Chapter Twenty-Seven The Bijou of Atlas
Twenty-Seven
The Bijou of Atlas
As soon as she woke up, Dilyara explained to Brynmor Strauss about the truck and the men in the night.
It was hard, because the incident didn’t belong in the range of things their common language could manage, but he understood, and tried to reassure her: if they’d gone away, it was because they had no further interest in the station.
But as they were talking, a voice called from outside. It was Chen. Dilyara hadn’t told him about Strauss, and she was immediately afraid, for several reasons.
“Is that Chen?” said Strauss.
“I tell him go. He not know you here.”
“It doesn’t matter. I remember Chen. I’d like to talk to him.”
“No, no. He not…” She couldn’t find the words. In her own language she said, “He changed. He is violent and greedy now.”
But she said it quietly and without hope.
Chen called again, impatiently.
“I’m coming,” she called back in his language, and hurried to open the outside door.
He was wearing new clothes, and looking as if he had important things to do and she was holding him up.
“You get to work,” he snapped. “There are rich people coming to look at this place. Merchant people. I want it all clean, all tidy. You wash everything, clean everything.”
“Merchant people?” she said timidly.
“Not your business. I talk to rich people now. They want to buy all this, building and land, everything. You make it clean, you understand?”
He was standing on the threshold of the lobby, looking past her and gesturing contemptuously at everything behind her.
Then he stopped and blinked with surprise, and took a step or two back.
Dilyara looked round and saw Strauss standing behind her, still in the shabby robe and sandals he was wearing when he came out of the desert; after all, there were no other clothes.
Chen’s expression changed. It became angry and masterful. “Who are you?” he shouted. “What you doing here? Who let you into this building? You have no business here. You beggar, you vagrant! Get out!”
“I suppose you don’t recognize me, Chen,” said Strauss calmly. “I wasn’t dressed like this when you guided me and Dr. Hassall to the red building. It wasn’t all that long ago, either.”
He came forward into the sunlight, and Chen gaped. “You…” he said, searching for Strauss’s name.
“Dr. Strauss.”
“Yes, yes. Strauss. I know. You go to red building. You go in?”
“Yes, and came out again, as you see. We’ve changed places, you and I. I’m a beggar, as you say, and I see that you have become a rich man, Chen.”
“Yes. I make money. Camels.”
Chen was fretting and shaking with anxiety, and Dilyara knew why: he could hardly sell the building to these mysterious rich people if one of the scientists on the staff was still here.
Strauss said, “Camels, you say? You’ve got more camels now?”
“Yes, oh yes, plenty camels. You want buy camel? I sell you camel, or two, or three maybe, if you want leave. Right now. You got no money? I know you. I trust you, Dr. Strauss. You take camel, or two, you just go now, wherever you want. You know camels. You good rider, I remember you in the desert, very good. You take best camel, right now, you pay me later, I trust you. Good idea, no? Right now.”
“But I don’t want to go right now. I’m exhausted and ill. I need to rest first, and I can do that here.”
“No, no. Not here. Not rest here. You go to village. You go now and they give you food, they let you rest. House with green door, woman there. She give you food. You tell her Chen say. Go now.”
Strauss looked at Dilyara. She was looking down, expressionless. Chen, on the other hand, was fizzing with anxiety and impatience.
“I haven’t got the strength to argue with you, Chen. I know this place was raided. I know Dilyara has done a superb job of cleaning it up. What you’re planning, why you want me gone—I have no idea. I shall go to the village as you say. House with a green door?”
“Woman there. Tell her Chen say.”
“What is her name?”
Chen shook his head, baffled. Dilyara said, “Jamila.”
“Thank you. Jamila at the green door. I shall go when I’m ready.”
Chen was going to argue, but said nothing and shrugged.
Dilyara said, “Who are the rich people?”
Chen saw that Strauss was still looking at him, and said, “Just merchant people.”
Dilyara, daring, knowing that Strauss was still there, said, “And you want to sell this place to them?”
Chen replied in a torrent of words in a language Dilyara didn’t know. But she and Strauss both saw very clearly that he was angry, and that if Strauss hadn’t been there he would have struck her.
“What is this?” said Strauss. “Wait a minute. Let me understand. You’re trying to sell the station? To sell this place? It doesn’t belong to you. Who said you could do that?”
