She looked at the tillermans daemon as she passed, intending to thank her, but her old eyes were closed. She thanked the tillerman instead.
“Its almost like talking to someone, only you cant quite hear them, and you feel kind of stupid because theyre cleverer than you, only they dont get cross or any thing.... And they know such a lot, Farder Coram! As if they knew everything, almost! Mrs. Coulter was clever, she knew ever such a lot, but this is a different kind of knowing....Its like understanding, I suppose....”
John Faa shook his great head, but didnt reproach them.
“If you was to crack it open,” said Farder Coram, “youd find no living thing in there. No animal nor insect, at any rate. I seen one of these things afore, and I never thought Id see one again this far north. Afric things. Theres a clockwork running in there, and pinned to the spring of it, theres a bad spirit with a spell through its heart.”
Farder Coram took out the leaf tin and laid it on the table. Such a furious buzzing came from it that the tin itself moved slowly over the wood.
“No, I dont,” she said, but her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright. She had all the signs of fretful overexcitement, and it was made worse by her long confinement in this stuffy cabin.
“I see it now!” said Lyra, suddenly excited. “It means air, that lizard thing! I saw that, but I couldnt see why, so I tried to work it out and I lost it.”
And Im sorry to say that poor Jacob has just died. I think were going to have to take you with us after all, against my inclinations. Im troubled in my mind about it, but there dont seem to be any alternative. As soon as Jacobs buried according to custom, well take our way. You understand me, Lyra: youre a coming too, but it ent an occasion for joy or jubilation. Theres trouble and danger ahead for all of us.
The next two weeks passed more busily than any time of Lyras life so far.
And so began her journey to the North.
“But what was it after?”
But it was getting dark, and in the wide desolation of the creek nothing was moving but their own boat and a distant coal barge laboring toward the refinery; and Lyra was so flushed and tired, and shed been inside for so long; and so Farder Coram went on:
Lyra being the only female on board (for John Faa had decided against taking women, after much thought), she had a cabin to herself. Not a grand cabin, to be sure; in fact, little more than a closet with a bunk and a scuttle, which was the proper name for porthole. She stowed her few things in the drawer below the bunk and ran up excitedly to lean over the rail and watch England vanish behind, only to find that most of England had vanished in the mist before she got there.
“I dont know as we can do anything. We shall just have to keep him shut up tight in a box and never let him out. What worries me more is the other one, as got away. Hell be a flying back to Mrs. Coulter now, with the news that hes seen you. Damn me, Lyra, but Im a fool.”
“Im a putting you under Farder Corams wing. Dont you be a trouble or a hazard to him, or youll be a feeling the force of my wrath. Now cut along and explain to Ma Costa, and hold yourself in readiness to leave.”
“Ordinary clockwork, yes. But like I said, this uns kept tight wound by the spirit pinned to the end. The more he struggles, the tighter its wound, and the stronger the force is. Now lets put this feller out the way....”
“Mrs. Coulter?”
It was about as long as Lyras thumb, and dark green, not black. Its wing cases were erect, like a ladybirds about to fly, and the wings inside were beating so furiously that they were only a blur. Its six clawed legs were scrabbling on the smooth glass.
“Do that then, and see what it says.”
There was no life out on this bitter brown expanse, and only the steady chug of the engine and the subdued splashing of the water under the bows broke the wide silence. Heavy clouds hung low without offering rain; the air beneath was grimy with smoke. Only Pantalaimons flashing elegance had anything in it of life and joy.
“I kind of see em. Or feel em rather, like climbing down a ladder at night, you put your foot down and theres another rung. Well, I put my mind down and theres another meaning, and I kind of sense what it is. Then I put em all together. Theres a trick in it like focusing your eyes.”
“You dont even need to read the symbols, Lyra; you can guess as easy as I can.”
She clapped it over the creature at once. It buzzed and snarled like a little machine.
The vessel looked immense to Lyra: a wheelhouse and funnel amidships, a high focsle and a stout derrick over a canvas-covered hatch; yellow light agleam in the portholes and the bridge, and white light at the masthead; and three or four men on deck, working urgently at things she couldnt see.
He wrapped the tin in a flannel cloth to stifle the incessant buzzing and droning, and stowed it away under his bunk.
Lyra heard these tales at first with glee and later with despondency. All those people hating and fearing her! And she longed to be out of this narrow boxy cabin. She longed to be north already, in the wide snows under the blazing Aurora. And sometimes she longed to be back at Jordan College, scrambling over the roofs with Roger with the Stewards bell tolling half an hour to dinnertime and the clatter and sizzle and shouting of the kitchen....Then she wished passionately that nothing had changed, nothing would ever change, that she could be Lyra of Jordan College forever and ever.
“Lets go below and have a look. Take it careful, Lyra. Hold that tight.”
“Hold it still,” said Farder Coram from behind her, and then he was kneeling to slip a piece of card under the mug.
