His Dark Materials Omnibus (8 page)

“The Gobblers? Has they come to Oxford, then?”

The gyptian boy turned away to call to his friends, who were all watching Ma Costa.

“She don’t know what’s going on! She don’t know the Gobblers is here!”

Half a dozen brats turned with expressions of derision, and Lyra threw her cigarette down, recognizing the cue for a fight. Everyone’s dæmon instantly became warlike: each child was accompanied by fangs, or claws, or bristling fur, and Pantalaimon, contemptuous of the limited imaginations of these gyptian dæmons, became a dragon the size of a deer hound.

But before they could all join battle, Ma Costa herself waded in, smacking two of the gyptians aside and confronting Lyra like a prizefighter.

“You seen him?” she demanded of Lyra. “You seen Billy?”

“No,” Lyra said. “We just got here. I en’t seen Billy for months.”

Ma Costa’s dæmon was wheeling in the bright air above her head, a hawk, fierce yellow eyes snapping this way and that, unblinking. Lyra was frightened. No one worried about a child gone missing for a few hours, certainly not a gyptian: in the tight-knit gyptian boat world, all children were precious and extravagantly loved, and a mother knew that if a child was out of sight, it wouldn’t be far from someone else’s who would protect it instinctively.

But here was Ma Costa, a queen among the gyptians, in a terror for a missing child. What was going on?

Ma Costa looked half-blindly over the little group of children and turned away to stumble through the crowd on the wharf, bellowing for her child. At once the children turned back to one another, their feud abandoned in the face of her grief.

“What is them Gobblers?” said Simon Parslow, one of Lyra’s companions.

The first gyptian boy said,
“You
know. They been stealing kids all over the country. They’re pirates—”

“They en’t pirates,” corrected another gyptian. “They’re cannaboles. That’s why they call ’em Gobblers.”

“They
eat
kids?” said Lyra’s other crony, Hugh Lovat, a kitchen boy from St. Michael’s.

“No one knows,” said the first gyptian. “They take ’em away and they en’t never seen again.”

“We all know that,” said Lyra. “We been playing kids and Gobblers for months, before you were, I bet. But I bet no one’s seen ’em.”

“They have,” said one boy.

“Who, then?” persisted Lyra. “Have you seen ’em? How d’you know it en’t just one person?”

“Charlie seen ’em in Banbury,” said a gyptian girl. “They come and talked to this lady while another man took her little boy out the garden.”

“Yeah,” piped up Charlie, a gyptian boy. “I seen ’em do it!”

“What did they look like?” said Lyra.

“Well … I never properly saw ’em,” Charlie said. “I saw their truck, though,” he added. “They come in a white truck. They put the little boy in the truck and drove off quick.”

“But why do they call ’em Gobblers?” Lyra asked.

“ ’Cause they eat ’em,” said the first gyptian boy. “Someone told us in Northampton. They been up there and all. This girl in Northampton, her brother was took, and she said the men as took him told her they was going to eat him. Everyone knows that. They gobble ’em up.”

A gyptian girl standing nearby began to cry loudly.

“That’s Billy’s cousin,” said Charlie.

Lyra said, “Who saw Billy last?”

“Me,” said half a dozen voices. “I seen him holding Johnny Fiorelli’s old horse—I seen him by the toffee-apple seller—I seen him swinging on the crane—”

When Lyra had sorted it out, she gathered that Billy had been seen for certain not less than two hours previously.

“So,” she said, “sometime in the last two hours there must’ve been Gobblers here.…”

They all looked around, shivering in spite of the warm sun, the crowded wharf, the familiar smells of tar and horses and smokeleaf. The trouble was that because no one knew what these Gobblers looked like, anyone might be a Gobbler, as Lyra pointed out to the appalled gang, who were now all under her sway, collegers and gyptians alike.

“They’re
bound
to look like ordinary people, else they’d be seen at once,” she explained. “If they only came at night, they could look like anything. But if they come in the daylight, they got to look ordinary. So any of these people might be Gobblers.…”

“They en’t,” said a gyptian uncertainly. “I know ’em all.”

“All right, not
these
, but anyone else,” said Lyra. “Let’s go and look for ’em! And their white truck!”

