"I want to go and see him."
al blubber all over his armor, the care and attention he was paying the task reminding Lyra of her own devotion to Pantalaimon. Just as the bear had said: the armor was his soul. The sysselman and the policemen withdrew, and slo
So in less than half
g on very well, but she must take great care when removed from those whose influence now guided her, and who could he have meant but me? And now she is to go on with me always. She will be quite one of the old sort of faithful servants, who feel that they owe everything to their masters, and will it not be pleasant to have so sweet and expressive a face about the house?'
'Do I know her face?' said Claude. 'Oh yes! I do. She has black eyes, I think, and would be pretty if she did not look pert.'
'You provoking Claude!' cried Lily, 'you are as bad as Alethea, who never will say that Esther is the best person for us.'
'I was going to inquire for the all-for-love principle,' said Claude, 'but I see it is in full force. And how are the verses, Lily? Have you made a poem upon Michael Moone, or Mohun, the actor, our uncle, whom I discovered for you in Pepys's Memoirs?'
'Nonsense,' said Lily; 'but I have been writing something about Sir Maurice, which you shall hear whenever you are not in this horrid temper.'
The next afternoon, as soon as luncheon was over, Lily drew Claude out to his favourite place under the plane-tree, where she proceeded to inflict her poem upon his patient ears, while he lay flat upon the grass looking up to the sky; Emily and Jane had promised to join them there in process of time, and the four younger ones were, as usual, diverting themselves among the farm buildings at the Old Court.
Lily began: 'I meant to have two parts about Sir Maurice going out to fight when he was very young, and then about his brothers being killed, and King Charles knighting him, and his betrothed, Phyllis Crossthwayte, embroidering his black engrailed cross on his banner, and then the taking the castle, and his being wounded, and escaping, and Phyllis not thinking it right to leave her father; but I have not finished that, so now you must hear about his return home.'
'A romaunt in six cantos, entitled Woe woe,
By Miss Fanny F. known more commonly so,'
muttered Claude to himself; but as Lily did not understand or know whence his quotation came, it did not hurt her feelings, and she went merrily on:-
''Tis the twenty-ninth of merry May;
Full cheerily shine the sunbeams to-day,
Their joyous light revealing
"Well, even if it is, Lyra, I don't know what anyone could do about it. Sixty Sibirsk riflemen, and fire throwers...Mr. Scoresby, step over here if you would, for a moment."
While the aeronaut came to the sledge, Lyra slipped away and spoke to the bear.
"lorek, have you traveled this way before?"
"Once," he said in that deep flat voice.
"There's a village near, en't there?"
"Over the ridge," he said, looking up through the sparse trees.
"Is it far?"
"For you or for me?"
dream, or some kind of harmless local spirit; but something was following the train of sledges, swinging lightly from branch to branch of the close-clustering pine trees, and it put him uneasily in mind of a monkey.
Chapter 12 The Lost Boy
They traveled for several hours and then stopped to eat. While the men were lighting fires and melting snow for water, with lorek Byrnison watching Lee Scoresby roast seal meat close by, John Faa spoke to Lyra.
"Lyra, can you see that instrument to read it?" he said.
The moon itself had long set. The light from the Aurora was brighter than moonlight, but it was inconstant. However, Lyra's eyes were keen, and she fumbled inside her furs and tugged out the black velvet bag.
"Yes, I can see all right," she said. "But I know where most of the symbols are by now anyway. What shall I ask it, Lord Faa?"
"I want to know more about how they're defending this place, Bolvangar," he said.
Without even having to think about it, she found her fingers moving the hands to point to the helmet, the griffin, and the crucible, and felt her mind settle into the right meanings like a complicated diagram in three dimensions. At once the needle began to swing round, back, round and on further, like a bee dancing its message to the hive. S
an hour, the expedition was on its way northward. Under a sky peopled with millions of stars and a glaring moon, the sledges bumped and clattered over the ruts and stones until they reached clear snow at the edge of town. Then the sound changed to a quiet crunch of snow and creak of timber, and the dogs began to step out eagerly, and the motion became swift and smooth.
Lyra, wrapped up so thickly in the back of Farder Coram's sledge that only her eyes were exposed, whispered to Pantalaimon:
"Can you see lorek?"
"He's padding along beside Lee Scoresby's sledge," the daemon replied, looking back in his ermine form as he clung to her wolverine-fur hood.
Ahead of them, over the mountains to the north, the pale arcs and loops of the Northern Lights began to glow and tre
he'd seen worse than a dead body, and it might calm her. So with Pantalaimon as a white hare bounding delicately at her side, she trudged along the line of sledges to where some men were piling brushwood.
The boy's body lay under a checkered blanket beside the path. She knelt and lifted the blanket in her mittened hands. One man was about to stop her, but the others shook their heads.
Pantalaimon crept close as Lyra looked down on the poor wasted face. She slipped her hand out of
wly the other townspeople turned and drifted away, though a few remained to watch.
John Faa put his hands to his mouth and called: "Gyptians!"
They were all ready to move. They had been itching to get under way ever since they had disembarked; the sledges were packed, the dog teams were in their traces.
