27

The Café Antalya

The afternoon was far advanced; the sun had already set behind the mountains, and the air was cooling rapidly. Lyra had to move: she had to find somewhere to stay. She set off towards the centre of the city, past apartment buildings and office blocks and government ministries and banks, and soon the daylight was all gone, and the light she saw by came instead from naphtha lamps hung outside shops or the more brilliant gaslights shining out from windows and open doors. The air was fragrant with the smells of grilling meat and spiced chickpeas, and Lyra realised that she was hungry.

The first hotel she tried turned her down at once: the receptionist’s look of superstitious horror made it clear why. The second place did the same, with fulsome expressions of regret and apology. They were small places, family-run, in quiet streets, not the large glittering palaces that served statesmen and plutocrats and rich tourists. Perhaps she’d be better off in one of those, she thought, but shuddered at the expense.

The third place she tried was more welcoming, simply by being less interested. The young woman at the desk was perfectly indifferent as Lyra signed the register and took her room key, and turned back to her photo-magazine at once. Only her dog-dæmon seemed concerned, and whined softly and hid behind her chair as Lyra passed.

The room was small and shabby and overheated, but the light worked and the bed was clean and there was a little balcony overlooking the street. Lyra found that she could sit on a chair half in the room and half on the balcony and see along the street in both directions.

She locked the room and went out briefly, coming back with a greaseproof paper bag containing grilled meat and peppers and some bread, and with a bottle of luridly coloured orange drink. She sat on the chair and ate and drank, finding little pleasure in the gristly meat and the sickly liquid, but thought grimly that at least she was keeping her strength up.

The street below was narrow, but clean and well-lit. On the side opposite her balcony was a café whose pavement tables were empty, but whose interior was crowded and bright. Shops to left and right sold hardware, or shoes, or newspapers and smokeleaf, or cheap clothes, or sweetmeats. It was busy; it looked as if everywhere was going to stay open long into the evening. People were slowly wandering along, or passing the time talking with friends, or sitting and smoking together beside a hookah, or haggling with shopkeepers.

She fetched a blanket from the bed, and put the light out, and settled herself comfortably to watch everything. She wanted to see people and their dæmons: she felt hungry for their completeness. There was a stout man, short, bald, moustached, in a voluminous blue shirt, who had been standing in the doorway of his shop when Lyra began to watch, and who showed no sign of moving except to step out of the way when a customer wanted to go past. His dæmon was a monkey with a bag of peanuts and a loud cheerful voice, who carried on a raucous dialogue with him and with any of the friends who stopped to pass the time. There seemed to be plenty of them. Another fixture was a beggar who sat on the pavement with a kind of lute on his lap, occasionally playing a mournful snatch of melody for a few bars before breaking off to call for alms. Another was a woman in a black headscarf who was involved in a long discussion with two friends while their children squabbled and stole sweets from the stall behind them.

Lyra watched: their dæmons observed the owner without seeming to, and prompted the children, who struck like snakes when he turned away for a second. Their mothers were quite aware of this, and accepted sweets from the children’s hands without breaking off their conversation.

Occasionally a couple of policemen, guns at their waists, helmets low over their eyes, strolled along looking at everything. People avoided returning their stare. Their dæmons, large and powerful dogs, stalked closely at their heels.

Lyra thought about the princess’s story. She wondered what the dancer’s name had been, and if there was a picture of her anywhere in the archives of a Levantine newspaper. What was happening, anyway, when people fell in love? She’d heard enough about her friends’ love affairs to know that dæmons complicated the matter, but deepened it too when it worked. Some girls seemed to be attracted to this boy or that, only for their dæmons to be indifferent or even hostile. Sometimes it was the other way round: the dæmons passionately attracted, their people kept apart by dislike. And the princess’s story had shown her yet another human possibility. Was it possible, though, as the old lady had said, for pretending to be in love to turn into actual love?

She looked down at the street again, huddling the blanket up around her shoulders. The stout man in the blue shirt was now smoking a cheroot, passing it up to the monkey-dæmon on his shoulder, and talking volubly to two other men whose dæmons were sharing a bag of nuts between them, cracking the shells in their teeth and throwing them into the gutter. The lute player had found another tune, and had even gathered an audience of two children who gazed at him hand-in-hand, the little boy nodding with his dæmon approximately in time with the rhythm. The women with the sweet-stealing children had gone, and the sweetmeat-seller was busy folding and stretching a hank of red-brown toffee.

