The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) (56 page)

“I don’t want to make it easy. I want to know why I’m to be dismissed, after doing my job well for twelve years.
You’ve
never had a complaint about me, have you?”

“Well, not as such, but it seems that yesterday you did interfere with some important men in the execution of their duty.”

“Not here, though. Not in college. Did I interfere yesterday when they were here?”

“It doesn’t matter where.”

“I’d have thought it mattered quite a lot. Did they tell you what they were doing?”

“I didn’t speak to them directly.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. They were stealing the property of an old lady and treating her brutally, and I happened to see it going on, and me and my friend stepped in and helped her. And that’s all, Mr. Stringer, that’s all that happened. Is this the kind of country we’re living in now, that people can be sacked from jobs they do well just because they inconvenience bullies and thugs from the CCD? Is that the kind of place this is?”

The Bursar put his head in his hands. Janet had never in her life spoken to an employer like that, and she stood with fast-beating heart while he sighed heavily and three times tried to say something.

“It’s very difficult,” he said. He looked up, but not at her. “There are things I can’t explain. Pressures and tensions that…umm…college staff, domestic staff are quite properly protected from. These are times unlike any…I have to protect the staff from…”

She said nothing as his words faded into silence.

“Well, if you’ve got to get rid of
me,
” she said finally, “why did they arrest Alice? And what have they done with her? Where is she now?”

All he could do was sigh and lower his head.

She began to gather her own few possessions from the desk where she worked. She felt light-headed, as if part of her was somewhere else and dreaming of this, and she’d wake up soon and find everything normal.

Then she went into his office again. He looked utterly diminished.

“If you can’t tell me where she is as an employer,” she said, “can you tell me as a friend? She is my friend. She’s everyone’s friend. She’s part of the college—she’s been here ages, much longer than me. Please, Mr. Stringer, where have they taken her?”

He was pretending he couldn’t hear her. His face was turned down; he sat perfectly still; he was pretending she wasn’t there, and that no one was asking him questions, and he seemed to think that if he sat still and didn’t look at her, what he pretended would come true.

She felt a little sick. She put her things in a shopping bag and left.

Several hours later Alice was sitting, her ankles shackled, in a closed railway carriage with a dozen other figures similarly restrained. Some of them had swollen eyes and lips, bloody noses, bruised cheekbones. The youngest was a boy of eleven or so, chalk-pale and wide-eyed with fear; the oldest, a man of Hannah’s age, gaunt and trembling. Two dim anbaric bulbs, one at each end of the carriage, provided the only light. As an ingenious extra way of keeping the prisoners still, cages of some bright metal covered in silvery mesh were attached underneath the hard benches that ran the length of the carriage, and each prisoner’s dæmon was locked in one of them.

There was little conversation. Their guards had thrown them roughly inside, manhandled their dæmons into the cages, slapped the shackles on their ankles, and told them nothing. The carriage had been on a siding in the empty countryside when the prisoners had been brought there, and a locomotive had arrived after an hour or so to pull the carriage—somewhere.

The young boy was sitting opposite Alice. After they had been moving for half an hour, he began to fidget, and Alice said, “You all right, love?”

“I need the toilet,” he said in a whisper.

Alice looked up and down the carriage. The doors had been locked at each end—they had all heard the sound, and seen the large keys—and there was no lavatory, and she knew full well that no one would come if they called.

“Stand up and turn around and do it behind the bench,” she said. “No one’ll blame you. It’s their fault, not yours.”

He tried to do as she said, but it was too hard to turn around with his ankles shackled. He had to urinate on the floor in front. Alice looked away till he’d finished. He was bitterly ashamed.

“What’s your name, love?” she said.

“Anthony.” She could hardly hear him.

“You stick to me,” she said. “We’ll help each other. I’m Alice. Don’t worry about peeing on the floor. We’ll all be doing it in the end. Where d’you live?”

They began to talk, and the train moved on into the night.

The noises of shouting voices, heavy boots on concrete, the trundle of iron wheels as a large trolley went past the train window laden with what looked like boxes of ammunition, all combined with the violent hiss of steam, filled the air and made Lyra listen hard for a language she recognized or a voice that wasn’t harsh and commanding. There was loud male laughter too, and more shouted orders. Men in desert camouflage uniforms were staring in at her, and making remarks about her, and then moving past towards the door of the carriage.

Invisible,
she thought.
Dowdy. Undesirable.

The compartment door slid open with a bang. A soldier looked in and said something in Turkish, in reply to which she could only shake her head and shrug. He said something to the other men behind him and came in, heaving his heavy pack up onto the rack and unslinging the rifle he was carrying. Four others joined him, jostling, laughing, staring at her, treading on one another’s feet.

She kept her own feet out of the way and made herself as small as possible. The soldiers’ dæmons were all dogs, fierce ones, shoving each other and snarling—and then one of them stopped and stared at her with sudden interest, and threw her head back and howled with fear.

