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

by Philip Pullman

“Are you traveling a long way, mademoiselle?” the old man said. His French was flawless.

  “A very long way,” Lyra said, “but on this train, only to Seleukeia.”

  “Do you know that city?”

  “No. I shan’t be there long.”

  “Perhaps that would be wise. I understand that civil order is somewhat disturbed there. You are not French, I think, mademoiselle?”

  “You’re right. I come from further north.”

  “You are traveling a long way from your homeland.”

  “Yes, I am. But it’s a journey I have to make.”

  “I hesitate to ask, and if I am being impolite, I most sincerely beg your pardon, but it seems to me that you are one of the women of the far north, those known as the witches.”

  He used the word sorcières. Lyra, intensely wary, looked at him directly, but could see only courteous interest.

  “That is true, monsieur,” she said.

  “I admire your courage in coming so readily among the lands of the south. I am emboldened to speak like this because I traveled a great deal myself at one time, and many years ago I was so lucky as to fall in love with a witch from the far north. We were very happy, and I was very young.”

  “Such encounters do happen,” she said, “but in the nature of things, they cannot last.”

  “Nevertheless, I learnt a good deal. I learnt a certain amount about myself, which was no doubt useful. My witch, if I may call her that, came from Sakhalin, in the far east of Russia. May I know the name of your homeland?”

  “In Russian it’s called Novy Kievsk. We have our own name, which I’m not allowed to pronounce away from there. It is a small island, and we love it fiercely.”

  “May I ask what has brought you to travel among us?”

  “The queen of my clan has fallen sick, and the only cure for her disease is a plant that grows near the Caspian Sea. Perhaps you are wondering why I am not flying there. The fact is that I was attacked in St. Petersburg, and my cloud-pine was burnt. My dæmon flew home to tell my sisters what had happened, and I am traveling like this, across the earth, slowly.”

  “I see,” he said. “I hope your journey is successful, and that you return with the cure for your queen’s malady.”

  “That is kind of you, monsieur. Are you traveling to the end of this line?”

  “Merely as far as Antalya. My home is there. I am retired, but I still retain an interest in some business affairs in Smyrna.”

  The child had been watching them with the sort of exhaustion that is beyond sleep. Lyra realized that he was ill: how had she not seen that before? His face was pale and gaunt, the skin around his eyes dark and drawn. He needed to sleep more than anything else in the world, but his body wouldn’t let him. He still held the half-empty bottle of orange drink, and his mother took it from his limp fingers and screwed the top on.

  The old man said, “I am going to tell this little fellow a story.” He reached into an inner pocket of his silk jacket and took out a pack of cards. They were narrower than ordinary playing cards, and when he laid one down on the attaché case on his knees, facing the child, Lyra saw that it showed a picture of a landscape.

  Something jogged her memory, and she was back in that smoky cellar in Prague, with the magician telling her about cards and pictures….

  The card showed a road running from one side to the other, and beyond the road a stretch of open water, a river or a lake, with a sailing boat on it. Beyond the water was part of an island where a castle stood on a wooded hill. On the road, two soldiers in scarlet uniforms were riding splendid horses.

  The old man began to speak, describing the scene or naming the soldiers or explaining where they were going. The little boy, leaning in to his mother’s side, watched with those exhausted eyes.

  The man laid another picture card next to the first. The two landscapes fitted together perfectly: the road moved on, and on this card a path led towards a house standing among trees at the edge of the water. Evidently the soldiers turned off the road and went to knock at the door of the house, where a farmer’s wife gave them some water from the well beside the path. As he mentioned each event, each little object, the old man touched a silver pencil to the card, showing precisely where it was. The little boy peered closer, blinking as if he found it hard to see.

  Then the old man spread out the rest of the cards in his hands facedown and offered them to the boy, asking him to take one. He did, and the old man laid it next to the last. As before, the picture seamlessly continued the landscape of the previous one, and Lyra saw that the whole pack must be like that, and it must be possible to put them together in an uncountable number of ways. This time the picture showed a ruined tower, with the road running across as ever in front of it, and the lake continuing behind. The soldiers were tired, so they went into the tower and tied up their horses before lying down to sleep. But flying over the tower was a large bird—there it was—a gigantic bird—a bird so huge that it flew down and seized one of the horses in each claw and took them up into the sky.

  So Lyra judged to be what was happening, from the way the old man mimed the bird’s flight and uttered the terrified neighing of the captured horses. Even the mother was listening closely, wide-eyed like her son. The soldiers woke up. One was about to fire his rifle at the bird, but the other held him back because the horses would certainly die if the bird dropped them. So they set off on foot to follow the bird, and the story went on.

  Lyra leant back, attending to the old man’s voice without understanding it, but happy to guess and watch the expressions come and go on the faces of the boy and his mother, and gradually enliven them both, bringing a flush of warmth to their sallow cheeks, brightening their eyes.

  The old man’s voice was melodious and comforting. Lyra found herself slipping backwards into slumber, into the easy sleep of her childhood, with Alice’s voice, not so musical but soft and low, telling her a story about this doll or that picture as her eyes fell heavily, softly, closed.

