The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) (49 page)

Parker shook his head. “New to me,” he said. “Why? It sounds like the sort of slogan any of these fanatics might use.”

“It probably is. You kept your promise, anyway.”

“What promise?”

“To show me something interesting. Another glass?”

The afternoon was far advanced; the sun had already set behind the mountains, and the air was cooling rapidly. Lyra had to move: she had to find somewhere to stay. She set off towards the center of the city, past apartment buildings and office blocks and government ministries and banks, and soon the daylight was all gone, and the light she saw by came instead from naphtha lamps hung outside shops or the more brilliant gaslights shining out from windows and open doors. The air was fragrant with the smells of grilling meat and spiced chickpeas, and Lyra realized that she was hungry.

The first hotel she tried turned her down at once: the receptionist's look of superstitious horror made it clear why. The second place did the same, with fulsome expressions of regret and apology. They were small places, family-run, in quiet streets, not the large glittering palaces that served statesmen and plutocrats and rich tourists. Perhaps she'd be better off in one of those, she thought, but shuddered at the expense.

The third place she tried was more welcoming, simply by being less interested. The young woman at the desk was perfectly indifferent as Lyra signed the register and took her room key, and turned back to her photo magazine at once. Only her dog dæmon seemed concerned, and whined softly and hid behind her chair as Lyra passed.

The room was small and shabby and overheated, but the light worked and the bed was clean and there was a little balcony overlooking the street. Lyra found that she could sit on a chair half in the room and half on the balcony and see along the street in both directions.

She locked the room and went out briefly, coming back with a greaseproof paper bag containing grilled meat and peppers and some bread, and with a bottle of luridly colored orange drink. She sat on the chair and ate and drank, finding little pleasure in the gristly meat and the sickly liquid, but thought grimly that at least she was keeping her strength up.

The street below was narrow, but clean and well lit. On the side opposite her balcony was a café whose pavement tables were empty but whose interior was crowded and bright. Shops to left and right sold hardware, or shoes, or newspapers and smokeleaf, or cheap clothes, or sweetmeats. It was busy; it looked as if everywhere was going to stay open long into the evening. People were slowly wandering along, or passing the time talking with friends, or sitting and smoking together beside a hookah, or haggling with shopkeepers.

She fetched a blanket from the bed, and put the light out, and settled herself comfortably to watch everything. She wanted to see people and their dæmons: she felt hungry for their completeness. There was a stout man, short, bald, mustached, in a voluminous blue shirt, who had been standing in the doorway of his shop when Lyra began to watch, and who showed no sign of moving except to step out of the way when a customer wanted to go past. His dæmon was a monkey with a bag of peanuts and a loud cheerful voice, who carried on a raucous dialogue with him and with any of the friends who stopped to pass the time. There seemed to be plenty of them. Another fixture was a beggar who sat on the pavement with a kind of lute on his lap, occasionally playing a mournful snatch of melody for a few bars before breaking off to call for alms. Another was a woman in a black headscarf who was involved in a long discussion with two friends while their children squabbled and stole sweets from the stall behind them.

Lyra watched: their dæmons observed the owner without seeming to, and prompted the children, who struck like snakes when he turned away for a second. Their mothers were quite aware of this, and accepted sweets from the children's hands without breaking off their conversation.

Occasionally a couple of policemen, guns at their waists, helmets low over their eyes, strolled along, looking at everything. People avoided returning their stare. Their dæmons, large and powerful dogs, stalked closely at their heels.

Lyra thought about the princess's story. She wondered what the dancer's name had been, and if there was a picture of her anywhere in the archives of a Levantine newspaper. What was happening, anyway, when people fell in love? She'd heard enough about her friends' love affairs to know that dæmons complicated the matter, but deepened it too when it worked. Some girls seemed to be attracted to this boy or that, only for their dæmons to be indifferent or even hostile. Sometimes it was the other way round: the dæmons passionately attracted, their people kept apart by dislike. And the princess's story had shown her yet another human possibility. Was it possible, though, as the old lady had said, for pretending to be in love to turn into actual love?

She looked down at the street again, huddling the blanket up around her shoulders. The stout man in the blue shirt was now smoking a cheroot, passing it up to the monkey dæmon on his shoulder, and talking volubly to two other men whose dæmons were sharing a bag of nuts between them, cracking the shells in their teeth and throwing them into the gutter. The lute player had found another tune, and had even gathered an audience of two children who gazed at him, hand in hand, the little boy nodding with his dæmon approximately in time with the rhythm. The women with the sweet-stealing children had gone, and the sweetmeat seller was busy folding and stretching a hank of red-brown toffee.

Gradually, as Lyra watched, she found her mood lifting. She'd hardly been aware of feeling anxious, but that was because anxiety was everywhere, built into the very molecules of the world, or so it had seemed. But now it was disappearing, like heavy gray clouds thinning and dispersing and finding their great banks of vapor drifting into wisps that wafted away into invisibility, leaving the sky clear and open. She felt her whole self, including the absent Pan, becoming light and free. Something good must have happened to him, she thought.

And she found herself thinking about roses and Dust. The street below her was saturated in Dust. Human lives were generating it, being sustained and enriched by it; it made everything glow as if it was touched with gold. She could almost see it. It brought with it a mood that she hadn't felt for so long that it was unfamiliar, and she welcomed it almost apprehensively: it was a quiet conviction, underlying every circumstance, that all was well and that the world was her true home, as if there were great secret powers that would see her safe.

She sat there for an hour, unconscious of the time, sustained by this new strange mood, and then went to bed and fell instantly asleep.

