The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials 2)

“For a human being, nothing comes naturally,” said Grumman. “We have to learn everything we do. Sayan Kötör is telling me that the ravine leads to a pass. If we get there before they see us, we could escape yet.”

The eagle swooped down again, and the men climbed higher. Hester preferred to find her own way over the rocks, so Lee followed where she led, avoiding the loose stones and moving as swiftly as he could over the larger rocks, making all the time for the little gulch.

Lee was anxious about Grumman, because the other man was pale and drawn and breathing hard. His labors in the night had drained a lot of his energy. How far they could keep going was a question Lee didn’t want to face; but when they were nearly at the entrance to the ravine, and actually on the edge of the dried riverbed, he heard a change in the sound of the zeppelin.

“They’ve seen us,” he said.

And it was like receiving a sentence of death. Hester stumbled, even surefooted, firm-hearted Hester stumbled and faltered. Grumman leaned on the stick he carried and shaded his eyes to look back, and Lee turned to look too.

The zeppelin was descending fast, making for the slope directly below them. It was clear that the pursuers intended to capture them, not kill them, for a burst of gunfire just then would have finished both of them in a second. Instead, the pilot brought the airship skillfully to a hover just above the ground, at the highest point in the slope where he safely could, and from the cabin door a stream of blue-uniformed men jumped down, their wolf dæmons beside them, and began to climb.

Lee and Grumman were six hundred yards above them, and not far from the entrance to the ravine. Once they reached it, they could hold the soldiers off as long as their ammunition held out; but they had only one rifle.

“They’re after me, Mr. Scoresby,” said Grumman, “not you. If you give me the rifle and surrender yourself, you’ll survive. They’re disciplined troops. You’ll be a prisoner of war.”

Lee ignored that and said, “Git moving. Make the gulch and I’ll hold them off from the mouth while you find your way out the other end. I brought you this far, and I ain’t going to sit back and let ’em catch you now.”

The men below were moving up quickly, for they were fit and rested. Grumman nodded.

“I had no strength left to bring the fourth one down” was all he said, and they moved quickly into the shelter of the gulch.

“Just tell me before you go,” said Lee, “because I won’t be easy till I know. What side I’m fighting for I cain’t tell, and I don’t greatly care. Just tell me this: What I’m a-going to do now, is that going to help that little girl Lyra, or harm her?”

“It’s going to help her,” said Grumman.

“And your oath. You won’t forget what you swore to me?”

“I won’t forget.”

“Because, Dr. Grumman, or John Parry, or whatever name you take up in whatever world you end up in, you be aware of this: I love that little child like a daughter. If I’d had a child of my own, I couldn’t love her more. And if you break that oath, whatever remains of me will pursue whatever remains of you, and you’ll spend the rest of eternity wishing you never existed. That’s how important that oath is.”

“I understand. And you have my word.”

“Then that’s all I need to know. Go well.”

The shaman held out his hand, and Lee shook it. Then Grumman turned and made his way up the gulch, and Lee looked around for the best place to make his stand.

“Not the big boulder, Lee,” said Hester. “You cain’t see to the right from there, and they could rush us. Take the smaller one.”

There was a roaring in Lee’s ears that had nothing to do with the conflagration in the forest below, or with the laboring drone of the zeppelin trying to rise again. It had to do with his childhood, and the Alamo. How often he and his companions had played that heroic battle, in the ruins of the old fort, taking turns to be Danes and French! His childhood was coming back to him, with a vengeance. He took out the Navajo ring of his mother’s and laid it on the rock beside him. In the old Alamo games, Hester had often been a cougar or a wolf, and once or twice a rattlesnake, but mostly a mockingbird. Now—

“Quit daydreaming and take a sight,” she said. “This ain’t play, Lee.”

The men climbing the slope had fanned out and were moving more slowly, because they saw the problem as well as he did. They knew they’d have to capture the gulch, and they knew that one man with a rifle could hold them off for a long time. Behind them, to Lee’s surprise, the zeppelin was still laboring to rise. Maybe its buoyancy was going, or maybe the fuel was running low, but either way it hadn’t taken off yet, and it gave him an idea.

He adjusted his position and sighted along the old Winchester until he had the port engine mounting plumb in view, and fired. The crack raised the soldiers’ heads as they climbed toward him, but a second later the engine suddenly roared and then just as suddenly seized and died. The zeppelin lurched over to one side. Lee could hear the other engine howling, but the airship was grounded now.

The soldiers had halted and taken cover as well as they could. Lee could count them, and he did: twenty-five. He had thirty bullets.

Hester crept up close to his left shoulder.

“I’ll watch this way,” she said.

Crouched on the gray boulder, her ears flat along her back, she looked like a little stone herself, gray-brown and inconspicuous, except for her eyes. Hester was no beauty; she was about as plain and scrawny as a hare could be; but her eyes were marvelously colored, gold-hazel flecked with rays of deepest peat brown and forest green. And now those eyes were looking down at the last landscape they’d ever see: a barren slope of brutal tumbled rocks, and beyond it a forest on fire. Not a blade of grass, not a speck of green to rest on.

Her ears flicked slightly.

“They’re talking,” she said. “I can hear, but I cain’t understand.”

“Russian,” he said. “They’re gonna come up all together and at a run. That would be hardest for us, so they’ll do that.”

“Aim straight,” she said.

“I will. But hell, I don’t like taking lives, Hester.”

“Ours or theirs.”

“No, it’s more than that,” he said. “It’s theirs or Lyra’s. I cain’t see how, but we’re connected to that child, and I’m glad of it.”

“There’s a man on the left about to shoot,” said Hester, and as she spoke, a crack came from his rifle, and chips of stone flew off the boulder a foot from where she crouched. The bullet whined off into the gulch, but she didn’t move a muscle.

“Well, that makes me feel better about doing this,” said Lee, and took careful aim.

He fired. There was only a small patch of blue to aim at, but he hit it. With a surprised cry the man fell back and died.

And then the fight began. Within a minute the crack of rifles, the whine of ricocheting bullets, the smash of pulverizing rock echoed and rang the length of the mountainside and along the hollow gulch behind. The smell of cordite, and the burning smell that came from the powdered rock where the bullets hit, were just variations on the smell of burning wood from the forest, until it seemed that the whole world was burning.

Lee’s boulder was soon scarred and pitted, and he felt the thud of the bullets as they hit it. Once he saw the fur on Hester’s back ripple as the wind of a bullet passed over it, but she didn’t budge. Nor did he stop firing.

That first minute was fierce. And after it, in the pause that came, Lee found that he was wounded; there was blood on the rock under his cheek, and his right hand and the rifle bolt were red.

Hester moved around to look.

“Nothing big,” she said. “A bullet clipped your scalp.”

“Did you count how many fell, Hester?”

“No. Too busy ducking. Reload while you can, boy.”

He rolled down behind the rock and worked the bolt back and forth. It was hot, and the blood that had flowed freely over it from the scalp wound was drying and making the mechanism stiff. He spat on it carefully, and it loosened.

Then he hauled himself back into position, and even before he’d set his eye to the sight, he took a bullet.

It felt like an explosion in his left shoulder. For a few seconds he was dazed, and then he came to his senses, with his left arm numb and useless. There was a great deal of pain waiting to spring on him, but it hadn’t raised the courage yet, and that thought gave him the strength to focus his mind on shooting again.