His Dark Materials Omnibus (48 page)

Mrs. Coulter hesitated; her eyes closed, she seemed to sway as if she were fainting; but she kept her balance and opened her eyes again, with an infinite beautiful sadness in them.

“No,” she said. “No.”

Their dæmons were apart again. Lord Asriel reached down and curled his strong fingers into the snow leopard’s fur. Then he turned his back and walked away without another word. The golden monkey leaped into Mrs. Coulter’s arms, making little sounds of distress, reaching out to the snow leopard as she paced away, and Mrs. Coulter’s face was a mask of tears. Lyra could see them glinting; they were real.

Then her mother turned, shaking with silent sobs, and moved down the mountain and out of Lyra’s sight.

Lyra watched her coldly, and then looked up toward the sky.

Such a vault of wonders she had never seen.

The city hanging there so empty and silent looked new-made, waiting to be occupied; or asleep, waiting to be woken. The sun of that world was shining into this, making Lyra’s hands golden, melting the ice on Roger’s wolfskin hood, making his pale cheeks transparent, glistening in his open sightless eyes.

She felt wrenched apart with unhappiness. And with anger, too; she could have killed her father; if she could have torn out his heart, she would have done so there and then, for what he’d done to Roger. And to her: tricking her: how
dare
he?

She was still holding Roger’s body. Pantalaimon was saying something, but her mind was ablaze, and she didn’t hear until he pressed his wildcat claws into the back of her hand to make her. She blinked.

“What? What?”

“Dust!” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Dust. He’s going to find the source of Dust and destroy it, isn’t he?”

“That’s what he said.”

“And the Oblation Board and the Church and Bolvangar and Mrs. Coulter and all, they want to destroy it too, don’t they?”

“Yeah … Or stop it affecting people … Why?”

“Because if
they
all think Dust is bad, it must be good.”

She didn’t speak. A little hiccup of excitement leaped in her chest.

Pantalaimon went on:

“We’ve heard them all talk about Dust, and they’re so afraid of it, and you know what? We
believed
them, even though we could see that what they were doing was wicked and evil and wrong.… We thought Dust must be bad too, because they were grown up and they said so. But what if it isn’t? What if it’s—”

She said breathlessly, “Yeah! What if it’s really
good
 …”

She looked at him and saw his green wildcat eyes ablaze with her own excitement. She felt dizzy, as if the whole world were turning beneath her.

If Dust were a
good
thing … If it were to be sought and welcomed and cherished …

“We could look for it too, Pan!” she said.

That was what he wanted to hear.

“We could get to it before he does,” he went on, “and.…”

The enormousness of the task silenced them. Lyra looked up at the blazing sky. She was aware of how small they were, she and her dæmon, in comparison with the majesty and vastness of the universe; and of how little they knew, in comparison with the profound mysteries above them.

“We
could
,” Pantalaimon insisted. “We came all this way, didn’t we? We
could
do it.”

“We got it wrong, though, Pan. We got it all wrong about Roger. We thought we were helping him.…” She choked, and kissed Roger’s still face clumsily, several times. “We got it wrong,” she said.

“Next time we’ll check everything and ask all the questions we can think of, then. We’ll do better next time.”

“And we’d be alone. Iorek Byrnison couldn’t follow us and help. Nor could Farder Coram or Serafina Pekkala, or Lee Scoresby or no one.”

“Just us, then. Don’t matter. We’re not alone, anyway; not like.…”

She knew he meant
not like Tony Makarios; not like those poor lost dæmons at Bolvangar; we’re still one being; both of us are one
.

“And we’ve got the alethiometer,” she said. “Yeah. I reckon we’ve got to do it, Pan. We’ll go up there and we’ll search for Dust, and when we’ve found it we’ll know what to do.”

Roger’s body lay still in her arms. She let him down gently.

“And we’ll do it,” she said.

She turned away. Behind them lay pain and death and fear; ahead of them lay doubt, and danger, and fathomless mysteries. But they weren’t alone.

So Lyra and her dæmon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.

Sometimes it becomes possible for an author to revisit a story and play with it, not to adapt it to another medium (it’s not always a good idea for the original author to do that), nor to revise or “improve” it (tempting though that is, it’s too late: you should have done that before it was published, and your business now is with new books, not old ones). But simply to play
.

And in every narrative there are gaps: places where, although things happened and the characters spoke and acted and lived their lives, the story says nothing about them. It was fun to visit a few of these gaps and speculate a little on what I might see there
.

