The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage

Twenty-two Resin

In the flood of news that followed the flood of water, news that was full of collapsing buildings, daring rescues, drownings, and disappearances, the information that a religious community near Oxford had been devastated by the deaths of several nuns and the destruction of a medieval gatehouse was a minor item. Many other places and communities had fared even worse. Trying to locate the relevant facts among the immense volume of information was no easy task for the Consistorial Court of Discipline or for Oakley Street; but Oakley Street had a slight advantage, thanks to Hannah Relf, and was able to start searching for a boy and girl in a canoe, with a baby, before the opposition did.

However, the CCD was better resourced. Oakley Street had three vessels — the boat Bud Schlesinger had hired from Tilbury, and two gyptian narrowboats, with Nugent in one and Papadimitriou in the other — whereas the CCD had seven, including four fast powerboats. On the other hand, in the gyptians the Oakley Street boats had well-informed and greatly experienced guides to all the waterways. The CCD had little to rely on but the fear they caused when they asked questions with their customary force.

So the two sides set out in search of La Belle Sauvage and her crew and passengers, the Oakley Street boats from Oxford and the CCD from various points downriver.

But the weather was unhelpful, the flood all-consuming, and the confusion universal. Besides, Lord Nugent soon found himself wondering whether this deluge was altogether natural. It seemed to him and his gyptian companions that the inundation had a stranger source than the weather because it had begun to cause curious illusions and to behave in unexpected ways. At one point, they lost sight of all land altogether and might have been out on the ocean. At another, Nugent was certain that he could see a beast like a crocodile at least as long as the boat shadowing them without ever quite revealing itself; and then one night there were mysterious lights moving below the surface, and the sound of an orchestra playing music such as none of them had heard before.

It wasn’t long before Nugent overheard his gyptian companions using a phrase to describe the phenomena, a phrase that was unknown to him. They called the flood and all its effects part of the secret commonwealth. He asked them what that meant, but they would say no more about it.

So they moved on, and still La Belle Sauvage evaded them.

The flood was running smoothly, like a great river, such as the Amazon or the Nile, which Malcolm had read about — an unimaginable volume of water carried onwards with no snags, no rocks, no shoals, and no harsh wind or tempest to fling the surface into waves.

The sun went down and gave way to the moon. Malcolm and Alice said nothing, and Lyra slept on. Malcolm thought Alice was asleep too, until some time had gone by.

Then she said, “Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Nor me. I’d’ve thought we would be, being as we en’t eaten anything for hours… ”

“Lyra too.”

“Fairy milk,” she said. “I wonder what it’ll do… It’ll make her part fairy.”

“We ate fairy food too.”

“Them eggs. Yeah, I s’pose we did.”

They floated on over the moonlight-scintillating water, as if they were sharing the same dream.

“Mal,” she said.

“What?”

“How’d you know how to fool her like that? I was thinking it’d never work, but as soon as she realized she’d got the names wrong…”

“I remembered Rumpelstiltskin, and I thought names must be important to fairies, so maybe it’d work. But if you hadn’t used those fake names in the first place, we wouldn’t have been able to try it, even.”

They said nothing for another minute, and then Malcolm said, “Alice, are we murderers?”

She thought, and finally said, “He might not be dead. We can’t be sure. We didn’t want to kill him. That wasn’t the plan at all. We were just defending Lyra. En’t that right?”

“That’s what I try and think. But we’re thieves, certainly.”

“ ’Cause of the rucksack? No sense in leaving it there. Someone else would’ve took it. And if we hadn’t had that box… Mal, that was brilliant. I couldn’t never’ve thought of that. You saved us then. And getting Lyra out of that big white priory…”

“I still feel bad.”

“About Bonneville?”

“Yeah.”

“I s’pose… The only thing to do is—”

“Do you feel bad about him?”

“Yeah. But then I think what he done to Sister Katarina. And… I never told you what he said to me, did I?”

“When?”

“That first night I saw him. In Jericho.”

“No…”

“Nor what he did.”

“What did he do?”

“After he bought me fish and chips, he said, ‘Let’s go for a walk on the meadow.’ And I thought, Well, he seems nice… ”

“It was nighttime, wasn’t it? Why did he want to go for a walk?”

