Serpentine, Page 2

  “Anyway,” Lyra added weakly, baffled, “he’s…sort of indoors.”

  “Yeah, and he’s very clever and he’s very tough.”

  “But I still don’t know how you know!”

  “Just something I noticed.”

  “What?”

  “You remember Serafina’s crown? Those little scarlet flowers?”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, he was wearing one in his lapel. And it was fresh. And it’s the wrong season.”

  “There might be all kinds of reasons…”

  “No, it’s a token they have. Witches and their lovers.”

  They were passing the last houses in the town: wooden buildings mostly one storey in height, with stone chimneys and corrugated iron roofs held down by cables against the winds. The tractor and the trailer swung from side to side through the ruts and potholes.

  Lyra wedged herself in more tightly, and pulled the hood of her anorak down further around them both.

  “Pan,” she said, “if I had something to tell you…I mean, if I knew something you didn’t…”

  “I’d know,” he said confidently.

  “You might not.”

  “I would. Anyway, you wouldn’t be able to keep it to yourself.”

  “We’ll see,” she said. “One day I’ll find a secret you’ll never know about.”

  “And I bet I’ll know it within five minutes.”

  “All right,” she said. “Try this. What was I talking to Dr. Lanselius about?”

  “About the dig,” he said at once.

  “And?”

  “The fish bones.”

  “And?”

  “Some other stuff. I don’t know. The fact remains that you don’t notice anything, and I do.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re glad to hear it.”

  “You better be.”

  The note of the tractor engine changed as they began to climb the slope towards the forest. It wouldn’t be nightfall for some hours yet, but the clouds were low and heavy.

  “All right back there?” Duncan Armstrong called.

  “Fine,” she called back.

  “It’s going to get cold.”

  “Good!”

  Pantalaimon settled more comfortably around her neck.

  After a few minutes Lyra said, “You don’t know it’s a token at all. The flower.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, “because he wasn’t wearing one anyway. I knew you wouldn’t remember.”

  “All right, enough,” Lyra said shakily. “You’re being a pain, you know? You’re more observant, you’re this, you’re that, I never notice anything…That’s all true, Pan. I know it is. But why compete? Why try and make a fool of me? You notice things for me, and I think of things for you. We do what we’re good at. We used to be kind to each other. We are each other. We shouldn’t have secrets. We should tell the truth to each other.”

  He said nothing, but he wasn’t pretending to be asleep. Then he said, “She told me what you were talking about.”

  “Well then.”

  “No, not well then. All this time you wanted me to tell you something and you didn’t even ask?”

  “I was worried in case it wasn’t the right time. I didn’t want to make you feel you had to. I don’t know. This is difficult, Pan. Trying not to ask…It never felt easy. But I’d done something horrible to you in the first place and you had the right to keep it to yourself, if you wanted to. But I didn’t want you to think I didn’t care or I wasn’t interested…”

  “I wouldn’t ever think that.”

  There was another silence, but a more companionable one.

  “What did she say?” said Lyra. “If she didn’t tell you that nonsense about lovers.”

  “She didn’t tell me. I worked it out, and it wasn’t the flower. After all—”

  “Answer!” she said, and pulled his tail.

  “All right. I didn’t know what she was talking about at first—I thought she was mad. It was hard to know what to say. She said some people, witches and normal people as well, sort of quarrel with their dæmons. In the end they come to hate each other. They never speak, they try and hurt each other, they just feel contempt, they never touch…It’s easier for witches because they can put the whole world between them and their dæmons if they want to. But still they only live half a life, really. And if you’re not a witch…”

  “John the porter at Gabriel!”

  “Yeah—like that. Just like that.”

  One of the porters at Gabriel College never spoke to his dæmon, or she to him. He was a quiet and courteous man, she a bitter-looking terrier. Lyra had been through Gabriel lodge scores of times, and whenever John was on duty there was an air of profound and helpless melancholy under the vaulted stone roof. Coming out of the lodge into the quadrangle was like passing from cold to warm. Lyra hadn’t thought of it like that before, but now she shivered, and resolved, next time she went there, to stop and be friendly to the unhappy man and his silent dæmon.

  “When I think of what that must be like,” she said, “I mean, to get into a state like that, it makes me think of the abyss. That horrible endless bottomless—it must be like having an abyss right next to you every moment, knowing it’s there all the time…just horrible.”

