The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2)
Page 60
“ ‘The secret commonwealth’…No, I have never heard the expression.”
“Perhaps there are other names for it.”
“I am sure there are many.”
He wiped the frying pan around with the last of the bread and ate it slowly. Lyra was so tired, she felt on the verge of delirium. She wanted to sleep quite desperately, but she knew that if she gave in and put her head down, she wouldn’t wake up till the morning was filling the sky. Ionides pottered about their little camp, covering the fire, gathering his blankets, rolling a smokeleaf cigarette. Finally he settled down to huddle in the dark shade of a camel-sized rock. Only the tiny glow of his cigarette showed he was there at all.
Lyra stood up, feeling every one of the separate pains and injuries. The hand was worst; she took a very little of the rose salve on her right forefinger and rubbed it in as gently as a butterfly landing on a grass blade.
Then she put the salve in her rucksack with the alethiometer, and stepped away from the fire and towards the tumbled ruins. The moon was climbing the sky, and the vast sweep of the Milky Way stretched above, every one of those minute specks a sun in its own system, lighting and warming planets, maybe, and life, maybe, and some kind of wondering being, maybe, looking out at the little star that was her sun, and at this world, and at Lyra.
Ahead of her the dead bones of the town lay almost white in the moonlight. Lives had been spent here—people had loved one another and eaten and drunk and laughed and betrayed and been afraid of death—and not a single fragment of that remained. White stones, black shadows. All around her, things were whispering, or it might only have been night-loving insects conversing together. Shadows and whispers. Here was the tumbled ruin of a little basilica: people had worshipped here. Nearby a single archway topped with a classical pediment stood between nothing and nothing. People had walked through the arch, driven donkey carts through, stood and gossiped in its shade in the heat of a long-dead day. There was a well, or a fountain, or a spring: at any rate, someone had thought it worth cutting stones and forming a cistern, and a representation of a nymph above it, now blurred and smoothed by time, the cistern dry, the only trickle that of the insect sounds.
So she walked on, further and further into the silent moonscape of the City of the Moon, the Blue Hotel.
* * *
* * *
And Olivier Bonneville watched. He was lying among some rocks on the slope nearest the little camp; he had been there since shortly after Lyra and Ionides had arrived. He was watching through binoculars as Lyra picked her way among the stones of the dead town, and beside him lay a loaded rifle.
He had made himself as comfortable as he could be without a fire. His camel knelt some way behind, chewing something resistant and appearing to think deeply.
The view Bonneville had of Lyra was the first time he had ever seen her in the flesh. He was taken aback by how different she looked from the photogram, the short black hair, the tense and strained expression, the obvious exhaustion and pain in every movement. Was it the same girl? Had he mistakenly followed someone else? Could she have changed this much already?
He half wanted to follow her right into the ruins, and confront her close to. At the same time, he feared to do that, guessing that it would be much easier to shoot someone from a distance, in the back, than to do it when they were face to face. He considered the man who was with her, the camel man, the guide, to be a slight nuisance, but no more than that. A few dollars would pay him off.
Lyra was still brightly visible in the moonlight, an easy target as she picked her slow way through the stones. Bonneville was a good shot: the Swiss were keen on such things as military service and hunting and marksmanship. But if he wanted to shoot her cleanly, he had better do it before she moved very far into the Blue Hotel.
He put down the binoculars and took the rifle, carefully, silently, knowing everything about its weight and its length and the feeling of the stock against his shoulder. He lowered his head to look along the barrel, and moved his hips a fraction of an inch to settle himself more securely.
Then he had a horrible shock.
There was a man lying next to him, and looking at him, no more than three feet to his left.
He actually gasped aloud, “Ahh…,” and twisted away involuntarily, and his dæmon burst up into the air, flapping her wings in panic.
The man didn’t move, in spite of the way the rifle barrel was waving wildly in Bonneville’s shaking hands. He was monstrously, inhumanly calm. His gecko dæmon sat on a rock just behind him, licking her eyeballs.
“Who—where did you come from?” said Bonneville hoarsely. He spoke in French, by instinct. His dæmon glided down to his shoulder.
The camel man, Lyra’s guide, replied in the same language, “You didn’t see me because you took your eyes off the whole picture. I’ve been watching you for two days. Listen, if you kill her, you’ll be making a big mistake. Don’t do it. Put your gun away.”
