His Dark Materials Omnibus (20 page)

“What is it?” she said.

Pantalaimon, a wildcat still, crouched on the table six inches away, his green eyes following it round and round inside the glass.

“If you was to crack it open,” said Farder Coram, “you’d find no living thing in there. No animal nor insect, at any rate. I seen one of these things afore, and I never thought I’d see one again this far north. Afric things. There’s a clockwork running in there, and pinned to the spring of it, there’s a bad spirit with a spell through its heart.”

“But who sent it?”

“You don’t even need to read the symbols, Lyra; you can guess as easy as I can.”

“Mrs. Coulter?”

“ ’Course. She en’t only explored up north; there’s strange things aplenty in the southern wild. It was Morocco where I saw one of these last. Deadly dangerous; while the spirit’s in it, it won’t never stop, and when you let the spirit free, it’s so monstrous angry it’ll kill the first thing it gets at.”

“But what was it after?”

“Spying. I was a cursed fool to let you up above. And I should have let you think your way through the symbols without interrupting.”

“I see it now!” said Lyra, suddenly excited. “It means
air
, that lizard thing! I saw that, but I couldn’t see why, so I tried to work it out and I lost it.”

“Ah,” said Farder Coram, “then I see it too. It en’t a lizard, that’s why; it’s a chameleon. And it stands for air because they don’t eat nor drink, they just live on air.”

“And the elephant—”

“Africa,” he said, and “Aha.”

They looked at each other. With every revelation of the alethiometer’s power, they became more awed by it.

“It was telling us about these things all the time,” said Lyra. “We oughter listened. But what can we do about this un, Farder Coram? Can we kill it or something?”

“I don’t know as we can do anything. We shall just have to keep him shut up tight in a box and never let him out. What worries me more is the other one, as got away. He’ll be a flying back to Mrs. Coulter now, with the news that he’s seen you. Damn me, Lyra, but I’m a fool.”

He rattled about in a cupboard and found a smokeleaf tin about three inches in diameter. It had been used for holding screws, but he tipped those out and wiped the inside with a rag before inverting the glass over it with the card still in place over the mouth.

After a tricky moment when one of the creature’s legs escaped and thrust the tin away with surprising strength, they had it captured and the lid screwed down tight.

“As soon’s we get about the ship I’ll run some solder round the edge to make sure of it,” Farder Coram said.

“But don’t clockwork run down?”

“Ordinary clockwork, yes. But like I said, this un’s kept tight wound by the spirit pinned to the end. The more he struggles, the tighter it’s wound, and the stronger the force is. Now let’s put this feller out the way.…”

He wrapped the tin in a flannel cloth to stifle the incessant buzzing and droning, and stowed it away under his bunk.

It was dark now, and Lyra watched through the window as the lights of Colby came closer. The heavy air was thickening into mist, and by the time they tied up at the wharves alongside the Smokemarket everything in sight was softened and blurred. The darkness shaded into pearly silver-gray veils laid over the warehouses and the cranes, the wooden market stalls and the granite many-chimneyed building the market was named after, where day and night fish hung kippering in the fragrant oakwood smoke. The chimneys were contributing their thickness to the clammy air, and the pleasant reek of smoked herring and mackerel and haddock seemed to breathe out of the very cobbles.

Lyra, wrapped up in oilskin and with a large hood hiding her revealing hair, walked along between Farder Coram and the tillerman. All three dæmons were alert, scouting around corners ahead, watching behind, listening for the slightest footfall.

But they were the only figures to be seen. The citizens of Colby were all indoors, probably sipping jenniver beside roaring stoves. They saw no one until they reached the dock, and the first man they saw there was Tony Costa, guarding the gates.

“Thank God you got here,” he said quietly, letting them through. “We just heard as Jack Verhoeven’s been shot and his boat sunk, and no one’d heard where you was. John Faa’s on board already and jumping to go.”

The vessel looked immense to Lyra: a wheelhouse and funnel amidships, a high fo’c’sle and a stout derrick over a canvas-covered hatch; yellow light agleam in the portholes and the bridge, and white light at the masthead; and three or four men on deck, working urgently at things she couldn’t see.

