His Dark Materials Omnibus (14 page)

Ma Costa was setting a saucepan of milk on the iron stove and riddling the grate to stir the fire up.

“Away from here. No talking now. We’ll talk in the morning.”

And she said no more, handing Lyra a cup of milk when it was ready, swinging herself up on deck when the boat began to move, exchanging occasional whispers with the men. Lyra sipped the milk and lifted a corner of the blind to watch the dark wharves move past. A minute or two later she was sound asleep.

She awoke in a narrow bed, with that comforting engine rumble deep below. She sat up, banged her head, cursed, felt around, and got up more carefully. A thin gray light showed her three other bunks, each empty and neatly made, one below hers and the other two across the tiny cabin. She swung over the side to find herself in her underclothes, and saw the dress and the wolfskin coat folded at the end of her bunk together with her shopping bag. The alethiometer was still there.

She dressed quickly and went through the door at the end to find herself in the cabin with the stove, where it was warm. There was no one there. Through the windows she saw a gray swirl of fog on each side, with occasional dark shapes that might have been buildings or trees.

Before she could go out on deck, the outer door opened and Ma Costa came down, swathed in an old tweed coat on which the damp had settled like a thousand tiny pearls.

“Sleep well?” she said, reaching for a frying pan. “Now sit down out the way and I’ll make ye some breakfast. Don’t stand about; there en’t room.”

“Where are we?” said Lyra.

“On the Grand Junction Canal. You keep out of sight, child. I don’t want to see you topside. There’s trouble.”

She sliced a couple of rashers of bacon into the frying pan, and cracked an egg to go with them.

“What sort of trouble?”

“Nothing we can’t cope with, if you stay out the way.”

And she wouldn’t say any more till Lyra had eaten. The boat slowed at one point, and something banged against the side, and she heard men’s voices raised in anger; but then someone’s joke made them laugh, and the voices drew away and the boat moved on.

Presently Tony Costa swung down into the cabin. Like his mother, he was pearled with damp, and he shook his woollen hat over the stove to make the drops jump and spit.

“What we going to tell her, Ma?”

“Ask first, tell after.”

He poured some coffee into a tin cup and sat down. He was a powerful, dark-faced man, and now that she could see him in daylight, Lyra saw a sad grimness in his expression.

“Right,” he said. “Now you tell us what you was doing in London, Lyra. We had you down as being took by the Gobblers.”

“I was living with this lady, right …”

Lyra clumsily collected her story and shook it into order as if she were settling a pack of cards ready for dealing. She told them everything, except about the alethiometer.

“And then last night at this cocktail party I found out what they were really doing. Mrs. Coulter was one of the Gobblers herself, and she was going to use me to help her catch more kids. And what they do is—”

Ma Costa left the cabin and went out to the cockpit. Tony waited till the door was shut, and cut in:

“We know what they do. Least, we know part of it. We know they don’t come back. Them kids is taken up north, far out the way, and they do experiments on ’em. At first we reckoned they tried out different diseases and
medicines, but there’d be no reason to start that all of a sudden two or three years back. Then we thought about the Tartars, maybe there’s some secret deal they’re making up Siberia way; because the Tartars want to move north just as much as the rest, for the coal spirit and the fire mines, and there’s been rumors of war for even longer than the Gobblers been going. And we reckoned the Gobblers were buying off the Tartar chiefs by giving ’em kids, cause the Tartars eat ’em, don’t they? They bake children and eat ’em.”

“They never!” said Lyra.

“They do. There’s plenty of other things to be told, and all. You ever heard of the Nälkäinens?”

Lyra said, “No. Not even with Mrs. Coulter. What are they?”

“That’s a kind of ghost they have up there in those forests. Same size as a child, and they got no heads. They feel their way about at night and if you’re a sleeping out in the forest they get ahold of you and won’t nothing make ’em let go. Nälkäinens, that’s a northern word. And the Windsuckers, they’re dangerous too. They drift about in the air. You come across clumps of ’em floated together sometimes, or caught snagged on a bramble. As soon as they touch you, all the strength goes out of you. You can’t see ’em except as a kind of shimmer in the air. And the Breathless Ones …”

“Who are they?”

