16

Lignum Vitae

Lyra woke up in the early evening, feeling heavy-headed and anxious and not in the least refreshed. After eating a meal of mussels and mashed potato with Ma Costa, and telling her about life at school and college, she did as Farder Coram had suggested and went to see him again. She found him bright-eyed in the lamplight and eager to talk, as if he had a secret to tell her, but he asked her to put another log in the little iron stove and pour them both a glass of jenniver before he’d say anything about it.

She sat in the other armchair and took a sip of the clear cold spirit.

‘Well now,’ he said, ‘it was something you said, or it might have been something I said, or it might have been neither of those, but it set me thinking about this journey of yours. And witches.’

‘Yes!’ she said. ‘I wonder if we’re thinking the same thing? If people think I’m a witch, then they won’t—’

‘Exactly! If a witch came this far south, like my Serafina did—’

‘And she lost her cloud-pine, or it was stolen, or something—’

‘Thassit. She’d have to stay earth-bound till she found her way back north. We are thinking the same thing, gal. But it en’t going to be easy. People might accept that you’re a witch, and that’d account for Pan being missing, but don’t forget they fear witches, and they hate them sometimes.’

‘I’ll have to be careful then. But I can be careful.’

‘You’ll have to be lucky too. But you know, Lyra, maybe this could work. Except … well, that scheme might work with ordinary people. But suppose you met a real witch?’

‘Whatever would a witch be doing in Central Asia?’

‘Them regions where you’re going, in Central Asia, they en’t unfamiliar with witches. They travel a long way sometimes, for trade, for learning, for diplomacy. You’ll have to work out all you’re going to say. And specially what you’ll say if you meet a real witch.’

‘I’ll be very young. Only just separated from my dæmon at that place in Siberia …’

‘Tungusk.’

‘That’s it. And I’m still learning a lot of witch ways. I don’t look like a witch, that’s one problem.’

‘I don’t know about that. How many witches did you see when we were in the north?’

‘Hundreds.’

‘Yes, but all from Serafina’s clan, or related ones. They look similar, naturally. But they don’t all look the same. There’s fair-haired witches with Scandinavian-looking eyes and ones with black hair and different-shaped eyes. I think you could easy pass for a witch, if it was just a matter of looks.’

‘And Ma Costa did say once that I had witch-oil in my soul.’

‘There you are then!’ He was becoming enthusiastic about the idea, crazy as it was.

‘But then there’s language,’ she said. ‘I don’t speak any of their languages.’

‘Cross that bridge later. Fetch me that atlas off the bookshelf.’

The atlas was old and much-used, and the pages were held together by the very last of the stitching. Farder Coram opened it on his lap and turned at once to the pages showing the far north.

‘Here,’ he said, his finger on one of the maps of the Arctic Ocean.

‘What’s that?’ she said, and came round to look over his shoulder.

‘Novy Kievsk. This is where you can come from. It’s that little island, and there is a witch-clan there, and it’s fiercer and prouder for being so small. You invent a story to explain how something’s sent you all the way south on some high purpose. When you were a little gal you could’ve spun out a yarn like that for hours on end, and had everyone around listening and half believing every word.’

‘Yes, I could,’ she said, and for a moment all the exhilaration of telling a story like that returned to her heart, and the old man saw the light in her eyes as she remembered it; ‘but I’ve lost it,’ she went on. ‘I can’t do that any more. That was just fancy. I was spinning those tales out of the air, nothing more than that, there was nothing solid in them. Maybe Pan was right, and I haven’t got a real imagination. I was bullshitting.’

‘You were what?’

‘That’s a word Mr Scoresby taught me. He told me there were truth-tellers, and they needed to know what the truth was so as to tell it. And there were liars, and they needed to know what the truth was so they could change it or avoid it. And there were bullshitters, who didn’t care about the truth at all. They weren’t interested. What they spoke wasn’t the truth and it wasn’t lies, it was bullshit. All they were interested in was their own performance. I remember him telling me that, but I didn’t realise it applied to me till much later, after the world of the dead. The story I told there for the ghosts of the kids wasn’t bullshit, that was truth. That’s why the harpies listened … But with all those other stories I told, I was bullshitting. I can’t do it any more.’

‘Well, I’m blowed. Bullshitting!’ He laughed gently. ‘But listen, gal, bullshit or not, you’re going to need to keep in touch with Hannah Relf and young Malcolm. Are you going to let ’em know before you set off?’

‘Yes. When I left here earlier I got a letter …’

She told him about Malcolm’s letter, and what she’d said in reply.

‘He says he’s off to Central Asia?’ he said. ‘There’s only one reason for that. Oakley Street’ll have sent him. No doubt there’s good cause, but … Still, he’ll find ways of getting in touch. And I’ll tell you something else: there’s Oakley Street agents and friends in places you might not suspect, and he’ll have let ’em know your predicament, and they’ll be keeping an eye out for you.’

‘How would I know who they are?’

‘Leave it to young Malcolm. He’ll find ways of doing that.’

Lyra fell silent, and tried to imagine this journey of several thousand miles, alone, truly alone, and conspicuous too, if her witch-disguise was penetrated.

