The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials

by Philip Pullman

He listened, and then took the lid of a biscuit tin and deftly folded it into a small flat cylinder. She marveled at the skill of his hands: unlike most bears, he and his kin had opposable thumb claws with which they could hold things still to work on them; and he had some innate sense of the strength and flexibility of metals which meant that he only had to lift it once or twice, flex it this way and that, and he could run a claw over it in a circle to score it for folding. He did this now, folding the sides in and in until they stood in a raised rim and then making a lid to fit it. At Lyra’s bidding he made two: one the same size as the original smokeleaf tin, and another just big enough to contain the tin itself and a quantity of hairs and bits of moss and lichen all packed down tight to smother the noise. When it was closed, it was the same size and shape as the alethiometer.

  When that was done, she sat next to Iorek Byrnison as he gnawed a haunch of reindeer that was frozen as hard as wood.

  “Iorek,” she said, “is it hard not having a dæmon? Don’t you get lonely?”

  “Lonely?” he said. “I don’t know. They tell me this is cold. I don’t know what cold is, because I don’t freeze. So I don’t know what lonely means either. Bears are made to be solitary.”

  “What about the Svalbard bears?” she said. “There’s thousands of them, en’t there? That’s what I heard.”

  He said nothing, but ripped the joint in half with a sound like a splitting log.

  “Beg pardon, Iorek,” she said. “I hope I en’t offended you. It’s just that I’m curious. See, I’m extra curious about the Svalbard bears because of my father.”

  “Who is your father?”

  “Lord Asriel. And they got him captive on Svalbard, you see. I think the Gobblers betrayed him and paid the bears to keep him in prison.”

  “I don’t know. I am not a Svalbard bear.”

  “I thought you was....”

  “No. I was a Svalbard bear, but I am not now. I was sent away as a punishment because I killed another bear. So I was deprived of my rank and my wealth and my armor and sent out to live at the edge of the human world and fight when I could find employment at it, or work at brutal tasks and drown my memory in raw spirits.”

  “Why did you kill the other bear?”

  “Anger. There are ways among bears of turning away our anger with each other, but I was out of my own control. So I killed him and I was justly punished.”

  “And you were wealthy and high-ranking,” said Lyra, marveling. “Just like my father, Iorek! That’s just the same with him after I was born. He killed someone too and they took all his wealth away. That was long before he got made a prisoner on Svalbard, though. I don’t know anything about Svalbard, except it’s in the farthest North....Is it all covered in ice? Can you get there over the frozen sea?”

  “Not from this coast. The sea is sometimes frozen south of it, sometimes not. You would need a boat.”

  “Or a balloon, maybe.”

  “Or a balloon, yes, but then you would need the right wind.”

  He gnawed the reindeer haunch, and a wild notion flew into Lyra’s mind as she remembered all those witches in the night sky; but she said nothing about that. Instead she asked Iorek Byrnison about Svalbard, and listened eagerly as he told her of the slow-crawling glaciers, of the rocks and ice floes where the bright-tusked walruses lay in groups of a hundred or more, of the seas teeming with seals, of narwhals clashing their long white tusks above the icy water, of the great grim iron-bound coast, the cliffs a thousand feet and more high where the foul cliff-ghasts perched and swooped, the coal pits and the fire mines where the bearsmiths hammered out mighty sheets of iron and riveted them into armor...

  “If they took your armor away, Iorek, where did you get this set from?”

  “I made it myself in Nova Zembla from sky metal. Until I did that, I was incomplete.”

  “So bears can make their own souls...” she said. There was a great deal in the world to know. “Who is the king of Svalbard?” she went on. “Do bears have a king?”

  “He is called Iofur Raknison.”

  That name shook a little bell in Lyra’s mind. She’d heard it before, but where? And not in a bear’s voice, either, nor in a gyptian’s. The voice that had spoken it was a Scholar’s, precise and pedantic and lazily arrogant, very much a Jordan College voice. She tried it again in her mind. Oh, she knew it so well!

