The Book of Dust, Volume 1

by Philip Pullman

  “She’s horrible. I’ve never seen a dæmon so different from their person before.”

  “I wonder if Dr. Relf will know who he is.”

  “I shouldn’t think so. She knows professors and scholars and people like that. He’s different.”

  “And spies. She knows spies.”

  “I don’t s’pose he’s a spy. He’s too obvious. Anyone would notice a dæmon like that.”

  Malcolm turned to his homework, constructing figures with his ruler and compasses, a task he normally enjoyed, but he couldn’t focus on it at all. That smile was still dazzling him.

  —

  Dr. Relf had never heard of anyone with a dæmon that was maimed in that way.

  “It must happen, though, occasionally,” she said.

  Then Malcolm told her what the dæmon had done on the path, and that puzzled her even more. Dæmons were as keen on privacy as people were, being people themselves, of course.

  “Well, it’s a puzzle,” she said.

  “What d’you think it means?”

  “Quite right, Malcolm. Treat it like a question for the alethiometer. See if we can work out what it all signifies. What she did on the path was an expression of contempt, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I thought so.”

  “For you, who were watching, and for the place where she was—for the priory. Perhaps for the nuns and all the things they represent. Then…a hyena is a scavenger. It feeds on carrion and dead bodies left by other animals, as well as killing prey itself.”

  “So it’s disgusting, but useful too,” said Malcolm.

  “So it is. I hadn’t thought of that. And it laughs.”

  “Does it?”

  “The ‘laughing hyena.’ Not really a laugh, but a cry that sounds like it.”

  “Like the crocodile crying tears when it doesn’t mean it.”

  “Hypocritical, you mean?”

  “Hypocritical,” said Malcolm, relishing the word.

  “And the man kept out of sight, you said.”

  “In the shadow, anyway.”

  “Tell me about the smile.”

  “Oh, yes, it was the strangest thing he did. He smiled and winked. No one else saw it. It was as if he was letting me know that he knew something I knew and no one else did. It was a secret between us. But not…You know how that sort of thing could make you feel creepy or dirty or guilty….”

  “But it wasn’t like that?”

  “It was happy, sort of. Really friendly and nice. And I can’t hardly believe it now, but I couldn’t help sort of liking him.”

  “But his dæmon kept gnawing at her leg,” said Asta. “I was watching. It was still raw—the stump, I mean. Sort of bloody.”

  “What could that mean?” said Malcolm.

  “She—he—they’re vulnerable, perhaps?” said Dr. Relf. “If she lost another leg, she wouldn’t be able to walk at all. What an awful situation.”

  “He didn’t look worried, though. He didn’t look as if anything would worry him or frighten him ever.”

  “Did you feel sorry for his dæmon?”

  “No,” said Malcolm decisively. “I felt glad. She’d be much more dangerous if she wasn’t hurt like that.”

  “So you’re in two minds about this man.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But your parents…”

  “Mum just said keep away, and didn’t say why. Dad obviously hated him being in the bar, but he had no reason to ask him to leave, and the other customers hated him being there too. I asked Dad later, and all he said was that he was a bad man and he wasn’t going to let him in the pub again. But he didn’t tell me what he’d done, or why he was bad, or anything. I think it was just something he felt.”

  “Have you seen him since?”

  “It was only the day before yesterday. But no.”

  “Let me see what I can find out,” said Dr. Relf. “Now, what about your books this week?”

  “The symbolic pictures one was difficult,” said Malcolm. “I didn’t understand most of it.”

  “What did you understand?”

  “That…things can stand for other things.”

  “That’s the main point. Good. The rest is a matter of detail. No one can remember all the meanings of the alethiometer pictures, so we need the books to be able to read it.”

  “It’s like a secret language.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Did someone make it up? Or…”

  “Or did they discover it? Was that what you were going to say?”

  “Yes, it was,” he said, a little surprised. “So which is it?”

