The Golden Compass (Page 63)

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 don’t know. They tell me this is cold. I don’t know what cold is, because I don’t freeze. So I don’t know what lonely means either. Bears are made to be solitary.”

“What about the Svalbard bears?” she said. “There’s thousands of them, en’t there? That’s 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 en’t offended you. It’s just that I’m curious. See, I’m 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 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 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 justly punished.”

“And you were wealthy and high-ranking,” said Lyra, marveling. “Just like my father, lorek! That’s 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 don’t know anything about Svalbard, except it’s 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 Lyra’s 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 Lyra’s mind. She’d heard it before, but where? And not in a bear’s voice, either, nor in a gyptian’s. The voice that had spoken it was a Scholar’s, precise and pedantic and lazily arrogant, 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. He’d used the word panserbj0rne, which Lyra didn’t know, and she hadn’t known that lofur Raknison was a bear; but what was it he’d 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 Lyra’s hand at least, and as sharp as a knife. He let her run her hands over them wonderingly.

“One blow will crush a seal’s skull,” he said. “Or break a man’s back, or tear off a limb. And I can bite. If you had not stopped me in Trollesund, I would have crushed that man’s 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. When she was ready, she faced him, but she didn’t like to stab at him because he looked so peaceable. So she flourished it, feinting to right and left, not intending to hit him at all, and he didn’t move. She did that several times, and not once did he move so much as an inch.