Chapter 33 Thirty-three, almond halva

sweet spring days full of sweetness and roses inside a box It's a candy-wrapped lie. ——George Herben [George Herben (1593-1633), a famous British poet] The next morning, Lyra awoke from a dream in which Pantalaimon had returned to her in his final form, which she liked a lot, but now she could not remember at all. . The sun had risen long ago and there was a fresh scent of flowers in the air.She could see the sunlight through the open door of the little thatched cottage where she slept, which was Mary's house.She lay there for a while listening to the sound of birds and some kind of cricket outside, with Mary still breathing peacefully in her sleep.

Lyra sat up and was momentarily annoyed to find herself naked, and then she saw some clean clothes folded on the floor beside her: a Mary's blouse, a length of soft and light patterned cloth that could be tied into a a skirt.She put them on and felt wrapped in a big shirt, but at least they were decent. She leaves the thatched cottage.Pantalaimon was nearby: she was sure.She could almost hear him talking and laughing, which must have shown that he was safe, that they were still connected somehow, and when he forgave her and came back to her - they would talk for hours and tell each other Everything... Will is still sleeping under the tree, what a lazy bastard.Laila would have woken him, but if it was just her, she could go swimming in the river.She used to swim happily naked in the Cherwell with all the kids in Oxford, but it would be so different with Will that she blushed even thinking about it.

So on this pearly morning, she went down to the water's edge alone. Among the aquatic plants by the water's edge, there was a bird as tall as a pine crane, standing completely still on one leg.She walked over quietly and slowly so as not to disturb it, but the bird paid no attention to her, as if she were only a branch in the water. "Well," she said. She left her clothes on the bank, slipped into the water, swam hard to keep warm, and emerged from the water, curled up and shivering on the bank.Usually Pan would help dry her off: would he turn into a fish laughing at her underwater?Or turn into a beetle crawling into her clothes to tickle her, or a bird?Perhaps in another place entirely different with another elf, without Lyra at all?

Now that the sun has warmed up, she dries quickly.She put on Mary's loose blouse again, saw some flat stones on the edge of the embankment, went back to get her clothes to wash, only to find that someone else had already washed them: hers, and Will's, were all covered in a pile of incense. The springy branches of the fragrant bushes are almost dry. Will moved.She sat nearby and called him softly. "Will! Wake up!" "Where are we?" he said at once, sitting up and reaching for the knife. "It's safe." She said, looking away. "They also did our laundry, Dr. Malone probably. I'll get yours, it's almost dry..."

She handed them over and sat with her back to him until he was dressed. "I swam in the river," she said. "I went to Pam, but I think he's hiding." "That's a really good idea, I mean swimming, I feel like I've got years of dust on my body... I'll go down and wash." After he left, Lyra wandered around the village a little, not looking at anything too closely to violate some protocol, but curious about everything she saw.Some of the houses were old, some quite new, but all were built in much the same way, out of wood, mud, and thatch, without being crude at all, with elaborate patterns on every door, window frame, and lintel, but those patterns Not carved in wood: it's as if they coaxed the wood into that shape naturally.

The more she saw, the more she saw the order and carefulness in the village, like the layers of meaning in the alethiometer.One part of her brain was eager to unravel all these mysteries, moving lightly from similarity to similarity, from one meaning to another, as she did when she read the alethiometer, but another part wondered: How long can they stay here before they hit the road. Well, I'm not going anywhere until Pam comes back, she told herself. Soon Will came up from the river, and Mary came out of her house, and asked them to have breakfast.Soon Atar came too, and the village came to life around them.Two young Mulfa kids, wheelless, kept peeking around their house, and Lyra would turn suddenly and look straight at them, making them jump up and laugh.

"Well now," said Mary, when they had eaten some bread and drank a hot liquid like mint, "yesterday you were so tired that all you could do was rest, but today you both look refreshed , I think we need to tell each other what we've found, it's going to take a long time, and we'd better work while we talk, mend some nets, make a difference." They took the great pile of net, which was stiff and waiting to be repaired, to the bank of the river and spread it on the grass, and Mary showed them how to tie a new piece of rope where it had broken.She was careful, for Atal told her that, farther from the shore, large numbers of Torapi had been seen, those white birds congregating in the sea; Meanwhile work had to go on.

