The Rose Field, page 58
There was a rap at the door, very loud and very sudden.
Lyra stood up. “I’ll go,” she said.
“Lyra—” said Malcolm.
“No. I know what to say.” She left the little parlor as there came another knock at the door, louder and more impatient than before.
More knocking at the door. Lyra took off her circlet and smoothed her hair down before she opened the door.
“Good morning,” she said. “Can I help you?”
The man was taken aback. He even stood down to the step below. “Who are you?” he said.
“My name is Tatiana Iorekova. I am a queen of the witches of Novaya Zemlya. Who are you?”
His expression was puzzled and cautious. She could see he’d been prepared to be angry, and now didn’t know what to do with the expression he’d been practicing.
“I’m a security officer. Are you the…Is this your house?”
“No. Is it yours?”
“Where’s the…What did you say you were?”
“The queen of the witches of Novaya Zemlya.”
He looked her up and down. “That’s not true,” he said. “You got any identification to prove what you just said?”
“Of course I have. Here you are.”
She took out Mustafa Bey’s letter. He scanned it quickly and gave it back.
“Anyone could have made that. You’ve got to leave here now. I want to speak to the occupiers.”
“But you didn’t read the paper I gave you. You’re going to claim you didn’t obey the law because you couldn’t read?” Lyra said. “Will the courts be impressed by that defense?”
“No, because it won’t reach the courts. Gather your belongings and go, now.”
Then Malcolm said, “What’s going to happen to Mr. and Mrs. Butler?” He had appeared beside Lyra without a sound.
The officer blinked and sighed. “Did you hear what I said to your…friend here?”
“My colleague. Yes.”
“And did you hear me say one word about the future of Mr. and Mrs. Butler?”
“No.”
“That’s because I don’t know what’s going to happen to them. And I don’t know because I haven’t asked, because it’s none of my business. We’ll take them to a transit camp, and then they can go or they can stay. They’ve had fair warning. If they stay here, we won’t be answerable for the consequences.”
“You’d pull the house down around them?”
The officer shrugged.
“Where’s your dæmon?” said Lyra.
“Dunno. Now, I’ve told you to move out the way, because you’re impeding an officer in the course of his duty.”
Lyra saw his subordinates move forward a step or so, a dozen men, all uniformed and armed. Malcolm remembered something from a very long time before, something in his childhood: an old lady addressing a crowd of soldiers, and forcing them to leave—it was the Priory at Wolvercote, of course! Sister Benedicta speaking to the Office of Child Protection, who had come to take the baby Lyra away from the nuns who were looking after her—and he, Malcolm, and old Mr. Taphouse, the handyman, were listening as she chastised them. And now as Lyra stood on the doorstep facing the officers it was like seeing a dream about that memory, because Lyra was standing firmly, her chin high, her eyes glinting, just as Sister Benedicta had been twenty years before. Of course, thought Malcolm, she wouldn’t remember. She’d been a baby asleep in her crib. But it looked for a moment as if she were consciously modeling herself on the brave old nun.
Only for a moment, though. And Malcolm thought that if Pan had been with her, she would have challenged the men, and outfaced them, but he wasn’t, and she was incomplete. It was the wrong moment. He saw her flush with mortification. One or two passersby stopped and watched in mild curiosity, but without anything dramatic to see, they soon moved on again.
“I told you to move,” said the officer in charge. “Mr. and Mrs. Butler have had plenty of time to take their belongings elsewhere. You can help them, or you can leave, but you can’t stand in the way.”
He stepped up to stand on a level with her. Lyra felt Malcolm’s hands on her arms, and realized that she’d been trembling with passion, a dead-end passion, fruitless and empty. The officer snapped an order and the men raised their rifles. Behind her, the parlor door opened and Mr. and Mrs. Butler came through, slowly, arm in arm, a soldier behind them holding a rifle. They had nothing. Lyra gathered up the knitting bag from the hall table and thrust it into Mrs. Butler’s arms, and she held it like a baby.
At the same moment Lyra saw something clearly for the first time. It was as if a blocked channel in her mind had suddenly opened, and a rush of understanding poured through clear and free.
“Malcolm,” she said, “I know what the alkahest is.”
Thirty-Four
The Alkahest at Work
After a day’s travel over sand and gravel, Pan was following Olivier Bonneville and his horse through some rough grassland that led gradually down towards the trees where the red building stood. He could see the distant scarlet roof quite clearly, and whenever he passed a shrub or a small tree he scrambled up to get a better view, but the roof was still the only part he could see.
A path through the grass was gradually becoming easier to follow. People and animals had trodden this way, maybe for many years, maybe for centuries. Bonneville seemed easier in his mind now that their goal was visible, or so it seemed to Pan; he even tried to encourage the horse into a trot, though the horse would have nothing to do with it. When they stopped for a drink, just before the trees really began, Pan decided to make himself known.
He ran through the branches to the tree nearest to where Bonneville had stopped, and called out, “Hey! You! Bonneville! I want to talk to you.”
Bonneville started with surprise and looked all around.
“Up here,” said Pan.
“You!”
“Yes, it is.”
