The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) (45 page)

Then the note of the engines slowed, and the slight movement changed as the boat seemed to be turning tightly. Not again, thought Lyra, but a few moments later it began to pitch a little and lean into the turn. In the confined and overheated passageway, with no sight of the sea, Lyra began to feel a little queasy, and when Aisha came out, she took the child’s hand and led her out on deck again, where the air was fresh. Aisha held her hand readily enough, and her dæmon seemed more active and less fearful than he’d been in the night. He was whispering in the girl’s ear and watching Lyra all the time. Aisha murmured a word or two in response.

Lyra saw a queue of people forming on the deck outside the main saloon and led Aisha to join it, hoping it was for breakfast. And so it turned out to be: fresh flatbreads and a little cheese. Lyra took some and went back to the chair, where Aisha sat huddled under the blanket, bread in one hand and cheese in the other, and nibbled steadily.

Then Lyra noticed that the ferry had indeed changed direction and was now slowing down and moving towards a harbor under the rocky hills of an island.

“I wonder where this is,” she said to Aisha.

The child simply stared at her and then at the hills, the little town of white-painted houses, the fishing boats in the harbor.

“Well, how’s she doing?” said Alison Wetherfield, appearing suddenly beside them.

“She’s eating, at least,” said Lyra.

“What about you? Have you eaten something?”

“I thought the food was for the refugees.”

“Well, go and buy something from the cafeteria. I’ll wait here. You won’t be any use if you’re hungry.”

Lyra did, and came back with bread and cheese for herself and a spice cake for the child. The only drink available was a sweet mint tea, which was hot, at least. Every part of the vessel was crowded and noisy and alive with voices expressing fear, curiosity, anger, and sorrow; and Lyra was grateful for it, because she was definitely less interesting than the situation they were all in, and she could pass among people without being noticed at all.

When she got back to the child, she found her talking freely to Alison. Freely, but quietly and with eyes lowered, and in a monotone. Lyra tried to follow her words, but could make out very little; perhaps Aisha spoke a dialect of Arabic different from the classical kind they taught at Jordan College. Or perhaps Lyra simply hadn’t paid attention to her lessons.

She offered the spice cake, and the child looked up just once as she accepted it, and then cast her eyes down again; and Lyra knew in a moment that the trust of the night was gone, and Aisha now felt the fear every human being felt for someone so mutilated as to be without a dæmon.

“I’m going to wash,” she said to Alison, not noticing that the woman had seen Aisha’s fear and the immediate sadness it had caused Lyra.

When she came back, hoping she looked refreshed, she said, “Where are we? What’s this place?”

“One of the Greek islands. I don’t know which one. The refugees will go ashore here, no doubt. I don’t expect the Greeks will refuse to let them land. They’ll take them to the mainland eventually and they’ll settle somewhere.”

“What’ll happen to her?”

“I’ve spoken to a woman who’ll look after her. We can only do so much, Lyra. There comes a point when we have to accept that other people can do more.”

Aisha was now finishing the spice cake, her eyes still firmly cast down. Lyra wanted to stroke her hair but held back, not wanting to frighten her.

The ferry had come to rest against a quay, and deckhands were making it fast to bollards at the bow and the stern. There was a loud clatter of chains as a gangway was lowered, and a little crowd was already gathering on the waterfront to see what had brought the ferry to their harbor.

Lyra stood at the rail and watched the activity unfold, and gradually fell into a kind of trance. Perhaps she hadn’t slept well, or perhaps her energy was depleted, but she found herself withdrawing little by little into a labyrinth of daydream and speculation, all involving dæmons.

The moment in the night when the little mouse dæmon had cuddled against her: had that really happened? She was as sure of it as she could be of anything, but (as so often now) it was the meaning that was a mystery.

Perhaps there was no meaning. That’s what Simon Talbot would say. She felt a lurch of revulsion, and then she thought something else: she’d felt at the time that the poor little dæmon was attracted by her warmth, the greater certainty of her adulthood, by the simple fact of her being in charge and offering comfort. Now it occurred to her that there was another interpretation. Perhaps it was the little dæmon himself who sensed a loneliness and desolation in Lyra, and came to give her comfort—not the other way round at all. And it had worked. That thought was a shock, but it convinced her. She wanted to express her gratitude, but when she turned to look at the child again, she found that it would be impossible; there was no point where they could meet and understand each other. The moment in the night was an end point, not a starting point.