She hurried up the wooden gangway ahead of Farder Coram, and looked around with excitement. Pantalaimon became a monkey and clambered up
the derrick at once, but she called him down again; Farder Coram wanted them indoors, or below, as you called it on board ship.

Down some stairs, or a companionway, there was a small saloon where John Faa was talking quietly with Nicholas Rokeby, the gyptian in charge of the vessel. John Faa did nothing hastily. Lyra was waiting for him to greet her, but he finished his remarks about the tide and pilotage before turning to the incomers.

“Good evening, friends,” he said. “Poor Jack Verhoeven’s dead, perhaps you’ve heard. And his boys captured.”

“We have bad news too,” said Farder Coram, and told of their encounter with the flying spirits.

John Faa shook his great head, but didn’t reproach them.

“Where is the creature now?” he said.

Farder Coram took out the leaf tin and laid it on the table. Such a furious buzzing came from it that the tin itself moved slowly over the wood.

“I’ve heard of them clockwork devils, but never seen one,” John Faa said. “There en’t no way of taming it and turning it back, I do know that much. Nor is it any use weighing it down with lead and dropping it in the ocean, because one day it’d rust through and out the devil would come and make for the child wherever she was. No, we’ll have to keep it by, and exercise our vigilance.”

Lyra being the only female on board (for John Faa had decided against taking women, after much thought), she had a cabin to herself. Not a grand cabin, to be sure; in fact, little more than a closet with a bunk and a scuttle, which was the proper name for porthole. She stowed her few things in the drawer below the bunk and ran up excitedly to lean over the rail and watch England vanish behind, only to find that most of England had vanished in the mist before she got there.

But the rush of water below, the movement in the air, the ship’s lights glowing bravely in the dark, the rumble of the engine, the smells of salt and fish and coal spirit were exciting enough by themselves. It wasn’t long before another sensation joined them, as the vessel began to roll in the German Ocean swell. When someone called Lyra down for a bite of supper, she found she was less hungry than she’d thought, and presently she decided it would be a good idea to lie down, for Pantalaimon’s sake, because the poor creature was feeling sadly ill at ease.

And so began her journey to the North.

John Faa and the other leaders had decided that they would make for Trollesund, the main port of Lapland. The witches had a consulate in the town, and John Faa knew that without their help, or at least their friendly neutrality, it would be impossible to rescue the captive children.

He explained his idea to Lyra and Farder Coram the next day, when Lyra’s seasickness had abated slightly. The sun was shining brightly and the green waves were dashing against the bows, bearing white streams of foam as they curved away. Out on the deck, with the breeze blowing and the whole sea a-sparkle with light and movement, she felt little sickness at all; and now that Pantalaimon had discovered the delights of being a seagull and then a stormy petrel and skimming the wave tops, Lyra was too absorbed by his glee to wallow in landlubberly misery.

John Faa, Farder Coram, and two or three others sat in the stern of the ship, with the sun full on them, talking about what to do next.

“Now, Farder Coram knows these Lapland witches,” John Faa said. “And if I en’t mistaken, there’s an obligation there.”

“That’s right, John,” said Farder Coram. “It were forty years back, but that’s nothing to a witch. Some of ’em live to many times that.”

“What happened to bring this obligation about, Farder Coram?” said Adam Stefanski, the man in charge of the fighting troop.

“I saved a witch’s life,” Farder Coram explained. “She fell out of the air, being pursued by a great red bird like to nothing I’d seen before. She fell injured in the marsh and I set out to find her. She was like to drowning, and I got her on board and shot that bird down, and it fell into a bog, to my regret, for it was as big as a bittern, and flame-red.”

“Ah,” the other men murmured, captured by Farder Coram’s story.

“Now, when I got her in the boat,” he went on, “I had the most grim shock I’d ever known, because that young woman had no dæmon.”

It was as if he’d said, “She had no head.” The very thought was repugnant. The men shuddered, their dæmons bristled or shook themselves or cawed harshly, and the men soothed them. Pantalaimon crept into Lyra’s arms, their hearts beating together.

