Chapter Thirty-Six An Incident by the Lake at the Moon Festival #3
“It was lovely,” she said. “As beautiful as the alethiometer itself, almost. But…” She told him about the old couple who’d kept the bridge, and what she’d done with the circlet.
“I had to. And the way they…” She had to swallow hard.
“Just the way they sat there, on their old sofa, side by side and holding hands, and I could see how much they loved each other and how completely he relied on her and she relied on him, and how they…” She sobbed, suddenly, surprising herself, and finding it hard to carry on.
“So then I thought if I hid the circlet in her bag of knitting, they’d at least have something to sell and a bit of money to live on for a while.
But I had to tell Malcolm and I don’t think he was… I don’t know.”
“I watched him making it. He told the gryphons he was an artificer from the realms of gold, and he proved it.”
“One day I’ll explain to him…”
“But you have done.”
“I mean…I don’t know what I mean.”
“You know when he saved us in the flood—I mean, you know about it—well, apparently a witch came to the Thames, in the flood, to look at him. We were asleep, but she looked at us too. He told me. And just recently, when Malcolm and I were imprisoned by the gryphons, she came again, because he was there.”
“The same witch?”
“Yes, the same one. She cured the wound in his leg. She asked me if you and Malcolm were in love.”
“What? What did you say?”
“I said I’d know it if you were, and you didn’t feel like that. And in any case he was in love with Alice. He should marry Alice, really. Ideal. We’ll have to put the idea into his head.”
“How did you know that?”
“Just thought of it.”
“You know, he was in love with her twice, when he was younger. He told me how it happened.”
“Well, there you are. He knows how to do it.”
—
Olivier dozed for some of the time in the little storeroom, and woke in the late afternoon to see her in the road below. She was with the red-haired man, Polstead; they stopped to buy ice creams. It was a shock to see her, but there she was, no doubt about it.
He ran down the stairs silently, and watched them from the alley, and followed when they moved on.
The town was busy, like any waterside town during a holiday in good weather.
The streets were crowded; anyone who’d only seen the place when the construction was going on would have had no idea how cheerful the place could be during a festival.
It wasn’t hard to keep Lyra and Polstead in sight while not being seen himself.
As the sun set and darkness gradually filled the streets, it became even easier.
—
The first coordinated piece of music sounded from the town, where all the lights were glowing and people were now dancing at the harbor’s edge.
Lyra swayed, just a little, in time with the tango from the band—or bands, for soon another one joined in with a faster dance, and the two groups played quite happily together, if not at all in tune.
It seemed to Lyra that the dancers were expressing something about the night and the town and the moon as they swayed and swung around the little dance floor in the harbor, and about more things too.
Pan took up her thought. “As if they’re saying yes, strangers are digging up the roads and knocking down the buildings, and things are changing everywhere, but still a tango is a tango…”
“And that swing the strings do as they climb the scale, and the trumpet above them holding on to the long note and then all plunging together down when the bass changes the rhythm…They love that. You can hear they do.”
“The band loves it too. Look at the conductor. Can you see him? Never seen such a show-off!”
“But listen to how he holds the beat back just a tiny bit and then releases it again—he’s really good. I don’t care how much he shows off.”
They listened, and Lyra swayed. She felt her whole being inhabiting the rhythm.
After another chorus she said, “I wonder if we can hear Dust as well as see it. It’s just another sense, after all.”
“We haven’t worked out what Dust is yet.”
“We have, almost. Mr. Ionides used to study it. The Rusakov field—the Rose Field—he was explaining about fields and particles and how each one is an aspect of the other, sort of—”
“Look at it one way and it’s a field; look at it another way and it’s a particle, you mean?”
“I did say ‘sort of.’ But he began to say something else, about consciousness. Then he stopped and asked about Karamakan. I wonder, though…”
The tango came to an end, and the dancers clapped and cheered, and Lyra could hear that the other band had been playing a waltz, but they worked quite amicably together. And soon they were both playing again, and more people had joined the dancing.
“Is Dust there if we’re not there to see it?” said Pan.
Lyra had to think. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “If there’d been a way to discover that, I think they would have done it. But I think we might have been confusing things.”
“Why? What things?”
“The Rose Field and Dust.”
“Now I’m confused.”
“Well, a few minutes ago I thought that the dancers were expressing something about the night and the town and the moon, that they were sort of saying what those things would say if they could dance. But perhaps the night and the town and the moon were saying things, and using the dancers to say it.”
“And us? Are we just looking at it and…being conscious of it?”
“But no, wait…I saw something then about imagination too.”
“What?”
“Maybe it doesn’t come out of the Rose Field; it comes out of us. It happens when we see it. The Rose Field needs it in order to be seen.”
“You mean it’s Dust? The imagination?”
“Yes, I think it is. It’s our response to the Rose Field.”
“And the Rose Field needs it…Well, what’s the Rose Field, then?”
“It’s really there, around everything. It’s everything being conscious.
We’re all bathed in it, everything conscious, and everything is conscious.
It’s…it’s what metaphors do, when they show us connections between things.
And the way we see them is Dust. Dust is what happens when our imagination touches the Rose Field. ”
“So it wasn’t a wild-goose chase.”
“Doesn’t seem like one now. We’ve got it, Pan, we’ve got it.”
Another round of applause came from the dancers, and Lyra and Pan laughed.
