The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials Read online

  But in the middle of the Aurora, high above the bleak landscape, Lyra could see something solid. She pressed her face to the crack to see more clearly, and she could see the Scholars near the screen leaning forward too. As she gazed, her wonder grew, because there in the sky was the unmistakable outline of a city: towers, domes, walls...Buildings and streets, suspended in the air! She nearly gasped with wonder.

  The Cassington Scholar said, “That looks like...a city.”

  “Exactly so,” said Lord Asriel.

  “A city in another world, no doubt?” said the Dean, with contempt in his voice.

  Lord Asriel ignored him. There was a stir of excitement among some of the Scholars, as if, having written treatises on the existence of the unicorn without ever having seen one, they’d been presented with a living example newly captured.

  “Is this the Barnard-Stokes business?” said the Palmerian Professor. “It is, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what I want to find out,” said Lord Asriel.

  He stood to one side of the illuminated screen. Lyra could see his dark eyes searching among the Scholars as they peered up at the slide of the Aurora, and the green glow of his dæmon’s eyes beside him. All the venerable heads were craning forward, their spectacles glinting; only the Master and the Librarian leaned back in their chairs, with their heads close together.

  The Chaplain was saying, “You said you were searching for news of the Grumman expedition, Lord Asriel. Was Dr. Grumman investigating this phenomenon too?”

  “I believe he was, and I believe he had a good deal of information about it. But he won’t be able to tell us what it was, because he’s dead.”

  “No!” said the Chaplain.

  “I’m afraid so, and I have the proof here.”

  A ripple of excited apprehension ran round the Retiring Room as, under Lord Asriel’s direction, two or three of the younger Scholars carried the wooden box to the front of the room. Lord Asriel took out the last slide but left the lantern on, and in the dramatic glare of the circle of light he bent to lever open the box. Lyra heard the screech of nails coming out of damp wood. The Master stood up to look, blocking Lyra’s view. Her uncle spoke again:

  “If you remember, Grumman’s expedition vanished eighteen months ago. The German Academy sent him up there to go as far north as the magnetic pole and make various celestial observations. It was in the course of that journey that he observed the curious phenomenon we’ve already seen. Shortly after that, he vanished. It’s been assumed that he had an accident and that his body’s been lying in a crevasse all this time. In fact, there was no accident.”

  “What have you got there?” said the Dean. “Is that a vacuum container?”

  Lord Asriel didn’t answer at first. Lyra heard the snap of metal clips and a hiss as air rushed into a vessel, and then there was a silence. But the silence didn’t last long. After a moment or two Lyra heard a confused babble break out: cries of horror, loud protests, voices raised in anger and fear.

  “But what—”

  “—hardly human—”

  “—it’s been—”

  “—what’s happened to it?”

  The Master’s voice cut through them all.

  “Lord Asriel, what in God’s name have you got there?”

  “This is the head of Stanislaus Grumman,” said Lord Asriel’s voice.

  Over the jumble of voices Lyra heard someone stumble to the door and out, making incoherent sounds of distress. She wished she could see what they were seeing.

  Lord Asriel said, “I found his body preserved in the ice off Svalbard. The head was treated in this way by his killers. You’ll notice the characteristic scalping pattern. I think you might be familiar with it, Sub-Rector.”

  The old man’s voice was steady as he said, “I have seen the Tartars do this. It’s a technique you find among the aboriginals of Siberia and the Tungusk. From there, of course, it spread into the lands of the Skraelings, though I understand that it is now banned in New Denmark. May I examine it more closely, Lord Asriel?”

  After a short silence he spoke again.

  “My eyes are not very clear, and the ice is dirty, but it seems to me that there is a hole in the top of the skull. Am I right?”

  “You are.”

  “Trepanning?”

  “Exactly.”

