The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) (23 page)

“A heron, was it? Might’ve been. I thought it was a flying boggart. They do fly, some of ’em, making a kind of a whirring noise. Only there was so much else going on, we couldn’t a’ heard that. That’s probably what it was, a flying elf or a spirit out the waters. Summing from the secret commonwealth, what I told you about. Look at the jacky lanterns now.”

The marsh lights, dozens of them, had all gathered around the burning wreck, making little darts towards it and out again, flickering and dancing.

“What are they doing?”

“Looking for any survivors. They’ll pull ’em down under the water and finish ’em off. Them potaters done yet?”

“Oh—yes.”

“Well, don’t let ’em get cold. Tell you what, there’s a tin of bully beef in the locker. Chop it up with the potatoes and fry the lot. I’m getting peckish.”

Lyra felt sick. She couldn’t help thinking of the dead men from the zeppelin, burned or drowned or worse, and of that beautiful white bird, driven up without mercy into the blades of the engine. Food was the last thing she wanted just then, but when the hash was cooking she found that, after all, it was a shame to waste it, and it did smell good; so she brought two plates of it to the cockpit, where Brabandt began by scooping up a forkful and dropping it over the side.

“For the will o’ the wykeses,” he said.

She did the same with hers, and then they ate their supper, sheltering their plates from the rain.

That same evening, Dick Orchard pushed open the door and went into the public bar of the Trout. He knew many of Oxford's pubs, but like everyone else, he had his favorites, and the Trout was too far out of the way for him to visit often. Still, the beer was good.

He ordered a pint and looked around warily. There was no one among the customers who looked like a scholar: a group of old men playing cards near the fireplace, two men who looked like farmworkers stolidly working their way through a long and winding argument about stock fencing, two younger couples ordering a meal—nothing more than a quiet night in a traditional waterside pub.

When the meal had been ordered and the younger couples were sitting down with their drinks, Dick spoke to the barman, a hefty man of sixty or so with thinning red hair and a genial expression.

“S'cuse me, mate,” Dick said. “I'm looking for someone called Malcolm Polstead. D'you know him?”

“He's my son,” said the barman. “He's in the kitchen at the moment, having a bite of supper. You want to speak to him?”

“When he's finished. No hurry.”

“You've only just caught him, as a matter of fact. He's leaving shortly for somewhere abroad.”

“Oh, is he? Lucky I came when I did, then.”

“Yes…he's got to go and sort out some of his affairs at the university and then he'll be catching a train. I don't think he's got all that long—he'll be off by tomorrow night latest, I'd guess. Why don't you take your drink over to the corner table and I'll let him know you're here, then he can come and say hello before he leaves. What name is it?”

“Dick Orchard. He won't know it, though. It's about…It's about Lyra.”

The barman's eyes widened. He leant a little closer and said quietly, “You know where she is?”

“No, but she told me the name Malcolm Polstead, so…”

“I'll get him now.”

Dick took his pint and sat down at the corner table. Something in the barman's manner made him wish he'd come here sooner.

Less than a minute later a tall man, not quite as hefty as his father the landlord, but still someone Dick would have hesitated to tangle with, sat down at the table with him. He held a mug of tea in one hand, and he was wearing a brown corduroy suit. His dæmon, a large ginger cat, touched noses courteously with Dick's vixen, Bindi.

Dick held out his hand, and Polstead shook it firmly.

“You know something about Lyra?” he said.

He spoke quietly, but his voice was very clear. It was deep and resonant, the voice of a singer, perhaps. Dick was puzzled. It wasn't surprising to know the man was a scholar, because of the intelligence in his face, but he had the air of someone who knew his way around the real world.

“Yeah,” said Dick. “She's a…she's a friend. She came round my house the other morning because she was in trouble, she said, and she asked if I could help her. She wanted to get to the Fens, you see, and my grandad's gyptian, and he happened to be in Oxford just then with his boat, and I gave her a…I told her how to introduce herself to him. I think she must've done that and gone off with him. She told me about something that had happened down near the Oxpens, by the river, and—”

“What was that?”

“She saw someone being killed.”

Malcolm liked the look of this boy. He was nervous, but he didn't let it get in the way of speaking clearly and frankly.

