The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, #3)

by Philip Pullman

They had all the time in the world: all the time the world had.

he could not understand how anyone so steeped in evil could look so radiant with hope and happiness.

The first thing to do here would be to convince the four-legged creatures, who seemed to have the rudiments of reason, that their habit of riding on wheels was abominable and Satanic, and contrary to the will of God. Break them of that, and salvation would follow.

Then Lyra took one of those little red fruits. With a fast-beating heart, she turned to him and said, “Will. . .” And she lifted the fruit gently to his mouth.

She could see from his eyes that he knew at once what she meant, and that he was too joyful to speak. Her fingers were still at his lips, and he felt them tremble, and he put his own hand up to hold hers there, and then neither of them could look; they were confused; they were brimming with happiness.

Like two moths clumsily bumping together, with no more weight than that, their lips touched. Then before they knew how it happened, they were clinging together, blindly pressing their faces towards each other. “Like Mary said –” he whispered – “you know straight away when you like someone – when you were asleep, on the mountain, before she took you away, I told Pan –” “I heard,” she whispered, “I was awake and I wanted to tell you the same and now I know what I must have felt all the time: I love you, Will, I love you –” The word love set his nerves ablaze. All his body thrilled with it, and he answered her in the same words, kissing her hot face over and over again, drinking in with adoration the scent of her bod...

Mary turned, spyglass in hand, to see Will and Lyra returning. They were some way off; they weren’t hurrying. They were holding hands, talking together, heads close, oblivious to everything else; she could see that even from a distance. She nearly put the spyglass to her eye, but held back, and returned it to her pocket. There was no need for the glass; she knew what she would see; they would seem to be made of living gold. They would seem the true image of what human beings always could be, once they had come into their inheritance. The Dust pouring down from the stars had found a living home again, and these children-no-longer-children, saturated with love, were the cause of it all.

And alwaies crouds it self betwixt. Andrew Marvell

Pantalaimon cried aloud, a pure cold owl-cry, a sound never heard in that world before. In nests and burrows for a long way around, and wherever any small night creature was hunting or grazing or scavenging, a new and unforgettable fear came into being.

Until then, they hadn’t felt like that, but suddenly they did. And then the Dust was attracted to them, very powerfully, and it stopped flowing the other way.”

She and the rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed.

the struggle isn’t over now, though the forces of the kingdom have met a setback. They’ll regroup under a new commander and come back strongly, and we must be ready to resist.”

My soul, do not seek eternal life, but exhaust the realm of the possible. Pindar

they felt they were melting with love.

Will knew what it was to see his dæmon. As she flew down to the sand, he felt his heart tighten and release in a way he never forgot. Sixty years and more would go by, and as an old man he would still feel some sensations as bright and fresh as ever: Lyra’s fingers putting the fruit between his lips under the gold-and-silver trees; her warm mouth pressing against his; his dæmon being torn from his unsuspecting breast as they entered the world of the dead; and the sweet rightfulness of her coming back to him at the edge of the moonlit dunes.

they’re like the children of the abyss. Every time we open a window with the knife, it makes a Spectre. It’s like a little bit of the abyss that floats out and enters the world. That’s why the Cittàgazze world was so full of them, because of all the windows they left open there.”

they grow by feeding on Dust,” said Pantalaimon. “And on dæmons. Because Dust and dæmons are sort of similar; grown-up dæmons anyway. And the Spectres get bigger and stronger as they do.

What you don’t know is what the knife does on its own. Your intentions may be good. The knife has intentions too.

I’d follow you down to the world of the dead without thinking twice about it, just like you followed Roger; and that would be two lives gone for nothing, my life wasted like yours.

No, we should spend our whole lifetimes together, good long busy lives, and if we can’t spend them together, we . . . we’ll have to spend them apart.”

He said we have to build the republic of heaven where we are.

She carried it everywhere: when Will thought of her in later years, it was often with that little bag over her shoulder. She tucked the hair behind her ears in the swift movement he loved and took out the black velvet bundle.

“Understand this,” said Xaphania: “Dust is not a constant. There’s not a fixed quantity that has always been the same. Conscious beings make Dust – they renew it all the time, by thinking and feeling and reflecting, by gaining wisdom and passing it on. “And if you help everyone else in your worlds to do that, by helping them to learn and understand about themselves and each other and the way everything works, and by showing them how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious. . . Then they will renew enough to replace what is lost through one window. So there could be one left open.”

And at the word alone, Will felt a great wave of rage and despair moving outwards from a place deep within him, as if his mind were an ocean that some profound convulsion had disturbed. All his life he’d been alone, and now he must be alone again, and this infinitely precious blessing that had come to him must be taken away almost at once. He felt the wave build higher and steeper to darken the sky, he felt the crest tremble and begin to spill, he felt the great mass crashing down with the whole weight of the ocean behind it against the iron-bound coast of what had to be. And he found himself gasping and shaking and crying aloud with more anger and pain than he had ever felt in his life, and he found Lyra just as helpless in his arms. But as the wave expended its force and the waters withdrew, the bleak rocks remained; there was no arguing with fate; neither his despair nor Lyra’s had moved them a single inch.