Farder Coram was leaning over the side of his chair and rummaging in the bottom drawer of a little cabinet beside him. With an effort he heaved himself up again.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I ever ordered you to do anything before. I never thought I’d dare. Now you do as I tell you, and don’t argue. Take this.’ He held out a little leather bag closed with a drawstring.

She hesitated.

He snapped, ‘Take it. Don’t argue,’ and his eyes darkened.

For the first time in her life she felt afraid of him. She took the little bag, and felt by the weight of it that the coins in there must be gold.

‘Is this—’

‘Listen to me. I’m telling you what to do. If you won’t listen to Farder Coram, you can listen to a senior officer in Oakley Street. I’m giving you this because I got a high regard for you, and for Hannah Relf, and for young Malcolm. Now open it up.’

She did, and poured the coins into her hand. They were all kinds of currency from a dozen or more countries and every kind of shape: mostly round, to be sure, but also square with rounded corners, and octagonal, and seven- or eleven-sided; and some had holes in the middle, and some were worn smooth, and others were clipped or bent; but every single one was heavy and lustrous and gleaming with the purity of gold.

‘But I can’t—’

‘Hush. Hold ’em out.’

She did, and he turned them over with a trembling finger and picked out four, which he put in his waistcoat pocket.

‘That’ll do me. I don’t need any more’n that, no matter what happens. The rest is for you. Keep it tight about yourself, but not all in the same pocket. Another thing: if you remember the witches you’ve seen, you’ll recall the little coronet of flowers they wear. Little tiny Arctic flowers. You remember that?’

‘Some of them did. Not all. Serafina did.’

‘The queens always do. Sometimes other witches do as well. It wouldn’t do no harm to make yourself a little coronet, something simple, a piece of cotton braid even. It’d give you an air. Never mind how little it cost. Witches are poor, but they bear theirselves like queens and great ladies. I don’t mean conceit and swagger, that’s the last thing I mean, but there’s a majesty, a kind of pride and awareness, a sense of magnificence. I’m not finding the right words. It can exist in the same place as modesty, strange as it seems. They’re modest in their clothing, and they have the bearing of panthers. You could do that. You do it already, only you don’t know it.’

Lyra asked him to tell her more about Oakley Street, and he told her some things that might be useful, such as a catechism by which she could tell whether or not someone was trustworthy; and she asked about the witches – little details of their life, ways of behaving, habits, as much as she could think of. She felt contented, because she’d made a decision. She was in charge again.

‘Farder Coram, I don’t know what to say, except thank you.’

‘We en’t finished yet. See that locker up there over the bookshelf? Go and look in there.’

She did as he said, and found a mass of notebooks, a roll of something heavy in a soft leather covering, an elaborate leather belt, together with some other bits and pieces she could only examine if she took them out.

‘What am I looking for?’

‘A short heavy stick. It’d be nearly black by now. It en’t round – it’s got seven sides.’

Her hands found it under the notebooks and brought it out. It was almost black, and surprisingly heavy – so heavy it might be made of brass; but the warmth and the very slight oiliness of the surface showed that it was clearly wood.

‘What’s this?’

‘It’s a fighting stick. It’s called Pequeno.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means Little One, more or less. Little Stick.’

It tapered slightly inwards towards the handle, which was bound tightly with some sort of hard cord. At its thickest it was about as thick as three of her fingers together, and the handle was only a little thicker than her thumb. In length it was about the distance between the inside of her elbow and the palm of her hand.

She held it, testing the weight, swinging it lightly to and fro. The balance made it feel almost like part of her.

‘What’s this wood?’ she said.

‘It’s lignum vitae. The hardest wood in the world.’

‘Has it got lead or something inside it?’

‘No, that’s the weight of the wood itself. I got that – where’d I get that? – in High Brazil. A slaver attacked me with it. Trouble is, he wasn’t fast enough. His dæmon was an old monkey, and she’d got fat. We took the stick away from him, and I used it ever since.’

Lyra imagined the weight of it swung by a strong arm: it would be quite enough to smash a skull.

‘Pequeno?’ she said. ‘All right. Pequeno it is.’ Having a name made it feel more alive to her. She weighed it in her two hands. ‘Well, thank you, Farder Coram,’ she said. ‘I’ll take it, though it frightens me. I didn’t think I might need to fight. I’ve never sort of prepared for it.’

‘No, it didn’t look like being necessary, once you come home from that other world.’

‘I thought all the danger was over … Everything, the good as well as the bad, it was all over. There was nothing left but learning and … Well, just that really.’

She looked down. He was watching her tenderly. ‘That young boy,’ he said.

‘Will.’

‘I remember Serafina saying to me, last words we ever had, she said that boy has more power of vanishing than a witch, and he don’t know it. Imitate him, Lyra, when you can. Be aware all round. Be aware of boys and men. Older men in particular. There’s a time to show your own power, and a time to seem so insignificant they don’t even notice you, and if they do they forget you in a moment. That’s how Will done it, and that’s why Serafina was so impressed.’

‘Yes. I’ll remember that. Thank you, Farder Coram.’

‘You en’t never left Will really, have you?’

‘I think about him every day. Probably every hour. He’s still the centre of my life.’

‘We could see that, John and me. We could see that then. There was a question come up, as should we let you sleep beside him as you did? You both being what was it, only twelve, thirteen … We talked about that and it troubled us.’

