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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.
“But I’m divided, I’m pulled apart, because also I want to go back and look after my mother, because I could, and also the angel Balthamos told me I should go to Lord Asriel and offer the knife to him, and I think maybe he was right as well . . .”
“He fled,” said the bear.
“He wasn’t a warrior. He did as much as he could, and then he couldn’t do any more. He wasn’t the only one to be afraid; I’m afraid, too. So I have to think it through. Maybe sometimes we don’t do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don’t want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it’s dangerous. We’re more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right. It’s very hard. That’s why I didn’t answer you.”
“I see,” said the bear.
They stood in silence for what felt like a long time, especially to Will, who had little protection from the bitter cold. But Iorek hadn’t finished yet, and Will was still weak and dizzy from the blow, and didn’t quite trust his feet, so they stayed where they were.
“Well, I have compromised myself in many ways,” said the bear-king. “It may be that in helping you I have brought final destruction on my kingdom. And it may be that I have not, and that destruction was coming anyway; maybe I have held it off. So I am troubled, having to do un-bearlike deeds and speculate and doubt like a human.
“And I shall tell you one thing. You know it already, but you don’t want to, which is why I tell you openly, so that you don’t mistake it. If you want to succeed in this task, you must no longer think about your mother. You must put her aside. If your mind is divided, the knife will break.
“Now I’m going to say farewell to Lyra. You must wait in the cave; those two spies will not let you out of their sight, and I do not want them listening when I speak to her.”
Will had no words, though his breast and his throat were full. He managed to say, “Thank you, Iorek Byrnison,” but that was all he could say.
He walked with Iorek up the slope toward the cave, where the fire glow still shone warmly in the vast surrounding dark.
There Iorek carried out the last process in the mending of the subtle knife. He laid it among the brighter cinders until the blade was glowing, and Will and Lyra saw a hundred colors swirling in the smoky depths of the metal, and when he judged the moment was right, Iorek told Will to take it and plunge it directly into the snow that had drifted outside.
The rosewood handle was charred and scorched, but Will wrapped his hand in several folds of a shirt and did as Iorek told him. In the hiss and flare of steam, he felt the atoms finally settle together, and he knew that the knife was as keen as before, the point as infinitely rare.
But it did look different. It was shorter, and much less elegant, and there was a dull silver surface over each of the joins. It looked ugly now; it looked like what it was, wounded.
When it was cool enough, he packed it away in the rucksack and sat, ignoring the spies, to wait for Lyra to come back.
Iorek had taken her a little farther up the slope, to a point out of sight of the cave, and there he had let her sit cradled in the shelter of his great arms, with Pantalaimon nestling mouse-formed at her breast. Iorek bent his head over her and nuzzled at her scorched and smoky hands. Without a word he began to lick them clean; his tongue was soothing on the burns, and she felt as safe as she had ever felt in her life.
But when her hands were free of soot and dirt, Iorek spoke. She felt his voice vibrate against her back.
“Lyra Silvertongue, what is this plan to visit the dead?”
“It came to me in a dream, Iorek. I saw Roger’s ghost, and I knew he was calling to me . . . You remember Roger. Well, after we left you, he was killed, and it was my fault, at least I felt it was. And I think I should just finish what I began, that’s all: I should go and say sorry, and if I can, I should rescue him from there. If Will can open a way to the world of the dead, then we must do it.”