  That caused a murmur of excitement. The Master moved out of the way and Lyra could see again. The old Sub-Rector, in the circle of light thrown by the lantern, was holding a heavy block of ice up close to his eyes, and Lyra could see the object inside it: a bloody lump barely recognizable as a human head. Pantalaimon fluttered around Lyra, his distress affecting her.

  “Hush,” she whispered. “Listen.”

  “Dr. Grumman was once a Scholar of this College,” said the Dean hotly.

  “To fall into the hands of the Tartars—”

  “But that far north?”

  “They must have penetrated further than anyone imagined!”

  “Did I hear you say you found it near Svalbard?” said the Dean.

  “That’s right.”

  “Are we to understand that the panserbjørne had anything to do with this?”

  Lyra didn’t recognize that word, but clearly the Scholars did.

  “Impossible,” said the Cassington Scholar firmly. “They’d never behave in that manner.”

  “Then you don’t know Iofur Raknison,” said the Palmerian Professor, who had made several expeditions himself to the arctic regions. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that he had taken to scalping people in the Tartar fashion.”

  Lyra looked again at her uncle, who was watching the Scholars with a glitter of sardonic amusement, and saying nothing.

  “Who is Iofur Raknison?” said someone.

  “The king of Svalbard,” said the Palmerian Professor. “Yes, that’s right, one of the panserbjørne. He’s a usurper, of sorts; tricked his way onto the throne, or so I understand; but a powerful figure, by no means a fool, in spite of his ludicrous affectations—having a palace built of imported marble—setting up what he calls a university—”

  “For whom? For the bears?” said someone else, and everyone laughed.

  But the Palmerian Professor went on: “For all that, I tell you that Iofur Raknison would be capable of doing this to Grumman. At the same time, he could be flattered into behaving quite differently, if the need arose.”

  “And you know how, do you, Trelawney?” said the Dean sneeringly.

  “Indeed I do. Do you know what he wants above all else? Even more than an honorary degree? He wants a dæmon! Find a way to give him a dæmon, and he’d do anything for you.”

  The Scholars laughed heartily.

  Lyra was following this with puzzlement; what the Palmerian Professor said made no sense at all. Besides, she was impatient to hear more about scalping and the Northern Lights and that mysterious Dust. But she was disappointed, for Lord Asriel had finished showing his relics and pictures, and the talk soon turned into a College wrangle about whether or not they should give him some money to fit out another expedition. Back and forth the arguments ranged, and Lyra felt her eyes closing. Soon she was fast asleep, with Pantalaimon curled around her neck in his favorite sleeping form as an ermine.

  She woke up with a start when someone shook her shoulder.

  “Quiet,” said her uncle. The wardrobe door was open, and he was crouched there against the light. “They’ve all gone, but there are still some servants around. Go to your bedroom now, and take care that you say nothing about this.”

  “Did they vote to give you the money?” she said sleepily.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s Dust?” she said, struggling to stand up after having been cramped for so long.

  “Nothing to do with you.”

  “It is to do with me,” she said. “If you wanted me to be a spy in the wardrobe, you ought to tell me what I’m spying about. Can I see the man’s head?”

  Pantalaimon’s white
ermine fur bristled: she felt it tickling her neck. Lord Asriel laughed shortly.

  “Don’t be disgusting,” he said, and began to pack his slides and specimen box. “Did you watch the Master?”

  “Yes, and he looked for the wine before he did anything else.”

  “Good. But I’ve scotched him for now. Do as you’re told and go to bed.”

  “But where are you going?”

  “Back to the North. I’m leaving in ten minutes.”

  “Can I come?”

  He stopped what he was doing, and looked at her as if for the first time. His dæmon turned her great tawny leopard eyes on her too, and under the concentrated gaze of both of them, Lyra blushed. But she gazed back fiercely.

  “Your place is here,” said her uncle finally.

  “But why? Why is my place here? Why can’t I come to the North with you? I want to see the Northern Lights and bears and icebergs and everything. I want to know about Dust. And that city in the air. Is it another world?”

