33

The Dead Town

All the next day Lyra rode her camel in a little enclosed tent of pain. Ionides managed everything with good humour and perfect tact; he knew when to be quiet, and when she wouldn’t mind a friendly remark; he found somewhere shady to rest at noon, and made sure she kept drinking enough water.

After their midday rest he said, ‘It is really and quite genuinely not far now, Miss Silver. I estimate that we shall arrive in the neighbourhood of Madinat al-Qamar at about sunset.’

‘Have you ever been into the place?’ she asked.

‘No. To be immaculately candid, Miss Silver, I was afraid. You mustn’t under-appreciate the degree of fear that is aroused in persons who are complete at the thought of a company of separated dæmons, or of the process of separation that must have occurred.’

‘I don’t under-whatever the fear. I used to feel it myself. I’ve been causing it in other people for two and a half thousand miles.’

‘Yes, of course. I would never assume you didn’t deeply and thoroughly know that. But the result of that emotional reaction is that I was too frightened to follow my clients into the purlieus of the Blue Hotel. I told them so with perfect frankness. They went in alone. I brought them there, but I never guaranteed the outcome of their search. All I guaranteed was to take them to the Blue Hotel, which I did. One hundred per cent. The rest was up to them.’

She nodded; she was almost too tired to say anything. They rode on. The little pot of Ionides’s salve was in her pocket and, balancing as best she could, she prised it open and applied a dab to the back of her abominably aching hand, and then, experimenting, to her temples. The headache she’d had for days was still firmly in residence, and the glare from the sand all around was helping not at all. But a marvellous coolness quite soon began to soothe her brow, and the glare even seemed to dim slightly.

‘Mr Ionides,’ she said, ‘tell me more about this salve.’

‘I bought it from a train-master who had just arrived from Samarkand. Its virtues are quite well known, I assure you.’

‘Where does it originally come from?’

‘Oh, who knows, very much further east, beyond the highest mountains in the world. No camel trains make the journey through the mountain passes. It is too high and too arduous even for camels. Anyone who wishes to transport goods from that side to this, or this side to that, has to negotiate with the bagazhkti.’

‘And what’s that? Or they?’

‘They are beings who are like humans in that they have a language and can speak, but unlike us in that, if they have a dæmon, it is internal or invisible. They are like small camels, no hump, long neck. They hire themselves out for purposes of transport. Bad-tempered, very unpleasant, oh, I can’t tell you. Arrogant. But they can climb the high passes with loads of unbelievable size.’

‘So if this salve came from beyond the mountains …’

‘It will have been carried part of the way by the bagazhkti. But the bagazhkti have another virtue. The mountains are infested with large birds of a carnivorous rapacity, which are known as oghâb-gorgs. Enormously dangerous. Only the bagazhkti have found a way of fighting off these birds. The bagazhkti can spit their offensive and venomous saliva very accurately for a not inconsiderable distance. The birds find this not at all enjoyable, and quite commonly retreat. So in paying for the services of the bagazhkti, a train-master will also ensure his survival and that of the goods he carries. But as you will realise, Miss Silver, it adds to the cost. May I ask how is your pain now?’

‘It’s slightly better, thank you. Tell me, did you know about this salve? Did you specifically ask for it?’

‘Yes, I did know, and that is why I managed to find a merchant likely to have it.’

‘Has it got a special name?’

‘It is called gülmuron. But there are many cheap kinds that do not have any beneficial effects. This is the true gülmuron.’

‘I’ll remember that. Thank you.’

The pain in her hand was just about bearable, but to add to all the other discomforts she began to feel a familiar deep dragging ache low in her belly. Well, it was due. There was even something reassuring in it: if that part’s working, then at least my body’s still in good order, she thought.

But it was uncomfortable none the less, and she was profoundly glad when the sun touched the horizon and Ionides said it was time to make camp.

‘Are we there?’ she said. ‘Is this the Blue Hotel?’

Looking around she saw a low range of hills – not even hills: not much more than rocky slopes – to the right, and endless flat desert to the left. Directly ahead was a mass of broken stone, with little to show at a first glance that there had ever been a town there, though the last rays of the sun did illuminate the top of a line of columns made of light-coloured limestone much eroded by wind, which she might not have noticed otherwise. While Ionides bustled around tethering the camels and making a fire, Lyra climbed the nearest rock and looked steadily into the mass of jumbled boulders, and in the rapidly fading light she did begin to make out some regular shapes: a rectangular set of tumbled walls, an arch that had tilted slightly without actually falling, a paved open space that might have been a market or forum.

It was all lifeless. If there were any dæmons there, they were hiding well and keeping very quiet.

‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ she said, joining Ionides at the fire, where he was grilling some kind of meat.

‘Miss Silver,’ he said in a tone of deep reproach, ‘I did not think of you as a diehard sceptic.’

‘Not a diehard one, but just a little cautious. Is this the place?’

‘Guaranteed. There are the remains of the town – all those rocks, they used to be buildings. Even now some of the walls are still standing. You have only to walk among them to know that you are in what used to be a centre of commerce and culture.’

She stood watching the shadows lengthen as Ionides turned the meat and mixed some flour with a little water and slapped the dough flat before cooking it in a long-blackened frying pan. By the time the food was ready the sky was nearly dark.

‘A good sleep, Miss Silver, and you will be awake bright and early to investigate the ruins in the morning,’ he said.

‘I’m going in tonight.’

‘Is that altogether one hundred per cent wise?’

‘I don’t know. But it’s what I want to do. My dæmon is in there and I want to find him as soon as possible.’

‘Of course you do. But there may be other things than dæmons in there.’

‘What things?’

‘Phantoms. Ghasts of this kind or that. Emissaries of the Evil One.’

‘Do you believe that?’

‘Of course. It would be an intellectual failure to do anything else.’

‘There are philosophers who say that the failure would be to believe, not to disbelieve.’

‘Then excuse me, Miss Silver, but they have separated their intelligences from their other faculties. And that is not an intelligent thing to do.’

She said nothing at first, because she agreed with him – agreed instinctively, if not yet intellectually; part of her was still in thrall to the cast of mind of Talbot and Brande. But it came to her clearly, as she swallowed the last of the tender meat and the hot bread, how incongruous it was to bring any of that university scepticism to the Blue Hotel.

‘Mr Ionides, have you ever heard the term “the secret commonwealth”?’

‘No. What does it refer to?’

‘To the world of half-seen things and half-heard whispers. To things that are regarded by clever people as superstition. To fairies. Spirits, hauntings, things of the night. The sort of thing you said the Blue Hotel is full of.’

‘“The secret commonwealth” … No, I have never heard the expression.’

‘Perhaps there are other names for it.’

‘I am sure there are many.’

He wiped the frying pan around with the last of the bread, and ate it slowly. Lyra was so tired she felt on the verge of delirium. She wanted to sleep quite desperately, but she knew that if she gave in and put her head down she wouldn’t wake up till the morning was filling the sky. Ionides pottered about their little camp, covering the fire, gathering his blankets, rolling a smokeleaf cigarette. Finally he settled down to huddle in the dark shade of a camel-sized rock. Only the tiny glow of his cigarette showed he was there at all.

Lyra stood up, feeling every one of the separate pains and injuries. The hand was worst; she took a very little of the rose salve on her right forefinger and rubbed it in as gently as a butterfly landing on a grass blade.

Then she put the salve in her rucksack with the alethiometer, and stepped away from the fire and towards the tumbled ruins. The moon was climbing the sky, and the vast sweep of the Milky Way stretched above, every one of those minute specks a sun in its own system, lighting and warming planets, maybe, and life, maybe, and some kind of wondering being, maybe, looking out at the little star that was her sun, and at this world, and at Lyra.

Ahead of her the dead bones of the town lay almost white in the moonlight. Lives had been spent here – people had loved one another and eaten and drunk and laughed and betrayed and been afraid of death – and not a single fragment of that remained. White stones, black shadows. All around her things were whispering, or it might only have been night-loving insects conversing together. Shadows and whispers. Here was the tumbled ruin of a little basilica: people had worshipped here. Nearby a single archway topped with a classical pediment stood between nothing and nothing. People had walked through the arch, driven donkey-carts through, stood and gossiped in its shade in the heat of a long dead day. There was a well, or a fountain, or a spring: at any rate someone had thought it worth cutting stones and forming a cistern, and a representation of a nymph above it, now blurred and smoothed by time, the cistern dry, the only trickle that of the insect sounds.

So she walked on, further and further into the silent moonscape of the City of the Moon, the Blue Hotel.

And Olivier Bonneville watched. He was lying among some rocks on the slope nearest the little camp; he had been there since shortly after Lyra and Ionides had arrived. He was watching through binoculars as Lyra picked her way among the stones of the dead town, and beside him lay a loaded rifle.

He had made himself as comfortable as he could be without a fire. His camel knelt some way behind, chewing something resistant and appearing to think deeply.

The view Bonneville had of Lyra was the first time he had ever seen her in the flesh. He was taken aback by how different she looked from the photogram, the short dark hair, the tense and strained expression, the obvious exhaustion and pain in every movement. Was it the same girl? Had he mistakenly followed someone else? Could she have changed this much already?

