Lyra's Oxford (4 page)

Over her head, returning, the other swans came past so low that Lyra felt the snap of feathers in her hair and felt the sound they made in her very bones; and then she was at the edge of the water and she bent down, trembling with the weight of him, and he slid heavily out of her grasp and into the dark water with a splash. After a moment he swung upright, and shook his wings, standing up in the water to beat them hard and wide, and then he sank down again and paddled away. Farther along the canal, the other swans skimmed down onto the water one after the other, and swam toward him, faint white patches in the dark.

Lyra felt a hand on her shoulder. She was too shaken already to be further startled; she merely turned, to see a man in his sixties, with a dazed and ravaged face and scarred, sooty hands. His black cat daemon was close in conversation with Pan, at their feet.

“This way,” he said quietly, “and you won't be caught up in anyone's curiosity. Now she's dead, the street will begin to wake up.”

He led the way along the canal path to the right, toward the ironworks, and slipped through a narrow gate in the wall. The faint moonlight was enough to show Lyra a passage between the wall and the high brick side of the building. With Pan on her shoulder, whispering, “It's safe—we're safe with him,” she followed the man along and around a corner into a bleak little courtyard, where he lifted a trapdoor.

“This takes us into my cellar, and then there's a way out farther along. When they find her body there'll be a big fuss. You don't need to be mixed up in that.”

She went down the wooden steps and into a hot, close, sulfurous room lit only by the flames from a great iron furnace in one corner. Benches along each wall were laden with glass beakers and retorts, with crucibles and sets of scales and every kind of apparatus for distilling and condensing and purifying. Everything was thick with dust, and the ceiling was completely black with years of soot.

“You're Mr. Makepeace,” Lyra said.

“And you're Lyra Silvertongue.”

He shut the door. Pan was ranging curiously here and there, touching delicately with a nose or a paw, and the black cat calmly leapt up to a chair and licked her paws.

“She was lying,” said Lyra. “Her daemon lied to us. Why?”

“Because she wanted to kill you. She wanted to trick you into coming here, and then kill you, and put the blame on me.”

“I thought I could trust witches,” Lyra said, and there was a quiver in her voice that she couldn't prevent. “I thought…”

“I know. But witches have their own causes and alliances. And some are trustworthy, others are not; why should they be different from us?”

“Yes. I should know that. But why did she want to kill me?”

“I'll tell you. To begin with, we were lovers, she and I, many years ago….”

“I wondered,” Lyra said.

“We had a son, and—you know the way of things among the witches—after his young childhood, he had to leave the north and come to live with me. Well, he grew up, and became a soldier, and he died fighting for Lord Asriel's cause in the late war.”

Lyra's eyes widened.

“His mother blamed me,” Makepeace went on. He was ill, or perhaps he'd been drugged, because he had to hold on to the bench to stay upright, and his deep voice was hoarse and quiet. “You see, her clan was among those fighting against Asriel, and she thought that in the confusion of battle she might have killed our son herself, because she found his body with one of her own arrows in his heart. She blamed me because I brought him up to cherish the things that Asriel was fighting for, and she blamed you because it was said among the witches that the war was fought over you.”

Lyra shook her head. This was horrible.

“No, no,” she said, “no, it was nothing to do with me—”

“Oh, it was something to do with you, though you were not to blame. Yelena—the witch— wasn't alone in thinking that. She could have killed you herself, but she wanted to make it seem as if I had done it, and punish me at the same time.”

He stopped to sit down. His face was ashen and his breathing was labored. Lyra saw a glass and a flask of water, and poured some for him; he took it with a nod of thanks and sipped before going on.

“Her plan was to trick you into coming here and arrange for me to be found drugged beside your body, so that you would be dead and I would be charged with your murder, and disgraced. She took care to induce you to leave a trail, no doubt? People would be able to follow you here?”

Lyra realized, with a little blow to her pride, how simple she'd been. Miss Greenwood and Dr. Polstead were not fools; once she was found to be missing, it would take very little time to connect her with the famous Oxford alchemist, and Mr. Shuter would remember Jericho and the directory. Oh, how stupid she could be when she was being clever!

She nodded unhappily.

“Don't blame yourself,” said Makepeace. “She had six hundred years' start on you. As for me, she was unlucky: years of inhaling the fumes in this cellar have given me some immunity to the drug she put in my wine, which is why I managed to wake in time.”

“We nearly fell into her trap,” said Lyra. “But the swan—where did the swan come from?”

“The swan is a mystery to me.”

“All the birds,” said Pantalaimon, leaping to her shoulder. “From the beginning! The starlings and then the pigeons—and finally the swan—they were all attacking the daemon, Lyra—”

“And we tried to save him from them,” she said.

“They were protecting us!” said Pan.

Lyra looked at the alchemist. He nodded.

“But we thought it was just—I don't know—malice,” she said. “We didn't think it meant anything.”

“Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it,” he said.

Since that was exactly what she had said to Pan just a few hours before, she could hardly deny it now.

“So what do you think it means?” she said, bewildered.

“It means something about you, and something about the city. You'll find the meaning if you search for it. Now you had better go.”

He stood up painfully, and glanced up at the little window. Lyra could hear excited voices in the street, cries of alarm; someone had found the witch's body.

“You can slip out of the yard at the back of this house,” said Sebastian Makepeace, “and make your way along beside the ironworks. No one will see you.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Mr. Makepeace, do you really turn lead into gold?”

“No, of course not. No one can do that. But if people think you're foolish enough to try, they don't bother to look at what you're really doing. They leave you in peace.”

“And what are you really doing?”

“Not now. Perhaps another time. You must go.”

He showed them out, and told them how to loosen the gate between the ironworks and the canal path, and then close it again from outside. On the path they could make their way along to Walton Well Road, and from there it was only ten minutes' walk back to the school, and the open pantry window, and their Latin.

“Thank you,” she said to Mr. Makepeace. “I hope you feel better soon.”

“Good night, Lyra,” he said.

Five minutes later, in the University Park, Pan said: “Listen.”

They stopped. Somewhere in the dark trees, a bird was singing.

“A nightingale?” Lyra guessed, but they didn't know for certain.

“Maybe,” Pan said, “the meaning—you know…”

“Yeah. … As if the birds—and the whole city—”

“Protecting us? Could it be that?”

They stood still. Their city lay quietly around them, and the only voice was the bird's, and they couldn't understand what it said.

“Things don't mean things as simply as that,” Lyra said, uncertainly. “Do they? Not like mensa means table. They mean all kinds of things, mixed up.”

“But it feels like it,” Pan said. “It feels as if the whole city's looking after us. So what we feel is part of the meaning, isn't it?”

“Yes! It is. It must be. Not the whole of it, and there's a lot more we don't even know is there, probably…. Like all those meanings in the alethiometer, the ones we have to go deep down to find. Things you never suspect. But that's part of it, no question.”

The city, their city—
belonging was
one of the meanings of that, and
protection
, and
home.

Very shortly afterward, as they climbed in through the pantry window with the loose latch, they found the remains of an apple pie on the marble worktop.

“We must be lucky, Pan,” Lyra said, as they carried it upstairs. “See, that's another thing it means.”

And before they went to bed, they put the crumbs out on the windowsill, for the birds.