Gradually as Lyra watched she found her mood lifting. She’d hardly been aware of feeling anxious, but that was because anxiety was everywhere, built into the very molecules of the world, or so it had seemed. But now it was disappearing, like heavy grey clouds thinning and dispersing and finding their great banks of vapour drifting into wisps that wafted away into invisibility, leaving the sky clear and open. She felt her whole self, including the absent Pan, becoming light and free. Something good must have happened to him, she thought.

And she found herself thinking about roses and Dust. The street below her was saturated in Dust. Human lives were generating it, being sustained and enriched by it; it made everything glow as if it was touched with gold. She could almost see it. It brought with it a mood that she hadn’t felt for so long that it was unfamiliar, and welcomed it almost apprehensively: it was a quiet conviction, underlying every circumstance, that all was well and that the world was her true home, as if there were great secret powers that would see her safe.

She sat there for an hour, unconscious of the time, sustained by this new strange mood, and then went to bed and fell instantly asleep.

Pantalaimon was making his way south. And east. That was all he could tell. For as long as he could he stayed beside water: river, lake or sea, it didn’t matter which, as long as there was somewhere nearby to dive into and swim away. He avoided towns and villages. As he travelled through rougher and stranger country, he felt himself becoming wilder, as if he were really a pine marten and not a human being.

But he was a human being, or part of one, and he felt just as Lyra did: unhappy, and guilty, and wretchedly lonely. If he ever saw Lyra again he would run towards her, and he imagined her bending to greet him, arms wide, and they’d both swear eternal love and promise never to part again, and it would all go back to the way it used to be. At the same time, he knew it wouldn’t, but he had to hold on to something in the dark nights, and imagination was all he had.

When he finally saw her she was sitting in the shade of an olive tree on a hot afternoon, and she looked as if she was asleep. His heart leaped, and he bounded towards her—

But of course it wasn’t Lyra. It was a girl a few years younger, maybe sixteen or so, with a shawl covering her hair and a mixture of clothes that hadn’t been hers, because they were a mixture of expensive and shabby, of new and old, of the too-big and the too-small. She looked exhausted. She looked hungry and dirty. She’d been weeping before she fell asleep, or maybe even during the sleep itself, because there were tears still on her cheeks. She looked as if she’d come from somewhere in north Africa, and she had no dæmon.

Pan looked around very carefully and quietly, and looked at her from all sides, but he wasn’t wrong: she was alone. Not even a dæmon as small as the smallest mouse was hiding near her, or curled up close by her head as it lay on a bank of dusty moss.

She was in danger, then. He leaped up into the olive tree above her, perfectly silent, and climbed high until he could see all around: the blue gleam of the sea, the near-white stone of the mountain on whose slopes the tree was growing, the dry green of the grass being cropped by a few skinny sheep …

Sheep, so there might be a shepherd nearby. But Pan couldn’t see anyone, shepherd or not. He and the girl seemed to be the only humans alive. Well, he could look after her, and pretend to be her dæmon, and guard her from suspicion at least.

He climbed down and settled at her feet to doze.

When she woke up soon afterwards she sat up slowly and painfully, rubbing her eyes, and then, seeing Pan, jumped to her feet and backed away.

She said something, but he couldn’t understand it. She knew he was a dæmon, of course, and she was looking for his person, and she was terrified.

He stood and bowed his head in greeting. ‘My name is Pantalaimon,’ he said clearly. ‘Can you speak English?’

She understood. She looked around again, wide-eyed and sleepy still, as if it might have been a dream. ‘Where is your …’ she said.

‘I don’t know. I’m looking for her, and she’s probably looking for me. Where’s your dæmon?’

‘There was a shipwreck. Our boat was sunk. I thought he must be dead, but he can’t be, because I’m alive, I think, only I can’t find him anywhere. What did you say your name was?’

‘Pantalaimon. What’s yours?’

‘Nur Huda el-Wahabi.’ She was still dizzy from tiredness. She sat down slowly. ‘This is too strange,’ she said.

