The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) (43 page)

“Well,” Lyra said, “all right, I will. Thank you.”

The sirens of an ambulance howled through the square, which was getting fuller every minute, as more people poured out of the cathedral and still more came hurrying in from the four roads that met in front of it. Another ambulance arrived to join the first one in trying to thrust a way through the crowd.

The young priest on the steps, still clinging to the guard, was now talking to three or four people who were busy scribbling into notebooks.

“Reporters already,” said the woman. “He’s having the time of his life.”

She turned her back and strode vigorously through the crowd. Lyra went with her. As they left the square, they could hear a different kind of siren, coming from the first police cars that were arriving.

Five minutes later they were sitting outside a little café in a side street. Lyra was glad of the woman’s presence at the table with her.

The woman was called Alison Wetherfield, she told Lyra, and she worked as a teacher in the English school in Aleppo. She had come to Constantinople on vacation.

“But I’m not sure how much longer the school will be able to survive,” she said. “The city’s holding out, but in the countryside people are getting very nervous.”

“I feel I should know what’s going on,” said Lyra. “Why do people feel nervous now?”

“There’s a lot of unrest. The awful business this morning is part of it. People are feeling brutalized by the laws, exploited by their bosses, discriminated against by social structures they’ve got no means of changing. It’s been like that for years: there’s nothing new about it. But it’s a fertile soil for the rose panic to flourish in….”

“The rose panic?”

“It’s a new sort of fanaticism. Rose growers are being persecuted, their gardens set ablaze or plowed over by these men from the mountains, as they’re called, who say that the rose is an abomination to the Authority. I hadn’t realized it had spread this far.”

“They’re feeling the effects already in Oxford,” said Lyra, and told her about the rosewater problem at Jordan College. She might have regretted revealing where she came from, as it went against every principle she was trying to obey, but the sheer relief and pleasure of talking to someone sympathetic was too much to resist.

“But what are you doing, traveling in this part of the world?” asked Alison Wetherfield. “Have you come here to work?”

“I’m just passing through. I’m on my way to Central Asia. Just waiting for a ferry.”

“A long way to go yet, then. And what are you going to do there?”

“Research for the thesis I have to write.”

“What’s your subject?”

“History, basically, but I wanted to see things you can’t find in libraries.”

“And…you…the thing I noticed about you…”

“No dæmon.”

“Yes. Is your journey about him too?”

Lyra nodded.

“Mainly about him?”

Lyra sighed and looked away.

“You’re going to Madinat al-Qamar,” Alison said.

“Well…”

“No need to try and hide it. I’m not shocked or surprised. I know someone else who set out to go there, but I don’t know what happened to him. I’d tell you to be careful, but you look sensible enough to realize that yourself. Do you know how to find it?”

“No.”

“There are so many dead towns, dead villages, in that part of the desert. You could spend years looking for the right place. You’ll need to find a guide.”

“It does exist, then?”

“As far as I know. I thought it was just a legend or a ghost story when I first heard about it. To be honest, I find all that sort of thing—well, I don’t know—unconvincing. Irrelevant, really. There’s enough trouble and difficulty in this world, enough sick people to look after, enough children to teach, enough poverty and oppression to fight without worrying about the supernatural. But then I’m lucky. I’m perfectly at home in the world and perfectly happy with my dæmon and the work I do. I realize that other people aren’t so lucky. Why did your dæmon leave you?”

“We quarreled. I had no idea it would lead to this. I didn’t think it was possible. But we didn’t speak for a long time, and one day he just vanished.”

“How painful for you!”

“Oh, the pain…Yes, but the hardest thing was just having no one to talk to. And sometimes give good advice.”

“What d’you think he’d say to you now?”

“About my journey, or about today?”

“Today.”

“Well, he’d have mistrusted that young priest.”

“Quite right.”

“And he’d make me take notes about everything.”

“He’d be a good journalist.”

“And he’d have made friends with your dæmon at once. That’s one of the things I miss most.”

Alison’s greenfinch dæmon was listening intently, and now he sang a few notes of sympathy. Lyra thought she should change the subject before she revealed too much.

“What about this new High Council?” she said. “What d’you think that’ll mean?”

“I don’t think anyone knows yet. It’s come rather out of the blue. I hope it won’t mean that there’s a much more ferocious orthodoxy. The system we’ve had for hundreds of years was flawed, no one claimed it was perfect, but one merit it did have was room for disagreement of a limited kind. If there’s one voice imposing one will on us all…I can’t see it leading anywhere very good, I’m afraid.”

In the background, the noise of sirens had been continuous. Now another sound joined it: the clangor of a loud bell in a campanile nearby. A few seconds later another bell joined in. For a moment Lyra thought of the bells of Oxford and felt intensely homesick, but it was only a moment. From other buildings in the area more bells began to ring, and presently yet another sound thrust its way over them: the harsh thud-thud-thud of a gyropter.