  “That’s not so easy. Let’s think of another example—something else. You know the theorem of Pythagoras?”

  “The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.”

  “That’s exactly it. And is that true for every example you’ve tried?”

  “Yes.”

  “And was it true before Pythagoras realized it?”

  Malcolm thought. “Yes,” he said. “It must have been.”

  “So he didn’t invent it. He discovered it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Now let’s take one of the alethiometer symbols. The hive, for example, surrounded by bees. One of its meanings is sweetness, and another is light. Can you see why?”

  “Honey for the sweetness. And…”

  “What are candles made of?”

  “Wax! Beeswax!”

  “That’s right. We don’t know who first realized that those meanings were there, but did the similarity, the association, exist before they realized it, or not until then? Did they invent it or discover it?”

  Malcolm thought hard.

  “That’s not quite the same,” he said slowly. “Because you can prove Pythagoras’s theorem. So you know it must be true. But there’s nothing to prove with the beehive. You can see the connection, but you can’t prove…”

  “All right, put it like this. Suppose the person who made the alethiometer was looking for a symbol to express the ideas of sweetness and light. Could they have chosen just anything? Could they have chosen a sword, for example, or a dolphin?”

  Malcolm tried to work it out. “Not really,” he said. “You could twist it a lot and make them similar, but…”

  “That’s right. There’s a natural sort of connection with the beehive, but not with the other two.”

  “Yeah. Yes.”

  “So was it invented or discovered?”

  Malcolm thought hard again, and then smiled.

  “Discovered,” he said.

  “All right. Next let’s try this. Can you imagine another world?”

  “I think so.”

  “A world where Pythagoras never existed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would his theorem be true there as well?”

  “Yes. It would be true everywhere.”

  “Now imagine that world has people like us in it, but no bees. They’d have the experience of sweetness and of light, but how would they symbolize them?”

  “Well, they…they’d find some other things. Maybe sugar for the sweetness and something else, maybe the sun, for light.”

  “Yes, those would work. Let’s imagine another world, a different one again, where there are bees but no people. Would there still be a connection between a beehive and sweetness and light?”

  “Well, the connection would be…here, in our minds. But not there. If we can think about that other world, we could see a connection, even if there was no one there to see it.”

  “That’s good. Now, we still can’t say whether that language you spoke about, the language of symbols, was definitely invented or definitely discovered, but it looks more as if—”

  “As if it was discovered,” said Malcolm. “But it’s still not like Pythagoras’s theorem. You can’t prove it. It depends on…on…”

  “Yes?”

  “It depends on people being there to see it. The theorem doesn’t.”


  “That’s right!”

  “But it’s a bit invented as well. Without people to see it, it would just be…it might as well not be there at all.”

  He sat back, feeling slightly dizzy. Her familiar room was warm, the chair was comfortable, the plate of biscuits was to hand. He felt as if this was the place where he was truly at home, more so than his mother’s kitchen or his own bedroom, and he knew he would never say that to anyone but Asta.

  “I’ll have to go soon,” he said.

  “You’ve worked hard.”

  “Was that work?”

  “Yes, I think so. Don’t you?”

  “I suppose so. Can I see the alethiometer?”

  “I’m afraid it has to stay in the library. We’ve only got the one instrument. But here’s a picture you can have.”

  She took a folded sheet of paper from a drawer in the cabinet and gave it to him. Unfolding it, he found the plan of a large circle with thirty-six divisions around the rim. In each of the little spaces was a picture: an ant, a tree, an anchor, an hourglass….

  “There’s the beehive,” he said.

  “Keep it,” she told him. “I used it when I was learning them, but I know them now.”

  “Thank you! I’ll learn them too.”

  “There’s a memory trick I’ll tell you about another time. Rather than memorize them all for now, you could choose one of them and just think about it. What ideas does it suggest? What could it symbolize?”