‘But you didn’t try and separate us.’

‘No.’

‘And we never … It never seemed to be … All we ever did was kiss. Again and again as if we’d never stop. As if we’d never have to stop. And that was enough. If we’d been older, I don’t know, then it wouldn’t have been enough. But for us then it was.’

‘I think we knew that, so we said nothing.’

‘That was the best thing you could have done.’

‘But you got to let him go sometime, Lyra.’

‘D’you think so?’

‘Yes, I do. Serafina taught me that.’

They sat in silence for a while. Lyra thought: If I haven’t got Pan, and if I must give up Will too … But it wasn’t really Will, she knew – it was a memory. All the same, she thought, it was the best thing she had. Could she really ever let it go?

She felt the boat rock slightly, and recognised Rosella’s step. A moment later the door opened and the girl came in.

‘It’s time for your hot drink, Farder Coram,’ she said.

The old man was looking tired. Lyra got up and kissed him goodnight. ‘Rosella,’ she said, ‘do you know how to stew eels?’

‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘It was the first thing my mum showed me when I was little.’

‘What’s the secret of good stewed eels?’

‘The secret … Well, I dunno if I should tell you.’

‘Go on, child,’ said Farder Coram. ‘You tell her.’

‘Well, what my mum does, and my gran does it too, is … You know the flour you use for thickening the gravy?’

‘Yes,’ said Lyra.

‘Well, you toast it a bit first. In a dry pan. Just to give it a bit of colour. Not much. My mum says it makes all the difference.’

‘Best stewed eels you’ll ever taste,’ said the old man.

‘Thanks,’ said Lyra. ‘That must be it. I’ll be off now, Farder Coram. Thank you for everything. I’ll come again tomorrow.’

Darkness had fallen, and all around her the windows of the gyptian boats were lit, and wood-smoke drifted from their chimneys. Lyra passed a group of gyptian boys smoking outside a liquor-shop, her age or thereabouts, and they all fell silent as she approached and stared as she passed by. When she’d gone past one of them spoke, and the others sniggered. She ignored it, but she was very conscious of the stick, and imagined how it would feel in her hand if she ever did wield it in anger.

It was too early for bed, and she still felt restless; so she went to pay a last call on Giorgio Brabandt before he left. There was a slight rain falling as she trod the muddy path to the Maid of Portugal’s mooring.

She found Brabandt working by lantern-light to clear the weed-trap, hauling up strands of dripping weed and cutting them clear of the propeller. Someone was bustling about inside: the lamp was alight in the galley, and she could hear the chink of crockery.

He looked up as she arrived. ‘How do, gal,’ he said. ‘Want to clear some weeds?’

‘It looks too difficult for me,’ she said. ‘I’d rather watch you and make notes.’

‘Well, that’s not on offer. Get in the galley and say hello to Betty and bring me a cup of tea.’

‘Who’s Betty?’ she began to ask, but his head was already down by the trap, his right arm working busily under the water.

Lyra stepped down into the cockpit and opened the door. The steam, the warmth, and the aroma told her that Betty (and Lyra had already guessed that she was Giorgio’s latest inamorata-cum-cook) was boiling some potatoes to go with the casserole that stood next to the stove.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m Lyra, and you must be Betty.’

Betty was plump and fortyish, and at the moment she was pink in the face and her blonde hair was a little dishevelled. She smiled immediately and held out a warm hand, which Lyra shook with pleasure.

‘Giorgio told me all about you,’ Betty said.

‘Then I bet he told you I couldn’t stew eels to save my life. What’s the secret?’

‘Oh, there en’t no secret. But did you put an apple in?’

‘I never thought of doing that.’

‘A cooking apple. It cuts the fat a little bit. It boils down so you don’t know it’s there but it makes the gravy all silky and just a little bit tart.’

‘Well, I’ll remember that. Thank you.’

‘Where’s my tea?’ Giorgio called.

‘Oh Lord,’ said Betty.

‘I’ll take it out to him,’ said Lyra.

Betty put three teaspoons of sugar in a big mug of tea, and Lyra carried it out to the cockpit. Giorgio was fitting the cover back on the trap.

‘So what you been doing with yourself?’ he said.

‘Learning things. Betty’s just taught me how to stew eels properly.’

‘High time you knew.’

‘Ma Costa says only a real gyptian can stew eels. But I think there’s more to it than that.’

‘Course there is. They got to be moon-caught eels, did she tell you that?’

‘Moon-caught?’

‘Caught at the full moon. What else could it mean? They’re the best. Nothing compares to moon-caught eels.’

‘Well, you never told me that before. That’s something else I’ve learned. And the secret commonwealth – you taught me about that too.’

His expression became serious, and he looked up and down the path. He lowered his voice and said, ‘Judgement, gal. There’s things you can talk about and things you better hold your tongue on. Eels is one of the first, and the secret commonwealth is one of the other.’

‘I think I realised that.’

‘Well, take it to heart. Out there on land you’ll meet all kinds of different opinions. Some people will hear talk about the secret commonwealth and take it literally, and think you do too, and that you’re stupid. Others just scoff, as if they already know it’s a lot of moonshine. Both stupid. Keep away from the literal-minded folk, and ignore the scoffers.’

