Chapter Thirty-Three Into the Red Building #6
The tollkeeper’s raven daemon suddenly uttered a shriek loud enough to hurt their ears. The old man stood up, trembling, and his wife held on with one hand to her dove daemon, who was uttering soft moans of fear. She reached out to her husband’s hand with the other, and he took it tightly.
“What you talking like that for?” the tollkeeper said, and his eyes were blazing with anger. “How dare you come into decent people’s houses and frighten them with thoughtless things like that, lies, terrible things? En’t you got any decent manners?”
His anger was directed at Lyra, and she felt shocked and frightened and guilty, though she didn’t know why. She also saw that the old man was as much frightened as angry.
Malcolm turned to face him. “My colleague meant no offense,” he said. “Please excuse us. We’ve only been in your world for an hour or so. Things are still very strange to us. But if there is a condition that affects the well-being of your daemons, we want to tell the world about it. Our world.”
“So we can help safeguard people who aren’t affected yet, and maybe help cure those who are,” Lyra added.
“Where’s your daemon, then?” the old man demanded. “You might be the source of all this trouble yourself. You thought of that?”
“My daemon left me a few months ago. He said he was going to look for my imagination, and I’ve been following him ever since. I’m still looking now.”
“Sit down, Henry,” said his wife. “This maid can’t be to blame any more than we are.”
“I won’t have bad talk in my house,” the old man grumbled.
“No, you shouldn’t,” said Lyra. “I wouldn’t either.
I apologize for upsetting you. It really wasn’t bad manners, though.
It was ignorance, but I know better now.
There’s another thing we need to ask about.
Who’s in charge of all this building work?
How long has it been going on? Who’s paying for it? What are they hoping to do?”
“It’s all them companies,” said Ethel. Her daemon was calmer; he settled on her shoulder, but still hid his head in her hair.
“They make up what they call a conglomerate, but they never said what that meant. They called a meeting in the town hall, things to eat and drink, little booklet things they gave out, pictures on a screen, and speeches, and it sounded like heaven. Everything thought about. Schools for the children, parks, hospitals…”
“What we didn’t know then was that they counted everybody there as voting in favor,” said the tollkeeper.
He was less angry now, but Lyra and Malcolm could see he was still trembling underneath.
And so could his wife, who was looking at him fondly and anxiously and patiently.
They were still holding hands. “So we were voting in favor without knowing it. They said later there’d been no need to take a vote officially because everyone was already in favor of the idea.
Clearing old buildings out the way, setting up new roads, a new market, new systems. Knocking things down…
This house is going, the whole terrace is going.
There’s going to be flats here. Small apartments for businesspeople, and machines to take the toll automatically.
And we thought we’d be here all our lives.
No pension, you see, just taking the toll like we’d always done.
It was like a wind was coming, a hurricane, to sweep all the old things out and replace them with new ones. ”
“It was around then that the daemons started getting sick,” said Ethel. “People seemed to have a different feeling about them, I don’t know why. Ever since I was a baby everyone had their daemon, it was like part of you.”
“What we couldn’t understand,” said Henry, “was how people came to forget those old ways, kind of thing. As if everything they used to know had suddenly become just unwanted.”
“It was fashionable,” said his wife. “Young people started to pretend they weren’t interested in their daemons, like it was out of date to take any notice of them. Then they just became a nuisance for some people.”
“An embarrassment,” her husband put in.
At that point, like a spark on a little trail of gunpowder, a thought in Lyra’s mind caught light and raced away, and she saw herself before Pan had left her, deep in the works of Brande and Talbot and their followers, fashionably ignoring her daemon entirely until he began to fade and weaken. It could have happened so easily.
“That’s it,” said Ethel. “Not just daemons, either. Other things we used to rely on. You know, like the idea of helping your neighbor. Or having laws that companies have to obey, like about not building on public land. That road along the lakeshore, you seen that?”
“They’re widening it. Building up the embankment,” said Lyra.
“They never got permission to do that,” said Ethel. “That’s public land. Builders used to have to apply for permission to alter public roadways, but now they just do as they want. It’ll change everything.”
“And the town hall in the market square. We don’t need a town hall no more, they say, because decisions about public affairs are going to be made by company boards, to save a lot of townspeople’s money, apparently.
So they’re going to pull the town hall down and put up a hotel or a big shop or something.
But it’s no use talking to ’em. It’s like arguing with fog. They got lawyers who—”
“There’s someone coming,” said Malcolm, who could see out of the bay window. “Police, or soldiers.”