“Well, he — he wanted…”

Malcolm suddenly felt foolish. “Oh, right,” he said. “I— Sorry. Yeah.”

“Don’t worry about it. There en’t been many boys wanted that with me. Seems I scare ’em off or summing. But he was a proper man, and I couldn’t resist. We went down Walton Well Road and over the bridge, and then he kissed me and told me I was beautiful. That’s all he did. I felt so many things, I can’t tell you, Mal.”

Something glittered on her cheek, and he saw to his immense surprise that tears were flowing from her eyes. Her voice was a little unsteady. She went on.

“But I’d always thought that if it ever happened, right, if it ever happened to me, then the other person’s dæmon would kind of… be nice to my dæmon too. That’s what happens in stories. That’s what people tell you. But Ben, he…”

Her dæmon, greyhound-formed, put his head under her hand. She played with his ears. Malcolm watched and said nothing.

“That bloody hyena,” she went on, and she was sobbing now. “That bloody violent… It was horrible… It was impossible. She was never going to be nice. He was, Bonneville was, he wanted to go on kissing me, but I couldn’t, not with her growling and biting and… and pissing. She pissed like it was a weapon… ”

“I saw her do that,” said Malcolm.

“So I had to say to him, ‘No, I can’t, no more,’ and then he just laughed and pushed me away. And it could have been… I thought it was going to be the best thing… And in the end it was just scorn and hate. But I was so torn about it, Mal, ’cause first of all he was so gentle and so sweet to me… He said it twice, that I was beautiful. No one ever said that to me and I thought no one ever would.”

She dragged a torn handkerchief from a pocket and mopped her eyes.

“And when that fairy woman done my hair with all them blossoms and that and showed me in the mirror, I thought… Well, maybe. I just thought that.”

“You are pretty,” said Malcolm. “Well, I think so.”

He tried to sound loyal. He felt loyal. But Alice gave a short, bitter laugh and wiped her eyes again, saying nothing.

“When I first saw him in the priory garden,” he said, “I was dead afraid. He just stepped out of the dark and said nothing, and that hyena just stood and pissed on the path. But later that same evening, he came in the Trout and my dad had to serve him. He’d done nothing wrong, Bonneville, nothing that anyone knew about, but the other customers all moved away. They just didn’t like him. As if they knew all about him already. But then I came in, and he was so friendly I thought I must be wrong, I’d mistaken what I saw, and he was really nice. And all the time he was after Lyra… ”

“Sister Katarina didn’t have a chance,” said Alice. “She had no hope at all. He could have got anything he wanted.”

“He nearly did. If the flood hadn’t begun…”

“D’you think he really wanted to kill Lyra?” she said.

“It seemed like it. I can’t imagine what else he could have wanted. Maybe to kidnap her.”

“Maybe…”

“We had to defend her.”

“Course.”

And he knew that they had to — they had no choice. He was perfectly sure about that.

“What was that thing you took out of the box?” Alice asked after a minute or two.

“An alethiometer. I think so, anyway — I never seen one. But there was only six ever made, and they know where five of them are, but one was missing for years. I think maybe this is the missing one.”

“What would he have done with it?”

“Maybe he could read it. But you need years of training… He might have tried to sort of use it for bargaining. He was a spy.”

“How d’you know?”

“The papers in the rucksack. Loads of ’em are in code. I’ll take them to Dr. Relf, if we ever get back… ”

“You think we might not?”

“No. I think of course we’ll get back. This — what’s happening now, on the flood and all — it’s a kind of… I don’t know how to make it clear. It’s a kind of between-time. Like a dream or something.”

“It’s all in our heads? It’s not real?”

“No, not that. It’s as real as anything could be. But it just seems kind of bigger than I thought. There’s more things in it.”

He wanted to tell her about the spangled ring, but knew that if he did, the meaning of it would come apart and be lost. That would have to wait till he was more certain of it himself.

“But we’re getting closer to London and to Lord Asriel,” he said, “and then we’ll go back to Oxford ’cause the flood will have gone down by then. And I’ll see my…”

He was going to say mum and dad, but he couldn’t say the words, because he found a sob choking his throat, and then another, as the images came pouring into his memory: his mother’s kitchen, her calm, sardonic presence, shepherd’s pies and apple crumbles and steam and warmth, and his father laughing and telling stories and reading the football results and listening as Malcolm told him about this theory or that discovery and being proud of him; and before he could help it, he was sobbing as if his heart had been broken, and it was his fate to drift forever on a worldwide flood, further and further away from everything that was home, and they would never know where he was.

