The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) (19 page)

“I am interested in the men. What do people say about them? Are they organized? Have they a leader? Do we know why they destroyed the station at Tashbulak?”

“I understand it was because they believed the work there was blasphemous.”

“Then what is their religion? What counts as blasphemy for them?”

The merchant shook his head and spread his hands.

Delamare slowly nodded and tapped his pencil on a small pile of folded and stained papers. “These are the expenses you incurred?” he said.

“They are. And of course the invoice for the oil. I would be grateful—”

“You shall be paid tomorrow. Are you staying at the Hotel Rembrandt, as I recommended?”

“I am.”

“Stay there. A messenger will bring you your money before very long. I would remind you of the contract we signed so many months ago.”

“Ah,” said the traveler.

“Yes, ah, indeed. If I learn that you’ve been talking about this business, I shall invoke the confidentiality clause and pursue you through every court till I have recovered all the money you’re being paid and a great deal more besides.”

“I remember that clause.”

“Then we need say no more. Good morning to you.”

The visitor bowed and left. Delamare put the bottle of oil into a desk drawer and locked it, then turned over in his mind the news the merchant had told him. But there was something about the way the man had looked at him while talking about it, something surprised, maybe skeptical, maybe doubtful. It had been hard to read. In fact, Delamare knew quite a lot already about these men from the mountains, and his purpose in asking about them was to find out how much was known by others.

No matter. He wrote a swift note to the Rector of the College of Theophysical Research, and then brought his attention back to the project that was occupying most of his time: a forthcoming congress of the entire Magisterium, of a kind that had never happened before. The oil, and what had happened at Tashbulak, would be at the center of their deliberations, though very few delegates would know that.

Malcolm was detained most of that day by college business, but as the afternoon clouded over, he locked his door and set off for Godstow. He was keen to tell Lyra about the meeting at the Botanic Garden and everything he’d learnt from it, and not just to warn her: he wanted to see her expression as she absorbed all the implications of what had happened. Her emotions came and went so vividly that it seemed to him that she was more in tune with the world than anyone else he’d known. He didn’t know quite what he meant by that, and he wouldn’t have said it to anyone, least of all her; but it was enchanting to see.

The temperature was falling, and there even seemed like a hint of snow in the air. When he opened the kitchen door at the Trout and went in, the familiar warmth and steam enveloped him like a welcome. But his mother’s face, as she looked up from the pastry she was rolling, was tense and anxious.

“You seen her?” she said at once.

“Seen Lyra? What d’you mean?”

She nodded towards the note Lyra had left, which was still in the middle of the table. He snatched it up and read it quickly, then again slowly.

“Nothing else?” he said.

“She left some of her things upstairs. Looks like she took what she could carry. She must’ve gone out early, before anyone else got up.”

“Did she say anything yesterday?”

“She just looked preoccupied. Unhappy, your dad thinks. But she was trying to be cheerful, you could see that. She didn’t say anything much, though, and she went to bed early.”

“When did she go?”

“She left before we got up. That note was on the table. I thought she might have come to you at Durham, or Alice, maybe….”

Malcolm ran upstairs and into the bedroom Lyra had been using. Her books, or some of them, were still on the little table; the bed was made; there were a few items of clothing in one of the drawers. Nothing else.

“Fuck,”
he said.

“I wonder…,” said Asta from the windowsill.

“What?”

“I just wonder if she and Pantalaimon both went. Or if she thought he’d gone and went after him. We know they weren’t…they didn’t…they weren’t very happy together.”

“But where would he have gone?”

“Just to go out on his own. We know he used to do that. That’s when I saw him first.”

“But…” He was baffled and angry, and far more upset than he could remember being for a long time.

“Though she’d always know that he’d come back,” Asta said. “Perhaps this time he just didn’t.”

“Alice,” he said at once. “We’ll go there now.”

Alice was drinking a glass of wine in the Steward’s parlor after dinner.

