His Dark Materials Omnibus (19 page)

“And we couldn’t see anything of Gerard, but there was a howl from above in his voice and we were too terrified and stunned to move, and then an arrow shot down at our shoulder and pierced deep down within.…”

The dæmon’s voice was fainter, and a groan came from the wounded man. Farder Coram leaned forward and gently pulled back the counterpane, and there protruding from Jacob’s shoulder was the feathered end of an arrow in a mass of clotted blood. The shaft and the head were so deep in the poor man’s chest that only six inches or so remained above the skin. Lyra felt faint.

There was the sound of feet and voices outside on the jetty.

Farder Coram sat up and said, “Here’s the physician, Jacob. We’ll leave you now. We’ll have a longer talk when you’re feeling better.”

He clasped the woman’s shoulder on the way out. Lyra stuck close to him on the jetty, because there was a crowd gathering already, whispering and pointing. Farder Coram gave orders for Peter Hawker to go at once to John Faa, and then said:

“Lyra, as soon as we know whether Jacob’s going to live or die, we must have another talk about that alethiometer. You go and occupy yourself elsewhere, child; we’ll send for you.”

Lyra wandered away on her own, and went to the reedy bank to sit and throw mud into the water. She knew one thing: she was not pleased or proud to be able to read the alethiometer—she was afraid. Whatever power was making that needle swing and stop, it knew things like an intelligent being.

“I reckon it’s a spirit,” Lyra said, and for a moment she was tempted to throw the little thing into the middle of the fen.

“I’d see a spirit if there was one in there,” said Pantalaimon. “Like that old ghost in Godstow. I saw that when you didn’t.”

“There’s more than one kind of spirit,” said Lyra reprovingly. “You can’t see all of ’em. Anyway, what about those old dead Scholars without their heads? I saw them, remember.”

“That was only a night-ghast.”

“It was not. They were proper spirits all right, and you know it. But whatever spirits’s moving this blooming needle en’t that sort of spirit.”

“It might not be a spirit,” said Pantalaimon stubbornly.

“Well, what else could it be?”

“It might be … it might be elementary particles.”

She scoffed.

“It could be!” he insisted. “You remember that photomill they got at Gabriel? Well, then.”

At Gabriel College there was a very holy object kept on the high altar of the oratory, covered (now Lyra thought about it) with a black velvet cloth, like the one around the alethiometer. She had seen it when she accompanied the Librarian of Jordan to a service there. At the height of the invocation the Intercessor lifted the cloth to reveal in the dimness a glass dome inside which there was something too distant to see, until he pulled a string attached to a shutter above, letting a ray of sunlight through to strike the dome exactly. Then it became clear: a little thing like a weathervane, with four sails black on one side and white on the other, that began to whirl around as the light struck it. It illustrated a moral lesson, the Intercessor explained, and went on to explain what that was. Five minutes later Lyra had forgotten the moral, but she hadn’t forgotten the little whirling vanes in the ray of dusty light. They were delightful whatever they meant, and all done by the power of photons, said the Librarian as they walked home to Jordan.

So perhaps Pantalaimon was right. If elementary particles could push a photomill around, no doubt they could make light work of a needle; but it still troubled her.

“Lyra! Lyra!”

It was Tony Costa, waving to her from the jetty.

“Come over here,” he called. “You got to go and see John Faa at the Zaal. Run, gal, it’s urgent.”

She found John Faa with Farder Coram and the other leaders, looking troubled.

John Faa spoke:

“Lyra, child, Farder Coram has told me about your reading of that instrument. And I’m sorry to say that poor Jacob has just died. I think we’re going to have to take you with us after all, against my inclinations. I’m troubled in my mind about it, but there don’t seem to be any alternative. As soon as Jacob’s buried according to custom, we’ll take our way. You understand me,
Lyra: you’re a coming too, but it en’t an occasion for joy or jubilation. There’s trouble and danger ahead for all of us.

“I’m a putting you under Farder Coram’s wing. Don’t you be a trouble or a hazard to him, or you’ll be a feeling the force of my wrath. Now cut along and explain to Ma Costa, and hold yourself in readiness to leave.”

