Now that Lyra had a task in mind, she felt much better. Helping Mrs. Coulter had been all very well, but Pantalaimon was right: she wasnt really doing any work there, she was just a pretty pet. On the gyptian boat, there was real work to do, and Ma Costa made sure she did it. She ed and swept, she peeled potatoes and made tea, she greased the propeller shaft bearings, she kept the weed trap clear over the propeller, she washed dishes, she opened lock gates, she tied the boat up at m posts, and within a couple of days she was as much at home with this new life as if shed been byptian.
What she didnt notice was that the Costas were alert every sed for unusual signs of i in Lyra from the waterside people. If she hadnt realized it, she was important, and Mrs. Coulter and the Oblation Board were bound to be searg everywhere for her. Iony heard from gos-sip in pubs along the way that the police were making raids on houses and farms and building yards and factories without any explanation, though there was a rumor that they were searg for a missing girl. And that in itself was odd, sidering all the kids that had gone missing without being looked fyptians and land folk alike were getting jumpy and nervous.
And there was another reason for the Costas i in Lyra; but she wasnt to learn that for a few days yet.
So they took to keeping her below decks when they passed a lockkeepers cottage or a al basin, or ahere were likely to be idlers hanging about. Ohey passed through a towhe police were searg all the boats that came along the waterway, and holding up the traffi both dires. The Costas were equal to that, though. There was a secret partmeh Mas bunk, where Lyra lay cramped for two hours while the police banged up and down the length of the boat unsuccessfully.
「Why didnt their daemons fihough?」 she asked afterward, and Ma showed her the lining of the secret space: cedarwood, which had a soporific effe daemons; and it was true that Pantalaimon had spent the whole time happily asleep by Lyras head.
Slowly, with many halts aours, the Costas boat drew he fens, that wide and never fully mapped wilderness of huge skies and endless marshland iern Anglia. The furthest fringe of it mingled indistinguishably with the creeks and tidal is of the shallow sea, and the other side of the sea mingled indistinguishably with Holland; and parts of the fens had been drained and dyked by Hollanders, some of whom had settled there; so the language of the fens was thick with Dutch. But parts had never been drained or planted or settled at all, and in the wildest tral regions, where eels slithered and waterbirds flocked, where eerie marsh fires flick-ered and waylurkers tempted careless travelers to their doom in the ss and bogs, the gyptian people had always found it safe to muster.
And now by a thousand winding els and creeks and watercourses, gyptian boats were moving in toward the byanplats, the only patch of slightly higher ground in the hundreds of square miles of marsh and bog. There was an a woodeing hall there with a huddle of perma dwellings around it, and wharves aies and an eelmarket.
When the gyptians called a byanroping—a summons or muster of families—so many boats filled the waterways that you could walk for a mile in any dire over their decks; or so it was said. The gyptians ruled in the fens. No one else dared enter, and while the gyptiahe pead traded fairly, the landlopers turned a blio the incessant smugglin