Only a day or two before, he would rather have had his right arm torn off than cry in front of Alice. This was like being naked in front of her, but strangely it didn’t matter, because she was weeping herself. The length of the boat and the sleeping Lyra lay between them, or otherwise, he felt, they would have embraced and wept together.

As it was, they each sobbed for a while, and then quietly, gently, the little storms died down. And still the canoe floated on, and still Lyra slept, and still they felt no hunger.

And still they saw nowhere to land and rest. Malcolm thought the flood must have been at its highest now, because although there were little groups of trees above the water here and there, there was no land to be seen — no islands of the sort they’d rested on before, no hills, no housetops, no rocks. They might have been on the Amazon, which was so wide, Malcolm had read, that from the middle you could see neither of the banks.

For the first time a little question came into Malcolm’s mind: Just suppose they did manage to get to London, and that London was still standing after this flood… Would it be hard to find Lord Asriel? Malcolm had said glibly to Alice that it would be easy to find him, but would it really?

He dared not close his eyes, tired as he was, for fear of running La Belle Sauvage over some dangerous obstacle, and yet he didn’t feel inclined to sleep either, because he had passed into a state beyond that, as he was beyond hunger. Maybe sleeping on the fairy’s island meant you never needed to sleep again.

And Lyra slept on, calm and silent and still.

When they had been quiet for an hour, Malcolm began to notice a new kind of movement in the water. There was a definite current in the great wide flood, not all of it, but a stream within it moving with what felt like purpose. And they were caught in it.

To begin with, it was very little faster than the vast body of water around them, and it might have been moving like that for some time without their noticing. When Malcolm woke up to it, though, it had already become like a separate river inside the larger one. He wondered whether he should try to paddle out of it and back onto the vast slow mirror of the main flood, but when he tried it, he found La Belle Sauvage moved her head almost intentionally to follow the faster stream, and when he’d noticed that, he found that it was too strong for him to paddle against anyway. If they had two paddles, and if Alice was awake— But they didn’t. He rested the paddle across his knees and tried to see where they were going.

But Alice was awake.

“What’s going on?” she said.

“There’s a current in the water. It’s all right. It’s taking us in the right direction.”

She sat up, not quite alarmed but curious.

“You sure?” she said.

“I think so.”

The moon had almost set; it was the darkest hour of night. A few stars shone, and their reflections shook and broke up, silver scintillating in the black water. Malcolm looked all around the horizon and saw nothing as clear as an island or a tree or a cliff; but wasn’t that something ahead — a thicker blackness at one point?

“What you looking at?” said Alice.

“Dead ahead… something…”

She turned around, peering back over her shoulder.

“Yeah, there is. Are we going straight for it? Can’t you paddle us out of this current?”

“I’ve tried. It’s too strong.”

“It’s an island.”

“Yeah… Could be… It must be deserted. There’s no lights at all.”

“We’re going to crash into it!”

“The current’ll take us round one side or the other,” he said, but he was far from certain. It looked exactly as if they were heading directly for the island, and as they got closer, Malcolm could hear something that he didn’t like at all. So could Alice.

“That’s a waterfall,” she said. “Can you hear it?”

“Yeah. We’ll have to hang on tight. But it’s a fair way off yet… ”

And it was, but it was getting closer. He tried again to paddle hard to the right, which his muscles liked better than the left; but as hard as he dug and as fast as he worked, it made no difference at all.

There was another thing about the sound of the waterfall: it seemed to be coming from within the body of the island, deep under the earth. He cursed himself for not noticing the current sooner, and not paddling out while it had still been weak enough to let him.

“Keep your head down!” he shouted, because they were making straight for the dark flank of the island, heavy with vegetation — and the stream was going even faster—

And then there was a crashing and a sweeping of low branches and sharp twigs, and he only just threw his arm up across his face in time, and they were in a tunnel, in the utter dark, and all the clamor of rushing water and booming was resounding from the walls close around their heads.