And that precipitated a swarm. Other searchers soon joined the first ones, and before long, thirty or more gyptian children were racing from end to end of the wharves, running in and out of stables, scrambling over the cranes and derricks in the boatyard, leaping over the fence into the wide meadow, swinging fifteen at a time on the old swing bridge over the green water, and running full pelt through the narrow streets of Jericho, between the little brick terraced houses and into the great square-towered oratory of St. Barnabas the Chymist. Half of them didn’t know what they were looking for, and thought it was just a lark, but those closest to Lyra felt a real fear and apprehension every time they glimpsed a solitary figure down an alley or in the dimness of the oratory: was it a Gobbler?

But of course it wasn’t. Eventually, with no success, and with the shadow of Billy’s real disappearance hanging over them all, the fun faded away. As Lyra and the two College boys left Jericho when suppertime neared, they saw the gyptians gathering on the wharf next to where the Costas’ boat was moored. Some of the women were crying loudly, and the men were standing in angry groups, with all their dæmons agitated and rising in nervous flight or snarling at shadows.

“I bet them Gobblers wouldn’t dare come in here,” said Lyra to Simon Parslow, as the two of them stepped over the threshold into the great lodge of Jordan.

“No,” he said uncertainly. “But I know there’s a kid missing from the market.”

“Who?” Lyra said. She knew most of the market children, but she hadn’t heard of this.

“Jessie Reynolds, out the saddler’s. She weren’t there at shutting-up time yesterday, and she’d only gone for a bit of fish for her dad’s tea. She never come back and no one’d seen her. They searched all through the market and everywhere.”

“I never heard about that!” said Lyra, indignant. She considered it a deplorable lapse on the part of her subjects not to tell her everything and at once.

“Well, it was only yesterday. She might’ve turned up now.”

“I’m going to ask,” said Lyra, and turned to leave the lodge.

But she hadn’t got out of the gate before the Porter called her.

“Here, Lyra! You’re not to go out again this evening. Master’s orders.”

“Why not?”

“I told you, Master’s orders. He says if you come in, you stay in.”

“You catch me,” she said, and darted out before the old man could leave his doorway.

She ran across the narrow street and down into the alley where the vans unloaded goods for the covered market. This being shutting-up time, there were few vans there now, but a knot of youths stood smoking and talking by the central gate opposite the high stone wall of St. Michael’s College. Lyra knew one of them, a sixteen-year-old she admired because he could spit further than anyone else she’d ever heard of, and she went and waited humbly for him to notice her.

“Yeah? What do you want?” he said finally.

“Is Jessie Reynolds disappeared?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“ ’Cause a gyptian kid disappeared today and all.”

“They’re always disappearing, gyptians. After every horse fair they disappear.”

“So do horses,” said one of his friends.

“This is different,” said Lyra. “This is a kid. We was looking for him all afternoon and the other kids said the Gobblers got him.”

“The what?”

“The Gobblers,” she said. “En’t you heard of the Gobblers?”

It was news to the other boys as well, and apart from a few coarse comments they listened closely to what she told them.

“Gobblers,” said Lyra’s acquaintance, whose name was Dick. “It’s stupid. These gyptians, they pick up all kinds of stupid ideas.”

“They said there was Gobblers in Banbury a couple of weeks ago,” Lyra insisted, “and there was five kids taken. They probably come to Oxford now to get kids from us. It must’ve been them what got Jessie.”

“There was a kid lost over Cowley way,” said one of the other boys. “I remember now. My auntie, she was there yesterday, ’cause she sells fish and chips out a van, and she heard about it.… Some little boy, that’s it … I dunno about the Gobblers, though. They en’t real, Gobblers. Just a story.”

“They are!” Lyra said. “The gyptians seen ’em. They reckon they eat the kids they catch, and …”

She stopped in midsentence, because something had suddenly come into her mind. During that strange evening she’d spent hidden in the Retiring
Room, Lord Asriel had shown a lantern slide of a man with streams of light pouring from his hand; and there’d been a small figure beside him, with less light around it; and he’d said it was a child; and someone had asked if it was a severed child, and her uncle had said no, that was the point. Lyra remembered that
severed
meant “cut.”

And then something else hit her heart: where was Roger?

