The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage

Twenty-one The Enchanted Island

Between bites of the bread and cheese and strokes of the paddle, Malcolm told Alice everything that had happened.

“So the priest wanted to take her away,” she said, “and the nun showed him the wrong child? D’you think she just didn’t know herself which was the right one?”

“No, I think she knew, all right. She was trying to trick him, and it would have worked. Well, it might still work — for a while, anyway. Till he finds out it wasn’t Lyra. And the nuns find out that the real Lyra’s missing.”

“But how could he know it was Lord Asriel’s kid who was there in the first place?”

“It must have been Andrew. I had to use our real names ’cause Mr. Boatwright knows who we are, but I should have called Lyra something else. There can’t be many Lyras in the world.”

“You can’t help that. I trusted ’em too. Little toe rag.”

“But I can’t understand what the nuns were going to do with Lyra if the priest had taken the wrong kid. I mean, they wouldn’t have been able to keep her hidden forever. Maybe what she was going to do would have been even worse’n what he was going to do.”

“I’d like to see what happens in the morning, though. Pity we can’t get ’em all out. Poor little buggers.”

He finished the bread and cheese. All he wanted to do was lie down and sleep. He felt on the edge of death with the desire for it, and presently, without his being able to prevent it, his eyes closed.

“Want me to paddle for a bit?” said Alice, waking him up with a start. He nearly dropped the paddle. “You been asleep for a long time.”

“No,” he said. “I’m all right. But as soon as we find somewhere…”

“Yeah. What about that hill over there?”

She pointed, turning around. A wooded hilltop rose out of the water, a little island all on its own, brightly lit by the low-lying moon. The air was warm, and there was a softness about it, almost a fragrance.

Malcolm steered for it, still more than half asleep, and brought La Belle Sauvage gently alongside the hill, out of the main current, where little swirls and whirlpools made the canoe dance and lurch and bob, until Alice found a branch to hold on to.

“Just a bit further along — look — there’s a sort of little beach,” she said, and he pushed the paddle into the water and brought the bow of the canoe firmly up onto a patch of grass. The moon shone directly in at it and helped him see a firm branch to tie the painter to, and then he slumped down in the canoe where he was and closed his eyes and fell asleep.

He must have slept for hours. When he woke up, it felt like a whole season later because he was warm, and the light through the leaves above was bright and sparkling. Leaves! There couldn’t be leaves out, not yet! He blinked and rubbed his eyes, but there they were: leaves, and blossoms too. He had to put his hand up against the brilliance. But the brilliance defeated him: there it was inside his eyes, twisting and scintillating like a…

It was like an old friend now. Certainly it was a sign of something. He lay stiff and aching where he’d dropped, and slowly let his wits come back to him as the spangled ring expanded and drifted closer and closer, until it vanished past the corner of his eye.

Someone was talking nearby. It was Alice, and a woman was responding. The woman’s voice was low and sweet. They were discussing babies. Could he hear Lyra’s voice as well, burbling her nonsense? It might have been that, or it might have been the lapping of the water, which sounded like a little stream now, not like a great flood. And birdsong! He could hear a blackbird, and sparrows, and a lark, for all the world as though it was already spring.

There was a warm smell — was that coffee? Or toast? Or both? Either was impossible. Both were inconceivable. But there it was, that fragrance, stronger by the minute.

“I think he’s woken up,” said the woman’s voice.

“Richard?” called Alice quickly.

And he was on his guard at once.

He heard her light footsteps, and then felt her hand on his, and he had to open his eyes properly.

“Richard, come and have some coffee,” she said. “Coffee! Think of that!”

“Where are we?” he mumbled.

“I dunno, but this lady, she… Come on. Wake up!”

He yawned and stretched and made himself sit up.

“How long have I been asleep?”

“Hours and hours.”

“And how’s—”

“Ellie?” she cut in. “She’s fine. Everything’s all right.”

“And who—” he whispered.

“This lady, it’s her place, that’s all,” she whispered back. “She’s really nice. But…”

He rubbed his eyes and reluctantly pushed himself up out of the canoe. He’d been so deeply asleep that he could remember no dreams, unless the episode at the white priory had been a dream itself, which seemed not unlikely, now that scraps of it came back to him.