  * * *

  * * *

  When she woke up, it was some hours later. She was alone in the compartment, and the train was steaming steadily up a gradient among mountains, as she could see through the window: a starlit panorama of bleak rocks and cliffs and ravines.

  After a moment’s slow confusion, she suddenly thought: The alethiometer! She flung open her rucksack, plunged her hand inside, and found the familiar heavy roundness in its velvet bag. But there was something else on her lap, a little pasteboard box with a bright label saying MYRIORAMA. It was the old man’s pack of picture cards. He had left it for her.

  The light from the gaslamp was inconstant, flaring briefly before sinking to a faint flicker and then rising again. Lyra stood up and looked at it closely, but there was no means of turning it up or down. There must be a problem with the supply. She sat down again and took out the cards, and in one of the flares of light she noticed something, some words written on the back of one of the cards, in an elegant hand in pencil. They were in French:

  Dear young lady,

  Please take my advice and be very careful when you reach Seleukeia. These are difficult times. It would be best if you did not even cast a shadow.

  With my most earnest wishes for your well-being.

  It wasn’t signed, but she remembered the silver pencil he’d been using to point out details in the pictures. She sat there troubled and lonely in the inconstant gaslight, unable to sleep anymore. She found her bread and cheese and ate a little, thinking it might strengthen her. Then she took out Malcolm’s last letter and reread it, but it brought her little comfort.

  She put it back and reached for the alethiometer again. She wasn’t intending to read it, or to use the new method: just to hold something familiar and be comforted by it. The light was too poor to see the symbols clearly in any case. She held the instrument on her lap
and thought about the new method. All the time she was trying to resist the temptation to try it there and then. She would look for Malcolm, of course, but with no idea where to start, and it would be fruitless, and leave her sickened and weak. So she shouldn’t do it. And anyway, what was she thinking of, intending to look for Malcolm? It was Pan she should look for.

  She gathered the little cards together with an automatic hand. That was the phrase that came to her, as if her hand were purely mechanical, not alive at all, as if the messages from her skin and her nerves were changes in the anbaric current along a copper wire, not anything conscious. With that vision of her body as something dead and mechanical came a sense of limitless desolation. She felt not only as if she were dead now, but that she’d always been dead, and had only dreamed of being alive, and that there was no life in the dream either: it was only the meaningless and indifferent jostling of particles in her brain, nothing more.

  But that little chain of ideas provoked a spasm of reaction, and she thought, No! That’s a lie! That’s a slander! I don’t believe it!

  Except that she did believe it, just then, and it was killing her.

  She made a helpless movement with her hands—her automatic hands—which disturbed the little cards in her lap and sent some of them falling to the floor of the carriage. She leant down to pick them up. The first one she found showed a woman, alone, crossing a bridge. She was carrying a basket, and was herself wrapped up in a shawl against a cold day. She was looking out of the picture as if directly at Lyra, who saw her with a little jar of self-recognition. She set the card down on the dusty seat beside her, and picked up another at random and set it beside the first.

  This one showed a number of travelers walking along beside some packhorses. They were going in the same direction as the woman, from left to right, and the bundles on the animals’ backs were large and heavy-looking. Make them camels instead of horses, sweep away the trees and replace them with a sandy desert, and they could be a camel train on the Silk Road.

  As faintly as a bell tolling just once a mile away on a summer evening, as tenuous as the fragrance of a single flower borne indoors through an open window, there came to Lyra the notion that the secret commonwealth was involved in this.

  She picked up one more card. It was one of those the old man had come to in his story, the one with the farmhouse and the well among the trees. She saw what she hadn’t seen before: there were roses growing over an archway outside the door.

  She thought: I could choose to believe in the secret commonwealth. I don’t have to be skeptical about it. If free will exists, and I have it, I can choose that. I’ll try one more.

  She shuffled the cards and then cut them and turned over the one on the top. She laid it next to the last. It showed a young man, a knapsack on his back, walking towards the packhorses and the woman with the basket. To the uninflected eye, he probably looked no more like Malcolm than the woman with the basket resembled her, but that didn’t matter.

  The train began to slow down. The whistle blew, and a lonely sound it made, which Lyra seemed to hear echoing among the mountains. There was a French poem she used to know, about a horn blowing in a forest….There were isolated lights on the slopes, and then more lights, lit buildings and streets: they were coming into a station.

  Lyra gathered all the cards together and put them with the alethiometer in her rucksack.

  The train came to a halt. The name of the station, painted on a board, was not one she recognized; at all events it wasn’t Seleukeia; and it didn’t seem to be a large place, but the platform was crowded. It was packed with soldiers.

  She moved further into the corner and held her rucksack on her lap.

  The message brought to Glenys Godwin by the Cabinet Office messenger was brief and to the point:

  The Chancellor of the Private Purse would be obliged if Mrs. Godwin would attend on him this morning at 10:20.