John Faa said, "Time to move out, friends. We're all assembled now, and the road lies open. Mr. Scoresby, you all a loaded?"
"Ready to go, Lord Faa."
"And you, lorek Byrnison?"
"When I am clad," said the bear.
He had finished oiling the armor. Not wanting to waste the seal meat, he lifted the carcass in his teeth and flipped it onto the back of Lee Scoresby's larger sledge before donning the armor. It was astonishing to see how lightly he dealt with it: the sheets of metal were almost an inch thick in places, and yet he swung them round and into place as if they were silk robes. It took him less than a minute, and this time there was no harsh scream of rust.
the mitten and touched his eyes. They were marble-cold, and Farder Coram had been right; poor little Tony Makarios was no different from any other human whose daemon had departed in death. Oh, if they took Pantalaimon from her! She swept him up and hugged him as if she meant to press him right into her heart. And all little Tony had was his pitiful piece offish....
Where was it?
She pulled the blanket down. It was gone.
She was on her feet in a moment, and her eyes flashed fury at the men nearby.
"Where's his fish?"
They stopped, puzzled, unsure what she meant; though some of their daemons knew, and looked at one another. One of the men began to grin uncertainly.
"Don't you dare laugh! I'll tear your lungs out if you laugh at him! That's all he had to cling onto, just an old dried fish, that's all he had for a daemon to love and be kind to! Who's took it from him? Where's it gone?"
Pantalaimon was a snarling snow leopard, just like Lord Asriel's daemon, but she didn't see that; all she saw was right and wrong.
"Easy, Lyra," said one man. "Easy, child."
"Who's took it?" she flared again, and the gyptian took a step back from her passionate fury.
"I didn't know," said another man apologetically. "I thought it was just what he'd been eating. I took it out his hand because I thought it was more respectful. That's all, Lyra."
"Then where is it?"
The man said uneasily, "Not thinking he had a need for it, I gave it to my dogs. I do beg your pardon."
"It en't my pardon you need, it's his," she said, and turned at once to kneel again, and laid her hand on the dead child's icy cheek.
Then an idea came to her, and she fumbled inside her furs. The cold air struck through as she opened her anorak, but in a few seconds she had what she wanted, and took a gold coin from her purse before wrapping herself close again.
"I want to borrow your knife," she said to the man who'd taken the fish, and when he'd let her have it, she said to Pantalaimon: "What was her name?"
He understood, of course, and said, "Ratter."
She held the coin tight in her left mittened hand and, holding the knife like a pencil, scratched the lost daemon's name deeply into the gold.
"I hope that'll do, if I provide for you like a Jordan Scholar," she whispered to the dead boy, and forced his teeth apart to slip the coin into his mouth. It was hard, but she managed it, and managed to close his jaw again.
Then she gave the man back his knife and turned in the morning twilight to go back to Farder Coram.
He gave her a mug of soup straight off the fire, and she sipped it greedily.
"What we going to do about them witches, Farder Coram?" she said. "I wonder if your witch was one of them."
"My witch? I wouldn't presume that far, Lyra. They might be going anywhere. There's all kinds of concerns that play on the life of witches, things invisible to us: mysterious sicknesses they fall prey to, which we'd shrug off; causes of war quite beyond our understanding; joys and sorrows bound up with the flowering of tiny plants up on the tundra....But I wish I'd seen them a flying, Lyra. I wish I'd been able to see a sight like that. Now drink up all that soup. D'you want some more? There's some pan-bread a cooking too. Eat up, child, because we're on our way soon."
The food revived Lyra, and presently the chill at her soul began to melt. With the others, she went to watch the little half-child laid on his funeral pyre, and bowed her head and closed her eyes for John Faa's prayers; and then the men sprinkled coal spirit and set matches to it, and it was blazing in a moment.
Once they were sure he was safely burned, they set off to travel again. It was a ghostly journey. Snow began to fall early on, and soon the world was reduced to the gray shadows of the dogs ahead, the lurching and creaking of the sledge, the biting cold, and a swirling sea of big flakes only just darker than the sky and only just lighter than the ground.
Through it all the dogs continued to run, tails high, breath puffing steam. North and further north they ran, while the pallid noontide came and went and the twilight wrapped itself again around the world. They stopped to eat and drink and rest in a fold of the hills, and to get their bearings, and while John Faa talked to Lee Scoresby about the way they might best use the balloon, Lyra thought of the spy-fly; and she asked Farder Coram what had happened to the smokeleaf tin he'd trapped it in.
"I've got it tucked away tight," he said. "It's down in the bottom of that kit bag, but there's nothing to see; I soldered it shut on board ship, like I said I would. I don't know what we're a going to do with it, to tell you the truth; maybe we could drop it down a fire mine, maybe that would settle it. But you needn't worry, Lyra. While I've got it, you're safe." The first chance she had, she plunged her arm down into the stiffly frosted canvas of the kit bag and brought up the little tin. She could feel the buzz it was making before she touched it.
While Farder Coram was talking to the other leaders, she took the tin to lorek Byrnison and explained her idea. It had come to her when she remembered his slicing so easily through the metal of the engine cover.
He listened, and then took the lid of a biscuit tin and deftly folded it
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