The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage

Twenty-four The Mausoleum

They were tired, they were hungry, they were cold, they were filthy, and they were followed everywhere by a shadow. Heavy clouds filled the sky again. Over the gray waste of water Malcolm paddled all the next day while Lyra cried fretfully and Alice lay indifferently in the bow. Whenever they saw a hilltop or a roof rising above the water, Malcolm stopped, tied up, built a fire, and one or the other of them attended to Lyra. Sometimes Malcolm didn’t know whether it was him doing it or it was Alice.

And everywhere they went, something went with them, behind, just beyond the edge of eyesight, something that flickered and vanished and then appeared again when they looked at something else. They both saw it. It was the only thing they talked about, and neither could see it fully.

“If it was night,” said Malcolm, “it’d be a night-ghast.”

“Well, it en’t. Night, I mean.”

“I hope it’s gone by the time it gets dark.”

“Shut up. I didn’t want to think about that. Thanks for nothing.”

She sounded like the old Alice, the first Alice, scornful and bitter. Malcolm had hoped that that Alice had gone for good, but there she was again, sprawling and scowling and sneering; and he couldn’t look at her now anyway without an electric tension in his body that he only part understood, and part delighted in, and part feared. And he couldn’t talk to Asta about it because they were all so close together in the canoe; and in any case, he felt that his dæmon was in thrall to it too, whatever it was, this bewitchment.

The landscape was changing as they got further down the great flood towards London. Scenes of devastation began to emerge: the shells of houses, their roofs torn off, furniture and clothing strewn all around or caught in bushes and trees; and the trees themselves, stripped of their branches and sometimes of their bark, standing stark and dead under the gray sky; an oratory, its tower lying full-length on the sodden ground, with enormous bronze bells scattered beside it, their mouths full of mud and leaves.

And all the time, never quite forgotten, never fully seen, the shadow.

Malcolm tried to catch it by turning suddenly to the left or to the right, but all he saw was the swift movement that showed where it had been a moment before. Asta watched behind, but she had just the same experience: whenever she looked, it had just moved away.

“Wouldn’t matter if it felt friendly,” Malcolm muttered to her.

But it didn’t. It felt as if it was hunting them.

Seated as they were, with Alice in the bow looking back over the stern, she was more aware of things behind them than Malcolm was, and two or three times during the day she’d seen something else to worry about.

“Is that them?” she said. “The CCD? Is that their boat?”

Malcolm tried to turn and look, but he was so stiff from paddling that it hurt to twist his body, and besides, the heavy gray of the sky and the dark gray of the wind-whipped water made it hard to see anything. Once he thought he could distinguish the CCD colors of navy blue and ocher, and Asta became a wolf cub and uttered an involuntary little howl, but the boat, if that was what it was, soon faded into the murky haze.

Late in the afternoon the clouds darkened, and they heard a rumble of thunder. It was going to rain.

“We’d better stop next place we see,” said Malcolm. “We’ll put the tarpaulin up.”

“Yeah,” said Alice wearily. And then, alarmed: “Look. It’s them again.”

This time when Malcolm turned round, he saw the beam of a searchlight, brilliant against the gloomy sky, sweeping from left to right.

“They just switched it on,” Alice said. “They’ll see us any minute now. They’re coming fast.”

Malcolm dug the paddle into the water with limbs that were trembling with fatigue. There was no point in trying to outpace the CCD boat; they’d have to hide, and the only hiding place in sight was a wooded hill with an overgrown grassy space just above the waterline. Malcolm made for it as quickly as he could. It was getting darker rapidly, and the first big drops of rain splashed onto his head and hands.

“Not here,” said Alice. “I hate this place. I dunno what it is, but it’s horrible.”

“There’s nowhere else!”

“No. I know. But it’s horrible.”

Malcolm brought the canoe up onto the lank and sodden grass under a yew tree, tied the painter urgently to the nearest branch, and hastened to fix the hoops into their brackets. Lyra, feeling raindrops on her face, woke up and protested, but Alice ignored her, pulling the coal silk over the hoops and fastening it as Malcolm instructed her. The sound of the engine grew louder and closer.