  And then she had it: the Retiring Room. The Scholars listening to Lord Asriel. It was the Palmerian Professor who had said something about Iofur Raknison. He’d used the word panserbjørne, which Lyra didn’t know, and she hadn’t known that Iofur Raknison was a bear; but what was it he’d said? The king of Svalbard was vain, and he could be flattered. There was something else, if only she could remember it, but so much had happened since then....

  “If your father is a prisoner of the Svalbard bears,” said Iorek Byrnison, “he will not escape. There is no wood there to make a boat. On the other hand, if he is a nobleman, he will be treated fairly. They will give him a house to live in and a servant to wait on him, and food and fuel.”

  “Could the bears ever be defeated, Iorek?”

  “No.”

  “Or tricked, maybe?”

  He stopped gnawing and looked at her directly. Then he said, “You will never defeat the armored bears. You have seen my armor; now look at my weapons.”

  He dropped the meat and held out his paws, palm upward, for her to look at. Each black pad was covered in horny skin an inch or more thick, and each of the claws was as long as Lyra’s hand at least, and as sharp as a knife. He let her run her hands over them wonderingly.

  “One blow will crush a seal’s skull,” he said. “Or break a man’s back, or tear off a limb. And I can bite. If you had not stopped me in Trollesund, I would have crushed that man’s head like an egg. So much for strength; now for trickery. You cannot trick a bear. You want to see proof? Take a stick and fence with me.”

  Eager to try, she snapped a stick off a snow-laden bush, trimmed all the side shoots off, and swished it from side to side like a rapier. Iorek Byrnison sat back on his haunches and waited, forepaws in his lap. When she was ready, she faced him, but she didn’t like to stab at him because he looked so peaceable. So she flourished it, feinting to right and left, not intending to hit him at all, and he didn’t move. She did that several times, and not once did he move so much as an inch.

  Finally she decided to thrust at him directly, not hard, but just to touch the stick to his stomach. Instantly his paw reached forward and flicked the stick aside.

  Surprised, she tried again, with the same result. He moved far more quickly and surely than she did. She tried to hit him in earnest, wielding the stick like a fencer’s foil, and not once did it land on his body. He seemed to know what she intended before she did, and when she lunged at his head, the great paw swept the stick aside harmlessly, and when she feinted, he didn’t move at all.

  She became exasperated, and threw herself into a furious attack, jabbing and lashing and thrusting and stabbing, and never once did she get past those paws. They moved everywhere, precisely in time to parry, precisely at the right spot to block.

  Finally she was frightened, and stopped. She was sweating inside her furs, out of breath, exhausted, and the bear still sat impassive. If she had had a real sword with a murderous point, he would have been quite unharmed.

  “I bet you could catch bullets,” she said, and threw the stick away. “How do you do that?”

  “By not being human,” he said. “That’s why you could never trick a bear. We see tricks and deceit as plain as arms and legs. We can see in a way humans have forgotten. But you know about this; you can understand the symbol reader.”

  “That en’t the same, is it?” she said. She was more nervous of the bear now than when she had seen his anger.

  “It is the same,” he said. “Adults can’t read it, as I understand. As I am to human fighters, so you are to adults with the symbol reader.”

  “Yes, I suppose,”
she said, puzzled and unwilling. “Does that mean I’ll forget how to do it when I grow up?”

  “Who knows? I have never seen a symbol reader, nor anyone who could read them. Perhaps you are different from others.”

  He dropped to all fours again and went on gnawing his meat. Lyra had unfastened her furs, but now the cold was striking in again and she had to do them up. All in all, it was a disquieting episode. She wanted to consult the alethiometer there and then, but it was too cold, and besides, they were calling for her because it was time to move on. She took the tin boxes that Iorek Byrnison had made, put the empty one back into Farder Coram’s kit bag, and put the one with the spy-fly in it together with the alethiometer in the pouch at her waist. She was glad when they were moving again.

  The leaders had agreed with Lee Scoresby that when they reached the next stopping place, they would inflate his balloon and he would spy from the air. Naturally Lyra was eager to fly with him, and naturally it was forbidden; but she rode with him on the way there and pestered him with questions.

  “Mr. Scoresby, how would you fly to Svalbard?”