Still heavy and groggy with sleep, he followed Alice (No! What was her name? What was it? Sandra! Sandra!) up the grassy slope to where Lyra/Ellie lay on the grass, with Pan laughing at the flight of a dozen, a score, of large blue butterflies that flickered and fluttered around him. One of them might have been the woman’s dæmon.

The woman…

She was young, as far as Malcolm could judge, maybe in her twenties, and very pretty, with the sunlight glowing in her golden hair and her light green dress. She was kneeling on the grass in front of Lyra, tickling her, or letting the petals of some sort of blossom fall over her face, or leaning down to let the child play with a long necklace she wore, but Lyra never managed to grasp it. Her hands went right through it, as if it wasn’t there.

“Miss,” said Alice, “this is Richard.”

The woman stood up in one swift, elegant movement.

“Hello, Richard,” she said. “Did you sleep well?”

“Very well, thank you, miss. Is it morning or afternoon?”

“Late morning. If Sandra has finished with the cup, you can have some coffee. Would you like some?”

“Yes, please.”

Alice filled it for him from a copper pot that hung over a fire that crackled in a ring of stones.

“Thanks. Do you live here?” he said.

“Not all the time. I do when it suits me. Where do you live?”

“In Oxford. Up the river…”

She seemed to be listening intently, but not necessarily to his words. Everything about her was pretty and gentle and kind, and yet he felt uneasy.

“And what are you going to do with little Ellie?” she said.

“We’re taking her to her father. In London.”

“That’s a long way,” she said, sitting back down and stroking the child’s hair. Pan had become a butterfly himself by now and was struggling to fly with the cloud of big blue ones, who fluttered around him, encouraging, helping, lifting, but he couldn’t fly very far from Lyra and soon fell back on the grass beside her, as lightly as a leaf. Then he became a mouse and scuttled to her neck.

“Well, yeah, it is,” said Malcolm.

“You can rest here as long as you like.”

“Thank you… ”

Alice was doing something at the fire.

“Here y’are,” she said, and held out a plate with a fork and two fried eggs on it.

“Oh, thanks!” he said, and suddenly realized how hungry he was, and ate them up in a moment.

Lyra was laughing. The woman had picked her up and was holding her high and laughing up at her. Pan was a butterfly again, a pure white one, and was dancing in the air with the cloud of blue ones, successfully this time, and Malcolm suddenly thought: Suppose her dæmon is the whole cloud of butterflies, not just one of them?

That made him shiver.

Alice gave him a slice of bread. It was fresh and soft, unlike the brick-hard bread from the cave, and he thought he’d never tasted anything better.

“Miss,” he said when he’d finished the bread, “what’s your name?”

“Diania,” she said.

“Diana?”

“No, Diania.”

“Oh. Well, um… How far are we from London?”

“Oh, miles and miles.”

“Is London closer than Oxford?”

“It depends how you go. By road, yes, it’s probably closer. But all the roads in Albion are drowned now. By water, everything is changed. By air, I think we’re exactly halfway.”

Malcolm looked at Alice. Her expression was neutral.

“By air?” he said to Diania. “You en’t got a zeppelin or a gyropter, have you?”

“Zeppelins! Gyropters!” she said, laughing and tossing Lyra up and making her laugh too. “Who needs a zeppelin? Great noisy things.”

“But you can’t… I mean…”

“You know, Richard, I’ve only known you for half an hour, since you woke up, but I can already tell that you’re an uncommonly earth-minded boy.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Literal-minded. How’s that?”

He didn’t want to contradict her, because after all she might have been right. He was still a long way from understanding himself, and she was grown up.

“Is that a bad thing to be?” he said cautiously.

“Not for a mechanic, for instance. It would be a good thing, if you were a mechanic.”

“Well, I wouldn’t mind being a mechanic.”

“There you are, then.”

Alice was watching this exchange closely. A little frown occupied her forehead, and her eyes were narrowed.

“I’m going to check the canoe,” Malcolm said.

