The Book of Dust, Volume 1

by Philip Pullman

  “This is surmise,” said Papadimitriou, “but it’s likely that he’s pursuing the boy and the girl who are looking after Lyra. They have a boat—a canoe, I believe—and Hannah thinks they escaped in that. But, Hannah, where would they go? What would they be looking for?”

  “Well,” said Hannah, “some time ago now, Malcolm asked me about the idea of sanctuary, because he’d heard about it from one of the nuns, and he asked me if the colleges still offered sanctuary to scholars, and I told him that Jordan used to have some form of it….”

  “We still do,” said Papadimitriou. “Scholastic sanctuary has to be invoked by asking the Master himself. There’s a Latin formula….”

  “So I’m sure Malcolm would try to bring her here,” Hannah said. “But we’ve all seen the way the flood is racing through the city. I don’t think a canoe could make much headway in this sort of torrent. They’d have to go where the flood took them.”

  “But a baby is not a scholar,” said Papadimitriou. “It wouldn’t work.”

  “If she were granted scholastic sanctuary, though, how safe would it make her?”

  “Completely. The law has been tested in the courts, and always found to be impregnable. But, as I say—”

  “You know,” said Schlesinger, sitting forward suddenly, excited, “this makes sense of something else I heard in the north. I was asking about a child—I didn’t say girl, on purpose, I said child. Was there a prophecy about a child? And there was one witch—what was she called? Tilda Vasara…Queen Tilda Vasara—she told me she’d heard a prophecy about a boy, so I kind of listened politely, but I was really only interested in what they might have to say about a girl. And she said the voices in the aurora had spoken about a boy who had to carry a treasure to a place of safety. Well, I had no interest in a boy, so I clean forgot it till you started talking about a place of safety. Sanctuary. Could this boy of yours be doing that?”

  “Yes!” said Hannah. “It’s just the sort of way he’d think. He’s intensely romantic.”

  “But in any case, he hasn’t brought her here,” said Papadimitriou, “so we have to assume that if he was trying to come here, he failed, and they’ve been carried further downstream. What would his next idea be?”

  Hannah found all three men looking at her intently, as if they thought she knew. Well, perhaps she did.

  “Lord Asriel,” she said. “That night when Lord Asriel came to the priory and saw the baby, and Malcolm lent him his canoe, it made a great impression on him. Malcolm would think that Asriel represented safety for Lyra. I think he’d try and take her to him.”

  “Would he know where to find him?” said Papadimitriou.

  “I don’t know. I suppose London…but no, I have no idea.”

  “Anyway,” said Schlesinger, “I saw Asriel briefly last night in Chelsea. He’s just about to set off for the north again. Even if your Malcolm does get there, Asriel might be gone.”

  “Unless the flood holds him up,” said Nugent, standing. He looked suddenly younger, energized, full of purpose. “Well, everything’s clarified. We know what we have to do: we have to set off on the flood and find them before Bonneville does. Bud, how did you travel here?”

  “I hired a fast powerboat. I guess the owner’s still around; he said he’s going to try and pick up some work in Oxford.”

  “Find him, and set off,” said Nugent. “George, you know the gyptians. Use your contacts. Find a couple of boats, for yourself and for me. The Magisterium will be looking for them too. The CCD has a number of riverboats; they’ll all be concentrating on this. Hannah, put everything else aside and use the alethiometer to search for them.”

  “How will I keep in touch with you?” said Hannah.

  “You won’t,” said Lord Nugent. “Whether we’re successful or not, you’ll be writing the history in due course. Go home, keep dry and safe, and watch the alethiometer. I’ll find a way of keeping in contact.”

  Malcolm had never thought it possible for an entire river, not to say an entire countryside, to disappear under a flood. Where this colossal amount of water had come from was hard to imagine. At one point later in the morning, he put his hand over the side and brought some to his mouth to taste, half expecting to find it salty, as if it was the Bristol Channel pouring its way through to London. But there was no salt; it didn’t taste very good, but it wasn’t seawater.