“Good evening, Dr. Polstead,” said the Steward, rising to his feet. “Will you take a glass of port with us?”

“Another time with pleasure, Mr. Cawson,” Malcolm said, “but this is rather urgent. May I have a quick word with Mrs. Lonsdale?”

Alice, seeing his expression, stood up at once. They went out into the quad and spoke quietly under the light by the Hall steps.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

He explained briefly and showed her the note.

“What’d she take with her?”

“A rucksack, some clothes…Not a clue otherwise. Had she come to see you in the last day or so?”

“No. I wish she had. I’d have made her tell me the truth about her and that dæmon.”

“Yes…I saw there was something wrong, but it wasn’t something I could bring up in conversation, with urgent things to talk about. You knew they weren’t happy, then?”

“Not happy? They couldn’t stand each other, and it was awful to see. How’d she get on at the Trout?”

“They saw the state of mind she was in, but she didn’t say anything about it. Alice, you did know she and Pantalaimon could separate?”

Alice’s dæmon, Ben, growled and pressed himself against her legs.

“She never spoke about it,” said Alice. “But I thought there was something different about them after they come back from the north. She was like someone haunted, I used to think. Shadowed, kind of thing. Why?”

“Just a feeling that Pan might have left, and she went off to try and find him.”

“She must’ve thought he’d gone a long way. If he was just out for a scamper in the woods, he’d have been back before morning.”

“That’s what I thought. But if you hear from her, or hear anything about her…”

“Course.”

“Is there anyone else in the college she might have spoken to?”

“No,” she said decisively. “Not after the new Master as good as chucked her out, the bastard.”

“Thanks, Alice. Don’t stand about in the cold.”

“I’ll tell old Ronnie Cawson that she’s missing. He’s fond of her. All the servants are. Well, the original servants. Hammond’s got some new buggers that don’t talk to anyone. This place en’t the same as it used to be, Mal.”

A quick embrace, and he left.

Ten minutes later he was knocking on Hannah Relf’s door.

“Malcolm! Come in. What’s—”

“Lyra’s vanished,” he said, shutting the door behind him. “She was gone before Mum and Dad were up this morning. Must’ve been pretty early. She left this note, and no one’s got a clue where she’s gone. I’ve just been to ask Alice, but—”

“Pour us some sherry and sit down. Did she take the alethiometer with her?”

“It wasn’t in her bedroom, so I suppose she must have done.”

“She might have left it there if she was intending to come back. If she thought it would be safe.”

“I think she felt safe there. I was going to talk to her this evening, tell her about the business at the Botanic Garden…I haven’t even told you yet, have I?”

“Does that concern Lyra?”

“Yes, it does.”

He told her about the meeting, and what he’d learnt from it, and the men from the CCD.

“Right,” she said. “Definitely Oakley Street business. Are you seeing her again?”

“Lucy Arnold—yes. And the others. But, Hannah, I was going to ask—would you be able to look for Lyra with your alethiometer?”

“Yes, of course I could, but not quickly. She might be anywhere by now. What is it, twelve hours or so ago when she left? I’ll gladly start looking, but it’ll only give me a general idea at first. It might be easier to ask why she’s gone, rather than where.”

“Do that, then. Anything that’ll help.”

“The police? What about telling them she’s missing?”

“No,” he said. “The less attention they pay to her, the better.”

“I think you’re probably right. Malcolm, are you in love with her?”

The question took him utterly by surprise. “What on earth—where did that come from?” he said.

“The way you talk about her.”

He felt his cheeks flaring. “Is it that obvious?” he said.

“Only to me.”

“There’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing at all. Completely forbidden, by every kind of moral and—”

“Once, yes, but not anymore. You’re both adults. All I was going to say was don’t let it affect your judgment.”

He could see that already she regretted having asked about it. He’d known Hannah for most of his life, and he trusted her completely; but as for her final piece of advice, he thought it was the least wise thing he’d ever heard her say.

“I’ll try not to,” he said.

