Lyra urgently needed a privy, or something of the sort, and when she tried to convey this, the man looked away and the woman understood and led her outside through another door into a little yard. The latrine was in the far corner, and meticulously clean.
Yozdah was waiting in the doorway when she came out, holding a jar of water. She mimed holding out her hands, and Lyra did that, guarding her left from the shock of the cold water as best she could when Yozdah poured it over them. She offered Lyra a thin towel, and beckoned her inside.
The man was still standing, waiting for her to come back, and indicated that she should sit on the carpet with them and eat from the bowl of rice. She did so, using her right hand, as they did.
Yozdah said to the man, “Lyra,” and pointed to her.
“Ly-ra,” he said, and pointed to himself and said, “Chil-du.”
“Chil-du,” Lyra said.
The rice was sticky and almost flavorless but for a little salt. Still, it was all they had, and she tried to take as little as possible, since they hadn’t expected a guest. Chil-du and Yozdah spoke quietly to each other, and Lyra wondered what language they were speaking; it was like none that she’d heard before.
But she had to try to communicate with them. She spoke to them both, turning from one to the other and saying as clearly as she could, “I want to find the Blue Hotel. Have you heard of the Blue Hotel? Al-Khan al-Azraq?”
They both looked at her. He was politely mystified, and she was anxious.
“Or Madinat al-Qamar?”
They knew that. They drew back, they shook their heads, they put up their hands as if to ban any further mention of that name.
“English? Do you know anyone who speaks English?”
They didn’t understand.
“Français? Quelqu’un qui parle français?”
Same response. She smiled and shrugged and ate another morsel of rice.
Yozdah stood up and took a pan from the open fire and poured boiling water into two earthenware cups. Into each one she dropped a pinch of some dark, gritty-looking powder, and scooped a lump of what might have been butter or soft cheese in after it. Then she stirred each cup with a stiff brush, making both cups froth up, and gave one to Chil-du and the other to Lyra.
“Thank you,” Lyra said, “but…,” and pointed to the cup and then to Yozdah. That seemed to breach some point of etiquette, for Yozdah frowned and looked away, and Chil-du gently pushed Lyra’s hand away.
“Well,” said Lyra, “thank you. I expect you can use the cup when I’ve finished. It’s very generous of you.”
The drink was too hot to sip, but Chil-du was drinking it by sucking at the edge with a noisy splashing sound. Lyra did the same. It tasted both bitter and rancid, but inside it there was a taste not unlike tea. She found after several noisy slurpings that it was sharp and refreshing.
“It’s good,” she said. “Thank you. What is it called?”
She pointed to her cup and looked inquisitive.
“Choy,” said Yozdah.
“Ah. It is tea, then.”
Chil-du spoke to his wife for about a minute, making suggestions, perhaps, or maybe giving instructions. She listened critically, making an interjection here, asking a question there, but finally saying something that was plainly in agreement. They both glanced at Lyra throughout. She watched, wary, listening for any words she might understand, trying to interpret their expressions.
When the conversation was over, Yozdah stood up and opened a wooden chest, which looked as if it was made of cedar, and was the only beautiful or costly-seeming object in the room. She took out a folded piece of cloth, black in color, and shook it out of its folds. It was surprisingly long.
Yozdah looked at her and beckoned, so Lyra got up. Yozdah was refolding the cloth a different way and indicating that Lyra should watch, so she did, trying to memorize the sequence of folds. Then Yozdah stepped behind her and began to fasten the cloth around her head, first putting one edge across the bridge of Lyra’s nose so that the cloth hung over the lower part of her face, and then winding the rest around her head to conceal every part of it except her eyes. She tucked the ends in on both sides.
Chil-du was watching. He gestured at his own head, and Yozdah understood and tucked away the last strand of Lyra’s hair.
He said something that clearly signified approval. Lyra said, “Thank you,” hearing her voice muffled.
She hated it, but she could see the sense. She was impatient to be on her way, as if she knew what her way was, or where; and there was nothing to keep her here, especially since they had no language in common.
So she put her palms together in what she hoped would be understood as a gesture of thanks and of farewell, and bowed her head, and picked up her rucksack and left. She bitterly regretted having nothing to give them but money, and thought briefly of offering them a couple of coins, but feared that they’d feel she was insulting their hospitality.
She made her way out of the little alley, where the night-soil cart stood at one side, looking as if it was ashamed of itself. It wasn’t locked to anything; who would want to steal such an object? The street outside was dazzling with brilliant sunshine, and Lyra soon began to feel hot under the abominably confining veil and headscarf.
However, no one looked at her. She had become what she’d been trying to become ever since the beginning of this journey: invisible. Combined with the dowdy-depressed way of moving recommended by Anita Schlesinger, the veil made her actively resistant to other people’s interest. Men in particular walked in front of her as if she had no more substance or importance than a shadow, barged ahead at street crossings, took no notice at all. And little by little she began to feel a kind of freedom in this state.
It was hot, though, and getting hotter as the sun rose higher. She made her way towards where she thought the center of the city must be, in the direction of more traffic, more noise, bigger shops, and more crowded streets. At some point, she thought, she might find someone who spoke English.