La Belle Sauvage was bobbing comfortably on the water, which had lost the racing fury of the past days and was now flowing steadily, faster than the Thames in Port Meadow, but not much. It looked as if it had settled like this forever.

Malcolm checked the canoe over from end to end, taking his time, letting his hands rest on it for longer than he needed to; it calmed his unease. Everything was in order, everything inside was dry and safe, and Bonneville’s rucksack was still tucked under the seat.

The rucksack…

He lifted it out.

“You going to open it?” said Asta.

“What do you think?”

“I thought it might be like evidence, or something, if they found his body,” she said.

“Evidence that we’d…”

“Yes. But then I thought we could have picked it up anywhere. Just found it on the bank — summing like that.”

“Yeah. It’s pretty heavy.”

“Might be gold bars in there. Go on.”

It was a battered old thing of green canvas, with leather patches on the corners and edges. The buckles were made of tarnished brass. Malcolm unfastened them and pulled back the top. The first thing he found was a sweater of navy-blue wool, which smelled of fuel oil and smokeleaf.

“We could have done with that,” he said.

“Well, now we know… Go on.”

He laid the sweater on the grass and looked again. There were five folders of faded cardboard, bent or torn at the corners, each one full of paper.

“No wonder it was heavy,” he said.

He took out the first folder and opened it. The papers were covered in swift, spidery handwriting, in black ink, which was hard to read; it seemed to be a sort of long argument about mathematics, all in French.

“There’s a map,” said Asta.

One sheet of paper did have what looked like a plan of a building on it. Rooms, corridors, doorways… The explanatory words were in French too, and in different writing. He could understand none of it. There were more plans beside the first one, which looked as if they might be further floors of the same building.

He put them all back and took out the next folder.

“This is in English,” he said.

“He was English, wasn’t he?”

“Bonneville? I suppose he might have been French. Hey, look!”

The first page was typewritten, a title page, and it said: An Analysis of Some Philosophical Implications of the Rusakov Field, by Gerard Bonneville, Ph.D.

“The Rusakov field!” said Malcolm. “We were right! He did know about it!”

“And he’s got a Ph.D., look. Like Dr. Relf. We ought to take all this to her.”

“Yeah,” he said. “If we ever…”

“What else is in the folder?”

He flipped through it. Densely typed pages, the text broken by equations full of signs he had never seen before; there was no way of understanding it. He looked at the opening paragraph.

“Save that for later,” Malcolm said. “It’ll be interesting, though, I bet.”

“What’s next?”

The third, fourth, and fifth folders contained only papers that were unreadable. The mixture of letters, numbers, and symbols was like no language Malcolm had ever seen.

“It must be code,” he said. “I bet Dr. Relf and Oakley Street could understand it.”

There was still something else at the bottom of the rucksack, and it was heavy too. A package wrapped in oilskin, and inside that in thick soft leather, and finally in black velvet, opened up to disclose a square wooden box, as big as the palm of a large man’s hand, much decorated with marquetry in exotic patterns.

“Look at that!” Malcolm said, admiring the workmanship. “That must have taken years!”

“How d’you open it?” said Asta, mouse-formed.

He looked all round it and saw no hinges, no clasp, no keyhole, no way in at all.

“Hmm,” he said. “Well, if there’s no hinges…”

“Does the lid just lift off?”

He tried and found it didn’t.

“If you were a mechanic—” she said, and got no further before he flicked her off the gunwale. But before she hit the water, she became a butterfly and flew up to perch on his hair.

He turned the box round slowly. He pressed every part of its surface, looking for a secret catch.

“That edge, there,” said his dæmon’s butterfly voice. “Where it’s sort of green.”

“What about it?”

“Press it sideways.”

He did, quite gently, and then a little more forcefully, and felt something move. A narrow panel that ran the length of the end of the box slid sideways for about the length of his thumbnail.

“Ah,” he said. “That’s a start.”

He pushed it back, and then out again, feeling for some tiny looseness anywhere that might reveal where the next movement came. After a few moments he found it: the opposite side of the box slid downwards for the same distance.

“Getting there,” he said.