Lyra and Alison looked up and saw first one and then two more of the aircraft circling the dome of the Holy Wisdom.

“What that’s likely to be,” said Alison, “is the first sign of official panic. Quite soon—in fact, any minute, I’d guess—there’ll be police patrols demanding to see everyone’s documents, and arresting anyone they don’t like the look of. Such as you, my dear. If you take my advice, you’ll go straight back to your hotel and stay there till your ferry goes.”

Lyra felt a great weariness descend on her. Oh, Pan, she thought. She forced herself to stand up and shook the woman’s hand. “Thank you for talking to me,” she said. “I’ll remember you.”

She left and went back to her hotel. On the way she saw a police patrol in the process of arresting a young man who was fighting back fiercely, and in another street she saw a different patrol retreating from a crowd of angry men who were tearing up the roadway and throwing cobblestones at them. She walked carefully and stayed invisible as far as she could; even the hotel receptionist at her dingy little desk didn’t notice as she walked past.

Once inside her room, she locked the door.

News of the assassination spread wide and quickly. Several news agencies picked up the fact that the martyred Patriarch, so aged, so holy, was also the President of the new High Council of the Magisterium.

In Geneva it registered at once. The council—or those members who lived and worked in the city, and whose numbers, by the blessed workings of Providence, constituted a quorum—met at once, and opened with shocked prayers for the dead St. Simeon, whose presidency had been so short.

Then they turned immediately to the matter of the succession. It was clear, in these anxious times, that the question should be resolved quickly, and it was also clear that the only possible candidate was Marcel Delamare. More than one council member saw the hand of Providence there too.

So he was elected unanimously. With sorrow and reluctance he accepted the great responsibility, proclaiming his unworthiness in phrases so perfectly turned they might almost have been composed in advance of the terrible and utterly unpredictable events in Constantinople.

But even in his evident modesty and hesitation he had the calmness of mind and clarity of vision to suggest a few slight amendments to the constitution, all in the interests of firmness, resolution, and efficiency in, as the phrase had it, these anxious times. In order not to distract the holy work of the council with needless elections, the President’s term of office was increased from five to seven years, and there were to be no restrictions to the number of times an individual could serve. Furthermore, the President was to be granted executive powers, which would be needed in order to allow swift action in these anxious, etc.

Thus, for the first time in six centuries, the Magisterium had one sole leader, invested with all the authority and power that had previously run through many channels. Shorn and parceled no longer, the might of the Church now flowed through the office and the person of Marcel Delamare.

And the first to feel how swiftly the new dispensation could act, and how disagreeable its actions could be, was Pierre Binaud, the Chief Justice of the Consistorial Court of Discipline. He was removed from that office within an hour, and he would never interrupt anyone again.

As he signed the order, Marcel Delamare thought of the sister he had admired so much. He thought of his mother too, and looked forward to seeing her again.

After a night in her hotel room listening to the sirens, the shouting, the breaking windows, the gyropters thudding overhead, and occasionally the gunshots, Lyra felt tired and oppressed. But the Smyrna ferry left that day, and she couldn’t hide in the hotel forever.

She went down for breakfast and then stayed in her room till it was time to check out. According to the receptionist, who had read it in the morning paper, the assassins had all been killed when the guard stormed the cathedral. The rioting since had been the work of some men from the mountains, he didn’t know more, exploiting the general panic. It was all over now, he told her. The civil police were in command.

The hotel staff were glad to see her leave, because they were all afraid of her. She felt their alarm and dread, and since there was no point in trying to be invisible to them, she tried to dispel it by being friendly, but there was nothing she could do to acquire a dæmon. She felt glad to put the place behind her and make for the port.

The ferry left in the late afternoon and would arrive in Smyrna on the second morning afterwards. Lyra could have paid for a cabin, but after her temporary imprisonment in the hotel, she wanted to spend as much time as possible in the open. On the first evening, she ate by herself in the dingy restaurant and then sat on deck, wrapped in a blanket in a comfortable wicker reclining chair, watching the lights on the shore as they went past, and the night-fishing boats, and the starry sky.