‘Yes, it is. But I’ve had a bit longer to get used to it, maybe. We’ve been separated for … Well, I can’t remember, but it seems like a long time. When was your ship wrecked?’

‘Two nights – three nights – I don’t know. My family – my mother, my little sister, my grandmother – we were all in a boat, just a small boat, because of the men from the mountains – a big ship ran us down. We were all in the water, everyone, and the sailors in the big ship tried to save us, but some of us were carried away. I called and called until my throat was sore and my dæmon wasn’t with me and I was so frightened and everything was hurting and in the dark I couldn’t see anyone, anything, and I was sure I would drown, and Jamal would die, wherever he was – it was the worst thing I ever felt. But when the sun came up I could see some mountains so I tried to swim towards them, and finally there was a beach and I swam there and just fell asleep on the sand. I had to hide from people when I woke up in case … You know.’

‘Yes. Course you did. I suppose Lyra must be doing the same.’

‘Her name is Lyra? … I had to steal things like these clothes. And food. I’m so hungry.’

‘How did you come to speak English so well?’

‘My father is a diplomat. We lived in London for a while when I was younger. Then he was sent to Baghdad. We were safe until the men from the mountains came. Lots of people had to flee, but my father had to stay. He sent us away.’

‘Who are these men from the mountains?’

‘No one knows. They just come from the mountains and …’ She shrugged. ‘People try and escape. They come to Europe, but where … I don’t know. I would cry, but I’ve cried so much I haven’t got any tears left. I don’t know if Mama is alive, or Papa, or Aisha, or Jida …’

‘But you know your dæmon is alive.’

‘Yes. Alive somewhere.’

‘We might find him. Have you heard of the Blue Hotel? Al-Khan al-Azraq?’

‘No. What is that?’

‘It’s a place where dæmons go. Dæmons without their people. I’m going there myself.’

‘Why are you going there if your girl is somewhere else?’

‘I don’t know where else to go. Your dæmon might be there.’

‘What did you call it? The Blue Khan?’

‘Al-Kahn al-Azraq. I think people are afraid of it.’

‘It sounds like Moontown. Moon City maybe. I don’t know what it would be in English.’

‘Do you know where it is?’ he said eagerly.

‘No. In the desert somewhere. When I went to school in Baghdad the other kids used to talk about this place where there were night-ghasts and ghouls and people with their heads chopped off, horrible things. So I was afraid of it. But then I thought it probably wasn’t real anyway. Is it real?’

‘I don’t know. But I’m going to find it.’

‘Do you really think my dæmon could be there?’

She reminded him of the Lyra of a few years ago, before their estrangement: eager, curious, open-hearted, half child still, but with the shadow of suffering on her.

‘Yes, I do,’ he said.

‘Could I—’

‘Why don’t we—’

They both spoke together, and stopped.

Then, ‘I could pretend to be your dæmon,’ he said. ‘We could go there together. No one would know if we just behaved normally.’

‘Really?’

‘It would help me too. A lot. Honestly.’

Some way off down the slope below them, someone was playing a reed pipe. A thin musical knocking of bells followed it as the sheep began to move.

‘Let’s do that then,’ said Nur Huda.

In the morning Lyra remembered the mood of calmness and certainty like a dream, incomplete but still powerful. She hoped she could retain it for a long time, and revisit it whenever she needed to.

It was going to be a warm day. Spring was coming, and for some reason that made her think of one of the papers she’d found in the wallet of the murdered Dr Hassall: it had been that brochure for a shipping line, listing the ports of call for a cruise on the SS Zenobia, among the ports being Smyrna; and someone had written the words Café Antalya, Süleiman Square, 11 a.m. against the date of the ship’s visit. That was several weeks away, but she could still go and look at the Café Antalya, and maybe have breakfast there.

First she went out and bought some new clothes: a flowered skirt, a white shirt and some underclothes. Remembering the etiquette, she haggled the price down to what she felt was a respectable level. The shopkeeper was the man in the blue shirt, who was indifferent to her lack of a dæmon, though his own monkey-dæmon jumped up to a shelf as far away as she could get; but Lyra managed to seem so calm and matter-of-fact that the monkey was merely disconcerted.