  “You’re not coming, child. Put it out of your head; the times are too dangerous. Do as you’re told and go to bed, and if you’re a good girl, I’ll bring you back a walrus tusk with some Eskimo carving on it. Don’t argue anymore or I shall be angry.”

  And his dæmon growled with a deep savage rumble that made Lyra suddenly aware of what it would be like to have teeth meeting in her throat.

  She compressed her lips and frowned hard at her uncle. He was pumping the air from the vacuum flask, and took no notice; it was as if he’d already forgotten her. Without a word, but with lips tight and eyes narrowed, the girl and her dæmon left and went to bed.

  The Master and the Librarian were old friends and allies, and it was their habit, after a difficult episode, to take a glass of brantwijn and console each other. So after they’d seen Lord Asriel away, they strolled to the Master’s lodging and settled in his study with the curtains drawn and the fire refreshed, their dæmons in their familiar places on knee or shoulder, and prepared to think through what had just happened.

  “Do you really believe he knew about the wine?” said the Librarian.

  “Of course he did. I have no idea how, but he knew, and he spilled the decanter himself. Of course he did.”

  “Forgive me, Master, but I can’t help being relieved. I was never happy about the idea of...”

  “Of poisoning him?”

  “Yes. Of murder.”

  “Hardly anyone would be happy at that idea, Charles. The question was whether doing that would be worse than the consequences of not doing it. Well, some providence has intervened, and it hasn’t happened. I’m only sorry I burdened you with the knowledge of it.”

  “No, no,” protested the Librarian. “But I wish you had told me more.”

  The Master was silent for a while before saying, “Yes, perhaps I should have done. The alethiometer warns of appalling consequences if Lord Asriel pursues this research. Apart from anything else, the child will be drawn in, and I want to keep her safe as long as possible.”

  “Is Lord Asriel’s business anything to do with this new initiative of the Consistorial Court of Discipline? The what-do-they-call-it: the Oblation Board?”

  “Lord Asriel—no, no. Quite the reverse. The Oblation Board isn’t entirely answerable to the Consistorial Court, either. It’s a semiprivate initiative; it’s being run by someone who has no love of Lord Asriel. Between them both, Charles, I tremble.”

  The Librarian was silent in his turn. Ever since Pope John Calvin had moved the seat of the Papacy to Geneva and set up the Consistorial Court of Discipline, the Church’s power over every aspect of life had been absolute. The Papacy itself had been abolished after Calvin’s death, and a tangle of courts, colleges, and councils, collectively known as the Magisterium, had grown up in its place. These agencies were not always united; sometimes a bitter rivalry grew up between them. For a large part of the previous century, the most powerful had been the College of Bishops, but in recent years the Consistorial Court of Discipline had taken its place as the most active and the most feared of all the Church’s bodies.

  But it was always possible for independent agencies to grow up under the protection of another part of the Magisterium, and the Oblation Board, which the Librarian had referred to, was one of these. The Librarian didn’t know much about it, but he disliked and feared what he’d heard, and he completely understood the Master’s anxiety.

  “The Palmerian Professor mentioned a name,” he said after a minute or so. “Barnard-Stokes? What is the Barnard-Stokes business?”

  “Ah, it’s not our field, Charles. As I understand it, the Holy Church teaches that there are two worlds: the world of everything we can see and hear and touch, and another world, the spiritual world of heaven and hell. Barnard and Stokes were two—how shall I put it—renegade theologians who postulated the existence of numerous other worlds like this one, neither heaven nor hell, but material and sinful. They are there, close by, but invisible and unreachable. The Holy Church naturally disapproved of this abominable heresy, and Barnard and Stokes were silenced.

  “But unfortunately for the Magisterium there seem to be sound mathematical arguments for this other-world theory. I have never followed them myself, but the Cassington Scholar tells me that they are sound.”