Ethel gave a little gasp and shrank back into the sofa. Henry sat up and put his arm around her, and she turned her head into his neck.
“ ’S all right, my old love,” he murmured. “They won’t part us. Whatever happens, I won’t let ’em put us apart.”
Their daemons, raven and turtledove, were whispering to each other on the back of the sofa. The old man was holding his wife closely to himself.
There was a rap at the door, very loud and very sudden.
Lyra stood up. “I’ll go,” she said.
“Lyra—” said Malcolm.
“No. I know what to say.” She left the little parlor as there came another knock at the door, louder and more impatient than before.
More knocking at the door. Lyra took off her circlet and smoothed her hair down before she opened the door.
“Good morning,” she said. “Can I help you?”
The man was taken aback. He even stood down to the step below. “Who are you?” he said.
“My name is Tatiana Iorekova. I am a queen of the witches of Novaya Zemlya. Who are you?”
His expression was puzzled and cautious. She could see he’d been prepared to be angry, and now didn’t know what to do with the expression he’d been practicing.
“I’m a security officer. Are you the…Is this your house?”
“No. Is it yours?”
“Where’s the…What did you say you were?”
“The queen of the witches of Novaya Zemlya.”
He looked her up and down. “That’s not true,” he said. “You got any identification to prove what you just said?”
“Of course I have. Here you are.”
She took out Mustafa Bey’s letter. He scanned it quickly and gave it back.
“Anyone could have made that. You’ve got to leave here now. I want to speak to the occupiers.”
“But you didn’t read the paper I gave you. You’re going to claim you didn’t obey the law because you couldn’t read?” Lyra said. “Will the courts be impressed by that defense?”
“No, because it won’t reach the courts. Gather your belongings and go, now.”
Then Malcolm said, “What’s going to happen to Mr. and Mrs. Butler?” He had appeared beside Lyra without a sound.
The officer blinked and sighed. “Did you hear what I said to your…friend here?”
“My colleague. Yes.”
“And did you hear me say one word about the future of Mr. and Mrs. Butler?”
“No.”
“That’s because I don’t know what’s going to happen to them.
And I don’t know because I haven’t asked, because it’s none of my business.
We’ll take them to a transit camp, and then they can go or they can stay.
They’ve had fair warning. If they stay here, we won’t be answerable for the consequences. ”
“You’d pull the house down around them?”
The officer shrugged.
“Where’s your daemon?” said Lyra.
“Dunno. Now, I’ve told you to move out the way, because you’re impeding an officer in the course of his duty.”
Lyra saw his subordinates move forward a step or so, a dozen men, all uniformed and armed.
Malcolm remembered something from a very long time before, something in his childhood: an old lady addressing a crowd of soldiers, and forcing them to leave—it was the Priory at Wolvercote, of course!
Sister Benedicta speaking to the Office of Child Protection, who had come to take the baby Lyra away from the nuns who were looking after her—and he, Malcolm, and old Mr. Taphouse, the handyman, were listening as she chastised them.
And now as Lyra stood on the doorstep facing the officers it was like seeing a dream about that memory, because Lyra was standing firmly, her chin high, her eyes glinting, just as Sister Benedicta had been twenty years before.
Of course, thought Malcolm, she wouldn’t remember.
She’d been a baby asleep in her crib. But it looked for a moment as if she were consciously modeling herself on the brave old nun.
Only for a moment, though. And Malcolm thought that if Pan had been with her, she would have challenged the men, and outfaced them, but he wasn’t, and she was incomplete.
It was the wrong moment. He saw her flush with mortification.
One or two passersby stopped and watched in mild curiosity, but without anything dramatic to see, they soon moved on again.
“I told you to move,” said the officer in charge. “Mr. and Mrs. Butler have had plenty of time to take their belongings elsewhere. You can help them, or you can leave, but you can’t stand in the way.”
He stepped up to stand on a level with her.
Lyra felt Malcolm’s hands on her arms, and realized that she’d been trembling with passion, a dead-end passion, fruitless and empty.
The officer snapped an order and the men raised their rifles.
Behind her, the parlor door opened and Mr. and Mrs. Butler came through, slowly, arm in arm, a soldier behind them holding a rifle.
They had nothing. Lyra gathered up the knitting bag from the hall table and thrust it into Mrs. Butler’s arms, and she held it like a baby.
At the same moment Lyra saw something clearly for the first time. It was as if a blocked channel in her mind had suddenly opened, and a rush of understanding poured through clear and free.
“Malcolm,” she said, “I know what the alkahest is.”