They got the canopy fixed and sat still, Alice holding Lyra tight and whispering to keep her quiet, Malcolm hardly daring to breathe. The searchlight shone through the thin coal silk, illuminating every corner of their little enclosed world, and Malcolm imagined the canoe from the outside, hoping passionately that the regular green shape wouldn’t show up in the mass of irregular shadows. Lyra looked around solemnly, and their three dæmons clung together on the thwart. The searchlight shone directly at them for seconds that felt like minutes, but then it swung away and the engine noise changed as the steersman opened the throttle and moved off along the flood. Malcolm could hardly hear it over the rain hammering on the canopy.

Alice opened her eyes and breathed out.

“I wish we’d stopped somewhere else,” she said. “You know what this place is?”

“What?”

“It’s a graveyard. It’s got one of them little houses where they bury people.”

“A mausoleum,” said Malcolm, who had seen the word but never heard it, and pronounced it to rhyme with linoleum.

“Is that what it is? Well, I don’t like it.”

“Me neither. But there wasn’t anywhere else. We’ll just have to keep tight in the canoe and go as soon as we can.”

“How are we going to feed her, then?” said Alice. “Or wash her? You gonna build a fire in the boat?”

“We’ll have to wash her in cold water and—”

“Don’t be stupid. We can’t do that. She’s got to have a hot bottle anyway.”

“What’s the matter? Why are you angry?”

“Everything. What d’you think?”

He shrugged. There was nothing he could do about everything. He didn’t want to argue. He wanted the searchlight to go away and never come back. He wanted to talk about the garden under the ground, and wonder with her what it meant; he wanted to tell her what he’d seen beyond the fog bank. He wanted to tell her about the witch and the wild dogs, and wonder what they meant. He wanted to talk about the shadow they felt was following them, and agree that it was nothing and laugh about it. He wanted her to admire him for mending the crack in the hull. He wanted her to call him Mal. He wanted Lyra to feel warm and clean and happy and well fed. But none of that was going to happen.

The rain beat on the coal silk with more force every minute. It was so loud that he didn’t even notice Lyra crying until Alice leaned forward and picked her up. Even when she was cross with him, she was always patient with Lyra, he thought.

Maybe there’d be some dry wood under the trees. If he went out now, he could get it inside the boat before it got too wet. Maybe the rain would stop soon.

Presently there came another crack of thunder, but further away, and shortly after that the rain did stop coming down so hard; and then it eased off until the only drops falling on the tarpaulin were what dripped down from the branches above.

Malcolm lifted the edge of the canopy. Everything around was still dripping, and the air was as wet as a sodden sponge, full of the smells of dank vegetation, of rot, of earth crawling with worms. Nothing but earth and water and air, and all he wanted was fire.

“I’m going to look for some wood,” he said.

“Don’t go too far!” she said, alarmed at once.

“No. But we’ve got to have some if we want a fire.”

“Just don’t go out of sight, all right? You got the torch?”

“Yes. The battery’s nearly dead, though. I can’t keep it on all the time.”

The moon was still large and the clouds thin as they raced away after the storm, so there was some light from the sky; but under the yew trees it was horribly dark. Malcolm stumbled more than once on gravestones that had half sunk into the soil or were simply hidden in the long grass, and all the time kept an eye on that little building of stone, where bodies were laid to rot without being buried.

And everything was saturated, whether with rain or dew or the remains of the flood; everything he touched was heavy and soaked and rotten. His heart was just like that. He would never manage to light any of it.

But behind the mausoleum, in the dim light of the torch, he found a stack of old fence posts. They were soaking wet, but when he broke one over his knee — with great effort — he found that, inside, it was dry. He could shave some tinder off it, and there were always Bonneville’s notes, five volumes of them.

“Don’t think of doing that,” whispered Asta. She was a lemur perching on his shoulder, her eyes wide.

“They’d burn well.”

But he knew he wouldn’t do that, not even if they were desperate.

He gathered up half a dozen of the fence posts and brought them around to the front of the mausoleum, where a thought struck him. He shone the torch at the door; it was closed with a padlock.

“What d’you think?” he whispered to Asta. “Dry wood…”

“They can’t hurt us if they’re dead,” she whispered back.

The padlock didn’t look very strong, and it was easy to thrust the end of a fence post behind it and pull down hard. The lock snapped and fell away. One push, and the door was open.

Malcolm looked in cautiously. The air smelled of age and dry rot and damp, but of nothing worse than that. In the dimly flickering light, they saw rows of shelves, with coffins neatly placed on them, and the wood of the coffins was perfectly dry, as he found when he touched one.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the occupant of the first, “but I need your coffin. They’ll give you another one, don’t worry.”

