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Chapter Three

Lyra’s Jordan

Jordan College was the grandest and richest of all the colleges in Oxford It was probably the largest, too, though no one knew for certain The buildings, which were grouped around three irregular quadrangles, dated frohteenth century It had never been planned; it had grown piece at every spot, and the final effect was one of jurandeur Soenerations the same fae ashis son the craft; the two of them and their three workmen would scra they’d erected at the corner of the library, or over the roof of the chapel, and haul up bright new blocks of stone or rolls of shiny lead or balks of tie owned farland It was said that you could walk from Oxford to Bristol in one direction and London in the other, and never leave Jordan land In every part of the kingdom there were dye works and brick kilns, forests and atomcraft works that paid rent to Jordan, and every quarter-day the bursar and his clerks would tot it all up, announce the total to Concilium, and order a pair of swans for the feast Some of the money was put by for reinvestment - Concilium had just approved the purchase of an office block in Manchester - and the rest was used to pay the Scholars’ es of the servants (and the Parslows, and the other dozen or so fae), to keep the wine cellar richly filled, to buy books and anbarographs for the ile and extended, burrow-like, for several floors beneath the ground, and, not least, to buy the latest philosophical apparatus to equip the chapel

It was ie had no rival, either in Europe or in New France, as a center of experiy Lyra knew that e’s eminence, and liked to boast of it to the various urchins and ragamuffins she played with by the canal or the claybeds; and she regarded visiting Scholars and e scorn, because they didn’t belong to Jordan and so s, than the humblest of Jordan’s under-Scholars

As for what experiy was, Lyra had no more idea than the urchins She had foric, with the movements of the stars and planets, with tiny particles of uesswork, really Probably the stars had daey involved talking to the to the star dae his head in regret But whatbetween them, she couldn’t conceive

Nor was she particularly interested In many ways Lyra was a barbarian What she liked best was claer, the kitchen boy as her particular friend, to spit plu Scholars or to hoot like owls outside a here a tutorial was going on, or racing through the narrow streets, or stealing apples fro war Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a child’s life in Oxford Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be ?

In fact, of course, Lyra and her peers were engaged in deadly warfare There were several wars running at once The children (young servants, and the children of servants, and Lyra) of one college waged war on those of another Lyra had once been captured by the children of Gabriel College, and Roger and their friends Hugh Lovat and Si through the Precentor’s garden and gathering armfuls of small stone-hard plues, which allowed for endless permutations of alliance and betrayal But the enotten in a er: then all the collegers banded together and went into battle against the town-iesThis rivalry was hundreds of years old, and very deep and satisfying

But even this was forgotten when the other enemies threatened One enemy was perennial: the brickburners’ children, who lived by the claybeds and were despised by collegers and townies alike Last year Lyra and some townies hadthe brick-burners’ children with luy castle they’d built, before rolling the substance they lived by until victors and vanquished alike reseular eneyptian families, who lived in canal boats, ca and autuht There was one faularly returned to theirin that part of the city known as Jericho, ho ever since she could first throw a stone When they were last in Oxford, she and Roger and some of the other kitchen boys froe had laid an ahtly painted narrowboat until the whole family came out to chase them away - at which point the reserve squad under Lyra raided the boat and cast it off fro in the way of all the other water traffic while Lyra’s raiders searched the boat fro Lyra fir If they pulled it out, she assured her troop, the boat would sink at once; but they didn’t find it, and had to abandon ship when the gyptians caught theh the narrow lanes of Jericho

That was Lyra’s world and her delight She was a coarse and greedy little savage, for the most part But she always had a dim sense that it wasn’t her whole world; that part of her also belonged in the grandeur and ritual of Jordan College; and that soh world of politics represented by Lord Asriel All she did with that knowledge was to give herself airs and lord it over the other urchins It had never occurred to her to find out more

