The Amber Spyglass (Page 27)

Will paused in the center of the little village and looked around, wondering where to go, and as he stood there, two or three men appeared ahead and stood staring at him. They were the first people he had ever seen in Lyra’s world. They wore heavy felt coats, muddy boots, and fur hats, and they didn’t look friendly.

The white dog changed into a sparrow and flew to Will’s shoulder. No one blinked an eye at this: each of the men had a dæmon, Will saw, dogs, most of them, and that was how things happened in this world. On his shoulder, Balthamos whispered: “Keep moving. Don’t look them in the eye. Keep your head down. That is the respectful thing to do.”

Will kept walking. He could make himself inconspicuous; it was his greatest talent. By the time he got to them, the men had already lost interest in him. But then a door opened in the biggest house in the road, and a voice called something loudly.

Balthamos said softly, “The priest. You will have to be polite to him. Turn and bow.”

Will did so. The priest was an immense, gray-bearded man, wearing a black cassock, with a crow dæmon on his shoulder. His restless eyes moved over Will’s face and body, taking everything in. He beckoned.

Will went to the doorway and bowed again.

The priest said something, and Balthamos murmured, “He’s asking where you come from. Say whatever you like.”

“I speak English,” Will said slowly and clearly. “I don’t know any other languages.”

“Ah, English!” cried the priest gleefully in English. “My dear young man! Welcome to our village, our little no-longer-perpendicular Kholodnoye! What is your name, and where are you going?”

“My name is Will, and I’m going south. I have lost my family, and I’m trying to find them again.”

“Then you must come inside and have some refreshment,” said the priest, and put a heavy arm around Will’s shoulders, pulling him in through the doorway.

The man’s crow dæmon was showing a vivid interest in Balthamos. But the angel was equal to that: he became a mouse and crept into Will’s shirt as if he were shy.

The priest led him into a parlor heavy with tobacco smoke, where a cast-iron samovar steamed quietly on a side table.

“What was your name?” said the priest. “Tell me again.”

“Will Parry. But I don’t know what to call you.”

“Otyets Semyon,” said the priest, stroking Will’s arm as he guided him to a chair. “Otyets means Father. I am a priest of the Holy Church. My given name is Semyon, and the name of my father was Boris, so I am Semyon Borisovitch. What is your father’s name?”

“John Parry.”

“John is Ivan. So you are Will Ivanovitch, and I am Father Semyon Borisovitch. Where have you come from, Will Ivanovitch, and where are you going?”

“I’m lost,” Will said. “I was traveling with my family to the south. My father is a soldier, but he was exploring in the Arctic, and then something happened and we got lost. So I’m traveling south because I know that’s where we were going next.”

The priest spread his hands and said, “A soldier? An explorer from England? No one so interesting as that has trodden the dirty roads of Kholodnoye for centuries, but in this time of upheaval, how can we know that he will not appear tomorrow? You yourself are a welcome visitor, Will Ivanovitch. You must stay the night in my house and we will talk and eat together. Lydia Alexandrovna!” he called.

An elderly woman came in silently. He spoke to her in Russian, and she nodded and took a glass and filled it with hot tea from the samovar. She brought the glass of tea to Will, together with a little saucer of jam with a silver spoon.

“Thank you,” said Will.

“The conserve is to sweeten the tea,” said the priest. “Lydia Alexandrovna made it from bilberries.”

The result was that the tea was sickly as well as bitter, but Will sipped it, nonetheless. The priest kept leaning forward to look closely at him, and felt his hands to see whether he was cold, and stroked his knee. In order to distract him, Will asked why the buildings in the village sloped.

“There has been a convulsion in the earth,” the priest said. “It is all foretold in the Apocalypse of St. John. Rivers flow backward . . . The great river only a short way from here used to flow north into the Arctic Ocean. All the way from the mountains of central Asia it flowed north for thousands and thousands of years, ever since the Authority of God the Almighty Father created the earth. But when the earth shook and the fog and the floods came, everything changed, and then the great river flowed south for a week or more before it turned again and went north. The world is turned upside down. Where were you when the great convulsion came?”

“A long way from here,” Will said. “I didn’t know what was happening. When the fog cleared, I had lost my family and I don’t know where I am now. You’ve told me the name of this place, but where is it? Where are we?”

“Bring me that large book on the bottom shelf,” said Semyon Borisovitch. “I will show you.”

The priest drew his chair up to the table and licked his fingers before turning the pages of the great atlas.

“Here,” he said, pointing with a dirty fingernail at a spot in central Siberia, a long way east of the Urals. The river nearby flowed, as the priest had said, from the northern part of the mountains in Tibet all the way to the Arctic. He looked closely at the Himalaya, but he could see nothing like the map Baruch had sketched.

Semyon Borisovitch talked and talked, pressing Will for details of his life, his family, his home, and Will, a practiced dissembler, answered him fully enough. Presently the housekeeper brought in some beetroot soup and dark bread, and after the priest had said a long grace, they ate.