His Dark Materials Omnibus (16 page)

Lyra could only sit in wonder.

“Here’s how it came about,” John Faa went on. “When he was a young man, Lord Asriel went exploring all over the North, and came back with a great fortune. And he was a high-spirited man, quick to anger, a passionate man.

“And your mother, she was passionate too. Not so well born as him, but a clever woman. A Scholar, even, and those who saw her said she was very beautiful. She and your father, they fell in love as soon’s they met.

“The trouble was, your mother was already married. She’d married a politician. He was a member of the king’s party, one of his closest advisers. A rising man.

“Now when your mother found herself with child, she feared to tell her husband the child wasn’t his. And when the baby was born—that’s you, girl—it was clear from the look of you that you didn’t favor her husband, but your true father, and she thought it best to hide you away and give out that you’d died.

“So you was took to Oxfordshire, where your father had estates, and put in the care of a gyptian woman to nurse. But someone whispered to your mother’s husband what had happened, and he came a flying down and ransacked the cottage where the gyptian woman had been, only she’d fled to the great house; and the husband followed after, in a murderous passion.

“Lord Asriel was out a hunting, but they got word to him and he came riding back in time to find your mother’s husband at the foot of the great staircase. Another moment and he’d have forced open the closet where the gyptian woman was hiding with you, but Lord Asriel challenged him, and they fought there and then, and Lord Asriel killed him.

“The gyptian woman heard and saw it all, Lyra, and that’s how we know.

“The consequence was a great lawsuit. Your father en’t the kind of man to deny or conceal the truth, and it left the judges with a problem. He’d killed all right, he’d shed blood, but he was defending his home and his child against an intruder. On t’other hand, the law allows any man to avenge the violation of his wife, and the dead man’s lawyers argued that he were doing just that.

“The case lasted for weeks, with volumes of argument back and forth. In the end the judges punished Lord Asriel by confiscating all his property and all his land, and left him a poor man; and he had been richer than a king.

“As for your mother, she wanted nothing to do with it, nor with you. She turned her back. The gyptian nurse told me she’d often been afeared of how your mother would treat you, because she was a proud and scornful woman. So much for her.

“Then there was you. If things had fallen out different, Lyra, you might have been brought up a gyptian, because the nurse begged the court to let her have you; but we gyptians got little standing in the law. The court decided you was to be placed in a priory, and so you were, with the Sisters of Obedience at Watlington. You won’t remember.

“But Lord Asriel wouldn’t stand for that. He had a hatred of priors and monks and nuns, and being a high-handed man he just rode in one day and carried you off. Not to look after himself, nor to give to the gyptians; he took you to Jordan College, and dared the law to undo it.

“Well, the law let things be. Lord Asriel went back to his explorations, and you grew up at Jordan College. The one thing he said, your father, the one condition he made, was that your mother shouldn’t be let see you. If she ever tried to do that, she was to be prevented, and he was to be told, because all the anger in his nature had turned against her now. The Master promised faithfully to do that; and so time passed.

“Then come all this anxiety about Dust. And all over the country, all over the world, wise men and women too began a worrying about it. It weren’t of any account to us gyptians, until they started taking our kids. That’s when we got interested. And we got connections in all sorts of places you wouldn’t imagine, including Jordan College. You wouldn’t know, but there’s been someone a watching over you and reporting to us ever since you been there. ’Cause we got an interest in you, and that gyptian woman who nursed you, she never stopped being anxious on your behalf.”

“Who was it watching over me?” said Lyra. She felt immensely important and strange, that all her doings should be an object of concern so far away.

“It was a kitchen servant. It was Bernie Johansen, the pastry cook. He’s half-gyptian; you never knew that, I’ll be bound.”

Bernie was a kindly, solitary man, one of those rare people whose dæmon was the same sex as himself. It was Bernie she’d shouted at in her despair when Roger was taken. And Bernie had been telling the gyptians everything! She marveled.

