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Roses...what did it have to do with roses?
“I don’t know,” Malcolm said, his hair shining a brilliant marmalade orange.
Lyra looked at the gilt curls of the golden boy and pondered, not seeing. She hadn't realised she'd spoken out loud. Pantalaimon needed to be here - Pan would know, Pan would understand. There was something she was not grasping.
She glanced sidelong at Dr Polstead. It was not that he didn’t not know, she thought. It was only that she felt he didn’t know in a different way from her not knowing: her Gottfried-Brande-inflected, pain-of-losing-people-studded blindness. And Malcolm didn’t know in an entirely different way to Asta, and to Pan, and all of them altogether. Like little diamond panes in a window. All of them were looking through together, but none of them could see the same thing. Everyone had their own pane: but wasn’t it all the same window? With the same view on the other side.
It’s not even the window we’re looking at, she thought, brushing aside a spray of flowers. Here the marshes sprouted gardens, hot and heady, artificial planting gone wild. She knew they were getting close. She thought of the windows from her world to Will’s world, and a thousand other universes, remembering looking through them. That’s what she was looking for, in the red building. But had she and Will been looking through the same window? It hadn’t been a question, back then: they had known, instinctively, as children or animals know, that what they were looking at was no trick of the light. That it was something concrete, solid and shared, even if it was not the same for everyone. She thought of Abdel Ionides, her magician, and his explanation of the Rusakov particle. More like a field - a rose field, where everything touched, and which contained everything. There was something there, she thought. The knife had a third edge. It was something about ways of looking. The knife, the alethiometer...Will had said he had to feel for another world. That was it! Lyra brushed aside a trailing branch and stopped. He could feel the worlds: the knife-wielder could touch them. But how did that help?
Because the fabric of reality wasn’t conceptual, a little voice told her. It was physical. He could touch it. Something about touch. She thought about the bonds between things: the bonds between daemons and people, the bonds between atoms, the bonds between the edges of the knife, between the hands of the alethiometer, between worlds. She remembered lips, warm and slightly damp, smelling of fruit, in the world of the Mulefa. Where things touched: that was it. Touch.
She stopped in the midst of a marshy patch of ground, sinking slightly. Malcolm put a hand on her shoulder. “Lyra?” he asked, and then, reverting to his more casual idiom, “you alright?”
A halo seemed to cluster around her blonde hair, streaked with sweat and alive with static, as she turned to him and nodded. “Yes,” she said, firmly, her eyes bright, and the lack of hesitation told him she was thinking of something. He dropped his gaze, allowing her to wander on in thought and step, but to his surprised she took his hand, tugging him along with her. Like this, they made their way onwards till they came to the building.
It was a high, red-walled structure with small windows set under the roof, imposing and pagoda-like in its sloped gables. They stopped under the scorched blue sky, gazing apprehensively at the guards standing at the top of the steps.
Lyra went first, slowly, dropping Malcolm’s slightly sweaty hand when they reached the top. She leaned in, listening to something they said, then gave her reply. Again a halo of bright somethings seemed to cluster around her head; and then it was gone in the shadow of the door, as the guards moved aside and she entered.
It took a minute for Malcolm’s eyes to adjust to the dark, but when they did, he saw Lyra standing, alone, in a shaft of sunlight in the centre of an empty room. The whole building was hollow, with no partitions or levels to it. She was staring, transfixed, at the walls; and when Malcolm followed her eyeline he saw what she was looking at, an endless interconnected pattern of painted murals, showing gardens, and roses, and bridges, all startling in their colour. Yet he knew just by looking at her that she saw something he didn’t. She was thinking again.
Lyra turned, and said something unexpected. “Do you like it?” Malcolm’s mouth fell open in surprise.
“I don’t really know,” he replied, after a moment. “It’s not for me to like it.”
Lyra shook her head ruefully, as if he had failed some test, but her lips were smiling. Suddenly Malcolm felt as though he were the student and she the master, though he was ten years her senior.
“That’s the academic in you,” she said, facing him front-on, and her eyes danced, but she wasn’t laughing. “You think there’s a set of lenses that we see the world through, like - oh, I don’t know, like an occulist, when they put different-strength glasses in front of your eyes. But the glass is warped, and you can choose which one. Like Gottfried Brande thinks. Isn’t that it?”
“I wouldn’t compare myself to Gottfried Brande,” Malcolm said, frowning, though he wanted to smile. Lyra’s eyes flashed pityingly at him again.
“Come,” she said, reaching out her hand to him. “Come here.”
He took her hand again, his strong and firm in her warm, damp, slender fingers. They stood side by side in the high shafts of the sun, staring at the shadowy paintings.
“Look,” she said, pleadingly. “Or don’t look - feel.”
