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

by Philip Pullman

  She didn’t try the new method; she felt uneasy about it. Instead, she gazed at the dial and let her mind hover, not setting off onto a wild sea so much as drifting over a calm one. She kept herself as free from conscious intention as she could manage, asking nothing and puzzling over nothing, and floated in her mind over the Sun or the Moon or the Bull, looking down on each one, taking in all their details with equal attention, gazing into the great depth of the symbol ranges, from the highest levels that were so familiar now to the lower ones fading into darkness further down. She hovered over the Walled Garden for a long time, letting all the associations and connotations of nature and order and innocence and protection and fertility and many, many other meanings float past like exquisite jellyfish, their myriad tendrils of gold or coral or silver drifting in a pellucid ocean.

  From time to time she felt a little snag at the drift of her awareness and knew that the young man she’d mistaken for Will was looking for her. She made herself relax, not fight it, not even ignore it, just float, and presently the snag disappeared, like a little thorn that catches for a moment on a traveler’s sleeve, only to pull out when the traveler walks on.

  She thought constantly about Pantalaimon: Was he safe? Where could he be going? What did he mean by that brief and contemptuous note? Surely he couldn’t have meant it literally. It was cruel, he was cruel, and she was cruel too, and it was all a mess, all a dreadful mess.

  She hardly thought of Oxford at all. She wondered about writing a note and posting it to Hannah, but that wouldn’t be easy: Brabandt seldom stopped during the day, and tended to moor at night on a lonely stretch of water far from any village where there might be a post office.

  He was curious about why the CCD was interested in her, but when she kept saying she had no idea, he realized he wasn’t going to get an answer and stopped asking. He had things to tell her about the gyptians and the Fens, though, and on the third night of their journey, when the frost was hardening the grass on the riverbank and the old stove was glowing in the galley, he sat down and talked with Lyra as she made their supper.

  “The CCD, they got a down on the gyptians,” he told her, “but they daresn’t do much to make us angry. Whenever they tried to enter the Fens, we made damn sure they got lured into swamps and dead waterways where they’d never get out. There was one time when they tried to invade the Fens in force, hundreds of ’em, guns and cannons and all. Seems the will o’ the wykeses, the jacky lanterns—you heard of them? They shine lights out on the bogs, to lure innocent people off the safe paths—anyways, they heard the CCD was coming, and all the will o’ the wykeses come shining their lanterns and flickering this side and that, and the CCD men were so bewithered and bewildered that half of ’em drowned and the other half went mad with fear. That was nigh on fifty year ago.”

  Lyra wasn’t sure that the CCD had existed fifty years before, but she didn’t quibble. “So the ghosts and the spirits are on your side, then?” she said.

  “Against the CCD, they’re on the gyptians’ side, aye. Mind you, they chose the wrong time o’ the month, them CCD men. They come in the dark of the moon. It’s well-known that when the moon’s dark, all the bogles and boggarts come out, all the ghouls and the bloody-boneses, and they do powerful harm to honest men and women, gyptian and landloper alike. They caught her once, you know. Caught her and killed her.”

  “Caught who?”

  “The moon.”

  “Who did?”

  “The bogles did. Some say they climbed up and pulled her down, only there en’t nothing in the Fens high enough for that; and others say she fell in love with a gyptian man and come down to sleep with him; and still others say she come down of her own accord ’cause she’d heard terrible tales of the things the bogles got up to when she was dark. Anyway, she come down one night, and walked about among the swamps and the bogs, and a whole host of wicked creatures, ghasts, hobgoblins, boggarts, hell-wains, yeth-hounds, trolls, nixies, ghouls, fire-drakes, they come a tippy-toeing after her right into the darkest and doulest part of the Fens, what’s known as Murk-Mire. And there she turned her foot on a stone, and a bramble snagged her cloak, and the creeping horrors attacked her, the lady moon, they bore her down in the cold water and the filthy grim old bog, where there’s crawling creatures so dark and horrible they en’t even got names. There she lay, cold and stark, with her poor little old light just going out, bit by bit.

