His Dark Materials 02 - The Subtle Knife

by Philip Pullman

  Lyra narrowed her eyes. Was this a trap?

  “Well, all right,” she said. “But remember, there’s things I need to know.”

  “Yes. Of course. You will come?”

  “Yes,” said Lyra. “If I say I will, I will. I could help you, I expect.”

  And she left. The porter at the desk looked up briefly and then went back to his paper.

  “The Nuniatak dig,” said the archaeologist, swinging his chair around. “You’re the second person in a month to ask me about that.”

  “Who was the other one?” said Will, on his guard at once.

  “I think he was a journalist. I’m not sure.”

  “Why did he want to know about it?” he said.

  “In connection with one of the men who disappeared on that trip. It was the height of the cold war when the expedition vanished. Star Wars. You’re probably too young to remember that. The Americans and the Russians were building enormous radar installations all across the Arctic . . . . Anyway, what can I do for you?”

  “Well,” said Will, trying to keep calm, “I was just trying to find out about that expedition, really. For a school project about prehistoric people. And I read about this expedition that disappeared, and I got curious.”

  “Well, you’re not the only one, as you see. There was a big to-do about it at the time. I looked it all up for the journalist. It was a preliminary survey, not a proper dig. You can’t do a dig till you know whether it’s worth spending time on it, so this group went out to look at a number of sites and make a report. Half a dozen blokes altogether. Sometimes on an expedition like this you combine forces with people from another discipline—you know, geologists or whatever—to split the cost. They look at their stuff and we look at ours. In this case there was a physicist on the team. I think he was looking at high-level atmospheric particles. The aurora, you know, the northern lights. He had balloons with radio transmitters, apparently.

  “And there was another man with them. An ex-Marine, a sort of professional explorer. They were going up into some fairly wild territory, and polar bears are always a danger in the Arctic. Archaeologists can deal with some things, but we’re not trained to shoot, and someone who can do that and navigate and make camp and do all the sort of survival stuff is very useful.

  “But then they all vanished. They kept in radio contact with a local survey station, but one day the signal didn’t come, and nothing more was heard. There’d been a blizzard, but that was nothing unusual. The search expedition found their last camp more or less intact, though the bears had eaten their stores. But there was no sign of the people whatsoever.

  “And that’s all I can tell you, I’m afraid.”

  “Yes,” said Will. “Thank you. Umm . . . that journalist,” he went on, stopping at the door. “You said he was interested in one of the men. Which one was it?”

  “The explorer type. A man called Parry.”

  “What did he look like? The journalist, I mean?”

  “What d’you want to know that for?”

  “Because . . . ” Will couldn’t think of a plausible reason. He shouldn’t have asked. “No reason. I just wondered.”

  “As far as I can remember, he was a big blond man. Very pale hair.”

  “Right, thanks,” Will said, and turned to go.

  The man watched him leave the room, saying nothing, frowning a little. Will saw him reach for the phone, and left the building quickly.

  He found he was shaking. The journalist, so called, was one of the men who’d come to his house: a tall man with such fair hair that he seemed to have no eyebrows or eyelashes. He wasn’t the one Will had knocked down the stairs: he was the one who’d appeared at the door of the living room as Will ran down and jumped over the body.

  But he wasn’t a journalist.

  There was a large museum nearby. Will went in, holding his clipboard as if he were working, and sat down in a gallery hung with paintings. He was trembling hard and feeling sick, because pressing at him was the knowledge that he’d killed someone, that he was a murderer. He’d kept it at bay till now, but it was closing in. He’d taken away the man’s life.

  He sat still for half an hour, and it was one of the worst half-hours he’d ever spent. People came and went, looking at the paintings, talking in quiet voices, ignoring him; a gallery attendant stood in the doorway for a few minutes, hands behind his back, and then slowly moved away; and Will wrestled with the horror of what he’d done, and didn’t move a muscle.

  Gradually he grew calmer. He’d been defending his mother. They were frightening her; given the state she was in, they were persecuting her. He had a right to defend his home. His father would have wanted him to do that. He did it because it was the good thing to do. He did it to stop them from stealing the green leather case. He did it so he could find his father; and didn’t he have a right to do that? All his childish games came back to him, with himself and his father rescuing each other from avalanches or fighting pirates. Well, now it was real. I’ll find you, he said in his mind. Just help me and I’ll find you, and we’ll look after Mum, and everything’ll be all right . . . .

  And after all, he had somewhere to hide now, somewhere so safe no one would ever find him. And the papers from the case (which he still hadn’t had time to read) were safe too, under the mattress in Cittàgazze.

  Finally he noticed people moving more purposefully, and all in the same direction. They were leaving, because the attendant was telling them that the museum would close in ten minutes. Will gathered himself and left. He found his way to the High Street, where the lawyer’s office was, and wondered about going to see him, despite what he’d said earlier. The man had sounded friendly enough . . . .

  But as he made up his mind to cross the street and go in, he stopped suddenly.

  The tall man with the pale eyebrows was getting out of a car.

