Lyra's Oxford

LYRA'S OXFORD His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman: The Golden Compass The Subtle Knife The Amber Spyglass LYRA'S OXFORD Philip Pullman Engravings by J o h n Lawrence A David Fickling Book Alfred A. Knopf New York T H I S IS A B O R Z O I B O O K P U B L I S H E D BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Text copyright © 2003 Philip Pullman Illustrations copyright © 2003 John Lawrence Design copyright © 2003 Trickett & Webb Limited All rights reserved u n d e r International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and in Great Britain by David Fickling Books, an imprint of Random House Children's Books. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. www.randomhouse.com/teens KNOPF, BORZOI BOOKS, a n d t h e c o l o p h o n a r e r e g i s t e r e d trademarks of Random House, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request. ISBN 0-375-82819-2 Manufactured in Germany October 2003 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First American Edition "... Oxford, where the real and the unreal jostle in the streets; where North Parade is in the south and South Parade is in the north, where Paradise is lost under a pumping station;1 where the river mists have a solvent and vivifying effect on the stone of the ancient buildings, so that the gargoyles of Magdalen College climb down at night and fight with those from Wykeham, or fish under the bridges, or simply change their expressions overnight; Oxford, where windows open into other worlds..." Oscar Baedecker, The Coasts of Bohemia 1 The old houses of Paradise Square were demolished in order to make an office block, in fact, not a pumping station. But Baedecker, for all his wayward charm, is a notoriously unreliable guide. T HIS BOOK contains a story and several other things. The other things might be connected with the story, or they might not; they might be connected to stories that haven't appeared yet. It's not easy to tell. It's easy to imagine how they might have turned up, though. The world is full of things like that: old postcards, theater programs, leaflets about bombproofing your cellar, greeting cards, photograph albums, holiday brochures, instruction booklets for machine tools, maps, catalogs, railway timetables, menu cards from long-gone cruise liners—all kinds of things that once served a real and useful purpose, but have now become cut adrift from the things and the people they relate to. They might have come from anywhere. They might have come from other worlds. That scribbled-on map, that publisher's catalog—they might have been put down absentmindedly in another universe, and been blown by a chance wind through an open window, to find themselves after many adventures on a market stall in our world. All these tattered old bits and pieces have a history and a meaning. A group of them together can seem like the traces left by an ionizing particle in a bubble chamber: they draw the line of a path taken by something too mysterious to see. That path is a story, of course. What scientists do when they look at the line of bubbles on the screen is work out the story of the particle that made them: what sort of particle it must have been, and what caused it to move in that way, and how long it was likel