Then she went back to the hotel and washed her hair, towelling it roughly dry and shaking her head to let it fall where it would; and then she put on the new clothes and paid her bill, and went out to find Süleiman Square.

The air was fresh and clear. Lyra bought a tourist map of the city centre and walked the half-mile or so to the square, which was shaded by trees just coming into leaf and overlooked by the statue of a lavishly medalled Turkish general.

The Café Antalya was a quiet and old-fashioned place, with starched white tablecloths and dark wood panelling. It might have been the kind of place where a young woman on her own, let alone one without a dæmon, might have felt unwelcome; it had an air of old-fashioned masculine formality and style; but the elderly waiter showed her to a table with every courteous attention. She ordered coffee and pastries, and looked around at the other customers: businessmen perhaps, a father and mother with a young family, one or two older men dressed with fastidious elegance, one wearing a fez. There was one man on his own, writing busily in a notebook, and while she waited for her coffee she played an Oakley Street sort of game and watched him without looking directly. He wore a linen suit with a blue shirt and a green tie, and a panama hat lay on the chair beside him. He was in his forties or early fifties, fair-haired, slim, strong and active-looking. Perhaps he was a journalist.

The waiter brought her coffee, a plate of elaborate pastries, and a little carafe of water. She thought: Pan would say I’d better eat no more than one of those. Across the café the journalist was closing his notebook. Without looking, Lyra knew that his dæmon – a small white owl, with large black-rimmed yellow eyes – was watching her. She sipped her coffee, which was intensely hot and sweet. The journalist stood up, put on his hat, and came straight towards her, making for the exit; but then he stopped in front of her, raised his hat, and said quietly, ‘Miss Lyra Belacqua?’

She looked up, genuinely startled. The glare of the owl-dæmon on his shoulder was ferocious, but the man’s expression was friendly, puzzled, interested, a little concerned, but most of all surprised. His accent was New Danish.

‘Who are you?’ said Lyra.

‘My name is Schlesinger. Bud Schlesinger. If I said the words Oakley Street …’

Lyra remembered Farder Coram’s voice, instructing her in his warm tidy boat, and said, ‘If you said that, I’d have to say Where is Oakley Street?’

‘Oakley Street is not in Chelsea.’

‘That’s true as far as it goes.’

‘It goes as far as the Embankment.’

‘So I’ve heard … Mr Schlesinger, what on earth is going on?’

They had been speaking very quietly.

‘May I join you for a moment?’ he said.

‘Please do.’

His manner was free, informal, friendly. He was possibly even more taken aback by this encounter than she was.

‘What—’

‘How—’

They both spoke at the same time, and were both still too surprised to laugh.

‘You first,’ she said.

‘Is it Belacqua, or Silvertongue?’

‘It was Belacqua. The other name is what I’m called now. Among friends. But – oh, it’s complicated. How did you know about me?’

‘You’re in danger. I’ve been looking for you for over a week. There’s been a general call for news of your whereabouts, that is among Oakley Street agents, because the High Council of the Magisterium – you’ve heard about the new constitution? – has ordered your arrest. Did you know about that?’

She felt dizzy. ‘No,’ she said. ‘First I’ve heard.’

‘The last news we had of you was in Buda-Pesth. Someone saw you, but couldn’t make contact. Then there was a report that you were in Constantinople, but that wasn’t a definite sighting.’

‘I’ve tried not to leave a trail. When – why – what does the Magisterium want to arrest me for?’

‘Blasphemy, among other things.’

‘But that’s not against the law …’

‘Not in Brytain. Not yet. This is not a matter of public knowledge – there isn’t a price on your head, nothing of that sort. The Council has let it be known discreetly that your arrest will be pleasing to the Authority. The way these things work now, a word of that sort will be sufficient justification to make it happen.’

‘How did you know who I was?’

He produced a pocket book, and took out a printed photogram. It showed an enlargement of Lyra’s face taken from the matriculation photogram Lyra and her contemporaries had posed for in their first term at St Sophia’s.

‘There are hundreds of copies of this in circulation,’ he said. ‘With the name Belacqua. I was kind of on the lookout, not because I expected you to come through Smyrna, but because I know Malcolm Polstead, and—’

‘You know Malcolm?’ she said. ‘How?’