  The abyss that opened out of the world of the dead was something that Pantalaimon hadn’t seen, but Lyra had told him all about it.

  “When I was with Will’s dæmon, before she had her name,” Pan said, and Lyra rubbed her chin on his head, “we fell in a river and got carried towards a waterfall. And we saved each other. But the feeling of being swept towards it…”

  “Pan, d’you think it might have happened at the same time as I nearly fell?”

  “It might have done…”

  “It must have done. Or I’m sure I’d have felt it with you.”

  “Maybe you falling into the abyss is what made me dizzy. I would have felt it, I know I would.”

  “Yeah! It must be.”

  They both fell silent. But this falling was into the loved and familiar, into safety.

  “Anyway, she knew what she was talking about, that dæmon,” said Lyra. “But I’m glad you’re not a snake.”

  “D’you remember when we saw that mongoose in the museum and I was a snake and Roger’s Salcilia was a mongoose, and she couldn’t catch me, so I had to let her because they were getting upset?”

  Lyra did. The snow was falling thickly now, and it was just the time when the flakes stop looking dark against the sky, because the sky has become darker than they are, so they look light instead. The little tractor’s solid rattle sounded muffled in the feathery air. Duncan Armstrong switched on the lights.

  “I bet Mary Malone’s dæmon would be a snake,” Lyra murmured. “She was wise.”

  “He was a bird. Like a blackbird, or more like a crow with a yellow beak.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I could see him. At the end, just when we got to the Botanic Garden and said goodbye. She can see him now too. Like Will can see Kirjava. I’m sure she can.”

  Lyra saw no reason to doubt him. She’d been in no state to notice anything at that point; she had been blind with tears and love and sadness. But he was part of her, and he had noticed, and she felt proud of him, because not many people had dæmons as clear-sighted as Pantalaimon. She stroked his head and settled down deeper in the furs as they fell asleep.

  “Never notice anything,” was the last thing she whispered, fondly scornful: “Ha!”

  A Note from the Author

  Between the publication of The Amber Spyglass and La Belle Sauvage, quite a long time went by during which I worked on other things. But Lyra and her world wouldn’t leave me alone, and when I thought of this story I didn�
��t need much prompting to write it down.

  The prompting came from the National Theatre. Nicholas Hytner, the Director at that time, had put on a magnificent production of the entire His Dark Materials story in two full-length plays, with a brilliant script by Nicholas Wright. When the NT held a fundraising gala in 2004 they asked if I could contribute something for an auction, and I thought this would be a good reason to write this story properly.

  So I did that, and gave them the manuscript (because I always write by hand: ballpoint pen on narrow-lined A4 paper) and the typed final text, to be auctioned together. In the event, the gala was very successful, and Serpentine was bought for an astonishing amount of money by Glenn and Phyllida Earle. Now that the story is published in book form, I’m happy to acknowledge their great generosity in this way.

  Finally, why are we publishing this story now, after sixteen years? Because with the development of The Book of Dust, especially after the events described in The Secret Commonwealth, we can see a change in the way Lyra understands herself, and her relationship with Pantalaimon, which is prefigured in this little Arctic episode. When I wrote Serpentine I had no idea that I was going on to write another trilogy, showing Lyra as an adult, but (as I say) she and her world wouldn’t leave me alone. When it comes to human affairs, a billion invisible filaments connect us to our own pasts, as well as to the most remote things we can imagine; and I hope that, above all, these books are about being alive and being human.

  Philip Pullman

  © Tom Nicholson

  PHILIP PULLMAN is one of the most acclaimed writers working today. He is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy, which has been named one of the top 100 books of all time by Newsweek and one of the all-time greatest novels by Entertainment Weekly. Pullman was knighted for his services to literature in the 2019 New Years Honours.

  The Book of Dust, Pullman’s eagerly anticipated return to the world of His Dark Materials, will also be a book in three parts. It began with La Belle Sauvage and continues with The Secret Commonwealth.

  Other companion works that illuminate this world include Lyra’s Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, The Collectors, and The Golden Compass Graphic Novel.

  Philip Pullman lives in Oxford, England.

  philip-pullman.com

  Tom Duxbury is an illustrator from the moors of West Yorkshire. His work is influenced by lino-printing, which he uses to depict feeling, movement and nostalgia. He is inspired by the spirit of nature and the narrative of a landscape.

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