“Can I do anything to help?” she said to Alison when the woman got up and lifted the child to her feet.

“I’ve decided I should go ashore to see that they’re looked after properly. I’ve got no authority; all I can do is boss people, but it seems to work. I’ll wait for a later boat—I doubt the captain will want to lose more time than he needs to. You stay on board and gather yourself, and go on and find your dæmon. That’s what you need to do. If you go through Aleppo, don’t leave without seeing Father Joseph at the English school. He’s not hard to find, and he’s a very good man. Goodbye, my dear.”

A brisk kiss, and she led Aisha away. The child didn’t look back. Her dæmon was a little bird now, of a kind that Lyra didn’t recognize, and he’d probably already forgotten what he’d done in the night, though Lyra knew that she never would.

She sat down in the wicker chair. In the warmth of the Aegean morning, she soon fell asleep.

Malcolm and Mehrzad Karimov spent the night in their dry cave, and woke to a warm, sunny morning. By staying in the forest, they managed to cross the border without being discovered. They could see, from their path among the trees higher up the mountain, the long queues of traffic that had built up on either side of the frontier post, and exchanged a silent glance of relief. From that point on, the journey was untroubled. Malcolm paid for Karimov’s ticket as far as Constantinople, and they arrived two days after the assassination of the Patriarch.

They found the city in a state of feverish anxiety. Their travel documents were examined three times before they could manage to leave the railway station, and Malcolm’s cover identity as a scholar traveling to study various documents in the libraries of that city was thoroughly ransacked. It stood up because it was genuine, and the details of his contacts and sponsors and hosts had all been rigorously checked before he left London; but the manner of the soldiers who examined it was hostile and suspicious.

He said goodbye to Karimov, whom he’d come to like a great deal. He had told Malcolm everything he knew about Tashbulak and the work of the scientists there, and about the desert of Karamakan, and about the poem
Jahan and Rukhsana,
long passages of which Karimov knew by heart. He was going to pick up some business in Constantinople, he said, and join a caravan further along on the Silk Road.

“Malcolm, thank you for your companionship on this journey,” he said as they shook hands outside the railway station. “May God keep you safe.”

“I hope he’ll do the same for you, my friend,” said Malcolm. “Go well.”

After finding a cheap hotel, he set out to call on an old acquaintance of his, an inspector in the Turkish police who was an unofficial friend of Oakley Street. But on his way to the police headquarters, he realized that he was being followed.

It wasn’t hard to see, in shop windows and the glass doors of banks and office buildings, the young man who was on his trail. The only way of following someone with real success, without being detected, was to have a team of three people doing it, all trained and experienced; but this young man was on his own and had to stay close. Without looking at him directly, Malcolm had plenty of time to examine him: his dark good looks, his slender build, and his nervous, sudden movements and pauses were clearly visible in the wealth of reflections Malcolm saw around him. He didn’t look Turkish; he might have been Italian; in fact, he might have been English. He was wearing a green shirt, dark trousers, and a pale linen jacket. His dæmon was a small hawk. His face was badly bruised, and there was a plaster across the bridge of his nose.

Malcolm moved gradually towards the more crowded streets, where his follower would need to come nearer. He wondered whether the young man was familiar with the city: at a guess, he thought not. They were in the neighborhood of the Grand Bazaar, and Malcolm meant to lead him into the crowded alleys of the bazaar itself, where he’d have to come even closer.

He came to the great stone archway that led into the bazaar and paused to look up at it, giving his follower time to see where he was going, and strolled inside.

Immediately, before the young man could see, he stepped into a little shop selling rugs and textiles. There were over sixty different lanes in the bazaar, and hundreds of shops. It wouldn’t be hard to escape from his follower, but Malcolm wanted to do something different: to turn the tables and follow
him.

A few seconds later, the young man hurried in at the great gate and looked around, craning to peer along the crowded alley, looking quickly to left and right—too quickly to see anything clearly. He was agitated. Malcolm, among the hanging rugs, was facing away from the alley, but was watching in the back of his wristwatch, which consisted of a mirror. The rug seller was busy attending to a customer and gave Malcolm no more than a quick glance.