So she had passed her childhood, like a half-wild cat The only variation in her days caular occasions when Lord Asriel visited the College A rich and powerful uncle was all very well to boast about, but the price of boasting was having to be caught by the ht to the Housekeeper to be washed and dressed in a clean frock, follohich she was escorted (with many threats) to the Senior Coroup of senior Scholars She dreaded being seen by Roger He’d caught sight of her on one of these occasions and hooted with laughter at this beribboned and pink-frilled vision She had responded with a volley of shrieking curses that shocked the poor Scholar as escorting her, and in the Senior Common Room she’d slumped mutinously in an armchair until the Master told her sharply to sit up, and then she’d glowered at theh

What happened on those aard, formal visits never varied After the tea, the Master and the other few Scholars who’d been invited left Lyra and her uncle together, and he called her to stand in front of him and tell him what she’d learned since his last visit And she would eoy, and he would sit back with one ankle resting on the other knee and watch her inscrutably until her words failed

Last year, before his expedition to the North, he’d gone on to say, "And how do you spend your ti?"

And she e Justplay, really"

And he said, "Let me see your hands, child"

She held out her hands for inspection, and he took theernails Beside hi her tail occasionally and gazing unblinkingly at Lyra

"Dirty," said Lord Asriel, pushing her hands away "Don’t they make you wash in this place?"

"Yes," she said "But the Chaplain’s fingernails are always dirty They’re even dirtier than mine"

"He’s a learned ot theet so dirty?"

She looked at hi on the roof was forbidden, though no one had actually said so "In some of the old rooms," she said finally

"And where else?"

"In the claybeds, sometimes"

"And?"

"Jericho and Port Meadow"

"Nowhere else?"

"No"

"You’re a liar I saw you on the roof only yesterday"

She bit her lip and said nothing He atching her sardonically

"So, you play on the roof as well," he went on "Do you ever go into the library?"

"No I found a rook on the library roof, though," she went on

"Did you? Did you catch it?"

"It had a hurt foot I was going to kill it and roast it but Roger said we should help it get better So we gave it scraps of food and soot better and fleay"

"Who’s Roger?"

"My friend The kitchen boy"

"I see So you’ve been all over the roof - "

"Not all over You can’t get onto the Sheldon Building because you have to juap There’s a skylight that opens onto it, but I’h to reach it"

"You’ve been all over the roof except the Sheldon Building What about underground?"

"Underground?"

"There’s as round as there is above it I’oing in a h Here"

He fished in his pocket and drew out a handful of coins, froold dollars

"Haven’t they taught you to say thank you?" he said

"Thank you," she mumbled

"Do you obey the Master?"

"Oh, yes"

"And respect the Scholars?"

"Yes"

Lord Asriel’s daehed softly It was the first sound she’d made, and Lyra blushed

"Go and play, then," said Lord Asriel

Lyra turned and darted to the door with relief, re to turn and blurt out a "Goodbye"

So Lyra’s life had been, before the day when she decided to hide in the Retiring Room, and first heard about Dust

And of course the Librarian rong in saying to the Master that she wouldn’t have been interested She would have listened eagerly now to anyone who could tell her about Dust She was to hear a great deal more about it in the months to come, and eventually she would know more about Dust than anyone in the world; but in thelived around her

And in any case there was soh the streets for sorow silent, as sohosts and others fear theinning to disappear

It would happen like this

East along the great highway of the River Isis, thronged with slow-es and asphalt boats and corn tankers, way down past Henley and Maidenhead to Teddington, where the tide from the German Ocean reaches, and further down still: to Mortlake, past the house of the great ardens spread out bright with fountains and banners by day, with tree laht; past White Hall Palace, where the king holds his weekly council of state; past the Shot Tower, dropping its endless drizzle of molten lead into vats of murky water; further down still, to where the river, wide and filthy noings in a great curve to the south

This is Li to disappear

He is called Tony Makarios His mother thinks he’s nine years old, but she has a poor ht, or ten His surnauess on his mother’s part, because he looksand Lascar in hiht, but he has a sort of cluive hisand plant a sticky kiss on her cheeks The poor woman is usually too fuddled to start such a procedure herself; but she responds war

