Tony knows nothing of this. His face contentedly deep in the pie, his toes curled inward and his bare soles together, he sits and chews and swallows while his daemon becomes a mouse and grooms her whiskers.
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.
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 every 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 bythe College as masons and scaffolders.
She reached up and lifted the nearest skull gently out of its resting place.
“Hush,” he said.
“We want your help,” she said. “You dont mind helping us, do you?”
Finally, and almost simultaneously, the children discovered what it was like to be drunk.
“Did you? Did you catch it?”
And in any case there was something else to think about. A rumor had been filtering through the streets for some weeks: a rumor that made some people laugh and others grow silent, as some people scoff at ghosts and others fear them. For no reason that anyone could imagine, children were beginning to disappear.
“As it happens, Ive got more chocolatl than I can drink myself. Will you come and help me drink it?”
“I ent. I dont believe in em anyway.”
“Its a coin!” said Roger, feeling for it. “Might be treasure!”
“Hello,” says the beautiful lady. “Whats your name?”
The young ladys daemon is moving out from beside the fox-fur coat. He is in the form of a monkey, but no ordinary monkey: his fur is long and silky and of the most deep and lustrous gold. With sinuous movements he inches down the steps toward the boy, and sits a step above him.
East along the great highway of the River Isis, thronged with slow-moving brick barges and asphalt boats and corn tankers, way down past Henley and Maidenhead to Teddington, where the tide from the German Ocean reaches, and further down still: to Mortlake, past the house of the great magician Dr. Dee; past Falkeshall, where the pleasure gardens spread out bright with fountains and banners by day, with tree lamps and fireworks by night; past White Hall Palace, where the king holds his weekly council of state; past the Shot Tower, dropping its endless drizzle of molten lead into vats of murky water; further down still, to where the river, wide and filthy now, swings in a great curve to the south.
“Whats in that pie?”
She held out her hands for inspection, and he took them and turned them over to look at her fingernails. Beside him, his daemon lay sphinxlike on the carpet, swishing her tail occasionally and gazing unblinkingly at Lyra.
“Dont stay out late, or the Gobblers11 get you!”
Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a childs life in Oxford. Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and charming?
“Yes.”
* * * It would happen like this.
Here.”
“Do you like chocolatl?”
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.
“Yes,” she said. “But the Chaplains fingernails are always dirty. Theyre even dirtier than mine.”
“No. I found a rook on the library roof, though,” she went on.
“Hes a learned man. Whats your excuse?”
“You dont know what they do. They might not do that at all.”
So one day she and Roger made their way into the crypt below the oratory. This was where generations of Masters had been buried, each in his lead-lined oak coffin in niches along the stone walls. A stone tablet below each space gave their names:
“These coffins vegot skeletons in “em!” whispered Roger.
Lyra had once been captured by the children of Gabriel College, and Roger and their friends Hugh Lovat and Simon Parslow had raided the place to rescue her, creeping through the Precentors garden and gathering armfuls of small stone-hard plums to throw at the kidnappers. There were twenty-four colleges, which allowed for endless permutations of alliance and betrayal. But the enmity between the colleges was forgotten in a moment when the town children attacked a colleger: then all the collegers banded together and went into battle against the town-ies.This rivalry was hundreds of years old, and very deep and satisfying.
She told them that they were going on a voyage. They would be well fed and warmly clothed, and those who wanted to could send messages back to their families to let them know they were safe. Captain Magnusson would take them on board his ship very soon, and then when the tide was right, theyd sail out to sea and set a course for the North.
The stall holder sees that, and shouts, and her cat daemon leaps, but Tonys sparrow is aloft and Tony himself halfway down the street already. Curses and abuse go with him, but not far. He stops running at the steps of St. Catherines Oratory, where he sits down and takes out his steaming, battered prize, leaving a trail of gravy on his shirt.
He held it up to the candle and they both gazed wide-eyed. It was not a coin, but a little disc of bronze with a crudely engraved inscription showing a cat.
“It had a hurt foot. I was going to kill it and roast it but Roger said we should help it get better. So we gave it scraps of food and some wine and then it got better and flew away.”
“Not all over. You cant get onto the Sheldon Building because you have to jump up from Pilgrims Tower across a gap. Theres a skylight that opens onto it, but Im not tall enough to reach it.”