Lyra soon fell into a comfortable enough way of life with Giorgio Brabandt. He wasn’t overscrupulous as far as cleaning was concerned; she gathered that his last girlfriend had been a zealot for scrubbing and polishing, and that he was glad to live a little more casually. Lyra swept the floors and kept the galley sparkling, and that satisfied him. Where cooking was concerned, she had learnt a few things in the Jordan kitchens, and she could make the sort of hefty pies and stews that Brabandt liked best: he had no taste for delicate sauces or fancy desserts.

“What we’ll do if anyone asks who you are,” he said, “is we’ll say you’re my son Alberto’s gal. He married a landloper woman and they live down Cornwall way. He en’t been on the water for years. You can be called Annie. That’ll do. Annie Brabandt. Good gyptian name. As for the dæmon…Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

He gave Lyra the forward cabin, a cold little place until he put a rock oil stove in there. Wrapped up in bed at night, with a naphtha lamp beside her, she pored over the alethiometer.

She didn’t try the new method; she felt uneasy about it. Instead, she gazed at the dial and let her mind hover, not setting off onto a wild sea so much as drifting over a calm one. She kept herself as free from conscious intention as she could manage, asking nothing and puzzling over nothing, and floated in her mind over the Sun or the Moon or the Bull, looking down on each one, taking in all their details with equal attention, gazing into the great depth of the symbol ranges, from the highest levels that were so familiar now to the lower ones fading into darkness further down. She hovered over the Walled Garden for a long time, letting all the associations and connotations of nature and order and innocence and protection and fertility and many, many other meanings float past like exquisite jellyfish, their myriad tendrils of gold or coral or silver drifting in a pellucid ocean.

From time to time she felt a little snag at the drift of her awareness and knew that the young man she’d mistaken for Will was looking for her. She made herself relax, not fight it, not even ignore it, just float, and presently the snag disappeared, like a little thorn that catches for a moment on a traveler’s sleeve, only to pull out when the traveler walks on.

She thought constantly about Pantalaimon: Was he safe? Where could he be going? What did he mean by that brief and contemptuous note? Surely he couldn’t have meant it literally. It was cruel, he was cruel, and she was cruel too, and it was all a mess, all a dreadful mess.

She hardly thought of Oxford at all. She wondered about writing a note and posting it to Hannah, but that wouldn’t be easy: Brabandt seldom stopped during the day, and tended to moor at night on a lonely stretch of water far from any village where there might be a post office.

He was curious about why the CCD was interested in her, but when she kept saying she had no idea, he realized he wasn’t going to get an answer and stopped asking. He had things to tell her about the gyptians and the Fens, though, and on the third night of their journey, when the frost was hardening the grass on the riverbank and the old stove was glowing in the galley, he sat down and talked with Lyra as she made their supper.

“The CCD, they got a down on the gyptians,” he told her, “but they daresn’t do much to make us angry. Whenever they tried to enter the Fens, we made damn sure they got lured into swamps and dead waterways where they’d never get out. There was one time when they tried to invade the Fens in force, hundreds of ’em, guns and cannons and all. Seems the will o’ the wykeses, the jacky lanterns—you heard of them? They shine lights out on the bogs, to lure innocent people off the safe paths—anyways, they heard the CCD was coming, and all the will o’ the wykeses come shining their lanterns and flickering this side and that, and the CCD men were so bewithered and bewildered that half of ’em drowned and the other half went mad with fear. That was nigh on fifty year ago.”

Lyra wasn’t sure that the CCD had existed fifty years before, but she didn’t quibble. “So the ghosts and the spirits are on your side, then?” she said.

“Against the CCD, they’re on the gyptians’ side, aye. Mind you, they chose the wrong time o’ the month, them CCD men. They come in the dark of the moon. It’s well-known that when the moon’s dark, all the bogles and boggarts come out, all the ghouls and the bloody-boneses, and they do powerful harm to honest men and women, gyptian and landloper alike. They caught her once, you know. Caught her and killed her.”