  Will turned aside at once, casually, and looked in the window of the jeweler’s shop beside him. He saw the man’s reflection look around, settle the knot of his tie, and go into the lawyer’s office. As soon as he’d gone in, Will moved away, his heart thudding again. There wasn’t anywhere safe. He drifted toward the university library and waited for Lyra.

  FIVE

  AIRMAIL PAPER

  “Will,” said Lyra.

  She spoke quietly, but he was startled all the same. She was sitting on the bench beside him and he hadn’t even noticed.

  “Where did you come from?”

  “I found my Scholar! She’s called Dr. Malone. And she’s got an engine that can see Dust, and she’s going to make it talk—”

  “I didn’t see you coming.”

  “You weren’t looking,” she said. “You must’ve been thinking about something else. It’s a good thing I found you. Look, it’s easy to fool people. Watch.”

  Two police officers were strolling toward them, a man and a woman on the beat, in their white summer shirtsleeves, with their radios and their batons and their suspicious eyes. Before they reached the bench, Lyra was on her feet and speaking to them.

  “Please, could you tell me where the museum is?” she said. “Me and my brother was supposed to meet our parents there and we got lost.”

  The policeman looked at Will, and Will, containing his anger, shrugged as if to say, “She’s right, we’re lost, isn’t it silly.” The man smiled. The woman said: “Which museum? The Ashmolean?”

  “Yeah, that one,” said Lyra, and pretended to listen carefully as the woman gave her instructions.

  Will got up and said, “Thanks,” and he and Lyra moved away together. They didn’t look back, but the police had already lost interest.

  “See?” she said. “If they were looking for you, I put ’em off. ’Cause they won’t be looking for someone with a sister. I better stay with you from now on,” she went on scoldingly once they’d gone around the corner. “You en’t safe on your own.”

  He said nothing. His heart was thumping with rage. They walked along toward a round build
ing with a great leaden dome, set in a square bounded by honey-colored stone college buildings and a church and wide-crowned trees above high garden walls. The afternoon sun drew the warmest tones out of it all, and the air felt rich with it, almost the color itself of heavy golden wine. All the leaves were still, and in this little square even the traffic noise was hushed.

  She finally became aware of Will’s feelings and said, “What’s the matter?”

  “If you speak to people, you just attract their attention,” he said, with a shaking voice. “You should just keep quiet and still and they overlook you. I’ve been doing it all my life. I know how to do it. Your way, you just—you make yourself visible. You shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t play at it. You’re not being serious.”

  “You think so?” she said, and her anger flashed. “You think I don’t know about lying and that? I’m the best liar there ever was. But I en’t lying to you, and I never will, I swear it. You’re in danger, and if I hadn’t done that just then, you’d’ve been caught. Didn’t you see ’em looking at you? ’Cause they were. You en’t careful enough. If you want my opinion, it’s you that en’t serious.”

  “If I’m not serious, what am I doing hanging about waiting for you when I could be miles away? Or hiding out of sight, safe in that other city? I’ve got my own things to do, but I’m hanging about here so I can help you. Don’t tell me I’m not serious.”

  “You had to come through,” she said, furious. No one should speak to her like this. She was an aristocrat. She was Lyra. “You had to, else you’d never find out anything about your father. You done it for yourself, not for me.”

  They were quarreling passionately, but in subdued voices, because of the quiet in the square and the people who were wandering past nearby. When she said this, though, Will stopped altogether. He had to lean against the college wall beside him. The color had left his face.

  “What do you know about my father?” he said very quietly.

  She replied in the same tone. “I don’t know anything. All I know is you’re looking for him. That’s all I asked about.”

  “Asked who?”

  “The alethiometer, of course.”

  It took a moment for him to remember what she meant. And then he looked so angry and suspicious that she took it out of her rucksack and said, “All right, I’ll show you.”

  And she sat down on the stone curb around the grass in the middle of the square and bent her head over the golden instrument and began to turn the hands, her fingers moving almost too quickly to see, and then pausing for several seconds while the slender needle whipped around the dial, flicking to a stop here and there, and then turning the hands to new positions just as quickly. Will looked around carefully, but there was no one near to see; a group of tourists looked up at the domed building, an ice cream vendor wheeled his cart along the pavement, but their attention was elsewhere.

  Lyra blinked and sighed, as if she were waking after a sleep.

  “Your mother’s ill,” she said quietly. “But she’s safe. There’s this lady looking after her. And you took some letters and ran away. And there was a man, I think he was a thief, and you killed him. And you’re looking for your father, and—”

  “All right, shut up,” said Will. “That’s enough. You’ve got no right to look into my life like that. Don’t ever do that again. That’s just spying.”

  “I know when to stop asking,” she said. “See, the alethiometer’s like a person, almost. I sort of know when it’s going to be cross or when there’s things it doesn’t want me to know. I kind of feel it. But when you come out of nowhere yesterday, I had to ask it who you were, or I might not have been safe. I had to. And it said . . . ” She lowered her voice even more. “It said you was a murderer, and I thought, Good, that’s all right, he’s someone I can trust. But I didn’t ask more than that till just now, and if you don’t want me to ask any more, I promise I won’t. This en’t like a private peep show. If I done nothing but spy on people, it’d stop working. I know that as well as I know my own Oxford.”

