Chapter Twenty-Two Coruscating #3
Asta didn’t reply. She was crouching, paws folded together below her chin, eyes half open.
“Lyra,” she said after a minute or so, “you remember the things in that rucksack you found—the one belonging to the man who was killed by the river, Dr. Hassall?”
“Yeah. Most of them.”
“There was a battered old book, with a faded red cover.”
“It looked like a poem, but it was in some language I didn’t recognize.”
“Malcolm knew it. He could read it. It was in Tajik. A story about two lovers, Jahan and Rukhsana—a kind of Arabian Nights story.”
“Why are you thinking about that?”
“It just came into my mind. So it might be in his mind right now.”
“What was it about?”
“They have to find their way to a garden belonging to her uncle, a sorcerer. They have all kinds of adventures and overcome all kinds of enemies and dangers.”
“Do they get there in the end?”
“I think so. But it’s not a prophecy; it’s something else.”
“Has he got the book with him? Or does he know it by heart?”
“He has got it. And he does know it, sort of. But if he thinks of something he’d still need to look it up.”
Looking something up…Lyra found the pack of cards, the Myriorama, and spread them out on the table at the end of the bed.
“Normally, a time like this is just when I’d look at the alethiometer,” she explained. “Not so much asking a particular question. Just watching the needle wandering.”
“I thought it only moved when it had a question to answer.”
“Mostly. But sometimes it just wandered. I wonder if…” Unconsciously she touched the little paper packet where the needle lay immobile.
Asta noticed. “If there was a way of balancing the needle so it could move, and you put all the cards around it…” she said.
“I wonder.”
Lyra took the needle out and cleared a space for it among the Myriorama cards. But no: it was silly even to try.
“It won’t know these pictures, so it won’t know where to go. Anyway, remember when we looked at them in the bus? They sort of work differently from the symbols.”
“Yes. That’s true. You tell a story with them.”
Lyra put the needle away carefully, and then scooped up all the cards and turned them over so the faces were hidden.
“Pick one,” she said.
Asta reached out a paw and took her time to tap one card. Lyra turned it over to show a picture of rose gardens, the bushes covered in red blooms, with a young woman picking the flowers and putting them in a cart pulled by a donkey.
“So…” Lyra began. “Once upon a time, Rosella and Samson were working in the rose garden. They had to pick the roses at exactly the right moment, when the precious oil was at its strongest. This year the oil—”
“Who’s Samson?”
“The donkey. He was very strong. He had to pull the cart full of roses to the distillery. This year the blooms were especially heavy, because the oil had never been so…so rich.”
“Where was the distillery?”
“Off that way, out of the picture. Rosella’s whole family worked there. They took the roses and boiled them in a big copper pot and distilled the vapor. Pick another card.”
Asta moved two or three cards out of the way, very carefully, and put her paw on the card beneath them. Lyra turned it over. It showed two eagles fighting in midair, above another section of the same road, the one road that led from card to card, joining them all together.
“One day,” Lyra went on, “Rosella heard a terrible scream in the sky. There were two eagles fighting, tearing feathers out of each other, slashing with their claws and snapping with their beaks. They fought more and more fiercely until one of them fell out of the sky, dead, at Rosella’s feet.
The other eagle screamed in triumph and flew away, out over the sea until it was just a tiny speck in the sky and then it was nothing.
“But the dead eagle was carrying a message. Rosella could see a little tube tied to its leg, with the letters R-O-S…written on it. She untied the ribbon and yes, there was the rest of her name on the other side.
“She tried to unscrew the lid of the tube, but it wouldn’t move. It was stuck tight. Then she remembered a story she’d heard—”
“It screwed the other way!” said Asta.
“That’s right. She had to unscrew it clockwise. And inside it there was a piece of paper—”
There was an explosion outside, sounding as if it came from the square at the end of the street. Both Lyra and Asta jumped. They could hear stones, bricks, tiles falling onto the cobbled roadway, and then a longer rumbling crash as a building fell down. People were screaming.
And before they could look around, Ionides was with them.
“What’s happened?” said Lyra. “Are you all right?”
“Safe and sound. Miss Silver, Miss Asta, I think time to leave.”
Lyra packed the cards away. “I wanted to see what happened next,” she said.
“The message on the paper,” said Asta. “We’ll have to wait.”
“It’ll give me time to think of it. Where are we going?”
“First we find a boat,” said Ionides. “Then we go north.”
Lyra was tucking her last shirt into the rucksack. “What’s happening outside? Was that a bomb just now, or what?”
“Big gun. Quick now, Miss Silver.”
There were running footsteps in the corridor. Someone was shouting. Lyra made sure the Myriorama was safe, the lodestone was safe, the needle in her breast pocket was safe, and followed Ionides out of the room.
Asta darted ahead to the top of the stairs and looked back to see if Lyra and Ionides were behind her, before racing down and out of sight.