So they sat and worked in the sun by the placid river, and Laila told her story from long ago when she and Pan had decided to investigate the Jordan College common room. The tide rose and receded, and there was still no sign of Torapi.Later in the day, Mary led Will and Lyra along the embankment, past fishing rods with nets, and across the wide salt marshes toward the sea.It was safe to go there after the tide was out, for the white birds only went inland when the water was high, and Mary led them on a solid path in the middle of the mud, like many things that Mulfa had built Well, that trail has been around for a while, but is well maintained, more like a part of nature than something imposed upon it.

"Is it the stone roads they built?" Will said. "No, I think in a way those roads built them," said Mary, "I mean they never could have developed the function of the wheel if they hadn't had plenty of hard, flat ground for them to use. I think they are lava flows from ancient volcanic eruptions. "So those roads enabled them to use the wheel, and so did everything else, like the wheel tree itself, and the formation of their size—they weren't vertebrates, they didn't have a spine, long ago in our world, Lucky chance must have meant that creatures discovered that having a backbone made survival a little easier, and so all other body types were developed in this direction, all based on the central spine.

And in this world, chance has turned to the other side, the rhombus has succeeded, and of course there are vertebrates, but not many, such as snakes.Snakes are important here, people take care of them and find ways not to harm them. "Anyway, their shapes and roads and wheel trees all come together to make it possible, a lot of little chances, all together. When does your story start, Will?" "There are many little chances for me, too," he began, thinking of the cat under the hornbeam.Had he gotten there a few seconds earlier or a few seconds later with parched lips, he would never have seen the cat, never found the window, never found Magpie City and Lyra, all of it will not happen.