  “And now Lord Asriel has taken a picture of one of these other worlds,” the Librarian said. “And we have funded him to go and look for it. I see.”

  “Quite. It’ll seem to the Oblation Board, and to its powerful protectors, that Jordan College is a hotbed of support for heresy. And between the Consistorial Court and the Oblation Board, Charles, I have to keep a balance; and meanwhile the child is growing. They won’t have forgotten her. Sooner or later she would have become involved, but she’ll be drawn in now whether I want to protect her or not.”

  “But how do you know that, for God’s sake? The alethiometer again?”

  “Yes. Lyra has a part to play in all this, and a major one. The irony is that she must do it all without realizing what she’s doing. She can be helped, though, and if my plan with the Tokay had succeeded, she would have been safe for a little longer. I would have liked to spare her a journey to the North. I wish above all things that I were able to explain it to her...”

  “She wouldn’t listen,” the Librarian said. “I know her ways only too well. Try to tell her anything serious and she’ll half-listen for five minutes and then start fidgeting. Quiz her about it next time and she’ll have completely forgotten.”

  “If I talked to her about Dust? You don’t think she’d listen to that?”

  The Librarian made a noise to indicate how unlikely he thought that was.

  “Why on earth should she?” he said. “Why should a distant theological riddle interest a healthy, thoughtless child?”

  “Because of what she must experience. Part of that includes a great betrayal....”

  “Who’s going to betray her?”

  “No, no, that’s the saddest thing: she will be the betrayer, and the experience will be terrible. She mustn’t know that, of course, but there’s no reason for her not to know about the problem of Dust. And you might be wrong, Charles; she might well take an interest in it, if it were explained in a simple way. And it might help her later on. It would certainly help me to be less anxious about her.”

  “That’s the duty of the old,” said the Librarian, “to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.”

  They sat for a while longer, and then parted, for it was late, and they were old and anxious.

  THREE

  LYRA’S JORDAN

  Jordan College was the grandest and richest of all the colleges in Oxford. It was probably the largest, too, though no one knew for certain. The buildings, which were grouped around three irregular quadrangles, dated from every period from the early Middle Ages to the mid-eighteenth century. It had never been planned; it had grown piecemeal, with past and present overlapping at eve
ry spot, and the final effect was one of jumbled and squalid grandeur. Some part was always about to fall down, and for five generations the same family, the Parslows, had been employed full time by the College as masons and scaffolders. The present Mr. Parslow was teaching his son the craft; the two of them and their three workmen would scramble like industrious termites over the scaffolding they’d erected at the corner of the library, or over the roof of the chapel, and haul up bright new blocks of stone or rolls of shiny lead or balks of timber.

  The College owned farms and estates all over England. It was said that you could walk from Oxford to Bristol in one direction and London in the other, and never leave Jordan land. In every part of the kingdom there were dye works and brick kilns, forests and atomcraft works that paid rent to Jordan, and every quarter-day the bursar and his clerks would tot it all up, announce the total to Concilium, and order a pair of swans for the feast. Some of the money was put by for reinvestment—Concilium had just approved the purchase of an office block in Manchester—and the rest was used to pay the Scholars’ modest stipends and the wages of the servants (and the Parslows, and the other dozen or so families of craftsmen and traders who served the College), to keep the wine cellar richly filled, to buy books and anbarographs for the immense library that filled one side of the Melrose Quadrangle and extended, burrow-like, for several floors beneath the ground, and, not least, to buy the latest philosophical apparatus to equip the chapel.

  It was important to keep the chapel up to date, because Jordan College had no rival, either in Europe or in New France, as a center of experimental theology. Lyra knew that much, at least. She was proud of her College’s eminence, and liked to boast of it to the various urchins and ragamuffins she played with by the canal or the claybeds; and she regarded visiting Scholars and eminent professors from elsewhere with pitying scorn, because they didn’t belong to Jordan and so must know less, poor things, than the humblest of Jordan’s under-Scholars.