“Yeah, go on.”
She wrapped a blanket around her thin shoulders and kept watch behind as he began to paddle. The moon was brilliant, the water one sheet of fast-flowing glass. Malcolm felt good to be paddling again, despite his bruises, and he worked their way steadily to the center of the flood. The only sense of speed he had was the cold air against his face and the occasional tremor of the hull as some obstruction far below raised a slight wave in the water.
He had a thousand misgivings. If they were to miss the priory, they would never be able to work their way back against the power of the water. And if they got there and found it guarded? Or impossible to get inside? And suppose…And so on. But he thrust all those thoughts aside.
On they sped, and the moon continued to shine. Alice continually scanned the stream behind, on both sides, and as far back as the horizon; but she saw no other boats, no sign of life at all. They said little. Since their fight with Bonneville, something large had changed in the relationship between them, and it wasn’t just that she’d started calling him Mal. A wall of hostility had fallen down and vanished. They were friends now. It was easy to sit together.
Something ahead was gleaming, on the horizon, nowhere near yet.
“Is that a light, d’you reckon?” he said, pointing.
She turned and looked.
“Could be. But it looks more like summing’s just white, with the moon shining on it.”
And there it was again: the spangled ring, his personal aurora. It was so familiar now that he almost welcomed it, in spite of the difficulty it caused in seeing things behind it. And right inside the lovely celestial curve as it grew was the thing Alice mentioned, the great building gleaming white under the moon.
They were going so fast that it soon became clear that she was right: a large building, something like a castle, rising out of the water; but it wasn’t a castle because instead of a great keep at the heart of it, there rose the spire of an oratory.
“That’s it!” Malcolm said.
“It’s bloody immense,” she said.
It lay on the left as they floated swiftly towards it. It was built of a light stone that shone almost like snow in the glare of the moon, a vast spreading complex of walls and roofs and buttresses, all surrounding the slender spire. Black windows pierced the flat blank cliffs of white, occasionally flashing a reflection of the moon as the canoe floated by. It was just as bright and just as black as the scintillations on the spangled ring, which was now close enough to be almost out of sight behind him. The building had no windows low enough to climb into, no doors at all, no flights of steps; just immense vertical sheets of white stone, with any break in the smoothness high above anything they could reach from the level of the water. Like a fortress, it seemed designed to repel any attempt to get inside.
Malcolm was holding the canoe back now, trying to resist the power of the flood, and La Belle Sauvage responded sweetly. She could almost dance on the water, Malcolm thought, and he stroked the gunwale with love.
“Can you see a way in?” Alice said quietly.
“Not yet. But we won’t be going in through the front door anyway.”
“S’pose not….It’s bloody huge. It goes on and on.”
Malcolm was turning the canoe to port to go around and see how far the building extended. As they left the moon behind and passed into the great shadow of the walls, he felt a chill, though he’d been cold enough already, and to be sure, the moon gave no warmth. They were out of the main current here, and he could bring the canoe closer and look up at the towering walls, to see if there was any way in at all, but it seemed to be impossible.
“What’s that?” said Alice.
“What?”
“Listen.”
He kept still and heard a soft, continual splashing a little way ahead. There was what looked like a broad stone buttress there, running the full height of the wall, and at the top it continued into a stack of chimneys, with the moon shining brightly on them. He thought, They must have a kitchen somewhere, so maybe it’s here….And then he saw what was splashing. A square opening near the foot of the wall, in which an iron grating hung loosely, was letting a stream of water spill out and fall in a steady arc.
“Toilets,” said Alice.
“No. I don’t think so. It’s quite clean, look, and it doesn’t smell….Must be an overflow or summing.”
He paddled on to the next corner, slowly and silently. They were still in the shadow of the moon, but he knew that anything moving attracted the eye, and there were no bushes or reeds to hide among: just the bare water and the bare stone. They would be very easy to see. With infinite caution he edged the canoe past the corner of the great building and looked along what must have been the front.
Alice was gripping the gunwales and peering as hard as she could in the deceptive light. Malcolm turned the boat sideways so that anyone looking from that direction would have had a much smaller silhouette to see. Roughly halfway along the front there was a wide row of steps, surmounted by a portico where classical columns supported a pediment….Was that a figure among the columns?
Alice was twisting right round to look at it. Then she whispered, “There’s a man—two men—look, they got a boat….”
There was a powerboat tied up at the base of the steps, and Alice was right: there were two men. As Malcolm looked, they stepped idly out of the line of columns and talked together. They were smoking and had rifles over their shoulders.
With even more care than before, Malcolm maneuvered the canoe around the corner and out of sight.
“What did the man in the cave call them?” he whispered. “The Security of the Holy Spirit—they guard nunneries and monasteries and that….So we can’t go in that way.”
He looked up at the chimneys again, and an idea came to him.
“If this is the kitchen, right, just inside this wall, ’cause of the chimneys—well, you know in the priory? In Godstow?” He was suddenly excited. “In the old room they called the scullery?”
“I never went in there.”
