THIRTEEN - FENCING-2

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    While Farder  was talking to the other leaders, she took the tin to lorek Byrnison and explained her idea. It had e to her when she remembered his slig so easily through the metal of the engine cover.

    He listened, and then took the lid of a biscuit tin aly folded it into a small flat der. She marveled at the skill of his hands: unlike most bears, he and his kin had opposable thumb claws with which they could hold things still to work on them; and he had some innate sense of the strength and flexibility of metals which meant that he only had to lift it once or twice, flex it this way and that, and he could run a claw over it in a circle to score it for folding.

    He did this now, folding the sides in and in until they stood in a raised rim and then making a lid to fit it. At Lyras bidding he made two: ohe same size as the inal smokeleaf tin, and another just big enough to taiin itself and a quantity of hairs and bits of moss and li all packed down tight to smother the noise. When it was closed, it was the same size and shape as the alethiometer.

    When that was done, she sat o lorek Byrnison as he gnawed a haunch of reihat was frozen as hard as wood.

    “lorek,” she said, “is it hard not having a daemon? Dont you get lonely?”

    “Lonely?” he said. “I dont know. They tell me this is cold. I dont know what cold is, because I dont freeze. So I dont know what lonely meaher. Bears are made to be solitary.”

    “What about the Svalbard bears?” she said. “Theres thousands of them, ent there? Thats what I heard.”

    He said nothing, but ripped the joint in half with a sound like a splitting log.

    “Beg pardon, lorek,” she said. “I hope I ent offended you. Its just that Im curious. See, Im extra curious about the Svalbard bears because of my father.”

    “Who is your father?”

    “Lord Asriel. And they got him captive on Svalbard, you see. I think the Gobblers betrayed him and paid the bears to keep him in prison.”

    “I dont know. I am not a Svalbard bear.”

    “I thought you was....”

    “No. I was a Svalbard bear, but I am not now. I was sent away as a punishment because I killed another bear. So I was deprived of my rank and my wealth and my armor a out to live at the edge of the human world and fight when I could find employment at it, or work at brutal tasks and drown my memory in raw spirits.”

    “Why did you kill the other bear?”

    “Ahere are ways among bears of turning away er with each other, but I was out of my own trol. So I killed him and I was justly punished.”

    “And you were wealthy and high-ranking,” said Lyra, marveling. “Just like my father, lorek! Thats just the same with him after I was born. He killed someooo and they took all his wealth away. That was long before he got made a prisoner on Svalbard, though. I dont know anything about Svalbard, except its in the farthest North....Is it all covered in ice?  you get there over the frozen sea?”

    “Not from this coast. The sea is sometimes frozen south of it, sometimes not.

    You would need a boat.”

    “Or a balloon, maybe.”

    “Or a balloon, yes, but then you would he right wind.”

    He ghe reindeer haunch, and a wild notion flew into Lyras mind as she remembered all those witches in the night sky; but she said nothing about that.

    Instead she asked lorek Byrnison about Svalbard, and listened eagerly as he told her of the slow-crawling glaciers, of the rocks and ice floes where the bright-tusked walruses lay in groups of a hundred or more, of the seas teeming with seals, of narwhals clashing their long white tusks above the icy water, of the great grim iron-bound coast, the cliffs a thousa and more high where the foul cliff-ghasts perched and swooped, the coal pits and the fire mines where the bearsmiths hammered out mighty sheets of iron and riveted them into armor...

    “If they took your armor away, lorek, where did you get this set from?”

    “I made it myself in Nova Ze<samp>藏书网</samp>mbla from sky metal. Until I did that, I was inplete.”

    “So bears  make their own souls...” she said. There was a great deal in the world to know. “Who is the king of Svalbard?” she went on. “Do bears have a king?”

    “He is called lofur Raknison.”

    That name shook a little bell in Lyras mind. Shed heard it before, but where?