  “Right, I will. There’s—” He stopped. The circle in the diagram, divided into its little sections, reminded him of something.

  “There’s what?”

  “It’s sort of like something I saw….”

  He described the spangled ring that he’d seen on the night Lord Asriel had come to the Trout. She was interested at once.

  “That sounds like a migraine aura,” she said. “Do you have bad headaches?”

  “No, never.”

  “Just the aura, then. You’ll probably see it again sometime. Did you like the other book? The one about the Silk Road?”

  “It’s the place I want to go to most in the world.”

  “One day, perhaps, you will.”

  —

  That evening, someone brought La Belle Sauvage back.

  Just as Malcolm finished his supper and took his pudding bowl to the sink, there was a knock on the kitchen door—the door to the garden. No one came to that door as a rule. Malcolm looked at his mother, but she was busy at the stove and he was close to the door, so he opened it a little way.

  There stood a man he didn’t know, wearing a leather jacket and a wide-brimmed hat, with a blue-and-white-spotted handkerchief around his neck. Something about his clothes, or the way he stood, made Malcolm think: gyptian.

  “Are you Malcolm?” the man asked.

  “Yes,” said Malcolm, and at the same moment his mother said, “Who is it?”

  The man stepped forward into the light and took off his hat. He was in late middle age, lean and brown-skinned. His expression was calm and courteous, and his dæmon was a very large and beautiful cat.

  “Coram van Texel, ma’am,” he said. “I’ve got something for Malcolm, if you’ll just excuse him for a few minutes.”

  “Got something? Got what? Come inside and give it to him here,” she said.

  “It’s a bit big for that,” said the gyptian. “It won’t take more’n a short while. I need to explain a couple of things.”

  His mother’s badger dæmon had left his corner and come to the door, and he and the cat dæmon touched noses and exchanged a whisper. Then Mrs. Polstead nodded.

  “Go on, then,” she said.

  Malcolm finished drying his hands and went outside with the stranger. It had stopped raining, but the air was saturated with moisture, and the lights through the windows shone on the terrace and the grass with a misty radiance that made everything look as if it was underwater.

  The stranger stepped off the terrace and headed towards the river. Malcolm could see the line of the footprints in the wet grass he’d just made coming up.

  “You remember Lord Asriel,” the stranger said.

  “Yes. Is it—”

  “He charged me with bringing back your boat, and he said to give you great thanks, and he hopes you’ll be pleased with her condition.”

  As they went beyond the reach of the lights from the windows, the man struck a match and lit a lantern. He adjusted the wick and closed the lens, and a clear beam fell out on the grass ahead and all the way to the little jetty, where La Belle Sauvage was tied up.

  Malcolm ran to look. The river was full, holding his beloved canoe higher than usual, and he could see at once that she had been worked on.

  “The name—oh, thanks!” he said.

  Her name had been painted with great skill in red paint and outlined with a fine line of cream in a way that he would never have managed. It stood out proudly against the green of the boat, which itself…Ignoring the wet grass, he knelt to look closely. Something was different.

  “She’s been through the hands of the finest boatbuilder on English waters,” said Coram van Texel. “Every inch of her has been looked at and strengthened, and that paint on her now is a special anti-fouling paint that has another virtue too. She’ll be the slippiest vessel on the Thames, apart from real gyptian boats. She’ll go through the water like a hot knife through butter.”

  Malcolm touched the canoe in wonderment.

  “Now let me show you something else,” said the visitor. “See those brackets set along the gunwales?”

  “What are they for?”

  The man reached down into the canoe and pulled up a handful of long, slender hazel sticks. He took one and handed the rest to Malcolm, then he leaned out and slipped one end into a bracket on the far side of the canoe, bent it towards himself, and put the other end in a bracket on the near side. The result was a neat hoop across the canoe.

  “You try another,” he said, and shone the lantern on the next bracket. After a few tries Malcolm slipped it in. He found that the stick bent with great ease, but that once both ends were fixed, the stick was completely firm and unmoving.