“Who are you?”
“Abdel Ionides. Put the rifle down, now. Put it down.”
Bonneville’s heart was hammering so hard that he thought it must be audible. The blood pounded in his head as he made his hands relax and push the rifle away.
“What do you want?” he said.
Ionides said, “I want you to leave her alive for now. There is a great treasure, and she is the only one who can get it. Kill her now and you’ll never have it, and more importantly, neither will I.”
“What treasure? What are you talking about?”
“You don’t know?”
“Again, what are you talking about? Where is this treasure? You don’t mean her dæmon?”
“Of course not. The treasure is three thousand miles to the east, and as I said, no one can get it but her.”
“And you want her to get it so you can have it?”
“What do you think?”
“Why should I care what you want? I don’t want treasure from three thousand miles away. What I want is what she has now.”
“And if you take that, she will never find the treasure. Listen to me: I speak to you harshly, but I have to admire you. You are resourceful, courageous, hardy, inventive. I like all those qualities, and I want to see them rewarded. But at the moment you are like the wolf in the fable who seizes the nearest lamb and arouses the shepherd. Your attention is in the wrong place. Wait, and watch, and learn, and then kill the shepherd, and you will be able to have the entire flock.”
“You’re speaking in riddles.”
“I am speaking in metaphor. You are intelligent enough to understand that.”
Bonneville was silent for a few moments. Then he said, “What is this treasure, then?”
Ionides began to talk, quietly, confidently, confidentially. In the fable that Bonneville knew, it was a fox, but he enjoyed being compared to a wolf, and above all else he enjoyed the praise of older men. As the moon rose higher, as Lyra in the distance slowly made her solitary way into the dead and dæmon-haunted town, Ionides went on talking, and Bonneville listened. When he looked at the dead city again, Lyra had vanished.
* * *
* * *
She was out of sight because she’d turned to avoid a broken mass of gleaming marble that had once been a temple. There she found herself at one end of a colonnade, which cast black bars of shadow across the snow-white stone of the path.
And there was a girl sitting on a fallen piece of masonry, a girl of sixteen or so, of North African appearance and shabby dress. She wasn’t a phantom: she cast a shadow, as Lyra herself did, and like her, she had no dæmon. She stood up as soon as she saw Lyra. In the moonlight she looked tense and full of fear.
“You are Miss Silvertongue,” she said.
“Yes,” said Lyra, astonished. “Who are you?”
“Nur Huda el-Wahabi. Come on, come quickly. We have been
waiting for you.”
“We? Who—? You don’t mean…?”
But Nur Huda tugged urgently at Lyra’s right hand, and they hurried together along the colonnade, towards the heart of the ruins.
Thus she there waited untill eventyde,
Yet living creature none she saw appeare:
And now sad shadowes gan the world to hyde,
From mortall vew, and wrap in darkenesse dreare;
Yet nould she d’off her weary armes, for feare
Of secret daunger, ne let sleepe oppresse
Her heavy eyes with natures burdein deare,
But drew her selfe aside in sickernesse,
And her welpointed wepons did about her dresse.
EDMUND SPENSER, The Faerie Queene, III XI 55
To be concluded…
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe many people thanks for their help in writing this story, and I’ll acknowledge them all in full at the end of the final book. But there are three debts I would like to pay now. One is to the great work of Katharine Briggs, Folk Tales of Britain, where I first read the story of the dead moon. The second is to the poet and painter Nick Messenger, from whose account of a voyage in the schooner Volga in his poem Sea-Cow I have borrowed the story of the phosphor-bronze propeller. The third is to Robert Kirk (1644–1692), whose wonder-filled book The Secret Commonwealth, or an Essay on the Nature and Actions of the Subterranean (and for the Most Part) Invisible People Heretofore Going Under the Names of Fauns and Fairies, or the Like, Among the Low Country Scots as Described by Those Who Have Second Sight has been an inspiration in many ways, not least in reminding me of the value of a good title. So I stole it, or some of it.
There are three characters in this novel whose names are those of real people whose friends wanted to remember them in a work of fiction. One is Bud Schlesinger, whom we saw first in La Belle Sauvage; the second is Alison Wetherfield, whom we shall see again in the final book; and the third is Nur Huda el-Wahabi, who was one of the victims of the terrible fire at Grenfell Tower. I’m privileged to be able to help commemorate them.
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