‘I did my doctorate in Oxford, oh, I guess, twenty years ago. It was around the time of the great flood. That’s when I first met him, but of course he was just a kid then.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘What, right now? No, I don’t. But he wrote me a short while ago, enclosing a letter for you, under the name Silvertongue. The letter’s in the safe in my apartment. He said to look out for you.’

‘A letter … Is your apartment nearby?’

‘Not far. We’ll go get it in a minute. Apparently Malcolm’s on his way east. There’s some big operation going on involving Central Asia – that’s all he said – and we’ve heard something on the same lines from local eyes and ears.’

‘Yes. I think I know what that’s about. It involves a desert in Sin Kiang, near Lop Nor, a place where … Well, a place where dæmons can’t go.’

Schlesinger’s dæmon spoke. ‘Tungusk,’ she said.

‘Like that,’ said Lyra, ‘but further south.’

‘Tungusk, where the witches go?’ said Schlesinger.

‘Yes. But not that. Like it but somewhere else.’

‘I can’t help noticing …’ he said.

‘No. No one can help noticing.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry. It’s relevant. I can do what the witches do and separate from my dæmon. But then he disappeared, my dæmon, and before I do anything else I have to find him. So I’m going to a place called … the Blue Hotel. Or sometimes the City of the Moon, Madinat al-Qamar.’

‘There’s something familiar about that name … What is that place?’

‘Oh, a story. Maybe just a travellers’ tale … They say there’s a ruined city there that’s inhabited by dæmons. It might be nonsense. But I’ve got to try.’

‘Oh, be careful,’ said the owl-dæmon.

‘I don’t know. Maybe they’re ghosts and not dæmons. I don’t even know where it is, exactly.’ She pushed the plate of pastries towards him, and he took one. ‘Mr Schlesinger,’ she went on, ‘if you wanted to travel on the Silk Road to Sin Kiang, to Lop Nor, how would you go about it?’

‘You specifically want to go that way rather than, say, by rail to Muscovy and then through Siberia?’

‘Yes. I want to go that way. Because I think on the road I’d be able to hear a lot of news, gossip, stories, information.’

‘You’re right about that. Well, your best bet is Aleppo. That’s the western terminus, if I can put it like that, for one of the main routes. Join a caravan there and go as far as they’ll take you. I can tell you the man to see.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘His name is Mustafa Bey. The Bey is a courtesy title. He’s a merchant. He doesn’t travel much himself any more but he has interests in many ventures, caravans, cities, factories, enterprises the whole length of the Silk Road. It’s not one road – but I guess you knew that – it’s a whole bundle of trails and roadways and tracks. Some go south round a desert or a mountain range, some go further north. Depends on what the caravan-master decides.’

‘And if I went to see this man Mustafa Bey, would he be suspicious of me? Of the way I am?’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t know him very well, but I think he’s interested almost entirely in profit. If you want to travel with one of his caravans, just show him you can pay.’

‘Where can I find him? Is he well known there?’

‘Very well known. The best place to find him is in a café called Marletto’s. He’s there every morning.’

‘Thank you. I’ll remember that. D’you know why I came to this café today?’

‘No. Why?’

Lyra told him about the shipping brochure, and the annotation marking the appointment in that very café. ‘It was found on the body of a man who’d just arrived in Oxford from Tashbulak, the place Oakley Street is interested in. He was a botanist, working with roses. We think that was why he was killed. But we’ve got no idea who was going to keep this appointment, him or someone else, or both.’

Schlesinger wrote a note in his diary. ‘I’ll make sure to be here on that date,’ he said.

‘Mr Schlesinger, do you work full-time for Oakley Street?’

‘No. I’m a diplomat. But I’m bound to Oakley Street by old ties of friendship, besides actually believing in what they stand for. Smyrna is a kind of a crossroads; there are always things to watch, or people to keep an eye on. And, once in a while, something to do. Now tell me what Oakley Street knows about your present situation. Do they know where you are? Do they know about your plan to visit this Blue Hotel, if it exists?’

