Chapter Thirty-Three Into the Red Building #4
“Why?”
“I met a man in Aleppo who used to be an accountant with Thuringia Potash. The place they had there—like a factory or a research place—was neglected, paint peeling, plants not watered, and so on, and I wondered why, and he said they’d closed down because TP had a big new project further east. But he didn’t know what it was. ”
“Well, this is further east. But…they couldn’t get one of those machines through the opening in the red building, could they?”
“There must be others. More openings, I mean, bigger ones. Or else…”
“Or else just the idea of a machine like this. The plans, the blueprints, the technical knowledge. Then they could make…Except for all the things they’d need in place to do that. But maybe time passes at different speeds in different worlds. I don’t know. There must be other ways in.”
If Pan had found one of those, though, he might be anywhere. Her heart felt heavy in her breast.
“Nothing would surprise me now,” Malcolm said. “Shall we try this man?”
The man he meant was driving towards them in a small truck with some machinery in the back of it. Malcolm stood in the way and waved him down.
As he came to a halt Lyra could see that he was some kind of supervisor: he wore office clothing, not overalls and heavy boots. He waited for them to come close, but he left the engine running. His expression was busy, patient, focused somewhere else, but polite.
Malcolm said, “English?”
“I speak English, yes.”
“What are you building here?”
“A communications hub.”
Malcolm and Lyra exchanged a look. It was an expression neither of them had heard.
“Communications…Roads, railway? A canal?”
“All of that, yes.”
“What’s the name of this place?”
“It will have a name when it’s ready. At the moment it’s just called the expressway.”
Lyra was looking for the man’s daemon, and then she saw her, lying on the floor on the passenger side. She was a mongoose, and she lay limp and still. Her eyes were open and blank.
“Is your daemon all right?” Lyra said.
“Yes. Who are you, and why are you here?”
“Travelers. We were caught in a storm and lost our way,” Malcolm said.
“Well, you can’t stay here. You’d better move somewhere else. Building sites are dangerous places.”
Before they could ask anything else, he put the truck into gear and drove away.
“I wasn’t sure what to ask next anyway,” said Malcolm. “This is all impossible.”
“She wasn’t all right. I think she was dead, his daemon.”
“So do I.”
They looked ahead. They were nearly at the first buildings at the edge of the town, a nondescript group of small buildings dominated by a tall chimney. There was no one around.
“Distillery?” said Malcolm.
A paved road led towards it from the churned-up edge of the nearest meadow. Rosebushes were still growing there, the first they’d seen since the ones being torn up further back.
A stone building like an open barn lay next to the road.
As they passed they could see some kind of machinery inside it, still and silent.
They went inside to look: a brick furnace under a large copper vessel, various tubes above it leading to another vessel, obviously a condenser, Lyra thought knowledgeably.
Shelves on the barn wall carried rank upon rank of empty bottles.
The air in the place smelt very faintly of wood smoke and fuel oil and, under everything else, roses.
“As you said. Pretty simple,” said Lyra. “No dials and pressure gauges and so on.”
“It’s a simple process. They’d have used something like this hundreds of years ago.”
A wooden crate part-filled with bottles stood near a pile of other crates, all empty.
“They stopped in the middle,” she said. “Something must have interrupted—Oh!” She’d seen the body of a desert fox, another daemon, in a wooden bin against the wall, half-smothered in decaying rose petals.
“Let’s go out,” said Asta. She was still in Malcolm’s arms.
“Good idea,” he said.
Outside the barn they found a woman who seemed to be waiting for them.
She was old and thin, dressed in what they guessed were the clothes of a peasant, and with wild gray hair.
Her expression spoke of suspicion, hope, and curiosity.
In her arms she held a daemon, a ferret, whose eyes had the same look as hers.
“Well, who are you?” she said at once, and in English. Both Lyra and Malcolm were familiar with that kind of voice: upper-class, confident, brusque.
“Malcolm Polstead,” he said, “and Lyra Silvertongue.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m looking for my daemon, Pantalaimon,” Lyra said.
“He came here without you?”
“I hope he didn’t. But I haven’t found him yet. May we know your name?”
“I am Silvina Policastro. This is all the property I have left. My family used to own all this land, including the door into the desert. Now it is the property of a company of…I don’t know what they are. They seem to have many names. Merchants. Development people.”