But even this was forgotten when the other enemies threatened. One enemy was perennial: the brickburners children, who lived by the claybeds and were despised by collegers and townies alike. Last year Lyra and some townies had made a temporary truce and raided the claybeds, pelting the brick-burners children with lumps of heavy clay and tipping over the soggy castle theyd built, before rolling them over and over in the clinging substance they lived by until victors and vanquished alike resembled a flock of shrieking golems.
“And where else?”
So she had passed her childhood, like a half-wild cat. The only variation in her days came on those irregular occasions when Lord Asriel visited the College. A rich and powerful uncle was all very well to boast about, but the price of boasting was having to be caught by the most agile Scholar and brought to the Housekeeper to be washed and dressed in a clean frock, following which she was escorted (with many threats) to the Senior Common Room to have tea with Lord Asriel and an invited group of senior Scholars. She dreaded being seen by Roger.
Last year, before his expedition to the North, hed gone on to say, “And how do you spend your time when youre not diligently studying?”
And of course the Librarian was wrong in saying to the Master that she wouldnt have been interested. She would have listened eagerly now to anyone who could tell her about Dust. She was to hear a great deal more about it in the months to come, and eventually she would know more about Dust than anyone in the world; but in the meantime, there was all the rich life of Jordan still being lived around her.
“Yeah!”
“Youve been all over the roof except the Sheldon Building. What about underground?”
“You hide and I find you and slice you open, right, like the Gobblers do.”
It was another boy who asked the obvious question.
“Nowhere else?”
“Oh, yes.”
So he wanders through the market, between the old-clothes stalls and the fortune-paper stalls, the fruitmongers and the fried-fish seller, with his little daemon on his shoulder, a sparrow, watching this way and that; and when a stall holder and her daemon are both looking elsewhere, a brisk chirp sounds, and Tonys hand shoots out and returns to his loose shirt with an apple or a couple of nuts, and finally with a hot pie.
And, inevitably:
“My friend. The kitchen boy.”
But one thing on which everyone agreed was the name of these invisible kidnappers. They had to have a name, or not be referred to at all, and talking about them—especially if you were safe and snug at home, or in Jordan College—was delicious. And the name that seemed to settle on them, without anyones knowing why, was the Gobblers.
“And respect the Scholars?”
And so the legend grew of a mysterious group of enchanters who spirited children away. Some said their leader was a beautiful lady, others said a tall man with red eyes, while a third story told of a youth who laughed and sang to his victims so that they followed him like sheep.
“Beefsteak.”
Soon those few who did want to send a message to what-ever home they had were sitting around the beautiful lady as she wrote a few lines at their dictation and, having let them scratch a clumsy X at the foot of the page, folded it into a scented envelope and wrote the address they told her. Tony would have liked to send something to his mother, but he had a realistic idea of her ability to read it. He plucked at the ladys fox-fur sleeve and whispered that hed like her to tell his mum where he was going, and all, and she bent her gracious head close enough to his malodorous little body to hear, and stroked his head and promised to pass the message on.
SIMON LE CLERC, MASTER 1765-1789 CEREBATON REQUIESCANT IN PACE “Whats that mean?” said Roger.
No one could say a word. They all gazed, suddenly shy. They had never seen a lady like this; she was so gracious and sweet and kind that they felt they hardly deserved their good luck, and whatever she asked, theyd give it gladly so as to stay in her presence a little longer.
“My cousin in Northampton, she knows a woman whose little boy was took by the Gobblers....”
He is called Tony Makarios. His mother thinks hes nine years old, but she has a poor memory that the drink has rotted; he might be eight, or ten. His surname is Greek, but like his age, that is a guess on his mothers part, because he looks more Chinese than Greek, and theres Irish and Skraeling and Lascar in him from his mothers side too. Tonys not very bright, but he has a sort of clumsy tenderness that sometimes prompts him to give his mother a rough hug and plant a sticky kiss on her cheeks. The poor woman is usually too fuddled to start such a procedure herself; but she responds warmly enough, once she realizes whats happening.
He was a tough-looking wretch with dark chocolatl on his top lip and a gaunt black rat for a daemon. The lady was standing near the door, talking to a stout man with the air of a sea captain, and as she turned to answer, she looked so angelic in the hissing naphtha light that all the children fell silent.
“How dyou play that?”
“Theres as much College below ground as there is above it. Im surprised you havent found that out. Well, Im going in a minute. You look healthy enough.
“He never,” said Roger doubtfully. “They never said anything about that in the kitchen. Anyway, you ent allowed in the Retiring Room.”
