The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman

Author:Philip Pullman [Pullman, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2019-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

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At the Gasthaus Eisenbahn in Munich, Olivier Bonneville went straight to his ill-lit little room after a dinner of pork and dumplings, and tried to find Lyra. There was something he’d noticed about the new method….It wasn’t easy to put into words….He couldn’t find any sign of her with it, that was the point, whereas earlier he’d seen her with little difficulty. Something must have happened. Had she found a way of hiding? She’d better not. He was damned if he’d give up.

And there’d been something…almost a nudge, as if the alethiometer was giving him a hint….He hadn’t thought it dealt in hints. But there was something….

And because the light from the single overhead bulb was so poor, and the print in his stolen books so small, and because he knew the pictures on the dial so well, he didn’t try the classical method. He sat in the overstuffed armchair and focused his mind on the girl yet again. He tried to conjure up her face: no success. A blank-faced girl with blond hair, or blondish. Maybe not blond. Light brown? He couldn’t see anything. Couldn’t even see her dæmon.

What was her dæmon, anyway? Some kind of weasel or ferret? Something like that. He’d only had a glimpse, but he remembered a broad head, red-brown, a patch of lighter color on the throat—

There was a rustle among twigs and leaves.

Bonneville sat up. He closed his eyes and concentrated. It was dark, of course it was, because it was night, but there was a sort of luminescence from somewhere—undergrowth, leafless brambles, water….Bonneville rubbed his eyes, which made no difference. He made himself relax and tried to subdue the nausea, which was not helped at all by those dumplings. Next time eat less, he thought.

There it was again, that rustling, and a visible movement—immediate nausea. He made it to the washbasin before he threw up. But he nearly had it! So nearly! He rinsed his mouth out with a glass of water and sat down again.

The problem was…The question was…Whose viewpoint was seeing it? Whose eyes were there to see through? No one’s. The point of view was unanchored, and consequently it lurched all over the place. If it kept still, there’d be no nausea….But there were no eyes there. No camera. There was no reason for the viewpoint to be in this spot rather than that.

All right: try not seeing. Try listening instead, or smelling, or both. They didn’t depend on a viewpoint in the same way. Bonneville made his mind’s eye see nothing but darkness, and focused instead on the other two senses.

That was better at once. He could hear a light wind through bushes, and the occasional brush of an animal’s feet against dead leaves, but not dry ones; and he could smell damp, and a larger and more distant river smell, and hear the little murmur of water as the ripples of a wake ran along the bank.

Then more. He could hear the wide night all around.

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