There were large numbers of armed police, some sitting on the pavement playing dice, some standing scrutinizing every passerby, some inspecting the items a poor hawker was trying to sell from his suitcase, others eating and drinking at a food stall placed illegally in the road. Lyra watched them closely, and felt their eyes when they did deign to notice her, a brief incurious flick at her hidden face, the automatic and inevitable glance at her body, then the look away. Not even her lack of a dæmon provoked a glimmer of attention. Despite the heat, it really was almost like being liberated.
As well as the police, there were soldiers sitting in armored cars or patrolling with guns held across their chests. They looked as if they were waiting for an uprising they knew was coming but didn’t know when. At one point Lyra nearly walked into a squad who seemed to be interrogating a group of boys, some so young that their dæmons kept flickering between one abject form and another, trying to appease the men with guns and faces ablaze with anger. One boy dropped to his knees and held his hands out, pleading, only for a rifle butt to slam into the side of his head and drop him on the road.
Lyra very nearly cried out, “No!” and had to hold herself back from running up to protest. The boy’s dæmon had changed into a snake and squirmed brokenly in the dust until the soldier’s dæmon put a heavy foot on her, and she and the boy fell still.
The soldiers were aware that Lyra was watching. The man who’d hit the boy looked up and shouted something, and she turned and walked away. She hated being helpless, but the thought of this man’s violence made her feel every bruise, every cut from the attack on the train, and the memory of those hands thrusting up inside her skirt made her very entrails cold with repugnance. Her first task was to get out of this place alive and active, and that meant remaining inconspicuous, however hard that was.
She moved on further into the busy streets
, into an area of shops and small businesses, repairers of furniture, sellers of secondhand bicycles, makers of cheap clothing and the like. Always the presence of the police, always the sight of soldiers. She wondered about relations between the two forces. They seemed to be keeping scrupulously apart, with a formal politeness when they had to pass one another on the street. She wished Bud Schlesinger would suddenly appear to guide her calmly through the maze of difficulties here, or Anita, to keep her cheerful with encouragement and conversation, or Malcolm—
She let that thought linger until it faded.
The closer she came to the center of the city, the more she felt uncomfortable, because the pain in her left hand got a little worse with each throb of blood through the arteries near her broken bone. She looked at every shop sign, every notice board, every brass plate on every building, looking for a sign that might mean English was spoken there.
In the end the sign she found was on an oratory. A little limestone basilica, roofed with red-brown terra-cotta tiles, in a dusty graveyard where three olive trees grew out of the gravel, bore a wooden sign that said The Holy Chapel of St. Phanourios in English, French, and Arabic, followed by a list of the times of services and the name of the priest in charge, a Father Jerome Burnaby.
Princess Cantacuzino…Hadn’t she said that her dæmon was called Phanourios? Lyra stopped to look into the enclosure. Beside the basilica stood a little house in a palm-shaded garden where a man in a faded blue shirt and trousers was watering some flowers. He looked up as she watched, and gave a cheerful wave. Encouraged by this, Lyra moved cautiously towards him.
He put down his watering can and said, “As-salamu aleikum.”
She went a little closer, into the garden itself, which was rich with many kinds of green leaves, but where the only flowers were deep red.
“Wa-aleikum as-salaam,” she said quietly. “Do you speak English?”
“Yes, I do. I’m the priest in charge here, Father Burnaby. I am English. Are you? You sound English.”
He sounded as if he came originally from Yorkshire. His dæmon was a robin who watched Lyra from the handle of the watering can with her head cocked. The priest himself was burly and red-faced, older than she’d thought from the road, and his expression radiated a shrewd kind of concern. He reached out a hand to steady her as she stumbled over a stone.
“Thank you…”
“Are you all right? You don’t look well. Not that it’s easy to tell…”
“May I sit down?”
“Come with me.”
He led her into the house, where it was a little cooler than outside. As soon as the door closed behind her, Lyra unwound the headscarf-veil and took it off with relief.
“What have you been doing to yourself?” he said, taken aback by the cuts and the bruising on her face.
“I was attacked. But I just need to find—”
“You need a doctor.”
“No. Please. Let me just sit down for a minute. I’d rather not—”
“You can have a glass of water, anyway. Stay there.”
She was in a small hallway, where there stood one flimsy-looking cane chair. She waited till he came back with the water and said, “I didn’t mean to—”
“Never mind. Come in here. It’s not very tidy, but at least the chairs are comfortable.”
He opened a door into a room that seemed to be part study and part junk shop, where books lay everywhere, including on the floor. She was reminded of the house of Kubiček in Prague; how long ago that seemed!
The priest moved a dozen books from an armchair. “You take this chair,” he said. “The springs are still intact.”
She sat down and watched as he distributed the books into three separate piles, corresponding, she supposed, to three aspects of the subject he was reading about, which seemed to be philosophy. His robin dæmon was perching on the back of the other armchair, watching her with bright eyes.
Burnaby sat down and said, “Obviously you need some medical attention. Let’s take that as read. I’ll give you the address of a good doctor in a minute. Now tell me what else you need. Apart from a dæmon. We’ll take that as read too. How can I help?”