    And not in a bears voice, either, nor in a gyptians. The voice that had spoken it was a Scholars, precise aid lazily arrogant, very much a Jordan College voice. She tried it again in her mind. Oh, she k so well! And then she had it: the Retiring Room. The Scholars listening to Lord Asriel.

    It was the Palmerian Professor who had said something about lofur Raknison. Hed used the word panserbj0rne, which Lyra didnt know, and she hadnt known that lofur Raknison was a bear; but what was it hed said? The king of Svalbard was vain, and he could be flattered. There was something else, if only she could remember it, but so much had happened sihen....

    “If your father is a prisoner of the Svalbard bears,” said lorek Byrnison, “he will not escape. There is no wood there to make a boat. Oher hand, if he is a nobleman, he will be treated fairly. They will give him a house to live in and a servant to wait on him, and food and fuel.”

    “Could the bears ever be defeated, lorek?”

    “No.”

    “Or tricked, maybe?”

    He stopped gnawing and looked at her directly. Then he said, “You will never defeat the armored bears. You have seen my armor; now look at my ons.”

    He dropped the meat and held out his paws, palm upward, for her to look at. Each black pad was covered in horny skin an inore thick, and each of the claws was as long as Lyras hand at least, and as sharp as a knife. He let her run her hands over them wly.

    “One blow will crush a seals skull,” he said. “Or break a mans back, or tear off a limb. And I  bite. If you had not stopped me in Trollesund, I would have crushed that mans head like an egg. So much for strength; now for trickery. You ot trick a bear. You want to see proof? Take a stid feh me.”

    Eager to try, she snapped a stick off a snow-laden bush, trimmed all the side shoots off, and swished it from side to side like a rapier. lorek Byrnison sat ba his haunches and waited, forepaws in his lap. When she was ready, she faced him, but she didnt like to stab at him because he looked so peaceable. So she flourished it, feinting tht a, not intending to hit him at all, and he didnt move. She did that several times, and not once did he move so much as an inch.

    Finally she decided to thrust at him directly, not hard, but just to touch the stick to his stomach. Instantly his paw reached forward and flicked the stick aside.

    Surprised, she tried again, with the same result. He moved far more quickly and sure<s>..</s>ly than she did. She tried to hit him in ear, wielding the stick like a fencers foil, and not once did it land on his body. He seemed to know what she intended before she did, and when she lu his head, the great paw swept the stick aside harmlessly, and when she feinted, he didnt move at all.

    She became exasperated, and threw herself into a furious attack, jabbing and lashing and thrusting and stabbing, and never once did she get past those paws.

    They moved everywhere, precisely in time to parry, precisely at the right spot to block.

    Finally she was frightened, and stopped. She was sweating inside her furs, out of breath, exhausted, and the bear still sat impassive. If she had had a real sword with a murderous point, he would have been quite unharmed.

    “I bet you could catch bullets,” she said, and threw the stick away. “How do you do that?”

    “By not being human,” he said. “Thats why you could rick a bear. We see tricks a as plain as arms and legs. We  see in a way humans have fotten. But you know about this; you  uand the symbol reader.”

    “That ent the same, is it?” she said. She was more nervous of the bear now than when she had seen his anger.

    “It is the same,” he said. “Adults t read it, as I uand. As I am to human fighters, so you are to adults with the symbol reader.”

    “Yes, I suppose,” she said, puzzled and unwilling. “Does that mean Ill fet how to do it when I grow up?”

    “Who knows? I have never seen a symbol reader, nor anyone who could read them.

    Perhaps you are different from others.” He dropped to all fain a on gnawing his meat. Lyra had unfastened her furs, but now the cold was striking in again a<q>藏书网</q>nd she had to do them up. All in all, it was a disquieting episode.

    She wao sult the alethiome-ter there and then, but it was too cold, and besides, they were calling for her because it was time to move on. She took the tin boxes that lorek Byrnison had made, put the empty one bato Farder s kit bag, and put the oh the spy-fly in it together with the alethiometer in the pouch at her waist. She was glad when they were moving again.

    The leaders had agreed with Lee Scoresby that when they reached the  stopping place, they would inflate his balloon and he would spy from the air.