She thought for a few moments. ‘I don’t know. There’s a man called Coram van Texel, a gyptian from the Fens, a retired Oakley Street agent, who knows; he’s an old friend, and I know he can be trusted. But … in the light of day, I’m not sure about the Blue Hotel anyway. It all sounds so improbable. Secret commonwealth business.’

She used the phrase to see whether he’d heard it before, but he merely looked puzzled. ‘Now you’ve told me, I have to pass it on,’ he said.

‘I understand that. What’s the best way of getting to Aleppo?’

‘There’s a good train service twice a week. One leaves tomorrow, I think. Listen, Miss Silvertongue, I really am anxious about your safety. You look too much like this picture. You ever thought of a disguise?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I thought not having a dæmon might be a sort of disguise. People don’t like looking at me, because they’re frightened or disgusted. They look away. I’ve been getting used to that. Trying to be inconspicuous. Or invisible, like the witches. It works some of the time.’

‘Can I make a suggestion?’

‘Of course. What?’

‘My wife used to be on the stage. She’s done this before a few times – changing someone’s look. Nothing drastic. Just a few details to help people’s eyes see someone different from you. Would you come to my apartment with me now and let her help you? We’ll pick up Malcolm’s letter at the same time.’

‘Is she at home now?’

‘She’s a journalist. She’s working at home today.’

‘Well,’ Lyra said, ‘I think that might be a good idea.’

Why did she trust this Bud Schlesinger? He knew about Oakley Street, and about Malcolm heading this way too, but an enemy might know those things and use them to trap her. It was partly her mood. The morning was sparkling; things were intensely themselves; even the Turkish general on the stone plinth had a roguish light in his eye. She felt she could trust the world.

So twenty minutes later she stepped out of the shuddering, creaking, ancient elevator in Schlesinger’s apartment building and waited as he opened the door.

‘Excuse the lack of domestic airs and graces,’ he said.

It was certainly a place of colour. On every wall hung rugs and other textiles, there were dozens of paintings, and several walls of bookshelves. Schlesinger’s wife, Anita, was colourful too: slender and dark-haired and dressed in a scarlet smock and Persian slippers. Her dæmon was a squirrel.

As Schlesinger explained the circumstances, she examined Lyra curiously, but it was a professional curiosity, full of life and understanding. Lyra sat on a large sofa and tried not to feel self-conscious.

‘Right,’ said Anita Schlesinger. She too was New Danish, her accent a little less marked than her husband’s. ‘Now, Lyra, I’m going to suggest three things. One is simple: you wear a pair of spectacles. Plain glass. I’ve got some. The second thing is to cut your hair much shorter. And the third thing is to dye it. How d’you feel about that?’

‘Intrigued,’ said Lyra carefully. ‘Would those things make a big difference?’

‘You’re not trying to fool your friends or anyone who knows you well. It won’t do that. What you’re trying to do is make someone who’s got a picture in his mind of a blondish girl without glasses not look at you twice. They’ll be looking for someone who doesn’t look like you. It’s superficial, but superficial is the level most interactions work at. Do they know you haven’t got your dæmon with you?’

‘I’m not sure about that.’

‘Because that’s a pretty big giveaway.’

‘I know. But I’ve tried to make myself invisible …’

‘Hey! I’d love to do that. You must tell me how. But first, can I cut your hair?’

‘Yes. And dye it. I can understand the reason – all you said makes sense. Thank you.’

Bud brought Lyra the letter from Malcolm, and then he had to leave. He shook Lyra’s hand and said, ‘Seriously, you’re in real danger. Don’t forget that. It might be safer to stay in Smyrna till Mal gets here. We could keep you out of sight.’

‘Thank you. I’ll think hard about that.’

Lyra was burning to read the letter, but she put it away for now and focused on Anita, who was keen to hear about the witches and their way of becoming invisible. Lyra told her everything she knew. And that led to Will, and how he’d worked the same sort of spell without knowing it; and that led somehow to Malcolm, and everything he’d told her about the flood, and how she’d never known about it when she was his pupil, and how differently she saw him now.

It was the sort of conversation she hadn’t had for a long time, and she had no idea how much she’d missed that sort of easy friendly chatter. She thought: this woman would make an irresistible interrogator. No one could help telling her things. She wondered how often Anita had helped her husband with Oakley Street business.