“How did you know my name?” Malcolm said. “Did Lyra tell you?”

“She said you knew about that business by the river, and she'd been staying here in the Trout, but she had to go, because…”

He was finding it hard to say. Malcolm waited. Dick looked around and leant in closer, and finally said almost in a whisper:

“She felt…the thing was, her dæmon, Pan…he'd gone. He wasn't with her. He'd just disappeared.”

And Malcolm thought:
Of course. Of course…This changes everything.

“I'd never seen anyone like that,” Dick went on in the same tone. “You know, separated. She was frightened, and she thought everyone'd be looking at her, or worse. There was someone she knew in the Fens, an old gyptian man, she knew she'd be safe with him, and she thought my grandad might be able to take her there.”

“What's his name?”

“My grandad? Giorgio Brabandt.”

“And the man in the Fens?”

“I dunno. She never said.”

“What did she have with her?”

“Just a rucksack.”

“What time was this?”

“Quite early. I'd just come home. I work the night shift at the Royal Mail.”

“Was it you who told Lyra about Benny Morris?”

“Yeah. I did.”

Dick wanted to ask whether Malcolm had found out anything about that man, but he held his tongue. Malcolm was taking out a notebook and pencil. He wrote something down and tore out the page.

“You can trust these two people,” he said. “They both know Lyra well. They'll be anxious to know where she's gone. If you could tell them what you've just told me, I'd be very obliged. And if you have the time to come out here, my mother and father would be glad to know if you hear any more from her. But don't tell anyone else.”

He passed over the paper, on which he'd written Alice's name and address and Hannah's.

“You going abroad, then?” Dick said.

“Yes. I wish I didn't have to. Listen, there's a possibility that Pan, that her dæmon, might turn up. He'll be just as vulnerable as she is. If he knows you, he might do what she did and ask for help.”

“I thought people died when they got separated like that. I couldn't believe it when I saw her.”

“Not always. Tell me, do you know anything about a man called Simon Talbot?”

“Never heard of him. Is he summing to do with this?”

“Quite possibly. What's your address, by the way?”

Dick told him, and Malcolm wrote it down.

“You going away for long?” said Dick.

“No way of telling at the moment. Oh—one of the people on that piece of paper, Dr. Relf, would be interested in anything else you can tell her about Benny Morris. He'll be back to work soon.”

“You seen him, then?”

“Yes.”

“Did he do it?”

“He said he didn't.”

“Are you…You en't police, are you?”

“No. Just a Scholar. Look, I've got to go—lots to do before I can leave. Thanks for coming here, Dick. When I get back, I'll buy you a drink.”

He stood up, and they shook hands.

“Cheers, then,” said Dick, and he watched as Malcolm made his way out of the bar. He moves easy for a big man, he thought.

At about the same time, Pantalaimon was crouching in the shadow of a derelict warehouse near a wharf in the Thames estuary, watching three sailors steal a ship's propeller.

There wasn't much light from the sky; a few stars flickered between the ragged clouds, and the moon was somewhere else. There was a feeble glow from the anbaric bulkhead light on the warehouse wall, but very little else to see by except the naphtha lantern in the prow of the rowing boat that had wavered across the creek from a battered old schooner tied up further along the wharf. The schooner was called the
Elsa,
and her captain had spent the day drinking beer after beer and persuading the mate to help him make off with the propeller, which was bolted to the deck of an almost equally squalid-looking coaster that seemed to have no crew at all, and to consist entirely of rust, apart from the four hundredweight of phosphor-bronze on the foredeck. They'd spent hours looking at it through the captain's cracked binoculars and speculating about how much it would fetch in a tolerant shipyard, while two deckhands languidly tossed various splintered planks and bits of rope overboard, the remains of a badly stowed deck cargo that had come apart after a storm in the Channel and was now never going to be paid for.

The tide was coming in, and the jetsam was floating slowly upstream over the rotting skeleton of a barge and the broken bottles and tin cans in the mud as the silent water gradually lifted the coaster upright. Pantalaimon was watching intently. He'd been interested in the
Elsa
since he'd arrived at the filthy little harbor the night before and heard German conversation on the deck. From what he could make out, they were intending to leave with the tide and cross the Channel, heading north for Cuxhaven, near Hamburg. That was when Pan knew he'd have to go with them: Cuxhaven lay at the mouth of the river Elbe, and the city of Wittenberg, where Gottfried Brande lived, lay many miles inland on the same river. It couldn't be better.