“It works both ways,” said Pan. “Betcha.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Suppose the Rose Field depends on Dust as well. Without Dust it just sort of lies there, sort of inert. But we think about it, and that’s our imagination, and the Dust flows through it and fertilizes it like pollen and it all comes to life.”
She said, “Yes!” and clapped her hands.
He rolled over on the grass and yawned and stretched. “And the Myriorama,” he said. “You were going to tell me about that.”
“So I was. But it’s dark.”
“There’s plenty of light.”
“Well, all right…”
She found the cards and began to spread them out. Pan watched closely.
Behind her, Olivier Bonneville said quietly, “Sister.”
—
All her nerves seemed to jolt at once. She dropped a card and swung round to look at him.
Pantalaimon bristled and sprang to her lap.
The light from the festival, the colored lamps and the spotlights and the mirror ball, was all coming from behind her now, and her expression would have been hard to see if it weren’t for the rising moon, whose plain silver light shone over his shoulder and full into her eyes. Her face was brimful of emotion.
“Well, brother, then,” she said shakily.
“All right if I join you?”
“Go ahead.”
The first time she’d ever seen him, in an alethiometer reading using the new method he’d invented, she had thought he was Will.
A similar build—similar hair—but then he’d turned round, and it was obviously not the Will she’d loved, but someone else, defensive, sullen, threatening.
The second time had been during the brief but ferocious struggle they’d had in the Brazilian Embassy garden in Aleppo.
Those were the only glimpses she’d had of this shadowy figure, this secretary or agent or whatever he was, this son of the abominable Gerard Bonneville, the man whose daemon was a three-legged hyena: the man whom Malcolm had killed to protect her and Alice.
And now here he was, picking up the card she’d dropped and handing it back before sitting down cross-legged and comfortable close by.
He was thin and his clothes were dusty and ragged, but he had the sort of clear-cut good looks which would go well with expensive tailoring and a fashionable setting.
That was how she put it to herself at first, but—perhaps because the moon was behind him, and the light illuminating his face came from the town, multicolored and inconstant—she saw layer upon layer of expression and subtlety, sorrow and pity, hope and understanding, in the eyes that looked back at her.
“When did you find out?” she said.
“Not long ago…Did you know her?”
“Mrs. Coulter? Yes, briefly, when I was younger.”
“Is she dead?”
“Yes.”
“And you called her Mrs. Coulter.”
“What did you call her?”
“I didn’t call her anything. I didn’t know that the woman who I thought was my mother wasn’t. But I have an early memory, of a woman singing to me, and I wonder now…”
Lyra thought of the night on the Smyrna ferry, singing nursery rhymes to the child who’d been saved from the wreck.
“My real mother—I mean, the person who mattered most—was a barmaid called Alice,” she said.
Pantalaimon had been braced for attack, or defense, all the time he’d been on her lap; now he relaxed his muscles and flowed down onto the grass.
Olivier’s hawk daemon watched from where he’d set her, on his knee.
She inclined her head, and Pan moved cautiously towards her.
Lyra and Olivier both watched as their daemons touched, nose and beak, and then Bonneville gently lowered her to the grass.
“What are you playing?” he said, indicating the cards.
“Oh, it’s not a game. It’s a story. But you have to fill in the words.”
“And the alethiometer? I know it’s broken.”
“It was stolen by a gryphon. We’ve got a few bits, and the movement is all there. Malcolm’s going to mend it.”
“Malcolm. Oh, yes. I came across him in a bazaar somewhere. D’you think it can be mended?”
“If anyone can do it, he can.”
He nodded. He watched the two daemons, talking together very quietly a yard or two away. Then he turned back to Lyra.
“What’s the story, then?” he said. “The one on the cards.”
She handed a card to him. It showed a man in a long cape, riding a horse through a forest, clutching a small bundle against his breast.
“Erlkonig,” he said. “I know this story.”
“What story?”
“Wer reitet so sp?t durch Nacht und Wind, Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“It’s a poem. And a song. It’s a father with his child and the father wants to keep him safe, but the Erlking whispers to the boy, promising all kinds of things, and by the time the father gets home, the boy is dead.”
“I think I’ve heard the song.”
“I used to think I was the boy.”
“Oh…How old were you?”
“I suppose young enough to be frightened.”
“And your father…”
“No, I didn’t think it was him. It was someone else. Have you got the rest of the story there?”
Lyra held out the pack. “Take a card.”
He took one and held it up in the moonlight so they could both see it. It showed a girl on the bank of a river, or a lake, reaching out to take a letter from the hand of a boy in a boat.
“You have to carry on the story using what’s in this picture,” she told him.
“Oh. Well, she’s the Erlking’s daughter. The boy isn’t the one from the poem, because he’s dead.”
“Who is he, then?”
“He learned the poem at school. He always wanted to see the Erlking’s daughter, but he only half-believed it was true.”
“What’s in the letter?”
“We won’t know till she does.”
Lyra put the card back in the pack.
“Well, that’s how it works,” she said.
He stood up and took something out of his pocket.
In the multicolored fairground light, Lyra saw that it was a heavy clasp knife.
The daemons stopped whispering together and raised their heads to watch as he stretched out his arm behind him and then hurled the knife as far as he could into the lake.
“That’s over,” he said, and sat down again.
“What are you going to do when you get back?” she said.
“Get a job. All I know is the alethiometer. Someone’ll pay me to read it for them. I want to find out more about the new method. There’s a lot to discover.”
“I want to ask you about that…”
“And what are you going to do?”
“Go on telling stories, I expect,” said Lyra.