“Is there a load more new kids coming?” demanded one of the girls.
“Dunno. Just me.”
“Where’d they get you then?”
Lyra struggled to sit up. She didn’t remember taking a sleeping pill, but there might well have been something in the drink she’d had. Her head felt full of eiderdown, and there was a faint pain throbbing behind her eyes.
“Where is this place?”
“Middle of nowhere. They don’t tell us.”
“They usually bring more’n one kid at a time….”
“What do they do?” Lyra managed to ask, gathering her doped wits as Pantalaimon stirred into wakefulness with her.
“We dunno,” said the girl who was doing most of the talking. She was a tall, red-haired girl with quick twitchy movements and a strong London accent. “They sort of measure us and do these tests and that—”
“They measure Dust,” said another girl, friendly and plump and dark-haired.
“You don’t know,” said the first girl.
“They do,” said the third, a subdued-looking child cuddling her rabbit dæmon. “I heard ’em talking.”
“Then they take us away one by one and that’s all we know. No one comes back,” said the redhead.
“There’s this boy, right,” said the plump girl, “he reckons—”
“Don’t tell her that!” said the redhead. “Not yet.”
“Is there boys here as well?” said Lyra.
“Yeah. There’s lots of us. There’s about thirty, I reckon.”
“More’n that,” said the plump girl. “More like forty.”
“Except they keep taking us away,” said the redhead. “They usually start off with bringing a whole bunch here, and then there’s a lot of us, and one by one they all disappear.”
“They’re Gobblers,” said the plump girl. “You know Gobblers. We was all scared of ’em till we was caught….”
Lyra was gradually coming more and more awake. The other girls’ dæmons, apart from the rabbit, were close by listening at the door, and no one spoke above a whisper. Lyra asked their names. The red-haired girl was Annie, the dark plump one Bella, the thin one Martha. They didn’t know the names of the boys, because the two sexes were kept apart for most of the time. They weren’t treated badly.
“It’s all right here,” said Bella. “There’s not much to do, except they give us tests and make us do exercises and then they measure us and take our temperature and stuff. It’s just boring really.”
“Except when Mrs. Coulter comes,” said Annie.
Lyra had to stop herself crying out, and Pantalaimon fluttered his wings so sharply that the other girls noticed.
“He’s nervous,” said Lyra, soothing him. “They must’ve gave us some sleeping pills, like you said, ’cause we’re all dozy. Who’s Mrs. Coulter?”
“She’s the one who trapped us, most of us, anyway,” said Martha. “They all talk about her, the other kids. When she comes, you know there’s going to be kids disappearing.”
“She likes watching the kids, when they take us away, she likes seeing what they do to us. This boy Simon, he reckons they kill us, and Mrs. Coulter watches.”
“They kill us?” said Lyra, shuddering.
“Must do. ’Cause no one comes back.”
“They’re always going on about dæmons too,” said Bella. “Weighing them and measuring them and all…”
“They touch your dæmons?”
“No! God! They put scales there and your dæmon has to get on them and change, and they make notes and take pictures. And they put you in this cabinet and measure Dust, all the time, they never stop measuring Dust.”
“What dust?” said Lyra.
“We dunno,” said Annie. “Just something from space. Not real dust. If you en’t got any Dust, that’s good. But everyone gets Dust in the end.”
“You know what I heard Simon say?” said Bella. “He said that the Tartars make holes in their skulls to let the Dust in.”
“Yeah, he’d know,” said Annie scornfully. “I think I’ll ask Mrs. Coulter when she comes.”
“You wouldn’t dare!” said Martha admiringly.
“I would.”
“When’s she coming?” said Lyra.
“The day after tomorrow,” said Annie.
A cold drench of terror went down Lyra’s spine, and Pantalaimon crept very close. She had one day in which to find Roger and discover whatever she could about this place, and either escape or be rescued; and if all the gyptians had been killed, who would help the children stay alive in the icy wilderness?