He nearly shouted, “Hold tight to Lyra!” but he knew he didn’t need to tell Alice that. He hooked his left arm through one strap of the rucksack, jammed the paddle tight under his feet, and held on to the gunwales with all his strength—

And the sound of crashing water was almost upon them, and then it was there, and the canoe pitched forward violently and Malcolm was drenched with icy water and shaken hard — Alice cried out in fear — Malcolm yelled, “Hold on! Hold on!”

But then, of all things, came a burst of happy laughter from the child. Lyra was beside herself with glee. Nothing in the world, nothing she had ever seen or heard, had pleased her more than this crazy plunge down a waterfall in the total darkness.

She was in Alice’s arms — but was Alice safe?

Malcolm called again, his boy’s voice high and frightened over the roar of the water: “Alice — Alice — Alice—”

And then, as suddenly as if a light had been switched on, the canoe shot out of the cavern, out of the cataract, out of the dark, and they were bobbing calmly on a gentle stream flowing between green banks by the light of a thousand glowing lanterns.

“Alice!”

She was lying unconscious with her arms around Lyra. Ben lay beside her, completely still.

Malcolm took up the paddle with shaking hands and moved the canoe swiftly towards the left-hand bank, where a smooth lawn came down to a little landing. In a moment he’d made the boat fast, Asta had carried Pan up onto the bank, and he had lifted Lyra from Alice’s grasp and sat her down on the grass, where she chattered with pleasure.

Then he leaned down into the canoe and moved Alice’s head as gently as he could. She had been shaken about so much that her head had crashed into the gunwale, but she was already moving, and there was no blood.

“Oh, Alice! Can you hear me?”

He clumsily embraced her, and then pulled back as she struggled to sit up.

“Where’s Lyra?” she said.

“On the grass. She’s fine.”

“Little bugger. She thought it was fun.”

“She still does.”

With his help, Alice stumbled out of the canoe and onto the landing, Ben following cautiously. Asta was impatient to go and see to Pan, so they moved up to sit on the grass beside Lyra, exhausted, shaking, and looked around.

They found themselves in a great garden, where paths and beds of flowers were set in immense lawns of soft grass, which glowed a brilliant green in the light of the lanterns. Or were they lanterns? There seemed to be large blossoms on every branch of every tree, glowing with soft, warm light; and there were so many trees that light was everywhere on the ground, though above there was nothing but a velvet black that might have been a million miles away, or no more than six feet.

The lawns sloped up to a terrace that ran along the front of a grand house where every window was brightly lit, and where people (too small to see in detail at that distance) moved about, as if at a ball or a reception for important guests. They danced behind the windows; they stood talking on the terrace; they wandered here and there among the fountains and the flowers in the garden. Scraps of a waltz played by a large orchestra drifted down to the travelers on the grass, and scraps of conversation too, from the people who were walking to and fro.

On the other bank of the little river there was… nothing to see at all. A thick fog covered everything beyond the edge of the water. From time to time something would make the fog swirl and seem about to part, but it never did. Whether the opposite bank was like this one — cultivated, beautiful, wealthy — or an empty desert, they couldn’t tell.

So Malcolm and Alice sat amazed on the garden side of the river, pointing to this marvel and that: a glowing fountain, a tree laden with golden pears, a school of rainbow-colored fish that sprang up out of the stream, all moving as one, and turned their heads to look at them with their goggle eyes.

Malcolm stood up, feeling stiff and painful, and Alice said, “Where you going?”

“I’m just going to bail the canoe out. Put things out to dry.”

The fact was that he was dizzy with all this strangeness, and he hoped that by attending to something dull and workmanlike he’d regain a little balance.

He took out all the wet things, the blankets and pillows and Lyra’s sodden clothes, and laid them flat on the planks of the landing. He inspected the tin and found the biscuits shaken to pieces but not damp, and the matches were safe as well. Then he unrolled the coal-silk tarpaulin and laid that out to dry on the grass. The rucksack with its precious cargo, which he’d had over his shoulder, was wet only on the outside; the canvas had been stout enough to protect the folders of paper, and the alethiometer was snug in its oilskin.