They hurried after her and found her standing in the little lobby by the revolving door, her tail swinging quickly.
It was easy to read her mood. Lyra felt Ionides’s hand on her arm and let him go through first.
He stopped on the pavement outside in the bright sunshine and looked to left and right. As soon as Lyra and Asta had joined him he said, “Follow me. Don’t stop.”
His gecko daemon on his shoulder was looking backwards, head flicking this way and that.
Lyra followed close behind, with Asta padding swiftly beside her.
Ionides led them away from the square and into a succession of side streets, marketplaces, alleyways, shopping districts, past banks and office buildings and warehouses, small factories, wholesale spice merchants, weavers and dyers, until Lyra was almost dizzy.
Ionides sure-footedly strode ahead as if he’d known this route since boyhood, pausing only to check that Lyra and Asta were still with him, and to utter a word of encouragement.
“I can smell the open water,” Lyra said.
“Not far now. Keep moving.”
From behind them, they could hear distant shouts and cries and occasional gunshots. There were few people along their route: an old woman carrying a bundle in her arms, a drunk man outside a café, a man looting a smokeweed shop.
As they went past three or four children playing on a bit of waste ground, one of the boys picked up a stone and threw it at them.
It missed. Ionides picked it up from the gutter and threw it back, hard and accurate, hitting the boy on the ankle and making him hop and curse.
His companions yelled obscenities and threw more stones, but all their missiles fell short, and soon they were left behind.
After another five minutes’ quick walking, they came out to the waterfront.
In the sunny open space, with a light breeze stirring her hair, Lyra felt almost happy, almost free of her burdens.
Life was simple, after all, if you kept moving.
If you met trouble you could just walk away from it. Anxiety was a result of keeping still.
She knew that was too simple to be true, but she pretended it was so as to cheer herself up. Ionides was a few paces ahead, looking intently at the boats—pleasure craft mostly, engine-boats or yachts—bobbing on the water, and then he stopped and shaded his eyes against the glitter.
“Miss Silver,” he said. “Over that way—the fishing boat—red hull.”
It was one of the few fishing boats visible. Lyra supposed that, riots or not, people had to catch fish, so most of the working boats were out at sea. But the one Ionides indicated was in the middle of the harbor, smoke coming from its funnel, someone working in the wheelhouse.
“How do we get to it?”
“We steal this dinghy.”
There was a flight of stone steps leading down to the water, and an inflatable rubber dinghy tied up at the foot.
“Miss Silver, come directly after me. Don’t wait. Miss Asta, you go ahead and jump in. No claws, please.”
He held the boat steady while Lyra stepped in, careful not to upset the light little craft. Ionides cast off and reached under the seat for a paddle.
“Who is that in the fishing boat?”
“Someone you know. Sit still, Queen Tatiana.”
She did, holding on to the taut rubber sides as he paddled towards the boat. She twisted to look over her shoulder as they got nearer and saw a number painted in white on the rusty red of the hull, but no more, because then they were right up against it, bumping into the side.
“Hold the ladder,” Ionides said.
Lyra grabbed the metal rungs that hung from the deck.
“On my shoulder,” she said to Asta, who leapt there in a moment and settled herself lightly.
Lyra climbed up and onto the deck. Standing at the door of the wheelhouse was Leila Pervani. Lyra stood still at once and then turned to see Ionides just stepping off the ladder. He nodded.
“I thought…” Lyra said. “You…”
Asta sprang from her shoulder onto the rail, and stalked along it till she was level with the woman. Leila Pervani held out her arm, and her serpent daemon emerged from her sleeve. The two daemons exchanged a silent and wary greeting.
“Leila,” said Ionides. “Let’s move.”
She nodded and went back into the wheelhouse.
There was a man at the stern of the boat, Lyra now saw, and then Leila Pervani did something and the sound of the engine changed to a louder throb, the chimney coughed several gouts of smoke, and the boat began to move forward as the propeller thrashed at the water.
Lyra sat down on a hatch cover. Ionides had joined the woman in the wheelhouse, and the other man was coiling a rope.
Ashore, life went on; the boat’s engine was making too much noise for her to hear any sounds of riot or pursuit, and no one was pointing or gesticulating at them, and no police cars were screeching to a halt by the stone steps. No one seemed to have noticed anything.
Asta jumped up beside her as the little boat passed the harbor wall and sailed out onto the open sea. The air was fresh, the sun threw off little darts of light from the wave tops, and Lyra found herself wanting to caress the fur on Asta’s neck as if it were Pan sitting next to her.
Realizing, she took her hand away at once. Asta didn’t move, but continued to look out at the waves, regal and impassive.
Ionides came out of the wheelhouse and called a few words to the sailor, who’d finished stowing his rope.
The man nodded and went to take over the wheel.
Leila Pervani came out, and finding the wind tossing her hair about her face, tied it back behind her neck, and somehow that little change made her faded dungarees look like haute couture.
Then she came to join Lyra on the hatch cover.