Philip Pullman_His Dark Materials 03

by The Amber Spyglass

  During dinner the Master and Dame Hannah talked of what had happened in Lyra’s absence, and she listened in dismay, or sorrow, or wonder. When they withdrew to his sitting room for coffee, the Master said:

  “Now, Lyra, we’ve hardly heard from you. But I know you’ve seen many things. Are you able to tell us something of what you’ve experienced?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But not all at once. I don’t understand some of it, and some makes me shudder and cry still; but I will tell you, I promise, as much as I can. Only you have to promise something, too.”

  The Master looked at the gray-haired lady with the marmoset dæmon in her lap, and a flicker of amusement passed between them.

  “What’s that?” said Dame Hannah.

  “You have to promise to believe me,” Lyra said seriously. “I know I haven’t always told the truth, and I could only survive in some places by telling lies and making up stories. So I know that’s what I’ve been like, and I know you know it, but my true story’s too important for me to tell if you’re only going to believe half of it. So I promise to tell the truth, if you promise to believe it.”

  “Well, I promise,” said Dame Hannah.

  The Master said, “And so do I.”

  “But you know the thing I wish,” Lyra said, “almost—almost more than anything else? I wish I hadn’t lost the way of reading the alethiometer. Oh, it was so strange, Master, how it came in the first place and then just left! One day I knew it so well—I could move up and down the symbol meanings and step from one to another and make all the connections—it was like…” She smiled, and went on, “Well, I was like a monkey in the trees, it was so quick. Then suddenly—nothing. None of it made sense; I couldn’t even remember anything except just basic meanings, like the anchor means hope and the skull means death. All those thousands of meanings… Gone.”

  “They’re not gone, though, Lyra,” said Dame Hannah. “The books are still in Bodley’s Library. The scholarship to study them is alive and well.”

  Dame Hannah was sitting opposite the Master in one of the two armchairs beside the fireplace, Lyra on the sofa between them. The lamp by the Master’s chair was all the light there was, but it showed the expressions of the two old people clearly. And it was Dame Hannah’s face that Lyra found herself studying. Kindly, Lyra thought, and sharp, and wise; but she could no more read what it meant than she could read the alethiometer.

  “Well, now,” the Master went on. “We must think about your future, Lyra.”

  His words made her shiver. She gathered herself and sat up.

  “All the time I was away,” Lyra said, “I never thought about that. All I thought about was just the time I was in, just the present. There were plenty of times when I thought I didn’t have a future at all. And now… Well, suddenly finding I’ve got a whole life to live, but no… but no idea what to do with it, well, it’s like having the alethiometer but no idea how to read it. I suppose I’ll have to work, but I don’t know at what. My parents are probably rich, but I bet they never thought of putting any money aside for me. And anyway, I think they must have used all their money up by now, so even if I did have a claim on it, there wouldn’t be any left. I don’t know, Master. I came back to Jordan because this used to be my home, and I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I think King Iorek Byrnison would let me live on Svalbard, and I think Serafina Pekkala would let me live with her witch clan; but I’m not a bear and I’m not a witch, so I wouldn’t really fit in there, much as I love them. Maybe the gyptians would take me in… But really I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m lost, really, now.”

  They looked at her: her eyes were glittering more than usual, her chin was held high with a look she’d learned from Will without knowing it. She looked defiant as well as lost, Dame Hannah thought, and admired her for it; and the Master saw something else—he saw how the child’s unconscious grace had gone, and how she was awkward in her growing body. But he loved the girl dearly, and he felt half-proud and half in awe of the beautiful adult she would be, so soon.

  He said, “You will never be lost while this college is standing, Lyra. This is your home for as long as you need it. As for money—your father made over an endowment to care for all your needs, and appointed me executor; so you needn’t worry about that.”

  In fact, Lord Asriel had done nothing of the sort, but Jordan College was rich, and the Master had money of his own, even after the recent upheavals.

  “No,” he went on, “I was thinking about learning. You’re still very young, and your education until now has depended on… well, quite frankly, on which of our scholars you intimidated least,” he said, but he was smiling. “It’s been haphazard. Now, it may turn out that in due course your talents will take you in a direction we can’t foresee at all. But if you were to make the alethiometer the subject of your life’s work, and set out to learn consciously what you could once do by intuition—”

  “Yes,” said Lyra definitely.

  “—then you could hardly do better than put yourself in the hands of my good friend Dame Hannah. Her scholarship in that field is unmatched.”