He laid everything carefully on the little wooden jetty and made his way back to the others. Alice was playing with Lyra, holding her up so her feet touched the ground, pretending to make her walk. The child was still in high spirits, and blackbird Ben was helping Pantalaimon fly as high as he could, which was not quite high enough to reach the lowest branches of a light-bearing tree.

“What d’you want to do?” said Alice when Malcolm came back.

“Go and see that house. See if anyone there can tell us where Lord Asriel lives. You never know. They all look like lords and ladies.”

“Come on, then. You carry her for a bit.”

“We might find something to eat too. And somewhere to change her.”

Lyra was lighter than the rucksack but awkwarder, because the rucksack’s weight was taken on the shoulders, whereas carrying Lyra, Malcolm soon remembered, involved both arms. Nor was she very fragrant. Alice happily took the rucksack, and Malcolm went along beside her, with Lyra squirming and complaining in his arms.

“No, you can’t go with Alice all the time,” he told her. “You got to put up with me. As soon as we get up to that pretty house on the hill, see, with all those lights, we’ll change your nappy and give you a feed. That’s all you want. Won’t be long now… ”

But it was going to take longer than they thought. The path to the palace led through the gardens, among the little trees with lights, past the beds of roses and lilies and other flowers, past a fountain with blue water and then another with water that sparkled and a third that sprayed up not water but something like eau de cologne — and after all that, the travelers seemed not a yard closer to the building on the hill. They could see every window, every column, every one of the steps leading to the great open door and the brightly lit space inside; they could see people moving about behind the tall windows; they could even hear the sound of music, as if a ball was in progress; but they were just as far from the palace as they were when they started.

“This path must be laid out like a sodding maze,” said Alice.

“Let’s go straight across the grass,” said Malcolm. “If we keep it right in front of us, we can’t go wrong.”

So they tried that. If they came to a path, they crossed it. If they came to a fountain, they went round it and carried straight on. If they came to a flower bed, they went right through it. And still they were no closer.

“Oh, bollocks,” said Alice, dropping the rucksack on the grass. “This is driving me mad.”

“It’s not real,” said Malcolm. “Not normal, anyway.”

“There’s someone coming. Let’s ask them.”

Wandering towards them was a little group of two men and two women. Malcolm put Lyra down on the grass; she began to wail, so Alice wearily picked her up. Malcolm waited on the path for the people to come closer. They were young and elegant, dressed for a ball, the women in long gowns that left their arms and shoulders bare, the men in black-and-white evening dress, and they each carried a glass. They were laughing and talking in that light, happy way that Malcolm had seen lovers doing, and their bird dæmons fluttered around or settled on their shoulders.

“Excuse me,” he said as they approached, “but…”

They ignored him and walked closer. Malcolm stepped right in front of them.

“Sorry to bother you, but d’you know how we can—”

They took no notice whatsoever. It was as if he didn’t exist, except as an obstacle in the path. Two went on one side of him, laughing and chatting, and two went on the other, hand in hand, murmuring into each other’s ears. Asta became a bird and flew up to talk with their dæmons.

“They won’t listen! They don’t seem as if they can see us at all!” she said.

“Excuse me! Hello!” Malcolm said more loudly, and ran around in front of them again. “We need to know how to get to the house up there, whatever it is. Can you…”

And again they walked around him, taking no notice. It was exactly as if he was invisible, inaudible, impalpable. He picked up a little stone from the path and threw it, and it hit one of the men on the back of the head, but it might as well have been a molecule of air, for all the notice he took.

Malcolm looked back at Alice and spread his hands. She was scowling.

“Rude sods,” she said.

Lyra was crying properly now. Malcolm said, “I’ll light a fire. Then we can warm some water for her, at least.”

“Where’s the canoe? Can we find our way back to it, or is that going to play tricks with us as well?”

“It’s just there — look,” he said, pointing back fifty yards or so. “All that walking, and we hardly got anywhere. Maybe it’s magic. It doesn’t make any bloody sense anyway.”

He found that he could return to the canoe in just a few steps. Somehow that wasn’t surprising. He gathered everything they needed for the child and made his way back to Alice. He plucked some twigs from the nearest tree and broke off a few short branches, shredding the twigs and placing them as well as he could before striking a match. The fire caught at once. He snapped the branches into shorter pieces, and it was easy, as if they had been designed to break to exactly the right length, and to be dry enough to burn too, just off the tree.

