Over the few days, Lyra cocted a dozen plans and dismissed them impatiently; for they all boiled down to stowing away, and how could you stow away on a narrowboat? To be sure, the real voyage would involve a proper ship, and she knew enough stories to expect all kinds of hiding places on a full-sized vessel: the lifeboats, the hold, the bilges, whatever they were; but shed have to get to the ship first, and leaving the fe traveling the gyptian way.
And even if she got to the coast on her own, she might stow away on the wrong ship. It would be a fihing to hide in a lifeboat and wake up on the way to High Brazil.
Meanwhile, all arouhe tantalizing work of assembling the expedition was going on day and night. She hung around Adam Stefanski, watg as he made his choice of the volunteers for the fighting force. She pestered Roger van Poppel with suggestions about the stores they o take: Had he remembered snow goggles? Did he know the best place to get arctic maps?
The man she most wao help was Benjamin de Ruyter, the spy. But he had slipped away in the early hours of the m after the sed roping, and naturally no one could say where hed gone or when hed return. So in default, Lyra attached herself to Farder .
「I think itd be best if I helped you, Farder ,」 she said, 「because I probably know more about the Gobblers than anyone else, being as I was nearly one of them. Probably youll need me to help you uand Mr. de Ruyters messages.」
He took pity on the fierce, desperate little girl and didnt send her away.
Instead he talked to her, and listeo her memories of Oxford and of Mrs.
Coulter, and watched as she read the alethiometer.
「Wheres that book with all the symbols in?」 she asked him one day.
「In Heidelberg,」 he said.
「And is there just the one?」
「There may be others, but thats the one Ive seen.」
「I bet theres one in Bodleys Library in Oxford,」 she said.
She could hardly take her eyes off Farder s daemon, who was the most beautiful daemon shed ever seen. When Pantalaimon was a cat, he was lean and ragged and harsh, but Sophonax, for that was her name, was golden-eyed and elegant beyond measure, fully twice as large as a real cat and richly furred.
When the sunlight touched her, it lit up more shades of tawny-brown-leaf-hazel--gold-autumn-mahogany than Lyra could name. She loo touch that fur, to rub her cheeks against it, but of course she never did; for it was the grossest breach of etiquette imagio touother persons daemon. Daemons might touch each other, of course, ht; but the prohibition against human-daemon tact went so deep that even in battle no warrior would tou enemys daemon. It was utterly forbidden. Lyra couldnt remember having to be told that: she just k, as instinctively as she felt that nausea was bad and food. So although she admired the fur of Sophonax and even speculated on what it might feel like, she never made the slightest move to touch her, and never would.
Sophonax was as sleek ahy aiful as Farder was ravaged and weak. He might have been ill, or he might have suffered a crippling blow, but the result was that he could not walk without leaning on two sticks, arembled stantly like an aspen leaf. His mind was sharp and clear and powerful, though, and soon Lyra came to love him for his knowledge and for the firm way he directed her.
「Whats that hlass mean, Farder ?」 she asked, over the alethiometer, one sunny m in his boat. 「It ke