  It was signed with what looked like a contemptuous and indecipherable scribble, in which Godwin recognized the signature of the Chancellor, Eliot Newman. It arrived at her Oakley Street office at nine-thirty, giving her enough time to cross London to the Chancellor’s office in White Hall, but not enough to consult her colleagues or do very much more than to say to her secretary, “Jill, the time’s come. They’re going to close us down. Tell all the Heads of Section that Christabel is now in operation.”

  “Christabel” was the name for a long-standing plan to withdraw and conceal the most important of all the active papers. Christabel status was constantly reviewed, and only the Section Heads were aware of it. If the word got around as quickly as it could, the papers concerning the bulk of Oakley Street’s current projects would be on their way to various locations—these to a locked room behind a laundry in Pimlico, those to the safe of a diamond merchant in Hatton Garden, others to a cupboard in the vestry of a church in Hemel Hempstead—by the time Godwin entered the office in White Hall to which she’d been summoned.

  The assistant private secretary who met her at the door was so young, he could hardly have been shaving for more than a year, she thought, and he regarded her with exquisitely polite condescension; but she treated this junior functionary like a favorite nephew, and even managed to extract a little information from him about what she could expect.

  “Frankly, Mrs. Godwin, it’s all arisen from the forthcoming visit of the new President of the High Council of the Magisterium—but of course, I didn’t tell you that,” the young man said.

  “A wise person knows when to keep things dark. An even wiser person knows when to let the light in,” Glenys Godwin said gravely as they climbed the stairs. It was the first she’d heard about Delamare visiting London.

  The assistant private secretary was duly impressed by his own wisdom, and showed her into the outer office before softly knocking at the inner door and announcing the visitor in deferential tones.

  Eliot Newman, the Chancellor of the Private Purse, was a large man with slick black hair and heavy black-rimmed spectacles, whose dæmon was a black rabbit. He had been in office less than a year; Glenys Godwin had met him only once, and had had to listen to a lengthy and ignorant explanation of why Oakley Street was useless, expensive, and counter-modern—that being the latest way of describing anything His Majesty’s Government did not like. Newman didn’t stand up to greet his visitor and didn’t offer to shake her hand. It was precisely as she had expected.

  “This little department of yours, what d’ye call it, the…” The Chancellor knew perfectly well, but he picked up a paper and peered down at it as if to remind himself of the name. “The Intelligence Division of the Office of the Private Purse,” he read fastidiously.

  He sat back as if he’d finished a sentence. Since he hadn’t, Godwin said nothing and continued to look at him mildly.

  “Well?” said Newman. Every tone of his voice was designed to express barely controlled impatience.

  “Yes, that’s the full name of the department.”

  “We’re closing it down. It’s disrecognized. It’s an anomaly. Counter-modern. A useless money pit. Besides which, the political tendency is iniquitous.”

  “You’ll have to explain what you mean by that, Chancellor.”

  “It expresses a hostility to the new world we’re in. There are new ways of doing things, new ideas, new men in charge.”

  “You mean the new High Council in Geneva, I take it.”

  “Yes, I do, of course I do. Forward-looking. Not bound by convention and propriety. HMG is of the opinion that that’s where the future lies. It’s the correct way to go. We must reach out the hand of friendship to the future, Mrs. Godwin. All the old ways, the suspicions, the plotting, the spying, the gathering of endless pages of useless and irrelevant so-called information, must come to an end. And that very much includes the ramshackle outfit you’ve been battening on to for years past. Now, we’re not going to
treat you badly. Staff will all be reassigned positions in the domestic civil service. You’ll have a decent pension and some sort of bauble, if that’s what you fancy. Accept with good grace and no one’ll be any the worse. In a year or two, Oakley Street—yes, I know what you call yourselves—Oakley Street will have vanished forever. Not a trace left.”

  “I see.”

  “A team from the Cabinet Office will come over this afternoon to begin the transition. You’ll be dealing with Robin Prescott. First-class man. You’ll hand over everything to him and be out of your office and home pruning the roses by the weekend. Prescott will deal with all the details.”

  Godwin said, “Very well, Chancellor. The authority for this comes entirely from this office, I take it?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “You represented it as a move towards modernity and away from the habits of the past.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And that turn towards streamlined efficiency is strongly identified with you in the public mind.”

  “I’m pleased to say it is,” said the Chancellor, a little suspicion creeping into his manner. “Why?”

  “Because unless you manage the announcement with some caution, it will look like appeasement.”

  “Appeasing who, for God’s sake?”

  “Appeasing the High Council. I gather the new President is visiting soon. To do away with the very body that’s done more than any other branch of government to curb Geneva’s influence on our affairs would look to those who know about these things like an act of extraordinary generosity, if not actually abject self-damage.”

  Newman’s face had darkened to a dull crimson. “Get out and put your affairs in order,” he said.

  Godwin nodded and turned to go. The assistant private secretary opened the door for her and accompanied her down the marble stairs to the entrance, seeming all the way to be on the point of saying something, and not to be able to find the words.