He half wanted to follow her right into the ruins, and confront her close to. At the same time he feared to do that, guessing that it would be much easier to shoot someone from a distance, in the back, than to do it when they were close and face to face. He considered the man who was with her, the camel man, the guide, to be a slight nuisance, but no more than that. A few dollars would pay him off.

Lyra was still brightly visible in the moonlight, an easy target as she picked her slow way through the stones. Bonneville was a good shot: the Swiss were keen on such things as military service and hunting and marksmanship. But if he wanted to shoot her cleanly, he had better do it before she moved very far into the Blue Hotel.

He put down the binoculars and took the rifle, carefully, silently, knowing everything about its weight and its length and the feeling of the stock against his shoulder. He lowered his head to look along the barrel, and moved his hips a fraction of an inch to settle himself more securely.

Then he had a horrible shock.

There was a man lying next to him, and looking at him, no more than three feet to his left.

He actually gasped aloud: ‘Ah’ and twisted away involuntarily, and his dæmon burst up into the air, flapping her wings in panic.

The man didn’t move, in spite of the way the rifle barrel was waving wildly in Bonneville’s shaking hands. He was monstrously, inhumanly calm. His gecko-dæmon sat on a rock just behind him, licking her eyeballs.

‘Who – where did you come from?’ said Bonneville hoarsely. He spoke in French, by instinct. His dæmon glided down to his shoulder.

The camel-man, Lyra’s guide, replied in the same language, ‘You didn’t see me because you took your eyes off the whole picture. I’ve been watching you for two days. Listen, if you kill her you’ll be making a big mistake. Don’t do it. Put your gun away.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Abdel Ionides. Put the rifle down, now. Put it down.’

Bonneville’s heart was hammering so hard that he thought it must be audible. The blood pounded in his head as he made his hands relax and push the rifle away.

‘What do you want?’ he said.

Ionides said, ‘I want you to leave her alive for now. There is a great treasure, and she is the only one who can get it. Kill her now and you’ll never have it and, more importantly, neither will I.’

‘What treasure? What are you talking about?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘Again: what are you talking about? Where is this treasure? You don’t mean her dæmon?’

‘Of course not. The treasure is three thousand miles to the east and, as I said, no one can get it but her.’

‘And you want her to get it so you can have it?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Why should I care what you want? I don’t want treasure from three thousand miles away. What I want is what she has now.’

‘And if you take that, she will never find the treasure. Listen to me: I speak to you harshly, but I have to admire you. You are resourceful, courageous, hardy, inventive. I like all those qualities, and I want to see them rewarded. But at the moment you are like the wolf in the fable who seizes the nearest lamb and arouses the shepherd. Your attention is in the wrong place. Wait, and watch, and learn, and then kill the shepherd, and you will be able to have the entire flock.’

‘You’re speaking in riddles.’

‘I am speaking in metaphor. You are intelligent enough to understand that.’

Bonneville was silent for a few moments. Then he said, ‘What is this treasure, then?’

Ionides began to talk, quietly, confidently, confidentially. In the fable that Bonneville knew, it was a fox, but he enjoyed being compared to a wolf, and above all else he enjoyed the praise of older men. As the moon rose higher, as Lyra in the distance slowly made her solitary way into the dead and dæmon-haunted town, Ionides went on talking, and Bonneville listened. When he looked at the dead city again, Lyra had vanished.

She was out of sight because she’d turned to avoid a broken mass of gleaming marble that had once been a temple. There she found herself at one end of a colonnade, which cast black bars of shadow across the snow-white stone of the path.

And there was a girl sitting on a fallen piece of masonry, a girl of sixteen or so, of North African appearance and shabby dress. She wasn’t a phantom: she cast a shadow, as Lyra herself did, and, like her, she had no dæmon. She stood up as soon as she saw Lyra. In the moonlight she looked tense and full of fear.

‘You are Miss Silvertongue,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Lyra, astonished. ‘Who are you?’

‘Nur Huda el-Wahabi. Come on, come quickly. We have been waiting for you.’

‘We? Who—? You don’t mean …?’

But Nur Huda tugged urgently at Lyra’s right hand, and they hurried together along the colonnade, towards the heart of the ruins.

Thus she there waited untill eventyde,

Yet living creature none she saw appeare:

And now sad shadowes gan the world to hyde

From mortall vew, and wrap in darknes dreare;

Yet nould she d’off her weary armes, for feare

Of secret daunger, ne let sleepe oppresse

Her heavy eyes with natures burdein deare,

But drew her self aside in sickernesse,

And her welpointed wepons did about her dresse.

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book III, Canto xi, 55

To be concluded …