Every other sound stopped. The dæmon’s soldier bent to stroke her in reassurance, but the others had all registered what had caused the howling and began to howl too.

A soldier snapped at Lyra, asking a question, fierce and hostile. Then a sergeant appeared at the door, evidently demanding to know what was happening, at which the soldier with the first howling dæmon pointed at Lyra and said something with an air of superstitious hatred.

The sergeant barked a question at her, but he too was frightened.

In answer she said,
“J’aime le son du Cor, le soir, au fond des bois.”

It was the first thing that came to mind: a line of French poetry. The men stood perfectly still, waiting for a cue, waiting for the sergeant to indicate what the proper response should be, and all, by the look of them, full of dread.

Lyra spoke again:
“Dieu! Que le son du Cor est triste, au fond des bois.”

“Française?”
said the sergeant hoarsely.

The eyes of every man and dæmon were on her. She nodded, then held up her hands as if to say “I surrender! Don’t shoot!”

There must have been something in the contrast between their big male healthy power, the weapons they carried, the snarling teeth of their dæmons, and this dæmonless, dowdy, timid girl with the dull clothes and the glasses, something comic; because first the sergeant smiled, and then began to laugh; and then the others, responding, saw the contrast too and joined in the laughter; and Lyra smiled and shrugged, and moved up a little more to make room. The sergeant said again,
“Française,”
and added,
“Voilà.”

The only soldier apparently willing to sit next to her was a heavily built, dark-skinned, big-eyed man with an air of being able to enjoy things. He said something to her in a friendly enough tone, and she replied with more French poetry:

“La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding confidently.

Then the sergeant spoke to them all, giving orders, looking at her a couple of times, as if the orders included instructions about how to behave towards her. With a final look at her and a nod, he left and went to push his way through the other soldiers still crowding onto the train.

It took several minutes to get them all on board, and Lyra wondered how many of them there were, and where the officer in charge was. She soon found that out, because, obviously prompted by the sergeant, a tall young man in a smarter uniform than the rest looked in at the compartment door and spoke to her.

“You are French, mademoiselle?” he said in careful and strongly accented French.

“Yes,” she said in the same language.

“Where are you traveling to?”

“Seleukeia, monsieur.”

“Why you have not…” He clearly didn’t know the French word, and indicated his own hawk dæmon, who was clutching his epaulette and staring with yellow eyes.

“He disappeared,” she said. “I am looking for him.”

“It is not possible.”

“But it is. It happened. You can see.”

“You are going to look in Seleukeia?”

“Everywhere. I will search everywhere.”

He gave a baffled nod. He seemed to want to know more, or to forbid something, or require something, but not to know what. He looked around at the soldiers in the compartment, and then withdrew. More men were passing along the corridor; doors were slamming; a voice called on the platform, and a guard blew a whistle.

The train began to move.

Once they were out of the station, and leaving the lights of the town for the darkness of the mountains again, the soldier nearest the door leant out and looked both ways along the corridor.

Evidently satisfied, he nodded to the man opposite, who produced a bottle from his pack and pulled out the cork. Lyra smelled a tang of powerful spirits, and remembered another occasion when she’d had the same sensation: outside Einarsson’s bar in the Arctic town of Trollesund, seeing the great bear Iorek Byrnison drinking spirits from an earthenware jug. If only she had his company on this journey! Or the company of Farder Coram, who’d been with her then.

The bottle was being passed around. When it reached the man next to her, he took a deep pull and then breathed out loudly, filling the air with fumes. The man opposite waved them away in mock disgust before taking the bottle himself. Then he hesitated, looked at Lyra with a knowing smile, and offered it to her.

She smiled back briefly and shook her head. The soldier said something and offered it again, more forcefully, as if daring her to refuse.

Another man spoke to him, apparently criticizing. The soldier took a pull at the spirits and said something hard and unfriendly to Lyra before passing the bottle on. She tried to become invisible but made sure her stick was just inside the rucksack.

The bottle went around the compartment again; the talk became louder and looser. They were talking about her, there was no doubt about that: their eyes moved over her body, one man was licking his lips, another clasping the crotch of his trousers.

Lyra gathered the rucksack to herself with her left arm and began to stand up, intending to leave, only for the man opposite to push her back into the seat and say something to the man by the door, who reached up and pulled down the blind over the corridor window. Lyra stood up again, and again the soldier pushed her back, this time squeezing her breast as he did. She felt a flood of dread invading her bloodstream.

Well, she thought, here it comes.

She stood up a third time, her right hand grasping the handle of her stick Pequeno, and when the soldier’s hand came forward, she whipped the stick out of the rucksack and smashed it down so hard that she heard the crack of bone a moment before he yelled in pain. His dæmon leapt up at her, and she lashed the stick across her dog face, sending her howling to the floor. The man was cradling his broken hand, white-faced, unable to speak or utter a sound except a high tremulous whimper.