‘What’s the best way of thinking about the secret commonwealth then, Master Brabandt?’

‘You gotta think about it the same way as if you want to see it. You got to look at it sideways. Out the corner of your eye. So you gotta think about it out the corner of your mind. It’s there and it en’t, both at the same time. If you want to see them jacky lanterns, the absolute worst way is to go out on the marsh with a searchlight. You take a bloody great light, and all the will o’ the wykeses and the little sparkers, they’d stay right under water. And if you want to think about them it don’t do no good making lists and classifying and analysing. You’ll just get a lot o’ dead rubbish what means nothing. The way to think about the secret commonwealth is with stories. Only stories’ll do.’

He blew on his tea to cool it.

‘So thassit,’ he said. ‘And what you learning all these things for, anyway?’

‘Did I tell you about Karamakan?’

‘I never heard that name before. What’s that?’

‘It’s a desert in Central Asia. The thing is … Well, dæmons can’t go into it.’

‘Why would anyone want to go where their dæmon can’t?’

‘To find out what’s inside. They grow roses there.’

‘What, in the desert?’

‘There must be somewhere hidden where the roses grow. Special roses.’

‘Ah, well, they would be.’ He sipped his tea with a loud slurp and pulled out a blackened old smoke-pipe.

‘Master B, is the secret commonwealth only in Brytain, or all over the world?’

‘Oh, it’s all over the world, naturally. But I spect there’s other names for it in other places. Like in Holland, they got a different name for the jacky lanterns. They call ’em dwaallichts, and in France they call ’em feux follets.’

Lyra thought about it. ‘When I was young,’ she said, ‘when I went to the north with the gyptian families, I remember Tony Costa telling me about the phantoms they had in the northern forests, the Breathless Ones, and the Windsuckers … I suppose they must be part of the secret commonwealth of the north.’

‘Stands to reason.’

‘And later in another place I saw Spectres … They were different again. And that was even in a different world altogether. So maybe there’s a secret commonwealth everywhere.’

‘Wouldn’t surprise me a bit,’ he said.

They sat there quietly for a minute or two, the gyptian packing his pipe with smokeleaf, Lyra helping herself to a sip of his tea.

‘Where you going next, Master B?’ she said.

‘Up north. Nice peaceful work, hauling stone and bricks and cement for that railroad bridge as is going to put us all out of business.’

‘What’ll you do then?’

‘Come back here and catch eels. Time I settled down. I’m past me first youth, ye see.’

‘Oh. I hadn’t realised.’

‘No, I know it dun’t show.’

She laughed.

‘What you laughing for?’ he said.

‘You take after your grandson.’

‘Yes, I learned a lot from young Dick. Or was it the other way round? I can’t remember. Did he treat you proper?’

‘He treated me very proper.’

‘Thass all right then. Cheerio, Lyra. Good luck.’

They shook hands, and she looked in and said goodnight to Betty, and then she left.

Ma Costa was already asleep in the forward cabin of the Persian Queen, so Lyra moved carefully as she boarded the boat, treading lightly and making no noise as she prepared for bed.

And once she was tucked up warmly in her bunk, with the little naphtha lamp glowing on the bedside shelf, she found herself wide awake. She thought about writing to Malcolm again; she thought about writing to Hannah; and she thought about something that had never occurred to her before – why she so enjoyed the company of old men like Giorgio Brabandt and Farder Coram.

That caught her attention. She began to think it through. She liked them a lot, and she’d liked the old Master of Jordan, Dr Carne, and she liked Mr Cawson the Steward. And Sebastian Makepeace the alchemist. She liked them much more than most young men. It wasn’t because they were too old to be interested in her sexually, and didn’t make her feel threatened: Mr Cawson was known to be a ladies’ man, and Giorgio Brabandt had been frank about his own girlfriends, though he’d said she didn’t have enough mileage on her to qualify as one herself.

It was something in that region of feelings. Then she had it: she liked being in their company not because they might be attracted to her, but because there was no danger of her being attracted to them. She didn’t want to be unfaithful to the memory of Will.

What about Dick Orchard, though? Why didn’t her brief romantic liaison with him count as being unfaithful? Probably because neither of them had once used the word ‘love’. He was frank about what he wanted, and he knew enough to make sure she enjoyed it as much as he did. And he liked her, and made that clear. And she liked the touch of his lips on her skin. There’d been nothing of the all-consuming, all-pervading intensity and ardent passion she and Will had felt together, each for the first time; she and Dick were simply two healthy young people under the spell of a golden summer, and that was quite enough to be.

That dream, though: the one in which she was playing with Will’s dæmon on the moonlit grass, stroking her, whispering together, in thrall to each other. The memory of it was still enough to make her body throb and melt and yearn for something impossible, unnameable, unreachable. Something like Will, or like the red building in the desert. Deliberately she let herself drift on a slow current of longing, but it didn’t last; she couldn’t bring it back; she lay awake with all the longing frustrated, the memory of that love-dream fading, no nearer sleep than ever.

Finally, tired and exasperated, she took out her copy of Simon Talbot’s The Constant Deceiver.

The chapter she was reading began:

On the non-existence of dæmons

Dæmons don’t exist.