“At least,” Farder Coram said, “that’s what it seemed. Being as she’d fell out of the air, I more than suspected she was a witch. She looked exactly like a young woman, thinner than some and prettier than most, but not seeing that dæmon gave me a hideous turn.”

“En’t they got dæmons then, the witches?” said the other man, Michael Canzona.

“Their dæmons is invisible, I expect,” said Adam Stefanski. “He was there all the time, and Farder Coram never saw him.”

“No, you’re wrong, Adam,” said Farder Coram. “He weren’t there at all. The witches have the power to separate theirselves from their dæmons a mighty sight further’n what we can. If need be, they can send their dæmons far abroad on the wind or the clouds, or down below the ocean. And this witch I found, she hadn’t been resting above an hour when her dæmon came a flying back, because he’d felt her fear and her injury, of course. And it’s my belief, though she never admitted to this, that the great red bird I shot was another witch’s dæmon, in pursuit. Lord! That made me shiver, when I thought of that. I’d have stayed my hand; I’d have taken any measures on sea or land; but there it was. Anyway, there was no doubt I’d saved her life, and she gave me a token of it, and said I was to call on her help if ever it was needed. And once she sent me help when the Skraelings shot me with a poison arrow. We had other connections, too.… I haven’t seen her from that day to this, but she’ll remember.”

“And does she live at Trollesund, this witch?”

“No, no. They live in forests and on the tundra, not in a seaport among men and women. Their business is with the wild. But they keep a consul there, and I shall get word to her, make no doubt about that.”

Lyra was keen to know more about the witches, but the men had turned their talk to the matter of fuel and stores, and presently she grew impatient to see the rest of the ship. She wandered along the deck toward the bows, and soon made the acquaintance of an able seaman by flicking at him the pips she’d saved from the apple she’d eaten at breakfast. He was a stout and placid man, and when he’d sworn at her and been sworn at in return, they became great friends. He was called Jerry. Under his guidance she found out that having something to do prevented you from feeling seasick, and that even a job
like scrubbing a deck could be satisfying, if it was done in a seamanlike way. She was very taken with this notion, and later on she folded the blankets on her bunk in a seamanlike way, and put her possessions in the closet in a seamanlike way, and used “stow” instead of “tidy” for the process of doing so.

After two days at sea, Lyra decided that this was the life for her. She had the run of the ship, from the engine room to the bridge, and she was soon on first-name terms with all the crew. Captain Rokeby let her signal to a Hollands frigate by pulling the handle of the steam whistle; the cook suffered her help in mixing plum duff; and only a stern word from John Faa prevented her from climbing the foremast to inspect the horizon from the crow’s nest.

All the time they were steaming north, and it grew colder daily. The ship’s stores were searched for oilskins that could be cut down for her, and Jerry showed her how to sew, an art she learned willingly from him, though she had scorned it at Jordan and avoided instruction from Mrs. Lonsdale. Together they made a waterproof bag for the alethiometer that she could wear around her waist, in case she fell in the sea, she said. With it safely in place she clung to the rail in her oilskins and sou’wester as the stinging spray broke over the bows and surged along the deck. She still felt seasick occasionally, especially when the wind got up and the ship plunged heavily over the crests of the gray-green waves, and then it was Pantalaimon’s job to distract her from it by skimming the waves as a stormy petrel; because she could feel his boundless glee in the dash of wind and water, and forget her nausea. From time to time he even tried being a fish, and once joined a school of dolphins, to their surprise and pleasure. Lyra stood shivering in the fo’c’sle and laughed with delight as her beloved Pantalaimon, sleek and powerful, leaped from the water with half a dozen other swift gray shapes. He had to stay close to the ship, of course, for he could never go far from her; but she sensed his desire to speed as far and as fast as he could, for pure exhilaration. She shared his pleasure, but for her it wasn’t simple pleasure, for there was pain and fear in it too. Suppose he loved being a dolphin more than he loved being with her on land? What would she do then?