The first panel slid a little further, and then the other side did the same, and then it happened a third time. But that was all. He could push them in back to the starting point and then out again, but they would only move those three steps, and still the box wasn’t open.

He looked all round, felt here and there, and then… “Ah,” he said, “I got it.”

When the side was as far down as it would go, the top could slide out. It was as simple as that.

“Oh!” said Asta. “Is that a…”

In a bed of black velvet lay a golden instrument like a large watch or a compass. It was the most beautiful thing Malcolm and his dæmon had ever seen. It was just as Dr. Relf had described it to him, but finer than he could ever have imagined. The thirty-six pictures around the dial were minute and clear, the three hands and the one needle were exquisitely shaped out of some silver-gray metal, and a golden sunburst surrounded the center of the dial.

“That’s what it is,” he said, and he found he was whispering.

“Hide it. Put it back straightaway,” she said. “Look at it later, when we’re somewhere else.”

“Yeah. Yeah. You’re right.”

He was bewitched by its beauty, but he did as she said and put it straight back into the box, wrapped it up, and thrust it into the bottom of the rucksack.

“Where can he have got that from?” she whispered.

“Stole it. That’s what I reckon.”

He fastened the rucksack again and stowed it where it was before, under the thwart.

“Dr. Relf said there was six originally, remember?” he said. “And one was missing, because they knew where five of them were but not the sixth… I bet this is it.”

There was silence from further up in the grassy glade where the fire was, and when Malcolm got back there, he saw why: Lyra was asleep on the grass, wrapped in a silken blanket the color of sunshine, and the woman was busy doing something to Alice’s hair. Alice was kneeling in front of her, facing away, as the woman bent over her and with deft fingers wove her hair into complex braids, twisting flowers into it as she did. The butterflies were still there. One or two were resting on the sleeping Pan, some on the woman’s shoulders and neck, and some tried to settle on Ben, who lay head on paws close to Alice; but whenever they did, he growled very softly and deeply, and they took off again.

Alice’s expression was strange. She was embarrassed, but at the same time she was shy and delighted and determined to be as pretty as the woman wanted her to be. The look she gave Malcolm was almost fierce, as if daring him to laugh or roll his eyes, and there was a pleading in it too. Since they had killed Bonneville, they had been close to each other, probably closer than Malcolm had felt to anyone. Now she was being made to look different from the ratty, thin-faced girl with the permanent sneer and the swift frown, his closest friend. Now she was becoming almost pretty. He felt strange about that, and he could tell that she did too.

He looked away.

The woman was murmuring to her, and Malcolm tried not to listen. He moved further away and lay down on the grass. The day was warm, and he was sleepy. He closed his eyes.

Someone was shaking his shoulder. It was Alice.

“Wake up! Mal, we can’t stay here. Wake up!”

She was whispering, but he heard every word.

“Why can’t we stay here?” he whispered back.

“Come and see what she’s doing.”

He rolled over and rubbed his eyes. Then he sat up.

“What? Where is she?”

“By the fire. Just come quietly. Don’t make a noise.”

Malcolm stood up and found himself still dazed with sleep. She caught him before he fell.

“You all right?” she said.

“Just dizzy. What’s she doing?”

“I can’t… But you gotta come and look.”

She took his hand as they walked the little way up to the fire. It was late afternoon, nearly evening, and for the first time for months, it seemed to Malcolm, he could see a sunset. The sky was clear in the southwest and the rays of the sun struck through the trees, red, warm, and dazzling. As his senses returned, he looked back at the canoe, and it was still there, and the rucksack was still under the seat. Alice tugged his hand: she didn’t want to stop.

The little grassy glade was clearly illuminated, and right in the middle of it sat Diania, bare-shouldered, bare-breasted, with Lyra sucking vigorously at her right nipple. The woman looked up and gave them a smile so strange she might have been inhuman.

“What are you doing?” said Malcolm.

“Why, feeding the child, of course! Giving her good milk. Look at her suck!”

She looked down proudly. The nipple slipped out of Lyra’s mouth, and the woman lifted her up to her shoulder and patted her back. Lyra obligingly belched, and the woman promptly brought her down on the other side, and the child’s little mouth began to work open and shut even before she found the nipple. Then she closed her eyes and went on sucking vigorously.