She was thinking about Alison Wetherfield. A teacher, a woman of clear decency and certainty, someone she would like to emulate…She reminded Lyra of Hannah Relf. The fears Alison expressed about the new High Council were like her own, though Lyra hadn’t managed to think them through. Since Pan left, her focus had been entirely on her own predicament, and…No, it had begun before that. When they’d first become estranged? Probably. Self-preoccupation was not something Lyra admired in others, but here she was, thinking of nothing else. Good women like Hannah and Alison found other things to fret about, or better still, didn’t fret at all. Good women…

It was so complicated. She remembered Malcolm describing the sisters in Godstow Priory, who had been so kind to him when he was a boy, and who’d taken in the baby Lyra and looked after her before the flood came. Clearly what they did was good, and equally clearly much of what the Magisterium did was not; but were they part of the Magisterium because of their beliefs, or something else altogether because of their activities? She thought she’d been certain about things when she came back from the north, but the things she’d learnt during her adventures there seemed so far away now; all that remained was a scatter of vivid impressions, of personalities such as Lee Scoresby and Mary Malone, and of events like the fight between the bears, and above all of the moment when she and Will kissed in the little wood in the world of the
mulefa.
She’d hugged to herself the phrase “the Republic of Heaven,” but never analyzed what it might mean. When she’d thought about it at all, she’d thought that rationality was the very foundation stone of the Republic of Heaven.

That was the Lyra who wrote essays and passed examinations. That Lyra had enjoyed disputing with Scholars and searching out the weaknesses in someone else’s arguments, and cracking them open with a flourish to disclose the assumptions, the inconsistencies, the dishonesties concealed within them. That was the Lyra who had found the writing of Gottfried Brande so intoxicating, and that of Simon Talbot so disturbing.

She hadn’t been prepared for the revolution in her mind caused by Giorgio Brabandt and his stories of the secret commonwealth. She would once have dismissed things like that with scorn. But now, under her blanket on the deck, watching all the little points of light in the dark sky or on the dark shore, feeling the little tremor of the engines and the constant gentle rocking as the ferry moved south over the calm sea, she wondered if she’d got everything wrong.

A thought that followed naturally: Was that why Pan had left her?

Time seemed to be suspended during that quiet night on the sea. She thought calmly and systematically back to the time of her first estrangement from Pan. The memories came obediently out of the dark, links on a long chain. His anger when she had been unkind to a younger girl at school, against her natural inclination and in spite of every prompting from him, mocking her inability to distinguish between the author and the narrator in a novel set for examination. An impatient word to a servant at St. Sophia’s. A scoffing refusal to go to an exhibition of paintings on religious themes by the parent of a friend. Her delight in seeing so much philosophy taken apart and trampled on by Gottfried Brande. Her behavior—and now it all came back to her, bright with shame—her behavior towards Malcolm, when he’d been just Dr. Polstead. Small things, perhaps, but a hundred of them, and they kept coming. Her dæmon had seen all that, and disliked it, and then he’d had enough.

She tried to defend herself against this self-summoned tribunal. But her defense was feeble, and she soon stopped pretending. She was profoundly ashamed. She
had
done wrong, and her wrongdoing was bound up, somehow, with a vision of the world from which the secret commonwealth was excluded.

The stars wheeled slowly around the pole. The ferry moved steadily along the coast. From time to time the lights of a village glimmered on the shore, their reflections shaken into a thousand silver or gold flakes by the myriad movements of the water. Once or twice she saw a different kind of light, a glow from the fishing boats, each with a lantern in the prow, setting out their nets to catch bluefish or squid. They gave her another image: she was enticing monsters out of the darkness of herself. And she remembered what the dead child Roger, once her closest friend, had told her about the harpies in the world of the dead: they know every bad thing you’ve ever done, and they whisper about them to you all the time. She was getting a foretaste of that now.

She wondered: Did the harpies belong to the secret commonwealth? Was the world of the dead, the world they dwelt in, part of that? Or had she imagined it, and was her imagination just a spindrift of falsity?

Well, she thought, what was the secret commonwealth, anyway? It was a state of being that had no place in the world of Simon Talbot, or the different world of Gottfried Brande. It was quite invisible to everyday vision. If it existed at all, it was seen by the imagination, whatever that was, and not by logic. It included ghosts, fairies, gods and goddesses, nymphs, night-ghasts, devils, jacky lanterns, and other such entities. They were neither well- nor ill-disposed to human beings by nature, but sometimes their purposes intersected or coincided with human ones. They had a certain power over human lives, but they could be defeated too, as the fairy of the Thames had been tricked by Malcolm when she had wanted to keep Lyra with her and not let her go….

A steward came along the deck to tell those passengers still outside (there were only a handful of them) that the bar was shortly going to close. Two men got up from their deck chairs and went inside. Lyra said, “Thank you,” her only phrase of Anatolian. The steward nodded and passed on.

She returned to her thoughts. Did the night-ghasts and fairies and jacky lanterns and other citizens of the secret commonwealth exist only in her imagination? Was there a logical, rational, scientific explanation for such things? Or were they inaccessible to science and baffling to reason? Did they exist at all?