  “If you was paddling to London,” said Alice, “and the river was normal and there wasn’t no flood, how long would it take?”

  It was the first time she’d spoken since they’d left the pharmacy two hours before.

  “Dunno. It’s about sixty miles, maybe more, ’cause the river twists and turns. But you’d be going with the current, so…”

  “Well, how long, then?”

  “A few days?”

  Alice’s expression indicated disgust.

  “But this’ll be quicker,” Malcolm went on, “ ’cause the current’s stronger. Look how fast we’re going past those trees.”

  The summit of a hill stood out above the water, crowned with a clump of trees, mostly oaks, whose bare branches looked mournful against the gray sky. But La Belle Sauvage was moving fast; in a minute she had sped past, and the hill was behind them.

  “So it shouldn’t take that long,” he said. “Maybe just a day.”

  Alice said nothing, but reached down to adjust Lyra’s covers. The child was lying between her feet, wrapped up so thickly that all Malcolm could make out was the top of her head and the brilliant butterfly Pantalaimon perching on her hair.

  “Is she all right?” he said.

  “Seems to be.”

  Asta was very curious about Pan. She had noticed before that he could change in Lyra’s sleep, although he was asleep himself. She had a theory that when he was a butterfly it meant that Lyra was dreaming, but Malcolm was skeptical. Of course, neither of them had the faintest idea what happened when they themselves were asleep; they knew Asta could go to sleep as one creature and wake up as another, but neither of them remembered anything about the change. It was the sort of thing he’d have liked to mention to Alice, but the prospect of her bottomless scorn put him off.

  “I bet it is a dream,” Asta said.

  “Who’s that?” said Alice sharply.

  She was pointing past Malcolm’s shoulder, looking some distance back. He turned to look and saw, only just visible through the wet gray air, a man in a dinghy rowing hard towards them.

  “Can’t see for sure,” Malcolm said. “It might be…”

  “It is,” she said. “That dæmon’s in the front. Go faster.”

  Malcolm could see that the dinghy was an unhandy vessel, by no means as swift and easy through the water as La Belle Sauvage. Still, the man had adult muscles and was plying the oars with determination.

  So Malcolm dug the paddle in and urged the canoe forward. But he couldn’t do it for long, because his shoulders and arms, his whole torso and waist, were aching.

  “What’s he doing? Where is he?” he said.

  “He’s dropping back. Can’t see him—he’s behind that hill—keep going!”

  “I’m going as fast as I can. But I’ll have to stop soon. Besides…”

  The change in motion had woken Lyra, and she began to cry quietly. They’d have to feed her before long, and that meant tying up the canoe, building a fire, heating the saucepan. And before that, finding somewhere to hide.

  Malcolm looked all around while paddling as steadily as he could. They were in a broad valley, probably far above the riverbed, with a wooded slope rising out of the water to the left, and to the right a large house, classical in shape and white in color, on the breast of a green hill on which were more trees. Each side was some way off; it was likely that the man in the dinghy would see them long before they reached a hiding place.

  “Make for the house,” said Alice.

  Malcolm thought that was the better option too, so he paddled the canoe as fast as he could in that direction. As they got cl
oser, he could see a thin column of smoke rising from one of the many chimneys, before being blown away.

  “There’s people there,” he said.

  “Good” was all she said.

  “If there’s people around,” said Asta, “he’s less likely to…”

  “Suppose he’s already here, and he’s one of them?” said Malcolm.

  “But that was him back there in the boat,” she said. “Wasn’t it?”

  “Maybe. Too far away to see.”

  Malcolm was realizing how tired he was. He had no idea how long he’d been paddling, but as he slowed down, nearing the house, he felt more and more hungry and weary and cold. He could barely hold his head up.

  Ahead of them a sloping lawn rose directly out of the floodwater and led smoothly up to the white facade of the house, the columns and the pediment. Someone was moving there, behind the columns, but the light was too gloomy to see anything more than the movement. The smoke was rising from a chimney somewhere at the back.