Malcolm thought that she never sucked the bottle like that. Asta whispered, “This woman is trying to steal her.”

Malcolm tugged at Alice’s hand, and together they left the little glade and went back to the canoe.

“She’s not good!” said Asta passionately.

“No, she en’t,” said Alice’s dæmon.

“She’s not doing her any harm,” said Malcolm, but he knew it wasn’t true as soon as he said it.

“She’s doing that to make her belong to her,” said Alice. “She en’t normal, Mal. She en’t proper human. See them butterflies? Well, which one’s her dæmon?”

“I think they all are.”

“Well, where were they just now?”

“I… They weren’t there.”

“They were. They were all over Pan. You couldn’t hardly see him. She’s doing some magic or summing, I swear. You know the fairies, in stories? Well, they take human children.”

“But not really,” said Malcolm. “Only in stories.”

“But story after story, and songs too, they all say that happens. They steal kids and they’re never seen again. It’s true,” she said.

“Well, normally…,” said Malcolm.

“It’s not normal!” said Asta. “Nothing’s normal. Everything’s changed after the flood.”

Asta was right — nothing was normal anymore. Malcolm tried to remember the fairy tales he knew. Could you bargain with fairies? Did they keep their promises? There was something about names…

“We’ve got to get her back,” he said.

“Let’s just go and ask her,” said Alice. “Then we’ll know right enough.”

“We’ve got to get ready to go straightaway. If we stay here, she’ll just steal Lyra when we’re asleep.”

“Yeah,” said Alice. “But we can’t pack all our stuff without her seeing. It’s impossible.”

“I got an idea,” said Malcolm.

Asta flew off his shoulder and began to search for a stone of the right size, while he took the rucksack out of the canoe.

“What you doing?” said Alice. “What’s that?”

He opened the box and showed her the alethiometer. Her eyes widened.

“Here’s one,” said Asta from a little way off, “but I can’t…”

Alice helped her pull the stone out of the ground and washed it in the water. Meanwhile, Malcolm wrapped the alethiometer in the velvet and the leather and oilskin and stuffed it back into the rucksack. Alice’s eyes gleamed with approval as he put the stone in the box and closed it again.

“I’ll tell you more later,” he said.

Then, alethiometer and box separately in the rucksack over his shoulder, they went back to the glade. The woman was still feeding Lyra, but when they arrived, she took the child away from her breast. Lyra was nearly asleep and utterly replete.

“She won’t have had milk like that before,” said the woman.

“No, and thank you for feeding her,” said Malcolm, “but we’re going to go now.”

“Won’t you stay another night?”

“No. We need to go. It’s been kind of you to let us stay here, but it’s time we went on.”

“Well, if you must, then you must.”

“And we’ll take Ellie now.”

“No, you won’t. She’s mine.”

Malcolm’s heart was beating so hard he could hardly stand up. Alice’s hand found his.

“We’re taking her,” she said, “because she’s ours. We know what we’re doing with her.”

“She’s mine. She’s drunk my milk. Look at how happy she is in my arms! She’s going to stay with me.”

“Why d’you think you can do this?” said Malcolm.

“Because I want to, and I have the power. If she could speak, she’d say she wanted to stay here too.”

“What are you going to do with her?”

“Bring her up to be one of my people, of course.”

“But she isn’t one of your people.”

“She is now she’s drunk my milk. You can’t alter that.”

“Anyway, what people d’you mean?”

“The oldest people there are. The first inhabitants of Albion. She’ll be a princess. She’ll be one of us.”

“Look,” said Malcolm, swinging the rucksack down to the ground, “I’ll give you a treasure to have instead.”

“What sort of treasure?”

“A treasure fit for a queen. You are a queen, en’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Are you a fairy person?”

“Where is this treasure?”

Malcolm brought out the box.

“Let me see,” she said.

“Let me hold Ellie, and then you can look properly,” said Alice.

But Diania held the child closer and gave Alice a look that frightened her.

