Twenty-Seven

The Bijou of Atlas

As soon as she woke up, Dilyara explained to Brynmor Strauss about the truck and the men in the night. It was hard, because the incident didn’t belong in the range of things their common language could manage, but he understood, and tried to reassure her: if they’d gone away, it was because they had no further interest in the station.

But as they were talking, a voice called from outside. It was Chen. Dilyara hadn’t told him about Strauss, and she was immediately afraid, for several reasons.

“Is that Chen?” said Strauss.

“I tell him go. He not know you here.”

“It doesn’t matter. I remember Chen. I’d like to talk to him.”

“No, no. He not…” She couldn’t find the words. In her own language she said, “He changed. He is violent and greedy now.”

But she said it quietly and without hope.

Chen called again, impatiently.

“I’m coming,” she called back in his language, and hurried to open the outside door.

He was wearing new clothes, and looking as if he had important things to do and she was holding him up.

“You get to work,” he snapped. “There are rich people coming to look at this place. Merchant people. I want it all clean, all tidy. You wash everything, clean everything.”

“Merchant people?” she said timidly.

“Not your business. I talk to rich people now. They want to buy all this, building and land, everything. You make it clean, you understand?”

He was standing on the threshold of the lobby, looking past her and gesturing contemptuously at everything behind her. Then he stopped and blinked with surprise, and took a step or two back. Dilyara looked round and saw Strauss standing behind her, still in the shabby robe and sandals he was wearing when he came out of the desert; after all, there were no other clothes.

Chen’s expression changed. It became angry and masterful. “Who are you?” he shouted. “What you doing here? Who let you into this building? You have no business here. You beggar, you vagrant! Get out!”

“I suppose you don’t recognize me, Chen,” said Strauss calmly. “I wasn’t dressed like this when you guided me and Dr. Hassall to the red building. It wasn’t all that long ago, either.”

He came forward into the sunlight, and Chen gaped. “You…” he said, searching for Strauss’s name.

“Dr. Strauss.”

“Yes, yes. Strauss. I know. You go to red building. You go in?”

“Yes, and came out again, as you see. We’ve changed places, you and I. I’m a beggar, as you say, and I see that you have become a rich man, Chen.”

“Yes. I make money. Camels.”

Chen was fretting and shaking with anxiety, and Dilyara knew why: he could hardly sell the building to these mysterious rich people if one of the scientists on the staff was still here.

Strauss said, “Camels, you say? You’ve got more camels now?”

“Yes, oh yes, plenty camels. You want buy camel? I sell you camel, or two, or three maybe, if you want leave. Right now. You got no money? I know you. I trust you, Dr. Strauss. You take camel, or two, you just go now, wherever you want. You know camels. You good rider, I remember you in the desert, very good. You take best camel, right now, you pay me later, I trust you. Good idea, no? Right now.”

“But I don’t want to go right now. I’m exhausted and ill. I need to rest first, and I can do that here.”

“No, no. Not here. Not rest here. You go to village. You go now and they give you food, they let you rest. House with green door, woman there. She give you food. You tell her Chen say. Go now.”

Strauss looked at Dilyara. She was looking down, expressionless. Chen, on the other hand, was fizzing with anxiety and impatience.

“I haven’t got the strength to argue with you, Chen. I know this place was raided. I know Dilyara has done a superb job of cleaning it up. What you’re planning, why you want me gone—I have no idea. I shall go to the village as you say. House with a green door?”

“Woman there. Tell her Chen say.”

“What is her name?”

Chen shook his head, baffled. Dilyara said, “Jamila.”

“Thank you. Jamila at the green door. I shall go when I’m ready.”

Chen was going to argue, but said nothing and shrugged.

Dilyara said, “Who are the rich people?”

Chen saw that Strauss was still looking at him, and said, “Just merchant people.”

Dilyara, daring, knowing that Strauss was still there, said, “And you want to sell this place to them?”

Chen replied in a torrent of words in a language Dilyara didn’t know. But she and Strauss both saw very clearly that he was angry, and that if Strauss hadn’t been there he would have struck her.