At theabout the , and he won’t get fed at hoave hioing to waste that on food, when you can pick up so h the market, between the old-clothes stalls and the fortune-paper stalls, the fruiters and the fried-fish seller, with his little dae this way and that; and when a stall holder and her dae elsewhere, a brisk chirp sounds, and Tony’s hand shoots out and returns to his loose shirt with an apple or a couple of nuts, and finally with a hot pie

The stall holder sees that, and shouts, and her cat daemon leaps, but Tony’s sparrow is aloft and Tony hio with hi at the steps of St Catherine’s Oratory, where he sits down and takes out his stearavy on his shirt

And he’s being watched A lady in a long yellow-red fox-fur coat, a beautiful young lady whose dark hair falls, shining delicately, under the shadow of her fur-lined hood, is standing in the doorway of the oratory, half a dozen steps above hiht co inside, and the lady is holding a jeweled breviary

Tony knows nothing of this His face contentedly deep in the pie, his toes curled inward and his bare soles together, he sits and chews and shile his daeroo lady’s dae out from beside the fox-fur coat He is in the for and silky and of the old With sinuous movements he inches down the steps toward the boy, and sits a step above hi, and beco her head a fraction sideways, and hops along the stone a step or two

The monkey watches the sparrow; the sparroatches the monkey

The monkey reaches out slowly His little hand is black, his nails perfect horny claws, hisThe sparrow can’t resist She hops further, and further, and then, with a little flutter, up on to the azes closely at her before standing and swinging back to his hu the sparrow daemon with him The lady bends her scented head to whisper

And then Tony turns He can’t help it

"Ratter!" he says, half in alarm, his mouth full

The sparrow chirps It must be safe Tony ss his mouthful and stares

"Hello," says the beautiful lady "What’s your name?"

"Tony"

"Where do you live, Tony?"

"Clarice Walk"

"What’s in that pie?"

"Beefsteak"

"Do you like chocolatl?"

"Yeah!"

"As it happens, I’ve got more chocolatl than I can drink myself Will you come and help me drink it?"

He’s lost already He was lost the moment his sloitted daemon hopped onto thelady and the golden e’s Steps to a little green door in the side of a tall warehouse She knocks, the door is opened, they go in, the door is closed Tony will never come out - at least, by that entrance; and he’ll never see his , will think he’s run away, and when she remembers him, she’ll think it was her fault, and sob her sorry heart out

Little Tony Makarios wasn’t the only child to be caught by the lady with the golden monkey He found a dozen others in the cellar of the warehouse, boys and girls, none older than twelve or so; though since all of thee What Tony didn’t notice, of course, was the factor that they all had in common None of the children in that ware of puberty

The kind lady saw hiainst the wall, and provided by a silent serving wo of chocolatl from the saucepan on the iron stove Tony ate the rest of his pie and drank the sweet hot liquor without taking s took little notice of him: he was too small to be a threat, and too stolid to promise much satisfaction as a victim

It was another boy who asked the obvious question

"Hey, lady! What you got us all here for?"

He was a tough-looking wretch with dark chocolatl on his top lip and a gaunt black rat for a dae to a stout man with the air of a sea captain, and as she turned to answer, she looked so angelic in the hissing naphtha light that all the children fell silent

"We want your help," she said "You don’tus, do you?"

No one could say a word They all gazed, suddenly shy They had never seen a lady like this; she was so gracious and sweet and kind that they felt they hardly deserved their good luck, and whatever she asked, they’d give it gladly so as to stay in her presence a little longer

She told thee They would be well fed and wares back to their fanusson would take theht, they’d sail out to sea and set a course for the North

Soon those feho did want to send aaround the beautiful lady as she wrote a few lines at their dictation and, having let thee, folded it into a scented envelope and wrote the address they told her Tony would have liked to send so to his mother, but he had a realistic idea of her ability to read it He plucked at the lady’s fox-fur sleeve and whispered that he’d like her to tell his racious head close enough to his malodorous little body to hear, and stroked his head and proe on