The other girls went on talking, but Lyra and Pantalaimon nestled down deep in the bed and tried to get warm, knowing that for hundreds of miles all around her little bed there was nothing but fear.
FIFTEEN
THE DAEMON CAGES
It wasn’t Lyra’s way to brood; she was a sanguine and practical child, and besides, she wasn’t imaginative. No one with much imagination would have thought seriously that it was possible to come all this way and rescue her friend Roger; or, having thought it, an imaginative child would immediately have come up with several ways in which it was impossible. Being a practiced liar doesn’t mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it’s that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.
So now that she was in the hands of the Oblation Board, Lyra didn’t fret herself into terror about what had happened to the gyptians. They were all good fighters, and even though Pantalaimon said he’d seen John Faa shot, he might have been mistaken; or if he wasn’t mistaken, John Faa might not have been seriously hurt. It had been bad luck that she’d fallen into the hands of the Samoyeds, but the gyptians would be along soon to rescue her, and if they couldn’t manage it, nothing would stop Iorek Byrnison from getting her out; and then they’d fly to Svalbard in Lee Scoresby’s balloon and rescue Lord Asriel.
In her mind, it was as easy as that.
So next morning, when she awoke in the dormitory, she was curious and ready to deal with whatever the day would bring. And eager to see Roger—in particular, eager to see him before he saw her.
She didn’t have long to wait. The children in their different dormitories were woken at half-past seven by the nurses who looked after them. They washed and dressed and went with the others to the canteen for breakfast.
And there was Roger.
He was sitting with five other boys at a table just inside the door. The line for the hatch went right past them, and she was able to pretend to drop a handkerchief and crouch to pick it up, bending low next to his chair, so that Pantalaimon could speak to Roger’s dæmon Salcilia.
She was a chaffinch, and she fluttered so wildly that Pantalaimon had to be a cat and leap at her, pinning her down to whisper. Such brisk fights or scuffles between children’s dæmons were common, luckily, and no one took much notice, but Roger went pale at once. Lyra had never seen anyone so white. He looked up at the blank haughty stare she gave him, and the color flooded back into his cheeks as he brimmed over with hope, excitement, and joy; and only Pantalaimon, shaking Salcilia firmly, was able to keep Roger from shouting out and leaping up to greet his best friend, his comrade in arms, his Lyra.
But he saw how she looked away disdainfully, and he followed her example faithfully, as he’d done in a hundred Oxford battles and campaigns. No one must know, of course, because they were both in deadly danger. She rolled her eyes at her new friends, and they collected their trays of cornflakes and toast and sat together, an instant gang, excluding everyone else in order to gossip about them.
You can’t keep a large group of children in one place for long without giving them plenty to do, and in some ways Bolvangar was run like a school, with timetabled activities such as gymnastics and “art.” Boys and girls were kept separate except for breaks and mealtimes, so it wasn’t until midmorning, after an hour and a half of sewing directed by one of the nurses, that Lyra had the chance to talk to Roger. But it
had to look natural; that was the difficulty. All the children there were more or less at the same age, and it was the age when most boys talk to boys and girls to girls, each making a conspicuous point of ignoring the opposite sex.
She found her chance in the canteen again, when the children came in for a drink and a biscuit. Lyra sent Pantalaimon, as a fly, to talk to Salcilia on the wall next to their table while she and Roger kept quietly in their separate groups. It was difficult to talk while your dæmon’s attention was somewhere else, so Lyra pretended to look glum and rebellious as she sipped her milk with the other girls. Half her thoughts were with the tiny buzz of talk between the dæmons, and she wasn’t really listening, but at one point she heard another girl with bright blond hair say a name that made her sit up.
It was the name of Tony Makarios. As Lyra’s attention snapped toward that, Pantalaimon had to slow down his whispered conversation with Roger’s dæmon, and both children listened to what the girl was saying.