She hadn’t seen him since the morning.…

Suddenly she felt afraid. Pantalaimon, as a miniature lion, sprang into her arms and growled. She said goodbye to the youths by the gate and walked quietly back into Turl Street, and then ran full pelt for Jordan lodge, tumbling in through the door a second before the now cheetah-shaped dæmon.

The Porter was sanctimonious.

“I had to ring the Master and tell him,” he said. “He en’t pleased at all. I wouldn’t be in your shoes, not for money I wouldn’t.”

“Where’s Roger?” she demanded.

“I en’t seen him. He’ll be for it, too. Ooh, when Mr. Cawson catches him—”

Lyra ran to the kitchen and thrust her way into the hot, clangorous, steaming bustle.

“Where’s Roger?” she shouted.

“Clear off, Lyra! We’re busy here!”

“But where is he? Has he turned up or not?”

No one seemed interested.

“But where is he? You
must’ve
heard!” Lyra shouted at the chef, who boxed her ears and sent her storming away.

Bernie the pastry cook tried to calm her down, but she wouldn’t be consoled.

“They got him! Them bloody Gobblers, they oughter catch ’em and bloody kill ’em! I hate ’em! You don’t care about Roger—”

“Lyra, we all care about Roger—”

“You don’t, else you’d all stop work and go and look for him right now! I hate you!”

“There could be a dozen reasons why Roger en’t turned up. Listen to sense. We got dinner to prepare and serve in less than an hour; the Master’s got guests in the lodging, and he’ll be eating over there, and that means Chef’ll have to attend to getting the food there quick so it don’t go cold; and what with one thing and another, Lyra, life’s got to go on. I’m sure Roger’ll turn up.…”

Lyra turned and ran out of the kitchen, knocking over a stack of silver dish covers and ignoring the roar of anger that arose. She sped down the
steps and across the quadrangle, between the chapel and Palmer’s Tower and into the Yaxley Quad, where the oldest buildings of the College stood.

Pantalaimon scampered before her, flowing up the stairs to the very top, where Lyra’s bedroom was. Lyra barged open the door, dragged her rickety chair to the window, flung wide the casement, and scrambled out. There was a lead-lined stone gutter a foot wide just below the window, and once she was standing in that, she turned and clambered up over the rough tiles until she stood on the topmost ridge of the roof. There she opened her mouth and screamed. Pantalaimon, who always became a bird once on the roof, flew round and round shrieking rook shrieks with her.

The evening sky was awash with peach, apricot, cream: tender little icecream clouds in a wide orange sky. The spires and towers of Oxford stood around them, level but no higher; the green woods of Château-Vert and White Ham rose on either side to the east and the west. Rooks were cawing somewhere, and bells were ringing, and from the oxpens the steady beat of a gas engine announced the ascent of the evening Royal Mail zeppelin for London. Lyra watched it climb away beyond the spire of St. Michael’s Chapel, as big at first as the tip of her little finger when she held it at arm’s length, and then steadily smaller until it was a dot in the pearly sky.

She turned and looked down into the shadowed quadrangle, where the black-gowned figures of the Scholars were already beginning to drift in ones and twos toward the buttery, their dæmons strutting or fluttering alongside or perching calmly on their shoulders. The lights were going on in the Hall; she could see the stained-glass windows gradually beginning to glow as a servant moved up the tables lighting the naphtha lamps. The Steward’s bell began to toll, announcing half an hour before dinner.

This was her world. She wanted it to stay the same forever and ever, but it was changing around her, for someone out there was stealing children. She sat on the roof ridge, chin in hands.

“We better rescue him, Pantalaimon,” she said.

He answered in his rook voice from the chimney.

“It’ll be dangerous,” he said.

“ ’Course! I know that.”

“Remember what they said in the Retiring Room.”

“What?”

“Something about a child up in the Arctic. The one that wasn’t attracting the Dust.”

“They said it was an entire child.… What about it?”

“That might be what they’re going to do to Roger and the gyptians and the other kids.”

“What?”

“Well, what does
entire
mean?”

“Dunno. They cut ’em in half, probably. I reckon they make slaves out of ’em. That’d be more use. They probably got mines up there. Uranium mines for atomcraft. I bet that’s what it is. And if they sent grownups down the mine, they’d be dead, so they use kids instead because they cost less. That’s what they’ve done with him.”

“I think—”

But what Pantalaimon thought had to wait, because someone began to shout from below.