“It’s ever so old, and they got this ancient drain—it comes out of a spring, and it runs in a sort of stone channel right across the floor and out the other side, into the river. Sister Fenella sometimes used to throw her washing-up water in it—”
“You think this is summing like that?”
“It could be. This water’s clean.”
“It’s got a bloody great iron grating across it.”
“Here, take the paddle and hold the boat up close to it….”
When she had it steady, he stood up and gripped the iron grille, and at once it came loose, in a shower of stone dust and mortar, and fell with a loud splash between the canoe and the wall.
“Blimey!” he said, steadying himself.
“We can’t go in there!”
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, we wouldn’t be able to get out again. There’s nothing to tie the boat up to. And s’pose there’s another grating at the top, where it comes out the kitchen or the scullery or wherever it is? Anyway, we’d get soaked. It’s freezing.”
“I’m going to try. You’ll have to stay here with the canoe. Just hold it steady and keep warm and wait.”
“You can’t—” she began, and then bit her lip. “You’ll drown, Mal.”
“If it gets too difficult, I’ll come back and we’ll think of something else. Stay close to the wall. Tuck it in close to the chimney stack. I’ll be as quick as I can.”
He gripped the gunwale of the canoe and thought, Look after her, Belle Sauvage.
Then he stood up again and reached up to the opening and took hold of the stone rim. The stream of water wasn’t great in volume, but it was cold and it was continuous, and by the time he’d managed to pull himself up, he was soaked to the skin. Asta was already inside the drain as an otter, with her teeth in his sleeve, pulling and pulling, and finally the two of them lay panting on the floor of the drain, trying to keep to one side, ou
t of the flow of water.
“Get up,” she said. “You can crawl. It’s high enough for that….”
His shins were scraped, his fingernails broken. He knelt gingerly and found, as she said, that there was room to crawl. Asta became some kind of night-dwelling beast and clung to his back, her wide eyes taking in every tiny flicker of light. Before long, though, there was no light left, and they were crawling upwards in total darkness, and Malcolm found himself beginning to get badly frightened. He thought of the great weight of stone above them; he wanted to stand up; he wanted to raise his arms above his head; he wanted much more space than there was….
He was near panic, but Asta whispered, “Not far now—honestly—I can see the light of the kitchen—just a little further—”
“But suppose—”
“Don’t suppose anything. Just breathe deeply.”
“Can’t help shivering—”
“No, but keep going. There’s bound to be a range in the kitchen burning all night. Big place like this. You can get warm in a minute. Just push the thoughts aside, like we learned how to do. Keep going—thassit….”
His hands and legs were numb with cold, but not so numb that he couldn’t feel a lot of pain in them under the numbness.
“How are we going to get Lyra down here—”
“We’ll find a way. There is a way. We just don’t know it yet. Don’t stop….”
And after another desperate minute, his eyes began to see what he’d disbelieved that hers could: a glimmer of light on the wet sides of the tunnel.
“There you are,” she said.
“Yeah—just hope there isn’t—”
A grating at the top like there is at the bottom, he was going to say. But of course there was: if something fell into the drain, the kitchen workers wouldn’t want it to disappear. He nearly despaired at that point. Dark bars of iron stood heavy and still between him and the dimly lit scullery beyond. There was no way through. He choked back a sob.
“No, wait,” said Asta. She was a rat now, and she scampered up the grating and examined it closely. “They’ll need to clean the drain sometimes—they’ll need to get brushes and things down here….”
Malcolm pulled himself together. One more sob, of cold as much as of despair, shook his chest, but after that he said, “Yeah, that’s right. Maybe…”
He gripped the bars, shook them, felt them move. They swung back and forth a tiny way.
“Is there a—at the top—”
“A hinge—yes!”
“So down at the bottom…”
Malcolm put his arm through the grating and felt around and, as simply as that, found a heavy iron bolt lying across the bars just above the water, the end deep in a hole in the stone. It was well greased, and it slid out with no effort. The grating swung up towards the kitchen, and Malcolm’s numb and trembling hands found a catch above that held it firmly.
A moment later he had scrambled underneath and into the room, which was, as he’d guessed, a scullery, with sinks for washing and racks for drying crockery. After the darkness of the drain, his eyes welcomed the dim light that let him see everything there. The stream ran across the floor, just like the one at Godstow, in a channel lined with bricks. And, mercy of all mercies, there was a range, slumbering but alight, and above it a rack of warming towels, hanging there to dry after having been washed. He tugged off his sweater and his shirt and wrapped a large towel around his shoulders, huddling near the range, rocking back and forth as the cold gradually left his body.
“I’ll never be warm again,” said Malcolm. “And if I’m shivering like this, I’ll never keep quiet in that nursery looking for Lyra. Are you sure we’ll recognize her? Babies are all pretty much the same, en’t they?”
“I’ll recognize Pan, and he’ll recognize me.”
“If you say so…We can’t stay here for long.”
He was thinking of Alice. It must be nerve-racking for her outside on the water, with nowhere to hide. He dragged his shirt and sweater back on, wet as they were, and shivered again violently.
