“All right, enough,” Lyra said shakily. “You’re being a pain, you know? You’re more observant, you’re this, you’re that, I never notice anything…That’s all true, Pan. I know it is. But why compete? Why try and make a fool of me? You notice things for me, and I think of things for you. We do what we’re good at. We used to be kind to each other. We are each other. We shouldn’t have secrets. We should tell the truth to each other.”
He said nothing, but he wasn’t pretending to be asleep. Then he said, “She told me what you were talking about.”
“Well then.”
“No, not well then. All this time you wanted me to tell you something and you didn’t even ask?”
“I was worried in case it wasn’t the right time. I didn’t want to make you feel you had to. I don’t know. This is difficult, Pan. Trying not to ask…It never felt easy. But I’d done something horrible to you in the first place and you had the right to keep it to yourself, if you wanted to. But I didn’t want you to think I didn’t care or I wasn’t interested…”
“I wouldn’t ever think that.”
There was another silence, but a more companionable one.
“What did she say?” said Lyra. “If she didn’t tell you that nonsense about lovers.”
“She didn’t tell me. I worked it out, and it wasn’t the flower. After all—”
“Answer!” she said, and pulled his tail.
“All right. I didn’t know what she was talking about at first—I thought she was mad. It was hard to know what to say. She said some people, witches and normal people as well, sort of quarrel with their dæmons. In the end they come to hate each other. They never speak, they try and hurt each other, they just feel contempt, they never touch…It’s easier for witches because they can put the whole world between them and their dæmons if they want to. But still they only live half a life, really. And if you’re not a witch…”
“John the porter at Gabriel!”
“Yeah—like that. Just like that.”
One of the porters at Gabriel College never spoke to his dæmon, or she to him. He was a quiet and courteous man, she a bitter-looking terrier. Lyra had been through Gabriel lodge scores of times, and whenever John was on duty there was an air of profound and helpless melancholy under the vaulted stone roof. Coming out of the lodge into the quadrangle was like passing from cold to warm. Lyra hadn’t thought of it like that before, but now she shivered, and resolved, next time she went there, to stop and be friendly to the unhappy man and his silent dæmon.
“When I think of what that must be like,” she said, “I mean, to get into a state like that, it makes me think of the abyss. That horrible endless bottomless—it must be like having an abyss right next to you every moment, knowing it’s there all the time…just horrible.”
The abyss that opened out of the world of the dead was something that Pantalaimon hadn’t seen, but Lyra had told him all about it.
“When I was with Will’s dæmon, before she had her name,” Pan said, and Lyra rubbed her chin on his head, “we fell in a river and got carried towards a waterfall. And we saved each other. But the feeling of being swept towards it…”
“Pan, d’you think it might have happened at the same time as I nearly fell?”
“It might have done…”
“It must have done. Or I’m sure I’d have felt it with you.”
“Maybe you falling into the abyss is what made me dizzy. I would have felt it, I know I would.”
“Yeah! It must be.”
They both fell silent. But this falling was into the loved and familiar, into safety.
“Anyway, she knew what she was talking about, that dæmon,” said Lyra. “But I’m glad you’re not a snake.”
“D’you remember when we saw that mongoose in the museum and I was a snake and Roger’s Salcilia was a mongoose, and she couldn’t catch me, so I had to let her because they were getting upset?”
Lyra did. The snow was falling thickly now, and it was just the time when the flakes stop looking dark against the sky, because the sky has become darker than they are, so they look light instead. The little tractor’s solid rattle sounded muffled in the feathery air. Duncan Armstrong switched on the lights.
“I bet Mary Malone’s dæmon would be a snake,” Lyra murmured. “She was wise.”
“He was a bird. Like a blackbird, or more like a crow with a yellow beak.”
“How do you know?”
“I could see him. At the end, just when we got to the Botanic Garden and said goodbye. She can see him now too. Like Will can see Kirjava. I’m sure she can.”
Lyra saw no reason to doubt him. She’d been in no state to notice anything at that point; she had been blind with tears and love and sadness. But he was part of her, and he had noticed, and she felt proud of him, because not many people had dæmons as clear-sighted as Pantalaimon. She stroked his head and settled down deeper in the furs as they fell asleep.
“Never notice anything,” was the last thing she whispered, fondly scornful: “Ha!”
A Note from the Author
Between the publication of The Amber Spyglass and La Belle Sauvage, quite a long time went by during which I worked on other things. But Lyra and her world wouldn’t leave me alone, and when I thought of this story I didn’t need much prompting to write it down.
The prompting came from the National Theatre. Nicholas Hytner, the Director at that time, had put on a magnificent production of the entire His Dark Materials story in two full-length plays, with a brilliant script by Nicholas Wright. When the NT held a fundraising gala