“So anyway,” John Faa went on, “we heard about you going away from Jordan College, and how it came about at a time when Lord Asriel was imprisoned and couldn’t prevent it. And we remembered what he’d said to the Master that he must never do, and we remembered that the man your mother had married, the politician Lord Asriel killed, was called Edward Coulter.”

“Mrs. Coulter?” said Lyra, quite stupefied.
“She
en’t my mother?”

“She is. And if your father had been free, she wouldn’t never have dared to defy him, and you’d still be at Jordan, not knowing a thing. But what the Master was a doing letting you go is a mystery I can’t explain. He was charged with your care. All I can guess is that she had some power over him.”

Lyra suddenly understood the Master’s curious behavior on the morning she’d left.

“But he didn’t want to …” she said, trying to remember it exactly. “He … I had to go and see him first thing that morning, and I mustn’t tell Mrs. Coulter.… It was like he wanted to protect me from her …” She stopped, and looked at the two men carefully, and then decided to tell them the whole truth about the Retiring Room. “See, there was something else. That evening I hid in the Retiring Room, I saw the Master try to poison Lord Asriel. I saw him put some powder in the wine and I told my uncle and he knocked the decanter off the table and spilled it. So I saved his life. I could never understand why the Master would want to poison him, because he was always so kind. Then on the morning I left he called me in early to his study, and I had to go secretly so no one would know, and he said …” Lyra racked her brains to try and remember exactly what it was the Master had said. No good; she shook her head. “The only thing I could understand was that he gave me something and I had to keep it secret from her, from Mrs. Coulter. I suppose it’s all right if I tell you.…”

She felt in the pocket of the wolfskin coat and took out the velvet package. She laid it on the table, and she sensed John Faa’s massive simple curiosity and Farder Coram’s bright flickering intelligence both trained on it like searchlights.

When she laid the alethiometer bare, it was Farder Coram who spoke first.

“I never thought I’d ever set eyes on one of them again. That’s a symbol reader. Did he tell you anything about it, child?”

“No. Only that I’d have to work out how to read it by myself. And he called it an alethiometer.”

“What’s that mean?” said John Faa, turning to his companion.

“That’s a Greek word. I reckon it’s from
aletheia
, which means truth. It’s a truth measure. And have you worked out how to use it?” he said to her.

“No. Least, I can make the three short hands point to different pictures, but I can’t do anything with the long one. It goes all over. Except sometimes, right, sometimes when I’m sort of concentrating, I can make the long needle go this way or that just by thinking it.”

“What’s it do, Farder Coram?” said John Faa. “And how do you read it?”

“All these pictures round the rim,” said Farder Coram, holding it delicately toward John Faa’s blunt strong gaze, “they’re symbols, and each one stands for a whole series of things. Take the anchor, there. The first meaning of that is hope, because hope holds you fast like an anchor so you don’t give way. The second meaning is steadfastness. The third meaning is snag, or prevention. The fourth meaning is the sea. And so on, down to ten, twelve, maybe a never-ending series of meanings.”

“And do you know them all?”

“I know some, but to read it fully I’d need the book. I seen the book and I know where it is, but I en’t got it.”

“We’ll come back to that,” said John Faa. “Go on with how you read it.”

“You got three hands you can control,” Farder Coram explained, “and you use them to ask a question. By pointing to three symbols you can ask any question you can imagine, because you’ve got so many levels of each one. Once you got your question framed, the other needle swings round and points to more symbols that give you the answer.”

“But how does it know what level you’re a thinking of when you set the question?” said John Faa.

“Ah, by itself it don’t. It only works if the questioner holds the levels in their mind. You got to know all the meanings, first, and there must be a thousand or more. Then you got to be able to hold ’em in your mind without fretting at it or pushing for an answer, and just watch while the needle wanders. When it’s gone round its full range, you’ll know what the answer is. I know how it works because I seen it done once by a wise man in Uppsala, and that’s the only time I ever saw one before. Do you know how rare these are?”

“The Master told me there was only six made,” Lyra said.

“Whatever the number, it en’t large.”

“And you kept this secret from Mrs. Coulter, like the Master told you?” said John Faa.

