Home > The Secret Commonwealth (The Book of Dust #2)

The Secret Commonwealth (The Book of Dust #2)
Author: Philip Pullman


    Acknowledgments

 

 

   Pantalaimon, the dæmon of Lyra Belacqua, now called Lyra Silvertongue, lay along the windowsill of Lyra’s little study-bedroom in St. Sophia’s College in a state as far from thought as he could get. He was aware of the cold draft from the ill-fitting sash window beside him, and of the warm naphtha light on the desk below the window, and of the scratching of Lyra’s pen, and of the darkness outside. It was the cold and the dark he most wanted just then. As he lay there, turning over to feel the cold now on his back, now on his front, the desire to go outside became even stronger than his reluctance to speak to Lyra.

   “Open the window,” he said finally. “I want to go out.”

   Lyra’s pen stopped moving; she pushed her chair back and stood up. Pantalaimon could see her reflection in the glass, suspended over the Oxford night. He could even make out her expression of mutinous unhappiness.

   “I know what you’re going to say,” he said. “Of course I’ll be careful. I’m not stupid.”

   “In some ways you are,” she said.

       She reached over him and slid the window up, propping it open with the nearest book.

   “Don’t—” he began.

   “Don’t shut the window, yes, Pan, just sit there freezing till Pan decides to come home. I’m not stupid at all. Go on, bugger off.”

   He flowed out and into the ivy covering the wall of the college. Only the faintest rustle came to Lyra’s ears, and then only for a moment. Pan didn’t like the way they were speaking to each other, or rather not speaking; in fact, these words were the first they’d exchanged all day. But he didn’t know what to do about it, and neither did she.

   Halfway down the wall he caught a mouse in his needle-sharp teeth and wondered about eating it, but gave it a surprise and let it go. He crouched on the thick ivy branch, relishing all the smells, all the wayward gusts of air, all the wide-open night around him.

   But he was going to be careful. He had to be careful about two things. One was the patch of cream-white fur that covered his throat, which stood out with unfortunate clarity against the rest of his red-brown pine marten fur. But it wasn’t hard to keep his head down, or to run fast. The other reason for being careful was much more serious. No one who saw him would think for a moment that he was a pine marten; he looked like a pine marten in every respect, but he was a dæmon. It was very hard to say where the difference lay, but any human being in Lyra’s world would have known it at once, as surely as they knew the smell of coffee or the color red.

   And a person apart from their dæmon, or a dæmon alone with their person nowhere in sight, was something uncanny, eldritch, impossible. No ordinary human beings could separate in that way, though reputedly witches could. The power that Lyra and Pan had was peculiar to them, and had been dearly bought eight years before in the world of the dead. Since coming home to Oxford after that strange adventure, they had told no one about it, and exercised the most scrupulous care to keep it a secret; but sometimes, and more often recently, they simply had to get away from each other.

       So now Pan kept to the shadows, and as he moved through the shrubs and the long grass that bordered the great expanse of the neatly mown University Parks, feeling the night with all his senses, he made no sound and kept his head low. It had rained earlier that evening, and the earth was soft and moist under his feet. When he came to a patch of mud, he crouched down and pressed his throat and chest into it, so as to conceal the treacherous patch of cream-white fur.

   Leaving the Parks, he darted across the Banbury Road at a moment when there were no pedestrians on the pavement, and only one distant vehicle in sight. Then he slipped into the garden of one of the large houses on the other side, and then through hedges, over walls, under fences, across lawns, making for Jericho and the canal only a few streets away.

   Once he reached the muddy towpath, he felt safer. There were bushes and long grass to hide in, and trees up which he could dart as quickly as a fire along a fuse. This semi-wild part of the city was the place he liked best. He had swum in every one of the many stretches of water that laced Oxford through and through—not only the canal but also the wide body of the Thames itself and its tributary the Cherwell, as well as the countless little streams diverted from the main flows to power a mill or feed an ornamental lake, some running underground and out of sight until they emerged beneath this college wall or behind that burial ground or brewery.

   At the point where one of these streams ran next to the canal with only the towpath between them, Pan crossed over a little iron bridge and followed the stream down to the great open space of the allotment gardens, with the Oxpens cattle market to the north and the Royal Mail depot beside the railway station on the western side.

       The moon was full, and a few stars were visible between the racing wisps of cloud. The light made it more dangerous for him, but Pan loved the cold silver clarity as he prowled through the allotments, slipping between the stalks of Brussels sprouts or cauliflowers, the leaves of onions or spinach, making no more noise than a shadow. He came to a tool shed, and leapt up to lie flat on the hard tar-paper roof and gaze across the wide-open meadow towards the mail depot.

   That was the only place in the city that seemed awake. Pan and Lyra had come here more than once before, together, and watched as the trains came in from the north and south to stand steaming at the platform while the workers unloaded sacks of letters and parcels onto large wheeled baskets and rolled them into the great metal-sided shed, where the mail for London and the continent would be sorted in time for the morning zeppelin. The airship was tethered fore and aft nearby, swinging and swaying in the wind as the mooring lines snapped and clanged against the mast. Lights glowed on the platform, on the mooring mast, above the doors of the Royal Mail building; railway trucks clattered in a siding, a metal door somewhere closed with a bang.

   Pan saw a movement among the allotments to his right, and very slowly turned his head to look. A cat was creeping along a line of cabbages or broccoli, intent on a mouse; but before the cat could spring, a silent white shape bigger than Pan himself swooped down from the sky and seized the mouse, to fly up again out of reach of the cat’s claws. The owl’s wings beat in perfect silence as it made its way back to one of the trees behind Paradise Square. The cat sat down, seeming to think about the matter, and then resumed the hunt among the vegetables.

   The moon was bright now, higher in the sky and almost clear of the cloud, and Pan could see every detail of the allotments and the cattle market from his vantage point on the shed. Greenhouses, scarecrows, galvanized-iron cattle pens, water butts, fences rotted and sagging or upright and neatly painted, pea sticks tied together like naked tepees: they all lay silent in the moonlight, like a stage set for a play of ghosts.

       Pan whispered, “Lyra, what’s happened to us?”

   There was no answer.

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