  “Well, by soon after there come along a gyptian man and he’d wandered off his path by reason of the dark, and he was beginning to be fearful on account of the slimy hands he could feel a-gripping his ankles, and the cold claws that scratched at his legs. And he couldn’t see a bloody thing.

  “Then all of a sudden he did see something. A little dim light a-shining under the water it was, a-gleaming just like the mild silver of the moon. And he must have called out, because that was the dying moon herself, and she heard him and she sat up, just for a moment like, and she shined all around, and all the ghouls and boggarts and goblins they fled away, and the gyptian man could see the path clear as day, and he found his way out of Murk-Mire and back home safe.

  “But by that time the moon’s light was all gone. And the creatures of the night placed a big stone over where she lay. And things got worse and worse for the gyptians. The creeping horrors come out the murk and snatched away babies and children; the jacky lanterns and the will o’ the wykeses shone their glimmers over all the bogs and the marshes and the quicksands; and things too horrible to mention, dead men and ghouls and rawheads and bonelesses, they come creeping round houses at night and swarmed over boats, fingering at the windows, snarling the rudders with weed, pressing their eyes against the slightest little bit of light shining between the curtains.

  “So the people went to a wisewoman and asked what they should do. And she said, find the moon, and there’ll be an end of the trouble. And then the man who’d been lost, he suddenly remembered what had happened to him, and he said, ‘I know where the moon is! She’s buried in Murk-Mire!’

  “So off they set with lanterns and torches and burning brands, a whole pack of men, carrying spades and pickaxes and mattocks to dig up the moon. They asked that wisewoman how to find her if her light had all gone out, and she said, look for a big coffin made of stone with a candle on top of it. And she made ’em put a stone in their mouths, each one of ’em, to remind ’em not to say a word.

  “Well, they traipsed on deep into Murk-Mire, and they felt slimy hands trying to grasp their feet, and scary whispers and sighings in their ears, but then they come to where that old stone was a-lying, with a candle glimmering made of dead man’s fat.

  “And they heaved up the stone lid, and there was the dead moon lying there, with her strange, beautiful lady’s face cold and her eyes closed. And then she opened her eyes, and out there shone a clear silver light, and she lay there for a minute just looking at this circle of gyptian men with their spades and mattocks, all silent because of the stones in their mouths, and then she says, ‘Well, boys, it’s time I woke up, and I thank’ee all for finding me.’ And all around there come a thousand little sucky sounds as the horrors fled back down under the bog. Next thing, the moon was shining down from the sky, and the path was as clear as day.

  “So that’s the kind of place that’s ours, and that’s why you better have gyptian friends if you come in the Fens. You come in without permission, the bogles and ghouls’ll have you. You don’t look like you believe a word of this.”

  “I do,” Lyra protested. “It’s only too likely.”

  She didn’t believe it at all, of course. But if it comforted people to believe that sort of nonsense, she thought it was polite to let them do so, even if the author of The Hyperchorasmians would have snarled with scorn.

  “Young people don’t believe in the secret commonwealth,” Brabandt said. “It’s all chemistry and measuring things, as far as they’re concerned. The
y got an explanation for everything, and they’re all wrong.”

  “What’s the secret commonwealth?”

  “The world of the fairies, and the ghosts, and the jacky lanterns.”

  “Well, I’ve never seen a jacky lantern, but I’ve seen three ghosts, and I was suckled by a fairy.”

  “You was what?”

  “I was suckled by a fairy. It happened in the great flood twenty years ago.”

  “You en’t old enough to remember that.”

  “No. I don’t remember it at all. But that’s what I was told by someone who was there. She was a fairy out of the river Thames. She wanted to keep me, only they tricked her and she had to let me go.”

  “The river Thames, eh? What was her name, then?”