“It doesn’t seem to mind us making a fire. It’s only going to the house it doesn’t want us doing. I’ll get some water.”

The fountain he walked to was closer than he thought, the water fresh and clean as he filled the saucepan. They’d taken some bottles of water from the pharmacy — it seemed very long ago now — and he refilled those as well.

“Everything’s in favor of us, except the house and the people,” said Asta.

Several people had walked past the fire, and not one had stopped to ask about it or tell them off. Malcolm had built it on the grass only a few feet from one of the main paths, but, like him, it seemed to be invisible. More young lovers, older men and women too, grave gray-haired statesman-looking figures, grandmotherly women in old-fashioned gowns, middle-aged people full of power and responsibility — all kinds of guests, and not only guests: waiters with trays of fresh glasses of wine or plates of canapés moved here and there among them. Malcolm lifted one of the plates away as the waiter went past and took it to Alice.

“I’m going to change her first,” she said, her mouth full of a smoked-salmon sandwich. “She’ll be more comfortable then. I’ll feed her after.”

“D’you need more water? That’ll be too hot, what’s in the pan now.”

But it was exactly right to wash her with. Alice opened Lyra’s garments, mopped her clean, dried her easily in the warm air. Then she went to look for somewhere to put the dirty nappy while Malcolm played with the child and fed her bits of smoked salmon. Lyra spat them out, and when Malcolm laughed at her, she frowned and clamped her mouth shut.

When Alice came back, she said, “Have you seen any rubbish bins here?”

“No.”

“Nor’ve I. But when I wanted one, there it was.”

It was just one more puzzle. The saucepan had boiled and the water had cooled enough for Lyra’s bottle, so Alice filled it and started to feed her. Malcolm wandered about the grass, looking at the little trees with glowing blossoms and listening to the birds that flew and sang in the branches as prettily as nightingales.

Asta flew up to join them, and soon came back.

“Just like you and the people on the path!” she said. “They didn’t seem to see me!”

“Were they young birds or grown-up ones?”

“Grown-up ones, I think. Why?”

“Well, everyone we’ve seen is grown up.”

“But it’s a sort of grand evening cocktail party kind of thing, or a ball, something like that. There wouldn’t be any kids around anyway.”

“Still,” said Malcolm.

They went back to Alice.

“Here, you do it,” she said.

He took Lyra, who had no time to complain before he plugged the bottle in again. Alice stretched out full-length on the grass. Ben and Asta lay down too, both snakes, each one trying to be longer.

“He never used to fool around,” said Alice quietly, meaning her dæmon.

“Asta fools around all the time.”

“Yeah. I wish…” Her voice faltered.

“What?” he said after a few moments.

She looked at Ben and, seeing him fully occupied with Asta, said quietly, “I wish I knew when he’d stop changing and settle.”

“What d’you think happens when they stop changing?”

“What d’you mean?”

“I mean, will they stop being able to do it suddenly one day, or will they just do it less and less?”

“Dunno. My mum always said, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’ll just happen.’ ”

“What would you like him to settle as?”

“Summing poisonous,” she said decisively.

He nodded. More people came past, all kinds of people, and among them were faces he thought he remembered, but they might have been customers at the Trout, or people he’d seen in dreams. They might even have been friends from school who’d grown up and were now middle-aged, which would account for the fact that they looked familiar but strange. And there was a young man who looked so much like Mr. Taphouse, only fifty years younger, that Malcolm almost jumped up and greeted him.

Alice was lying on her side watching them all go by.

“Can you see people you know?” he said.

“Yeah. I thought I was asleep.”

“Are the young ones older and the old ones younger?”

“Yeah. And some of them are dead.”

“Dead?”

“I just seen my gran.”

“D’you think we’re dead?”

Alice was silent for a few moments, and then she said, “I hope not.”

“Me too. I wonder what they’re all doing here. And who the other people are, the ones we don’t know.”

“Maybe they’re people we will know.”

“Or else… maybe it’s the world where that fairy lady came from. Maybe these people are all like her. It feels a bit like that.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It does. That’s what it is. Except they can’t see us, like she could… ”

“But we were above the ground then, in our world, so we’d’ve been more solid, like. Down here we’re probably invisible to them.”