The lid was screwed down, but the screws were brass, so they hadn’t rusted tight, and he had his knife with him. Only a few minutes later he had the lid off and split into long pieces. The skeleton inside didn’t worry him, he found, partly because he was expecting it, and anyway he’d seen worse than that. It must have been a woman, he thought, because around the neck — or where the flesh of the neck had been long ago — was a golden necklace, and there were gold rings on two of the bony fingers.

Malcolm thought about it, and then lifted them all gently away and tucked them down beneath the frail velvet the skeleton was lying on.

“To keep ’em safe,” he whispered. “Sorry about your lid, ma’am, truly sorry, but we need it bad.”

He set the pieces of the lid against the stone shelf and splintered them with a series of kicks. The coffin’s wood was as dry as its occupant, and perfect for burning.

He closed the mausoleum and hung the broken padlock in place so that it looked, at a quick glance, as if nothing had happened. He turned back towards the canoe, signaling once with the torch to let Alice know he was there, and then he saw the shadow.

It was formed like a man — he only saw it for a second and then it darted away — but he knew it at once: it wasn’t a shadow at all. It was Bonneville. It had been crouching beside the boat. There was no one else it could have been. The shock was horrible, and he instantly felt even more vulnerable, not knowing where it had gone.

“Did you see—” he whispered.

“Yes!”

He hurried across the gravestone-strewn grass, falling twice, bashing his knee, with Asta darting beside him as a cat, stopping to help, encouraging, watching all around.

Alice had been singing a nursery rhyme. She heard his panting, stumbling approach and stopped, and called, “Mal?”

“Yeah — it’s me—”

He played the feeble torch beam on the canopy and then shone it all around on the dark yews, the dripping branches, the sodden ground.

And of course saw no shadow, no Bonneville.

“Did you find some wood?” said Alice from the canoe.

“Yeah. A bit. Maybe enough.”

His voice was shaking, but he could do nothing about it.

“What’s the matter?” she said, lifting the canopy. “You see summing?”

She was instantly terrified. She knew quite well what he’d seen, and he knew it.

“No. It was just a mistake,” he said.

He looked around again, but it took courage: the shadow — Bonneville — could have been hiding among the darkness under any of the trees, behind any of the four columns at the entrance to the mausoleum, or, in the form of something small, behind any of the gravestones. And where was the hyena dæmon? But no, he must be imagining it. They couldn’t just paddle away, because this was the only land they’d seen, and it was dark, and out there on the water was the CCD boat, and Lyra needed food and warmth now. Malcolm breathed deeply and tried to stop himself shaking.

“I’ll make a fire here,” he said.

With the knife, he split some tinder from one of the splintered planks and set a fire on the grass. His hands were only just strong enough to do the work. But it caught at once, and soon one of their last bottles of water was heating in the little saucepan.

He tried not to look up from the flames. The little flicker of the fire made the surrounding darkness even deeper, and made every shadow move.

Lyra was crying steadily, a quiet lament of unhappiness. When Alice undressed her, she just lay there without even trying to move. Asta and Ben tried to comfort Pantalaimon, but he wriggled free; he wanted to be with the little pale form that could only weep and weep.

The coffin lid burned well, and there was enough of it to warm Lyra’s milk, but only just. As soon as Alice had her dressed and feeding, the last of the wood flared up in a single yellow flame and went out, and Malcolm kicked the ashes away and gladly got in the canoe. His arms ached, his back ached, his heart ached; the thought of setting off again over the unforgiving water was horrible, even if there’d been no CCD boat searching for them. Body, mind, and dæmon longed for the oblivion of sleep.

“Is there any of that candle left?” said Alice.

“A bit, I think.”

He rummaged among the jumble of stuff they’d taken from the pharmacy so long ago, and found a piece of candle about as long as his thumb. He lit it, let a little molten wax gather around the wick, and tilted it out onto the thwart and set the candle upright in it.

He could still do simple, everyday things, then. He hadn’t lost the power to live from second to second and to take pleasure, even, in the warm yellow light that filled the canoe.

Lyra twisted in Alice’s arms and looked at the candle. Her thumb found her mouth and she gazed solemnly at the little yellow flame.

“What did you see?” Alice whispered.

“Nothing.”

“It was him, wasn’t it?”

“It might have… No. It just looked like him for a second.”

“Then what?”