“Come on, then,” said Asta. “Oh, look! That box…”
She was a cat now. The box she meant was a wooden thing of the sort that might have contained apples.
“What about…Oh, yeah! Right!”
It was big enough for Lyra. If he lined it with towels, she might stay dry as he pulled her down the drain. He dragged some towels off the rack and laid them inside it, ready for her.
“Let’s go, then,” he said.
He opened the scullery door and listened. Silence. Then, from high above and some way off, a deep bell rang three times. He tiptoed along the stone corridor, making, he hoped, for the back staircase. There were dim anbaric lamps along the wall, which was otherwise bare and whitewashed, with doors to the left and right.
Then the bell rang again, much louder than before, and he heard a choir singing, as if the door to a chapel or an oratory had opened. He looked around—there was nowhere to hide. The singing got louder still, and then to his horror a line of nuns, hands pressed together and eyes lowered, came around a corner and straight towards him. Evidently, like the Godstow nuns, they got up at all times of the night to sing and pray. He was caught. There was nothing he could do but stand and shiver and lower his head.
Someone stopped in front of him. He kept his head low, so all he could see were her sandaled feet and the hem of her habit.
“Who are you, boy? What are you doing?”
“I wet me bed, miss. Sister. Then I got lost.”
He tried to sound sorry for himself, and in truth it wasn’t hard. He sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve, and the next moment there came a resounding slap on the side of his head that sent him staggering to the wall.
“Filthy brat. Go upstairs to the bathroom and wash yourself. Then take an oilcloth and a fresh blanket from the airing cupboard and go back to bed. We’ll discuss your punishment in the morning.”
“Sorry, Sister…”
“Stop whining. Do as I tell you, and don’t make a noise.”
“I dunno where the bathroom—”
“Of course you do. Up the back stairs and along the corridor. Just keep quiet.”
“Yes, Sister.”
He dragged his feet in the direction she pointed and tried to look contrite.
“Good! Good!” whispered Asta on his shoulder. She had subdued her natural wish to change into something that could bite and threaten, and remained a robin.
“ ’S all right for you. It wasn’t your head she smacked. The oilcloth’ll be useful, though. For the box.”
“And the blankets…”
He found the staircase easily enough. It was lit, like everything else he’d seen so far, with a dim anbaric bulb, which made him wonder how they still had power.
“Surely in a flood that would be the first thing to go,” he said.
“They must have a generator.”
They were barely whispering. At the top of the staircase, a drab corridor stretched out ahead, with rough coconut matting on the floor. The light here was even dimmer. Remembering what the woman in the cave had told them, Malcolm counted the doors: the ones on the left were cells for the nuns, and those on the right were first the two bathrooms and then the nursery.
“Where’s the airing cupboard?” he whispered.
“There, between the bathrooms.”
He opened the little door and was met with a wave of musty heat. Shelves of thin folded blankets rose above a hot-water tank.
“There’s the oilcloths,” said Asta.
They lay in rolls on the top shelf. Malcolm took one down, together with a couple of blankets.
“Can’t carry any more, not with her as well. This’ll be hard as it is.”
He closed the cupboard silently, and then, with Asta as a mouse, listened as hard as he could outside the nursery. A light snore, which might have been the nun on duty, a little snuffling and whimpering—no more than that.
“No point in wa
iting,” Malcolm whispered.
He turned the handle, trying to do it silently, but the little noise he made sounded to him like a stick banging a bucket. Nothing to be done about it: he slipped inside and shut the door, and then stood absolutely still, assessing the place.
A long room, with a dim anbaric light at each end. A line of cribs along one wall, and small beds along the other, with an adult’s bed at the nearer end, where a nun was sleeping and, as he’d heard from outside, gently snoring.
The floor was drab linoleum, and the walls were bare. He thought of the pretty little nursery the nuns had made for Lyra at Godstow and clenched his fists.
“Concentrate,” whispered Asta. “She’s in one of these cribs.”
There were so many things that could go wrong that Malcolm could scarcely manage to push them all aside in his mind. He tiptoed to the first crib and peered in. Asta was a night bird of some kind, perching on the side and looking down. A large heavy child with black hair. No. They shook their heads.
The next: too small.
The next: the head was too round.
The next: too fair.
The next: too big.
The next— The nun in the bed behind them groaned and murmured in her sleep. Malcolm stood stock-still and held his breath. After a moment the woman sighed heavily and fell silent again.
“Come on,” said Asta.
The next child was the right size and coloring, but she wasn’t Lyra. He was surprised: it was easy to tell, after all.
They moved on to the next, and then the door handle turned.
Without thinking, Malcolm darted to the nearest bed against the opposite wall and pulled himself underneath, clutching the blankets and the oilcloth.
Two voices were speaking quietly at the other end of the room, and one was a man’s.
Malcolm was already freezing cold, but a shiver took hold of him. Help me stop shivering! he thought desperately, and Asta instantly became a ferret and lay close around his neck.
Footsteps came slowly towards them. The voices continued in a murmur.
“Are you sure about this?” the woman said.
The Book of Dust, Volume 1 Page 32