Chapter Five: A New World
Will regained consciousness in a snowy field in the middle of nowhere. Lyra was off to his right, still unconscious, and Jordey and his daemon had landed in a tree branch. He looked rather pathetic, struggling to get down from up there. Will watched, as did Kirjava, as Jordey finally just feel out of the tree entirely. Then he got up and moved in a sort of James Bond way to Will.
"It was nothing," he said coolly.
"Right." Will said, trying hard to hide his sarcasm.
Lyra came to a few minutes later. They all checked to make sure they still had their puzzle boxes and it had not been some bizarre black out they'd all had, but they all had them. "So at least were not crazy." Will murmured.
"Hey!" Jordey exclaimed after a moment of holding his puzzle box. "It's vibrating!" And so it was. The pieces of the puzzle box seemed to move on their own and then, amazingly, they just stop. When Jordey tried to move the pieces further, they would not budge. "That's odd." He said. They had little time to ponder this; however, as they had little time to ponder this, as soon they found themselves with the points of stone spears in their faces.
The Master saw the gaping hole in reality, a hole into another world. Whereas it was spring in Jordan College, it was winter there, or somewhere with a constant tundra. Within an hour, he had donned artic gear, and then he and his raven daemon entered the vortex, unsure of what they might find there. But the Master was certain that Lyra and her son had gone through there, and possibly her friend Will as well. Sooner than later, he found himself in a snowy clearing. He looked at his surroundings precariously…
For the last hour, Will, Lyra, and Jordey had been marching across the massive clearing, spurred on by a party of men wearing heavy furs and a grotesque odor. Trying to talk to them was useless, as they spoke with only grunts and growls. Eventually, they reached a large village in a shielded valley. Being led down, they were greeted by more of the artic cavemen, who led them to a long, tall hut in the center of the village, surrounded by the other, less grant huts. Out of the hut came a man, who wore the trappings of a hunter (khaki pants, khaki long-sleeved shirt, etc.) that had been adapted to artic life. The man also had the look of someone very experienced in the field. His nose was sharp, his hair was braided, much in the style of the cavemen, and he had the warm smile of a cosmopolite about him.
"Welcome to Valley
Village," he said, "I am Alexander Rosenberg." Lyra and Jordey
had absolute no clue as to whom this man was. Will, on the flip side
of the coin, did. "You're Alexander Rosenberg?" Will marveled,
"The Alexander Rosenberg? The same Alexander Rosenberg who
found the temple of Montezuma deep in the jungles of Central America?
The same Alexander Rosenberg who…" Lyra cleared her throat and
Will remembered his companions.
"Uh…"
"Yes. I am, as you say, the Alexander Rosenberg." The man let out a wry chuckle. "But you have yet to introduce me to yourselves."
"Oh, I'm sorry sir," Will said, he pointed to each of his companions in turn, "My friends here are Lyra Silvertongue and Jordey, and I'm William Parry."
"Will Parry? Are you, per chance, the son of John Parry?"
"That's me."
Mr. Rosenberg's face lit up with Will's words "That's me." He graciously welcomed the group into his tent and offered them an array of exotic foods from a wooden tray and a warm, green drink from a handmade tea pot. "So tell me," Mr. Rosenberg said, as he poured Jordey a small glass of the green liquid, "How is you father? Have you seen him?" Painfully, Will recanted the tale of the night he met his father and how the witch killed him, and how he, in turn, had killed her. Mr. Rosenberg was close to tears by the end of it all. "Dear me, dear me. I'm sorry to here that, my boy. We were good friends, your father and I."
"You were?" Will asked.
"Oh, goodness yes!" Mr. Rosenberg's grin returned again. "We went to college together and were the best of friends. But..." his grin faded but a little. "…we had a bit of a falling out a few years back."
"What happened?" Lyra broke in. "Well…I sort of was attracted to his wife," he said (he gave Will an unsettled look), "your mother." Will was suddenly uncomfortable. Jordey, desperate to change the subject (but hardly able to grasp the magnitude of the situation), spoke. "So how did you end up here?" "Well," Mr. Rosenberg continued, "I heard that Mr. Parry had disappeared, so I funded an expedition to investigate." He took a breath, and then continued. "We found a gaping hole in reality, for all I know, the hole you came through, and things from another world attacked us. They were almost ghost, but they glided along the ground in a way that was almost human…"
"Specters!" Lyra let out.
"Whatever you want to call 'em, they were evil. They ate at the men I had with me and they were all lifeless. Like zombies, y'know? I only escaped by running through the portal and walking into a mist…"
"I fell," he continued, "for what seemed an eternity. Then, next thing I knew, I was here and I became one of the natives." "Didn't they attack you?" Jordey asked annoyingly. "Oh, no, they didn't. Did they do that to you?" Rosenberg asked. "Oh, yes, they did." Jordey grumbled. "Well, they didn't attack me, and they even told me why."
"Why?" Will asked.
"They said that their last Wiseman had died and had had no children, so there had been a prophecy that said the next Wiseman would fall from the sky and live forever."
"And that's you?"
"Yes…that's me."
The three children marveled at the man for minutes on end, and then Rosenberg called for a few of the barbarians to come in. His speech was a sort of bird chirp, and Lyra found it musical. The two men who entered took them away from the large hut and led them off to two huts that were only slightly smaller. Will and Lyra took on hut, along with their daemons, and Jordey and his daemon took the other one. Soon after this, Will fell asleep in one of the two cots in the hut.
