The Amber Spyglass (Page 54)

So the work continued. He had no idea how long it took; Lyra, for her part, found her arms aching, her eyes streaming, her skin scorched and red, and every bone in her body aching with fatigue; but still she placed each stone as Iorek had told her, and still the weary Pantalaimon raised his wings readily and beat them over the flames.

When it came to the final join, Will’s head was ringing, and he was so exhausted by the intellectual effort he could barely lift the next branch onto the fire. He had to understand every connection, or the knife would not hold together. And when it came to the most complex one, the last, which would affix the nearly finished blade onto the small part remaining at the handle—if he couldn’t hold it in his full consciousness together with all the others, then the knife would simply fall apart as if Iorek had never begun.

The bear sensed this, too, and paused before he began heating the last piece. He looked at Will, and in his eyes Will could see nothing, no expression, just a bottomless black brilliance. Nevertheless, he understood: this was work, and it was hard, but they were equal to it, all of them.

That was enough for Will, so he turned back to the fire and sent his imagination out to the broken end of the haft, and braced himself for the last and fiercest part of the task.

So he and Iorek and Lyra together forged the knife, and how long the final join took he had no idea; but when Iorek had struck the final blow, and Will had felt the final tiny settling as the atoms connected across the break, Will sank down onto the floor of the cave and let exhaustion possess him. Lyra nearby was in the same state, her eyes glassy and red-rimmed, her hair full of soot and smoke; and Iorek himself stood heavy-headed, his fur singed in several places, dark streaks of ash marking its rich cream-white.

Tialys and Salmakia had slept in turns, one of them always alert. Now she was awake and he was sleeping, but as the blade cooled from red to gray and finally to silver, and as Will reached out for the handle, she woke her partner with a hand on his shoulder. He was alert at once.

But Will didn’t touch the knife: he held his palm close by, and the heat was still too great for his hand. The spies relaxed on the rocky shelf as Iorek said to Will:

“Come outside.”

Then he said to Lyra: “Stay here, and don’t touch the knife.”

Lyra sat close to the anvil, where the knife lay cooling, and Iorek told her to bank the fire up and not let it burn down: there was a final operation yet.

Will followed the great bear out onto the dark mountainside. The cold was bitter and instantaneous, after the inferno in the cave.

“They should not have made that knife,” said Iorek, after they had walked a little way. “Maybe I should not have mended it. I’m troubled, and I have never been troubled before, never in doubt. Now I am full of doubt. Doubt is a human thing, not a bear thing. If I am becoming human, something’s wrong, something’s bad. And I’ve made it worse.”

“But when the first bear made the first piece of armor, wasn’t that bad, too, in the same way?”

Iorek was silent. They walked on till they came to a big drift of snow, and Iorek lay in it and rolled this way and that, sending flurries of snow up into the dark air, so that it looked as if he himself were made of snow, he was the personification of all the snow in the world.

When he was finished, he rolled over and stood up and shook himself vigorously, and then, seeing Will still waiting for an answer to his question, said:

“Yes, I think it might have been, too. But before that first armored bear, there were no others. We know of nothing before that. That was when custom began. We know our customs, and they are firm and solid and we follow them without change. Bear nature is weak without custom, as bear flesh is unprotected without armor.

“But I think I have stepped outside bear nature in mending this knife. I think I’ve been as foolish as Iofur Rakinson. Time will tell. But I am uncertain and doubtful. Now you must tell me: why did the knife break?”

Will rubbed his aching head with both hands.

“The woman looked at me and I thought she had the face of my mother,” he said, trying to recollect the experience with all the honesty he had. “And the knife came up against something it couldn’t cut, and because my mind was pushing it through and forcing it back both at the same time, it snapped. That’s what I think. The woman knew what she was doing, I’m sure. She’s very clever.”

“When you talk of the knife, you talk of your mother and father.”

“Do I? Yes . . . I suppose I do.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know.”

Suddenly Iorek lunged at Will and cuffed him hard with his left paw: so hard that Will fell half-stunned into the snow and tumbled over and over until he ended some way down the slope with his head ringing.

Iorek came down slowly to where Will was struggling up, and said, “Answer me truthfully.”

Will was tempted to say, “You wouldn’t have done that if I’d had the knife in my hand.” But he knew that Iorek knew that, and knew that he knew it, and that it would be discourteous and stupid to say it; but he was tempted, all the same.

He held his tongue until he was standing upright, facing Iorek directly.

“I said I don’t know,” he said, trying hard to keep his voice calm, “because I haven’t looked clearly at what it is that I’m going to do. At what it means. It frightens me. And it frightens Lyra, too. Anyway, I agreed as soon as I heard what she said.”

“And what was that?”

“We want to go down to the land of the dead and talk to the ghost of Lyra’s friend Roger, the one who got killed on Svalbard. And if there really is a world of the dead, then my father will be there, too, and if we can talk to ghosts, I want to talk to him.