Meanwhile Anita was cutting Lyra’s hair, a very little at a time, stepping back and looking critically, checking in the mirror.

‘We’re aiming to change the shape of your head,’ she said.

‘That sounds alarming.’

‘Without surgery. Your hair’s naturally wavy and thick and takes up a lot of space, even though it isn’t very long. We just want to make it a bit self-effacing. The dye will make a bigger difference. But a lot of what you call being invisible depends on the way you hold yourself. I recognise that. I acted with Sylvia Martine once.’

‘Really? I saw her Lady Macbeth. Terrifying.’

‘She could put it on at will. I was walking down the street with her one day. We’d just been rehearsing and it was a normal sort of busy city street, people going past, not noticing anything. And she said – you know her name was really Eileen Butler – she said, “Let’s call Sylvia.”

‘I didn’t know what she meant. But we’d been talking about audiences, and fans, and followers, and she said that, and I didn’t know what to expect.

‘Well, her dæmon was a cat, as you probably remember if you saw her onstage. A perfectly ordinary cat. But something happened to him then, or he did something, and instantly he became – well, I don’t know how to put it. He became more visible. As if a spotlight had come on, focused right on him. And the same was true of her. One second she was Eileen Butler, nice-looking, but just an ordinary passer-by. The next second she was Sylvia Martine, and everyone in the street knew it. People saw her, they came up to speak, they crossed the street to ask for her autograph, and within a minute she was pretty well surrounded. It happened outside a hotel – I think she knew exactly what would happen, and did it somewhere where we could escape. The commissionaire let us in and kept everyone else back. Then she was Eileen Butler again. I wasn’t a bad actress, but she was a star, and the difference is colossal, magical. Something supernatural about it. I was too shy to ask how she did it, becoming Sylvia in that way, but her dæmon had something to do with it. He said very little; he just – I don’t know – became more visible. Extraordinary.’

‘I believe it,’ said Lyra. ‘I believe every word of it. I wonder if you can learn to do it? Or whether it’s only possible for a few people?’

‘I don’t know. But I’ve often thought it would be dreadful to have that sort of power and not be able to turn it off. Sylvia could manage it, she was full of good sense, but in the case of someone vain or silly … It would drive them mad in the end. Make them a monster. Well, I can think of a few stars like that.’

‘I want to do just the reverse. Can I see what it looks like now?’

Anita stood aside, and Lyra looked in the mirror. Her hair had never been so short. She liked it, liked the lightness, liked the air it gave her of being alert and bird-like.

‘We’ve only just started,’ said Anita. ‘Wait till you see it dyed.’

‘What colour do you suggest?’

‘Well, dark. Not hard black – that wouldn’t go with your general colouring. A darkish chestnut brown.’

Lyra submitted willingly. In all her life it had never occurred to her to have her hair coloured; it was curious to find herself in the hands of someone so good at this whole business, so interested in it, so knowledgeable.

After applying the dye, Anita made some lunch, just bread and cheese and dates and coffee, and told Lyra about her journalistic work. She was currently writing a piece for an English-language paper in Constantinople about the state of the Turkish theatre. Journalism sometimes overlapped with her husband’s diplomatic work, and she’d seen something of the crisis in the world of rose gardens and precious oils and perfumery. She told Lyra about the numbers of gardens she knew about that had been destroyed, and of the merchants who dealt in those goods and who’d seen their factories and warehouses burned down.

‘It’s happening much further east as well,’ she said, ‘as far as Kazakhstan, apparently. A kind of mania.’

Lyra told her about her friend Miriam, whose father had gone bankrupt. ‘That was when I first heard about it. Only a few weeks ago – it feels like a lifetime. Am I really going to be a brunette? Miriam wouldn’t recognise me. She always wanted me to do more with my hair and so forth.’

‘Well, let’s look,’ said Anita.

They rinsed out the dye, washed her hair, and then Lyra sat impatiently as Anita dried it.

‘I think that’s worked very well,’ she said. ‘Let me just …’ She ran her fingers through Lyra’s hair, settled it slightly differently, stood back. ‘A success!’ she said.

‘Show me! Where’s the mirror?’

