On the Road

But I ain't going down
That long old lonesome road
All by myself.
I can't carry you, baby,
Gonna carry somebody else.

Floyd Jones & Alan Wilson

We found another auberge in another village that evening; the Deux Luppars in Honoréville.

'The "Duke's Whats"? Lepers?' said Mister Joyce, sounding slightly disgusted. I had a quick consultation with the innkeeper.

'It's Leopards,' I said. 'Luppars is Middle Frankish for Leopards, not Lepers.'

'Oh I see. That's all right then.'

That's all right then, mimicked Alfie.

'Come on,' I said. 'Let's go in. I'm knackered.'

- 0 -

The innkeeper wanted us to share a room, but the girl's got so much money we can afford to have a little privacy. That's probably a good thing, under the circumstances.

I've taken the alethiometer out again and had another look at it. It's tempting - desperately so - to try to force the welded-up components apart, but I mustn't. The chances are I would do irreparable damage and, for Lyra's sake as well as mine, I can't risk that. This is a terrible, a grievous blow. I'd come to rely on it. If it hadn't been for the information it gave me yesterday we'd all have been on the Marie-Louise when the strike hit.

Curse them! Now the Church has a working alethiometer and we haven't. That's going to make our task even harder and it means that I'm going to have to get some help from Arthur somehow, if I'm to get the girl to Geneva in one piece.

I'll have to let her in on things soon. A little more, anyway. It's tricky - if she knows too much she may blab - accidentally or under questioning. If she knows too little, she'll make mistakes, not be careful enough, give the game away by accident. This is difficult for me. I'm sure I was never cut out to be an undercover agent.

I wrote yesterday that these feel like the Last Days. If anything, that feeling has intensified over the last twenty-four hours. I need a dose.

And why, oh why, did it have to be a steam car she hired? Of all the foul things that could have happened! I'm going to have to tell her about that too - how the Ridgeworth's boiler exploded in the back garden of the house in the Botley Road where Martin James and Elias Cholmondley were holding Jim and Carrie and me hostage, and how it set off the leaky gas supply in the kitchen and brought the whole place down around our ears, and took my left arm and leg with it.

It was the price I had to pay, I know, to be reunited with my Viola after that lunatic James intercised her from me. It was a price I willingly accepted. It was the only way to save my life and - as it turned out - Carrie Mason's, but... sometimes you agree to something, believing you know what the implications of that agreement are. You think you understand them.You can even write them down in a list if you like. But you can't feel them, you can't experience them, until you've committed yourself and by then it's too late to change your mind.

I have suffered twenty years of almost continual pain. That sounds stupid. Just writing that down makes me feel stupid and self-pitying. Of course I hurt. My missing arm hurts. My missing foot hurts. Nothing can stop that. Yes; I can drink tincture of poppy for it. Not long after I left hospital I tried a little - a few grams from the apothecary - but it didn't take away the pain. Why should it? How could a little common poppy dissolved in alcohol remove the pain from an arm that wasn't there? But I took some more, and yet more, and I found that if I took a big enough dose the pain went away - but so did I. I stopped being me. So then I scaled down the dose again and I found that if I got it just right, and kept taking it regularly and at precise intervals I could keep the pain from driving me mad. But there's a cost. I've become a clockwork man. I'm ruled by the clock Me - a skilled instrument maker, a Master of the Guild of Temporalists - counting the everlasting hours until my next lovely forget-dose. Living for it, like a common Whitechapel poppy-head. Not being able to live without it.

This shames me. Writing this down shames me. I've not done this before. Written about my addiction, I mean. I don't think Miss Moon knows my secret and she's definitely not seen the tincture-bottle in my pocket - I've been very careful about that. That's down to years of careful habit.With any luck she thought I was asleep when I was actually dosed up.

It's under control. After all these years, it's under control. I have Jane to thank for that. She's determined and strong where I am weak. The business has prospered despite my ever-present need. I don't want my doses half so much when I'm working. Busy makes the pain go away nearly as well as poppy does. Busy keeps my mind occupied. Busy - and the love of Viola, my sweet Viola.

Please, please, don't ever make me have to lose her again.