  “You could have asked me instead of that thing. Did it say whether my father was alive or dead?”

  “No, because I didn’t ask.”

  They were both sitting by this time. Will put his head in his hands with weariness.

  “Well,” he said finally, “I suppose we’ll have to trust each other.”

  “That’s all right. I trust you.”

  Will nodded grimly. He was so tired, and there was not the slightest possibility of sleep in this world. Lyra wasn’t usually so perceptive, but something in his manner made her think: He’s afraid, but he’s mastering his fear, like Iorek Byrnison said we had to do; like I did by the fish house at the frozen lake.

  “And, Will,” she added, “I won’t give you away, not to anyone. I promise.”

  “Good.”

  “I done that before. I betrayed someone. And it was the worst thing I ever did. I thought I was saving his life actually, only I was taking him right to the most dangerous place there could be. I hated myself for that, for being so stupid. So I’ll try very hard not to be careless or forget and betray you.”

  He said nothing. He rubbed his eyes and blinked hard to try and wake himself up.

  “We can’t go back through the window till much later,” he said. “We shouldn’t have come through in daylight anyway. We can’t risk anyone seeing. And now we’ve got to hang around for hours . . . . ”

  “I’m hungry,” Lyra said.

  Then he said, “I know! We can go to the cinema!”

  “The what?”

  “I’ll show you. We can get some food there too.”

  There was a cinema near the city center, ten minutes’ walk away. Will paid for both of them to get in, and bought hot dogs and popcorn and Coke, and they carried the food inside and sat down just as the film was beginning.

  Lyra was entranced. She had seen projected photograms, but nothing in her world had prepared her for the cinema. She wolfed down the hot dog and the popcorn, gulped the Coca-Cola, and gasped and laughed with delight at the characters on the screen. Luckily it was a noisy audience, full of children, and her excitement wasn’t conspicuous. Will closed his eyes at once and went to sleep.

  He woke when he heard the clatter of seats as people moved out, and blinked in the light. His watch showed a quarter past eight. Lyra came away reluctantly.

  “That’s the best thing I ever saw in my whole life,” she said. “I dunno why they never invented this in my world. We got some things better than you, but this was better than anything we got.”

  Will couldn’t even remember what the film had been. It was still light outside, and the streets were busy.

  “D’you want to see another one?”

  “Yeah!”

  So they went to the next cinema, a few hundred yards away around the corner, and did it again. Lyra settled down with her feet on the seat, hugging her knees, and Will let his mind go blank. When they came out this time, it was nearly eleven o’clock—much better.

  Lyra was hungry again, so they bought hamburgers from a cart and ate them as they walked along, something else new to her.

  “We always sit down to eat. I never seen people just walking along eating before,” she told him. “There’s so many ways this place is different. The traffic, for one. I don’t like it. I like the cinema, though, and hamburgers. I like them a lot. And that Scholar, Dr. Malone, she’s going to make that engine use words. I just know she is. I’ll go back there tomorrow and see how she’s getting on. I bet I could help her. I could probably get the Scholars to give her the money she wants, too. You know how my father did it? Lord Asriel? He played a trick on them . . . . ”

  As they walked up the Banbury Road, she told him about the night she hid in the wardrobe and watched Lord Asriel show the Jordan Scholars the severed head of Stanislaus Grumman in the vacuum flask. And since Will was such a good audience, she went on and told him the rest of her story, from the time she escaped from Mrs.
Coulter’s flat to the horrible moment when she realized she’d led Roger to his death on the icy cliffs of Svalbard. Will listened without comment, but attentively, with sympathy. Her account of a voyage in a balloon, of armored bears and witches, of a vengeful arm of the Church, seemed all of a piece with his own fantastic dream of a beautiful city on the sea, empty and silent and safe: it couldn’t be true, it was as simple as that.

  But eventually they reached the ring road, and the hornbeam trees. There was very little traffic now: a car every minute or so, no more than that. And there was the window. Will felt himself smiling. It was going to be all right.

  “Wait till there’s no cars coming,” he said. “I’m going through now.”

  And a moment later he was on the grass under the palm trees, and a second or two afterward Lyra followed.

  They felt as if they were home again. The wide warm night, and the scent of flowers and the sea, and the silence, bathed them like soothing water.

  Lyra stretched and yawned, and Will felt a great weight lift off his shoulders. He had been carrying it all day, and he hadn’t noticed how it had nearly pressed him into the ground; but now he felt light and free and at peace.

  And then Lyra gripped his arm. In the same second he heard what had made her do it.

  Somewhere in the little streets beyond the café, something was screaming.

  Will set off at once toward the sound, and Lyra followed behind as he plunged down a narrow alley shadowed from the moonlight. After several twists and turns they came out into the square in front of the stone tower they’d seen that morning.

  Twenty or so children were facing inward in a semicircle at the base of the tower, and some of them had sticks in their hands, and some were throwing stones at whatever they had trapped against the wall. At first Lyra thought it was another child, but coming from inside the semicircle was a horrible high wailing that wasn’t human at all. And the children were screaming too, in fear as well as hatred.