“And you grew roses?” said Malcolm.
“This soil grows the most beautiful roses in the world. Or it used to, and it would still, if they left it alone.”
“The people who are digging up the land back there?”
“Yes, those people.”
“Did they buy it from you?”
“Buy? I had no choice. I had to sell it. ‘Choice’ means nothing these days.”
“May I ask about your daemon?” said Lyra.
The old woman held him closer, and he bent his head and rested it on her breast. Her glittering eyes were fixed on Lyra’s.
“We don’t want to pry,” Malcolm explained, “but this seems like a world where daemons are not safe. Is there some sickness they catch?”
Lady Silvina looked at Asta, still in Malcolm’s arms, and her wary expression melted into a tender longing. Lyra saw tears in her eyes.
“I want to lie down,” the old woman said. “I am very tired. I don’t understand much anymore.”
“These development people,” said Malcolm, “did they give you a fair price?”
“How could anyone tell what was fair? We used to be able to judge that sort of thing. We lived by trading. But they brought in this new money and everything has to be bought and sold with that now, and I can’t understand it.
I’m not the only one. And I’m not stupid.
Value…We used to know about value and fairness.
But now I have to pay rent to live in my own house.
Who can judge things they don’t understand? ”
“Thank you,” Lyra said, not wanting to tire her further.
The woman stood and watched as they left, and finally turned back to the house that wasn’t her home anymore.
Malcolm and Lyra walked away towards the main road. They were both thinking about the daemon bending his head to lean on the old woman’s breast.
“They’re not well, either of them,” said Malcolm.
“Could it be that they’re separated?”
“No. I don’t think it looked like that.”
They had to step aside; a truck filled with gravel was heading towards them, making for the construction site. The driver didn’t look at them as he passed.
They walked on half a mile or so, talking together.
It would have been so pleasant if things were different, Lyra began to think; but it was hot, and getting hotter, and the noise of the machinery was never-ending, and their rucksacks were not getting lighter.
They passed a farm, and then another with a small distillery like the one they’d just seen, deserted and empty.
Before long they came to the edge of the little town, like those Lyra had seen in pictures of Alpine countries, or the Balkans, with an onion-domed oratory and a campanile and narrow streets leading to a marketplace in front of a town hall.
It was like any market in their own world; stallholders were selling vegetables, fruit, cheese, meat, and one or two stalls offered shabby-looking household items like brushes, dusters, buckets.
The awnings over the stalls were striped in colors that a long time ago had been bright, and the town hall, for all its Gothic-looking crockets and finials and spires, looked forlorn.
Perhaps it was being repaired; men were erecting scaffolding around it.
“Are you hungry?” said Malcolm.
“I think I am. I’m not sure. We haven’t got any local money, though.
Local? What am I saying? This is a different world.
The old lady spoke about a new kind of money, didn’t she.
I’ve got two gold coins left that Farder Coram gave me, but that’s all, and I don’t suppose they’d be able to give any change even if they took them. We’ll manage somehow.”
That illusion held till they tried to buy a loaf of bread.
Lyra proffered one of her two coins, and the woman’s expression changed so quickly, and in so many ways, that Lyra was bewildered.
The woman looked shocked, then embarrassed, then cautious, then furtive, and finally, with a little shake of the head, cold and unfriendly.
“Let me try,” said Malcolm.
Lyra moved back and watched as he spoke to her, easily, calmly, in what sounded like Persian. The stallholder responded carefully at first, glancing around as if looking for some figure of authority who might stop her, but then agreed to swap the loaf for a small bottle he took from his rucksack.
“Impressive,” said Lyra. “What did you give her for it?”
“The last of my brantwijn. Let’s see if we can swap something for some cheese.”
A mechanical pencil bought them a piece of some hard cheese like cheddar, and then a little pair of nail-scissors from Lyra paid for half a dozen apples.
Each stallholder was unwilling at first, and the apple merchant took out a handful of banknotes from a wooden box and shook them angrily in Lyra’s face, tapping them hard with her forefinger.
It was clear what she meant: she wanted proper money, bank money.
But the delicacy of the pretty scissors won her over, and she put the apples in a paper bag and thrust them at Lyra, gesturing Go, go somewhere else, don’t stay here, looking around cautiously as the bread woman had done.