And then Tony turns. He cant help it.
Lyra firmly believed in this bung. If they pulled it out, she assured her troop, the boat would sink at once; but they didnt find it, and had to abandon ship when the gyptians caught them up, to flee dripping and crowing with triumph through the narrow lanes of Jericho.
Then the children clustered around to say goodbye. The golden monkey stroked all their daemons, and they all touched the fox fur for luck, or as if they were drawing some strength or hope or goodness out of the lady, and she bade them all farewell and saw them in the care of the bold captain on board a steam launch at the jetty. The sky was dark now, the river a mass of bobbing lights. The lady stood on the jetty and waved till she could see their faces no more.
Lord Asriels daemon laughed softly. It was the first sound shed made, and Lyra blushed.
So said Lyra to Roger, one rainy afternoon when they were alone in the dusty attics. He was her devoted slave by this time; he would have followed her to the ends of the earth.
“Whos Roger?”
The kind lady saw him settled on a bench against the wall, and provided by a silent serving woman with a mug of chocolatl from the saucepan on the iron stove. Tony ate the rest of his pie and drank the sweet hot liquor without taking much notice of his surroundings, and the surroundings took little notice of him: he was too small to be a threat, and too stolid to promise much satisfaction as a victim.
“Ratter!” he says, half in alarm, his mouth full.
They moved along the silent vault, tracing the letters of more inscriptions:
The sparrow chirps. It must be safe. Tony swallows his mouthful and stares.
However, that was a distraction; Lyra was still intent on playing Gobblers, and she inveigled Roger down into the wine cellars, which they entered by means of the Butlers spare set of keys. Together they crept through the great vaults where the Colleges Tokay and Canary, its Burgundy, its brantwijn were lying under the cobwebs of ages. Ancient stone arches rose above them supported by pillars as thick as ten trees, irregular flagstones lay underfoot, and on all sides were ranged rack upon rack, tier upon tier, of bottles and barrels. It was fascinating. With Gobblers forgotten again, the two children tiptoed from end to end holding a candle in trembling fingers, peering into every dark corner, with a single question growing more urgent in Lyras mind every moment: what did the wine taste like?
“Underground?”
Roger was less sure about that than about Gobblers, but the story was too good to waste, so they took it in turns to be Lord Asriel and the expiring Tartars, using sherbet dip for the foam.
Then she turned back inside, with the golden monkey nestled in her breast, and threw the little bundle of letters into the furnace before leaving the way she had come.
There was an easy way of answering that. Lyra—over Rogers fervent protests—picked out the oldest, twistiest, greenest bottle she could find, and, not having anything to extract the cork with, broke it off at the neck. Huddled in the furthest corner, they sipped at the heady crimson liquor, wondering when theyd become drunk, and how theyd tell when they were. Lyra didnt like the taste much, but she had to admit how grand and complicated it was. The funniest thing was watching their two daemons, who seemed to be getting more and more muddled: falling over, giggling senselessly, and changing shape to look like gargoyles, each trying to be uglier than the other.
She bit her lip and said nothing. He was watching her sardonically.
“Havent they taught you to say thank you?” he said.
“No.”
Beyond the first crypt they found a passage lined with stone shelves. Each shelf was partitioned off into square sections, and in each section rested a skull.
“Where do you live, Tony?”
Rogers daemon, tail tucked firmly between her legs, shivered against him and gave a little quiet howl.
And hes being watched. A lady in a long yellow-red fox-fur coat, a beautiful young lady whose dark hair falls, shining delicately, under the shadow of her fur-lined hood, is standing in the doorway of the oratory, half a dozen steps above him. It might be that a service is finishing, for light comes from the doorway behind her, an organ is playing inside, and the lady is holding a jeweled breviary.
“In the claybeds, sometimes.”
As for what experimental theology was, Lyra had no more idea than the urchins.
Hes lost already. He was lost the moment his slow-witted daemon hopped onto the monkeys hand. He follows the beautiful young lady and the golden monkey down Denmark Street and along to Hangmans Wharf, and down King Georges Steps to a little green door in the side of a tall warehouse. She knocks, the door is opened, they go in, the door is closed. Tony will never come out—at least, by that entrance; and hell never see his mother again. She, poor drunken thing, will think hes run away, and when she remembers him, shell think it was her fault, and sob her sorry heart out.
