The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials 1)

She stopped in midsentence, because something had suddenly come into her mind. During that strange evening she'd spent hidden in the Retiring Room, Lord Asriel had shown a lantern slide of a man with streams of light pouring from his hand; and there'd been a small figure beside him, with less light around it; and he'd said it was a child; and someone had asked if it was a severed child, and her uncle had said no, that was the point. Lyra remembered that severed meant “cut.”

And then something else hit her heart: where was Roger?

She hadn't seen him since the morning….

Suddenly she felt afraid. Pantalaimon, as a miniature lion, sprang into her arms and growled. She said goodbye to the youths by the gate and walked quietly back into Turl Street, and then ran full pelt for Jordan lodge, tumbling in through the door a second before the now cheetah-shaped daemon.

The Porter was sanctimonious.

“I had to ring the Master and tell him,” he said. “He en't pleased at all. I wouldn't be in your shoes, not for money I wouldn't.”

“Where's Roger?” she demanded.

“I en't seen him. He'll be for it, too. Ooh, when Mr. Cawson catches him—”

Lyra ran to the kitchen and thrust her way into the hot, clangorous, steaming bustle.

“Where's Roger?” she shouted.

“Clear off, Lyra! We're busy here!”

“But where is he? Has he turned up or not?”

No one seemed interested.

“But where is he? You must've heard!” Lyra shouted at the chef, who boxed her ears and sent her storming away.

Bernie the pastry cook tried to calm her down, but she wouldn't be consoled.

“They got him! Them bloody Gobblers, they oughter catch 'em and bloody kill 'em! I hate 'em! You don't care about Roger—”

“Lyra, we all care about Roger—”

“You don't, else you'd all stop work and go and look for him right now! I hate you!”

“There could be a dozen reasons why Roger en't turned up. Listen to sense. We got dinner to prepare and serve in less than an hour; the Master's got guests in the lodging, and he'll be eating over there, and that means Chef'11 have to attend to getting the food there quick so it don't go cold; and what with one thing and another, Lyra, life's got to go on. I'm sure Roger'11 turn up….”

Lyra turned and ran out of the kitchen, knocking over a stack of silver dish covers and ignoring the roar of anger that arose. She sped down the steps and across the quadrangle, between the chapel and Palmer's Tower and into the Yaxley Quad, where the oldest buildings of the College stood.

Pantalaimon scampered before her, flowing up the stairs to the very top, where Lyra's bedroom was. Lyra barged open the door, dragged her rickety chair to the window, flung wide the casement, and scrambled out. There was a lead-lined stone gutter a foot wide just below the window, and once she was standing in that, she turned and clambered up over the rough tiles until she stood on the topmost ridge of the roof. There she opened her mouth and screamed. Pantalaimon, who always became a bird once on the roof, flew round and round shrieking rook shrieks with her.

The evening sky was awash with peach, apricot, cream: tender little ice-cream clouds in a wide orange sky. The spires and towers of Oxford stood around them, level but no higher; the green woods of Chateau-Vert and White Ham rose on either side to the east and the west. Rooks were cawing somewhere, and bells were ringing, and from the oxpens the steady beat of a gas engine announced the ascent of the evening Royal Mail zeppelin for London. Lyra watched it climb away beyond the spire of St. Michael's Chapel, as big at first as the tip of her little finger when she held it at arm's length, and then steadily smaller until it was a dot in the pearly sky.

She turned and looked down into the shadowed quadrangle, where the black-gowned figures of the Scholars were already beginning to drift in ones and twos toward the buttery, their daemons strutting or fluttering alongside or perching calmly on their shoulders. The lights were going on in the Hall; she could see the stained-glass windows gradually beginning to glow as a servant moved up the tables lighting the naphtha lamps. The Steward's bell began to toll, announcing half an hour before dinner.

This was her world. She wanted it to stay the same forever and ever, but it was changing around her, for someone out there was stealing children. She sat on the roof ridge, chin in hands.

“We better rescue him, Pantalaimon,” she said. He answered in his rook voice from the chimney. “It'll be dangerous,” he said. '“Course! I know that.”

“Remember what they said in the Retiring Room.” “What?”

“Something about a child up in the Arctic. The one that wasn't attracting the Dust.”

“They said it was an entire child….What about it?”

“That might be what they're going to do to Roger and the gyptians and the other kids.”

“What?”

“Well, what does entire mean?”

“Dunno. They cut 'em in half, probably. I reckon they make slaves out of 'em. That'd be more use. They probably got mines up there. Uranium mines for atomcraft. I bet that's what it is. And if they sent grownups down the mine, they'd be dead, so they use kids instead because they cost less. That's what they've done with him.”

“I think—”

But what Pantalaimon thought had to wait, because someone began to shout from below.

“Lyra! Lyra! You come in this instant!”

There was a banging on the window frame. Lyra knew the voice and the impatience: it was Mrs. Lonsdale, the Housekeeper. There was no hiding from her.

Tight-faced, Lyra slid down the roof and into the gutter, and then climbed in through the window again. Mrs. Lonsdale was running some water into the little chipped basin, to the accompaniment of a great groaning and hammering from the pipes.

“The number of times you been told about going out there—Look at you! Just look at your skirt—it's filthy! Take it off at once and wash yourself while I look for something decent that en't torn. Why you can't keep yourself clean and tidy…”

Lyra was too sulky even to ask why she was having to wash and dress, and no grownup ever gave reasons of their own accord. She dragged the dress over her head and dropped it on the narrow bed, and began to wash desultorily while Pantalaimon, a canary now, hopped closer and closer to Mrs. Lonsdale's daemon, a stolid retriever, trying in vain to annoy him.

“Look at the state of this wardrobe! You en't hung nothing up for weeks! Look at the creases in this—”

Look at this, look at that…Lyra didn't want to look. She shut her eyes as she rubbed at her face with the thin towel.

“You'll just have to wear it as it is. There en't time to take an iron to it. God bless me, girl, your knees—look at the state of them….”

“Don't want to look at nothing,” Lyra muttered.

Mrs. Lonsdale smacked her leg. “Wash,” she said ferociously. “You get all that dirt off.”

“Why?” Lyra said at last. “I never wash my knees usually. No one's going to look at my knees. What've I got to do all this for? You don't care about Roger neither, any more than Chef does. I'm the only one that—” Another smack, on the other leg.

“None of that nonsense. I'm a Parslow, same as Roger's father. He's my second cousin. I bet you didn't know that, 'cause I bet you never asked, Miss Lyra. I bet it never occurred to you. Don't you chide me with not caring about the boy. God knows, I even care about you, and you give me little enough reason and no thanks.”

She seized the flannel and rubbed Lyra's knees so hard she left the skin bright pink and sore, but clean.

“The reason for this is you're going to have dinner with the Master and his guests. I hope to God you behave. Speak when you're spoken to, be quiet and polite, smile nicely and don't you ever say Dunno when someone asks you a question.”

She dragged the best dress onto Lyra's skinny frame, tugged it straight, fished a bit of red ribbon out of the tangle in a drawer, and brushed Lyra's hair with a coarse brush.

“If they'd let me know earlier, I could've given your hair a proper wash. Well, that's too bad. As long as they don't look too close…There. Now stand up straight. Where's those best patent-leather shoes?”

Five minutes later Lyra was knocking on the door of the Master's lodging, the grand and slightly gloomy house that opened into the Yaxley Quadrangle and backed onto the Library Garden. Pantalaimon, an ermine now for politeness, rubbed himself against her leg. The door was opened by the Master's manservant Cousins, an old enemy of Lyra's; but both knew that this was a state of truce.