  “Let me make a suggestion,” said the lady, “and you needn’t respond now. Think about it for a while. Now, my college is not as old as Jordan, and you’re too young yet to become an undergraduate in any case, but a few years ago we acquired a large house in north Oxford, and we decided to set up a boarding school. I’d like you to come and meet the headmistress and see whether you’d care to become one of our pupils. You see, one thing you’ll need soon, Lyra, is the friendship of other girls of your age. There are things that we learn from one another when we’re young, and I don’t think that Jordan can provide quite all of them. The headmistress is a clever young woman, energetic, imaginative, kindly. We’re lucky to have her. You can talk to her, and if you like the idea, come and make St. Sophia’s your school, as Jordan is your home. And if you’d like to begin studying the alethiometer systematically, you and I could meet for some private lessons. But there’s time, my dear, there’s plenty of time. Don’t answer me now. Leave it until you’re ready.”

  “Thank you,” said Lyra, “thank you, Dame Hannah, I will.”

  The Master had given Lyra her own key to the garden door so she could come and go as she pleased. Later that night, just as the porter was locking the lodge, she and Pantalaimon slipped out and made their way through the dark streets, hearing all the bells of Oxford chiming midnight.

  Once they were in the Botanic Garden, Pan ran away over the grass chasing a mouse toward the wall, and then let it go and sprang up into the huge pine tree nearby. It was delightful to see him leaping through the branches so far from her, but they had to be careful not to do it when anyone was looking; their painfully acquired witch power of separating had to stay a secret. Once she would have reveled in showing it off to all her urchin friends, and making them goggle with fear, but Will had taught her the value of silence and discretion.

  She sat on the bench and waited for Pan to come to her. He liked to surprise her, but she usually managed to see him before he reached her, and there was his shadowy form, flowing along beside the riverbank. She looked the other way and pretended she hadn’t seen him, and then seized him suddenly when he leapt onto the bench.

  “I nearly did it,” he said.

  “You’ll have to get better than that. I heard you coming all the way from the gate.”

  He sat on the back of the bench with his forepaws resting on her shoulder.

  “What are we going to tell her?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s only to meet this headmistress, anyway. It’s not to go to the school.”

  “But we will go, won’t we?”

  “Yes,” she said, “probably.”

  “It might be good.”

  Lyra wondered about the other pupils. They might be cleverer than she was, or more sophisticated, and they were sure to know a lot more than she did about all the things that were important to girls of their age. And sh
e wouldn’t be able to tell them a hundredth of the things that she knew. They’d be bound to think she was simple and ignorant.

  “D’you think Dame Hannah can really do the alethiometer?” said Pantalaimon.

  “With the books, I’m sure she can. I wonder how many books there are? I bet we could learn them all, and do without. Imagine having to carry a pile of books everywhere… Pan?”

  “What?”

  “Will you ever tell me what you and Will’s dæmon did while we were apart?”

  “One day,” he said. “And she’ll tell Will, one day. We agreed that we’d know when the time had come, but we wouldn’t tell either of you till then.”

  “All right,” she said peaceably.

  She had told Pantalaimon everything, but it was right that he should have some secrets from her, after the way she’d abandoned him.

  And it was comforting to think that she and Will had another thing in common. She wondered whether there would ever come an hour in her life when she didn’t think of him—didn’t speak to him in her head, didn’t relive every moment they’d been together, didn’t long for his voice and his hands and his love. She had never dreamed of what it would feel like to love someone so much; of all the things that had astonished her in her adventures, that was what astonished her the most. She thought the tenderness it left in her heart was like a bruise that would never go away, but she would cherish it forever.

  Pan slipped down to the bench and curled up on her lap. They were safe together in the dark, she and her dæmon and their secrets. Somewhere in this sleeping city were the books that would tell her how to read the alethiometer again, and the kindly and learned woman who was going to teach her, and the girls at the school, who knew so much more than she did.

  She thought, They don’t know it yet, but they’re going to be my friends.

  Pantalaimon murmured, “That thing that Will said…”

  “When?”

  “On the beach, just before you tried the alethiometer. He said there wasn’t any elsewhere. It was what his father had told you. But there was something else.”

  “I remember. He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn’t live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.”

  “He said we had to build something…”

  “That’s why we needed our full life, Pan. We would have gone with Will and Kirjava, wouldn’t we?”