“Then nothing. It wasn’t there. There was nothing there.”

“We should’ve made sure of him. Back there, when he nearly got us. We should’ve done him in proper.”

“When someone dies…,” he said.

“What?”

“What happens to their dæmon?”

“They just vanish.”

“Don’t talk about this!” said Asta, and Alice’s terrier dæmon, Ben, said, “Yeah, don’t say those things.”

“Then when there’s a ghost, or a night-ghast,” Malcolm said, ignoring them, “is that the dead person’s dæmon?”

“I dunno. And could someone’s body move around, and do things, if their dæmon was dead?”

“You never get a person without a dæmon. It’s impossible because—”

“Shut up!” said Ben.

“—because it hurts too much when you try and pull apart.”

“But I’ve heard that in some places there can be people without dæmons. Maybe they’re just dead bodies walking around. But maybe—”

“Don’t! Stop talking about that!” said Asta, and became a terrier, like Ben, and they growled together. But her voice had been terrified.

Then Lyra complained. Alice turned back to her.

“Listen, darling, your milk’s all gone. Special treat now, all right? I got a bag full of canopies.”

She reached into the bag and pulled out a bit of toast that had once had a quail’s egg on it.

“You eat the toast and I’ll find the little egg. Little tiny egg. You’ll like that.”

Lyra took the toast willingly enough and brought it to her mouth.

“You get them from the garden?” said Malcolm stupidly.

“I nicked a whole lot of stuff from the waiters that went past. They never noticed. There’s enough for us an’ all. Here y’are.”

She leaned forward, holding out something the size of Lyra’s palm, brown and squashed. It turned out to be a miniature spicy fish cake.

“I suppose,” he said with his mouth full, “if she eats enough toast and stuff, it won’t matter so much if we run out of—”

He heard something from outside. But it wasn’t “something”; it wasn’t just an abstract noise, a sound with no meaning. It was the word Alice, and it was spoken softly in the voice of Bonneville.

She froze. He couldn’t help looking at her, just as children in a classroom can’t help looking at the pupil whose name is spoken by a teacher in the tone that means trouble and punishment. He looked for a reaction, instinctively, and at once regretted it. She was terrified. Her face lost all its color, her eyes widened, she bit her lip. And he had stared at her like the child who was safe. He hated himself.

“You don’t have to—” he whispered.

“Shut up! Keep quiet!”

They both listened, sitting like statues, straining to hear. Lyra went on sucking and munching at her toast, unaware of anything wrong.

And there was no voice, just the wind passing through the yew trees, just the occasional lapping of water against the hull.

Something strange was happening to the candle. Its flame was burning, it was giving out light, but it had a shadow. The searchlight was back.

Alice gasped and put her hand over her mouth, then immediately took it away and held it close to Lyra to stifle any cry from her. Malcolm saw it all clearly in the cold glare through the canopy, and he could hear the engine noise too. After a few moments the full beam swung away from them, but there was still light nearby, as if the searchers were looking more slowly along the edge, where the water met the graveyard.

“Here,” whispered Alice, “take Lyra, because I’m going to faint.”

Very carefully, avoiding the candle, she passed the child to him. Lyra came placidly enough, happy with her toast. Alice was pale, but she didn’t look like fainting; he thought if she really felt faint, she wouldn’t be able to say so; she’d just sink down into oblivion.

Malcolm watched her closely. It wasn’t only the light that had frightened her; there’d been that whisper of her name in Bonneville’s voice. She looked at the very edge of terror. She sat back and suddenly turned to her left, the side closer to the bank. She was listening. Malcolm could hear a whisper. Her eyes grew wider, more full of horror, or loathing, and she didn’t seem to be aware of him or of Lyra anymore, just of that insistent whisper through the coal silk at her side.

“Alice—” he began again, desperate to help.

“Shut up!”

She put her hands over her ears. Ben, terrier-formed, was standing with his back legs on her lap, his forepaws on the gunwale, intent like her on the whisper, which Malcolm could hear now, though he couldn’t distinguish the words.

Expressions flitted over Alice’s face like the shadows of swift clouds on an April morning; but these expressions were all fear, or disgust, or horror, and looking at her, Malcolm felt he would never see sunlight on a spring morning again, so deep was the anguish and loathing the girl was feeling.

Then the tarpaulin rippled next to her, and Ben jumped back, and then a slit appeared in the coal-silk canopy as a knifepoint moved down it, and then a man’s hand reached through and seized Alice by the throat.