- 0 -

Mister Joyce was looking very tired when he said goodnight after supper. I'd finally found a make of Frankish cigarette I could smoke without feeling as if I wanted to throw up. Perhaps that's why he went upstairs so quickly - to get away from the smoke. It didn't bother me all that much. I finished off his half-eaten plate of tarte aux myrtilles for him. No point in letting it go to waste, especially when it was so scrummy. Even a spoilt, rich girl like me could see that. Except I wasn't a girl any more, of course, but a boy soldier. That idea was still giving me a funny, tingly feeling inside.

You are a floozy, said Alfie, with only one thing on your mind.

Just concentrate on being a convincing girl-daemon, I replied, taking another Tinta Rosa cigarette from my pocket and lighting it. I wondered if I should write to Gerry.

Leave it for today, said Alfie. You're tireder than you realise.

All right. I took another puff. It was getting late and the dining room of the Luppars was nearly empty. I called to the waiter to bring me another glass of cognac and a cup of the concentrated kaffee they called ristrait. One would counteract the other, I thought.

- 0 -

This is no more than an adventure for her. A jolly jape, she'd call it. Viola says I'm being unfair to her. Just because she's pretty it doesn't follow she's empty-headed and her trivial manner may be no more than a front to hide her fear - an act, in other words. Even so, she's not afraid to say what's on her mind. She put me properly in my place back at the garage where we got that bloody car. She meant what she said, too, every word of it. That wasn't an act. So she's proud of her family background, and if that sometimes comes over as haughtiness or snobbishness I shouldn't let it get to me. After all; who's the adult and who's the child around here?

All the same, I wish she wouldn't smoke. The ash is getting on my clothes and spoiling Viola's fur. Ah well. Time for my bedtime draught.

- 0 -

Alfie and I slept well. We had a nice room at the back of the auberge facing east and the sun got us out of bed in good time. I coughed a little as I washed and dressed and my head wasn't feeling quite right from too much to drink the night before, but breakfast would cure that. I felt a bit squashed around the chest - the inevitable result of trying to appear to be a boy - and I hoped I wasn't going to end up being forced permanently out of shape. Imagine! Anyway I draped the uniform over myself in the baggiest way I could manage. As a final touch and at his suggestion, Alfie scratched me on the chin with his right front claw. Ouch! But now I had a credible shaving-cut.

'Nice idea, Alfie,' I said. 'I bet you enjoyed doing that.'

I felt it just as much as you did. The poor little chap sounded quite upset, so I gave him a big kiss and a proper cuddle. That made both of us feel better.

When we got down to the dining room it was to find that we were the first there. I ordered kaffee and croissants and yoghurt and apricot conserve and tucked in. Nothing like a Frankish breakfast to counteract any tendency to pudginess - not that I had one, naturally.

When Mister Joyce finally appeared at the foot of the stairs, I waved to him. 'Over here, Mister Parry!'

He didn't blink. 'Hello, Sam. Slip with the razor?' I smiled and got the waiter to bring him toast, cheese, ham and thé au lait. I hoped that would cheer him up a bit because, frankly, he looked dreadful, with a sallow face and bleary eyes.

- 0 -

The beggar-it-all of the Dassault wasn't the time it took to get steam up or the way the throttle worked so differently from a gazole-powered vehicle. (It was much less direct, you know.) No - it was the bloody thing's thirst for water that gave us the most trouble. I'd thought I'd been clever, screwing an extra supply of naphtha out of Monsieur Herande the day before, but he must have been smiling behind his hand all the time. What we really needed was a spare water tank if we weren't to spend half our time stopping at streams or begging the use of the well at wayside cottages. Every village had a horse-trough, of course, but they weren't always full.

So as soon as we saw some cows by the side of the road we looked out for the farm they belonged to, and when we found it I bought three metal churns from the farmer - as many as would fit on the back seat of the Dassault - and filled them up with water from his well. Now we could go for more than half an hour without having to watch the gauge so closely. Mister Joyce relaxed a little. The car was making him nervous, I could tell, so I drove as gently as I could. I'm not sure how much he appreciated the trouble I was going to. Just as on the Marie-Louise he seemed to be in a dream for much of the time. Around midday we stopped for lunch in a nice shady spot by a bridge over a bright, fast-running stream The country was becoming steeper and hillier, and the Dassault was using more naphtha and water than I'd expected. Still, we'd see the day out. Mister Joyce opened his book and started writing in it again. I wished he'd talk to me more and spend less time with his diary, or whatever it was.