She felt another man’s hands on her waist and gripped the stick tight and swung it backwards, luckily hitting him on the temple with the end of the handle. He shouted and tried to grab her arm, so she twisted round and sank her teeth into his hand, feeling a flame of pure ferocity blaze up in her heart. She drew blood: she bit deeper—a length of skin came away in her teeth, and his hand fell off her arm. His face loomed close, insensate with fury: she stabbed the stick up into the soft flesh under his jaw, and as he reared up and away from that, she lashed it harder than she’d hit anything else in her life across his nose and mouth. He grunted and fell back, gushing blood, and then his dæmon too was leaping for Lyra’s throat. She brought up her knee as hard as she could, knocking the dæmon aside, and then felt other hands—two men’s hands—on her wrist, up inside her skirt, fumbling at her underwear, gripping it, tearing it aside, and thrusting fingers at her, and other hands on the stick, twisting it, tearing it out of her fingers, and then with feet, teeth, forehead, knees, she fought as she had seen Iorek Byrnison fight, reckless, heedless of pain, fearless, but she was outnumbered; even in the crowded little compartment they had more room, more strength, just more hands and feet than she did; and they had dæmons, who were now growling, roaring, barking with fury, teeth bared, spittle flying, and still she fought and struggled—and it was the noise from the dæmons that saved her, because suddenly the door was flung open and there was the sergeant, who took it all in at once and said a word to his dæmon, a massive brute, who tore at the soldiers’ dæmons, teeth in their necks, flinging them aside as if they weighed nothing, and the men fell back on the seats, bloodied and broken-boned, and Lyra was still standing, her skirt torn, her fingers blood-soaked and wrenched, her face cut and scratched, blood trickling down her legs, her eyes aflood with tears, trembling in every muscle, sobbing, but standing, still standing, facing them all.

She pointed to the man who had her stick. She had to support her right hand with her left wrist to do it.

“Give it to me,” she said. “Give it back to me.”

Her voice was thick with tears and shaking so much, she could hardly articulate the words. The man tried to shove the stick down beside him on the seat. With the last of her strength she flung herself at him and tore at his face, his hands, with nails and teeth and fury, but found herself lifted away effortlessly and held up in the air by the sergeant’s left arm.

He snapped the fingers of his right hand at the soldier, whose eyes and nose were now bleeding thickly. The man handed up the stick. The sergeant put it in his pocket and then barked an order. Another soldier picked up Lyra’s rucksack and handed it to him.

Another harsh sentence or two, and he carried the struggling Lyra out into the corridor and put her down. He jerked his head, indicating that she should follow him, although she could barely stand; and then he shoved his way forcefully through the men who had come out into the corridor to see what was going on. Lyra had to go with him: he had the rucksack and the stick. Shaking so violently she almost lost her balance, feeling the blood trickling past her mouth and the wetness on her legs, she did her best to follow.

Every soldier’s eyes were staring, taking in every detail, greedy to know more. She stumbled through the midst of them, trying to hold herself steady, simply that; once the train lurched over a poor section of track, and she almost fell, but a hand came out to hold her upright; she pulled her arm away and moved on.

The sergeant was waiting outside the last compartment in the next carriage. Standing in the doorway was the officer—major, captain, whatever he was; and as she reached him, the sergeant handed her the rucksack, which had never seemed so heavy.

“Thank you,” she managed to say in French. “And my stick.”

The officer asked the sergeant something. The sergeant took the stick out of his pocket and gave it to the officer, who looked at it curiously. The sergeant was explaining what had happened.

“My stick,” Lyra said, steadying her voice as much as she could. “Are you going to leave me entirely defenseless? Let me have it back.”

“You have already put three of my men out of action, I am told.”

“Am I supposed to let myself be raped? I’d kill them all first.”

She had never felt so ferocious and so weak. She was really on the point of falling to the floor, and at the same time, she was ready to tear out his throat to get her stick back.

The sergeant said something. The officer replied, and nodded, and reluctantly handed Lyra back the stick. She tried to open her rucksack, and failed, and tried again, and failed, and began to cry, to her immense anger. The officer stood aside and indicated the seat behind him. The compartment was empty apart from his valise, a multitude of papers spread out on the opposite seat, and a half-finished meal of bread and cold meat.

Lyra sat down and tried a third time to open her rucksack. This time she managed, though it made her realize how damaged her fingers were: torn nails, swollen joints, a wrenched thumb. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her left hand, took several deep breaths, gritted her teeth—at which point she found one of them broken, and explored it with her tongue. Half of it was missing. Too bad, she thought. She gathered her resolution and worked at the rucksack buckles with her painful fingers. Her left hand was so sore and weak and swollen, she touched the back of it tenderly, and thought she felt a broken bone. Finally she got the rucksack open and found the alethiometer, the pack of cards, and her little purse of money. She slipped the stick down inside and buckled it again, and then leant back and closed her eyes.

Every part of her seemed to hurt. She could still feel those hands tearing at her underclothes, and wanted to wash more than anything else in the world.

Oh, Pan, she thought. Are you satisfied now?