“Where are we? This is Seleukeia, I know that much, but is it far from Aleppo?”
“A few hours by motor. The road isn’t very good, though. Why do you want to go there?”
“I want to meet someone there.”
“I see,” he said. “May I know your name?”
“Tatiana Prokovskaya.”
“Have you tried the Muscovite consul?”
“I’m not a Muscovite. Only my name is.”
“When did you arrive in Seleukeia?”
“Late last night. It was too late to find a hotel. I was looked after very kindly by some poor people.”
“And when were you attacked?”
“On the train from Smyrna. By some soldiers.”
“Have you seen a doctor at all?”
“No. I’ve spoken to no one except the people who helped me, and we had no language in common anyway.”
“What were their names?”
“Chil-du and Yozdah.”
“A night-soil man and his wife.”
“Do you know them?”
“No. But their names are not Anatolian—they’re Tajik. They mean Forty-Two, the man, and Eleven, the woman.”
“Tajik?” she said.
“Yes. They’re not allowed to have personal names, so they’re given numbers instead, even for the men, odd for the women.”
“That’s horrible. Are they slaves or something?”
“Something like that. They can take up only a limited number of occupations: grave digging is a common one. And the night-soil business.”
“They were very kind. They gave me this veil, headscarf, this…niqab, is it?”
“You were wise to wear it.”
“Mr. Burnaby—Father—what should I call you?”
“Jerome, if you like.”
“Jerome, what is happening here? Why are there soldiers on the street and in the train?”
“People are restless. Frightened. There have been riots, arson, persecutions….Since the martyrdom of St. Simeon, the Patriarch, there’s been a sort of martial-ecclesiastical law in force. The rose garden troubles are at the bottom of it all.”
Lyra thought about that. Then she said, “The people—last night—they had no dæmons. Like me.”
“May I ask how you were deprived of your dæmon?”
“He vanished. That’s all I know.”
“You were lucky not to be stopped this morning. Those without dæmons, often Tajiks, are not allowed to be seen in the hours of daylight. If they’d thought you were a Tajik, you would have been arrested.”
Lyra sat still for a moment, and said, “This is a horrible place.”
“I can’t deny that.”
She sipped the water.
“And you want to get to Aleppo?” he said.
“Would it be hard to do that at the moment?”
“This is a trading city. You can find anything here for money. But it will be more expensive now, such a journey, than it would be in peaceable times.”
“Have you heard of a place,” she said, “called the Blue Hotel? A place where lost dæmons go?”
His eyes widened. “Oh—please—be careful,” he said, and actually got up out of his chair and patrolled the room, looking out of both windows, one facing the street and the other the narrow vegetable garden next to the house. His robin dæmon was twittering her alarm and flew towards Lyra before turning and making for the safety of the priest’s shoulder.
“Be careful about what?” Lyra said. She was a little bewildered.
“The place you mentioned. There are powers that are not of this world, spiritual powers, e
vil powers. I really do advise you not to go there.”
“But I’m trying to find my dæmon. You know I am. If the place exists, then he might be there. I must go and try. I’m—I’m incomplete. You must see that.”
“You don’t know that your dæmon is there. I have seen cases—I could tell you of examples of real spiritual evil arising in places where…among people who…No, no, I really do counsel you not to go there. Even if it does exist.”
“Even if? You mean it might not exist?”
“If such a place did exist, it would be wrong to go there.”
Lyra thought, Is this Bolvangar again? But she couldn’t waste time telling him about that. “If I were asking,” she said, “as a—I don’t know—simply as a journalist or something, if I were asking how one might get there if one wanted to, would you tell me?”
“Well, in the first place, I don’t know how to get there. It’s all rumor, myth, maybe even superstition. But I expect your friend the night-soil man might know, if anyone would. Why don’t you ask him?”
“Because we can’t speak each other’s language. Look, never mind. I haven’t got the strength to go anywhere at the moment. Thank you for listening. And for the glass of water.”
“I’m sorry. Don’t feel you have to go. I’m only concerned for your welfare, spiritual and…Sit here and rest. Stay awhile. I really think you should let a doctor have a look at your injuries.”
“I’ll be all right. But I’ve got to go now.”
“I wish there was something you’d let me do.”
“All right,” she said. “Just tell me about travel between here and Aleppo. Is there a train?”
“There used to be. Till quite recently, in fact, but they’ve stopped allowing them. There is a bus, twice a week, I think. But…”
“Is there any other way of getting there?”
He drew in his breath, tapped his fingers, shook his head. “There are camels,” he said.
“Where would I find a camel? And someone to guide me?”
“You realize that this city is a terminus of many of the Silk Road trails? The great markets and warehouses are in Aleppo, but a substantial number of goods come here to be taken onwards by sea. And there’s inward trade as well. Train masters load their camels here for journeys as far as Peking. Aleppo is just a step for them. If you go to the harbor—that’s what I’d do—go to the harbor and ask for a train master—they speak every language under the sun. Forget the other idea, I do beg you. It’s moonshine, deluding, dangerous. Really. By camel, Aleppo would be two days or so away. Maybe three. Have you got friends there?”
The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) Page 57