  “You’d need a dirigible with a gas engine, something like a zeppelin, or else a good south wind. But hell, I wouldn’t dare. Have you ever seen it? The bleakest barest most inhospitable godforsaken dead end of nowhere.”

  “I was just wondering, if Iorek Byrnison wanted to go back...”

  “He’d be killed. Iorek’s in exile. As soon as he set foot there, they’d tear him to pieces.”

  “How do you inflate your balloon, Mr. Scoresby?”

  “Two ways. I can make hydrogen by pouring sulfuric acid onto iron filings. You catch the gas it gives off and gradually fill the balloon like that. The other way is to find a ground-gas vent near a fire mine. There’s a lot of gas under the ground here, and rock oil besides. I can make gas from rock oil, if I need to, and from coal as well; it’s not hard to make gas. But the quickest way is to use ground gas. A good vent will fill the balloon in an hour.”

  “How many people can you carry?”

  “Six, if I need to.”

  “Could you carry Iorek Byrnison in his armor?”

  “I have done. I rescued him one time from the Tartars, when he was cut off and they were starving him out—that was in the Tunguska campaign; I flew in and took him off. Sounds easy, but hell, I had to calculate the weight of that old boy by guesswork. And then I had to bank on finding ground gas under the ice fort he’d made. But I could see what kind of ground it was from the air, and I reckoned we’d be safe in digging. See, to go down I have to let gas out of the balloon, and I can’t get airborne again without more. Anyway, we made it, armor and all.”

  “Mr. Scoresby, you know the Tartars make holes in people’s heads?”

  “Oh, sure. They’ve been doing that for thousands of years. In the Tunguska campaign we captured five Tartars alive, and three of them had holes in their skulls. One of them had two.”

  “They do it to each other?”

  “That’s right. First they cut partway around a circle of skin on the scalp, so they can lift up a flap and expose the bone. Then they cut a little circle of bone out of the skull, very carefully so they don’t penetrate the brain, and then they sew the scalp back over.”

  “I thought they did it to their enemies!”

  “Hell, no. It’s a great privilege. They do it so the gods can talk to them.”

  “Did you ever hear of an explorer called Stanislaus Grumman?”

  “Grumman? Sure. I met one of his team when I flew over the Yenisei River two years back. He was going to live among the Tartar tribes up that way. Matter of fact, I think he had that hole in the skull done. It was part of an initiation ceremony, but the man who told me didn’t know much about it.”

  “So...If he was like an honorary Tartar, they wouldn’t have killed him?”

  “Killed him? Is he dead then?”

  “Yeah. I saw his head,” Lyra said proudly. “My father found it. I saw it when he showed it to the Scholars at Jordan College in Oxford. They’d scalped it, and all.”

  “Who’d scalped it?”

  “Well, the Tartars, that’s what the Scholars thought....But maybe it wasn’t.”

  “It might not have been Grumman’s head,” said Lee Scoresby. “Your father might have been misleading the Scholars.”

  “I suppose he might,” said Lyra thoughtfully. “He was asking them for money.”

  “And when they saw the head, they gave him the money?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good trick to play. People are shocked when they see a thing like that; they don’t like to look too close.”

  “Especially Scholars,” said Lyra.

  “Well, you’d know better than I would. But if that was Grumman’s head, I’ll bet it wasn’t the Tartars who scalped him. They scalp their enemies, not their own, and he was a Tartar by adoption.”

  Lyra turned that over in her mind as they drove on. There were wide currents full of meaning flowing fast around her; the Gobblers and their cruelty, their fear of Dust, the city in the Aurora, her father in Svalbard, her mother....And where was she? The alethiometer, the witches flying northward. And poor little Tony Makarios; and the clockwork spy-fly; and Iorek Byrnison’s uncanny fencing...

  She fell asleep. And every hour they drew closer to Bolvangar.

  FOURTEEN

  BOLVANGAR LIGHTS

  The fact that the gyptians had heard or seen nothing of Mrs. Coulter worried Farder Coram and John Faa more than they let Lyra know; but they weren’t to know that she was worried too. Lyra feared Mrs. Coulter and thought about her often. And whereas Lord Asriel was now “father,” Mrs. Coulter was never “mother.” The reason for that was Mrs. Coulter’s dæmon, the golden monkey, who had filled Pantalaimon with a powerful loathing, and who, Lyra felt, had pried into her secrets, and particularly that of the alethiometer.