We might think they do; we might talk to them and hold them close and whisper our secrets to them; we might make judgements about other people whose dæmons we think we see, based on the form they seem to have and the attractiveness or repulsiveness they embody; but they don’t exist.

In few other areas of life does the human race display so great a capacity for self-deception. From our earliest childhoods we are encouraged to pretend that there exists an entity outside our bodies which is nevertheless part of ourselves. These wispy playmates are the finest device our minds have yet developed to instantiate the insubstantial. Every social pressure confirms us in our belief in them: habits and customs grow like stalagmites to fix the soft fur, the big brown eyes, the merry tricks in a behavioural cavern of stone.

And all the multitudinous forms this delusion takes are nothing more than random mutations of cells in the brain …

Lyra found herself reading on, though she wanted to deny every word. Talbot had an explanation for everything. The fact that children’s dæmons appeared to change form, for example, was no more than a representation of the greater malleability of the infant and juvenile mind. That they were usually, but not always, opposite in sex to their person was merely an unconscious projection of the sense of incompleteness felt by the human subject: yearning for its opposite, the mind embodied the complementary gender role in a sexually non-threatening creature, which could fulfil the part without evoking sexual desire or jealousy. The dæmon’s inability to move far from the person was simply a psychological expression of a sense of unity and wholeness. And so on.

Lyra yearned to tell Pan about this, and discuss the extraordinary sight of a clever mind attempting almost successfully to deny an obvious reality; but it was too late for that. She put the book down and tried to think like Talbot. His method consisted mainly of saying ‘X is [no more than, nothing but, only, merely, just, simply, etc.] Y’; and it was easy therefore to construct sentences such as ‘What we call reality is nothing but a gathering of flimsy similarities held together by habit.’

And that didn’t help at all, though no doubt Talbot’s explanation would have come with a multitude of examples and citations and arguments, each one perfectly reasonable and seemingly impossible to deny, by the end of which the reader would be a step nearer accepting his main argument, the preposterous idea that dæmons did not exist.

She felt unbalanced by his words, in a way that felt like reading the alethiometer with the new method. Things that had been steady were now unfixed; the very ground was shaky; she trembled on the edge of vertigo.

She put The Constant Deceiver down and thought about the other book that had made Pan angry, Gottfried Brande’s novel The Hyperchorasmians. For the first time she realised that the two writers had more in common than she’d thought. The famous sentence that ended The Hyperchorasmians – ‘It was nothing more than what it was’ – was constructed exactly like a sentence of Talbot’s. Why hadn’t she seen that before? And then she remembered that Pan had tried to tell her.

She wanted to talk about it. She took a sheet of paper and started to write to Malcolm. But she must have been tired: her summary of Talbot’s arguments seemed both heavy-handed and thin, her description of The Hyperchorasmians confused and confusing; she couldn’t summon any confidence or ease, and her sentences lay inert on the page. She felt defeated even before she’d finished a single paragraph.

She thought: if there were such things as Spectres, this is what it would feel like to be in a Spectre’s power. The Spectres she was thinking of were those dreadful parasites that fed on the inhabitants of Cittàgazze. Now she was an adult, and Pan’s form was fixed, she would be as vulnerable to the Spectres as the adults of that world had been. Simon Talbot could never have been to Cittàgazze, so Spectres made no appearance in The Constant Deceiver. No doubt he’d have a fluent and persuasive argument for denying their existence as well.

She put her pen away and tore up the page. The question was, she thought, was the universe alive or dead?

From somewhere far off on the marshes came the cry of an owl.

Lyra found herself thinking, ‘What does that mean?’ and simultaneously thought of Talbot’s inevitable reply: ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’ Some years before, in Oxford, she’d had an encounter with the dæmon of a witch, in a little adventure that had culminated in her thinking that everything meant something, if only she could read it. The universe had seemed alive then. There were messages to be read everywhere you looked. Something like the cry of an owl out on the marshes would have been blazing with significance.

Had she just been wrong then, to feel that? Or immature, naïve, sentimental? Simon Talbot would have said both, but charmingly, delicately, wittily. Devastatingly.

She had no answer. A tiny spark of consciousness in the oceanic night, and with her dæmon merely a projection of her unconscious mind, having no real existence at all, wherever he might be now, Lyra felt as unhappy and alone as she had ever done in her life.

‘But where is she?’

Marcel Delamare asked the question with enormous and unconcealed patience. The lamplight, glaring from over his shoulder full in the face of Olivier Bonneville, disclosed a hint of clamminess, of pallor, of physical unease in the young man. Delamare was glad to see it: he meant to make Bonneville even more uneasy before the interview was over.

‘I can’t pinpoint her,’ Bonneville snapped. ‘The alethiometer doesn’t work like that. I know she’s travelling, and I know she’s going east. More than that, no one could tell.’

‘Why not?’ Very patiently indeed.

‘Because the old method, which is the one you want me to use, Monsieur Delamare, is static. It’s based on a set of relationships which may be very complex, but are fixed.’ He stopped and stood up.

‘Where are you going?’ said Delamare.

‘I’m damned if I’m going to be interrogated with that light in my eyes. I’ll sit over here.’ He slouched to the sofa next to the fireplace. ‘If you’d let me use the new method I could find her in no time,’ he went on, putting his feet up on the tapestry-covered stool. ‘That’s dynamic. It allows for movement. It makes all the difference.’