  “What are they for?” he said.

  “I won’t show you now, but under the thwart amidships you’ll find a tarpaulin. A special kind made of coal silk. You put all the rods in place and pull the tarpaulin over and you’ll be snug and dry, no matter how much rain comes down. There’s fixings along the edge, but you can work out how to do them.”

  “Thank you!” said Malcolm. “That’s—oh, that’s wonderful!”

  “It’s Lord Asriel you must thank. But this is his thanks to you, so you’re all square. Now, Malcolm, I need to ask you a question or two. I know you’re visiting a lady called Dr. Relf, and I know why. You can tell her about this, and you can tell her about me, and if she needs to know any more, you can just say the words Oakley Street.”

  “Oakley Street.”

  “Thassit. That’ll reassure her. Don’t say those words to anyone else, mind. Now, everything you tell her comes back to me in due course, but time’s pressing, and I need to know this urgently. I daresay you see most people who come to the Trout?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You know a lot of ’em by name?”

  “Well, some.”

  “You ever know of a man by the name of Gerard Bonneville?”

  Before Malcolm could answer, he heard the kitchen door open behind him, and his mother’s voice calling, “Malcolm! Malcolm! Where are you?”

  “I’m here!” he shouted. “I won’t be a minute.”

  “Well, don’t, then,” she called, and went back inside.

  Malcolm waited till she shut the door, and then said, “Mr. Van Texel, what’s all this about?”

  “I got two warnings for you, and I’ll be off.”

  For the first time Malcolm saw another boat on the water—a long, low-cabined launch with a quiet motor that puttered gently and held it against the stream. It sh
owed no lights, and he could just make out a man’s outline at the wheel.

  “First,” said Van Texel, “the weather’s going to improve in the next few days. Sunshine, warm winds. Don’t be fooled by it. After that the rain’ll come back even harder, and then there’ll be the biggest flood anyone’s seen for a hundred years, and not a normal flood either. Every river’s full to bursting, and a lot of the weirs are about to give way. The River Board en’t been doing its job. But more’n that, there’s things in the water been disturbed, and things in the sky too, and they’re both clear and bright to them as can read the signs. Tell your mother and father. Be ready.”

  “I will.”

  “And second, remember that name I said: Gerard Bonneville. You’ll know him if you see him because his dæmon’s a hyena.”

  “Oh! Yes! He’s been here. A few days ago. His dæmon’s only got three legs.”

  “Has she, now. Did he say anything to you?”

  “No. I don’t think anyone wanted to speak to him. He was drinking by himself. He looked nice.”

  “Well, he might try to be nice to you, but don’t you go near him. Never let him get you alone. Have nothing to do with him.”

  “Thank you,” said Malcolm. “I won’t. Mr. Van Texel, are you a gyptian?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Are the gyptians against the CCD, then?”

  “We’re not all the same, Malcolm. Some are, and some aren’t.” He turned to the water and gave a low whistle, and instantly the launch turned its head and glided towards the jetty.

  Coram van Texel helped Malcolm haul La Belle Sauvage up onto the grass and then said, “Remember what I told you about the flood. And about Bonneville.”

  They shook hands, and the gyptian stepped onto the launch. A moment later the engine sound increased just a little and the boat sped away upstream and was lost in the dark.

  “What was that all about?” said his mother two minutes later.

  “I lent the canoe to someone, and that man brought it back.”

  “Oh. Well, get on and take these dinners through. Table by the big fire.”

  There were four plates of roast pork and vegetables. He could only manage two at a time, as they were hot, but he did that as quickly as he could and then brought the diners three pints of Badger and a bottle of IPA, and the evening was under way, as busy a Saturday as they’d had for weeks. Malcolm looked out for the man with the three-legged hyena dæmon, but there was no sign of him. He worked hard and picked up a lot of tips, which would all go into the walrus.