Chapter Thirty-Six An Incident by the Lake at the Moon Festival #2
“All this earth-clearing going on,” Bonneville said. “What are they building here?”
The smoker shrugged. The other shook his head slowly. “Doesn’t concern us, really,” he said. “Won’t make no difference.”
Bonneville nodded, as if agreeing with this shrewd assessment.
“Cheerio, then,” he said, and walked on.
The smoker waved his pipe, and they fell silent until Bonneville was out of hearing range. His daemon, looking back, saw the smoker say something, and the other man laugh.
—
Lyra and Malcolm and Ionides and Leila Pervani felt strangely awkward, like people invited to meet together for the sole purpose of—meeting together.
But the sun was warm, and the machines were silent, and human conversation was pleasant to hear.
By mutual agreement they didn’t go back at once through the opening Lyra had cut and into the ruins of the red building, though Malcolm privately took care to mark in his mind exactly where the opening was, lining up this rock and that bush and a high point in the hills across the lake. Ionides saw what he was doing.
“Miss Silver cut that opening?”
“Yes. Did you ever see her doing something like that?”
“She cut me out of a prison cell. But not into another world. Good idea to fix in your memory where it is.”
“You were doing the same,” said Malcolm.
Ionides said, “Course! I am her personal sorcerer. Have to look after her. She won’t remember where it is, that opening, not exactly. Very hard to see.”
They looked back. It was almost invisible.
“Are you and your friend intending to stay in this world, or to go back?” Malcolm asked after they’d moved on, following Lyra and Leila Pervani.
Ionides held back for a minute or so before answering. Malcolm watched: he was genuinely thinking it over.
“We used to work together, me and her,” Ionides said eventually, “at the University of Alexandria. Physics. Different approaches, but all the time Rusakov and his field and his particles. We found some things that made it dangerous for us, and eventually we had to escape.”
“What sort of things?”
“We were treading on the edge of many-worlds theory, and also consciousness. It began to be inevitable that we would discover something forbidden, never mind that it was true. We had seen samples of the rose oil, we had seen some of what it revealed, we had heard of this rose trade and the strange place it was carried on. We were eager to get to this place and the red building you had to pass through to get here. But the authorities fixed a scandal and forced us out. We went separate ways, so now here we are, and I earned the honor of becoming personal sorcerer to Miss Silver on the way. We thought we would stay and work. But all this construction…”
He gestured around. His expression was doubtful and anxious.
“I don’t think the developers are interested in roses, or consciousness, or the Rusakov discoveries,” said Malcolm.
“What they want is money. It makes everything dissolve. If they think they can make money out of your work, nothing will stop them. Incidentally, Lyra has decided that the Rusakov field is now going to be called the Rose Field.”
“That right? Well, she is a queen of the witches. Whatever she says must be.”
—
For the rest of the day Bonneville acted like a shadow.
It was another thing he was good at, he thought: silence and obscurity.
He stole some salami and an apple and sat to eat them at the harbor, at the end of a little alley, watching every face he saw.
If he had a table and a chair he would have consulted the alethiometer, which lay in his knapsack silent and still, and full of information.
He thought more than once of taking it out anyway and just holding it, turning the wheels, watching the needle swing on its own path, stopping and returning and moving on.
It was beautiful to watch even if you didn’t understand it.
But he would have been too conspicuous. People liked to look at it; they were curious, they asked questions, they wanted him to tell their fortunes. It would draw attention without giving him a chance to read it properly. It would make them remember him. It had to stay out of sight.
And all the time he scanned faces, not staring, not keeping his gaze on one particular girl, not letting himself be noticed.
Just looking lightly, glancing, resting a moment, looking away; and sometimes back again, if he thought those eyes had a similar brightness, or that hair a tint of hers, even under that dark dye; or those light movements a touch of her supple strength; or anything about her at all that brought the name Lyra to his mind.
Why was she called that anyway? Whose idea was it? What did it mean?
Never mind. Didn’t matter. She was here.