  “Yes. Of course! And they would have come with us. But—”

  “But then we wouldn’t have been able to build it. No one could if they put themselves first. We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we’ve got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds, and then we’ll build…”

  Her hands were resting on his glossy fur. Somewhere in the garden a nightingale was singing, and a little breeze touched her hair and stirred the leaves overhead. All the different bells of the city chimed, once each, this one high, that one low, some close by, others farther off, one cracked and peevish, another grave and sonorous, but agreeing in all their different voices on what the time was, even if some of them got to it a little more slowly than others. In that other Oxford where she and Will had kissed good-bye, the bells would be chiming, too, and a nightingale would be singing, and a little breeze would be stirring the leaves in the Botanic Garden.

  “And then what?” said her dæmon sleepily. “Build what?”

  “The Republic of Heaven,” said Lyra.

  THE

  END

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  His Dark Materials could not have come into existence at all without the help and encouragement of friends, family, books, and strangers.

  I owe these people specific thanks: Liz Cross, for her meticulous and tirelessly cheerful editorial work; Anne Wallace-Hadrill, for letting me see over her narrow boat; Richard Osgood, of the University of Oxford Archaeological Institute, for telling me how archaeological expeditions are arranged; Michael Malleson, of the Trent Studio Forge, Dorset, for showing me how to forge iron; and Mike Froggatt and Tanaqui Weaver, for bringing me more of the right sort of paper (with two holes in it) when my stock was running low. I must also praise the café at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. Whenever I was stuck with a problem in the narrative, a cup of their coffee and an hour or so’s work in that friendly room would dispel it, apparently without effort on my part. It never failed.

  I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching for a novel is “Read like a butterfly, write like a bee,” and if this story contains any honey, it is entirely because of the quality of the nectar I found in the work of better writers. But there are three debts that need acknowledgment above all the rest. One is to the essay “On the Marionette Theater,” by Heinrich von Kleist, which I first read in a translation by Idris Parry in The Times Literary Supplement in 1978. The second is to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The third is to the works of William Blake.

  Finally, my greatest debts. To David Fickling, and to his inexhaustible faith and encouragement as well as his sure and vivid sense of how stories can be made to work better, I owe much of what success this work has achieved; to Simon Boughton and Joan Slattery, I owe profound gratitude for their patience and generosity with the one thing I needed most in finishing this book, namely, time; to Caradoc King, I owe more than half a lifetime of unfailing friendship and support; to Enid Jones, the teacher who introduced me so long ago to Paradise Lost, I owe the best that education can give, the notion that responsibility and delight can coexist; to my wife, Jude, and to my sons, Jamie and Tom, I owe everything else under the sun.

  Philip Pullman

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Philip Pullman is the acclaimed author of The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife, the first two volumes in the trilogy His Dark Materials. His other books for children and young adults include I Was a Rat!, Count Karlstein, and a trilogy of Victorian thrillers featuring Sally Lockhart: The Ruby in the Smoke, The Shadow in the North, and The Tiger in the Well.

  A graduate of Oxford University with a degree in English, Philip Pullman lives with his family in Oxford, England.

  Also by Philip Pullman

  His Dark Materials:

  The Golden Compass • Book I

  The Subtle Knife • Book II

  The Broken Bridge

  Count Karlstein

  I Was a Rat!

  The Ruby in the Smoke

  The Shadow in the North

  The Tiger in the Well

  The Tin Princess

  The White Mercedes

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text and appendix text copyright © 2000, 2005 by Philip Pullman

  Appendix illustrations copyright © 2005 by Ian Beck

  Cover art copyright © 2007 by Dominic Harman/Arena

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Scholastic Children’s Books, London, in 1997, and subsequently published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.

  Yearling and the jumping horse design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  “The Ecclesiast” from Rivers and Mountains by John Ashbery. Copyright 1962, 1963, 1964, 1966 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the author.

  “The Third Elegy” from Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke.

  Copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this work as follows:

  Pullman, Philip.

  The amber spyglass/Philip Pullman.—1st ed.

  p. cm. — (His dark materials; bk. 3)

  Summary: Lyra and Will find themselves at the center of a battle between the forces of the

  Authority and those gathered by Lyra’s father, Lord Asriel.

  ISBN 978-0-679-87926-8 (trade) — ISBN 978-0-375-89003-1 (ebook)

  [1. Fantasy.] I. Title. II. Series: Pullman, Philip. His dark materials.

  PZ7.P968 Am 2000

  [Fic]—dc21

  00044776

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89003-1

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