The Rose Field, page 51
“No, and I’m worried. I thought you had a way of communicating with Malcolm, with him directly?”
“Not anymore. I knew I was going to be arrested; I managed to send my half of the system to the Silvertongue girl, care of the merchant who was killed. Whether she received it or not, I don’t know, but it was no longer of any use to me.”
Hannah sipped her whisky and said, “Well, you can’t go anywhere else for a while. You’re welcome to stay here. Or I know a place a little way out of the city where you’d be safe: Malcolm Polstead’s parents’ pub. Absolutely solid and reliable. Though, no—wait—the army’s occupied Port Meadow, and they’re requisitioning everywhere nearby…Better keep away from there.”
“In fact, I’m legally free, thanks to Kilkenny, but still on a wanted list. They’ll have thought of some other charges by now, and concocted the evidence. I know the Trout; I went there once a long time ago with Tom Nugent. I’ll find somewhere safe. A bed for tonight, though, and a hot bath…I spent last night in a wood near Hounslow.”
“You look remarkably well for it. Do you need any more clothes? I can easily slip out in the morning…”
“Yes, I do. Thank you. I’m very glad you were in this evening, Hannah.”
“I’ll go and make up your bed, and then we can have another drink.”
“Good. I want to hear more about what your economist says.”
Thirty-One
Merchant People
Cariad led Pan into the station at a point where a wall had fallen. Dilyara had begun to clear it, but much of the masonry was too heavy for her to move. The two dæmons climbed lightly over the twisted steel beams, the crumbling plaster, the broken glass, and Pan followed her down a swept and tidied corridor until they came to a door open on a lighted room.
“We’ll wait here,” Cariad whispered. “Just listen and see if Brynmor’s in there. Or Dilyara. She looks after the place. Brynmor trusts her.”
They crouched next to the wall beside the door. People were talking in the room, not urgently, nor in a carefree, relaxed way like friends after a good dinner, but with a businesslike seriousness that was nevertheless informal. Pan could tell that, even though he didn’t recognize the language they were speaking. But suddenly they switched and continued in English: three men’s voices and two women’s.
“The lake is the biggest obstacle,” said a young man.
“Lop Nor? No,” said a woman. “Look at what’s happening at the Aral Sea. A simple matter of drainage will remove it altogether. And think of the Suez Canal. How they built that.”
“I don’t see the similarity. For one thing—”
“Getting the supply chain for fuel and so forth in place first,” said another man. “Is that what you mean, Petra?”
“Exactly.”
“But you can’t plan any infrastructure if the ground itself shifts about.”
“I think that’s largely mythical, that moving business,” said a younger woman.
“Even so, we’d need to stabilize the soil—”
“Which we can do. More important to my mind is the need for refueling stations on the main link.”
Pan turned to Cariad. “Are these people…? Where do they come from?” he whispered.
“Sinkiang, maybe…Different places.”
“Do they come from the red building?”
But she was moving away. She stalked slowly past the open door, stopping to look in before moving on. No one seemed to notice her, so Pan stopped there as well, and saw the three men—in their twenties or thirties—and one older woman, and a young woman seemingly about Lyra’s age, sitting casually around or leaning against the counter where a coffee machine was steaming. All their attention was focused on one another, and none on the open door. He could see their dæmons, small and unobtrusive, perching or sitting silently.
He turned to Cariad, but she had vanished. He cursed himself, and moved on past the door. There was something odd about those dæmons, and he wanted very much to ask her about it. They looked asleep, or drugged.
He moved very carefully back into the open doorway. No one looked at him. It was as if he was invisible.
“…But thinking more boldly,” said one of the men, “I know our concern should be with the Great Road project, but there’s no reason why a canal shouldn’t solve a lot of the major problems. I mean, there’s no shortage of water running off the mountains before it all soaks into the sand.”
“If it was all directed—” said the young woman.
The other woman said something in Arabic. The conversation continued in that language, and Pan edged further into the room. One of the men moved his head a little to look at him, and Pan froze; but then the man turned back to the conversation and took no more notice.
This room was a sort of small common room or recreation area, a space where people would go to drink coffee or eat sandwiches or play cards during a break. It was untidy, but clean enough: perhaps it was one of the spaces Dilyara looked after. He noticed an anbaric clock fixed to the wall, and others; five altogether, showing the time in different places. He guessed that here in Tashbulak it was perhaps nine or ten in the evening, an odd time for people to take a break from work, unless they were working to the time in—he calculated roughly—Western Europe, as one of the clocks showed.
Pan looked at the dæmons of the people speaking. A sparrow, a small dog, a wren, a lizard, and a small rodent of some sort, perhaps a mouse. They perched or lay apparently asleep. Their people never spoke to them, and the dæmons never offered a comment or asked a question: it was quite unlike any such gathering Pan had ever seen. Normally he’d expect the dæmons to be awake, interested, responsive, to be included in the talk and the interactions. That’s what things were like. That happened everywhere and always.