“Such things” included dæmons, surely. They certainly did if Brande and Talbot were right about them. Neither of those scholars would see anything wrong with a young woman who had no dæmon. Alison Wetherfield, on the other hand, had seen what was different about Lyra straightaway, as most people did, but unlike most people was warm in her sympathy. The loud man on the Channel ferry had seen it and was warm in his hatred and fear. Dæmons certainly existed for most people.

She couldn’t get any further at that point. The sky full of stars seemed dead and cold, everything in it the result of the mechanical, indifferent interactions of molecules and particles that would continue for the rest of time, whether Lyra lived or died, whether human beings were conscious or unconscious: a vast, silent, empty indifference, all quite meaningless.

Reason had brought her to this state. She had exalted reason over every other faculty. The result had been—was now—the deepest unhappiness she had ever felt.

But we shouldn’t believe things because it makes us happy to, she thought. We should believe things because they’re true, and if that makes us unhappy, that’s very unfortunate, but it’s not the fault of reason. How do we see that things are true? They make sense. True things are more economical than false ones: Occam’s razor; things are more likely to be simple than complicated; if there is an explanation that leaves out things like imagination and emotion, then it’s more likely to be true than one that includes them.

But then she remembered what the gyptians had said: Include things, don’t leave them out. Look at things in their context. Include everything.

She felt a little spring of hope when she remembered that. She thought on: When I believed in the jacky lanterns, I saw more of them. Was that delusional? Was I making them up or seeing them? Was it rational to lift the little red fruit to Will’s lips, in that little sunlit wood, and relive the act they’d heard Mary Malone describe, the one that had made her fall in love? Had reason ever created a poem, or a symphony, or a painting? If rationality can’t see things like the secret commonwealth, it’s because rationality’s vision is limited. The secret commonwealth is
there.
We can’t see it with rationality any more than we can weigh something with a microscope: it’s the wrong sort of instrument. We need to imagine as well as measure….

But then she remembered what Pan had said about her imagination, and that cruel little note in the bedroom at the Trout. Pan had left in order to look for a quality she didn’t have.

And Dust? Where did that come in? Was it a metaphor? Was it part of the secret commonwealth? And the burning Dutchman! What would reason say about him? He couldn’t exist. He was a delusion. She had dreamed it all. It hadn’t happened—

Before she could examine that question, the ferry hit something. Lyra felt the shock almost before she heard the bang and the rending sound of metal being torn, and then came a roar from the engines as the helmsman immediately signaled FULL ASTERN. The ferry shuddered, lurching awkwardly like a horse refusing a jump, and as the propeller thrashed the water, Lyra heard something else: human voices crying out in pain or panic.

She threw off the blanket and ran to the rail. She could see very little from where she was—amidships—so she hurried forward, having to grab the rail as the boat plunged and shook.

More people were coming out to see what was happening, from the bar, from their cabins, or, like her, from sleeping places on the deck. Voices rose all around, their meaning clear whatever the language:

“What’s the matter?”

“Have we run aground?”

“I can hear a baby—”

“Someone put a spotlight on!”

“Look—in the water—”

The momentum of the vessel was still greater than the power of the screw, and it hadn’t yet come to a halt. And Lyra, looking down where the last speaker was pointing, saw planks, broken wood, a lifebelt, other unidentifiable detritus from a shattered boat. And people—bodies in the water—heads, faces, arms, screaming, waving, sinking, and struggling up again. They seemed to be floating past, but it was only the ferry still moving forward.

Finally the bite of the propeller in the water overcame the forward momentum and pulled the vessel to a halt. The sound of the engines fell at once.

More voices now, shouting from the deck, from the bridge—men’s voices, in Anatolian—and deckhands came running to throw ropes over the side, and lifebelts, and to lower a boat that swung from its davit over the deck.

The scene in the water was lit by a spotlight that was being hastily rigged on the foredeck, and by the light from every window or porthole on the port side. It became clear that the ferry had run down this smaller boat, which must have been showing no lights, and that the boat was carrying a large number of passengers, far more than its size would suggest it could; because the whole side of the boat had now drifted into view, lying dead in the water, with a dozen or more men and women clinging to it.

A woman kept trying to push a baby up onto it, herself sinking below the water every time she tried, and the baby was screaming and struggling, and no one helped.

Lyra couldn’t stop herself crying out, “Help her! Help her!”

Each of the men clinging to the overturned boat was in fear for his own life, and had no strength left to help the woman; and after several attempts to get the baby safe, the woman herself sank under the surface, leaving the baby still struggling, its little voice choked with water. Lyra, like the other passengers watching, could only call out in horror and point, and finally one of the men let go, grabbed the baby by an arm, and flung it up onto the rocking planks before sinking himself and drifting away into the dark.