The next two weeks passed more busily than any time of Lyra’s life so far. Busily, but not quickly, for there were tedious stretches of waiting, of hiding in damp crabbed closets, of watching a dismal rain-soaked autumn landscape roll past the window, of hiding again, of sleeping near the gas fumes of the engine and waking with a sick headache, and worst of all, of never once being allowed out into the air to run along the bank or clamber over the deck or haul at the lock gates or catch a mooring rope thrown from the lockside.

Because, of course, she had to remain hidden. Tony Costa told her of the gossip in the waterside pubs: that there was a hunt the length of the kingdom for a little fair-haired girl, with a big reward for her discovery and severe punishment for anyone concealing her. There were strange rumors too: people said she was the only child to have escaped from the Gobblers, and she had terrible secrets in her possession. Another rumor said she wasn’t a human child at all but a pair of spirits in the form of child and dæmon, sent to this world by the infernal powers in order to work great ruin; and yet another rumor said it was no child but a fully grown human, shrunk by magic and in the pay of the Tartars, come to spy on good English people and prepare the way for a Tartar invasion.

Lyra heard these tales at first with glee and later with despondency. All those people hating and fearing her! And she longed to be out of this narrow boxy cabin. She longed to be north already, in the wide snows under the blazing Aurora. And sometimes she longed to be back at Jordan College, scrambling over the roofs with Roger with the Steward’s bell tolling half an hour to dinnertime and the clatter and sizzle and shouting of the kitchen.… Then she wished passionately that nothing had changed, nothing would ever change, that she could be Lyra of Jordan College forever and ever.

The one thing that drew her out of her boredom and irritation was the alethiometer. She read it every day, sometimes with Farder Coram and sometimes on her own, and she found that she could sink more and more readily into the calm state in which the symbol meanings clarified themselves, and those great mountain ranges touched by sunlight emerged into vision.

She struggled to explain to Farder Coram what it felt like.

“It’s almost like talking to someone, only you can’t quite hear them, and you feel kind of stupid because they’re cleverer than you, only they don’t get cross or anything.… And they know such a lot, Farder Coram! As if they knew everything, almost! Mrs. Coulter was clever, she knew ever such a lot, but this is a different kind of knowing.… It’s like understanding, I suppose.…”

He would ask specific questions, and she would search for answers.

“What’s Mrs. Coulter doing now?” he’d say, and her hands would move at once, and he’d say, “Tell me what you’re doing.”

“Well, the Madonna is Mrs. Coulter, and I think
my mother
when I put the hand there; and the ant is
busy
—that’s easy, that’s the top meaning; and the hourglass has got
time
in its meanings, and partway down there’s now, and I just fix my mind on it.”

“And how do you know where these meanings are?”

“I kind of see ’em. Or feel ’em rather, like climbing down a ladder at night, you put your foot down and there’s another rung. Well, I put my mind down and there’s another meaning, and I kind of sense what it is. Then I put ’em all together. There’s a trick in it like focusing your eyes.”

“Do that then, and see what it says.”

Lyra did. The long needle began to swing at once, and stopped, moved on, stopped again in a precise series of sweeps and pauses. It was a sensation of such grace and power that Lyra, sharing it, felt like a young bird learning to fly. Farder Coram, watching from across the table, noted the places where the needle stopped, and watched the little girl holding her hair back from her face and biting her lower lip just a little, her eyes following the needle at first but then, when its path was settled, looking elsewhere on the dial. Not randomly, though. Farder Coram was a chess player, and he knew how chess players looked at a game in play. An expert player seemed to see lines of force and influence on the board, and looked along the important lines and ignored the weak ones; and Lyra’s eyes moved the same way, according to some similar magnetic field that she could see and he couldn’t.

The needle stopped at the thunderbolt, the infant, the serpent, the elephant, and at a creature Lyra couldn’t find a name for: a sort of lizard with big eyes and a tail curled around the twig it stood on. It repeated the sequence time after time, while Lyra watched.

“What’s that lizard mean?” said Farder Coram, breaking into her concentration.

“It don’t make sense.… I can see what it says, but I must be misreading it.
The thunderbolt I think is anger, and the child … I think it’s me … I was getting a meaning for that lizard thing, but you talked to me, Farder Coram, and I lost it. See, it’s just floating any old where.”

“Yes, I see that. I’m sorry, Lyra. You tired now? D’you want to stop?”