Except—and he remembered it with a sickening lurch—at the hideous place at Bolvangar, in the high Arctic, where he and Lyra had made their way in order to rescue her friend Roger, half a lifetime ago. The nurses there who looked after the stolen children had dæmons who behaved not like the people they were part of but like little trotting mechanical dogs or dolls, or pets. He and Lyra had only just escaped being separated under the silver guillotine, which cut children away from their dæmons: it had been almost the worst moment of their lives. The nurses, they thought, must have undergone the same sort of operation for their dæmons to be so compliant, so much less real than they should be.
Had these people been separated by force like those at Bolvangar?
But that wren was looking at him with what might have been a faint curiosity, and that dog, at the feet of the young man by the counter, had cocked his ear when Pan came in, though he didn’t open his eye. They were taking notice of the people, though unobtrusively, or even surreptitiously. It was just that the people didn’t seem to be aware of them.
The mouse dæmon was sitting in the pocket of the blue cardigan that the young woman had thrown over the back of her chair. He looked out, and his eyes met Pan’s, and immediately closed, like a child who thinks that if he can’t see, he can’t be seen either.
Pan wondered if the dæmons could talk to one another, or whether they were mutually invisible: whether he was the only being there who could see them.
He moved slowly further into the room, closer to the mouse dæmon in the blue cardigan. The people went on talking, switching languages whenever someone else contributed a remark or a question. They were fluent and seemingly at home in whichever language they were using. Pan paused beneath the cardigan, which was hung casually over the back of the owner’s chair, and looked at the dæmon again. The bright mouse eyes were still closed.
“My name is Pan,” he whispered. “Can you hear me?”
“I don’t know,” came a whisper in return.
“What do you mean? You answered the question. You can hear me. What’s your name?”
“I don’t know. I had one, but it was lost.”
“Doesn’t she talk to you?”
He looked up. The young woman was talking about financial something or other; Pan couldn’t follow it. The mouse dæmon tried to tuck himself further down into the pocket.
“I know you can hear me,” Pan whispered. “But I’m not sure she can. Am I right?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard.”
The little dæmon sounded as if he was frightened of everything, and wanted nothing more than to be invisible.
“She doesn’t seem to hear me,” Pan said. “None of them do. Or see me.”
“They do, but they don’t notice.”
“Do you? I mean, do you see the other dæmons here?”
“It’s difficult.”
“You can see me, though, can’t you? Or you could if you looked. Why don’t you want to talk?”
“We just don’t.”
“You mean ‘we dæmons,’ or ‘me and my person’?”
“Both, I think.”
“You never talk to another dæmon?”
“It’s wrong.”
“Who told you it’s wrong?”
“We just don’t do it.”
“Where do you come from? Do you come from the red building?”
The mouse dæmon shrank away. He seemed crushed by fear and misery.
Then Pan thought of something else, and said, “Are you separated?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Do you…d’you know what I mean by ‘separated’?”
“No, no, no, I don’t want to…”
“Or do you come from a different world?”
“Please go away. Please. This is frightening.”
“Well…I don’t mean to frighten you. I’m sorry. If I see you again, I’ll pretend not to notice you.”
He felt a little frightened himself. There was something repellent as well as pitiful about the abject state of this dæmon, and he wondered whether to approach another of them, but before he could move, the young woman’s chair scraped on the floor and she stood up, as if her break was over. Two of the others began to move away with her, leaving the older woman and the man by the counter.
Pan looked for the mouse dæmon to acknowledge him, but he never lifted his head from the cardigan pocket as the woman slung it around her shoulders, and then they were gone.
The young man at the counter shifted a little and poured himself another mug of coffee. His dæmon, some sort of small terrier, lay curled up at his feet, apparently asleep. The other people continued their conversation, mostly in Italian now, which Pan could understand a little, and they were talking about money or banking, and how some new form of money was making it easier to trade.
Pan looked up at the arm of the chair, where the older woman’s lizard dæmon was lying, also asleep. He waited for a flicker of movement from the dæmon, and saw none. But the conversation was coming to an end, and then he saw something he’d never seen before: the woman gathered a bag from the floor, picked up the dæmon as if he were nothing but a handkerchief, and dropped him casually inside the bag before snapping it shut and standing up. Pan felt sick: the dæmon looked boneless, as limp as a dead worm.
The woman got to her feet, said “Ciao” to the man, and left.
Pan had seen enough. He wanted to find Cariad, and he wanted to talk to Strauss, and he wanted to think about what he’d seen and heard; and most of all he wanted to talk to Lyra. No, not just that: he wanted to press himself against her, to feel her heart beating, to cherish the warmth of her blood beneath her skin. Above all, he feared seeing her like the woman with the cardigan, completely indifferent to her dæmon, to him. How could he bear it? How could she? He wanted to warn her. Something was wrong here.
He crept away from the lighted room. Cariad was nowhere to be seen. Pan was too disturbed to look for her; all he wanted to do was hide. He curled up to sleep under a staircase.