It was a new face that looked back at her. Lyra’s main thought, almost her only thought, was: would Pan like this? But at the back of her mind was another: as soon as Olivier Bonneville finds me again with the alethiometer, he’ll know I look like this, and then so will the Magisterium.

‘Haven’t quite finished yet,’ said Anita. ‘Put these on.’

It was a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. Now Lyra was a different person altogether.

‘You’ll have to go on doing all that witch stuff about being invisible,’ Anita reminded her. ‘That won’t change. Dowdy. You need to be dowdy. Dull. Low-powered. You need dull clothes, not bright colours. And I’ll tell you something else,’ she added, brushing Lyra’s new hair, ‘you’ll have to hold yourself differently. You’ve naturally got a springy, active way of moving. Think yourself heavy. Slow.’

Then her dæmon spoke. He’d been watching all this, saying little, occasionally nodding with approval, but now he perched on the back of a chair and said directly, ‘Make your body heavy and slow, but don’t forget what your mind’s doing. You need to look like someone who’s suffering from a depression of the spirits, because that makes people turn away. They don’t like looking at suffering. But it’s very easy to become depressed by mimicking it. Don’t fall into that trap. Your dæmon would tell you that, if he was here. Your body affects your mind. You need to act, not be.’

‘That’s it,’ said Anita. ‘That’s your note from Telemachus.’

‘It’s a very good one,’ said Lyra. ‘Thank you. I’ll do the reverse of what Eileen Butler did to become Sylvia Martine, but not in my mind.’

‘And what are you going to do now?’ said Anita.

‘Buy a railway ticket for Aleppo. Get some dowdy clothes.’

‘The Aleppo train leaves tomorrow. Where are you going to stay tonight?’

‘Not in the same hotel. I’ll find another one.’

‘You certainly won’t. You’ll stay here tonight. Anyway, those glasses need adjusting. They keep sliding down your nose.’

‘Are you sure? I mean, about me staying?’

‘Yes. I know Bud will want to hear more from you.’

‘Then … thank you.’

The spectacles adjusted, Lyra went out in her new persona. She bought a dull brown skirt and as dowdy a sweater as she could find; she bought a ticket for the Aleppo train; and then she found a small café and ordered hot chocolatl. When it was on the table in front of her, a mound of whipped cream slowly subsiding into the liquid, she looked at her name on the envelope in his clear hand. It wasn’t one of the heavy college envelopes, but a flimsy one of coarse yellowing paper, and it bore a Bulgarian stamp. How absurd to find her hands shaking as she tore it open!

Dear Lyra,

I wish you’d keep still so I could catch up with you. This part of the world is becoming more unstable by the day, and the kinds of thing I can say in a letter are getting fewer and fewer the more likely it is that the letter will have been opened before it reaches you.

If you come across an Oakley Street friend in Smyrna, you can rely on him with total confidence. Actually, if you’re reading this letter, you know that already.

You’re now being watched and followed, though you probably haven’t noticed yet. And those who are watching now know that you’ve been warned about it.

I understand your reason for taking the route you’ve chosen, and why you want to travel through that particular region. I shall search for you there if our paths don’t cross beforehand.

There’s a lot I’d like to say to you, but nothing I want to share with the other eyes that may read this letter along the way. I’ve learned a number of things I want to talk to you about: matters of philosophy not least. I want to hear about everything you’ve seen and felt.

I hope with every fibre of my being that you’re safe. Remember everything Coram told you, and keep watchful.

With the warmest of wishes,

Malcolm

Lyra had seldom been so frustrated. All those general warnings! And yet he was right. She looked carefully at the envelope again, and saw that the flap had been stuck down twice, the second time not quite over the first. When she wrote back, which she’d do as soon as she had paper and a pen, she’d have to write in exactly the same terms to Malcolm.

She read the letter through again twice, and then drank her cooling chocolatl and walked (carefully, dowdily, aware of everything around) back to the Schlesingers’ apartment.

But before she even turned the corner into the quiet street where their building stood, she heard the sound of sirens, and the harsh engines of police cars or fire appliances, and she saw above the rooftops a plume of dirty smoke rising into the air. People were running; the engines and the sirens came closer.

She went to the corner of the street and looked round. It was the Schlesingers’ building, and it was ablaze.