The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) Page 6

  “And that goes on all day?”

  “All day and night. Round the clock. What you want to know for?”

  “I got a reason. Maybe I’ll tell you, maybe I won’t. What shift are you on?”

  “Nights this week. I’ll be starting at ten tonight.”

  “Is there a man who works there—a big hefty man—who was working on Monday night, yesterday night, and who hurt his leg?”

  “That’s a peculiar question. There’s hundreds of people working there, specially this time of year.”

  “I suppose so….”

  “But as it happens, I think I know who you mean. There’s a big ugly bugger by the name of Benny Morris. I heard off someone earlier today that he’d hurt his leg falling off a ladder. Pity it wasn’t his neck. Funny thing is, he was working last night, first part of the shift anyway, then he cleared off partway through. At least, no one saw him after about midnight. Then this afternoon I hear he’s broken his leg, or summing like that.”

  “Is it easy to get out of the depot without anyone knowing?”

  “Well, you couldn’t get out the main gate without someone seeing you. But it’s not hard to jump over the fence—or to get through. What’s going on, Lyra?”

  Dick’s dæmon, Bindi, had jumped lightly up on the bench beside him and was watching Lyra with bright black eyes. Pan was on the table near Lyra’s elbow. They were both following the conversation closely.

  Lyra leant in and spoke more quietly. “Last night, after midnight, someone climbed out the depot over the gate by the allotments, and walked along by the river and joined another man, who was hiding among the trees. Then a third man came along the path from the station, and they attacked him. They killed him and hid his body down among the rushes. It wasn’t there this morning, because we went to look.”

  “How d’you know that?”

  “ ’Cause we saw it.”

  “Why en’t you told the police?”

  Lyra took a long sip of her beer while keeping her eyes on his face. Then she put it down. “We can’t,” she said. “There’s a good reason.”

  “What were you doing down there anyway, after midnight?”

  “Stealing parsnips. It doesn’t matter what we were there for. We were there, and we saw it.”

  Bindi looked at Pan, and Pan looked back, as bland and innocent as Lyra herself could be.

  “And these two men—they didn’t see you?”

  “If they had, they’d have chased us and tried to kill us too. But this is the point—they weren’t expecting him to fight back, but he had a knife and he cut one of them on the leg.”

  Dick blinked in surprise and drew back a little. “And you saw them shove his body in the river, you said?”

  “Down into the rushes, anyway. Then they went off towards the footbridge over to the gasworks, the one helping the other whose leg had been hurt.”

  “If the body was just in the rushes, they’d’ve had to go back later and get rid of it properly. Anyone could find it there. Kids play along the bank, there’s people going to and fro along the path all the time. During the day, anyway.”

  “We didn’t want to stay and find out,” Lyra said.

  “No.”

  She finished her beer.

  “Want another?” he said. “Get you a pint this time.”

  “No. Thanks, but I’m going soon.”

  “That other man, not the one that was attacked, the one that was waiting. Did you see what he was like?”

  “No, not clearly. But we heard him. And that’s”—she looked around, and saw that they were still unobserved—“that’s why we can’t go to the police. ’Cause we heard a policeman talking to someone, and it was the same voice. The exact same voice. The policeman was the man who killed him.”

  Dick shaped his lips to whistle but didn’t blow. Then he took a long drink. “Right,” he said. “That is awkward.”

  “I don’t know what to do, Dick.”

  “Better do nothing, then. Just forget about it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “That’s ’cause you keep thinking about it. Think of something else.”

  She nodded. That was as good as his advice was going to get. Then she suddenly did think of something else.

  “Dick, they take on extra workers at Christmas, don’t they, the Royal Mail?”

  “Yeah. You fancy a job?”

  “Well, I might.”

  “Just go along the office and ask ’em. It’s a good laugh. Hard work, mind. You won’t have time to go round being a detective.”

  “No. I just want to get a feel for what the place is like. It wouldn’t be for long, anyway.”

  “You sure you won’t have another drink?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “What you doing for the rest of the evening?”

  “Things to do, books to read…”

  “Stay with me. We could have a good time. You chased them other girls away. You going to leave me all on me own?”

  “I didn’t chase them away!”

  “You scared ’em stiff.”

  She felt a jolt of shame. She began to blush; she was mortified to remember how unpleasantly she’d behaved to the two girls, when it would have been so easy to be friendly to them.

  “Another time, Dick,” she said. It wasn’t easy to speak.

  “You’re all promises,” he said, but quite good-naturedly. He knew it wouldn’t take him long to find another girl to spend the evening with, a girl who had nothing to be ashamed of and who was happy with her dæmon. And they would have a good time, as he’d said. For a moment, Lyra envied this unknown other girl, because Dick was good company and considerate as well as more than good-looking; but then she remembered that after only a few weeks with him, she’d begun to feel confined. There were areas of her life about which she cared passionately, and which he was indifferent to or simply unaware of. She’d never be able to talk to him about Pan and separation, for example.