  Malcolm brought the canoe to rest against the grass of the lawn.

  “Well, what are we s’posed to do now?” said Alice.

  The slope was a gentle one, and the edge of the water was some feet further than the canoe could reach.

  “Take your shoes and socks off,” said Malcolm, hauling off his boots. “We’ll pull the canoe up out of the water. It’ll slide over the grass easy enough.”

  There was a shout from the house. A man came out from between the columns and gestured to them to go away. He shouted again, but they couldn’t hear what he said.

  “You better go up and tell him we got to feed a baby and rest for a while,” said Malcolm.

  “Why me?”

  “ ’Cause he’ll take more notice of you.”

  They got the canoe out of the water, and then Alice sulkily picked her way up the lawn towards the man, who was shouting again.

  Malcolm pulled the canoe away from the water and into ragged shrubbery at the edge of the lawn, and then slumped down beside it. He said to Lyra, “I suppose you’re just waking up, are you? It’s all right for some. It’s a nice life being a baby.”

  She wasn’t happy. Malcolm took her out of the canoe and cuddled her on his lap, ignoring the smell that meant she needed changing, ignoring the heavy gray sky and the cold wind and the distant man in the dinghy, who had come into sight again. He held the little child against his chest and self-consciously kissed her forehead.

  “We’ll keep you safe,” he said. “See, Alice is talking to the man up there. Soon we’ll take you there and make a fire and warm some milk. Course, if your mummy was here…You never had a mummy, did you? You were just found somewhere. The lord chancellor found you under a bush. And he thought, Blimey, I can’t look after a baby, I better take her to the sisters at Godstow. So then it was Sister Fenella who looked after you. I bet you remember her. She’s a nice old lady, isn’t she? And then the flood came and we had to take you away in La Belle Sauvage to keep you safe. I wonder if you’ll remember any of this. Prob’ly not. I can’t remember anything from when I was a baby. Look, here comes Alice. Let’s see what she says.”

  “He says we can’t stay long,” she told him. “I says we got to make a fire and feed the baby and we don’t want to stay long anyway. I think summing funny’s going on. He had a strange look about him.”

  “Was there anyone else there?” said Malcolm, getting to his feet.

  “No. At least I didn’t see no one.”

  “Take Lyra, then, and I’ll hide the canoe a bit more,” he said, handing over the child. His arms were trembling with fatigue.

  Once he had the canoe concealed, he gathered the things they needed for Lyra and made his way up to the house. The great door was open behind the columns, and lingering beside it was the man: a sour-faced individual in rough clothes, whose mastiff dæmon stood close by, watching without moving.

  “You en’t staying long,” the man said.

  “Not very long, no,” Malcolm agreed. And he recognized something: the man was a little drunk. Malcolm knew how to deal with drunks.

  “Lovely house,” he said.

  “So it may be. It en’t yours.”

  “Is it yours?”

  “ ’Tis now.”

  “Did you buy it, or did you fight for it?”

  “You being cheeky?”

  The mastiff dæmon growled.

  “No,” said Malcolm easily. “It’s just with everything changed by the flood, I wouldn’t be surprised if you had to fight for it. Everything’s different now. And if you fought for it, then it belongs to you, no doubt about it.”

  He looked down the lawn towards the turbid flood. In the heavy twilight he couldn’t see the rowing boat at all.

  “It’s like a castle,” he went on. “You could defend this easy, if you were attacked.”

  “Who’s going to attack it?”

  “No one. I’m just saying. You made a good choice.”

  The man turned and followed his gaze out over the water.

  “Has it got a name, this house?” said Malcolm.

  “Why?”

  “It looks important. It looks like a manor or a palace or something. You could call it after yourself.”

  The man snorted. It might have been with laughter.

  “You could put a notice up at the edge of the water,” Malcolm said. “Saying keep out, or trespassers will be prosecuted. You’d have every right to. Like that man over there in the dinghy,” he said, because now he could see the boat, still some way off, still moving steadily towards them.