“What is this?” said Strauss. “Wait a minute. Let me understand. You’re trying to sell the station? To sell this place? It doesn’t belong to you. Who said you could do that?”

Chen was nonplussed for a moment. Then he looked at Strauss’s clothing, and at his own, and at Strauss’s dæmon, a frightened lemur half-starved and thin-furred, and then at his own, a plump and glossy rat; and he drew himself up.

He said, “What they see when they come here, hey? They see you, beggar, dirty poor ragged homeless tramp, maybe holy man, worth nothing, hey? Then they see me, rich, nice clothes, clean. Man of property. Man of distinction. You think they believe you? You stupid? Listen, you listen to me. This place not yours. Never yours. You don’t own this place. You just work here, they tell you what to do, you do it. Obey orders. That’s all you do. Now I give orders. I tell you—”

“You know who come last night?” said Dilyara.

Chen was so shocked to be interrupted that he ran out of things to say. She went on: “Men from the mountains. They come, they look around. You look on the road. You see truck marks. Look.”

She pulled at his sleeve, and Chen, astonished, let himself be tugged out of the lobby and across to the dusty road, where the tire marks from the truck were still sharp and clear. She led him round to the loading bay. It was as clear as a map: the men’s footprints moving from the locked shutter to the other door, the tracks as the truck reversed and drove out.

“When?” said Chen.

“Last night. Dark.”

“You no tell me!”

“I tell you now.”

She didn’t say any more; he could see the implications quite easily.

Strauss had come with them, and he was looking at the marks too.

“Three men,” he said. “Look. Three different shoes. Work boots, combat boots. This is the men from the mountains. They will come back and finish what they started. Destroy this place completely. This is not your rich men, your merchant people. Merchants don’t ride in trucks and wear combat boots. What will you tell them when they arrive?”

Chen was gaping. He looked from the footprints to the loading bay, from Strauss’s face to the desert horizon, from the tire marks to the village. Dilyara could see him calculating: sliding every possibility this way and that, adding, subtracting, flicking through the outcomes like beads on an abacus. None of them seemed good.

Suddenly he turned and hurried away, scuttling, half running, half stumbling, making for the village and his camels.

Dilyara looked at Strauss.

“And us?” she said. “What we do?”

---

Lyra knew it wasn’t going to be a comfortable flight. Gulya was big enough and strong enough to carry both Lyra and Malcolm, and Asta too, but it was something she’d never done before. Prince Keshvād had flown smoothly; no sudden turns or dives disturbed his riders. But Gulya, Lyra kept thinking, was as new to this business as Lyra herself was, and eager, besides, to enjoy the power of her large wings. So they soared, or lurched, or glided, or swung their way over the sea, and Lyra and Malcolm clung together for safety as much as for warmth.

“Do we know anything about the Magisterium’s army?” Lyra managed to say during a bumpy passage.

“Not much. Except that they have a new kind of weapon. They’ve been testing it on various…You call them windows?”

“Openings into other worlds? Yes.”

“They can’t close them, exactly, but they’ve found a way of destroying them with a bomb.”

“How do you know that?”

“The witches who came to make a treaty with the gryphons had seen them doing it.”

“So that’s what they’re going to Karamakan to do…They’ll shut the opening in there. The one that lets people get the roses.”

“Was that where Pan was going?”

“I hope he still is…Oh, what a fool I am. What a fool he is. We both are.”

Malcolm said nothing. He adjusted his coat and pulled it a little tighter around her.

After a few moments, he looked across at her, at the circlet. “You don’t have to wear it all the time, you know,” he said. “You can take it off occasionally.”

“I don’t want to take it off. I love it. Is it really the gold from the alethiometer case?”

“Really. It was quite thick; there was more of it than I thought.”

“And you just hammered it out?”

“Well, there was hammering involved.”

“When they asked you to mend it, the gryphons—was it very battered?”

“Battered and twisted and crushed…How did it get into that state?”

She told him what had happened in the City of the Moon. “And you have got the inside? The mechanism?” she said.

“Yes. And I’ll mend it, when we get back.”

She was quiet for a moment. “Do you think we will? Get back, I mean?”

“Certain of it.”

“I wasn’t. Wasn’t even sure I wanted to.”

