guard Lyra-- I won't move--promise...."

  His eyes were streaming with hot tears. He kissed Lyra over and over again, and then held puppy Asta to his heart, to his face, to his lips. He set her down next to the child, and she became a leopard cub, so beautiful he sobbed with love.

  And he stood up so carefully, so gently, that the canoe didn't rock or move an inch, and he took the paddle and climbed out.

  Immediately the deep pain of separation began, and he heard a stifled moan from the canoe behind him. It was like struggling to climb up a steep slope with his lungs clamoring for air and his heart hammering at his ribs, but it was worse: because inside the pain and coloring it, deepening it, poisoning it, there was the horrible guilt of hurting his dearest Asta so much. She was shaking with love and pain, and she was so brave--her eyes were watching him with such devotion as he slowly, unforgivably wrenched his body away from her, as if he was leaving her behind forever. But he had to. He forced himself through the pain, which he knew was tearing at her leopard form without mercy; he dragged himself away from the little boat and up the slope to the dark mausoleum, because something was doing something to Alice and she was crying in wild protest.

  And the hyena daemon, both her front legs gone, was half standing, half lying on the grass, with Ben, the terrier, in her foul jaws. Ben writhed and kicked and bit and howled, and the monstrous jaws and teeth of Bonneville's daemon were closing, slowly, voluptuously, ecstatically, on his little form.

  Then the moon came out. There was Bonneville in clear sight, his hands gripping Alice's wrists, holding her down on the steps. The cold light was reflected in the hyena's eyes, and in Bonneville's too, and from the tears on Alice's cheeks. It was the worst thing Malcolm had ever seen, and he tore himself through the pain and lurched and stumbled up the slippery grass and raised the paddle and brought it down on the man's back, but feebly, too feebly.

  Bonneville twisted, saw Malcolm, and laughed out loud. Alice cried and tried to force the man away, but he slammed her down hard, and she screamed. Malcolm tried to hit him again. The moon shone brilliantly on the sodden grass, the mossy gravestones, the crumbling mausoleum, the figures in their hideous embrace between the columns.

  Malcolm felt something grow inside him that he couldn't argue with or control, and it was like a herd of wild dogs, snarling and howling and snapping, racing towards him with their torn ears and blind eyes and bloodied muzzles.

  And then they were all around him and through him and he whirled the paddle again and caught the hyena daemon on the shoulder.

  "Ah," said Bonneville, and fell clumsily.

  The hyena growled. Malcolm hit her again, full on the head, and she lurched and slid away, her back legs slipping on the grass, her chest and throat bearing all the weight of her as she crushed little Ben. One more blow from the paddle, and Ben fell out of her jaws and scrambled up towards Alice, but Bonneville saw him and kicked out at him, sending him tumbling away over the grass.

  Alice cried out in pain. The dogs howled and snarled, and what happened was that Malcolm whirled the paddle again and caught Bonneville hard on the back of the head.

  "Tell me--" Malcolm raged, though he couldn't finish the command, and he tried to hold the dogs back with the paddle, but they surged forward again, and Malcolm struck once more, and the figure fell full-length with a long, expiring moan.

  Malcolm turned to the imaginary dogs. He felt his eyes throwing fire. But he also knew in that fraction of a second that without the dogs he would find himself giving way to pity, and only with their help could he punish the figure who had hurt Alice. But if he didn't hold them off, he'd never know what Bonneville could tell him--and yet he didn't know what to ask, and if he held them off for a moment too long, they'd go away and take all that power with them. He thought all that in less than a second.

  Malcolm turned back to the dying figure. The dogs howled, and Malcolm whirled the paddle again and struck the arm that came up in defense. He had never hit anything so hard. The figure cried out, "Go on, kill me, you little shit! Peace at last."

  The dogs surged again, and the man flinched even before Malcolm had moved. If he hit him again, Malcolm knew, he'd kill him, and all the time the terrible, draining separation pain exhausted him, and the knowledge of his brave abandoned daemon guarding the little child drenched him with misery.

  "What's the Rusakov field?" he managed to say. "Why's it important?"

  "Dust..." It was the last word Bonneville said, hardly more than a whisper.

  The dogs were milling around, leaderless. Malcolm thought of Alice, of the fairy arranging her hair, of her sleep-warmed cheeks, and of how it felt to hold baby Lyra in his arms, and the dogs felt his emotion and turned around and leapt forward once more, through Malcolm, and he raised the paddle and struck again and again till the Bonneville figure fell still, the groaning stopped, all was silent, the hyena daemon had vanished, and Malcolm was left standing over the body of the man who had pursued them so madly and for so long.