Then the children clustered around to say goodbye The golden monkey stroked all their daemons, and they all touched the fox fur for luck, or as if they were drawing sooodness out of the lady, and she bade them all farewell and saw them in the care of the bold captain on board a steam launch at the jetty The sky was dark now, the river a hts The lady stood on the jetty and waved till she could see their faces no olden monkey nestled in her breast, and threw the little bundle of letters into the furnace before leaving the way she had coh to entice away, but eventually people noticed, and the police were stirred into reluctant action For a while there were no s But a rurew and spread, and when after a while a few children disappeared in Norwich, and then Sheffield, and then Manchester, the people in those places who’d heard of the disappearances elsewhere added the new vanishings to the story and gave it new strength

And so the legend grew of a roup of enchanters who spirited children away Some said their leader was a beautiful lady, others said a tall man with red eyes, while a third story told of a youth who laughed and sang to his victims so that they followed him like sheep

As for where they took these lost children, no two stories agreed Soround, to Fairyland Others said to a farm where the children were kept and fattened for the table Others said that the children were kept and sold as slaves to rich TartarsAnd so on

But one thing on which everyone agreed was the name of these invisible kidnappers They had to have a na about the at hoe - was delicious And the na as the Gobblers

"Don’t stay out late, or the Gobblers’11 get you!"

"My cousin in Northampton, she knooman whose little boy was took by the Gobblers"

"The Gobblers’ve been in Stratford They say they’re co south!"

And, inevitably:

"Let’s play kids and Gobblers!"

So said Lyra to Roger, one rainy afternoon when they were alone in the dusty attics He was her devoted slave by this time; he would have followed her to the ends of the earth

"How d’you play that?"

"You hide and I find you and slice you open, right, like the Gobblers do"

"You don’t knohat they do They ht not do that at all"

"You’re afraid of ’em," she said "I can tell"

"I en’t I don’t believe in ’em anyway"

"I do," she said decisively "But I en’t afraid either I’d just do what my uncle done last ti Roouest eren’t polite, and ive him a hard look and the man fell dead on the spot, with all foam and froth round his er doubtfully "They never said anything about that in the kitchen Anyway, you en’t allowed in the Retiring Room"

’"Course not They wouldn’t tell servants about a thing like that And I have been in the Retiring Roo that He done it to soht hiuts out, but when the first man come up with the knife, my uncle just looked at him, and he fell dead, so another one come up and he done the same to him, and finally there was only one left My uncle said he’d leave him alive if he untied him, so he did, and then my uncle killed hier was less sure about that than about Gobblers, but the story was too good to waste, so they took it in turns to be Lord Asriel and the expiring Tartars, using sherbet dip for the foam

However, that was a distraction; Lyra was still intent on playing Gobblers, and she inveigled Roger down into the wine cellars, which they entered by ether they crept through the great vaults where the College’s Tokay and Canary, its Burgundy, its brantere lying under the cobwebs of ages Ancient stone arches rose above thestones lay underfoot, and on all sides were ranged rack upon rack, tier upon tier, of bottles and barrels It was fascinating With Gobblers forgotten again, the two children tiptoed fro into every dark corner, with a single question growing ent in Lyra’s mind every moment: what did the wine taste like?

There was an easy way of answering that Lyra - over Roger’s fervent protests - picked out the oldest, twistiest, greenest bottle she could find, and, not having anything to extract the cork with, broke it off at the neck Huddled in the furthest corner, they sipped at the heady cri when they’d become drunk, and how they’d tell when they were Lyra didn’t like the taste rand and co their two dae over, giggling senselessly, and changing shape to look like gargoyles, each trying to be uglier than the other

Finally, and almost simultaneously, the children discovered what it was like to be drunk

"Do they like doing this?" gasped Roger, after vo copiously

"Yes," said Lyra, in the same condition "And so do I," she added stubbornly

Lyra learned nothing fro places She remean to explore underground, for as above ground was only a sus whose root syste for space above ground with St Michael’s College on one side, Gabriel College on the other, and the University Library behind) had begun, soes, to spread below the surface Tunnels, shafts, vaults, cellars, staircases had so hollowed out the earth below Jordan and for several hundred yards around it that there was ale stood on a sort of froth of stone

And now that Lyra had the taste for exploring it, she abandoned her usual haunt, the irregular alps of the College roofs, and plunged with Roger into this netherworld Fro the out of sight below the ground?