“No, I know why they took him,” she said, as heads clustered close nearby. “It was because his dæmon didn’t change. They thought he was older than he looked, or summing, and he weren’t really a young kid. But really his dæmon never changed very often because Tony hisself never thought much about anything. I seen her change. She was called Ratter…”
“Why are they so interested in dæmons?” said Lyra.
“No one knows,” said the blond girl.
“I know,” said one boy who’d been listening. “What they do is kill your dæmon and then see if you die.”
“Well, how come they do it over and over with different kids?” said someone. “They’d only need to do it once, wouldn’t they?”
“I know what they do,” said the first girl.
She had everyone’s attention now. But because they didn’t want to let the staff know what they were talking about, they had to adopt a strange, half-careless, indifferent manner, while listening with passionate curiosity.
“How?” said someone.
“’Cause I was with him when they came for him. We was in the linen room,” she said.
She was blushing hotly. If she was expecting jeers and teasing, they didn’t come. All the children were subdued, and no one even smiled.
The girl went on: “We was keeping quiet and then the nurse came in, the one with the soft voice. And she says, Come on, Tony, I know you’re there, come on, we won’t hurt you….And he says, What’s going to happen? And she says, We just put you to sleep, and then we do a little operation, and then you wake up safe and sound. But Tony didn’t believe her. He says—”
“The holes!” said someone. “They make a hole in your head like the Tartars! I bet!”
“Shut up! What else did the nurse say?” someone else put in. By this time, a dozen or more children were clustered around her table, their dæmons as desperate to know as they were, all wide-eyed and tense.
The blond girl went on: “Tony wanted to know what they was gonna do with Ratter, see. And the nurse says, Well, she’s going to sleep too, just like when you do. And Tony says, You’re gonna kill her, en’t yer? I know you are. We all know that’s what happens. And the nurse says, No, of course not. It’s just a little operation. Just a little cut. It won’t even hurt, but we put you to sleep to make sure.”
All the room had gone quiet now. The nurse who’d been supervising had left for a moment, and the hatch to the kitchen was shut so no one could hear from there.
“What sort of cut?” said a boy, his voice quiet and frightened. “Did she say what sort of cut?”
“She just said, It’s something to make you more grown up. She said everyone had to have it, that’s why grownups’ dæmons don’t change like ours do. So they have a cut to make them one shape forever, and that’s how you get grown up.”
“But—”
“Does that mean—”
“What, all grownups’ve had this cut?”
“What about—”
Suddenly all the voices stopped as if they themselves had been cut, and all eyes turned to the door. Sister Clara stood there, bland and mild and matter-of-fact, and beside her was a man in a white coat whom Lyra hadn’t seen before.
“Bridget McGinn,” he said.
The blond girl stood up trembling. Her squirrel dæmon clutched her breast.
“Yes, sir?” she said, her voice hardly audible.
“Finish your drink and come with Sister Clara,” he said. “The rest of you run along and go to your classes.”
Obediently the children stacked their mugs on the stainless-steel trolley before leaving in silence. No one looked at Bridget McGinn except Lyra, and she saw the blond girl’s face vivid with fear.
The rest of that morning was spent in exercise. There was a small gymnasium at the station, because it was hard to exercise outside during the long polar night, and each group of children took turns to play in there, under the supervision of a nurse. They had to form teams and throw balls around, and at first Lyra, who had never in her life played at anything like this, was at a loss what to do. But she was quick and athletic, and a natural leader, and soon found herself enjoying it. The shouts of the children, the shrieks and hoots of the dæmons, filled the little gymnasium and soon banished fearful thoughts; which of course was exactly what the exercise was intended to do.
At lunchtime, when the children were lining up once again in the canteen, Lyra felt Pantalaimon give a chirrup of recognition, and turned to find Billy Costa standing just behind her.
“Roger told me you was here,” he muttered.