Alice tried to scream, but the grip on her throat choked her voice, and then the hand moved down her front, to her lap, searching for something else, feeling left and right — trying to find Lyra. Alice was moaning, struggling to get away from the loathsome touch, and Ben, terrier-formed, seized the man’s wrist in his teeth, despite the disgust it must have caused him; and then, finding no Lyra, Bonneville’s hand grabbed the little dæmon and snatched him out through the slit in the canopy, out into the dark, away from Alice.

“Ben! BEN!” Alice cried, and stumbled up and fell across the thwart and half out of the canoe and then scrambled up and was gone after them. Malcolm reached for her, meaning to hold her back, but she was gone before he could touch her. The hyena dæmon laughed, just a couple of feet from Malcolm’s ears, splitting the night with her “Haa! Haaaa! Haaa!” And there was an additional note in the laughter, like a scream of agony.

Lyra, terrified by the sound, began to cry, and Malcolm rocked her closely while he called, “Alice! Alice!”

Asta, cat-formed, put her paws on the gunwale and tried to look out from under the canopy, but Malcolm knew she could see nothing. Pantalaimon was fluttering here and there, a moth, landing on Lyra’s hand for a moment and flying away again, blundering close to the candle flame and fleeing in fear, and finally settling on the child’s damp hair.

From the direction of the mausoleum there came a high, hopeless cry, not a scream, just a desperate wail of protest. Malcolm’s heart clenched.

Then there was just the sound of the baby crying in his arms, and the water lapping, and a soft, keening sob from Asta, a puppy, pressing herself against his side.

I’m not old enough for this! Malcolm thought, almost aloud.

He cuddled the child close and pulled the blanket up around her before setting her down among the cushions. Guilt and rage and fear fought one another in his mind. He thought he’d never been more awake in all his life; he thought he’d never sleep again; he thought this was the worst night he’d ever known.

His head was full of thunder. He thought his skull would crack open.

“Asta—” he gasped. “I’ve got to go to Alice — but Lyra — can’t leave her—”

“Go!” she said. “Yes, go! I’ll stay— I won’t leave her—”

“It’ll hurt so much—”

“But we have to— I’ll guard Lyra— I won’t move — promise… ”

His eyes were streaming with hot tears. He kissed Lyra over and over again, and then held puppy Asta to his heart, to his face, to his lips. He set her down next to the child, and she became a leopard cub, so beautiful he sobbed with love.

And he stood up so carefully, so gently, that the canoe didn’t rock or move an inch, and he took the paddle and climbed out.

Immediately the deep pain of separation began, and he heard a stifled moan from the canoe behind him. It was like struggling to climb up a steep slope with his lungs clamoring for air and his heart hammering at his ribs, but it was worse: because inside the pain and coloring it, deepening it, poisoning it, there was the horrible guilt of hurting his dearest Asta so much. She was shaking with love and pain, and she was so brave — her eyes were watching him with such devotion as he slowly, unforgivably wrenched his body away from her, as if he was leaving her behind forever. But he had to. He forced himself through the pain, which he knew was tearing at her leopard form without mercy; he dragged himself away from the little boat and up the slope to the dark mausoleum, because something was doing something to Alice and she was crying in wild protest.

And the hyena dæmon, both her front legs gone, was half standing, half lying on the grass, with Ben, the terrier, in her foul jaws. Ben writhed and kicked and bit and howled, and the monstrous jaws and teeth of Bonneville’s dæmon were closing, slowly, voluptuously, ecstatically, on his little form.

Then the moon came out. There was Bonneville in clear sight, his hands gripping Alice’s wrists, holding her down on the steps. The cold light was reflected in the hyena’s eyes, and in Bonneville’s too, and from the tears on Alice’s cheeks. It was the worst thing Malcolm had ever seen, and he tore himself through the pain and lurched and stumbled up the slippery grass and raised the paddle and brought it down on the man’s back, but feebly, too feebly.

Bonneville twisted, saw Malcolm, and laughed out loud. Alice cried and tried to force the man away, but he slammed her down hard, and she screamed. Malcolm tried to hit him again. The moon shone brilliantly on the sodden grass, the mossy gravestones, the crumbling mausoleum, the figures in their hideous embrace between the columns.

