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.
He propped the rifle on the dead and useless arm that had been so full of life a minute ago, and sighted with stolid concentration: one shot… two … three, and each found its man.
«How we doing?» he muttered.
«Good shooting,» she whispered back, very close to his cheek. «Don't stop. Over by that black boulder —»
He looked, aimed, shot. The figure fell.
«Damn, these are men like me,» he said.
«Makes no sense,» she said. «Do it anyway.»
«Do you believe him? Grumman?»
«Sure. Plumb ahead, Lee.»
Crack: another man fell, and his daemon went out like a candle.
Then there was a long silence. Lee fumbled in his pocket and found some more bullets. As he reloaded, he felt something so rare his heart nearly failed; he felt Hester's face pressed to his own, and it was wet with tears.
«Lee, this is my fault,» she said.
«Why?»
«The Skraeling. I told you to take his ring. Without that we'd never be in this trouble.»
«You think I ever did what you told me? I took it because the witch —»
He didn't finish, because another bullet found him. This time it smashed into his left leg, and before he could even blink, a third one clipped his head again, like a red-hot poker laid along his skull.
«Not long now, Hester,» he muttered, trying to hold still.
«The witch, Lee! You said the witch! Remember?»
Poor Hester, she was lying now, not crouching tense and watchful as she'd done all his adult life. And her beautiful gold-brown eyes were growing dull.
«Still beautiful,» he said. «Oh, Hester, yeah, the witch. She gave me…»
«Sure she did. The flower.»
«In my breast pocket. Fetch it, Hester, I cain't move.»
It was a hard struggle, but she tugged out the little scarlet flower with her strong teeth and laid it by his right hand. With a great effort he closed it in his fist and said, «Serafina Pekkala! Help me, I beg …»
A movement below: he let go of the flower, sighted, fired. The movement died.
Hester was failing.
«Hester, don't you go before I do,» Lee whispered.
«Lee, I couldn't abide to be anywhere away from you for a single second,» she whispered back.
«You think the witch will come?»
«Sure she will. We should have called her before.»
«We should have done a lot of things.»
«Maybe so …»
Another crack, and this time the bullet went deep somewhere inside, seeking out the center of his life. He thought: It won't find it there. Hester's my center. And he saw a blue flicker down below, and strained to bring the barrel over toil.
«He's the one,» Hester breathed.
Lee found it hard to pull the trigger. Everything was hard. He had to try three times, and finally he got it. The blue uniform tumbled away down the slope.
Another long silence. The pain nearby was losing its fear of him. It was like a pack of jackals, circling, sniffing, treading closer, and he knew they wouldn't leave him now till they'd eaten him bare.
«There's one man left,» Hester muttered. «He's a-making for the zeppelin.»
And Lee saw him mistily, one soldier of the Imperial Guard creeping away from his company's defeat.
«I cain't shoot a man in the back,» Lee said.
«Shame to die with one bullet left, though.»
So he took aim with his last bullet at the zeppelin itself, still roaring and straining to rise with its one engine, and the bullet must have been red-hot, or maybe a burning brand from the forest below was wafted to the airship on an updraft; for the gas suddenly billowed into an orange fireball, and the envelope and the metal skeleton rose a little way and then tumbled down very slowly, gently, but full of a fiery death.
And the man creeping away and the six or seven others who were the only remnant of the Guard, and who hadn't dared come closer to the man holding the ravine, were engulfed by the fire that fell on them.
Lee saw the fireball and heard through the roar in his ears Hester saying, «That's all of 'em, Lee.»
He said, or thought, «Those poor men didn't have to come to this, nor did we.»
She said, «We held 'em off. We held out. We're a-helping Lyra.»
Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.
Fifteen
Bloodmoss
On, said the alethiometer. Farther, higher.
So on they climbed. The witches flew above to spy out the best routes, because the hilly land soon gave way to steeper slopes and rocky footing, and as the sun rose toward noon, the travelers found themselves in a tangled land of dry gullies, cliffs, and boulder-strewn valleys where not a single green leaf grew, and where the stridulation of insects was the only sound.
They moved on, stopping only for sips of water from their goatskin flasks, and talking little. Pantalaimon flew above Lyra's head for a while until he tired of that, and then he became a little sure-footed mountain sheep, vain of his horns, leaping among rocks while Lyra scrambled laboriously alongside. Will moved on grimly, screwing up his eyes against the glare, ignoring the worsening pain from his hand, and finally reaching a state in which movement alone was good and stillness bad, so that he suffered more from resting than from toiling on. And since the failure of the witches' spell to stop his bleeding, he thought they were regarding him with fear, too, as if he was marked by some curse greater than their own powers.