“You fucking polecat. Where is she?”
“No idea. If she’s ahead, she’ll have gone into the building. If she’s behind us, she won’t. That’s all I can tell you.”
“What do you want?”
“Well, I want to stop you killing her, for one thing.”
“I’m not going to kill her,” Bonneville muttered.
“Speak up!”
“I said I’m not going to kill her. But Delamare might, and he’s not far behind us.”
“The Magisterium man. Your uncle.”
Bonneville’s head snapped up again. His face was pale and angry. “Better not get close to me,” he said.
“Oh, I won’t hurt you.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that.”
He shook the reins, and the horse trudged on. Pan followed through the branches. The trees were close enough now to make that easy enough.
“What does Delamare want?” he called to Bonneville.
“He wants to kill her, and he wants to blow something up. Both at the same time would suit him very well.”
“And if you don’t want to kill Lyra, what do you want?”
“She’s got my father’s alethiometer. I want it back. Then I’ll leave her alone and forget about her.”
“No, you won’t. She’s your sister.”
Bonneville slumped a little in the saddle. “How do you know that?” he said quietly.
“I thought it was common knowledge. What I’d like to know is how you heard of it.”
Bonneville rode on, saying nothing for over a minute. Then he said, “What’s in the red building?”
“I don’t know. I think Lyra might think…”
“What? What might she think?”
“It’s a doorway to another world. We’ve seen them before.”
He scoffed. “Think I’m stupid?”
“Well, no, but you do stupid things. Impulsive things. You should stop and consider. Didn’t you read your uncle’s sermon? I don’t suppose you were there to hear it. He certainly believes in doorways to other worlds. He thinks they’re the way evil comes into this one.”
“Well, you weren’t there either. How d’you know that?”
“Must have read it in some newspaper.”
Bonneville rode on. The horse was finding the going harder now; branches hung low over the path, and Bonneville sometimes had to lift them out of the way before they could pass.
After a minute or so he said, “Common knowledge, is it? About Lyra?”
“No. She certainly doesn’t know. If you want the truth, I heard it from your dæmon when you were asleep.”
“Bastard.”
His dæmon was perching as still as stone behind him.
“Do you remember your mother? Mrs. Coulter?” Pan said.
“No. She was probably in it with her brother. Inventing lies…”
Pan, whose memories of the woman were bright and terrifying still, was tempted to tell Bonneville everything he knew, but he held back.
The horse stopped suddenly. Bonneville, who wasn’t expecting that, almost fell from the saddle. “Can you hear that?” he said.
Pan turned his head one way and then the other to locate whatever sound Bonneville had heard. There was a light wind rustling the leaves, and some sort of small bird was singing not far away, but it was a different sound that Bonneville had heard, and after a few moments Pan heard it too.
“An engine,” he said. “From back there, the way we came.”
“Delamare and his bomb. Fuck. Can you see the red roof? How far is it?”
Pan leapt higher up the willow tree and called down, “Close. Another few minutes, no more.”
“Right. We’ll push on as quick as we can. That engine’s laboring—he’s finding it hard going. We’ll get there before he does.”
He shook the reins. The horse slouched forward.
Bonneville was urging it hard, but the horse was stubbornly unwilling to be urged. Pan leapt from tree to tree—easy now that they were closer—and thought of telling Bonneville to leave the horse and go forward on foot, because they were only a matter of minutes away from the building. The trees grew too thickly for them to see anything below the scarlet roof, but Pan had the impression of immensity, and of silence too, a silence in which the air-cooled engine of whatever sort of truck or armored car was following them kept snarling closer and closer.
Finally he leapt down as the horse passed below, and clung to Bonneville’s jacket for safety.
“What are you doing?” cried Bonneville, squirming in the saddle.
“Shut up and get down. Leave the horse to block the path and do the rest on foot. We’re nearly there.”
Bonneville’s dæmon raised her one useful wing in protest, but said nothing as she clung to his shoulder. He clambered down awkwardly, the horse moving a step or two as he set his foot on the ground, but he recovered and lurched forward, hitching his rucksack over his shoulder. The horse had already discovered some palatable grass beside the path and didn’t seem inclined to move away from it; Bonneville gave it a pat on the neck as he followed Pan towards the red glow through the trees ahead.
Less than a minute later they came to the flagstone area in front of the flight of steps up to the portico. Pan had had the idea that there would be guards, but his memory of Strauss’s journal was hazy, and there was no one there now.
Again they stopped to listen for Delamare’s engine.
“It’s closer,” said Bonneville.
“Hurry up, then. Open the door.”
Pan sprang to the top of the steps and looked at the twin columns, whose red paint was peeling, and at the edge of the tiled roof above as Bonneville ran up after him. The sound of the engine came clearly through the trees now: Pan expected to see it at any moment. Bonneville turned the handle, and was as surprised as Malcolm had been when it turned so easily.
“Quick,” he said, and Pan darted past his legs and into the great hall.