‘Take your feet off that stool. Turn to face me so I can see whether or not you’re lying.’

In response Bonneville lay back along the sofa, his head on one arm, his feet on the other. He stared at Delamare briefly, and then put his head back and gazed at the ceiling, nibbling at a fingernail.

‘You don’t look well,’ said the Secretary General. ‘You look as if you’ve got a hangover. Have you been drinking to excess?’

‘Kind of you to ask,’ said Bonneville.

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

Delamare took a deep breath and sighed. ‘The point is this,’ he said. ‘You are doing very little work. The last report you filed was nearly empty of useful content. Our arrangement will come to an end this Friday, unless by then you’ve made a real and relevant discovery.’

‘What d’you mean, our arrangement? What arrangement?’

‘The arrangement by which you are using the alethiometer. The privilege can easily be—’

‘You want to take it away? A lot of good that’ll do you. There’s no one half as quick as me, even with the old method. If you—’

‘It’s no longer simply a question of speed. I don’t trust you, Bonneville. For a while you seemed to promise an advantage. Now, because of your self-indulgent posturing, that advantage has disappeared. The Belacqua girl has eluded us, and you seem to have no—’

‘All right then,’ Bonneville said, and stood up. He looked paler than ever. ‘Have it your own way. Take the alethiometer. Send someone round in the morning to collect it. You’ll regret it. You’ll say sorry, you’ll beg and plead, but I won’t lift a finger. I’ve had enough.’

He picked up a cushion from the sofa and seemed about to throw it, probably into the fire; but he just dropped it on the floor and sauntered out.

Delamare tapped his fingers on the desk. It hadn’t gone the way he’d planned, and he blamed himself. Once again Bonneville had outwitted or, to be more accurate, out-insolenced him. Unfortunately, the boy was quite right: none of the other alethiometrists was a patch on him for speed or accuracy, and none had mastered the new method. Even though Delamare mistrusted it, he had to admit that the new method had produced some startling results. He suspected that Bonneville was using it despite his prohibition.

Perhaps, the Secretary General thought, it had been a mistake to rely so closely on the alethiometer. The older methods of spying still worked, as they had done for centuries, and the Magisterium’s intelligence network was powerful and had a long reach, with agents throughout Europe and across Asia Minor, as well as further east. Perhaps it was time to awaken them. Events were soon going to move fast in the Levant; it would be a wise precaution to put every agent on the alert.

He called in his secretary and dictated several notes. Then he put on his overcoat and hat and went out.

Marcel Delamare’s private life was intensely discreet. It was known that he was not married and assumed that he was not homosexual, but that was all. He had few friends and no hobbies, didn’t collect ceramics or play bridge or attend the opera. A man of his age and state of health might normally be expected to have a mistress, or to visit a brothel occasionally, but no whispers of that sort ever attended his name. The fact was that journalists didn’t find him a very promising subject. He was a dull functionary working in an obscure department of the Magisterium, and that was all. The papers had long given up hope of gaining readers by writing about Monsieur Delamare.

So no one followed when he went out for an evening walk, or saw him ring the bell of a large house in a quiet suburb, or watched as he was admitted by a woman in the habit of a nun. The light that came on over the door just before she opened it was exceptionally dim.

The nun said, ‘Good evening, Monsieur Delamare. Madame is expecting you.’

‘How is she?’

‘Adjusting to the new medication, we hope, monsieur. The pain is a little better.’

‘Good,’ said Delamare, handing her his coat and hat. ‘I’ll go straight up.’

He climbed the carpeted staircase and knocked at a door in a softly lit passageway. A voice from inside told him to enter.

‘Maman,’ he said, and bent over the old woman in the bed.

She turned her cheek to receive the kiss. Her wrinkled lizard-dæmon drew back on the pillow, as if there were the slightest danger that Delamare might kiss him too. The room was close and hot, and smelled oppressively of lily-of-the-valley, pungently of embrocation, and faintly of physical decay. Madame Delamare was extremely thin, for reasons of fashion, and had once been handsome. Her sparse yellow hair was stiffly coiffed and she was immaculately made up, though a tiny amount of the scarlet lipstick had seeped into the tight lines that led away from her mouth, and no amount of cosmetics could conceal the savagery in her eyes.

Delamare sat on the chair next to the bed.

‘Well?’ his mother said.

‘Not yet.’

‘Well, where was she last seen? And when?’

‘In Oxford some days ago.’

‘You’ll have to do a great deal better than that, Marcel. You are too busy with this congress. When is it going to finish?’

‘When I’ve had my way,’ he said calmly. He was beyond being irritated by his mother, and a long way beyond being frightened of her. He knew it was safe to discuss the progress of his various projects with her, because no one trusted her enough to believe her if she spoke about them. Besides, her opinions were usefully merciless.

‘What were you discussing today?’ she said, flicking an imaginary speck of dust from the dove-grey silk of her nightgown.

‘The doctrine of embodiment. Where is the boundary between matter and spirit? What is the difference?’

She was too well bred to sneer, exactly; her lips remained pursed; but her eyes blazed with contempt.