  Lyra tried to remember what Malcolm had told her. “Diania,” she said.

  “That’s right! Damn me, that’s right. That’s her name. That en’t common knowledge. You’d only know that if it was true, and it is.”

  “I’ll tell you something else,” she said. “Ma Costa told me this. She said I had witch oil in my soul. When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a gyptian, so I tried to talk in a gyptian way, and Ma Costa laughed at me and said I’d never be gyptian, because I was a fire person and I had witch oil in my soul.”

  “Well, if she said that, it must be right. I wouldn’t argue with Ma Costa. What you cooking there?”

  “Stewed eels. They’re probably ready now.”

  “Dish up, then,” he said, and poured some beer for them both.

  As they ate, she said, “Master Brabandt? D’you know the word akterrakeh?”

  He shook his head. “It en’t a gyptian word, and that’s a fact,” he said. “Might be French. Sounds a bit French.”

  “And did you ever hear of a place somewhere called the Blue Hotel? Something to do with dæmons?”

  “Yeah, I did hear about that,” he said. “That’s in the Levant somewhere, that is. It en’t a hotel of any kind, really. A thousand years ago, maybe more, it was a great city: temples, palaces, bazaars, parks, fountains, all sorts of beautiful things. Then one day the Huns swept down out the steppes—that’s the endless grasslands they have further north, what seem to go on forever—and they slaughtered all the people in that city, every man, woman, and child. It was empty for centuries because people said it was haunted, and I en’t surprised. No one would go there for love nor money. Then one day there was a traveler—he might have been a gyptian man—who went there exploring, and he come back with a strange tale, how the place was haunted all right, but not by ghosts: by dæmons. Maybe the dæmons of dead people go there, maybe that’s it. I dunno why they call it the Blue Hotel. Must be a reason, though.”

  “Would that be a secret commonwealth thing?”

  “Bound to be.”

  And so they passed the time as the Maid of Portugal sailed nearer and nearer to the Fens.

  * * *

  * * *

  In Geneva, Olivier Bonneville was becoming frustrated. The new method of reading the alethiometer was refusing to disclose anything at all about Lyra. It hadn’t at first; he’d spied on her more than once; but now it was as if some connection was broken, a wire come loose.

  He was beginning to discover more about the new method, though. For example, it only worked in the present tense, so to speak. It could reveal events, but not their causes or consequences. The classical method gave a fuller perspective, but at the cost of time and laborious research, and it required a kind of interpretation that Bonneville had little patience for.

  However, his employer, Marcel Delamare, was directing all his attention to the forthcoming congress of all the constituent bodies that made up the Magisterium. Since it was Delamare himself whose idea this was, and since he had no intention of making its true purpose clear, but every intention of arranging for it to deliver the resolutions he wanted, and since that involved a great deal of complex politics, Bonneville found himself comparatively unsupervised for a while.

  So he decided to try another approach to the new method. He had a photogram of Lyra, which Delamare had given him: it showed her among a group of other young women in academic dress, obviously on some university occasion. They stood formally facing the camera in bright sunlight. Bonneville had cut out the face and figure of Lyra and thrown the rest of the picture away; there was no reason to keep it, because the girls in it were too English to be attractive. He thought that if he looked at Lyra’s face in the picture, alethiometer in hand, it might help him focus more clearly on the question of where she was.

  So, having swallowed some pills to protect against travel sickness, in case the nausea struck again, he sat in his little apartment as the evening lights came on in the city, turned all three wheels to the image of the owl, and focused his attention on the scrap of photo paper with the picture of Lyra. But that didn’t work either, or not as he’d hoped it would. In fact, it generated a blizzard of other images, each of them pin-sharp for a moment and then succumbing to vagueness and blur, but each of them resembling Lyra for the second or so he could see them clearly.