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “Nothing, till he tries to land and take this house away from you.”

  “D’you know him?”

  “I think I know who he is. And he prob’ly would try and do that.”

  “I got a shotgun.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t dare land if you threatened him with that.”

  The man seemed to be thinking about it.

  “I got to defend my property,” he said.

  “Course you have. You got every right to.”

  “Who is he, anyway?”

  “If it’s who I think it is, his name’s Bonneville. He’s not long out of prison.”

  The mastiff dæmon, following the man’s line of sight, growled again.

  “Is he after you?”

  “Yeah. He’s been following us from Oxford.”

  “What’s he want?”

  “He wants the baby.”

  “Is it his kid, then?”

  The man’s blurred eyes swam towards focus on Malcolm’s face.

  “No. She’s our sister. He just wants her.”

  “Get away!”

  “I’m afraid so,” Malcolm said.

  “Bastard.”

  The man in the boat was getting closer, making quite clearly for the lawn, and now Malcolm had no doubt who he was.

  “I better get inside, in case he sees me,” he said. “We won’t make any trouble for you. We’ll get away as soon as we can.”

  “Don’t you worry, son,” the man said. “What’s your name?”

  Malcolm had to think.

  “Richard,” he said. “And my sister’s Sandra, and the baby’s Ellie.”

  “Get inside. Keep out the way. Leave him to me.”

  “Thank you,” said Malcolm, and he slipped inside.

  The man came inside too, and took a shotgun from a cabinet in a room just off the hall.

  “Be careful,” said Malcolm. “He might be dangerous.”

  “I’m dangerous.”

  The man went unsteadily outside. Malcolm looked around quickly. The hall was decorated with ornate plasterwork, cabinets in precious woods and tortoiseshell and gold, statues of marble. The huge chimneypiece was cracked, though, and the hearth was empty. Alice must have found the fire in another room.

  Afraid to call out for her, he hurried from room to room, listening hard for the sound of a gunshot; but there was no sound from outside excep
t the wind and the rush of the water.

  He found Alice in the kitchen. There was a fire in an iron range, and Lyra sat freshly changed in the center of a large pine table.

  “What’d he say?” Alice demanded.

  “He said we can stay here and do what we need to. And he’s got a shotgun and he’s going to defend the house against Bonneville.”

  “Is he coming? It was him in the boat, wannit?”

  “Yeah.”

  The water in the saucepan had been boiling when Malcolm came in. Alice took it off to cool. Malcolm picked up the biscuit that had fallen from Lyra’s hand and gave it to her again. She gurgled her appreciation.

  “If she drops her biscuit, you ought to tell her where it’s gone,” he said to Pantalaimon, who instantly became a bush baby and gazed at him with enormous eyes, unmoving and silent.

  “Look at Pan,” Malcolm said to Alice.

  She cast a quick glance, not interested.

  “How does he know how to be one of them?” Malcolm went on. “They can’t ever have seen a whatever-it-is. So how does he know—”

  “What we gonna do if Bonneville gets past the man?” said Alice, her voice sharp and high.

  “Hide. Then run out and get away.”

  Her face showed what she thought of that.

  “Go and find out what’s going on,” she told him. “And don’t let him see you.”

  Malcolm went out and tiptoed along the corridor to the main hall. Pressing himself into the shadows beside the door, he listened hard, and hearing nothing, he looked around carefully. The hall was empty. What now?

  There was no sound but the wind and the water, no voices, certainly no gunshots. They might be talking at the water’s edge, he thought, and keeping to the wall, he moved silently across the marble floor towards the great windows.

  But Asta, moth-formed, got there first, and Malcolm felt a horrible shock as she saw something outside and fell off the curtain into his hand.

  The man from the house was lying on the grass, with his head and arms in the water beside Bonneville’s dinghy, not moving. There was no sign of Bonneville, and no sign of the gun.