- 0 -

It's a relief not to be bumping along these infernal frog-eating roads for a while. This jagging motion is doing my arm and leg no good at all. We passed a sign not long ago - 50 miles to Geneva. By train, that would take less than an hour. In this horrible dangerous rattletrap of a car it's going to take much longer. And anyway, we'll reach the fighting soon and that will slow us down.

If only... Damn it, I must stop thinking like this. If only Lyra's alethiometer were still working I could plot us a course that would keep us clear of roadblocks and danger. Not even the poppy could prevent me from doing that. Actually, while I'm writing down the sordid details of my addiction I may as well note that the poppy has never prevented me from reading the alethiometer in my own uneducated way. In fact I've often found that it helps. I feel more in touch with what it's telling me, as if to be more detached from this world were to be closer to the world of the angels.

Miss Moon is really putting it away. How does she do it? She just ate a whole baguette and a quarter-pound of Brie and now she's tucking into her second apple. Where does she put it all? She's skinny as a lath. If I were to eat that much every day I'd balloon out until I looked like a football.

How I wish I were young again.

- 0 -

'Mister Parry?'

'Yes, Sam?'

'I've got a couple of questions, if you don't mind.'

'Go on.'

'It's about the alethiometer. You said that it didn't predict the future.'

'That's right.'

'So how did you know we were about to be hit by that lightning, if it couldn't tell you what was going to happen? Did you ask it if we were in danger?'

Mister Joyce looked up from his book. 'We're always in danger. The alethiometer would have answered yes. No, instead I asked where our danger came from and it told me to watch the skies.'

'That was while you were down in the Marie-Louise's cabin.'

'Yes.'

'But how did it tell you the danger was so close? Did it shout at you?'

'In a manner of speaking, yes. It used lots of truth symbols in its answer. Is that all you want to know?'

'No, there's something else. Are we going to be struck by lightning again? We're next to water, like we were two days ago. Are we in more danger? Do our... enemies know where we are?'

Mister Joyce shook his head. 'There's no way of knowing for sure. But I think not, else they'd have tried again by now. I think - I hope - there's somebody helping us.'

'Somebody? How? Who?'

'I can't say.'

'Oh.'

It was time to get moving again. I topped up the car's water tank and refilled the three churns from the stream. They were very heavy once they were full and it took all my strength to pull them out of the water, roll them up the bank and along the verge and lift them into the car. Mister Joyce tried to help, but he couldn't do much, even with his good right arm. He looked mortified - how useless he must have felt, him being a man and all and me just a slip of a girl. I was tempted to ask him to turn his back or go into the nearby copse while Alfie - Changed Alfie - helped me, but I didn't know if I could trust him. Besides, the churns were made of steel, and both Alfie and I were afraid of the burning touch of iron on his skin.

We had kept off the subject. It wasn't something we wanted to think about, either of us. It must have been pure chance that Alfie, in his Changed form, hadn't touched iron and been scorched by it long before we made that ill-starred visit to the Chelsea Barracks. It seemed so unlikely, though. Perhaps there was more to it than the simple fact of the chain that had hurt him so badly being made of iron. Perhaps intent came into it. The orderly had intended to hurt us and he had certainly succeeded in that.

Let's not chance it, said Alfie, and we cringed with remembered pain.

- 0 -

That night we had to share a room. Our meanderings along the country roads of north-east Frankland had finally brought us back to familiar territory and we had stopped for the night in the village of Saint-Claude, where everything had started to go so badly wrong a week or so before. This was potentially quite risky. I might be identified even though I had previously only been there for a night and a morning while the Brigade got ready to move up to the Front.

We had already been waved through two checkpoints along our route and I knew, from my earlier experiences, that there would probably be quite a few more between Saint-Claude and Geneva. Yes, Geneva. Mister Joyce hadn't told me where we were going - he'd been as tight-lipped as ever all day - but I'm not stupid, despite appearances. Where else could we possibly be going, if he didn't want to tell me about it, but the most dangerous of all possible destinations?

Anyway, we couldn't stay at Madame Fluegel's house again in case she recognised me, so we had to ask around and eventually we found a dusty attic room above a wheelwright's shop. 'Only one bed, but you lads won't mind sharing, will you?' said the shop manager, taking an exorbitant hundred francs from me for the night's rent.

This'll be a novel experience, said Alfie.

Shut up, daemon.