As he soared up out of a dive with wide wings white against the gray, something black hurtled at him and struck. He fell sideways in a flutter of shock and pain, and Lyra cried out, feeling it sharply. Another little black thing joined the first; they moved not like birds but like flying beetles, heavy and direct, and with a droning sound.
“And how do you know where these meanings are?”
They looked at each other. With every revelation of the alethiometers power, they became more awed by it.
“It was telling us about these things all the time,” said Lyra. “We oughter listened. But what can we do about this un, Farder Coram? Can we kill it or something?”
“Spying. I was a cursed fool to let you up above. And I should have let you think your way through the symbols without interrupting.”
It was dark now, and Lyra watched through the window as the lights of Colby came closer. The heavy air was thickening into mist, and by the time they tied up at the wharves alongside the Smokemarket everything in sight was softened and blurred. The darkness shaded into pearly silver-gray veils laid over the warehouses and the cranes, the wooden market stalls and the granite many-chimneyed building the market was named after, where day and night fish hung kippering in the fragrant oakwood smoke. The chimneys were contributing their thickness to the clammy air, and the pleasant reek of smoked herring and mackerel and haddock seemed to breathe out of the very cobbles.
When someone called Lyra down for a bite of supper, she found she was less hungry than shed thought, and presently she decided it would be a good idea to lie down, for Pantalaimons sake, because the poor creature was feeling sadly ill at ease.
Lyra, wrapped up in oilskin and with a large hood hiding her revealing hair, walked along between Farder Coram and the tillerman. All three daemons were alert, scouting around corners ahead, watching behind, listening for the slightest footfall.
The one thing that drew her out of her boredom and irritation was the alethiometer. She read it every day, sometimes with Farder Coram and sometimes on her own, and she found that she could sink more and more readily into the calm state in which the symbol meanings clarified themselves, and those great mountain ranges touched by sunlight emerged into vision.
“Ah,” said Farder Coram, “then I see it too. It ent a lizard, thats why; its a chameleon. And it stands for air because they dont eat nor drink, they just live on air.”
“This is Colby water,” he said. “The estuary of the river Cole. When we reach the town, well tie up by the Smoke-market and go on foot to the docks. Well be there in an hour or two....”
She struggled to explain to Farder Coram what it felt like.
“Whats Mrs. Coulter doing now?” hed say, and her hands would move at once, and hed say, “Tell me what youre doing.”
“And the elephant—”
“But dont clockwork run down?”
“Where are we?” said Lyra. “Can I go outside just for a bit, Farder Coram?”
He looked out of the window. It was nearly dark, and they were traveling along the last stretch of inland water before reaching the coast. Wide brown scummed expanses of an estuary extended under a dreary sky to a distant group of coal-spirit tanks, rusty and cobwebbed with pipework, beside a refinery where a thick smear of smoke ascended reluctantly to join the clouds.
“Lyra, child, Farder Coram has told me about your reading of that instrument.
John Faa spoke:
“As soons we get about the ship Ill run some solder round the edge to make sure of it,” Farder Coram said.
“Course. She ent only explored up north; theres strange things aplenty in the southern wild. It was Morocco where I saw one of these last. Deadly dangerous; while the spirits in it, it wont never stop, and when you let the spirit free, its so monstrous angry itll kill the first thing it gets at.”
Pantalaimon, a wildcat still, crouched on the table six inches away, his green eyes following it round and round inside the glass.
He rattled about in a cupboard and found a smokeleaf tin about three inches in diameter. It had been used for holding screws, but he tipped those out and wiped the inside with a rag before inverting the glass over it with the card still in place over the mouth.
Before she could comfort him, he changed into his wildcat shape and sprang down on the creature, batting it back from the edge of the roof, where it was crawling swiftly to escape. Pantalaimon held it firmly down with a needle-filled paw and looked up at the darkening sky, where the black wing flaps of the cormorant were circling higher as she cast around for the other.
“You oughter stayed below” was all he said.
Busily, butnot quickly, for there were tedious stretches of waiting, of hiding in damp crabbed closets, of watching a dismal rain-soaked autumn landscape roll past the window, of hiding again, of sleeping near the gas fumes of the engine and waking with a sick headache, and worst of all, of never once being allowed out into the air to run along the bank or clamber over the deck or haul at the lock gates or catch a mooring rope thrown from the lockside.
Lyra did. The long needle began to swing at once, and stopped, moved on, stopped again in a precise series of sweeps and pauses. It was a sensation of such grace and power that Lyra, sharing it, felt like a young bird learning to fly. Farder Coram, watching from across the table, noted the places where the needle stopped, and watched the little girl holding her hair back from her face and biting her lower lip just a little, her eyes following the needle at first but then, when its path was settled, looking elsewhere on the dial. Not randomly, though. Farder Coram was a chess player, and he knew how chess players looked at a game in play. An expert player seemed to see lines of force and influence on the board, and looked along the important lines and ignored the weak ones; and Lyras eyes moved the same way, according to some similar magnetic field that she could see and he couldnt.
Then the cormorant glided swiftly back and croaked something to the tillerman, who said, “Its gone. Dont let that other one escape. Here—” and he flung the dregs out of the tin mug hed been drinking from, and tossed it to Lyra.