As for why I call these little pieces lantern slides, it’s because I remember the wooden boxes my grandfather used to have, each one packed neatly with painted glass slides showing scenes from Bible stories or fairy tales or ghost stories or comic little plays with absurd-looking figures. From time to time he would get out the heavy old magic lantern and project some of these pictures on to a screen as we sat in the darkened room with the smell of hot metal and watched one scene succeed another, trying to make sense of the narrative and wondering what St. Paul was doing in the story of Little Red Riding Hood—because they never came out of the box in quite the right order
.

I think it was my grandfather’s magic lantern that Lord Asriel used in the second chapter of
The Golden Compass.
Here are some lantern slides, and it doesn’t matter what order they come in
.

Jordan College, like a great clockwork mechanism with every part connected ultimately to every other, and all slowly and heavily ticking despite the fur of dust on every cog, the curtains of cobweb draped in every corner, the mouse dirt, the insect husks, the leaf skeletons blown in every time the wind was in the east … Rituals and habits whose origins no one could remember, but which no one wanted to disturb. The great wheels and the small, the pins and the levers all performing their functions despite the wheezing and the creaking and the groaning of ancient timber. Sometimes the individual parts (a servant or a Scholar) forgot precisely what their function was in relation to the whole, but never that the whole had a function; and it was enough to do again what you had done yesterday, and every day before that, and trust to custom.

Lyra hanging about the Castle Mill boatyard. Each gyptian family had their particular patterns for decorating their boats, based on simple floral designs but becoming more and more complex and fanciful. Lyra watching old Piet van Poppel touching up his boat one day and laboriously copying the rose-and-lily pattern he was using, and then back in her room trying to paint it on her second-best dress before realizing that it would be better embroidered. And very soon after, having pricked her fingers countless times and snapped the threads and lost all patience with the task, throwing it away in disgust, and having to explain its absence to Mrs. Lonsdale.

Lee Scoresby, attracted north by the money being made in the gold rush and making none, but acquiring a balloon by chance in a card game. He was the lover of a witch from the Karelia region, briefly, but she was killed in battle—“She spoiled me for women younger’n three hundred”; but he had plenty of lovers all the same.

Asriel among the bears: “Iofur Raknison, I’m going to be entirely frank with you,” followed by a string of confident and overbearing lies—had he noticed the bear-king’s doll-dæmon, the clue that he was unbearlike enough to be tricked? Or was it just luck?—but he knew the bears well enough. He was very like his daughter.

Mrs. Coulter selected her lovers for their power and influence, but it did no harm if they were good-looking. Did she ever become fond of a lover? Not once. She could not keep her servants, either.

Lyra had a crush on Dick Orchard, the older boy who could spit farther than anyone else. She would hang about the Covered market gazing at him hopelessly, and cover her pillow with clumsy kisses, just to see what it felt like.

Every year the Domestic Bursar at Jordan would send for Lyra—or have her tracked down and caught—and have a photogram taken. Lyra submitted indifferently, and scowled at the camera; it was just one of the things that happened. It didn’t occur to her to ask where the pictures went. As a matter of fact, they all went to Lord Asriel, but he would never have let her know.

Benny, the pastry cook at Jordan, whose dæmon was male, sitting in the warm cabin with his cousins the Costa family and listening to the story of how Lyra hijacked their boat, and their demand that someone discipline the brat. Their indignation was too much to bear without laughing. In return, he told them about how she rescued a starling from the kitchen cat, only for it to die anyway, and of how she plucked and gutted it clumsily and smuggled it into the great ovens, hoping to retrieve it when it was cooked. But the chef sent her packing, and in the bustle the starling was sent to table with the rest of the Feast, and was eaten with relish by the Master. The truth came out when the doctor had to be summoned to deal with the poor man’s suffering. Lyra was unrepentant. “It wasn’t
for
him,” she said. “He’s obviously got a delicate stomach.
I
could have eaten it.” She was banned from the kitchens for a term. “Seems to me we got off lightly,” said Tony Costa.

Serafina Pekkala on her cloud-pine would find a still field of air at night and listen to the silence. Like the air itself, which was never quite still, the silence was full of little currents and turbulence, of patches of density and pockets of attenuation, all shot through with darts and drifts of whispering that were made of silence themselves. It was as different from the silence of a closed room as fresh spring water is from stale. Later, Serafina realized that she was listening to Dust.

Lantern Slides

Will tugged at his mother’s hand and said, “Come
on
, come
on
 …”

But his mother hung back. She was still afraid. Will looked up and down the narrow street in the evening light, along the little terrace of houses, each behind its tiny garden and its box hedge, with the sun glaring off the windows of one side and leaving the other in shadow. There wasn’t much time. People would be having their meal about now, and soon there would be other children around, to stare and comment and notice. It was dangerous to wait, but all he could do was persuade her, as usual.

“Mum, let’s go in and see Mrs. Cooper,” he said. “Look, we’re nearly there.”