He started at the very beginning, and they listened as they walked.By the time they reached the mudflats, he had told of the place where he and his father had wrestled on the top of the hill. "Then the witch killed him..." He never really understood it, and he explained what she had told him before killing herself: that she had loved John Perry, but he had despised her. "Witches are vicious, though," Lyra said. "But she loved him..." "Well," said Mary, "love is evil too." "But he loves my mother," Will said, "and I can tell her that he has never been unfaithful to her." Lyra looked at Will and wondered what it would be like if he fell in love with anyone. All around them, the warm air was filled with the quiet noises of the afternoon: the endless stream of swamp water, the chirping of insects, the call of seagulls.The tide was completely out, so the whole beach was crisp and gleaming in the bright sun.Countless tiny mud animals live, feed and die on the surface of the sand, tiny excrement and blowholes, and invisible movements reveal that the entire land vibrates with life. Without telling anyone else why, Mary looked out to sea, scanning the horizon for the white sails, but there was only a faint glint of the blue of the sky fading at the end of the sea, which picked up that grayness and made it shine through slightly. The glowing air flickers and glows. She taught Will and Lila how to harvest a particular type of mollusc by finding blowholes in the sand surface, which Murfa liked, but they had a hard time walking and harvesting on the sand.Whenever Mary went to the sea she collected as much as she could, and with three hands and eyes at work now, it would be a feast. She gave each of them a cloth sack, and they listened to the story as they worked.They filled the bags, and Mary led them back to the marsh, for the tide was turning. The story takes a long time to tell, and they can't tell the world of the dead today.Approaching the village, Will is telling Mary what he and Lyra have realized about the three-part human nature. "You know," said Mary, "the Church—the Catholic Church I once belonged to—don't use the word spirit, but St. Paul talks about spirit and soul and body, so the idea of ​​the three parts of human nature is not strangeness." "But the best part is the body," said Will, "that's what Baruch and Balthamus told me, the angels wanted them to have bodies, and they told me that the angels don't understand why we don't appreciate our bodies more." The world; they would be ecstatic to have bodies and senses like ours. In the world of the dead—” "Let's talk about it when we get there," Lyra said, smiling at him with such sweet understanding and joy that it confused his senses, and he smiled back.Mary thought his expression expressed more complete trust than she had ever seen on any human face. By this time they had reached the village, and since they were going to have dinner, Marie made them sit on the embankment and watched the tide come in, while she cooked by the fire, helping Attar, and her friend because of the shellfish. Excited about the feast. But, Mary, she said, Torapi destroyed one village above the coast, and another after another.They've never done this before, and they usually go back to the sea after attacking one.Another tree fell today...NO!where? Atal mentioned a grove not far from the hot springs, where Marie had been only three days before, and nothing seemed amiss.She picked up the binoculars and looked at the sky. She was sure that the huge shadow particles were flowing more powerfully. Compared with the current rising tide in the river bank, the speed and quantity were incomparably greater. what can you doAttar said. Mary felt the heavy responsibility like a heavy hand on her shoulder blades, but she forced herself to sit up easily. Tell them stories, she said. After dinner, the three of them sat with Attar on the carpet outside Mary's room, under the warm starlight. They ate and drank well, and lay comfortably in the flower-scented evening, listening to Mary tell her story. She started shortly before meeting Lyra for the first time, telling them about the work she was doing in the dark matter research group, and about the funding crisis, how much time she spent asking for money and the rest doing research How little time! But Leila's arrival changed everything, and so quickly: within a few days she was completely out of her own world. "I did what you said," she said, "I made a program—it was a set of instructions—to have the shadows talk to me through the computer. They told me what to do, they said they were angels, and— -Well……" "If you've been a scientist," Will said, "I don't think it's a good thing they say that. You probably don't believe in angels." "Ah, but I know about them, and I was a nun, you see. I thought physics would bring glory to God, and then I found out that there isn't any God, and physics is much more interesting. Christianity is a very Powerful and convincing mistakes, that's all." "When did you stop being a nun?" Lyra said. "I remember it so well," Mary said, "even down to the time of day. Because I was good at physics, they let me go on to college, and lo and behold, I finished my doctorate and was going to teach. It's not the kind of order that they keep you out of the world, in fact, we don't even wear nuns' attire, we just have to dress up and wear a cross. So I'm going to teach at a university and do research in particle physics. "Then there was a conference on my subject and they invited me to give a paper, the conference was in Lisbon, I'd never been there before, in fact, I'd never been out of England. The whole thing - the flights, the hotels , the bright sunshine, the foreign language that