The Amber Spyglass (45 page)
She sat on the bench and waited for Pan to come to her. He liked to surprise her, but she usually managed to see him before he reached her, and there was his shadowy form, flowing along beside the riverbank. She looked the other way and pretended she hadn’t seen him, and then seized him suddenly when he leapt onto the bench.
“I nearly did it,” he said.
“You’ll have to get better than that. I heard you coming all the way from the gate.”
He sat on the back of the bench with his forepaws resting on her shoulder.
“What are we going to tell her?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s only to meet this headmistress, anyway. It’s not to go to the school.”
“But we will go, won’t we?”
“Yes,” she said, “probably.”
“It might be good.”
Lyra wondered about the other pupils. They might be cleverer than she was, or more sophisticated, and they were sure to know a lot more than she did about all the things that were important to girls of their age. And she wouldn’t be able to tell them a hundredth of the things that she knew. They’d be bound to think she was simple and ignorant.
“D’you think Dame Hannah can really do the alethiometer?” said Pantalaimon.
“With the books, I’m sure she can. I wonder how many books there are? I bet we could learn them all, and do without. Imagine having to carry a pile of books everywhere . . . Pan?”
“What?”
“Will you ever tell me what you and Will’s dæmon did while we were apart?”
“One day,” he said. “And she’ll tell Will, one day. We agreed that we’d know when the time had come, but we wouldn’t tell either of you till then.”
“All right,” she said peaceably.
She had told Pantalaimon everything, but it was right that he should have some secrets from her, after the way she’d abandoned him.
And it was comforting to think that she and Will had another thing in common. She wondered whether there would ever come an hour in her life when she didn’t think of him—didn’t speak to him in her head, didn’t relive every moment they’d been together, didn’t long for his voice and his hands and his love. She had never dreamed of what it would feel like to love someone so much; of all the things that had astonished her in her adventures, that was what astonished her the most. She thought the tenderness it left in her heart was like a bruise that would never go away, but she would cherish it forever.
Pan slipped down to the bench and curled up on her lap. They were safe together in the dark, she and her dæmon and their secrets. Somewhere in this sleeping city were the books that would tell her how to read the alethiometer again, and the kindly and learned woman who was going to teach her, and the girls at the school, who knew so much more than she did.
She thought, They don’t know it yet, but they’re going to be my friends.
Pantalaimon murmured, “That thing that Will said . . .”
“When?”
“On the beach, just before you tried the alethiometer. He said there wasn’t any elsewhere. It was what his father had told you. But there was something else.”
“I remember. He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn’t live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.”
“He said we had to build something . . .”
“That’s why we needed our full life, Pan. We
would
have gone with Will and Kirjava, wouldn’t we?”
“Yes. Of course! And they would have come with us. But—”
“But then we wouldn’t have been able to build it. No one could if they put themselves first. We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we’ve got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds, and then we’ll build . . .”
Her hands were resting on his glossy fur. Somewhere in the garden a nightingale was singing, and a little breeze touched her hair and stirred the leaves overhead. All the different bells of the city chimed, once each, this one high, that one low, some close by, others farther off, one cracked and peevish, another grave and sonorous, but agreeing in all their different voices on what the time was, even if some of them got to it a little more slowly than others. In that other Oxford where she and Will had kissed good-bye, the bells would be chiming, too, and a nightingale would be singing, and a little breeze would be stirring the leaves in the Botanic Garden.
“And then what?” said her dæmon sleepily. “Build what?”
“The Republic of Heaven,” said Lyra.
THE
END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
His Dark Materials
could not have come into existence at all without the help and encouragement of friends, family, books, and strangers.
I owe these people specific thanks: Liz Cross, for her meticulous and tirelessly cheerful editorial work; Anne Wallace-Hadrill, for letting me see over her narrow boat; Richard Osgood, of the University of Oxford Archaeological Institute, for telling me how archaeological expeditions are arranged; Michael Malleson, of the Trent Studio Forge, Dorset, for showing me how to forge iron; and Mike Froggatt and Tanaqui Weaver, for bringing me more of the right sort of paper (with two holes in it) when my stock was running low. I must also praise the café at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. Whenever I was stuck with a problem in the narrative, a cup of their coffee and an hour or so’s work in that friendly room would dispel it, apparently without effort on my part. It never failed.
I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching for a novel is “Read like a butterfly, write like a bee,” and if this story contains any honey, it is entirely because of the quality of the nectar I found in the work of better writers. But there are three debts that need acknowledgment above all the rest. One is to the essay “On the Marionette Theater,” by Heinrich von Kleist, which I first read in a translation by Idris Parry in
The Times Literary Supplement
in 1978. The second is to John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
. The third is to the works of William Blake.
Finally, my greatest debts. To David Fickling, and to his inexhaustible faith and encouragement as well as his sure and vivid sense of how stories can be made to work better, I owe much of what success this work has achieved; to Simon Boughton and Joan Slattery, I owe profound gratitude for their patience and generosity with the one thing I needed most in finishing this book, namely, time; to Caradoc King, I owe more than half a lifetime of unfailing friendship and support; to Enid Jones, the teacher who introduced me so long ago to
Paradise Lost
, I owe the best that education can give, the notion that responsibility and delight can coexist; to my wife, Jude, and to my sons, Jamie and Tom, I owe everything else under the sun.
Philip Pullman
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Philip Pullman is the acclaimed author of
The Golden Compass
and
The Subtle Knife
, the first two volumes in the trilogy
His Dark Materials
. His other books for children and young adults include
I Was a Rat!, Count Karlstein
, and a trilogy of Victorian thrillers featuring Sally Lockhart:
The Ruby in the Smoke, The Shadow in the North,
and
The Tiger in the Well.
A graduate of Oxford University with a degree in English, Philip Pullman lives with his family in Oxford, England.
Also by Philip Pullman
His Dark Materials:
The Golden Compass • Book I
The Subtle Knife • Book II
The Broken Bridge
Count Karlstein
I Was a Rat!
The Ruby in the Smoke
The Shadow in the North
The Tiger in the Well
The Tin Princess
The White Mercedes
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2000 by Philip Pullman
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
“The Ecclesiast” from
Rivers and Mountains
by John Ashbery. Copyright 1962, 1963, 1964, 1966 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the author.
“The Third Elegy” from
Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
by Rainer Maria Rilke. Copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
KNOPF, BORZOI BOOKS
, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pullman, Philip, 1946–
The amber spyglass / Philip Pullman.
p. cm.—(His dark materials; bk. 3)
Summary: Lyra and Will find themselves at the center of a battle between the forces of the authority and those gathered by Lyra's father, Lord Asriel.
[1. Fantasy.] I. Title.
PZ7.P968 Am 2000
[Fic]—dc21 00-044776
eISBN: 978-0-375-89003-1
v3.0