FRANCIS LYALL, MASTER 1748-1765 ZOHARIEL REQUIESCANT IN PACE ICNATIUS COLE, MASTER 1745-1748 MUSCA REQUIESCANT IN PACE On each coffin, Lyra was interested to see, a brass plaque bore a picture of a different being: this one a basilisk, this a serpent, this a monkey. She realized that they were images of the dead mens daemons. As people became adult, their daemons lost the power to change and assumed one shape, keeping it permanently.
Lyra learned nothing from that episode except that playing Gobblers led to interesting places. She remembered her uncles words in their last interview, and began to explore underground, for what was above ground was only a small fraction of the whole. Like some enormous fungus whose root system extended over acres, Jordan (finding itself jostling for space above ground with St. Michaels College on one side, Gabriel College on the other, and the University Library behind) had begun, sometime in the Middle Ages, to spread below the surface.
She had formed the notion that it was concerned with magic, with the movements of the stars and planets, with tiny particles of matter, but that was guesswork, really. Probably the stars had daemons just as humans did, and experimental theology involved talking to them. Lyra imagined the Chaplain speaking loftily, listening to the star daemons remarks, and then nodding judiciously or shaking his head in regret. But what might be passing between them, she couldnt conceive.
* * * Little Tony Makarios wasnt the only child to be caught by the lady with the golden monkey. He found a dozen others in the cellar of the warehouse, boys and girls, none older than twelve or so; though since all of them had histories like his, none could be sure of their age. What Tony didnt notice, of course, was the factor that they all had in common. None of the children in that warm and steamy cellar had reached the age of puberty.
What happened on those awkward, formal visits never varied. After the tea, the Master and the other few Scholars whod been invited left Lyra and her uncle together, and he called her to stand in front of him and tell him what shed learned since his last visit. And she would mutter whatever she could dredge up about geometry or Arabic or history or anbarology, and he would sit back with one ankle resting on the other knee and watch her inscrutably until her words failed.
“Go and play, then,” said Lord Asriel.
Children from the slums were easy enough to entice away, but eventually people noticed, and the police were stirred into reluctant action. For a while there were no more bewitchings. But a rumor had been born, and little by little it changed and grew and spread, and when after a while a few children disappeared in Norwich, and then Sheffield, and then Manchester, the people in those places whod heard of the disappearances elsewhere added the new vanishings to the story and gave it new strength.
“Do you obey the Master?”
“I do,” she said decisively. “But I ent afraid either. Id just do what my uncle done last time he came to Jordan. I seen him. He was in the Retiring Room and there was this guest who werent polite, and my uncle just give him a hard look and the man fell dead on the spot, with all foam and froth round his mouth.”
The monkey reaches out slowly. His little hand is black, his nails perfect horny claws, his movements gentle and inviting. The sparrow cant resist. She hops further, and further, and then, with a little flutter, up on to the monkeys hand.
“Dirty,” said Lord Asriel, pushing her hands away. “Dont they make you wash in this place?”
“The Gobblersve been in Stratford. They say theyre coming south!”
That was Lyras world and her delight. She was a coarse and greedy little savage, for the most part. But she always had a dim sense that it wasnt her whole world; that part of her also belonged in the grandeur and ritual of Jordan College; and that somewhere in her life there was a connection with the high world of politics represented by Lord Asriel. All she did with that knowledge was to give herself airs and lord it over the other urchins. It had never occurred to her to find out more.
Nor was she particularly interested. In many ways Lyra was a barbarian. What she liked best was clambering over the College roofs with Roger, the kitchen boy who was her particular friend, to spit plum stones on the heads of passing Scholars or to hoot like owls outside a window where a tutorial was going on, or racing through the narrow streets, or stealing apples from the market, or waging war.
As for where they took these lost children, no two stories agreed. Some said it was to Hell, under the ground, to Fairyland. Others said to a farm where the children were kept and fattened for the table. Others said that the children were kept and sold as slaves to rich Tartars....And so on.
She looked at him suspiciously. She had the feeling that being on the roof was forbidden, though no one had actually said so. “In some of the old rooms,” she said finally.
“Thank you,” she mumbled.
The monkey watches the sparrow; the sparrow watches the monkey.
“Youre a liar. I saw you on the roof only yesterday.”
“I see. So youve been all over the roof—”
He fished in his pocket and drew out a handful of coins, from which he gave her five gold dollars.
“Clarice Walk.”