  She stood up, and then bent down and kissed him, which took him by surprise. “You won’t be waiting long,” she said.

  He smiled. Bindi and Pan touched noses, and then Pan leapt to Lyra’s shoulder and they moved away through the bar and into the chilly street.

  She began to turn left, but stopped, and thought for a second, and then crossed the street instead and went into Jordan.

  “What now?” said Pan, as she waved to the porter in the lodge window.

  “The rucksack.”

  They climbed the stairs to their old room in silence. Once she’d locked the door behind them and switched on the gas fire, she rolled back the rug and prized up the floorboard. Everything was as they’d left it.

  She retrieved the rucksack and took it to the armchair, under the lamplight. Pan crouched on the little table while Lyra unfastened the buckles. She would very much have liked to tell Pan how uneasy she felt, part guilty, part sad, part overwhelmingly curious. But talking was so difficult.

  “Who are we going to tell about this?” he said.

  “Depends what we find.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t depend on that. Let’s just…”

  She didn’t bother to finish the sentence. She folded back the top of the rucksack and found a neatly folded shirt that had once been white and a sweater of coarse dark blue wool, both much darned, and under them a pair of rope-soled sandals, badly worn down, and a tin box about the size of a large Bible, held shut with a couple of thick rubber bands. It was heavy, and the contents didn’t move or make a noise when she turned the box around in her hands. It had once contained Turkish smokeleaf, but the painted design was almost worn away. She opened it and found several small bottles and sealed cardboard boxes tightly packed in with cotton fibers.

  “Botanical stuff, mayb
e,” she said.

  “Is that all?” said Pan.

  “No. Here’s his toiletry bag or something.”

  It was made of faded canvas and contained a razor and shaving brush and a nearly empty tube of toothpaste.

  “There’s something else,” Pan said, peering inside the rucksack.

  Her hand found a book—two books—and brought them out. Disappointingly, they were both in languages she couldn’t read, though one looked from the illustrations like a textbook of botany, and the other, from the way it was laid out on the page, a long poem.

  “Still more,” said Pan.

  At the bottom of the rucksack she found a bundle of papers and brought them all out. They consisted of three or four offprints from learned journals, all concerning botany; a small battered notebook that at a quick look contained names and addresses from all over Europe and beyond; and a small number of handwritten pages. These were creased and stained, and the handwritten words were in a pale pencil. But whereas the journal offprints were in Latin or German, she saw at a quick glance that the written pages were in English.

  “Well?” he said. “Are we going to read them?”

  “Of course. But not here. The light in here’s dreadful. I don’t know how we managed to do any work at all.”

  She folded the pages and put them in an inside pocket, and then replaced everything else before unlocking the door and getting ready to leave.

  “And am I going to be allowed to read them too?” he said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  They said not a word on the way back to St. Sophia’s.

  Lyra made herself some hot chocolatl and sat at her little table by the fire, with the lamp close by, to read the document from the rucksack. It consisted of several pages of lined paper torn from an exercise book, by the look of it, covered with writing in pencil. Pan sat, holding himself ostentatiously away from her arm, close enough to read it with her.

  FROM DR. STRAUSS’S JOURNAL

  Tashbulak, 12 September

  Chen the camel herder says he has been into Karamakan. Once inside he managed to penetrate to the heart of the desert. I asked what was there. He said it was guarded by priests. That was the word he used, but I know he was searching for another that better expressed what they were. Like soldiers, he said. But priests.

  But what were they guarding? It was a building. He could not say what was inside it. They refused to let him enter.

  What sort of building? How big was it? What did it look like? Big like a great sand dune, he said, the greatest in the world, made of red stone, very ancient. Not like a building that people made. Like a hill, then, or a mountain? No, regular like a building. And red. But not like a house or a dwelling. Like a temple? He shrugged.

  What language did they speak, the guards? Every language, he said. (I daresay he means every language he knows, which is not a few: like many of his fellow camel men, he is at home in a dozen languages, from Mandarin to Persian.)

  Tashbulak, 15 September

  Saw Chen again. Asked him why he had wanted to enter Karamakan. He said he had always known stories about the limitless wealth to be found there. Many people had tried, but most had given up before they reached more than a little way, because of the pain of the journey akterrakeh, as they pronounce it.

  I asked how he overcame the pain. By thinking of gold, he said.

  And did you find any? I said.

  Look at me, he said. Look at us.

  He is a ragged, skeleton-thin figure. His cheeks are hollow, his eyes sunk among a hundred wrinkles. His hands are ingrained with dirt. His clothes would disgrace a scarecrow. His dæmon, a desert rat, is nearly hairless, and her bare skin is covered in weeping lesions. He is avoided by the other camel men, who seem to be afraid of him. The solitary nature of his way of living obviously suits him. The others have begun to avoid me, probably because of my contact with him. They know of his power to separate, and fear and shun him because of it.

  Was he not afraid for his dæmon? If she got lost, what would he have done?

