La Belle Sauvage, Page 33

  "Look," said Malcolm, swinging the rucksack down to the ground, "I'll give you a treasure to have instead."

  "What sort of treasure?"

  "A treasure fit for a queen. You are a queen, en't you?"

  "Of course."

  "Are you a fairy person?"

  "Where is this treasure?"

  Malcolm brought out the box.

  "Let me see," she said.

  "Let me hold Ellie, and then you can look properly," said Alice.

  But Diania held the child closer and gave Alice a look that frightened her.

  "You think I'm stupid? Every trick you can think of, I've seen it and heard it a thousand times before. How would a pair of children like you be in charge of a treasure? It doesn't make sense. No one would give you a treasure to look after."

  "Then why are we looking after a baby?" said Alice.

  "That's much easier to explain," she said.

  And that was the moment Malcolm had been waiting for.

  "If you can explain it," he said, "then you can keep her, and the treasure as well."

  The woman looked at him and cuddled Lyra closer, rocking her back and forth.

  "If I can explain..."

  "If you can explain how me and Sandra came to be looking after Ellie, then she can stay with you."

  The woman was thinking.

  "How many chances?" she said. "I want more than one."

  "You can have three."

  "Three. All right. First: she is your sister, and your parents have died. They left her to you to look after."

  "Wrong," said Malcolm. "Two more chances."

  "All right...Two: you stole her from her crib and you're taking her to London to sell."

  "That's wrong too. Only one chance left."

  "Only one...only one...Very well. Let me see. I know! She was in the care of the nuns, and then the flood came, and you and Sandra took her from her crib and put her in your boat, and you were swept away by the flood and there was a man chasing you, and then you killed him, and then she was taken by the Sisters of Holy Obedience, and you rescued her and brought her here."

  "Who did?"

  "You did. Richard and Sandra."

  "Brought who here?"

  "Ellie, of course!"

  "Well, you're wrong for the third time," said Malcolm, "because this is Alice, not Sandra, and I'm Malcolm, not Richard, and the baby's not Ellie, she's Lyra. You lost."

  And then the woman opened her mouth and uttered a wail so loud and terrible that Malcolm had to cover his ears. She opened her arms, and Lyra fell out and would have hit the ground if Alice hadn't darted in and caught her. The woman put her hands to her head, tears flooded from her eyes, and she flung herself full-length on the grass, weeping with a passion that touched Malcolm's heart with fear.

  But he gathered up their blankets and their tin of biscuits and held out the wooden box.

  "I promised you a treasure," he said, "and here it is."

  The woman was sobbing bitterly; her whole body was heaving with the gulps that racked her.

  "Here," he said again, and put it down on the grass.

  The woman rolled over onto her back and flung her head from side to side.

  "My baby!" she cried. "You're taking my baby away!"

  "No, she's not your baby," said Malcolm.

  "I waited for a thousand years to hold a baby to my breast! And she's drunk my milk! She's mine!"

  "We're going away now. Look, I put the treasure down here."

  She sat up, sobbing so much that she could hardly hold her balance. One hand wiped away the tears that flooded her face, and the other felt along the ground till it found the box.

  "What is this?"

  "I told you. Treasure. We're going now. Thank you for letting us stay for a bit."

  The woman got to her knees, and then flung herself at Alice's feet, clinging to her legs. Alice looked alarmed and held Lyra out of her reach.

  "He doesn't understand--he never would--how could a man understand? But you--"

  "No," said Alice.

  "Did you look in the glass after I arranged your hair?"

  "Yes..."

  "And did you like it?"

  "Yes. But..."

  "I could make you beautiful. I could make your face so lovely that every man would be your slave. I could do that! I have that power!"

  Alice's lips were set tight. Malcolm just looked at her helplessly. Something had told him already that Alice was discontented with her looks. He could read her face now, and he saw a succession of emotions pass over it, some too hard for him to name or to know. Finally it settled into the usual half-sneering contempt.

  "You're a liar," she said. "Let go of my legs."

  The woman did, sobbing again, but without hope this time. Malcolm felt truly sorry for her. But what could they do?

  He quietly walked away. Alice went with him, Lyra silent and asleep in her arms.

  He turned around once more and saw the woman sitting up, turning the box over and over in her hands.

  "What's she going to do when she opens it?" Alice whispered.

  "She never will."

  "How d'you know?"

  " 'Cause she's not a mechanic."

  The canoe was safe; he had been anxious about that. He held it steady for Alice, and when she and the child were settled in the prow and the rucksack was stowed under the thwart, he got in himself and took the paddle and propelled La Belle Sauvage away from the enchanted island.

  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 daemon would kind of...be nice to my daemon too. That's what happens in stories. That's what people tell you. But Ben, he..."

  Her daemon, 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 hav
e 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?