  Bonneville narrowed his eyes and tried to keep the pictures in focus for a little longer against the inevitable vertigo. They seemed to have the quality of photograms: all monochrome, some faded or creased, some on photographic paper, some on newsprint, some well lit and professionally taken, others informal, as if taken by someone who wasn’t used to a camera, with Lyra screwing up her eyes in the glare of the sun. Several of them seemed to have been taken surreptitiously when she was unaware, showing her lost in thought in a café or laughing as she walked hand in hand with a boy or looking around to cross the road. They showed Lyra at various periods in her childhood as well as more recently, her dæmon always in view. In the later pictures his form was clearly that of some large rodent: that was all Bonneville could tell.

  Then with a lurch he seemed to fall into an understanding of what he was looking at. They were photograms. They were pinned to a board: he could see a cloth folded back at the top of it, so they were probably kept under cover. Gradually some details of the background emerged: the board was leaning against a wall papered in a faint floral pattern; it stood next to a window across which a curtain of lustrous green silk had been drawn; it was lit by a single anbaric lamp on a desktop below; but whose eyes was he looking through? He had the impression of a consciousness, but—

  Something was moving—a hand moved and made Bonneville lurch again and almost vomit, as the viewpoint swung around instantaneously and showed him a white form sweeping across in a blur of wings that set some of the pictures stirring on the board—just a swift dash—a bird—a white owl, just for a moment, and it was gone again….

  Delamare!

  The owl was Delamare’s dæmon. The hand was Delamare’s. The floral wallpaper, the green silk curtain, the board of pictures was in Delamare’s apartment.

  And although Bonneville couldn’t see Lyra herself for some reason, he could see pictures of her because it wasn’t her he was focusing his mind on but a picture of her….All this came to him in a second, as he sank back into his armchair, closed his eyes, and breathed deeply to settle the nausea.

  So Marcel Delamare had collected dozens, scores of pictures of Lyra. He’d never mentioned them.

  And no one knew. He’d thought that his employer’s interest in the girl was professional, so to speak, or political, or something. But this was personal. This was bizarre. It was obsessive.

  Well, that was worth knowing.

  Next question: why?

  Bonneville knew very little about his employer, mainly because he wasn’t interested. Perhaps it was time to find things out. The new method would be little use for that, and besides, Bonneville’s nauseous headache made him reluctant to think of using the alethiometer again for a while. He’d have to go and ask people: be a detective.

  * * *
/>   * * *

  With no clue about where Lyra might have gone, Malcolm and Asta went over and over his conversation with her at La Luna Caprese in Little Clarendon Street.

  “Benny Morris…,” said Asta. “That name came up at some point.”

  “Yes. So it did. Something to do with…”

  “Someone who worked at the mail depot—”

  “That’s it! The man who was injured.”

  “We could try the compensation stunt,” she said.

  So after some work with Oxford city directories and voting registers, they found an address in Pike Street in the district of St. Ebbe’s, in the shadow of the gasworks. In the character of a personnel manager from the Royal Mail, Malcolm knocked on the door of a terraced house the next afternoon.

  He waited, and no one answered. He listened, but heard only the clanking of railway trucks being shunted into a siding on the other side of the gasworks.

  He knocked again. Still there was no response from inside. The trucks had begun to empty their coal, one by one, into the chute below the railway line.

  Malcolm waited till the whole train had gone through and the series of distant thunders was replaced by the hollow clank of shunting again.

  He knocked a third time, and then heard a heavy limping step inside, and the door opened.

  The man standing there was thickset and bleary-eyed, and a strong smell of drink hung around him. His dæmon, a mongrel with mastiff in her, stood behind his legs and barked twice.

  “Mr. Morris?” said Malcolm, smiling.

  “Who wants me?”

  “Your name is Morris? Benny Morris?”

  “What if it is?”

  “Well, I’ve come from the personnel department of the Royal Mail—”

  “I can’t work. I got a certificate from the doctor. Look at the state of me.”

  “We’re not disputing your injury, Mr. Morris, not at all. It’s a matter of sorting out the compensation you’re due.”