Malcolm glanced at her sideways. Not that he didn’t trust her, but he wondered if the heatstroke had got to her. Seeing he still had not understood, she turned her body towards him, taking his other hand, as if more points of connection would do the trick. An odd suspicion passed through him, odd because he wasn’t suspicious of her, that she was trying to seduce him. Yet all the time her eyes laughed at him and made him feel a fool, as if to say no, of course not, and welcomed him.
“It’s like this,” she said. “When I used to read the alethiometer, I used to have to hold the three symbols in my head. And all the meanings behind them, touching each other. Yes?”
He shook his head helplessly, at her mercy. She sighed, exasperated, yet it was almost a laugh.
“See here!” she said, dragging him over to the wall and gesturing to the painting. “It’s not like a window at all. Perspective, I mean. Or, how we experience reality. It’s not a window with many panes, it’s - it’s a rose. This rose.” She reached out and stroked it, going on, “We see each petal in the rose, yes? Yet that’s not how we feel it to be at all. We don’t experience the rose as a set of petals, one petal at a time. That’s - insane. We feel it to be a rose, we know it’s a rose - as one.” As she spoke, Lyra plucked the rose, twisting its thorny stem in her fingers, and held it out to him. “We can see its points of connection, we feel its part in the balance of everything. And see, seeing and feeling is like the rose, it’s all contact between different parts and interconnection, and so is the universe. Every world out there is a petal of the rose.” Lyra plucked off the outer petals, one by one. “And this is what the Magisterium wants to do. Pluck, pluck, pluck. Take everything apart, so that no one and nothing is connected, and everything is alone and isolated. Alkahest. The destroyer of bonds.”
Her eyes shone brightly at him, and he felt, rather than saw, his own eyes reflecting that light back to her. Her mouth was puckered like the rose, chewing her lip and thinking, but her eyes seemed to contain tears.
“For so long, I thought the same way. I thought I was alone - I thought I had to be separate, that everything had to be kept separate. And I started to fall apart. It made Pan sick, it made me - it made me almost like those people with dead daemons, or the children my mother cut from their daemons at Bolvangar.” She shuddered, looking away. “I’ll tell you about that another time. But don’t you see - don’t you see how silly it is? My father, to open a way into another world, had to destroy the bond between human and daemon. Not just that: he destroyed the bond between me and Roger, the boy that died. He thought he needed alkahest, too; but it was really that he couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it as a bond until it was ruptured, destroyed. He and my mother, they - they were always like that, only in death could they admit their relationship, and their love for me, and their love for each other. They felt the bonds through destruction, and they needed destruction to illuminate the pathway to the other - other worlds, and each other. Only with loss, don’t you see, only with loss could they know what they had. A lot of people are like that. I lost a lot, but it didn’t teach me anything. I only tried to forget what I already knew, because the grief - oh God, the grief was so strong -”
And suddenly she was sobbing, tears streaming down her scarlet face. Malcolm tried to let go of her hand to wipe away the tears, but she held on tighter, so tightly he could feel every bone in her fingers. He got the message, letting her keep her fingers interlaced with his as the storm of weeping subsided.
“Thank you,” she said at length, when her tears dried up. “I needed that.” He thought she sounded more dignified and mature than he’d ever known her.
“You were talking about your mother,” he said, prompting her.
“Yes, and my father - oh yes, and how he blew up the sky to move between worlds.” She laughed through her drying tears, and it was like the Spring sun through a shower of rain. “He didn’t understand, and I didn’t understand - but the Witches knew instinctively, and the angels, but they travel between worlds all the time, it’s so natural to them they don’t have a word for it - and they’re uninhibited, and the angels don’t have flesh so they couldn’t help me, they couldn’t tell me what it was - but the point is, what I’m trying to say - there are worlds all around us, all the time. And we know: just as we know that we can look at things one way, or another, but in the end we’re seeing both. It’s all there, as far as the eye can see and the hand can touch. We just have to reach out and touch. We don’t need a universe-destroyer to get through to other worlds: and alkahest can’t stop us. We just need our hands, our senses, our selves. Like the boy Will, whom I loved, the knifebearer. He was so afraid of people, and in a way - the knife, it’s a continuation of all that splitting and destroying, that’s why Iorek Byrnison didn’t like it - but Will, part of the knife-bearer’s wielding it involves them reaching out and touching other worlds. Just like that. And he could feel them. He could touch them, any of them, when he put his heart into it. Just like me with the alethiometer. It was one of the last things we said to each other, only I was such a child and so blinded by grief that I didn’t understand back then. ‘Let’s sit on the same bench in the same place in our worlds at the same time every year, and it’ll be like we’re together’. And it was - or it would’ve been, if I hadn't chickened out. I lost touch, don’t you see? I didn’t want to feel, because it was all too much. It’s everything, all at the same time, and that’s - I don’t know, that’s frightening to people, that’s why they created the Magisterium to keep things separate. But it’s wrong, I should’ve known that. But if I hadn’t lost touch - if I had only let myself feel - I would know, now, that it’s all here. It’s together, everything, like in this one rose.”