* * *
—
Pan woke up to the thunder of banging on doors and of stamping feet. His hiding place under the stairs was safe for the moment, but probably not for long; he crept as far as he could into the shadows and watched as the feet came closer.
Soldiers’ feet, in boots, sand-colored camouflage uniforms. Shouts in French and German, and in Tajik, and in English too: “Come out! Show yourselves! Armed military!”
A door opened cautiously. From where Pan was crouching he could see a woman who might have been the cleaner Dilyara looking out, full of fear; then she withdrew and closed the door silently. He cursed: if he’d had his wits about him, he would have darted in. Cariad must be in there with her and Strauss. They could have discussed what to do. Now the soldiers were moving along the corridor, banging on all the doors with the butts of their rifles and shouting.
Another of the doors opened, but not cautiously, nor in anger. The woman who came out was the older of the two women he’d heard talking during the night, the one who’d picked up her dæmon so casually. She was dressed in a khaki shirt and slacks, and her hair was neatly styled.
“Who are you?” she said in French to the soldier who’d been about to slam his rifle into her door.
“Magisterium. Come out.”
“No, I don’t want to. I shall stay here till I’m ready. Who is your commanding officer?”
“Not your business. Do as we tell you.”
Pan was impressed by her calm confidence. The soldiers seemed unable to speak in less than a shout; her voice was just as it had been in the coffee room, the tone conversational, the manner formal.
“No. I need an explanation of who you are and why you’re here. But you are a sergeant, and I want to speak to an officer.”
She stood with arms folded and without a flicker of doubt in her expression. The sergeant had been joined by two others, who were clearly expecting him to dominate her, and now seemed a little disconcerted to find that he couldn’t. One of them looked at him inquiringly.
“I’m not going to stand here arguing with you,” the sergeant said in a tone that tried to be menacing.
“Good. As soon as you move out of the way I can go about my work.”
“What work?”
“Business. Development banking.”
He was disconcerted. “Where’s your boss?” he demanded, after a pause that was a little too long.
“I’m the boss.”
“Go and report to Captain Schalken. He’s the officer in charge.”
“Report to him? I think he will report to me.”
The sergeant’s dæmon, a terrier with docked ears and tail, had been growling almost silently, crouching behind his legs; now she uttered a short angry bark. The sergeant put down a hand to calm her. The woman took no notice, but continued to look him directly in the eyes. Pan thought of her dæmon, limp in the bag she held over her shoulder, perhaps asleep, or paralyzed, or dead…No, this woman was afraid of nothing, and the sergeant knew it. He moved aside without a word, and let her pass calmly down the corridor.
He turned to the other two soldiers and snapped, “Come on, get on with it.”
They moved stolidly along the corridor, knocking on doors, shouting for their occupants to come out and identify themselves. No one did, and soon the soldiers had gone around the corner and out of sight.
Pan ran from the shelter of the stairs and scratched hard at Dilyara’s door. He heard voices, and after a moment the door opened cautiously. He darted through before the woman could shut it.
“Cariad?” he said softly.
“No! Go away!” came her reply.
Dilyara stood holding the door, puzzled. Cariad lay on the heap of blankets in the corner, next to a man who seemed almost dead from exhaustion and hunger. Cariad was clinging to his neck. Dilyara shut the door and came to stand next to the man protectively. Her own dæmon was sitting by her ankles, trembling.
“Cariad,” whispered the man. “Don’t be frightened, now.”
“Who is this dæmon?” said Dilyara.
“My name is Pan,” he said, keeping his voice as calm and quiet as he could. “My person is on her way here. Cariad, tell them what I told you last night. I want to know what’s inside the red building.”
“Where have you come from?” said the man. His voice was dry and faint.
“Brytain. Oxford. Cariad will tell you. You’ve been inside the red building, and I want to know what you found there.”
Dilyara sat down on the floor and helped the man to sit up a little. She took his hand and he clung to her tightly.
“Don’t go there,” he said. “It’s a terrible place. There’s a sickness there, a plague of some kind. Everyone who goes there gets infected. We shall die soon. I came out so I could tell the world about it. But now I think I shall never leave Tashbulak.”
“It wasn’t always like that, was it, that other world?” said Pan.
“Didn’t know then. Just know now. It’s a different place from anything I…Tell your person she must never go there and she must tell this world, here, our world, about the plague. The only safe thing is to stay away.”
“The plague—is it just in the red building, or everywhere?”
“You wouldn’t under—”
His voice gave out, and he started to cough, a dry rasping cough that seemed to tear the surface from his lungs. Cariad was weeping. Dilyara brushed the damp hair away from his face.
“Don’t strain…” Pan said helplessly. He felt there was nothing he could do; the woman’s little fox dæmon was already comforting Cariad. “But anything you can tell me…”
Dilyara said, “Dr. Bryn too tired. You leave him now.”
“How long has Dr…. Bryn been here? When did he come back?”
“Three days.”
She turned to Strauss, whose cough had diminished into a shallow scraping breath, and stroked his forehead. His eyes were closed. She murmured something in her own language, and he managed to nod.