Chen was nonplussed for a moment. Then he looked at Strauss’s clothing, and at his own, and at Strauss’s daemon, a frightened lemur half-starved and thin-furred, and then at his own, a plump and glossy rat; and he drew himself up.
He said, “What they see when they come here, hey? They see you, beggar, dirty poor ragged homeless tramp, maybe holy man, worth nothing, hey? Then they see me, rich, nice clothes, clean. Man of property. Man of distinction. You think they believe you? You stupid? Listen, you listen to me. This place not yours. Never yours. You don’t own this place.
You just work here, they tell you what to do, you do it.
Obey orders. That’s all you do. Now I give orders. I tell you—”
“You know who come last night?” said Dilyara.
Chen was so shocked to be interrupted that he ran out of things to say. She went on: “Men from the mountains. They come, they look around. You look on the road. You see truck marks. Look.”
She pulled at his sleeve, and Chen, astonished, let himself be tugged out of the lobby and across to the dusty road, where the tire marks from the truck were still sharp and clear.
She led him round to the loading bay. It was as clear as a map: the men’s footprints moving from the locked shutter to the other door, the tracks as the truck reversed and drove out.
“When?” said Chen.
“Last night. Dark.”
“You no tell me!”
“I tell you now.”
She didn’t say any more; he could see the implications quite easily.
Strauss had come with them, and he was looking at the marks too.
“Three men,” he said. “Look. Three different shoes. Work boots, combat boots. This is the men from the mountains. They will come back and finish what they started. Destroy this place completely. This is not your rich men, your merchant people. Merchants don’t ride in trucks and wear combat boots.
What will you tell them when they arrive? ”
Chen was gaping. He looked from the footprints to the loading bay, from Strauss’s face to the desert horizon, from the tire marks to the village.
Dilyara could see him calculating: sliding every possibility this way and that, adding, subtracting, flicking through the outcomes like beads on an abacus. None of them seemed good.
Suddenly he turned and hurried away, scuttling, half running, half stumbling, making for the village and his camels.
Dilyara looked at Strauss.
“And us?” she said. “What we do?”
—
Lyra knew it wasn’t going to be a comfortable flight.
Gulya was big enough and strong enough to carry both Lyra and Malcolm, and Asta too, but it was something she’d never done before.
Prince Keshvād had flown smoothly; no sudden turns or dives disturbed his riders.
But Gulya, Lyra kept thinking, was as new to this business as Lyra herself was, and eager, besides, to enjoy the power of her large wings.
So they soared, or lurched, or glided, or swung their way over the sea, and Lyra and Malcolm clung together for safety as much as for warmth.
“Do we know anything about the Magisterium’s army?” Lyra managed to say during a bumpy passage.
“Not much. Except that they have a new kind of weapon. They’ve been testing it on various…You call them windows?”
“Openings into other worlds? Yes.”
“They can’t close them, exactly, but they’ve found a way of destroying them with a bomb.”
“How do you know that?”
“The witches who came to make a treaty with the gryphons had seen them doing it.”
“So that’s what they’re going to Karamakan to do…They’ll shut the opening in there. The one that lets people get the roses.”
“Was that where Pan was going?”
“I hope he still is…Oh, what a fool I am. What a fool he is. We both are.”
Malcolm said nothing. He adjusted his coat and pulled it a little tighter around her.
After a few moments, he looked across at her, at the circlet. “You don’t have to wear it all the time, you know,” he said. “You can take it off occasionally.”
“I don’t want to take it off. I love it. Is it really the gold from the alethiometer case?”
“Really. It was quite thick; there was more of it than I thought.”
“And you just hammered it out?”
“Well, there was hammering involved.”
“When they asked you to mend it, the gryphons—was it very battered?”
“Battered and twisted and crushed…How did it get into that state?”
She told him what had happened in the City of the Moon. “And you have got the inside? The mechanism?” she said.
“Yes. And I’ll mend it, when we get back.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Do you think we will? Get back, I mean?”
“Certain of it.”
“I wasn’t. Wasn’t even sure I wanted to.”
They said nothing for a while.
Then Malcolm said, “Tell me about Mustafa Bey.”
“He was a great merchant. He dealt with every kind of business along the Silk Roads, and he controlled it all from a table in Marletto’s Café in Aleppo. It was Bud Schlesinger who told me about him.”
“Bud! Of course.”