The young man began to hurry along the alley, and Malcolm stepped out to follow him. He had a linen cap in his pocket, and he put it on now to hide his red hair. The lane they were in was one of the wider ones, but shops and stalls crowded close on both sides, and the whole alley was hung thickly with clothes, shoes, carpets, brushes, brooms, suitcases, lamps, copper cooking vessels, and a thousand other things.

Malcolm moved unobtrusively through it all, following the young man without ever looking at him directly, in case he suddenly looked around. His nervousness surrounded him like a vapor. His hawk dæmon sat on his shoulder, her head twitching this way and that, occasionally seeming to face backwards like an owl, and Malcolm saw every movement and moved closer and closer.

Then the boy—he was hardly a man—said something to his dæmon, and Malcolm saw his face more clearly. And that raised an apparition in his mind, no more than the ghost of a memory of another face, and he was back in his parents’ inn on a winter evening as Gerard Bonneville sat by the fire with his hyena dæmon and gave Malcolm such a warm smile of complicity that—

Bonneville!

This was his son. This was the Magisterium’s celebrated alethiometrist.

“Asta,” Malcolm whispered, and his dæmon leapt up into his arms and climbed to his shoulder. “It is, isn’t it?” he murmured.

“Yes. No doubt about it.”

The alleys were crowded, and Bonneville uncertain; he seemed so young, so inexperienced. Malcolm followed the boy into the heart of the bazaar, closer, closer, little by little, moving through the crowds like a ghost, unseen, unsuspected, unfelt, subduing his own personality, watching without looking and seeing without staring. Bonneville was becoming despondent, to judge by his bearing; he’d lost his quarry; he wasn’t sure of anything.

They came to a sort of crossroads, where an ornate fountain stood under the high arched roof. Malcolm guessed that Bonneville would stop there and look all around, and he did, Malcolm seeing it in the back of his watch, with his head turned away.

“He’s drinking,” said Asta.

Malcolm moved quickly, and while the boy’s head was still bent down to the water, he came to stand right behind him. The hawk dæmon was looking to left and right, and then, as Malcolm knew she would, she turned and saw him only an arm’s length away.

It gave Bonneville a great shock. He jerked back and up from the water, whirled around—and there was a knife in his right hand.

At once Asta sprang at the boy’s dæmon and bore her down into the stone trough where the water ran. Malcolm reacted in the same moment, just as the razor-sharp blade sliced through the left arm of his jacket and the skin beneath. Bonneville had swung his hand so hard that he was off balance for a fraction of a second, and in that moment Malcolm slammed his right fist with all his strength into the boy’s solar plexus, the kind of blow that would have ended a boxing match at once; and Bonneville, all breath and power gone, slumped back over the trough and dropped the knife.

Malcolm kicked it away and picked the boy up with one hand gripping his shirtfront.

“My knife,” Bonneville gasped in French.

“It’s gone. You’re going to come with me and talk,” said Malcolm in the same language.

“Like hell.”

Asta’s claws were firmly fixed in the hawk dæmon’s throat. She gripped harder, and the hawk screamed. Both dæmons were soaking wet, and Bonneville was wet through himself, and both frightened and defiant.

“You’ve got no choice,” said Malcolm. “You’re going to come and sit down and drink some coffee with me and talk. There’s a café just around the corner. If I’d wanted to kill you, I could have done it anytime during the last fifteen minutes. I’m in charge. You do as I say.”

Bonneville was winded and trembling, and hunched over as if his ribs were broken, which they might very well have been. He was in no condition to argue. He did try to shake off Malcolm’s grip on his arm, without the slightest success. It had all happened so quickly that hardly anyone had noticed. Malcolm took him to the café and made him sit in the corner, his back to a wall hung with photograms of wrestlers and film stars.

Malcolm ordered coffee for them both. Bonneville sat hunched forward, caressing his dæmon with trembling fingers, stroking the water off her feathers.

“Fuck you, man,” he muttered. “You’ve broken something. A rib or, I don’t know, something in my chest. Bastard.”