  He’d have searched for her in al-Khan al-Azraq. My Arabic is patchy, but Hassall told me that meant the Blue Hotel. I queried that, but Chen insisted: al-Khan al-Azraq, the Blue Hotel. And where was this Blue Hotel? He didn’t know where it was. Just a place where dæmons go. Anyway, he said, she probably wouldn’t go there, because she wanted gold as much as he did. That seemed to be a joke, because he laughed as he said it.

  Lyra looked at Pan and saw that he was gazing at the page with fierce intensity. She read on:

  Tashbulak, 17 September

  The more we examine it, the more it seems that Rosa lopnoriae is the parent and the others, R. tajikiae and so on, the descendants. The optical phenomena are by some way most marked with ol. R. lopnoriae. And the further from Karamakan, the harder it is to grow. Even when conditions have been arranged to duplicate the soil, the temperature, the humidity, etc., of K., so closely as to be more or less identical, specimens of R. lopnoriae fail to prosper and soon die. There’s something we’re missing. The other variants must have been hybridized in order to produce a plant with at least some of the virtues of R. lop while being viable in other places.

  There is a question about how to write this all up. Of course, the scientific papers will come first. But none of us can overlook the wider implications. As soon as the facts about the roses are known in the world, there will be a frenzy for exploration, for exploitation, and we—this little station—will be elbowed aside, if not actually wiped out. So will all the rose growers nearby. Nor is that all: given the nature of what the optical process discloses, there will be religious and political anger, panic, persecution, as surely as the night follows the day.

  Tashbulak, 23 September

  I have asked Chen to guide me into Karamakan. There will be gold for him. Rod Hassall will come too. I dread it, but there is no avoiding it. I expected it would be hard to persuade Cartwright to let us make the attempt, but he was all in favor. He can see the importance of it as well as we can. In any case, things here are desperate.

  Tashbulak, 25 September

  Rumors of violence from Khulanshan and Akdzhar, just 150 kilometers or so to the west. Rose gardens there have been burned and dug up by men from the mountains—at least so it’s said. We thought that particular trouble was limited to Asia Minor. Bad news if it’s come this far.

  Tomorrow we go into Karamakan, if it’s possible. Cariad begs me not to. Hassall’s dæmon likewise. They are afraid, of course, and my God, so am I.

  Karamakan, 26 September

  This pain is agonizing, almost indescribable, completely imperious and commanding. But it isn’t quite pain either anymore. A sort of heart-deep anguish and sorrow, a sickness, a fear, a despair almost unto death. All those things, which vary in their intensity. The physical pain grew less after half an hour or so. I don’t think I could have borne it for longer. As for Cariad…It is too painful to speak of. What have I done? What have I done to her, my soul? Her eyes so wide, so shocked, as I looked back.

  I can’t write of it.

  The worst thing I have ever done, and the most necessary. I pray there will be some future in which we can come together, and that she will forgive me.

  The page ended there. As she read it, Lyra felt a movement at her elbow and sensed Pan drawing away. He lay down at the edge of the table with his back to her. Her throat tightened; she couldn’t have spoken, even if she knew what to say to him.

  She closed her eyes for a moment and then read on:

  We have come 4 kilometers into the region and are resting to recover a little strength. It is a hellish place. Hassall was very badly affected at first, but recovered more quickly than I am doing. Chen, by contrast, is quite cheerful. Of course, he has experienced it before.

  The landscape is utterly barren
. Vast dunes of sand from whose summit you can see nothing except more dunes, and yet more beyond them. The heat is appalling. Mirages flicker at the edge of one’s vision and every sound is magnified, somehow; the passage of the wind over the loose sand creates an intolerable scraping, squeaking, as if a million insects lived just under the top layer of sand, and under one’s skin too, so that just out of sight these hideous creatures were living a gnawing, chewing, tearing, biting life that eats at one’s own inside as well as at the substance of the world itself. But there is no life, vegetable or animal. Only our camels seem unperturbed.

  The mirages, if that is what they are, disappear as you look directly at them, but recombine at once when you look away. They seem to be like images of furious gods or devils making threatening gestures. It is almost too hard to bear. Hassall is suffering too. Chen says we should keep asking these deities for forgiveness, reciting a formula of contrition and apology that he tried to teach us. He says the mirages are aspects of the Simurgh, some kind of monstrous bird. It’s very hard to make sense of what he says.

  It is time to move on.

  Karamakan, later

  Slow progress. We are camping for the night, despite Chen’s advice to keep moving. We simply have no strength left. We must rest and recover. Chen will wake us before dawn so we can travel in the coolest part of the day. Oh, Cariad, Cariad.

  Karamakan, 27 September

  An appalling night. Hardly slept for nightmares of torture, dismemberment, disemboweling—atrocious suffering that I had to watch, unable to flee or close my eyes or help. Kept being woken by my own cries, dreading to sleep again, unable to prevent it. Oh God, I hope Cariad is not disturbed in this way. Hassall in a similar state. Chen grumbled and went to lie apart, so as not to be disturbed.