“Your brother’s coming, and John Faa and a whole band of gyptians,” she said. “They’re going to take you home.”
He nearly cried aloud with joy, but subdued the cry into a cough.
“And you got to call me Lizzie,” Lyra said, “never Lyra. And you got to tell me everything you know, right.”
They sat together, with Roger close by. It was easier to do this at lunchtime, when children spent more time coming and going between the tables and the counter, where bland-looking adults served equally bland food. Under the clatter of knives and forks and plates Billy and Roger both told her as much as they knew. Billy had heard from a nurse that children who had had the operation were often taken to hostels further south, which might explain how Tony Makarios came to be wandering in the wild. But Roger had something even more interesting to tell her.
“I found a hiding place,” he said.
“What? Where?”
“See that picture…” He meant the big photogram of the tropical beach. “If you look in the top right corner, you see that ceiling panel?”
The ceiling consisted of large rectangular panels set in a framework of metal strips, and the corner of the panel above the picture had lifted slightly.
“I saw that,” Roger said, “and I thought the others might be like it, so I lifted ’em, and they’re all loose. They just lift up. Me and this boy tried it one night in our dormitory, before they took him away. There’s a space up there and you can crawl inside….”
“How far can you crawl in the ceiling?”
“I dunno. We just went in a little way. We reckoned when it was time we could hide up there, but they’d probably find us.”
Lyra saw it not as a hiding place but as a highway. It was the best thing she’d heard since she’d arrived. But before they could talk any more, a doctor banged on a table with a spoon and began to speak.
“Listen, children,” he said. “Listen carefully. Every so often we have to have a fire drill. It’s very important that we all get dressed properly and make our way outside without any panic. So we’re going to have a practice fire drill this afternoon. When the bell, rings you must stop whatever you’re doing and do what the nearest grownup says. Remember where they take you. That’s the place you must go to if there’s a real fire.”
Well, thought Lyra, there’s an idea.
During the first part of the afternoon, Lyra and four other girls were tested for Dust. Th
e doctors didn’t say that was what they were doing, but it was easy to guess. They were taken one by one to a laboratory, and of course this made them all very frightened; how cruel it would be, Lyra thought, if she perished without striking a blow at them! But they were not going to do that operation just yet, it seemed.
“We want to make some measurements,” the doctor explained. It was hard to tell the difference between these people: all the men looked similar in their white coats and with their clipboards and pencils, and the women resembled one another too, the uniforms and their strange bland calm manner making them all look like sisters.
“I was measured yesterday,” Lyra said.
“Ah, we’re making different measurements today. Stand on the metal plate—oh, slip your shoes off first. Hold your dæmon, if you like. Look forward, that’s it, stare at the little green light. Good girl…”
Something flashed. The doctor made her face the other way and then to left and right, and each time something clicked and flashed.
“That’s fine. Now come over to this machine and put your hand into the tube. Nothing to harm you, I promise. Straighten your fingers. That’s it.”
“What are you measuring?” she said. “Is it Dust?”
“Who told you about Dust?”
“One of the other girls, I don’t know her name. She said we was all over Dust. I en’t dusty, at least I don’t think I am. I had a shower yesterday.”
“Ah, it’s a different sort of dust. You can’t see it with your ordinary eyesight. It’s a special dust. Now clench your fist—that’s right. Good. Now if you feel around in there, you’ll find a sort of handle thing—got that? Take hold of that, there’s a good girl. Now can you put your other hand over this way—rest it on this brass globe. Good. Fine. Now you’ll feel a slight tingling, nothing to worry about, it’s just a slight anbaric current….”
Pantalaimon, in his most tense and wary wildcat form, prowled with lightning-eyed suspicion around the apparatus, continually returning to rub himself against Lyra.
She was sure by now that they weren’t going to perform the operation on her yet, and sure too that her disguise as Lizzie Brooks was secure; so she risked a question.
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