“Warriors half-killed. Being alive is one thing, and being dead’s another, but being half-killed is worse than either. They just can’t die, and living is altogether beyond ’em. They wander about forever. They’re called the Breathless Ones because of what’s been done to ’em.”

“And what’s that?” said Lyra, wide-eyed.

“The North Tartars snap open their ribs and pull out their lungs. There’s an art to it. They do it without killing ’em, but their lungs can’t work anymore without their dæmons pumping ’em by hand, so the result is they’re halfway between breath and no breath, life and death, half-killed, you see. And their dæmons got to pump and pump all day and night, or else perish with ’em. You come across a whole platoon of Breathless Ones in the forest sometimes, I’ve heard. And then there’s the
panserbjørne
—you heard of them? That means armored bears. They’re great white bears, and—”

“Yes! I have heard of them! One of the men last night, he said that my uncle, Lord Asriel, he’s being imprisoned in a fortress guarded by the armored bears.”

“Is he, now? And what was he doing up there?”

“Exploring. But the way the man was talking I don’t think my uncle’s on
the same side as the Gobblers. I think they were glad he was in prison.”

“Well, he won’t get out if the armored bears are guarding him. They’re like mercenaries, you know what I mean by that? They sell their strength to whoever pays. They got hands like men, and they learned the trick of working iron way back, meteoric iron mostly, and they make great sheets and plates of it to cover theirselves with. They been raiding the Skraelings for centuries. They’re vicious killers, absolutely pitiless. But they keep their word. If you make a bargain with a
panserbjørn
, you can rely on it.”

Lyra considered these horrors with awe.

“Ma don’t like to hear about the North,” Tony said after a few moments, “because of what might’ve happened to Billy. We know they took him up north, see.”

“How d’you know that?”

“We caught one of the Gobblers, and made him talk. That’s how we know a little about what they’re doing. Them two last night weren’t Gobblers; they were too clumsy. If they’d been Gobblers we’d’ve took ’em alive. See, the gyptian people, we been hit worse than most by these Gobblers, and we’re a coming together to decide what to do about it. That’s what we was doing in the basin last night, taking on stores, ’cause we’re going to a big muster up in the fens, what we call a roping. And what I reckon is we’re a going to send out a rescue party, when we heard what all the other gyptians know, when we put our knowledge together. That’s what I’d do, if I was John Faa.”

“Who’s John Faa?”

“The king of the gyptians.”

“And you’re really going to rescue the kids? What about Roger?”

“Who’s Roger?”

“The Jordan College kitchen boy. He was took same as Billy the day before I come away with Mrs. Coulter. I bet if I was took, he’d come and rescue me. If you’re going to rescue Billy, I want to come too and rescue Roger.”

And Uncle Asriel, she thought; but she didn’t mention that.

Now that Lyra had a task in mind, she felt much better. Helping Mrs. Coulter had been all very well, but Pantalaimon was right: she wasn’t really doing any work there, she was just a pretty pet. On the gyptian boat, there was real work to do, and Ma Costa made sure she did it. She cleaned and swept, she peeled potatoes and made tea, she greased the propeller shaft bearings, she kept the weed trap clear over the propeller, she washed dishes, she opened lock gates, she tied the boat up at mooring posts, and within a couple of days she was as much at home with this new life as if she’d been born gyptian.

What she didn’t notice was that the Costas were alert every second for unusual signs of interest in Lyra from the waterside people. If she hadn’t realized it, she was important, and Mrs. Coulter and the Oblation Board were bound to be searching everywhere for her. Indeed, Tony heard from gossip in pubs along the way that the police were making raids on houses and farms and building yards and factories without any explanation, though there was a rumor that they were searching for a missing girl. And that in itself was odd, considering all the kids that had gone missing without being looked for. Gyptians and land folk alike were getting jumpy and nervous.