surrounds me, the famous people to speak, and the thought of my own thesis, wondering if anyone will come to listen to it, if I will be too nervous to speak... Oh, I am so excited. It was so intense that I can't even describe it to you. "I was so naive - you have to remember that, I was always such a good little girl, I went to mass on time, I thought I had something to support my spiritual life, I wanted to serve God with all my heart, I Wanting to give my whole life like this," she said, throwing up her hands, "to put it in front of Jesus, and He can do whatever he wants with it. I think I was satisfied with myself, so satisfied. I was holy And smart. Ha! That went on until, oh, seven thirty years ago at nine-thirty in the evening on August 10." Lyra sat up, hugged her knees, and listened carefully. "That was the night after I had read my paper," continued Mary, "and things went well, there were some famous people listening, and my handling of the issues wasn't messed up, although I was filled with relief and joy ... no doubt have pride. "Later, some of my colleagues were going to a restaurant a little further down the coast, and they asked me if I wanted to go. Usually I would make some excuses to say no, but this time I thought, well, I'm a mature woman, I Read a paper on an important topic and it was well received, and I was with good friends... the weather was so warm, the conversation was full of things that interested me, we were all in high spirits, and I wanted to relax One click. I found another side of me: I liked the wine, the grilled sardines, the feel of the warm air on my skin and the beat of the music in the background. I enjoyed it with gusto. "So we sat down to eat in the garden, and I was sitting at the end of a long table under the lemon tree, next to me was a gazebo with passionate flowers, and my next table was talking to the guy on the other side... …Well, sitting across from me is a man I met once or twice during the conference, I didn’t know him well enough to talk, he’s an Italian, he’s doing some of the work that people are talking about, I want to hear It will be interesting to hear. "Anyway, he was only a little older than me, with soft black hair and a fine olive skin and dark, dark eyes, and his hair kept falling on his forehead, and he kept pushing it back, Slowly... as she demonstrated to them, Will felt that all the memories were vivid for her. "He's not handsome," she went on, "and he's not the sort of man or nice guy to please women. If he was, I'd be ashamed and I wouldn't know how to talk to him. But he's friendly, smart and Humor, sitting under a lemon tree in the light of a lantern, smelling the flowers, grilled food and wine, talking and laughing and feeling like I wish he thought I was pretty is the best thing in the world. Mary Ma Ron's flirting! What about my vows? I give my life for Jesus and all that? "Well, I don't know if it's the wine, or my stupidity, or the warm air, or the lemon tree, or whatever . Stuff, I made myself believe that I was fine and happy to be myself without the love of others. Falling in love is like China: you know it's there, and it's unquestionably very interesting, some people have been there, but I'll never go, I'll never go to China in my life, but that's okay because there are still so many in the world There are many other places to go. "Then someone handed me a sweet thing and all of a sudden I realized I'd been to China, so to speak. I forgot about it, it was the sweet thing that reminded me of it - I think it was almonds Halva—sweet almond paste," she said to Lyra, who looked puzzled. Lyra said, "Ah! Almond Pie!" and sat back comfortably to hear what happened next. "Anyway—" Mary went on—"I remember the taste, and immediately go back to the first time I tasted it as a little girl. "I was twelve years old, and I was at a party at a friend's house, a birthday party, and there was a disco—that's where they put music on a kind of tape recorder, and people danced." Seeing Leila's confusion, she explained , "Usually the girls dance together because the boys are too shy to invite them. But this boy—I don't know him—he asked me to dance, so we did the first dance, and the next One, by then we'd be talking... You know what it's like when you like someone, you'll know right away. Well, I like him so much, we talk non-stop, and then it's cut For the birthday cake, he picked up a bit of marzipan and put it lightly in my mouth—I remember wanting to laugh, blushing, and feeling silly—and that’s why I fell in love with him, because The way he touches my lips with the marzipan." As Mary spoke, Laila felt something strange happen to her body, she felt throbbing at the roots of her hair: she found herself breathing rapidly.She'd never been on a roller coaster, or anything like that, but if she had, she knew that was exactly what she felt in her heart: they were thrilling and scary at the same time. She had no idea why.The feelings persisted, deepened, changed, affected as more parts of her body discovered them, and herself.She felt as if someone had given her the key to a big house she didn't know was there, that house was inside her for some reason, and when she turned the key, she felt in the dark depths of the house, other The door was also opening, and the lights were on, and as she sat trembling, clutching her knees, barely daring to breathe, Mary went on: "I think it was at that party, or perhaps another one, that we Kissed for the first time. It was in a garden with the sound of music and the trees were peaceful and cool, and I longed—my whole body longed for him, and I could see he felt the same—we were both almost too shy to Not daring to move, that's about it.But one of us moved, and