“You’ve been in the wars, haven’t you? How did you get that broken nose?”

“Piss off.”

“What do you know about the murder of the Patriarch?” said Malcolm. “Did Monsieur Delamare send you here to see it done successfully?”

Bonneville tried to conceal his surprise. “How do you know—” he began, but stopped.

“I ask the questions. Where’s your alethiometer now? You haven’t got it on you, or I’d know.”

“You’ll never have it.”

“No, because Delamare will. You took it without permission, didn’t you?”

“Fuck you.”

“I thought so.”

“You’re not as clever as you think.”

“I daresay you’re right, but I’m cleverer than you think. For example, I know the names and addresses of Delamare’s agents in Constantinople, and now that you realize I can follow you, you’ll know that I’ll very soon find out where you’re staying. Ten minutes after that, they’ll know.”

“What are their names, then?”

“Aurelio Menotti. Jacques Pascal. Hamid Saltan.”

Bonneville gnawed his lower lip and looked at Malcolm with hatred. The waiter came with their coffee, and couldn’t help looking at the boy’s wet shirt and bandaged nose and at the blood now seeping through the cut in Malcolm’s sleeve.

“What do you want?” said Bonneville when the waiter had gone.

Malcolm ignored the question and sipped the scalding coffee. “I’ll say nothing to Menotti and the others,” he said, “if you tell me the truth now.”

Bonneville shrugged. “You wouldn’t know if it was the truth or not,” he said.

“Why did you come to Constantinople?”

“Nothing to do with you.”

“Why were you following me?”

“My business.”

“Not after you pulled a knife on me. It’s mine too.”

Another shrug.

“Where’s Lyra now?” Malcolm said.

Bonneville blinked. He opened his mouth to speak, changed his mind, tried to sip his coffee, burned his mouth, put the cup down.

“So you don’t know?” the boy said eventually.

“Oh, I know exactly where she is. I know why you’re following her. I know what you want from her. I know the way you use the alethiometer. Know how I know that? It leaves a trail, did you realize?”

Bonneville looked at him, narrow-eyed.

“She discovered that straightaway,” Malcolm went on. “You’ve been leaving a trail all through Europe, and they’re following you, and eventually they’ll pick you up.”

The boy’s eyes flickered for a moment in what would have been a smile if he’d let it.
He knows something,
thought Asta to Malcolm.

“Shows how much you know,” Bonneville said. “Anyway, what’s this trail? What do you mean by that?”

“I’m not going to tell you. What does Delamare want?”

“He wants the girl.”

“Apart from that. What does he want to do with this new High Council?”

Why did Delamare want Lyra?
was the one question Malcolm wanted to ask, but he knew he’d never get the answer by asking it.

“He’s always wanted power,” said Bonneville. “That’s all. Now he’s got it.”

“Tell me about the business with the roses.”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“Yes, you do. Tell me what you know.”

“I’m not interested in it, so I took no notice.”

“You’re interested in anything that gives you any power, so I know you’ll have heard about the rose business. Tell me what Delamare knows.”

“It’s no advantage to me to tell you anything.”

“That’s just what I mean. You’re shortsighted. Raise your eyes to the horizon. It would be a great advantage to you not to have me against you. Tell me what Delamare knows about the rose business.”

“What will I get in return?”

“I won’t break your neck.”

“I want to know about this trail.”

“You can work that out for yourself. Come on—roses.”

Bonneville sipped his coffee again. His hand was steadier now. “A man came to see him a few weeks ago,” he said. “A Greek, or a Syrian, I don’t know. Maybe from further east. He had a sample of rose oil from a place way out in Kazakhstan or somewhere. Lop Nor. They mentioned Lop Nor. Delamare had the sample analyzed.”

“Well?”

“That’s all I know.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“It’s all I know!”

“What about the business in Oxford that went wrong?”

“That was nothing to do with me.”

“So you know about it. That’s useful. Delamare was behind that as well, obviously.”

Bonneville shrugged. He was beginning to regain his confidence. It was time to shake it again.

“Did your mother know how your father died?” Malcolm said.

The boy blinked and opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, shook his head, picked up his coffee cup, but put it down again almost at once, seeing his own hand tremble.