And there was another reason for the Costas’ interest in Lyra; but she wasn’t to learn that for a few days yet.

So they took to keeping her below decks when they passed a lockkeeper’s cottage or a canal basin, or anywhere there were likely to be idlers hanging about. Once they passed through a town where the police were searching all the boats that came along the waterway, and holding up the traffic in both directions. The Costas were equal to that, though. There was a secret compartment beneath Ma’s bunk, where Lyra lay cramped for two hours while the police banged up and down the length of the boat unsuccessfully.

“Why didn’t their dæmons find me, though?” she asked afterward, and Ma showed her the lining of the secret space: cedarwood, which had a soporific
effect on dæmons; and it was true that Pantalaimon had spent the whole time happily asleep by Lyra’s head.

Slowly, with many halts and detours, the Costas’ boat drew nearer the fens, that wide and never fully mapped wilderness of huge skies and endless marshland in Eastern Anglia. The furthest fringe of it mingled indistinguishably with the creeks and tidal inlets of the shallow sea, and the other side of the sea mingled indistinguishably with Holland; and parts of the fens had been drained and dyked by Hollanders, some of whom had settled there; so the language of the fens was thick with Dutch. But parts had never been drained or planted or settled at all, and in the wildest central regions, where eels slithered and waterbirds flocked, where eerie marsh fires flickered and waylurkers tempted careless travelers to their doom in the swamps and bogs, the gyptian people had always found it safe to muster.

And now by a thousand winding channels and creeks and watercourses, gyptian boats were moving in toward the byanplats, the only patch of slightly higher ground in the hundreds of square miles of marsh and bog. There was an ancient wooden meeting hall there with a huddle of permanent dwellings around it, and wharves and jetties and an eelmarket. When the gyptians called a byanroping—a summons or muster of families—so many boats filled the waterways that you could walk for a mile in any direction over their decks; or so it was said. The gyptians ruled in the fens. No one else dared enter, and while the gyptians kept the peace and traded fairly, the landlopers turned a blind eye to the incessant smuggling and the occasional feuds. If a gyptian body floated ashore down the coast, or got snagged in a fishnet, well—it was only a gyptian.

Lyra listened enthralled to tales of the fen dwellers, of the great ghost dog Black Shuck, of the marsh fires arising from bubbles of witch oil, and began to think of herself as gyptian even before they reached the fens. She had soon slipped back into her Oxford voice, and now she was acquiring a gyptian one, complete with Fen-Dutch words. Ma Costa had to remind her of a few things.

“You en’t gyptian, Lyra. You might pass for gyptian with practice, but there’s more to us than gyptian language. There’s deeps in us and strong currents. We’re water people all through, and you en’t, you’re a fire person. What you’re most like is marsh fire, that’s the place you have in the gyptian scheme; you got witch oil in your soul. Deceptive, that’s what you are, child.”

Lyra was hurt.

“I en’t never deceived anyone! You ask …”

There was no one to ask, of course, and Ma Costa laughed, but kindly.

“Can’t you see I’m a paying you a compliment, you gosling?” she said, and Lyra was pacified, though she didn’t understand.

When they reached the byanplats it was evening, and the sun was about to set in a splash of bloody sky. The low island and the Zaal were humped blackly against the light, like the clustered buildings around; threads of smoke rose into the still air, and from the press of boats all around came the smells of frying fish, of smokeleaf, of jenniver spirit.

They tied up close to the Zaal itself, at a mooring Tony said had been used by their family for generations. Presently Ma Costa had the frying pan going, with a couple of fat eels hissing and sputtering and the kettle on for potato powder. Tony and Kerim oiled their hair, put on their finest leather jackets and blue spotted neckerchiefs, loaded their fingers with silver rings, and went to greet some old friends in the neighboring boats and drink a glass or two in the nearest bar. They came back with important news.