‘I should have thought that was perfectly clear,’ she said. ‘If you and your colleagues need to indulge in that sort of adolescent speculation, you’ve wasted your time, Marcel.’

‘No doubt. If it’s clear to you, Maman, what is the difference?’

‘Matter is dead, of course. Only the spirit gives life. Without spirit, or soul, the universe would be a wasteland of emptiness and silence. But you know this as well as I do. Why are you asking about this? Are you tempted by what these roses seem to reveal?’

‘Tempted? No, I don’t think I’m tempted. But I do think we need to reckon with it.’

‘Reckon with it? What does that mean?’

She was most alive when she was animated by venom. Now she was sick and old he enjoyed provoking her, as one might tease a scorpion that was safely behind glass.

‘It means we have to consider what to do about it,’ he went on. ‘There are several things we could do. First, we could suppress all knowledge of it, by rigorous investigation, by ruthless force. That would work for a while, but knowledge is like water: it always finds gaps to leak through. There are too many people, too many journals, too many places of learning, who already know something about it.’

‘You should have suppressed it already.’

‘No doubt you’re right. The second possibility is to go to the root of the problem, and wipe it out. There is something unexplained in that desert in Central Asia. The roses will not grow anywhere else, and we don’t know why. Well, we could send a force to go there and destroy the place, whatever it is. The amount of rose oil that’s ever come this far is very small; supplies of it would dry up and cease altogether, and the problem would wither away. That solution would take longer and cost more than the first, but we could do it, and it would be final.’

‘I think that is the least you should do. Your sister would not hesitate.’

‘Many things would be much better if Marisa had lived. But there we are. There is a third option.’

‘And what is that?’

‘We could embrace the facts.’

‘What on earth does that mean? What facts?’

‘The roses exist; they show us something we’ve always denied, something that contradicts the deepest truths we know about the Authority and his creation; there is no doubt about that. So we could admit it boldly, contradict the teachings of millennia, proclaim a new truth.’

The old woman shuddered with revulsion. Her lizard-dæmon began to weep, uttering little croaks of terror and despair.

‘Marcel, you will withdraw those words at once,’ his mother snapped. ‘I do not want to have heard them. Take them back. I refuse to listen to this heresy.’

He watched and said nothing, enjoying her distress. She began to breathe in hoarse shallow gasps. She gestured with a fluttering hand, and the sleeve of her nightgown fell back to show her forearm punctured with needle-marks, the skin like tissue paper loose around the bone. Her eyes were glittering with malice.

‘Nurse,’ she whispered. ‘Call the nurse.’

‘The nurse can do nothing about heresy. Calm down. You’re not in your second childhood yet. In any case, I haven’t told you the fourth option.’

‘Well?’

‘Revealing the truth in the way I’ve described it would not work. There are too many habits, ways of thought, institutions, that are committed to the way things are and always have been. The truth would be swept away at once. Instead we should delicately and subtly undermine the idea that truth and facts are possible in the first place. Once the people have become doubtful about the truth of anything, all kinds of things will be open to us.’

‘“Delicately and subtly,”’ she mocked. ‘Marisa would know how to show some force. Some character. She was all the man you’ll never be.’

‘My sister is dead. Meanwhile, I am alive, and in a position to command the course of events. I’m telling you about what I’m going to do because you won’t live to see it.’

His mother began to snivel. ‘Why are you talking to me like this?’ she whined. ‘So cruel.’

‘I’ve wanted to be able to treat you like this all my life.’

‘Wallowing in childish resentment,’ she said shakily, mopping her eyes and nose with a lace handkerchief. ‘I have powerful friends, Marcel. Pierre Binaud came to see me only last week. Be careful how you behave.’

‘When I hear you now, I hear Binaud’s voice. You were sleeping with that old goat when I was a boy. The pair of you must make a fine spectacle these days.’

She whimpered and struggled to sit up a little higher. He didn’t offer to help. Her lizard-dæmon lay panting on the pillow.

‘I want a nurse,’ the old woman said. ‘I’m suffering. You’re making me so unhappy I can’t tell you. You only come here to torment me.’

‘I shan’t stay long. I’ll tell the nurse to give you a sleeping draught.’

‘Oh no – no – such fearful dreams!’

Her dæmon gave a little shriek and tried to nuzzle her breast, but she pushed him away. Delamare stood up and looked around.

‘You should really let some fresh air in here,’ he said.

‘Don’t be unpleasant.’

‘What are you going to do with the girl once I’ve got her for you?’

‘Wring the truth out of her. Punish her. Make her truly sorry. Then, when I’ve broken her will, I shall educate her properly. Give her a true sense of who she is and what her priorities should be. Mould her into the woman her mother should have lived to be.’

‘And Binaud? What part will he play in this educational enterprise?’

‘I’m getting tired, Marcel. You don’t realise how much I’m suffering.’

‘I want to know what Binaud plans to do with the girl.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with him.’

‘Of course it has. The man is corrupt. He reeks of furtive copulation.’

‘Pierre Binaud is a man. You wouldn’t know what that means. And he loves me.’

Delamare laughed. He didn’t do that very often. His mother hit the bed with both bony fists, making her dæmon escape to the bedside table.

‘So we’re going to see a deathbed wedding, are we?’ he said. ‘Then he can have your money as well as the girl. I’m afraid I shall be too busy to attend.’