“Caught who?”

“The moon.”

“Who did?”

“The bogles did. Some say they climbed up and pulled her down, only there en’t nothing in the Fens high enough for that; and others say she fell in love with a gyptian man and come down to sleep with him; and still others say she come down of her own accord ’cause she’d heard terrible tales of the things the bogles got up to when she was dark. Anyway, she come down one night, and walked about among the swamps and the bogs, and a whole host of wicked creatures, ghasts, hobgoblins, boggarts, hell-wains, yeth-hounds, trolls, nixies, ghouls, fire-drakes, they come a tippy-toeing after her right into the darkest and doulest part of the Fens, what’s known as Murk-Mire. And there she turned her foot on a stone, and a bramble snagged her cloak, and the creeping horrors attacked her, the lady moon, they bore her down in the cold water and the filthy grim old bog, where there’s crawling creatures so dark and horrible they en’t even got names. There she lay, cold and stark, with her poor little old light just going out, bit by bit.

“Well, by soon after there come along a gyptian man and he’d wandered off his path by reason of the dark, and he was beginning to be fearful on account of the slimy hands he could feel a-gripping his ankles, and the cold claws that scratched at his legs. And he couldn’t see a bloody thing.

“Then all of a sudden he did see something. A little dim light a-shining under the water it was, a-gleaming just like the mild silver of the moon. And he must have called out, because that was the dying moon herself, and she heard him and she sat up, just for a moment like, and she shined all around, and all the ghouls and boggarts and goblins they fled away, and the gyptian man could see the path clear as day, and he found his way out of Murk-Mire and back home safe.

“But by that time the moon’s light was all gone. And the creatures of the night placed a big stone over where she lay. And things got worse and worse for the gyptians. The creeping horrors come out the murk and snatched away babies and children; the jacky lanterns and the will o’ the wykeses shone their glimmers over all the bogs and the marshes and the quicksands; and things too horrible to mention, dead men and ghouls and rawheads and bonelesses, they come creeping round houses at night and swarmed over boats, fingering at the windows, snarling the rudders with weed, pressing their eyes against the slightest little bit of light shining between the curtains.

“So the people went to a wisewoman and asked what they should do. And she said, find the moon, and there’ll be an end of the trouble. And then the man who’d been lost, he suddenly remembered what had happened to him, and he said, ‘I know where the moon is! She’s buried in Murk-Mire!’

“So off they set with lanterns and torches and burning brands, a whole pack of men, carrying spades and pickaxes and mattocks to dig up the moon. They asked that wisewoman how to find her if her light had all gone out, and she said, look for a big coffin made of stone with a candle on top of it. And she made ’em put a stone in their mouths, each one of ’em, to remind ’em not to say a word.

“Well, they traipsed on deep into Murk-Mire, and they felt slimy hands trying to grasp their feet, and scary whispers and sighings in their ears, but then they come to where that old stone was a-lying, with a candle glimmering made of dead man’s fat.

“And they heaved up the stone lid, and there was the dead moon lying there, with her strange, beautiful lady’s face cold and her eyes closed. And then she opened her eyes, and out there shone a clear silver light, and she lay there for a minute just looking at this circle of gyptian men with their spades and mattocks, all silent because of the stones in their mouths, and then she says, ‘Well, boys, it’s time I woke up, and I thank’ee all for finding me.’ And all around there come a thousand little sucky sounds as the horrors fled back down under the bog. Next thing, the moon was shining down from the sky, and the path was as clear as day.

“So that’s the kind of place that’s ours, and that’s why you better have gyptian friends if you come in the Fens. You come in without permission, the bogles and ghouls’ll have you. You don’t look like you believe a word of this.”

“I do,” Lyra protested. “It’s only too likely.”

She didn’t believe it at all, of course. But if it comforted people to believe that sort of nonsense, she thought it was polite to let them do so, even if the author of
The Hyperchorasmians
would have snarled with scorn.

