Chapter Three Towards Aleppo
Three
Towards Aleppo
When Lyra woke up under the sheepskins, it was to find the sun not yet risen, the stars not quite all absorbed back into the sky.
The air was very cold. From where she lay she could see the sleeping form of Abdel Ionides, and the camels slumbering on their folded legs, and the outline of the ruins of Madinat al-Qamar stark and still against the horizon.
She’d have liked nothing more than to lie there half-asleep, clutching the dream of Pan to her breast, but there were private things she wanted to attend to before Ionides awoke.
The cold was piercing, and her hand throbbed unmercifully, but she felt clean and empty and calm, and she knew the secret of the red building.
She wrapped herself up again and watched the dawn take over the sky.
There were no birds to sing in that wilderness; the only sounds that came to her were a subdued occasional snuffle from one of the camels and the quiet breathing of Ionides. The air was still, so there was not even the whisper of sand grains shifting over one another.
She thought again about what had happened in the moon-washed forum, and then deep in the treasury, and afterwards when she spoke to Nur Huda beside the fountain.
It felt now as if everything she’d done and said in the City of the Moon had taken place in a state of delirium.
She sent her blessings to Nur Huda and her little jerboa daemon, to guard her and wish her well on her journey home, and although she felt a helpless little sob from part of herself, knowing that the alethiometer was gone forever, there was also a curious relief…
A sob from part of herself? How many parts did she have?
Was Pan aware of what she’d done? He was a part of herself too, or she was a part of him.
Perhaps he wasn’t far away. Perhaps he was waiting in the desert near Aleppo.
She, or part of herself, was also feeling a distinct excitement, a tingle of expectation and hope.
And there was that dream…And the warning, if it was a warning, about something called the alkahest… There were so many things to find out!
Dawn was coming, and it came quickly: unlike the gradual reluctant sunrise of the high latitudes, it seemed to arrive between two blinks of an eye.
The camels were shifting. Ionides must have heard them, because he turned over and sat up smoothly.
Lyra saw his daemon scamper up the rock beside him and stretch herself in the first rays of the sun.
“You awake, Miss Silver,” he said, not as a question. “You beat me to it. How was your visit to Madinat al-Qamar? Did you find news of your daemon, I venture to ask?”
As he spoke, he rose to his feet and flicked out his blankets, laying them over the rock, brushing them free of sand. His voice was as clear as that of an actor on a stage: not loud, just brightly audible.
“No,” she said.
“Ah.”
While he went behind the rock, presumably to empty his bladder, Lyra took off the shirt she’d been wearing and changed it for another, carefully transferring the alethiometer needle from one pocket to the other.
Then she tried to tidy her hair. She was aware of how wild she must look, not that she was concerned very much about that; but something had lightened in her. She longed for a shower.
She crouched by the fire, which Ionides had banked against the night, and began to move pieces of wood around, hoping to rouse it into flame.
“Miss Silver! What you doing? This is my job. You employ me to make fires, to cook, all that, not to sit like a pasha watching while you put this one out!”
He bustled her aside and bent to correct her clumsy efforts.
“Look, see this, the flame want to go this way. You draw it, you give it energy, you help it. See this wood?” It was a gnarled and prickly twig with drops of resin oozing through the bark.
“This is your friend. This is your best servant. Like a shepherd has a dog—you have the redthorn. You save two, three pieces at night, you keep them close to hand, you watch till the little baby flames flicker up the height of one fingernail, and then…”
Like a candy-seller pulling sugar out of the air, he twined and twisted the redthorn in the little flames, and soon he was able to pull them upwards, stretching them, twisting them like yarn, and touching them down on another stick.
Before long the fire was blazing securely.
Ionides thrust the end of the redthorn in the sand to put it out, and handed it to her before settling the pot on the fire to boil for coffee.
Lyra put the charred twig into her pocket.
“When you come back last night,” he said, squatting back on his heels, “you tell me you see a gigantic bird like a lion, or a lion like a bird. Naturally I think you are briefly out of your mind.”
“You’ve never seen anything like that?”
“Never. Such things are said to exist, but if at all, only in the mountains of the Elburz.”
“They’re not the birds you told me about before? The oghab-gorgs?”