They said nothing for a while.

Then Malcolm said, “Tell me about Mustafa Bey.”

“He was a great merchant. He dealt with every kind of business along the Silk Roads, and he controlled it all from a table in Marletto’s Café in Aleppo. It was Bud Schlesinger who told me about him.”

“Bud! Of course.”

“In Smyrna. He said he knew you in Oxford. And he advised me to go and meet Mustafa Bey and ask his advice, so I did. Mr. Ionides took me to the café and arranged an introduction, in his own particular style…Mustafa Bey was very interested, and very kind too. He gave me a letter—a sort of laissez-passer—that would have helped all the way to Tashbulak, if he hadn’t been killed. I’ve still got it, just in case. It was him who told me that Mr. Ionides was a professor of mathematics. He seemed to know everything and everyone. I wish I could meet him again and thank him and just talk to him. And someone killed him. And I can’t understand why. I can’t see who’d gain from it, from his death.”

“Anyone who relishes confusion and disorder and sees a way of profiting from them. What did he say about the roses?”

“He told me how the trade worked, how his agents met the dealers and exchanged, I don’t know, gold or carpets or valuable things for it. He sent some people there to find out more, and they came back with rapturous reports about what they’d seen, gardens and lakes and so on, but no real information. Mustafa Bey was interested, but in the way a merchant would be, not like a philosopher or an experimental theologian.”

“Did he say anything about Thuringia Potash?”

“I don’t think so. What’s that? I’ve seen the name, but I don’t even know what potash is.”

“A big corporation. I think they moved on from just potash a long time ago. They had agents and research facilities in the Levant and further east. They were trying to synthesize the rose oil, but they look as if they’ve hit a bit of trouble recently. Abandoned buildings and so on…

“I suppose that sort of enemy could kill Mustafa Bey as well,” said Malcolm.

“On principle, you mean?”

“Or just carelessly. Indifferently.”

“I don’t know if that would be worse.”

“Oh, it would be. We can understand the Magisterium; we can work out their motives, even if we don’t agree with them. The men from the mountains too. They both think Dust is something evil and dangerous, so they want to destroy it. But if we can’t see a motive…”

They fell silent again. Not for the first time, Lyra thought how strange this was, lying so close and so comfortable next to Malcolm, to Dr. Polstead. The man who had confronted the sorcerer in his cavern, sure and fearless; who had made the circlet that fitted her head so well, of the same gold that had been her companion through the Arctic, through the world of the dead, and that came back to her in this form after its theft by the gryphon in the treasury of al-Khan al-Azraq, thanks to this man, thanks to his daring and his craftsmanship. She thought again how strange it was to feel his arm around her, keeping her warm; to feel his muscular weight so close against her body. And he was a man, after all. Would he want to kiss her? What would it be like if they kissed? She couldn’t imagine, but then her imagination was still lost, she remembered.

After a long time she fell asleep.

---

Pan and Tilda slept through most of the day. He woke as the sun was setting over the sea under a vaporous backcloth of crimson clouds, towering billows and sails of vast extent and baroque extravagance, like a theatrical setting designed by a madman with a bottomless purse.

“Night coming,” said Tilda Vasara. She was cooking a rabbit on a spit over a small fierce fire.

“You prefer to fly at night?”

“Always.”

“Because of the stars?”

“And the moonlight on our skin.”

She turned the rabbit over. It smelled good. “Want some?” she said.

“One bite, when it’s stopped bleeding.”

He looked at the sky again. He wondered if Lyra could see it, from wherever she was now. “Do you navigate by the stars?” he asked.

“Yes. And by the moon, and the rivers, and the mountains, and the sun, and the winds, and other things you can’t feel.”

“How old are you, Tilda Vasara?”

“Four hundred years, maybe a little more.”

“When you saw me—us—me and Lyra, before, whenever it was, during the flood…”

“You were asleep. In that little boat.”

“So I can’t remember, and I wondered—”

“You wouldn’t remember anyway. You were too young.”

“I know. But why had you come there? Were you on your way to somewhere else?”

