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

by Philip Pullman

“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-gray 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 draft.”

  “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. Mold 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 realize 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 rea
son 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 practiced 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 the 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 unlabeled 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 learnt 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 secondhand 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 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 woolen cap and a heavy jacket. He moved the throttle, and the engine growled like a tiger as the boat surged forward.

  Pantalaimon left the Elsa at Cuxhaven at a time when the crew were distracted. Captain Flint had sold the propeller to a boatyard on the island of Borkum, just as the deckhand had predicted, and then refused to share the money equally with the mate, because, he said, as skipper he was far more at risk. In response, the mate stole the captain’s whisky and took to his hammock to sulk. An hour out of Borkum, a bush around the Elsa’s propeller shaft fell apart, letting the sea into the engine room, and they limped into Cuxhaven with two men pumping resentfully while the mate grumbled nearby. Pan watched it all with fascination. It was easy to keep out of sight on a vessel like the Elsa.

  They tied up in the evening at a wharf with a crumbling stone warehouse behind it. The “passengers” currently keeping out of sight in the warehouse wouldn’t be able to come aboard till the prop shaft bush was replaced, because the whole “passenger” transaction depended on discretion and silence. It wasn’t easy to say how long the repair would take either; Flint knew a man who had the necessary spare part, but he was temporarily out of town, or in prison, and his assistant had a long-standing grudge against Flint and was bound to charge a high price. As soon as night fell, Pan darted down the gangway and into the shadows of the main harbor.

  Now it was just a matter of finding the river, and setting off upstream till he came to Wittenberg.

  * * *

  * * *

  At the same time, Lyra was sitting in the forward saloon of a crowded ferry heading for Flushing, on the Dutch coast. She would rather have sat outside, so as to be alone, but it was bitterly cold; so she put up with the oppressive heat and the smells of engine oil, stale food, smokeleaf, beer, dirty clothes, and a persistent hint of vomit. The anbaric strip lights flickered unpleasantly and threw an intrusive pallid glare into every corner. She had to struggle through a crowded doorway and push hard to get to the corner and find a seat.

  Her dæmonless state caused less alarm at first than she’d feared. Most of the passengers and staff were preoccupied with their tasks, or busy trying to deal with a crying child, or simply tired and indifferent. The few who did see something strange about her contented themselves with a furtive glance, a muttered word or two, or a gesture for turning away bad luck. She pretended to take no notice, and tried to become inconspicuous.

  Among the passengers in the forward saloon were half a dozen men who were obviously traveling together. They were similarly dressed in casual but good-quality cold-weather clothes, they spoke Welsh among themselves, and they had a confident, easy air. Lyra was watching them carefully, because one or two of them had looked at her appraisingly when she pushed her way through the jostling crowd in the doorway and entered the saloon, and said something to each other before looking back at her again. Their compa
nions were ordering drinks, expensive drinks too, and laughing loudly. If Pan had been there, he and Lyra could have played detective, and tried to work out these men’s occupation; but they’d have had to go back to their old relationship first, and that was probably gone forever.

  Well, she could still do that, she thought, even if she was on her own. She watched the men while trying to seem half asleep.

  They were all friends or colleagues: they were together. They were in their thirties or early forties, at a guess, and they looked like manual workers and not like people who sat in offices all day long, because they were fit and they moved with easy balance in the rocking ship, as if they were athletes or even gymnasts. Were they soldiers? That was possible, but then she thought that their hair was too long, and they were too pale: they didn’t work outside. They were well paid: the clothes and the drinks testified to that. They were all on the small side too, whereas soldiers were usually bigger, she thought….

  That was as far as she got before a bulky middle-aged man sat down next to her. She tried to move to give him more room, but there was a large woman sleeping on the bench to her left who didn’t move at all when Lyra gave her a nudge.

  “Don’t you worry,” said the man. “Bit of a squash, no one minds that. Traveling a long way?”

  “No,” she said indifferently. She didn’t look at him.

  His dæmon, a small, lively brown-and-white dog, was sniffing curiously around Lyra’s rucksack on the floor. She picked it up and held it tightly on her lap.

  “Where’s your dæmon?” said the man.

  Lyra turned and gave him a look of contempt.

  “No need to be unfriendly,” he said.

  Nine years before, when she traveled to the Arctic with Pan always close at hand, Lyra would have effortlessly come up with a story that would explain why the man should leave her alone: she was carrying an infectious disease, or she was on her way to her mother’s funeral, or her father was a murderer and was coming back any moment to find her—that story had worked very well on one occasion.