“No, no. Those are mere savages. The kind you describe is very noble, very proud. Some people say they are spirits, some people don’t believe in them at all, other people say they do exist, but only in stories. I don’t know English word for them. In French they are called griffon.”
“Gryphon,” said Lyra. “Same word in English, almost. I wonder what he was doing in al-Khan al-Azraq.”
“Looking for gold, maybe. They love gold. If anyone steal their gold, they chase them to the end of the earth.”
So the one-eyed man had been taken up into the sky for the sake of the gold of the alethiometer in his hand. But he hadn’t had it for more than a few seconds; the gryphon can’t have been pursuing him for that. Perhaps he had more gold in his pockets.
“You see any daemons in there?” Ionides went on.
“Yes. But not mine.”
“You want to try again?”
“No. My daemon’s not there. He was there, but he left.”
“So you had some news, anyway. Where did he go?”
“East. Further east.”
“You know where?”
She said, “Yes,” but she hesitated, and then wished she hadn’t.
He was too acute to miss it.
“If you know where, you will want to follow him, no?”
“I know where in general terms. Not exactly. East is a big place.”
“East is a big place,” he repeated, uttering the words without any mockery, but she could see the enjoyment in his eyes.
He adjusted the pot on the fire and passed Lyra a bag of dates. She ate one; it was intensely sweet.
“Aleppo is east,” said Ionides.
“He won’t be in Aleppo.”
“We shall be there tomorrow morning. What will you do then?”
“I shall go to Marletto’s Café.”
That surprised him. “You know Marletto’s? How you know that place?”
“I know more than you think,” she said, and put another date in her mouth; they’d be nourishing, at least.
“Who you going to see at Marletto’s?”
“Depends who’s there.”
“And then what?”
He poured some boiling water into the coffeepot and stirred the dark drink briskly with a twig whose end had been split several times to make a rough brush. When the froth reached the rim of the vessel, he added a pinch of something he took from a screw of paper.
“What’s that?” Lyra asked.
He held it out. It looked like salt. She took a small pinch and found that it was.
“You didn’t notice when I put salt in before?” he said.
“I wasn’t capable of noticing anything very much.”
“And now you are?”
“Yes. Why do you put salt in coffee? Most people put sugar.”
“Make the coffee taste better. Plenty sugar in the dates. You want me to make some bread? Very quick. Very nice.”
“No, thank you. The dates and the coffee are fine.”
“Full of nourishment. When you ready, we go. We leave this melancholy place. What kind of daemons you see in there?”
As he packed everything on the camels’ backs she told him a lot of lies about what she’d seen and done in the Blue Hotel.
She didn’t mention Nur Huda. It felt strange to be lying again, or storytelling, at least; the endless facility she’d had as a child was a marvel to her now.
Making it up wasn’t hard, but making it convincing was.
If Pan were with her, he could have helped by supplying details, prompting, pretending to qualify or correct…
She wondered, as she spoke, whether that was what he’d meant by imagination.
Ionides listened with close attention. He seemed to find her nonsense both illuminating and probable; but when she was securely on her camel and he on his, he said, “Miss Silver, you are being satirical.”
“Oh, you don’t believe me?”
“Not one word. But your story is very good.”
“Mr. Ionides, what is the alkahest?”
“The what?”
She said it again. “Something told me about it. Have you ever heard the word before?”
“No. Never.”
“It sounds sort of Arabic…What do you think the imagination is?”
“Why you ask me?”
“Because you’re here. But what do you think the imagination is?”
“You don’t think I tell the truth?”
“Not all the time.”
He laughed, and she found herself joining in. Then she said, “You haven’t answered the question.”
“Ah, is very difficult.”
“We have plenty of time.”
“Plenty of time for such a question? How many years you think people talk about this? And you want me to tell just like that, flash bang?”
They had joined the rough road along which they’d come the night before. Ionides turned his camel’s head eastwards, and Lyra’s followed.
“Well, you could tell me what you think,” she said, “and I could consider it and then tell you what I think about your answer, and we could keep ourselves amused for hours.”
The morning air was pleasant in her lungs; the sun was warm but not yet hot.
The movement of the camel under her felt steadier than it had done at first, so she must have been getting used to it.
The aches and pains of various kinds were still there, but subdued, and even her broken hand was a little less swollen, a little more mobile. Ionides had noticed.