  Malcolm's arms, strengthened by days of paddling, now ached with exhaustion. The weight of the paddle itself was too much for him. He dropped it. The dogs had gone. He sat down suddenly and leaned against one of the columns. Bonneville's body lay half in and half out of the dazzling moonlight. A trickle of blood ran slowly down, joining the rain puddles still lying on the steps.

  Alice's eyes were closed. There was blood on her cheek, blood dripping down her leg, blood in her fingernails. She was shaking. She wiped her mouth and lay back on the wet stone, looking like a broken bird. Ben was a mouse, trembling at her neck.

  "Alice," he whispered.

  "Where's Asta?" she mumbled through bruised lips. "How..."

  "She's guarding Lyra. We had to sep-separate...."

  "Oh, Mal," she said, just that, and he felt that all the pain had been worth it.

  He wiped his face.

  "We ought to drag him down to the water," he said shakily.

  "Yeah. All right. Go slowly...."

  Malcolm pulled his painful body upright and bent to grasp the man's feet. He began to pull. Alice forced herself up and helped, hauling at a sleeve. The body was heavy, but it came without resistance, without even snagging on the half-buried gravestones.

  They came to the water's edge, where the flood was flowing strongly. The CCD boat and its searchlight had gone. They rolled the dead man clumsily over until the current took him away, and then stood clinging to each other and watching the dark shape, darker on the dark water, drift off with the flood till it had vanished.

  The candle was still burning in the canoe. They found Lyra fast asleep and Asta, at the end of her strength, lying beside her. Malcolm lifted up his daemon and hugged her close, and they both wept.

  Alice climbed into the canoe and lay trembling as Ben, terrier-formed, licked and licked at her, cleaning the blood from every part. Then she pulled a blanket over them both and turned away and closed her eyes.

  Malcolm picked up the child and lay down with her in his arms and their daemons between them and the blankets wrapped around them both. The last thing he did was to pinch out the candle.

  The flood was at its height by this time. All across southern England houses and villages were devastated, large buildings were swept away, farm animals were drowned, and as for people, the number of missing or dead was, for the time being, uncountable. The authorities both local and national had to spend every penny in their treasuries and every second of time in the sole task of dealing with the chaos.

  Among all the other activities, desperate and urgent as they all were, the two sides that were searching for Malcolm and Lyra made their way steadily downstream towards the capital city. They followed rumors, of which there were many; they ignored every cry for help from the beleaguered people on all sides; they had ey
es and minds only for a boy and a girl in a canoe, with a baby, and for a man with a three-legged hyena daemon.

  Like Lord Nugent, George Papadimitriou had experienced the sense of strangeness and unreality that the flood produced. The gyptian owner of the boat he was traveling on told him that in gyptian lore, extreme weather had its own states of mind, just as calm weather did.

  "How can the weather have a state of mind?" said Papadimitriou.

  The gyptian said, "You think the weather is only out there? It's in here too," and tapped his head.

  "So do you mean that the weather's state of mind is just our state of mind?"

  "Nothing is just anything," the gyptian replied, and would say no more.

  They moved on with the flood, speaking to anyone they could find, asking about the canoe and the boy and the girl. Yes, they'd been seen the day before, but no, it wasn't a canoe, it was a dinghy with an outboard engine. Yes, some people had seen them, but they were dead in their boat, or they were water-ghasts, or they were armed with guns. And over and over again: they were spirits, it was bad luck to talk to them, they came from the fairy world. Papadimitriou accepted all this nonsense with serious attention. The CCD in their search would be hearing the same rumors: the problem was not to judge their truthfulness, but to assess the likely reaction of the other side. Nugent and Schlesinger would be faced with just the same problem.

  And every hour they came closer to London.

  --

  The morning light, as cold and merciless as it could be, woke Malcolm up far earlier than he liked. Aching in every muscle, and aching in his mind when images of the night came back to him, he struggled to sit up and assemble his senses.

  Alice was asleep, and so was the child, still and warm in his arms. He wished he hadn't woken; he knew he'd have to wake them, and he wished he could let them sleep. He looked out from under the canopy. The graveyard looked even worse than it had during the night, when the moonlight had at least given it a silvery coherence. In the cruel light of the morning, it looked squalid, neglected, overgrown, and there was something worse: the steps of the little mausoleum were stained with blood, a great deal of it.