Tilda lifted the rabbit away from the fire, letting a drop of fat hiss and spit as it fell, and put the carcass down on the grass and cut a leg away with her long knife. It was too hot to put in her mouth so she waved it in the air to cool.

“I was looking for him. The boy.”

“For Malcolm? Why?”

“Because he is remarkable. He was remarkable then. Many of us had heard about him. I wanted to see him.”

“And did he seem remarkable when you did?”

“Oh, yes.”

“How did…How was it that…How could a young boy from England be known about by witches in the far north?”

She took a big bite of the leg and chewed it noisily. “Not tender like rabbits of the Arctic,” she said with her mouth full. “How do you know things?”

“We hear about them from people who know. Or people who’ve been to strange places and come back. We read about them. But you don’t read, do you?”

“Some of us can. They are no wiser than the rest of us. Well, we hear things too. In many languages. In the wind. From the animals. From the ice. By loving. By thinking and remembering.”

“By imagining?”

“No doubt.”

“And…why was Malcolm remarkable? In what way?”

“You are too young.” She spat out a mouthful of gristle. “Best thing to do with this rabbit is chew it and spit it out. The blood is good, but the rest—worthless. Tomorrow we kill a sheep.”

The rabbit still smelled good. Pan nibbled off a piece of flesh, and swallowed the gristle anyway.

“Steppes now, then mountains,” said Tilda.

“Do you know about the birds? The oghâb-gorgs?”

“The filthy mountain birds. Yes. Like cliff-ghasts, only worse. They come north sometimes, and we kill them. They just rot where they fall. No creatures will eat them. Except maybe others of their kind.”

“How shall we deal with them?”

Tilda shrugged. She cut some more meat off the rabbit and wrapped it up in what looked like greaseproof paper. Pan watched, and she noticed.

“You watch everything,” she said.

“I’m sorry. Just curious.”

“What are you curious about now?”

“Greaseproof paper. I didn’t think witches would use anything like that.”

“Why not? Very good thing. We trade for all kinds of things. If we don’t make it but someone else does, we trade. What would you use?”

“I don’t know. The rabbit skin?”

“Do other things with that. But not this one. We have to fly a long way tonight. Leave the skin and bones. Maybe someone find it and make soup.”

“Tilda, these openings between the worlds…”

“Yes?”

“Have you ever been through one?”

“No. A sister of mine did once; in fact, two times. First time, she found a world where each kind of people hated every other kind. War, slavery, murder, jealousy, greed, anger—everyone angry all the time—hate for everything. She came away quickly. Then she went to another world where everyone loved everyone else. Kindness, patience, generosity, affection, tolerance. She came away even quicker. Too dull. Then she came home and fell in love with a Siberian hunter and forgot where the openings were.”

“Did she have any children?”

“No.” She looked at the last colors of the sunset. “You ready to fly?”

“Do you know how far we have to go?”

“No. We fly till we see it, then we stop. You fall off, I try to catch you, but maybe I can’t.”

“I’ll hold on,” he said.

---

Olivier Bonneville lay between sleeping and wakefulness all through the day. Occasionally the door was unlocked, and a guard came in with a tray of food and water. Bonneville tried to speak to him, but they had no common language, and the man was sour-faced and irritable and made no reply.

Bonneville ate the food and drank the water, to keep his strength up, and listened hard at the door, to find out what was happening; but apart from the occasional ringing of a telephone, or the shout of orders being given, or the stamp of heavy boots on the floor outside, there was nothing interesting to hear.

There was a barred window, whose shutters were closed outside, so all he could tell about the surroundings was whether the sun was shining or not. Mostly it was not. There was an open toilet in the corner, whose flush did work, and a sheet on the bed, clean but greatly patched and worn. There was one anbaric bulb overhead, but no switch to turn it off. The room was overheated and stuffy.

So he lay there, turning things over with his dæmon. Her wing was healing, but she couldn’t fly yet.

“What will he do with us?” she asked. It was the first thing she said when they woke up.

There was only one “he” that mattered. Bonneville had seen Delamare in this mood before: amused and conscious of his own power, like an executioner wielding a scourge with silky hands.

“He’ll keep us with him for the time being. He won’t trust Lacroix with the alethiometer, despite what he says. He needs me and he knows it.”