What is worth having is worth working for. But you have a friend who has already taken the first steps, and who could help you.”

“memory’s a poor thing to have. It’s your own real hair and mouth and arms and eyes and hands I want. I didn’t know I could ever love anything so much.

“I’ll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you. . . We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams. . . And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won’t just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be joined so tight. . .”

Pantalaimon was now an animal whose name he couldn’t quite find: like a large and powerful ferret, red-gold in colour, lithe and sinuous and full of grace. Kirjava was a cat again. But she was a cat of no ordinary size, and her fur was lustrous and rich, with a thousand different glints and shades of ink-black, shadow-grey, the blue of a deep lake under a noon sky, mist-lavender-moonlight-fog. . . To see the meaning of the word subtlety you had only to look at her fur.

Will put his hand on hers. A new mood had taken hold of him, and he felt resolute and peaceful. Knowing exactly what he was doing and exactly what it would mean, he moved his hand from Lyra’s wrist and stroked the red-gold fur of her dæmon. Lyra gasped. But her surprise was mixed with a pleasure so like the joy that flooded through her when she had put the fruit to his lips that she couldn’t protest, because she was breathless. With a racing heart she responded in the same way: she put her hand on the silky warmth of Will’s dæmon, and as her fingers tightened in the fur she knew that Will was feeling exactly what she was. And she knew too that neither dæmon would change now, having felt a lover’s hands on them. These were their shapes for life: they would want no other.

neither he nor John Faa could miss the way she stayed close to Will, and how the boy with the straight black eyebrows was aware every second of where she was, and made sure he never strayed far from her.

So John Faa, Farder Coram, Mary and Serafina went with them to the place where the land of the dead opened, and where the ghosts were coming out, still in their endless procession. The mulefa were planting a grove around it, because it was a holy place, they said; they would maintain it for ever; it was a source of joy.

She had to hold on to her normal way of looking while simultaneously slipping into the trance-like open dreaming in which she could see the Shadows. But now she had to hold both ways together, the everyday and the trance, just as you have to look in two directions at once to see the 3D pictures among the dots.

Lyra led him almost to the end of the garden, over a little bridge, to a wooden seat under a spreading low-branched tree. “Yes!” she said. “I hoped so much, and here it is, just the same. . . Will, I used to come here in my Oxford and sit on this exact same bench whenever I wanted to be alone, just me and Pan. What I thought was that if you – maybe just once a year – if we could come here at the same time, just for an hour or something, then we could pretend we were close again – because we would be close, if you sat here and I sat just here in my world –” “Yes,” he said, “as long as I live, I’ll come back. Wherever I am in the world I’ll come back here –” “On Midsummer’s Day,” she said. “At midday. As long as I live. As long as I live. . .” He found himself unable to see, but he let the hot tears flow and just held her close. “And if we – later on –” she was whispering shakily – “if we meet someone that we like, and if we marry them, then we must be good to them, and not make comparisons all the time and wish we were married to each other instead. . . But just keep up this coming here once a year, just for an hour, just to be together. . .” They held each other tightly. Minutes passed; a water-bird on the river beside them stirred and called; the occasional car moved over Magdalen Bridge.

Everything about her in that moment was soft; and that was one of his favourite memories later on – her tense grace made tender by the dimness, her eyes and hands and especially her lips, infinitely soft. He kissed her again and again, and each kiss was nearer to the last one of all.

And this time, with a wrenching crack, the knife shattered and the blade fell in pieces to the ground, to glitter on the stones that were still wet with the rain of another universe.

her chin was held high with a look she’d learned from Will without knowing it.

She wondered whether there would ever come an hour in her life when she didn’t think of him; didn’t speak to him in her head, didn’t relive every moment they’d been together, didn’t long for his voice and his hands and his love. She had never dreamed of what it would feel like to love someone so much; of all the things that had astonished her in her adventures, that was what astonished her the most. She thought the tenderness it left in her heart was like a bruise that would never go away, but she would cherish it for ever.

Somewhere in the garden a nightingale was singing, and a little breeze touched her hair and stirred the leaves overhead. All the different bells of the city chimed, once each, this one high, that one low, some close by, others further off, one cracked and peevish, another grave and sonorous, but agreeing in all their different voices on what the time was, even if some of them got to it a little more slowly than others. In that other Oxford where she and Will had kissed goodbye, the bells would be chiming too, and a nightingale would be singing, and a little breeze would be stirring the leaves in the Botanic Garden. “And then what?” said her dæmon sleepily. “Build what?” “The republic of heaven,” said Lyra.