Somehow the rose had got crushed between their joined hands, which were clamped tight around it. Malcolm could feel the softness of the petals, and the thorns digging into his wrist. There was a smear of pollen across his thumb where it overlapped hers, a golden line joining them both together. And now he understood. He smiled, looking down at her rose-petal lips, and she looked at his golden-pollen hair. In a whisper, she said, “It’s not the same, but everything touches. Everything is interconnected.” And she was trembling, so he leaned in and kissed her, and felt the spark pass between them, that anbaric charge of being alive, the energy of a thousand universes.
And suddenly there was Pan, and Asta too, intertwining with their humans. And they were all in a garden, trailing roses brushing pollen on everyone. What a lot of people there were: Olivier Bonneville, looking fragilely like his sister, and Abdel Ionides, hands interlocked with Leila Pervani’s in the same way as Lyra’s and Malcolm’s were. The gryphons were there, the Prince and Gulya intertwined, and the scent and sprays of roses seemed to loop round them, incorporating them into the pattern, so that Malcolm realised they were in the painting. Or more accurately, he had been looking at it like a window: but as Lyra had showed by picking the rose, this was a real, tangible world that they could reach out and touch, a world full of animals and daemons and people, populated with life. A river ran between two trees where a dark young man stepped out, followed by a cat daemon. And when Lyra saw him the tears in her eyes sparkled brighter than ever.
“Oh, Will,” she said, her voice quavering. “I got it right, didn’t I? It is you?”
“It took you long enough,” he said, dark eyes shadowed, but he was smiling. Then, turning towards Malcolm and frowning, he added, “Who’s your new feller?”
Lyra rolled her eyes at him. Malcolm noticed Pan and this man’s daemon were already frolicking nearer the riverside.
“He’s my teacher,” she said, “and he saved my life when I was a baby,” grabbing him by the hand again and presenting him to Will with a slightly challenging look. Will’s eyebrows shot up, but he put out a hand which, Malcolm noticed, lacked three fingers, saying, “How do you do?”
When they had exchanged names Malcolm turned to Lyra, embarrassed. “You’ve taught me so much today, I’m not sure I can really call myself your tutor,” he said, scratching the back of his head. “Besides which, kissing you is definitely a breach of faculty rules.”
Lyra just laughed, something playful in her eyes. “Let them try and fire you,” she said scornfully. “I’ll give the old bastards what for.” Will watched them both warily, then Lyra dropped Malcolm’s hand to put both hands on Will’s shoulders. She stood on tiptoe and placed a kiss on his forehead, suddenly seeming very solemn, to Malcolm’s eyes. Will, too, for his part, accepted this with his eyes closed, and there was a kind of relief in him which surprised Malcolm. But he supposed this was another history he would have to study: and what an interesting, living one, liable to slip out of his grasp if he didn’t hold onto it.
Lyra slid her arm round Will’s waist and they wandered side by side to the riverbank, her head on his shoulder. “‘And she did eat of the fruit...’” Malcolm heard her say, before she was out of earshot. He wondered if he would hear more about that later. He wasn’t sure quite what had happened between them, but he knew this wasn’t the end, even if this Will man seemed to be her real lover. But then, perhaps love was infinite, as she said: and why should one relationship exclude another?
With that in mind, he suddenly remembered there was something of importance to do.
Alice was standing a little apart from everyone, as he had known she would be, looking shockingly thinner. He had to adjust to the sight of her, her hunched shoulders to him, her loneliness. She hadn’t had the revelation he’d just had: and yet he felt he could share it with her, in time.
He placed a hand on her shoulder. She turned round quickly. “Alice,” he said.
And then it was once again as if the ages were reversed, for he was comforting her as she wept in his arms, sobbing raggedly into his shirtfront. He was reminded of when she had been 17, and he had worshipped her. Yet here again it was different, and he felt in some way they were home now, and would be forever. He held her tight, kissing the top of her head, remembering Lyra. Then she was holding his face in her hands, kissing him passionately, and all the pent up passion he had kept disguised around Lyra, knowing it was not the right person or time, came pouring out, entwining them, drawing them downhill to the trees where she pushed him back against the trunk and kissed him like her life depended on it. He knew there would be no going back now; but he didn’t want to stop. This bond was strong and it was everywhere, and it wouldn’t go away, ever.
They took one last look at Lyra, later, light beside dark with her hand in Will’s, wandering in bliss under the trees. And they knew she would be alright - it would be all alright.