  And they were bound to be chasing her; it was silly to think otherwise. The spy-fly proved that, if nothing else.

  But when an enemy did strike, it wasn’t Mrs. Coulter. The gyptians had planned to stop and rest their dogs, repair a couple of sledges, and get all their weapons into shape for the assault on Bolvangar. John Faa hoped that Lee Scoresby might find some ground gas to fill his smaller balloon (for he had two, apparently) and go up to spy out the land. However, the aeronaut attended to the condition of the weather as closely as a sailor, and he said there was going to be a fog; and sure enough, as soon as they stopped, a thick mist descended. Lee Scoresby knew he’d see nothing from the sky, so he had to content himself with checking his equipment, though it was all in meticulous order. Then, with no warning at all, a volley of arrows flew out of the dark.

  Three gyptian men went down at once, and died so silently that no one heard a thing. Only when they slumped clumsily across the dog traces or lay unexpectedly still did the nearest men notice what was happening, and then it was already too late, because more arrows were flying at them. Some men looked up, puzzled by the fast irregular knocking sounds that came from up and down the line as arrows hurtled into wood or frozen canvas.

  The first to come to his wits was John Faa, who shouted orders from the center of the line. Cold hands and stiff limbs moved to obey as yet more arrows flew down like rain, straight rods of rain tipped with death.

  Lyra was in the open, and the arrows were passing over her head. Pantalaimon heard before she did, and became a leopard and knocked her over, making her less of a target. Brushing snow out of her eyes, she rolled over to try and see what was happening, for the semidarkness seemed to be overflowing with confusion and noise. She heard a mighty roar, and the clang and scrape of Iorek Byrnison’s armor as he leaped fully clad over the sledges and into the fog, and that was followed by screams, snarling, crunching and tearing sounds, great smashing blows, cries of terror and roars of bearish fury as he laid them waste.

  But who was them? Lyra had seen no enemy figures yet. The gyptians were swarming to defend the sledges, but that (a
s even Lyra could see) made them better targets; and their rifles were not easy to fire in gloves and mittens; she had only heard four or five shots, as against the ceaseless knocking rain of arrows. And more and more men fell every minute.

  Oh, John Faa! she thought in anguish. You didn’t foresee this, and I didn’t help you!

  But she had no more than a second to think that, for there was a mighty snarl from Pantalaimon, and something—another dæmon—hurtled at him and knocked him down, crushing all the breath out of Lyra herself; and then hands were hauling at her, lifting her, stifling her cry with foul-smelling mittens, tossing her through the air into another’s arms, and then pushing her flat down into the snow again, so that she was dizzy and breathless and hurt all at once. Her arms were hauled behind till her shoulders cracked, and someone lashed her wrists together, and then a hood was crammed over her head to muffle her screams, for scream she did, and lustily:

  “Iorek! Iorek Byrnison! Help me!”

  But could he hear? She couldn’t tell; she was hurled this way and that, crushed onto a hard surface which then began to lurch and bump like a sledge. The sounds that reached her were wild and confused. She might have heard Iorek Byrnison’s roar, but it was a long way off, and then she was jolting over rough ground, arms twisted, mouth stifled, sobbing with rage and fear. And strange voices spoke around her.

  “Pan...”

  “I’m here, shh, I’ll help you breathe. Keep still...”

  His mouse paws tugged at the hood until her mouth was freer, and she gulped at the frozen air.

  “Who are they?” she whispered.

  “They look like Tartars. I think they hit John Faa.”

  “No—”

  “I saw him fall. But he should have been ready for this sort of attack. We know that.”

  “But we should have helped him! We should have been watching the alethiometer!”

  “Hush. Pretend to be unconscious.”

  There was a whip cracking, and the howl of racing dogs. From the way she was being jerked and bounced about, Lyra could tell how fast they were going, and though she strained to hear the sounds of battle, all she made out was a forlorn volley of shots, muffled by the distance, and then the creak and rush and soft paw thuds in the snow were all there was to hear.