We got supper - and a very poor supper it was, consisting of grey lentil soup, gritty bread and a repulsive gelatine mould pudding that reminded me of school dinners - at a nearby tavern. It looked as if the war economy was in full swing in Saint-Claude. A couple of glasses of nasty pale thin beer washed it down.

'Beggar this. Double-beggar this,' I said, thumping the beer-mug down on the table and remembering to keep my voice sounding gruff. I pushed my way to the bar and bought a quarter-bottle of cognac, being sure to check that the seal hadn't been messed about with. If they could water the beer, they'd more than likely dilute the brandy as well. 'Come on, John,' I slapped my companion's good shoulder with my right hand. 'Let's go to bed.'

Mister Joyce looked startled, but he was as tired as me after a long day spent bouncing over unmade roads in an open-topped car under a hot sun, so he nodded his head and followed me up the stairs.

- 0 -

I can't sleep. I'm deadly tired, but I can't sleep. Oh Hell.

That was a daft thing to write. There's no such place as Hell, unless I'm living there already. The pain is especially bad tonight.

The girl is fast asleep, lucky cow, and snoring gently. Her Alfie is wrapped in her arms. I hope he doesn't try to do... that obscene thing.

- 0 -

It was all I could do not to burst out laughing. It was all so silly. First Mister Joyce offered to sleep on the floor and let me have the bed. Then I said that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard - he was much older than me and should sleep in the bed himself as he needed it much more than me. I would roll myself up in a blanket and sleep on the floor, like I did when I went camping. He got all middle-aged about that and said he couldn't possibly sleep in a bed and let a lady sleep on the floor, especially when she was the one who had paid for the room. I said I was no lady, and anyway my name was Sam, wasn't it? That got his back up and for a time it looked as if we were both going to sleep on the floor, with the bed between us. I said I wasn't going to spend a hundred francs to sleep on the floor and why didn't we just get into the bed and stop mucking about? He said he was a married man who took his vows seriously, and how could he ever explain it to his wife? My reply was that he didn't have to tell her. She thought he was in London, didn't she? Wasn't somebody sending postcards from London to Oxford for him, the way Cecilia had sent forged messages from Argyll to my Aunt Sybil when I ran away from school? He mumbled and muttered and said all right, but we'd have to lay the bolster down the middle of the bed to divide it into two and "prevent any impropriety from occurring" as the stuffed idiot put it. So we tried that and it soon became obvious there wasn't enough room for him, me and the bolster, so I yanked it out and put it back at the head of the bed where it belonged. All this time the bed-frame groaned and squeaked so much they must have heard it in London. I pointed this out to Mister Joyce - that it sounded like he was giving his young driver a jolly rogering - and he looked so angry and upset that I said I was sorry and offered him a swig of brandy from my quarter-bottle in compensation.

So then he offered to sleep upside down, with his head at the bottom of the bed. There was no way on earth that I was going to put up with having his smelly old feet - foot - stuck underneath my nose all night. Not at all. So in the end we lay very primly side by side on our backs with our arms crossed over our chests the way they taught us at school, so we wouldn't succumb to the unconscious temptation to play with ourselves while we slept.

- 0 -

We're sleeping - or trying to sleep - in our day-clothes, so neither of us has had to undress in front of the other, or turn his or her back for discretion's sake while the other disrobed. Even so, now that we are lying so close to one another that we can't help coming into contact from time to time, I cannot help hearing what my imagination is whispering to me. My vision of her in the barn two nights ago has come back to me with full force and I can't bear it. I can't. She's not Lyra. I know that. She's nothing like Lyra - not the Lyra I knew; wise, kind and modest. She's thoughtless and vain, full of boasting and shamelessness, casually foul-mouthed, and I know she was laughing at me while we were sorting out the sleeping arrangements, as well she might. What an idea! Me - Peter Joyce the ugly old cripple - and she, the lovely daughter of a rich and powerful family, sleeping together? Ridiculous.

But as she lies and breathes next to me - lithe, warm and effortlessly beautiful - I cannot push away the thoughts that crowd my mind. Thoughts of the day when Lyra and I sailed down the Isis on a magical boat, and stopped by the side of the river, and told one another of our love, and consummated it; there in a open room with green walls, roofed by the sky and warmed by the golden air of a summer's afternoon.

Sunny is not Lyra. She never was, and she never will be. But oh - if only she were. If only...