Chapter Fourteen Dynamic Illustration
Fourteen
Dynamic Illustration
When she bought the tickets for the journey, Lyra had picked up a timetable from the ticket office, which gave their time of arrival in Baku as ten-thirty in the evening of the second day of travel.
She was inclined to trust the timetable, because every stop they had made so far was precisely at the time advertised.
She woke up when the bus stopped to refuel…
somewhere; there were wooded hills, and she thought she could see a lake; she regretted very much not having a map.
And a book to read, or even a magazine or a newspaper.
An attendant brought coffee and pastries, and folded the bed back into a seat.
Lyra ate and drank comfortably in the morning light and watched the landscape change as the great bus moved through it, climbing gradually as the road passed woods of oak and poplar and fields of wheat, overtaking donkey carts, once having to wait for a shepherd to move his flock aside.
The road…Lyra found herself thinking that all roads led to other roads, which she knew at once was not an original thought, or even a very interesting one, but it put her in mind of the pack of cards the old Turkish gentleman had given her, the Myriorama.
There was a road illustrated there, one road that went on forever.
She took the battered pack from her rucksack and spread the cards out on the table.
Where had they come from? Where were they printed?
The drawings looked early-nineteenth-century, from a time of romantic poetry and the coming together of landscape and sensibility; the backgrounds were mostly European, German forests, Italian mountains, a Mediterranean coast; the people moving about their business were farmers, soldiers, merchants, brigands perhaps, children at play, a shepherd and his flock holding up the progress of a horse-drawn coach—
Like the shepherd and his flock just then, holding up the bus.
“Well,” she said. “What does that mean?”
She spoke quietly but aloud, astonished into speech by the coincidence, and of course it was a coincidence; but what was a coincidence, anyway? Where did the meaning of it come from?
She remembered the process of learning how to read the alethiometer, something she’d done twice: once in her childhood, guided by instinct or guesswork or play, and then again after her return to Oxford from the north, toiling at the long, arduous, painstaking work of bringing the meaning into expressible consciousness.
Was that what the imagination did? See connections between things, connections otherwise invisible, and find a meaning in them?
The connection between the shepherd and his flock who held up the coach in the picture and the ones she’d seen a few minutes before on the real road: the meaning of that lay in the fact that she saw the similarity, not in the things themselves, which, unless she saw them, might as well be contingent and meaningless.
She had to be part of the process for the meaning to exist at all.
“Is this your new alethiometer?” said Asta.
Malcolm’s daemon had been dozing in the sun on the seat beside her, and Lyra had nearly forgotten she was there.
Everything in the past couple of days had happened so quickly, in a frenzy of danger and fear, that just to sit and think, to be still, felt like a sort of beneficent vertigo.
Or else it was like being lifted off the earth in a balloon like Lee Scoresby’s, and finding an expected companion there; and now she must find a way of talking to Asta that didn’t get confused with the connection she used to have with Pan.
“Sort of, I hope,” she said in answer to Asta’s question. “Did Malcolm ever use an alethiometer?”
“No, but we used to watch Hannah Relf use hers. You ask a question by combining three symbols?”
“Yes. Then you have to try to make sense of the answer.”
“Why three? Because there are three hands, I know, but why not two or four? Why did they give it three hands?”
“Because four’s too many, and two’s not enough,” said Lyra, remembering something she’d heard in a lecture about narrative patterns in folktales. “No, I mean, it just works perfectly well with three. Combined with the depth of the symbol ranges, you can say absolutely anything.”
“You might be able to say it, and it might be confirmed by the rest of the system, but you still couldn’t be sure it was true.”
“Why not?”
“In any system—like a system of mathematics, for example—you can prove a lot of things, but there are always things you can’t prove.”
“Is that true?”
“It’s not only true, it’s been proved. You can prove that there are things you can’t prove.”
“True things?”
“Yes. They’re true, but you have to look outside that system to prove it.”
Lyra thought about that. “So three pictures, or four, or ten thousand, it wouldn’t make any difference.”
“No. And I suppose it would be hard to fit yet another piece of mechanism in a small case too.”
“There’s that, as well.”
Asta stepped up onto the table and looked at the cards. “But this…What’s it called?”
“It says ‘Myriorama’ on the box.”
“With this you could have as many cards as you liked. You wouldn’t have to stick to three.”
“I don’t think it’s for the same sort of thing, really…The man who gave it to me used it to tell a story to a little boy. Besides, these are pictures of things happening, illustrations, not symbols like the ones on the alethiometer, where they have definite meanings, layers of them.”
“These pictures could have meanings too. But they’d be dynamic and not static.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Well, a symbol like the beehive on the alethiometer, for example, it has many meanings, but each one is fixed…”
“Yes, they are. That’s right. The beehive means productive work, to start with.
Sweetness. Light. Order. Topographical information…
Yes, they are fixed. That’s why there are books with them all laid out in order.
There has to be a common understanding of what things mean, or else it wouldn’t work at all. ”
“But the pictures on the cards here are different, as you said. They show things happening. Illustrations. People moving. Encounters. Events. Things happening in time. That’s why the man could use them to tell a story. It would be harder to tell a story with the symbols on the alethiometer.”
“Yes,” Lyra said, thinking about it. “But then you don’t use the alethiometer for that. You use it to see the truth about a situation. The essential elements. That’s why it’s called a truth measurer.”
“That thing you were using to cut the cell door open,” Asta said. “That was part of it, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was.”
“What happened?”