    Naturally Lyra was eager to fly with him, and naturally it was forbidden; but she rode with him on the way there aered him with questions. “Mr.

    Scoresby, how would you fly to Svalbard?” “Youd need a dirigible with a gas engine, something like a zeppelin, or else a good south wind. But hell, I wouldnt dare. Have you ever seen it? The bleakest barest most inhospitable godforsaken dead end of nowhere.”

    “I was just w, if lorek Bymison wao go back...” “Hed be killed.

    loreks in exile. As soon as he set foot there, theyd tear him to pieces.”

    “How do you inflate your balloon, Mr. Scoresby?” “Two ways. I  make hydrogen by p sulfuric acid onto iron filings. You catch the gas it gives off and gradually fill the balloon like that. The other way is to find a ground-gas vent near a fire miheres a lot of gas uhe ground here, and rock oil besides. I  make gas from rock oil, if I o, and from coal as well; its not hard to make gas. But the quickest way is to use ground gas. A good vent will fill the balloon in an hour.”

    “Hoeople  you carry?”

    “Six, if I o.”

    “Could you carry lorek Byrnison in his armor?”

    “I have done. I rescued him oime from the Tartars, when he was cut off and they were starving him out—that was iunguska campaign; I flew in and took him off. Sounds easy, but hell, I had to calculate the weight of that old boy by guess-work. And then I had to bank on finding ground gas uhe ice fort hed made. But I could see what kind of ground it was from the air, and I reed wed be safe in digging. See, to go down I have to let gas out of the balloon, and I t get airborne again without<cite>..</cite> more. Anyway, we made it, armor and all.”

    “Mr. Scoresby, you know the Tartars make holes in peoples heads?”

    “Oh, sure. Theyve been doing that for thousands of years. Iunguska campaign tured five Tartars alive, and three of them had holes in their skulls. One of them had two.”

    “They do it to each other?”

    “Thats right. First they cut partway around a circle of skin on the scalp, so they  lift up a flap and expose the bohen they cut a little circle of bo of the skull, very carefully so they dorate the brain, and then they sew the scalp back over.”

    “I thought they did it to their enemies!”

    “Hell, no. Its a great privilege. They<mark>藏书网</mark> do it so the gods  talk to them.”

    “Did you ever hear of an explorer called Stanislaus Grumman?”

    “Grumman? Sure. I met one of his team when I flew over the Yenisei River two years back. He was going to live among the Tartar tribes up that way. Matter of fact, I think he had that hole in the skull do art of an initiation ceremony, but the man who told me didnt know much about it.”

    “So...If he was like an honorary Tartar, they wouldnt have killed him?”

    “Killed him? Is he dead then?”

    “Yeah. I saw his head,” Lyra said proudly. “My father found it. I saw it when he showed it to the Scholars at Jordan College in Oxford. Theyd scalped it, and all.”

    “Whod scalped it?”

    “Well, the Tartars, thats what the Scholars thought....But maybe it wasnt.”

    “It might not have been Grummans head,” said Lee Scoresby. “Your father might have been misleading the Scholars.”

    “I suppose he might,” said Lyra thoughtfully. “He was asking them for money.”

    “And when they saw the head, they gave him the money?”

    “Yeah.”

    “Good trick to play. People are shocked when they see a thing like that; they dont like to look too close.”

    “Especially Scholars,” said Lyra.

    “Well, youd know better than I would. But if that was Grummans head, Ill bet it wasnt the Tartars who scalped him. They scalp their enemies, not their own, and he was a Tartar by adoption.”

    Lyra turhat over in her mind as they drove on. There were wide currents full of meaning flowing fast arouhe Gobblers and their cruelty, their fear of Dust, the city in the Aurora, her father in Svalbard, her mother....And where was she? The alethiometer, the witches flying northward. And poor little Tony Makarios; and the clockwork spy-fly; and lorek Byrnisons uny feng...

    She fell asleep. And every hour they drew closer to Bolvangar.

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