Pantalaimon was making his way south. And east. That was all he could tell. For as long as he could, he stayed beside water: river, lake, or sea, it didn't matter which, as long as there was somewhere nearby to dive into and swim away. He avoided towns and villages. As he traveled through rougher and stranger country, he felt himself becoming wilder, as if he were really a pine marten and not a human being.

But he was a human being, or part of one, and he felt just as Lyra did: unhappy, and guilty, and wretchedly lonely. If he ever saw Lyra again, he would run towards her, and he imagined her bending to greet him, arms wide, and they'd both swear eternal love and promise never to part again, and it would all go back to the way it used to be. At the same time, he knew it wouldn't, but he had to hold on to something in the dark nights, and imagination was all he had.

When he finally saw her, she was sitting in the shade of an olive tree on a hot afternoon, and she looked as if she was asleep. His heart leapt, and he bounded towards her—

But of course it wasn't Lyra. It was a girl a few years younger, maybe sixteen or so, with a shawl covering her hair and a mixture of clothes that hadn't been hers, because they were a mixture of expensive and shabby, of new and old, of the too-big and the too-small. She looked exhausted. She looked hungry and dirty. She'd been weeping before she fell asleep, or maybe even during the sleep itself, because there were tears still on her cheeks. She looked as if she'd come from somewhere in North Africa, and she had no dæmon.

Pan looked around very carefully and quietly, and looked at her from all sides, but he wasn't wrong: she was alone. Not even a dæmon as small as the smallest mouse was hiding near her, or curled up close by her head as it lay on a bank of dusty moss.

She was in danger, then. He leapt up into the olive tree above her, perfectly silent, and climbed high until he could see all around: the blue gleam of the sea, the near-white stone of the mountain on whose slopes the tree was growing, the dry green of the grass being cropped by a few skinny sheep….

Sheep, so there might be a shepherd nearby. But Pan couldn't see anyone, shepherd or not. He and the girl seemed to be the only humans alive. Well, he could look after her, and pretend to be her dæmon, and guard her from suspicion at least.

He climbed down and settled at her feet to doze.

When she woke up soon afterwards, she sat up slowly and painfully, rubbing her eyes, and then, seeing Pan, jumped to her feet and backed away.

She said something, but he couldn't understand it. She knew he was a dæmon, of course, and she was looking for his person, and she was terrified.

He stood and bowed his head in greeting. “My name is Pantalaimon,” he said clearly. “Can you speak English?”

She understood. She looked around again, wide-eyed and sleepy still, as if it might have been a dream.

“Where is your…,” she said.

“I don't know. I'm looking for her, and she's probably looking for me. Where's your dæmon?”

“There was a shipwreck. Our boat was sunk. I thought he must be dead, but he can't be, because I'm alive, I think, only I can't find him anywhere. What did you say your name was?”

“Pantalaimon. What's yours?”

“Nur Huda el-Wahabi.” She was still dizzy from tiredness. She sat down slowly.

“This is too strange,” she said.

“Yes, it is. But I've had a bit longer to get used to it, maybe. We've been separated for…Well, I can't remember, but it seems like a long time. When was your ship wrecked?”

“Two nights—three nights—I don't know. My family—my mother, my little sister, my grandmother—we were all in a boat, just a small boat, because of the men from the mountains—a big ship ran us down. We were all in the water, everyone, and the sailors in the big ship tried to save us, but some of us were carried away. I called and called until my throat was sore and my dæmon wasn't with me and I was so frightened and everything was hurting and in the dark I couldn't see anyone, anything, and I was sure I would drown, and Jamal would die, wherever he was—it was the worst thing I ever felt. But when the sun came up, I could see some mountains, so I tried to swim towards them, and finally there was a beach and I swam there and just fell asleep on the sand. I had to hide from people when I woke up, in case…You know.”

“Yes. Course you did. I suppose Lyra must be doing the same.”

“Her name is Lyra? I had to steal things, like these clothes. And food. I'm so hungry.”

“How did you come to speak English so well?”

“My father is a diplomat. We lived in London for a while when I was younger. Then he was sent to Baghdad. We were safe until the men from the mountains came. Lots of people had to flee, but my father had to stay. He sent us away.”

“Who are these men from the mountains?”

“No one knows. They just come from the mountains and…” She shrugged. “People try to escape. They come to Europe, but where…I don't know. I would cry, but I've cried so much, I haven't got any tears left. I don't know if Mama is alive, or Papa, or Aisha, or Jida…”

“But you know your dæmon is alive.”

“Yes. Alive somewhere.”

“We might find him. Have you heard of the Blue Hotel? Al-Khan al-Azraq?”

“No. What is that?”

“It's a place where dæmons go. Dæmons without their people. I'm going there myself.”

“Why are you going there if your girl is somewhere else?”

“I don't know where else to go. Your dæmon might be there.”

“What did you call it? The Blue Khan?”

“Al-Khan al-Azraq. I think people are afraid of it.”

“It sounds like Moontown. Moon City, maybe. I don't know what it would be in English.”

“Do you know where it is?” he said eagerly.

“No. In the desert somewhere. When I went to school in Baghdad, the other kids used to talk about this place where there were night-ghasts and ghouls and people with their heads chopped off, horrible things. So I was afraid of it. But then I thought it probably wasn't real anyway. Is it real?”

“I don't know. But I'm going to find it.”

“Do you really think my dæmon could be there?”

She reminded him of the Lyra of a few years ago, before their estrangement: eager, curious, openhearted, half child still, but with the shadow of suffering on her.

“Yes, I do,” he said.

“Could I—”

“Why don't we—”