So one day she and Roger made their way into the crypt below the oratory This here generations of Masters had been buried, each in his lead-lined oak coffin in niches along the stone walls A stone tablet below each space gave their names:

SIMON LE CLERC, MASTER 1765-1789 CEREBATON

REQUIESCANT IN PACE

"What’s that er

"The first part’s his name, and the last bit’s Roman And there’s the dates in the middle when he was Master And the other na the silent vault, tracing the letters of more inscriptions:

FRANCIS LYALL, MASTER 1748-1765 ZOHARIEL

REQUIESCANT IN PACE

ICNATIUS COLE, MASTER 1745-1748 MUSCA

REQUIESCANT IN PACE

On each coffin, Lyra was interested to see, a brass plaque bore a picture of a different being: this one a basilisk, this a serpent, this a es of the dead men’s daemons As people becae and assu it perot skeletons in "e flesh," whispered Lyra "And wor about in their eye sockets"

"Must be ghosts down here," said Roger, shivering pleasantly

Beyond the first crypt they found a passage lined with stone shelves Each shelf was partitioned off into square sections, and in each section rested a skull

Roger’s daeainst hiave a little quiet howl

"Hush," he said

Lyra couldn’t see Pantalai on her shoulder and probably shivering too

She reached up and lifted the nearest skull gently out of its resting place

"What you doing?" said Roger "You en’t supposed to touch e no notice So suddenly fell out of the hole at the base of the skull - fell through her fingers and rang as it hit the floor, and she nearly dropped the skull in alar for it "Might be treasure!"

He held it up to the candle and they both gazed wide-eyed It was not a coin, but a little disc of bronze with a crudely engraved inscription showing a cat

"It’s like the ones on the coffins," said Lyra "It’s his daeer uneasily, and Lyra upturned the skull and dropped the disk back into its i the skull to the shelf Each of the other skulls, they found, had its own dae its owner’s lifetime companion still close to him in death

"Who d’you think these hen they were alive?" said Lyra "Probably Scholars, I reckon Only the Masters get coffins There’s probably been so many Scholars all down the centuries that there wouldn’t be room to bury the whole of ’em, so they just cut their heads off and keep them That’s the most important part of ’em anyway"

They found no Gobblers, but the catacoer busy for days Once she tried to play a trick on so around the coins in their skulls so they ith the wrong daeed into a bat and flew up and down uttering shrill cries and flapping his wings in her face, but she took no notice: it was too good a joke to waste She paid for it later, though In bed in her narrow roohast, and woke up screaures who stood at the bedside pointing their bony fingers before throwing back their cowls to show bleeding stumps where their heads should have been Only when Pantalai away into the substance of the wall until all that was visible was their ar fingers, then nothing First thing in theshe hastened down to the catacohtful places, and whispered "Sorry! Sorry!" to the skulls

The catacoer than the wine cellars, but they too had a lier had explored every corner of them and were sure there were no Gobblers to be found there, they turned their attention elsewhere - but not before they were spotted leaving the crypt by the Intercessor, who called them back into the oratory

The Intercessor was a plump, elderly man known as Father Heyst It was his job to lead all the College services, to preach and pray and hear confessions When Lyra was younger, he had taken an interest in her spiritual welfare, only to be confounded by her sly indifference and insincere repentances She was not spiritually pro, he had decided

When they heard hi their feet, into the greatdimness of the oratory Candles flickered here and there in front of ies of the saints; a faint and distant clatter ca on; a servant was polishing the brass lectern Father Heyst beckoned from the vestry door

"Where have you been?" he said to them "I’ve seen you come in here two or three times now What are you up to?"

His tone was not accusatory He sounded as if he were genuinely interested His daeue at them from her perch on his shoulder

Lyra said, "We wanted to look down in the crypt"