Chapter 26 THIRTEEN-FENCING-2

While Farder Coram was talking to the other leaders, she took the tin to lorek Byrnison and explained her idea. It had come to her when she remembered his slicing so easily through the metal of the engine cover. He listened, and then took the lid of a biscuit tin and deftly folded it into a small flat cylinder. 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 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: one the same size as the original smokeleaf tin, and another just big enough to contain the tin itself and a quantity of hairs and bits of moss and lichen 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 next to lorek Byrnison as he gnawed a haunch of reindeer that was frozen as hard as wood. "lorek," she said, "is it hard not having a daemon? Don't 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 means either. Bears are made to be solitary." “What about the Svalbard bears?” she said. “There are 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 don't know. I am not a Svalbard bear." "I thought you were...." “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 and sent 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?"

“Anger. There are ways among bears of turning away our anger with each other, but I was out of my own control. So I killed him and I was just 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 someone too 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? Can 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 need the right wind." He gnawed the 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 thousand feet 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 Zembla from sky metal. Until I did that, I was incomplete.” "So bears can 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 and pedantic and lazy aggressive, very much a Jordan College voice. She tried it again in her mind. Oh, she knew it 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 since then.... "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. On the other 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 weapons.” 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 inch or more 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 wonderingly. “One blow will crush a seals skull,” he said. “Or break a mans back, or tear off a limb. And I can 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 cannot trick a bear. You want to see proof? Take a stick and fence with 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 back on his haunches and waited, forepaws in his lap. was ready, she faced him, but she didnt like to stab at him because he looked so peaceful. So she flourished it, feinting to right and left, not intending to hit him at all, and he didnt move. , 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 surely than she did. She tried to hit him in earnest, wielding the stick like a fencers foil, and not once did it land on his body. to know what she intended before she did, and when she lunged at 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 overwhelming. 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 never trick a bear. We see tricks and deceit as plain as arms and legs. We can see in a way humans have forgotten. But you know about this; understand 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 cant read it, as I understand. 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 forget 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 fours again and went on gnawing his meat. Lyra had unfastened her furs, but now the cold was striking in again and she had to do them up. All in all, it was a disquieting episode. She wanted to consult 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 back into Farder Corams kit bag, and put the one with 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 next 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 and pestered 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 wouldn't dare. Have you ever seen it? The bleakest barest most inhospitable godforsaken dead end of nowhere." "I was just wondering, if lorek Bymison wanted to go back..." "Hed be killed. loreks in exile. As soon as he set foot there, they tear him to pieces.” “How do you inflate your balloon, Mr. Scoresby?” “Two ways. I can make hydrogen by pouring 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 mine. Theres a lot of gas under the ground here, and rock oil besides. I can make gas from rock oil, if I need to, 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.” “How many people can you carry?” "Six, if I need to." “Could you carry lorek Byrnison in his armor?” “I have done. I rescued him one time from the Tartars, when he was cut off and they were starving him out—that was in the Tunguska 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 under the ice fort hed made. But I could see what kind of ground it was from the air, and I reckoned wed be safe in digging. See, to go down I have to let gas out of the balloon, and I cant get airborne again without more. Anyway, we made it, armor and all.” “Mr. Scoresby, you know the Tartars make holes in peoples heads?” "Oh, sure. They've been doing that for thousands of years. In the Tunguska campaign we captured 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 can lift up a flap and expose the bone. Then they cut a little circle of bone out of the skull, very carefully so they dont penetrate 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 do it so the gods can 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 done. It was part of an initiation ceremony, but the man who told me didnt know much about it.” "So...If he was like an honorary Tartar, they wouldn't 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.” "Who'd scalped it?" "Well, the Tartars, thats what the Scholars thought.... But maybe it wasn't." “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, you'd know better than I would. But if that was Grummans head, I'll bet it wasn't the Tartars who scalped him. They scalped their enemies, not their own, and he was a Tartar by adoption." Lyra turned that over in her mind as they drove on. There were wide currents full of meaning flowing fast around her; the 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 uncanny fencing... She fell asleep. And every hour they drew closer to Bolvangar.