“You think I’m stupid? Every trick you can think of, I’ve seen it and heard it a thousand times before. How would a pair of children like you be in charge of a treasure? It doesn’t make sense. No one would give you a treasure to look after.”

“Then why are we looking after a baby?” said Alice.

“That’s much easier to explain,” she said.

And that was the moment Malcolm had been waiting for.

“If you can explain it,” he said, “then you can keep her, and the treasure as well.”

The woman looked at him and cuddled Lyra closer, rocking her back and forth.

“If I can explain…”

“If you can explain how me and Sandra came to be looking after Ellie, then she can stay with you.”

The woman was thinking.

“How many chances?” she said. “I want more than one.”

“You can have three.”

“Three. All right. First: she is your sister, and your parents have died. They left her to you to look after.”

“Wrong,” said Malcolm. “Two more chances.”

“All right… Two: you stole her from her crib and you’re taking her to London to sell.”

“That’s wrong too. Only one chance left.”

“Only one… only one… Very well. Let me see. I know! She was in the care of the nuns, and then the flood came, and you and Sandra took her from her crib and put her in your boat, and you were swept away by the flood and there was a man chasing you, and then you killed him, and then she was taken by the Sisters of Holy Obedience, and you rescued her and brought her here.”

“Who did?”

“You did. Richard and Sandra.”

“Brought who here?”

“Ellie, of course!”

“Well, you’re wrong for the third time,” said Malcolm, “because this is Alice, not Sandra, and I’m Malcolm, not Richard, and the baby’s not Ellie, she’s Lyra. You lost.”

And then the woman opened her mouth and uttered a wail so loud and terrible that Malcolm had to cover his ears. She opened her arms, and Lyra fell out and would have hit the ground if Alice hadn’t darted in and caught her. The woman put her hands to her head, tears flooded from her eyes, and she flung herself full-length on the grass, weeping with a passion that touched Malcolm’s heart with fear.

But he gathered up their blankets and their tin of biscuits and held out the wooden box.

“I promised you a treasure,” he said, “and here it is.”

The woman was sobbing bitterly; her whole body was heaving with the gulps that racked her.

“Here,” he said again, and put it down on the grass.

The woman rolled over onto her back and flung her head from side to side.

“My baby!” she cried. “You’re taking my baby away!”

“No, she’s not your baby,” said Malcolm.

“I waited for a thousand years to hold a baby to my breast! And she’s drunk my milk! She’s mine!”

“We’re going away now. Look, I put the treasure down here.”

She sat up, sobbing so much that she could hardly hold her balance. One hand wiped away the tears that flooded her face, and the other felt along the ground till it found the box.

“What is this?”

“I told you. Treasure. We’re going now. Thank you for letting us stay for a bit.”

The woman got to her knees, and then flung herself at Alice’s feet, clinging to her legs. Alice looked alarmed and held Lyra out of her reach.

“He doesn’t understand — he never would — how could a man understand? But you—”

“No,” said Alice.

“Did you look in the glass after I arranged your hair?”

“Yes…”

“And did you like it?”

“Yes. But…”

“I could make you beautiful. I could make your face so lovely that every man would be your slave. I could do that! I have that power!”

Alice’s lips were set tight. Malcolm just looked at her helplessly. Something had told him already that Alice was discontented with her looks. He could read her face now, and he saw a succession of emotions pass over it, some too hard for him to name or to know. Finally it settled into the usual half-sneering contempt.

“You’re a liar,” she said. “Let go of my legs.”

The woman did, sobbing again, but without hope this time. Malcolm felt truly sorry for her. But what could they do?

He quietly walked away. Alice went with him, Lyra silent and asleep in her arms.

He turned around once more and saw the woman sitting up, turning the box over and over in her hands.

“What’s she going to do when she opens it?” Alice whispered.

“She never will.”

“How d’you know?”

“ ’Cause she’s not a mechanic.”

The canoe was safe; he had been anxious about that. He held it steady for Alice, and when she and the child were settled in the prow and the rucksack was stowed under the thwart, he got in himself and took the paddle and propelled La Belle Sauvage away from the enchanted island.