“What’s his overall plan, though?”

“It can only be to reach that building in the desert where the roses come from.”

“But why?”

“Oh, be quiet.”

“We’re just thinking, Olivier.”

Bonneville lay silent for a couple of minutes.

“Because—” the dæmon said.

“I’ve got a headache,” he snapped. “Never mind what he’s going to do. The question is what are we going to do?”

That was what she wanted to hear. She groomed her wings, the one with more difficulty than the other, and closed her eyes as she perched on the back of the single chair. Bonneville covered his face with the sheet and strolled through the twilit suburbs of sleep.

---

Over the fenlands of eastern England the moon shone as brightly as it had done some hours before over the steppes of Central Asia. Farder Coram had wrapped himself in a blanket and taken his chair out onto the roof of his boat to sit and look at the sky, despite the best advice of his niece Rosella, who warned him of dangerous lunar vapors.

“No, gal,” he said, “if I en’t succumbed to lunar vapors in seventy years, I reckon I must be immune. It’s the brightest night there’s been for months, and I want to enjoy it. Tell you what, go down the galley and make us both a mug of chocolatl, why not? Get another blanket and come and sit with me.”

“It’s too cold for you,” she said. “You’ll catch your death.”

“No, I reckon my death’s a long way off yet. Go on, make us that chocolatl.”

Grumbling, she did as he said, and presently, wrapped in one blanket and sitting on another, she curled up beside him to look at the sky.

After a few minutes she said, “Does it make you sad, Farder Coram?”

“What, the sky? Sad, no. Well, a bit. Sad when I think of things I won’t see no more. But mainly no, not sad. Something else too big for a name, maybe. What about you, gal?”

“Yeah. It’s so far away, all them stars, I can’t…I mean, it’s too big. Like you said. Maybe too big to understand.”

“Well, that’s what I like, you see.”

“It’s frightening.”

“Drink your chocolatl before it gets cold.”

“There are such things as lunar vapors, you know.”

“I don’t doubt it. But I en’t afraid of ’em.”

“Are you afraid of anything, Farder Coram?”

“Plenty of things. The trick is not to let yourself think about them. What are you afraid of, gal?”

“People dying.”

“ ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’ You know what that means? There en’t nobody dying here, not yet. Be calm, sweetheart. Look at the moon. Like a jewel, en’t she? Imagine her on a silver chain.”

“She en’t perfect, though. She’s got marks on her.”

“If she was perfect, without any marks, she’d look wrong. She’d look like she was made in a factory.”

“Yeah. New. Untouched.”

“Straight out the box.”

Rosella lay back on the deck and covered herself to the chin. “If she could see things,” she said, “she’d see us now, looking at her.”

“What else d’you reckon she could see?”

“Ships on the sea. Horses sleeping in a meadow. A traveler on a lonesome road. People dancing at a wedding. She can’t hear the music, though; it’s too far away. Someone laying eel traps in a river. Lovers…”

“Yeah, all that,” said Coram. “Go on.”

“A poor man and woman with their arms around each other sleeping under a hedge. An owl swooping down on a vole. The tide coming in slow over the mud. A lighthouse flashing. Candlelight in a cottage window. Or in a porthole. A scholar nodding over his books. A cat stalking a mouse through some cabbages. A thief creeping round the back of a house. A witch flying over the ice, all alone in the sky.”

“Where’s she going?”

“Somewhere dangerous.”

“And the moon’s seeing all that?”

“And more…Except shadows.”

“No, she can’t see shadows. Nor can the sun.”

“And shadows can’t see them neither.”

“That’s true.”

“Suppose there was a shadow that wanted to see the sun, and suppose the sun had heard about shadows and wanted to see one of them…They’d never be able to. Either of them.”

“That’s an allegory of life you got there, Rosella.”

“Is it?”

“No, probably not. There might be a story in it, though, if you could finish it.”

“I’ll think about it. Ooh, I’m cold, Farder Coram. I can’t stay out here all night. And you ought to go to bed and all.”

“Right like always, gal. You go on down with your blankets and I’ll bring the mugs.”

The moon watched mildly as they went below.