The crew of the
Elsa
had been waiting for a cargo, but someone had let them down, or more likely, from what Pan could gather, the skipper had simply got the date wrong. All day long the captain and the mate had bickered on the deck, drinking beer and tossing the bottles over the side, and finally, when the skipper agreed to split the proceeds fifty-fifty, the mate gave in and said he'd help liberate the propeller.

Pan saw his chance to get aboard the
Elsa,
and as soon as the rowing boat began to move across the creek towards the coaster, he crept silently along the wharf and darted up the gangplank. There were four crewmen apart from the skipper and the mate: one of them was rowing the boat, another two were asleep belowdecks, and the fourth was leaning on the rail, watching the expedition. The
Elsa
was older than Pan could guess, patched and mended over and over, her sails worn and shoddy, her deck filthy with grease and rust.

Plenty of places to hide, anyway, thought Pan, and he sat in the shadow of the wheelhouse and watched the thieves clambering up onto the coaster. At least, the mate climbed up, after the skipper tried twice and failed. The mate was a youngish man, lean and long-limbed, whereas the skipper was swag-bellied, bowlegged, and three-quarters drunk, and he'd never see sixty again.

But he was determined. He stood up in the unstable dinghy, hand on the side of the coaster, growling orders at the mate, who was trying to free the nearest davit from enough rust to let it swing out over the water. He kept up a stream of curses and abuse until the mate leant over the side and snarled back at him. The mate's herring gull dæmon added a sardonic squawk. Pan knew no more German than Lyra did, of course, but it wasn't hard to understand the drift of the conversation.

Finally the mate got the davit to move, and then turned his attention to the propeller. The skipper was refreshing himself from a bottle of rum, while his parrot dæmon clung half-insensible to the gunwale. The oily water was slipping into the creek without a murmur, bringing with it ragged clumps of scum and the body of an animal so dead, it was more than half rotted away.

Pan looked at the crewman who was watching from the
Elsa,
and at his dæmon, a scabby-looking rat, who sat at his feet, cleaning her whiskers. He looked back at the little scene across the creek, with the crewman drooping over the oars, more than half asleep, and the mate wielding a spanner on the deck of the coaster above, and the skipper clinging with one hand to a rope hanging from the davit while the other hand lifted the bottle to his lips again. Into Pan's mind came a memory of the night scene from the allotments near the Oxpens, with the Royal Mail depot across the meadow, the wisps of steam rising from the sidings, the bare trees by the river, the distant clank of wire on mooring post, everything silver and calm and beautiful; and, motionless, he felt a thrill of wild exultation at the loveliness of these things and at how the universe was so full of them. He thought how much he loved Lyra and how much he missed her, her warmth, her hands, and how much she would have loved to be here with him, watching, how they would have whispered together and pointed out this detail or that, how her breath would have caressed the delicate fur of his ears.

What was he doing? And what was she doing without him?

That little question wormed into his mind, and he flicked it out. He knew what he was doing. Something had made Lyra immune to the intoxication of night beauty such as this. Something had robbed her of that vision, and he would find it and bring it back to her, and they would never be apart again, and stay together as long as they lived.

The mate had freed the propeller and was looping the rope round and round it, ignoring the growled instructions from the skipper, while the oarsman paddled lethargically to keep the dinghy roughly under the davit. Pantalaimon wanted to see what happened when they lowered the propeller into the boat, and whether the dinghy would sink under it; but he was tired, more than tired, almost delirious with exhaustion, so he prowled the length of the deck until he found a companionway, and then crept down into the bowels of the
Elsa,
found a dark spot, and curled up and fell asleep at once.

Speeches long and short, motions for and motions against, objections, qualifications, amendments, protests, votes of confidence, more speeches and yet further speeches had filled the first day of the Magisterial conference with argument and the Council Chamber of the Secretariat of the Holy Presence with warm, stale air.