“Yeah. That’s probably it. But we better be careful all the same.”

She yawned and rolled over onto her back.

Not to be left out, Lyra yawned as well. Pantalaimon tried to be a snake like the other two, but gave up after half a minute and became a mouse instead, and cuddled close against Lyra’s neck. She was asleep in a moment, and once Ben had taken his greyhound shape and stretched out against Alice’s side, Alice was too.

Without knowing why he was doing it, Malcolm knelt down beside the sleeping Alice and looked at her face. He knew it well, but he’d never looked at her closely before because she would have shoved him away; he felt a little guilty doing it now, while she was unconscious.

But he was so curious. The little frown that lived between her eyebrows had vanished; it was a softer face altogether. Her mouth was relaxed, and her whole expression was complex and subtle. There was a sort of kindness in it, and a sort of lazy enjoyment — those were the words he found to describe it. A hint of a mocking smile lay in the flesh around her eyes. Her lips, narrow and compressed when she was awake, were looser and fuller in sleep, and almost smiling, like her sleeping eyes. Her skin too — or what did ladies call it? her complexion? — was fine and silky, and in her cheeks was a faint flush, as if she was hot, or as if she was blushing at a dream.

It was too close. He felt he was doing wrong. He sat up and looked away. Lyra stirred and murmured, and he stroked her forehead and found it hot, like Alice’s face. He wished he could stroke Alice’s cheeks, but that image was too troubling altogether. He stood up and walked the little way down to the landing, where La Belle Sauvage bobbed gently on the water.

He didn’t feel in the least bit sleepy, and his mind was still dwelling helplessly on the thought of Alice’s face, and what it might be like to stroke it or kiss it. He pushed that idea aside and tried to think of something else.

So he knelt down to look at the canoe, and there he had a shock because there was an inch of water in the bottom, and he knew he had bailed it out.

He untied the painter and hauled La Belle Sauvage up onto the grass and then tipped her over to let the water out. And just as he’d feared, there was a crack in the hull.

“When we came through that cataract,” said Asta.

“Must’ve hit a rock. Bugger.”

He knelt on the grass and looked at it closely. One of the cedar planks that formed the skin of the canoe had split, and the paint around it was scraped. The split didn’t look very serious, but Malcolm knew that the skin of the canoe flexed a little when it was moving, and no doubt it would go on letting in water till he mended it.

“What do we need?” said Asta, cat-shaped.

“Another plank, best of all. Or some canvas and glue. But we haven’t got any of them either.”

“The rucksack’s made of canvas.”

“Yeah. It is. I suppose I could cut a bit off the flap… ”

“And look over there,” she said.

She was pointing to a great cedar, one of the few coniferous trees among the rest. Partway up the trunk, a branch had broken off, and the wound was leaking golden resin.

“That’ll do,” he said. “Let’s cut a bit of canvas.”

The flap of the rucksack was quite long and could easily spare a patch of the right size. Malcolm wondered whether the canvas was really necessary, because the actual waterproofing would be done by the resin, but then he thought of Alice and Lyra as the water slowly came in, and of himself trying more and more desperately to find somewhere to land… He should repair it as well as he could, as well as Mr. Taphouse would. He opened his knife and began to saw at the thick, stiff fabric, cutting out a piece a bit longer than the split in the hull. It was hard work.

“I never thought canvas was so tough,” he said. “I should have sharpened the knife.”

Asta, now bird-formed, had been sitting on a branch as high as she could get and keeping watch all around. She flew down to his shoulder.

“Let’s not be too long,” she said quietly.

“Is something wrong?”

“There’s something I can’t see. Not wrong, exactly, but… Just get the resin and we’ll go.”

Malcolm cut through the last strands of the canvas and set off. Asta darted ahead a little way, becoming a hawk and getting to the tree just before he did. The resin was too high for him to reach without climbing, but he was happy to do that; the massive wide branches, sweeping low over the grass, made it feel totally secure.

He pressed the little piece of canvas into the resin and let it soak up as much as it could. Then he looked out of the tree and across the great lawns and flower beds as far as the terrace and the house beyond it: gracious and comfortable, splendid and generous. He thought that one day he’d come here by right, and be made welcome, and stroll among these gardens with happy companions and feel at ease with life and death.