“Young people don’t believe in the secret commonwealth,” Brabandt said. “It’s all chemistry and measuring things, as far as they’re concerned. They got an explanation for everything, and they’re all wrong.”

“What’s the secret commonwealth?”

“The world of the fairies, and the ghosts, and the jacky lanterns.”

“Well, I’ve never seen a jacky lantern, but I’ve seen three ghosts, and I was suckled by a fairy.”

“You was what?”

“I was suckled by a fairy. It happened in the great flood twenty years ago.”

“You en’t old enough to remember that.”

“No. I don’t remember it at all. But that’s what I was told by someone who was there. She was a fairy out of the river Thames. She wanted to keep me, only they tricked her and she had to let me go.”

“The river Thames, eh? What was her name, then?”

Lyra tried to remember what Malcolm had told her. “Diania,” she said.

“That’s right! Damn me, that’s right. That’s her name. That en’t common knowledge. You’d only know that if it was true, and it is.”

“I’ll tell you something else,” she said. “Ma Costa told me this. She said I had witch oil in my soul. When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a gyptian, so I tried to talk in a gyptian way, and Ma Costa laughed at me and said I’d never be gyptian, because I was a fire person and I had witch oil in my soul.”

“Well, if she said that, it must be right. I wouldn’t argue with Ma Costa. What you cooking there?”

“Stewed eels. They’re probably ready now.”

“Dish up, then,” he said, and poured some beer for them both.

As they ate, she said, “Master Brabandt? D’you know the word
akterrakeh
?”

He shook his head. “It en’t a gyptian word, and that’s a fact,” he said. “Might be French. Sounds a bit French.”

“And did you ever hear of a place somewhere called the Blue Hotel? Something to do with dæmons?”

“Yeah, I did hear about that,” he said. “That’s in the Levant somewhere, that is. It en’t a hotel of any kind, really. A thousand years ago, maybe more, it was a great city: temples, palaces, bazaars, parks, fountains, all sorts of beautiful things. Then one day the Huns swept down out the steppes—that’s the endless grasslands they have further north, what seem to go on forever—and they slaughtered all the people in that city, every man, woman, and child. It was empty for centuries because people said it was haunted, and I en’t surprised. No one would go there for love nor money. Then one day there was a traveler—he might have been a gyptian man—who went there exploring, and he come back with a strange tale, how the place was haunted all right, but not by ghosts: by dæmons. Maybe the dæmons of dead people go there, maybe that’s it. I dunno why they call it the Blue Hotel. Must be a reason, though.”

“Would that be a secret commonwealth thing?”

“Bound to be.”

And so they passed the time as the
Maid of Portugal
sailed nearer and nearer to the Fens.

In Geneva, Olivier Bonneville was becoming frustrated. The new method of reading the alethiometer was refusing to disclose anything at all about Lyra. It hadn’t at first; he’d spied on her more than once; but now it was as if some connection was broken, a wire come loose.

He was beginning to discover more about the new method, though. For example, it only worked in the present tense, so to speak. It could reveal events, but not their causes or consequences. The classical method gave a fuller perspective, but at the cost of time and laborious research, and it required a kind of interpretation that Bonneville had little patience for.

However, his employer, Marcel Delamare, was directing all his attention to the forthcoming congress of all the constituent bodies that made up the Magisterium. Since it was Delamare himself whose idea this was, and since he had no intention of making its true purpose clear, but every intention of arranging for it to deliver the resolutions he wanted, and since that involved a great deal of complex politics, Bonneville found himself comparatively unsupervised for a while.

So he decided to try another approach to the new method. He had a photogram of Lyra, which Delamare had given him: it showed her among a group of other young women in academic dress, obviously on some university occasion. They stood formally facing the camera in bright sunlight. Bonneville had cut out the face and figure of Lyra and thrown the rest of the picture away; there was no reason to keep it, because the girls in it were too English to be attractive. He thought that if he looked at Lyra’s face in the picture, alethiometer in hand, it might help him focus more clearly on the question of where she was.