He opened one of the windows wide, and the bitter night fell in.

‘No, Marcel! Please! Oh, don’t be vile to me! I shall die of cold!’

He bent over to kiss her goodbye. She turned her face away.

‘Goodbye, Maman,’ said Delamare. ‘Binaud had better not leave it too long.’

Olivier Bonneville hadn’t been telling the full truth, but that was nothing unusual. In fact, he hadn’t found Lyra because for some reason the new method wouldn’t let him. Somehow she’d managed to block his attempts to find her. One more reason for him to feel angry with her, and his anger was growing with his curiosity.

Suspicious by habit as well as inclination, he didn’t keep the alethiometer at his apartment; it would be the easiest thing in the world for a practised thief, especially one commissioned by La Maison Juste, to break into his little two-and-a-half rooms and steal anything he had. So he had taken to keeping the alethiometer in a private deposit box at the Banque Savoyarde, a place so discreet that it was almost invisible. The brass plate outside the door in the Rue de Berne said merely B. Sav. and was intentionally never polished.

Early next morning, Bonneville made his way to the bank and gave his name (false) and a password to the official, who opened the door to the private deposit boxes and left. Bonneville took out the alethiometer and slipped it into a pocket, and then put the fat roll of banknotes into another. The only item he left in the box was an unlabelled key which would open another deposit box in another bank.

Twenty minutes later he was buying a ticket at the Gare Nationale. Of course he took no notice of Delamare’s prohibition of the new method: of course he used it anyway. It was from his last session in the classic style, with the books, that he’d learned that Lyra was moving east, and was, as far as he could tell, alone. The new method was showing him nothing about her, and besides, like Lyra, he had found the disconcerting dizziness and nausea almost too much to bear; he thought it might be easier if he questioned the alethiometer for shorter times at longer intervals.

But there still remained the old method, after all, which involved no physical cost. As soon as his train reached Munich, he would take a room at a cheap hotel and begin a thorough search for Lyra. If he had all the books it would be quicker, no doubt, though by no means as quick as the new method; but he did have two of them – a holograph manuscript of Andreas Rentzinger’s Clavis Symbolorum, and the single remaining copy of Spiridion Trepka’s Alethiometrica Explicata, which had been until recently in the keeping of the Library of the Priory of St Jerome in Geneva. The latter book was without its handsome leather binding. That binding remained on the library shelf, now encasing the unreadable but identically sized memoirs of one of Napoleon’s generals, which Bonneville had bought at a second-hand bookstall. Eventually, perhaps quite soon, the theft of the books would be discovered, but by then, Bonneville trusted, he would have returned to Geneva in triumph.

Someone was shaking her.

‘Lyra! Lyra!’

It was Ma Costa’s voice, and she was leaning over the bunk in the light from the galley through the open door, and there was someone else beside her, and it was Farder Coram, and she heard him too: ‘Hurry, gal! Wake up!’

‘What is it? What’s happening?’

‘CCD,’ said Ma Costa. ‘They’ve broken the treaty, they’re coming into the Fens with a dozen boats or more, and—’

‘We got to get you away, Lyra,’ said Farder Coram. ‘Hurry up and get dressed. Quick as you can.’

She scrambled out of the bunk and Ma Costa stepped aside as Farder Coram went back into the galley.

‘What – how do they know—’

‘Here, gal, put this on quickly, over your nightclothes, doesn’t matter,’ the old woman was saying, as she thrust a dress into Lyra’s hands. Lyra pulled it over her head and, still half asleep, gathered everything loose and stuffed it into her rucksack.

Ma Costa said, ‘Coram’s got a man with a fast boat to take you away. He’s called Terry Besnik. You can trust him.’

Lyra cast around her dazedly to see if there was anything she’d forgotten. No: there wasn’t much, and she had it all. Pan? Where was Pan? Her heart faltered as she remembered, and she blinked and shook her head and said, ‘All my life I’ve done nothing but bring the gyptians trouble.’ Her voice was thick with sleep. ‘I’m so sorry …’

‘That’s enough,’ said Ma Costa, and hugged her so tight it was hard to breathe. ‘Now get on outside and don’t wait another moment.’

Farder Coram in the galley was leaning on two walking sticks, and he too looked as if he’d just been woken from sleep. Lyra could hear the quiet rumble of an engine-boat on the water.

‘Terry Besnik’s a good man,’ said Coram. ‘He understands the sittyation. He’ll take you to King’s Lynn – he knows all the drains and the by-channels – you can get a ferry from there – but quick as you can, Lyra, quick as you can. You got them things I gave you?’

‘Yes – yes – oh, Farder Coram …’ She embraced him tightly, and felt his bones frail under her hands.

‘Go on,’ said Ma Costa. ‘I can hear gunshots back there.’

‘Thank you, thank you,’ Lyra said, and scrambled out and over the side of the narrowboat, to where a hand reached up to help her down into the cockpit of another kind of vessel, a launch of dark wood that showed no lights.

‘Master Besnik?’ she said.

‘Hold tight,’ was all he said.

She could see little of his face. He was stocky, and he wore a dark woollen cap and a heavy jacket. He moved the throttle, and the engine growled like a tiger as the boat surged forward.