“No, I don’t,” she said, but her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright. She had all the signs of fretful overexcitement, and it was made worse by her long confinement in this stuffy cabin.

He looked out of the window. It was nearly dark, and they were traveling along the last stretch of inland water before reaching the coast. Wide brown scummed expanses of an estuary extended under a dreary sky to a distant group of coal-spirit tanks, rusty and cobwebbed with pipework, beside a refinery where a thick smear of smoke ascended reluctantly to join the clouds.

“Where are we?” said Lyra. “Can I go outside just for a bit, Farder Coram?”

“This is Colby water,” he said. “The estuary of the river Cole. When we reach the town, we’ll tie up by the Smokemarket and go on foot to the docks. We’ll be there in an hour or two.…”

But it was getting dark, and in the wide desolation of the creek nothing was moving but their own boat and a distant coal barge laboring toward the refinery; and Lyra was so flushed and tired, and she’d been inside for so long; and so Farder Coram went on:

“Well, I don’t suppose it’ll matter just for a few minutes in the open air. I wouldn’t call it fresh; ten’t fresh except when it’s blowing off the sea; but you can sit out on top and look around till we get closer in.”

Lyra leaped up, and Pantalaimon became a seagull at once, eager to stretch his wings in the open. It was cold outside, and although she was well wrapped up, Lyra was soon shivering. Pantalaimon, on the other hand, leaped into the air with a loud caw of delight, and wheeled and skimmed and darted now ahead of the boat, now behind the stern. Lyra exulted in it, feeling with him as he flew, and urging him mentally to provoke the old tillerman’s cormorant dæmon into a race. But she ignored him and settled down sleepily on the handle of the tiller near her man.

There was no life out on this bitter brown expanse, and only the steady chug of the engine and the subdued splashing of the water under the bows broke the wide silence. Heavy clouds hung low without offering rain; the air beneath was grimy with smoke. Only Pantalaimon’s flashing elegance had anything in it of life and joy.

As he soared up out of a dive with wide wings white against the gray, something black hurtled at him and struck. He fell sideways in a flutter of shock
and pain, and Lyra cried out, feeling it sharply. Another little black thing joined the first; they moved not like birds but like flying beetles, heavy and direct, and with a droning sound.

As Pantalaimon fell, trying to twist away and make for the boat and Lyra’s desperate arms, the black things kept driving into him, droning, buzzing, and murderous. Lyra was nearly mad with Pantalaimon’s fear and her own, but then something swept past her and upward.

It was the tillerman’s dæmon, and clumsy and heavy as she looked, her flight was powerful and swift. Her head snapped this way and that—there was a flutter of black wings, a shiver of white—and a little black thing fell to the tarred roof of the cabin at Lyra’s feet just as Pantalaimon landed on her outstretched hand.

Before she could comfort him, he changed into his wildcat shape and sprang down on the creature, batting it back from the edge of the roof, where it was crawling swiftly to escape. Pantalaimon held it firmly down with a needle-filled paw and looked up at the darkening sky, where the black wing flaps of the cormorant were circling higher as she cast around for the other.

Then the cormorant glided swiftly back and croaked something to the tillerman, who said, “It’s gone. Don’t let that other one escape. Here—” and he flung the dregs out of the tin mug he’d been drinking from, and tossed it to Lyra.

She clapped it over the creature at once. It buzzed and snarled like a little machine.

“Hold it still,” said Farder Coram from behind her, and then he was kneeling to slip a piece of card under the mug.

“What is it, Farder Coram?” she said shakily.

“Let’s go below and have a look. Take it careful, Lyra. Hold that tight.”

She looked at the tillerman’s dæmon as she passed, intending to thank her, but her old eyes were closed. She thanked the tillerman instead.

“You oughter stayed below” was all he said.

She took the mug into the cabin, where Farder Coram had found a beer glass. He held the tin mug upside down over it and then slipped the card out from between them, so that the creature fell into the glass. He held it up so they could see the angry little thing clearly.

It was about as long as Lyra’s thumb, and dark green, not black. Its wing cases were erect, like a ladybird’s about to fly, and the wings inside were beating so furiously that they were only a blur. Its six clawed legs were scrabbling on the smooth glass.