Malcolm felt something grow inside him that he couldn’t argue with or control, and it was like a herd of wild dogs, snarling and howling and snapping, racing towards him with their torn ears and blind eyes and bloodied muzzles.

And then they were all around him and through him and he whirled the paddle again and caught the hyena dæmon on the shoulder.

“Ah,” said Bonneville, and fell clumsily.

The hyena growled. Malcolm hit her again, full on the head, and she lurched and slid away, her back legs slipping on the grass, her chest and throat bearing all the weight of her as she crushed little Ben. One more blow from the paddle, and Ben fell out of her jaws and scrambled up towards Alice, but Bonneville saw him and kicked out at him, sending him tumbling away over the grass.

Alice cried out in pain. The dogs howled and snarled, and what happened was that Malcolm whirled the paddle again and caught Bonneville hard on the back of the head.

“Tell me—” Malcolm raged, though he couldn’t finish the command, and he tried to hold the dogs back with the paddle, but they surged forward again, and Malcolm struck once more, and the figure fell full-length with a long, expiring moan.

Malcolm turned to the imaginary dogs. He felt his eyes throwing fire. But he also knew in that fraction of a second that without the dogs he would find himself giving way to pity, and only with their help could he punish the figure who had hurt Alice. But if he didn’t hold them off, he’d never know what Bonneville could tell him — and yet he didn’t know what to ask, and if he held them off for a moment too long, they’d go away and take all that power with them. He thought all that in less than a second.

Malcolm turned back to the dying figure. The dogs howled, and Malcolm whirled the paddle again and struck the arm that came up in defense. He had never hit anything so hard. The figure cried out, “Go on, kill me, you little shit! Peace at last.”

The dogs surged again, and the man flinched even before Malcolm had moved. If he hit him again, Malcolm knew, he’d kill him, and all the time the terrible, draining separation pain exhausted him, and the knowledge of his brave abandoned dæmon guarding the little child drenched him with misery.

“What’s the Rusakov field?” he managed to say. “Why’s it important?”

“Dust…” It was the last word Bonneville said, hardly more than a whisper.

The dogs were milling around, leaderless. Malcolm thought of Alice, of the fairy arranging her hair, of her sleep-warmed cheeks, and of how it felt to hold baby Lyra in his arms, and the dogs felt his emotion and turned around and leapt forward once more, through Malcolm, and he raised the paddle and struck again and again till the Bonneville figure fell still, the groaning stopped, all was silent, the hyena dæmon had vanished, and Malcolm was left standing over the body of the man who had pursued them so madly and for so long.

Malcolm’s arms, strengthened by days of paddling, now ached with exhaustion. The weight of the paddle itself was too much for him. He dropped it. The dogs had gone. He sat down suddenly and leaned against one of the columns. Bonneville’s body lay half in and half out of the dazzling moonlight. A trickle of blood ran slowly down, joining the rain puddles still lying on the steps.

Alice’s eyes were closed. There was blood on her cheek, blood dripping down her leg, blood in her fingernails. She was shaking. She wiped her mouth and lay back on the wet stone, looking like a broken bird. Ben was a mouse, trembling at her neck.

“Alice,” he whispered.

“Where’s Asta?” she mumbled through bruised lips. “How…”

“She’s guarding Lyra. We had to sep-separate… ”

“Oh, Mal,” she said, just that, and he felt that all the pain had been worth it.

He wiped his face.

“We ought to drag him down to the water,” he said shakily.

“Yeah. All right. Go slowly… ”

Malcolm pulled his painful body upright and bent to grasp the man’s feet. He began to pull. Alice forced herself up and helped, hauling at a sleeve. The body was heavy, but it came without resistance, without even snagging on the half-buried gravestones.

They came to the water’s edge, where the flood was flowing strongly. The CCD boat and its searchlight had gone. They rolled the dead man clumsily over until the current took him away, and then stood clinging to each other and watching the dark shape, darker on the dark water, drift off with the flood till it had vanished.

The candle was still burning in the canoe. They found Lyra fast asleep and Asta, at the end of her strength, lying beside her. Malcolm lifted up his dæmon and hugged her close, and they both wept.

Alice climbed into the canoe and lay trembling as Ben, terrier-formed, licked and licked at her, cleaning the blood from every part. Then she pulled a blanket over them both and turned away and closed her eyes.

Malcolm picked up the child and lay down with her in his arms and their dæmons between them and the blankets wrapped around them both. The last thing he did was to pinch out the candle.