Then he looked the other way, across the little river. And he was high enough in the tree to see over the top of the fog bank, which only extended upwards for a few feet, as he now discovered; and beyond it he saw a desolation, a wilderness of broken buildings, burned houses, heaps of rubble, crude shanties made of shattered plywood and tar paper, coils of rusty barbed wire, puddles of filthy water whose surfaces gleamed with the toxic shimmer of chemical waste, where children with sores on their arms and legs were throwing stones at a dog tied to a post.

He cried out before he could help it. But so did Asta, and she glided to his shoulder and said, “Bonneville! It’s him! On the terrace—”

He turned to look. It was too far to see distinctly, but there was a stir, and people were running towards someone in a chair — a carriage of some kind — a wheelchair—

“What are they doing?” he said.

He was aware of her attention, of the straightness and speed of it like a lance from her brilliant eyes. He tugged the canvas away from the resin with trembling fingers.

“They’re looking this way — they’re pointing at where Alice is, at the canoe — they’re moving towards the steps—”

Now he could see clearly, and at the center of this activity was Gerard Bonneville. He was directing everyone. They began to carry his wheelchair down the steps of the terrace.

“Take this,” Malcolm said, and held out the canvas. It was abominably sticky. Asta pulled it away in her beak and hovered close to the tree as Malcolm clambered down. Once on the ground, he ran to the canoe as fast as he could, and Asta swooped down and laid the resin-soaked canvas where he directed her.

“Will this do by itself?” she said.

“I’ll put some tacks in it. It won’t be easy — my fingers are too sticky.”

Alice had heard them and opened her eyes sleepily.

“What you doing?” she said.

“Mending a hole. Then we got to get away quick. Bonneville’s up there by the house. Here, can you open the toolbox for me? And hand me a tack out of the smokeleaf tin in there?”

She scrambled up to do it. He took it stickily and touched the point of the little nail to a corner of the canvas. One tap of the hammer and it stayed in place while he hit it home, and so did the other five he put in.

“Right, let’s turn her over,” he said, and while he did that, Alice stood on tiptoe to look up at the activity on the terrace, and Malcolm found himself gazing at her slim, tense legs, her slender waist, the slight swell of her hips. He looked away with a silent groan in his chest. What had happened to him? But there was no time to think about that. He tore his mind away and slid the boat down and into the water. Asta was still in her hawk shape, hovering as high above him as she could get and staring fixedly at the terrace.

“What are they doing now?” Malcolm said as Alice threw the blankets into the canoe. Lyra was awake and interested, and Pan was buzzing around her head as a bee.

“They’re moving him towards the steps,” said Asta in the air above. “I can’t see exactly… There’s a big crowd around him now, and more people joining them… ”

“What we going to do?” said Alice, settling herself into the bow with Lyra on her lap.

“Only thing we can,” said Malcolm. “Can’t go up a waterfall. Have to see what happens at the other end… ”

He pushed away from the landing and watched the resin-mended patch with feverish curiosity.

La Belle Sauvage was moving swiftly over the water, and Malcolm dug the paddle in deep and hard as Asta glided to the gunwale. Alice’s Ben was a bird as well, and he too flew down to the safety of her shoulder.

“Shush, honey,” Alice said, because Lyra was starting to complain. “Soon be away. Shush now.”

They were going past a patch of lawn where there were no trees, and Malcolm felt horribly exposed. There was nothing between them and the house, and as he glanced up, he could see the crowd of people moving towards them, with something in the center of them, a small carriage, and people pointing at them, and a distant laugh: “Haa! Haa! Haaa! Haa-haaa!”

“Oh, God,” Alice murmured.

“Nearly there,” said Malcolm, because they had come to a group of trees that cut off their view of the house, and the garden was behind them. Vegetation clustered thickly on both banks, and the light that came from the tree lanterns was fading quickly the further away they got, so that almost everything ahead was dark.

Almost everything. But there was enough light still in the air for Malcolm to see ahead of them a great pair of iron-bound doors, heavy with age and draped in moss and weeds, emerging from the stream like the gates of a lock, completely shutting off their escape. There was no way out by water.