Hed caught sight of her on one of these occasions and hooted with laughter at this beribboned and pink-frilled vision. She had responded with a volley of shrieking curses that shocked the poor Scholar who was escorting her, and in the Senior Common Room shed slumped mutinously in an armchair until the Master told her sharply to sit up, and then shed glowered at them all till even the Chaplain had to laugh.
At the moment Tony is hanging about the market in Pie Street. Hes hungry. Its early evening, and he wont get fed at home. Hes got a shilling in his pocket that a soldier gave him for taking a message to his best girl, but Tonys not going to waste that on food, when you can pick up so much for nothing.
“Lets play kids and Gobblers!”
“Its like the ones on the coffins,” said Lyra. “Its his daemon. Must be.”
And now that Lyra had the taste for exploring it, she abandoned her usual haunt, the irregular alps of the College roofs, and plunged with Roger into this netherworld. From playing at Gobblers she had turned to hunting them, for what could be more likely than that they were lurking out of sight below the ground?
“Do they like doing this?” gasped Roger, after vomiting copiously.
“Jericho and Port Meadow.”
Lyra turned and darted to the door with relief, remembering to turn and blurt out a “Goodbye.”
And he said, “Let me see your hands, child.”
“Yes,” said Lyra, in the same condition. “And so do I,” she added stubbornly.
“Where do you play to get so dirty?”
Lyra couldnt see Pantalaimon, but she knew his moth form was resting on her shoulder and probably shivering too.
She turned it over and over, taking no notice. Something suddenly fell out of the hole at the base of the skull — fell through her fingers and rang as it hit the floor, and she nearly dropped the skull in alarm.
Lyra knew that much, at least. She was proud of her Colleges 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 didnt belong to Jordan and so must know less, poor things, than the humblest of Jordans under-Scholars.
The other regular enemy was seasonal. The gyptian families, who lived in canal boats, came and went with the spring and autumn fairs, and were always good for a fight. There was one family of gyptians in particular, who regularly returned to their mooring in that part of the city known as Jericho, with whom Lyrad been feuding ever since she could first throw a stone. When they were last in Oxford, she and Roger and some of the other kitchen boys from Jordan and St.
“Youre afraid of em,” she said. “I can tell.”
The monkey lifts her up, and gazes closely at her before standing and swinging back to his human, taking the sparrow daemon with him. The lady bends her scented head to whisper.
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 theyd 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.
In fact, of course, Lyra and her peers were engaged in deadly warfare. There were several wars running at once. The children (young servants, and the children of servants, and Lyra) of one college waged war on those of another.
“So, you play on the roof as well,” he went on. “Do you ever go into the library?”
And she mumbled, “I just play. Sort of around the College. Just...play, really.”
“What you doing?” said Roger. “You ent supposed to touch em.”
Michaels College had laid an ambush for them, throwing mud at their brightly painted narrowboat until the whole family came out to chase them away—at which point the reserve squad under Lyra raided the boat and cast it off from the bank, to float down the canal, getting in the way of all the other water traffic while Lyras raiders searched the boat from end to end, looking for the bung.
“And?”
So Lyras life had been, before the day when she decided to hide in the Retiring Room, and first heard about Dust.
“Must be ghosts down here,” said Roger, shivering pleasantly.
“Course not. They wouldnt tell servants about a thing like that. And I have been in the Retiring Room, so there. Anyway, my uncles always doing that. He done it to some Tartars when they caught him once. They tied him up and they was going to cut his guts out, but when the first man come up with the knife, my uncle just looked at him, and he fell dead, so another one come up and he done the same to him, and finally there was only one left. My uncle said hed leave him alive if he untied him, so he did, and then my uncle killed him anyway just to teach him a lesson.”
“I mustve got them dirty after I washed.”
“Tony.”
Tunnels, shafts, vaults, cellars, staircases had so hollowed out the earth below Jordan and for several hundred yards around it that there was almost as much air below ground as above; Jordan College stood on a sort of froth of stone.
Then the mouse senses something, and becomes a sparrow again, cocking her head a fraction sideways, and hops along the stone a step or two.
“The first parts his name, and the last bits Roman. And theres the dates in the middle when he was Master. And the other name must be his daemon.”
“Moldering flesh,” whispered Lyra. “And worms and maggots all twisting about in their eye sockets.”
This is Limehouse, and here is the child who is going to disappear.
“Hey, lady! What you got us all here for?”