The needle stopped at the thunderbolt, the infant, the serpent, the elephant, and at a creature Lyra couldnt find a name for: a sort of lizard with big eyes and a tail curled around the twig it stood on. It repeated the sequence time after time, while Lyra watched.
“But who sent it?”
“Where is the creature now?” he said.
But they were the only figures to be seen. The citizens of Colby were all indoors, probably sipping jenniver beside roaring stoves. They saw no one until they reached the dock, and the first man they saw there was Tony Costa, guarding the gates.
After a tricky moment when one of the creatures legs escaped and thrust the tin away with surprising strength, they had it captured and the lid screwed down tight.
It was the tillermans daemon, and clumsy and heavy as she looked, her flight was powerful and swift. Her head snapped this way and that—there was a flutter of black wings, a shiver of white—and a little black thing fell to the tarred roof of the cabin at Lyras feet just as Pantalaimon landed on her outstretched hand.
“Africa,” he said, and “Aha.”
“We have bad news too,” said Farder Coram, and told of their encounter with the flying spirits.
“What is it, Farder Coram?” she said shakily.
Lyra leaped up, and Pantalaimon became a seagull at once, eager to stretch his wings in the open. It was cold outside, and although she was well wrapped up, Lyra was soon shivering. Pantalaimon, on the other hand, leaped into the air with a loud caw of delight, and wheeled and skimmed and darted now ahead of the boat, now behind the stern. Lyra exulted in it, feeling with him as he flew, and urging him mentally to provoke the old tillermans cormorant daemon into a race.
“Ive heard of them clockwork devils, but never seen one,” John Faa said. “There ent no way of taming it and turning it back, I do know that much. Nor is it any use weighing it down with lead and dropping it in the ocean, because one day itd rust through and out the devil would come and make for the child wherever she was. No, well have to keep it by, and exercise our vigilance.”
She hurried up the wooden gangway ahead of Farder Coram, and looked around with excitement. Pantalaimon became a monkey and clambered up the derrick at once, but she called him down again; Farder Coram wanted them indoors, or below, as you called it on board ship.
“Well, the Madonna is Mrs. Coulter, and I think my mother when I put the hand there; and the ant is busy—thats easy, thats the top meaning; and the hourglass has got time in its meanings, and partway down theres now, and I just fix my mind on it.”
But she ignored him and settled down sleepily on the handle of the tiller near her man.
“What is it?” she said.
As Pantalaimon fell, trying to twist away and make for the boat and Lyras desperate arms, the black things kept driving into him, droning, buzzing, and murderous. Lyra was nearly mad with Pantalaimons fear and her own, but then something swept past her and upward.
“Thank God you got here,” he said quietly, letting them through. “We just heard as Jack Verhoevens been shot and his boat sunk, and no oned heard where you was. John Faas on board already and jumping to go.”
“It dont make sense....! can see what it says, but I must be misreading it. The thunderbolt I think is anger, and the child ...I think its me...l was getting a meaning for that lizard thing, but you talked to me, Farder Coram, and I lost it. See, its just floating any old where.”
But the rush of water below, the movement in the air, the ships lights glowing bravely in the dark, the rumble of the engine, the smells of salt and fish and coal spirit were exciting enough by themselves. It wasnt long before another sensation joined them, as the vessel began to roll in the German Ocean swell.
He would ask specific questions, and she would search for answers.
Because, of course, she had to remain hidden. Tony Costa told her of the gossip in the waterside pubs: that there was a hunt the length of the kingdom for a little fair-haired girl, with a big reward for her discovery and severe punishment for anyone concealing her. There were strange rumors too: people said she was the only child to have escaped from the Gobblers, and she had terrible secrets in her possession. Another rumor said she wasnt a human child at all but a pair of spirits in the form of child and daemon, sent to this world by the infernal powers in order to work great ruin; and yet another rumor said it was no child but a fully grown human, shrunk by magic and in the pay of the Tartars, come to spy on good English people and prepare the way for a Tartar invasion.
“Yes, I see that. Im sorry, Lyra. You tired now? Dyou want to stop?”
Down some stairs, or a companionway, there was a small saloon where John Faa was talking quietly with Nicholas Rokeby, the gyptian in charge of the vessel. John Faa did nothing hastily. Lyra was waiting for him to greet her, but he finished his remarks about the tide and pilotage before turning to the incomers.
She took the mug into the cabin, where Farder Coram had found a beer glass. He held the tin mug upside down over it and then slipped the card out from between them, so that the creature fell into the glass. He held it up so they could see the angry little thing clearly.
“Good evening, friends,” he said. “Poor Jack Verhoevens dead, perhaps youve heard. And his boys captured.”
“Whats that lizard mean?” said Farder Coram, breaking into her concentration.
“Well, I dont suppose itll matter just for a few minutes in the open air. I wouldnt call it fresh; tent fresh except when its blowing off the sea; but you can sit out on top and look around till we get closer in.”