“Yes. But her dæmon, right, he used to go in my room. And I’m sure he found it.”

“I see. Well, Lyra, I don’t know if we’ll ever understand the full truth, but this is my guess, as good as I can make it. The Master was given a charge by Lord Asriel to look after you and keep you safe from your mother. And that was what he did, for ten years or more. Then Mrs. Coulter’s friends in the Church helped her set up this Oblation Board, for what purpose we don’t know, and there she was, as powerful in her way as Lord Asriel was in his. Your parents, both strong in the world, both ambitious, and the Master of Jordan holding you in the balance between them.

“Now the Master’s got a hundred things to look after. His first concern is his College and the scholarship there. So if he sees a threat to that, he has to move agin it. And the Church in recent times, Lyra, it’s been a getting more commanding. There’s councils for this and councils for that; there’s talk of reviving the Office of Inquisition, God forbid. And the Master has to tread warily between all these powers. He has to keep Jordan College on the right side of the Church, or it won’t survive.

“And another concern of the Master is you, child. Bernie Johansen was always clear about that. The Master of Jordan and the other Scholars, they loved you like their own child. They’d do anything to keep you safe, not just because they’d promised to Lord Asriel that they would, but for your own sake. So if the Master gave you up to Mrs. Coulter when he’d promised Lord Asriel he wouldn’t, he must have thought you’d be safer with her than in Jordan College, in spite of all appearances. And when he set out to poison Lord Asriel, he must have thought that what Lord Asriel was a doing would place all of them in danger, and maybe all of us, too; maybe all the world. I see the Master as a man having terrible choices to make; whatever he chooses will do harm, but maybe if he does the right thing, a little less harm will come about than if he chooses wrong. God preserve me from having to make that sort of choice.

“And when it come to the point where he had to let you go, he gave you the symbol reader and bade you keep it safe. I wonder what he had in mind for you to do with it; as you couldn’t read it, I’m foxed as to what he was a thinking.”

“He said Uncle Asriel presented the alethiometer to Jordan College years before,” Lyra said, struggling to remember. “He was going to say something else, and then someone knocked at the door and he had to stop. What I thought was, he might have wanted me to keep it away from Lord Asriel too.”

“Or even the opposite,” said John Faa.

“What d’you mean, John?” said Farder Coram.

“He might have had it in mind to ask Lyra to return it to Lord Asriel, as a kind of recompense for trying to poison him. He might have thought the danger from Lord Asriel had passed. Or that Lord Asriel could read some wisdom from this instrument and hold back from his purpose. If Lord Asriel’s held captive now, it might help set him free. Well, Lyra, you better take this symbol reader and keep it safe. If you kept it safe so far, I en’t worried about leaving it with you. But there might come a time when we need to consult it, and I reckon we’ll ask for it then.”

He folded the velvet over it and slid it back across the table. Lyra wanted to ask all kinds of questions, but suddenly she felt shy of this massive man, with his little eyes so sharp and kindly among their folds and wrinkles.

One thing she had to ask, though.

“Who was the gyptian woman who nursed me?”

“Why, it was Billy Costa’s mother, of course. She won’t have told you, because I en’t let her, but she knows what we’re a talking of here, so it’s all out in the open.

“Now you best be getting back to her. You got plenty to be a thinking of, child. When three days is gone past, we’ll have another roping and discuss all there is to do. You be a good girl. Goodnight, Lyra.”

“Goodnight, Lord Faa. Goodnight, Farder Coram,” she said politely, clutching the alethiometer to her breast with one hand and scooping up Pantalaimon with the other.

Both old men smiled kindly at her. Outside the door of the parley room Ma Costa was waiting, and as if nothing had happened since Lyra was born, the boat mother gathered her into her great arms and kissed her before bearing her off to bed.

Lyra had to adjust to her new sense of her own story, and that couldn’t be done in a day. To see Lord Asriel as her father was one thing, but to accept Mrs. Coulter as her mother was nowhere near so easy. A couple of months ago she would have rejoiced, of course, and she knew that too, and felt confused.