He’d see her eventually. And that hefty red-haired bastard, and the beggar with the scar who’d fooled him so completely, and the woman from the nuncio’s house in Aleppo who’d seen him humiliated.
All around him people were hanging up lamps, bringing more chairs and tables for the dancing floor, setting up booths and stalls around the edge of the harbor, even decorating boats with garlands of flowers and colored flags.
The little alley was all very well for a few minutes, but Olivier couldn’t sit there all day.
Beyond some brimming dustbins opposite him there was a door, which he guessed opened out of the back of a cheap café, because at one point the door opened and a girl in an apron tipped a basin full of potato peelings over the nearest bin before slamming the door as she went back inside.
But the door bounced, and didn’t catch. It hung open a little way, and Olivier could see a flight of wooden stairs inside, so he stood up quickly and darted in without pausing to think.
The kitchen was straight ahead; the stairs were on the right. He ran up the flight with light feet, and found a dirty storeroom cluttered with broken chairs, sacks of rice and potatoes, a rack of apples, and best of all a window overlooking the busy harbor.
He’d eaten, he was hurt, and he was tired. He found a spot near the window, found a chair that worked, propped himself up more or less firmly, and watched the activity outside. She’d go past eventually, and then he’d follow her.
—
Pan and Lyra said little during the day, because much of what each had to say was only for the other, and it wasn’t until later, after they had all eaten, that the girl and her daemon could talk as they needed to, together and alone.
They sat on a grassy bank at the edge of the lake, with the town at their right and a ridge of mountains some way off to their left.
Ahead of them across the water, the tops of the tree-robed hills were already turning silver as the moon rose from behind the little hill where the rose exchange, and the opening into Lyra’s world, had stood.
They could hear snatches of music and bursts of laughter and the murmur of conversation from the town.
“Tell me again about Olivier Bonneville,” Lyra said. “I just can’t get it clear. It’s too strange altogether.”
“He said Mrs. Coulter was his mother—he just found out. And something about Delamare and lies.”
“Our brother…”
“Half brother.”
“Well…same thing, almost. Who was his father? Oh—wait a minute—of course, Malcolm knew him: the man Gerard Bonneville, in Wolvercote. Apparently he used to beat his daemon. Then later on Malcolm killed him. When we were too young to understand anything.”
“Remember what a shock it was to learn who our parents were…”
“Finding out from the gyptians…People ought not to do that. To keep children from knowing things, I mean. They should tell the truth.”
They sat quiet for a minute. Along the shore to their right, colored lights were coming on, and short snatches of music, like three or four bands tuning up, came to them over the water.
“Where did you look for my imagination?” she asked.
He looked at the moon, just clear of the hills. She followed his eyes.
“Like Orlando looking for his lost wits?” she said. “Was that what gave you the idea?”
“Well…It began as a figure of speech. I was exasperated. I didn’t mean it literally at first. But then I was committed to it and I didn’t want to stop. And it might have been true.”
“What, that my imagination was…”
“Missing. Or you didn’t trust it. Or you tried not to believe in it. And that was true.”
“Yes. I think it was. Pan, if we hadn’t been able to separate, we’d have been joined together hating each other forever.”
“Well, how wise you were to abandon me in the world of the dead.”
“It was the worst thing I ever did.”
“But you had to. I can see that now. You know the old Master knew you were going to do it? Malcolm told me.”
“How could the Master know that?”
“The alethiometer. It said you were going to be involved in a great betrayal.”
Lyra felt something fall across her face, something small and light: a leaf. She caught it and sat holding it. “Well, I’m glad I didn’t know,” she said.
“It would have been impossible for us to know something like that. Impossible to live with the weight of it. He was clever, the old Master.”
“Remember that dinner with the new one?”
“The pharmaceutical executive. What a smooth diplomat he was.”
Lyra shredded the leaf and let the pieces fall on the grass.
“This is the wrong time of the year for leaves to behave like metaphors,” Pan said.
“But they do. Everything does, all the time.”
“Was the gold circlet Malcolm made for you a metaphor, then? Where is it, by the way? I haven’t seen it on yet.”