Lyra told her about al-Khan al-Azraq, and the one-eyed Scythian with the captive daemon in a cage, and about how she’d held the alethiometer to her cheek, loving the beautiful thing before she took it apart.
Her eyes brimmed with tears as she spoke.
Cutting the cage open, waking the man, seeing him snatch the alethiometer and run away, only to be snatched himself from the top of the staircase by a gryphon; it might have happened years ago, not just a few days.
“That’s all you’ve got left?”
“And the glass. Well, it did keep getting stolen; I was lucky to have it as long as I did.”
She unfolded the little sheet of paper to show Asta the needle. The daemon leaned down close to look at it and touched it with a delicate claw.
“You need something better than that piece of paper to keep it in.”
“I know, but…”
“We’ll find something. We’ll make something.”
“That’s what Malcolm would do, I suppose.”
“Of course.”
“I wonder if he could make another alethiometer…”
“If he had the time, and the tools, and the gold, and the—whatever that needle’s made of. I’m sure he could.”
Lyra put the needle away. “Have you ever been away from him for this long before?”
“No, never. It was enough to know that we could if we needed to.”
“Did you ever know anyone else who could separate?”
“No.”
“So you’ve never seen one of these.”
She found the little black notebook, the clavicula adiumenti, and laid it on the table. Asta opened it with a claw and scanned it closely.
“Names and addresses…all the way to Chorasmia.”
“Names of people who can separate.”
“How did you get this?”
Lyra told her about discovering it in the rucksack of the murdered botanist, and about learning what it was, and about meeting the sorcerer Agrippa in Prague and learning the name of Princess Cantacuzino in Smyrna.
“Is there anyone in Baku?” said Asta.
Lyra turned the pages and found a name and address:
Horace Green, 23 Villa Victor Hugo, Hüseyn Javid Prospekt, Baku
“English name,” Lyra said. “Maybe we’ll try him.” She closed the book and went on. “It’s odd, though. You’d think we’d still be aware of each other—I mean daemons and their people, be aware of what each other was thinking—even if we weren’t close…”
“But a lot of that understanding comes from seeing each other’s faces and hearing our voices and physical things like that.
We think with our bodies, we understand with our bodies, not just with some abstract mind thing.
I can guess what Malcolm might be thinking or feeling, and I’d probably be right, but I’d only know for certain if he was nearby and I could see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice. ”
“Yes…But suppose if there was some awful, I don’t know, an accident or something, we might feel that. When Pan saw a murder in Oxford, I think I felt something then, a shock, something like that. At the same time as he did.”
“Yes, and if it was a big enough shock—”
“Then we’d both die.”
They both fell silent for a moment.
“The worst thing,” Lyra said, “would be not to be with them, if…”
She didn’t finish the sentence but she didn’t have to. Asta knew what she meant.
There was a knock at the door.
Lyra blinked and sat up and gathered herself. “Come in,” she said.
It was Ionides. He came in quickly and slid into the other seat.
“There is a Magisterium agent on the bus,” he said quietly. “One at least. Probably more.”
“Someone you recognized?”
“Yes.”
“Did he see you?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Who is he? When did you see him before?”
“Two years ago in Bucharest. Then he called himself Dumitriu.”
“Did he know you? D’you think he’ll recognize you now?”
He shook his head. “No reason why he should. We never spoke then.”
“How did you know he was a Magisterium agent?”
“In Bucharest I saw him passing some papers to a man I knew was from the Magisterium. Later I saw them together with a third man. He was not being careful, which is why I noticed him.”
“Perhaps you’d better not go to your seat again. Stay in here.”
“No, Miss Silver. I can watch him from my seat. In about one hour we stop for ten minutes. I shall watch him especially then. You have your little stick?”
“Right here.”
“If you have to use it, strike him very hard.”
He listened at the door and then left and closed it quietly.
“Well,” Lyra said.
“It’s a bit strange,” said Asta. “I’d have thought we were moving out of the reach of the Magisterium. The Angelus bell, for one thing.”
“I didn’t really understand that.”
“It was one of the things that Calvin forbade when he became Pope. The last Pope. The Magisterium’s control has always been so complete that little flickers of dissent used to be put out at once.
And in Pisidia, the murders at the rose growers’ meeting…
Of course, you don’t know about that; we’re still catching up with each other. ”
She told Lyra about the meeting in the theater and the attack by the men from the mountains, and how Malcolm had killed their leader.
“He just—killed him?”
“The man had already killed an innocent rose grower, and they would have killed more. It was the best thing to do. The only thing, really. It stopped everything in its tracks.”
“Has Malcolm…killed many people?”
“He killed one to keep you alive.”
“Oh…Bonneville. Yes.”
Lyra put her hand on the stick, Pequeno, and remembered Farder Coram saying that if good people wanted to defeat evil ones, they would have to be unscrupulous. Perhaps being unscrupulous might include killing people, sometimes. It wasn’t easy to think about.
She gathered together the Myriorama cards and then drew one out at random. It showed a young woman walking, as if lost in thought, along the bank of a river where a boy was fishing.
Asta saw what she was looking at. “Well, what does that mean?” she said.
“I suppose…that’s me, and the boy is Malcolm, and…”
“What’s he hoping to catch?”
“Truth. It’s the river of time. Truth is elusive, like a fish.”
“You’re making it up.”
“It’s true enough,” Lyra said.
OS to MP
In haste—bad news. I was betrayed, but they won’t find this. No more from me though for now. Straighten up and fly right.
Godwin