there was no pause - it was like a leap of measure, and all of a sudden - we kissed each other, and oh, it wasn't just China, it was heaven. "We met about five or six times, that's all, then his parents moved away and I never saw him again. It was such a sweet time, so short...but it was there and I knew it , I have been to China." It was a strange thing: Lyra knew exactly what she meant, and if it had been half an hour ago she would have known nothing.In her body, that rich house, with all its doors and lighted rooms, stood waiting, silent and expectant. "That night at the table in Portugal at nine-thirty," continued Mary, unaware of the silent drama that had taken place in Laila, "someone gave me a piece of marzipan and it all came back. .I thought: Am I really going to live the rest of my life without feeling that way again? I thought: I want to go to China, full of treasures, wonders, mysteries, and joys. I thought, If ...would anyone be better off if I went straight back to the hotel, said my prayers, confessed to the priest, and promised never to fall into temptation again? Would anyone be better off for making me sad? "That answer came back—no, no one would. Nobody bothered, nobody condemned, nobody blessed me for being a good girl, nobody punished me for being wicked. The sky was empty, I Don't know if God is dead, or if there was no God. Either way, I feel free and alone, and I don't know if I'm happy or unhappy, but something very strange has happened. All that big change happened when I had that piece of marzipan in my mouth before I could even swallow it. A taste - a memory - a landslide..." When I swallowed it and looked at the man at the opposite table, I could tell he knew something was going on and I couldn't tell then and there He, that was too weird and private for me, but then we walked along the beach in the dark, the warm night wind kept ruffling my hair, and the Atlantic was doing well - small quiet waves hugging us feet..." I took the cross from the neck and threw it into the sea.That's it, it's all over.gone. "That's how I ended up being a nun," she said. "Is that the one who found those skulls?" Lyra asked intently. "Oh, no. The man who found the skull was Dr. Payne, Olivier Payne. He showed up much later. No, the man at the meeting was called Alfredo Montal, He's very different." "Did you kiss him?" "Well," said Mary, laughing, "kissed, but not that one time." "Is it hard to leave the church?" Will said. "In a way yes, because everyone was so disappointed. Everyone, from the priory to the priest to my parents - they were so shocked and blamed...I felt like they were all so fervently believing something Depends on continuing something I don't believe in. "But on the other hand it was easy because it made sense. For the first time I felt like I was doing something with all of my being, not just part of it, so it was lonely for a while, but then I Just get used to it." "Did you marry him?" Lyra said. "No, I'm not married to anyone, I lived with someone - not Alfredo, it was someone else. I lived with him for almost four years. My family was slandered, but then we decided We would be happier not living together, so I lived alone. The man I lived with used to like to climb mountains, he taught me to climb mountains, I walked in the mountains... I have my work. Well, I have my work, so I'm alone, but happy and happy, if you know what I mean." "What's the boy's name?" Lyra said. "At the party?" "Tim." "What does he look like?" "Oh...okay. That's all I remember." "When I first met you at your Oxford," Lyra said, "you said one of the reasons you became a scientist was that you didn't have to think about good and evil. Did you think about that when you were a nun? " "Well, never. But I know what I'm supposed to think: that's what the church taught me to think, and when I do science I have to think about other things along with it, so I never have to think about them for myself." "But you're thinking now?" Will said. "I guess I have to," said Mary, trying to be precise. "When you stopped believing in God," he continued, "did you stop believing in good and evil?''"Nope.But I no longer believe that there is a force of good and evil outside of us, I have come to believe that good and evil are the names of what people do, not what they are.We can only say it's a good thing because it helps someone, or it's a bad thing because it hurts them.People are too complex for easy labels. " "Yes," said Lyra flatly. "Did you miss God?" Will asked. "No," said Mary. "I miss it a lot, and I still miss it. What I miss most is the feeling of being connected to the universe. I used to feel like I was connected to God, and because He was There, so I was connected with everything he created, but he wasn't there, and then... Far above the swamp, a bird called with a long, sad note. Ashes fell into the fire, grass Gently moving in the night breeze, Atal was dozing like a cat, her wheels almost resting on the grass beside her, her legs curled up under her body, her eyes half closed, paying attention Half of the force is here, half is elsewhere. Will lay on his back, eyes wide open, looking at the stars. As for Lyra, she hadn't moved a muscle since the strange incident.She kept the memory of those sensations inside her body, like a fragile vessel overflowing with new knowledge, which she scarcely dared to touch for fear it might overflow.She didn't know what it was, didn't know what it meant, and didn't know where it came from: so she sat there with her knees crossed, trying to suppress her shudder of excitement.Soon, she thought, soon I'll know, soon I'll know. Mary was tired: she had no stories to tell, and no doubt she would have more to come to her mind tomorrow.