They closed the door at once and looked around. Pan was searching for a way out: Bonneville was just amazed. Pan saw the door at the other end of the great dim hall and ran towards it, the scratching of his claws on the wooden floor loud in the enormous silence. Halfway across, he stopped and turned. Bonneville hadn’t moved; he stood staring all around and above as if struck by a revelation. There was a painting of some sort on the walls, and perhaps Bonneville was looking at that.
“Come on!” Pan said, as loud as he dared. The vehicle following them had arrived on the flagstone forecourt: the driver gave a little burst of the throttle, and then the engine cut out and fell silent. Bonneville came to his senses and began to run, following Pan towards the other door.
And when Pan was nearly there, with Bonneville close behind, the door opened behind them. Light fell in, and the figure of Marcel Delamare stood silhouetted in the entrance.
* * *
—
Lyra and Malcolm stood and watched as the old couple came out of the front door. Malcolm was eager to fight in their defense—she could tell by the tension in his stance—but she squeezed his hand and knew he wouldn’t be foolish; he’d be cut down in a moment.
Old Mr. Butler leaned towards her and said quietly, “You will tell them, won’t you?”
“Everything,” she said. “Everything we’ve seen.”
Mrs. Butler smiled nervously and clutched her bag of knitting as they left. They couldn’t march, so the soldiers had to adapt themselves to their pace as they moved away from the lakeshore and out of sight around a corner.
Malcolm was looking at Lyra. “What next?” he said.
“I don’t want to go too far away from the doorway. You know, the opening. If Pan had come through, I know he’d wait for me somewhere nearby. I just don’t want to be somewhere else when he does come.”
“Good idea. Let’s go back. And what were you going to say about the alkahest? You’d just seen what it was?”
“Yes! It is the universal solvent, just as it says in the encyclopedia. The destroyer of bonds. Look at what’s happening here—all the old ways and habits that brought people together, like bartering and trading—just dissolved. Wiped away by new ways people don’t fully understand. The new roads that go who knows where but just tear up the rose gardens and knock down perfectly good houses. And—”
“What about the dæmon sickness? Is it responsible for that too?”
“That most of all! What’s the closest bond there is? It’s between people and their dæmons. Somehow when you’re separated, like we are, the bond is still there, but this isn’t the same at all. With the sickness here, people just seem indifferent. They’re not interested anymore. But it’s not just happening here. It’s every kind of bond, in our world as well. Like the new Master of Jordan, breaking the old connection between me and the college, because I was costing them too much. It sounded so reasonable when he said it. Money. They had to save money, because…Everything about the alkahest is reasonable. It’s reasonable to make money, to save money…It’s so powerful. Why have I never seen it before? It gets everywhere. Didn’t you tell me something about Thuringia Potash—they had a branch or a laboratory or something in Aleppo?”
“That’s right. They’d just abandoned it because it was losing money. And that meant that all the things that depended on it had to go too. Jobs, businesses…There was a café where the TP staff used to eat. Going bankrupt.”
“All being dissolved. The more I see, the more obvious it seems…I really think I’m beginning to understand at last. Everything having to give way to money.”
“How does Mustafa Bey fit into this idea? You trusted him, didn’t you? But he was a trader above everything else. And he was building a new road, wasn’t he? And running buses on it?”
Lyra rubbed her head. It was true, and it was a fine and comfortable bus, and no doubt various carriers and small traders and couriers and camel-train owners would go out of business because of it. It wasn’t simple.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Yes, it’s true, of course it is. And of course people have always knocked things down and built other things in their place. But money’s different somehow. It swallows everything…Even the Magisterium, and the men from the mountains, even the people who wanted to destroy the roses took them seriously. They were wrong about them, but they felt they were important in themselves. But Thuringia Potash and all these other companies are only interested in the rose oil as a unit of value. If an acre of roses makes money, fine, but because the roses and the oil themselves aren’t important, they’ll tear them up in a moment. All those fields being dug up: it isn’t because the developers hate the roses, it’s because they can make more per acre by growing peanuts, or by building a factory.”
She was thinking this out as she said it, and she remembered Silvina Policastro, and her dæmon laying his weary head on her shoulder.
“The thing that troubles me most,” she went on, “or one of the things…I’m so tired, Malcolm, I can’t think straight…It’s something like this. In making rose oil, each part of the process is an end in itself. The roses are beautiful as they grow. Distilling the rosewater and making the oil are crafts worth knowing, things worth doing in themselves, things you can get better at and take pride in. So people who did them used to have a connection with the soil and the seasons and the light and the weather, and they felt the sun and the wind and the rain on their skins—the alkahest will change all that. They’ll soon be sitting in offices under artificial light, entering figures into ledgers and account books, and their dæmons will be dying beside them, and no one will care, and no one will know why.”
They were walking through the town as she spoke. Malcolm said little, but they both knew that if he did, he’d say that she was being absurdly romantic, that tending plants was hard physical work, that ledgers and account books had to be attended to as closely as rose gardens if civilization was to work at all. Lyra felt a wide, still melancholy, not anguish, not misery, but the endless gray light of a day on a motionless sea, as she thought about what she was saying and saw more implications. It was like watching the sand darken slowly as a tide came in, along the whole length of the shore, as far as she could see, the water seeping through, under everything there was, dissolving every bond.
