The Chimes (35 page)

‘Simon.’

‘Well, Simon,’ Sonja says, turning at last and fixing me with dark eyes, ‘don’t talk about what you don’t understand.’

Anger rushes into me. Like water into a vessel pushed under the surface. It floods my head and stomach and arms so fast it scares me. She might be Lucien’s sister, but her face in its cool blankness is that of every member of the Order, their privilege and cruelty.

‘I understand enough,’ I say. ‘I understand what it’s like to watch someone die of chimesickness, when they’re trying to hold your hand, but their muscles won’t even let them keep that last grip. And what it’s like to forget who you are and where you came from and the people you love. Every part of the place you live in is soundproofed to protect you. You have no idea about damage or pain.’

‘Chimesickness? A sickness given by the Carillon’s music? That’s not true. That’s a rumour started in the cities out of envy and ignorance.’

‘Believe what the hell you want,’ I say. ‘I saw my mother die from it.’

‘If they knew, they would not allow it,’ she says. She is speaking to herself. She taps the fingers of her right hand, bow hand, on the wood of the chair’s back. ‘It can’t be true.’

‘It’s true,’ says Lucien. His voice is somehow apologetic, which makes me angry. Why should she be protected? ‘I have heard it. And I’ve felt it myself. It attacks you in the joints. You can’t do anything to stop it.’

Sonja looks up abruptly.

Lucien continues. ‘Onestory teaches that the weapon was built out of dischord and turned dischord on itself. That the Order and Chimes saved us from the chaos after Allbreaking. But that isn’t true. The Order built the weapon to clear the way. To clear it for the Carillon, and for their harmonies. In London, under the river, parts of the old weapon remain.’

‘The weapon from Allbreaking?’ Sonja is pale and I think of myself in that dead room, my confusion. I almost feel sorry for her.

‘Yes.’

‘But how do you know the Order made it?’ Some emotion is fighting in her face.

‘Because the weapon is soundproofed in the same way as the Citadel. The Order omits an important fact from Onestory. The weapon was a Carillon.’

‘That is impossible.’ Sonja looks as though she is about to cry. She turns to face the cross-stretched man. Her hands tense and release on the wood. ‘They don’t lie,’ she says.

‘They lied from the beginning,’ says Lucien. ‘They think it’s for the greater good, but it is still a lie and the Order is built on it. Outside the Citadel, they can’t keep memory. Chimes brings sickness, and then it kills.’

Sonja’s thoughts have moved back inside, too deep for me to see, and she stands straight and unmoving. Somehow that stillness is a dark thing to watch and I feel that I should turn away. When you have kept your memories with you forever, I think, it might be harder to have their meaning destroyed. I turn away from her to the far wall of the crosshouse and I see a picture in my mind. A silver structure, an unsound platform held high in the air. The scaffold holding it sways, but it stays up as though by sheer force of will.

The silence lasts for a long while. Her voice has changed when she speaks again.

‘Father once showed me an object he had picked up in one of the cities as a souvenir. He said that citizens kept them to ward off memoryloss. He said that it was just superstition. That in the cities they had forgotten what was important, and they didn’t care for learning or contemplation.’ Her voice higher, strained. ‘He said they were ambitious, hungry for money. There was no discipline. No discipline, just ragged striving. He said that if people conducted solfege at Matins and Vespers, they would learn from the Carillon just as we did.’

Lucien and I wait. She speaks lento.

‘And I knew that he wasn’t telling the truth. Does that surprise you? I knew and I decided not to care. It was my decision.’

She tilts her head back and I see the tears she is fighting and will master. The fine blade of discrimination turned inward, cutting herself with it. And I see how her self-control is its own punishment. Close as she can come to remorse. She knows it also. I see Lucien in her then, his pride.

‘Why are you here?’ she asks at last, though I can see she already knows the answer.

‘We are here to broadcast what we know,’ says Lucien. ‘And then to destroy the Carillon.’

‘How do you plan to do it?’ she says. ‘Is it even possible?’

I walk away then, toward the chancel and from there toward the door to look out at the yard. I hear Lucien’s voice telling her. He tells her how we will put the memories in a line that shows the Order’s rise to power. How the story will be sounded out in music by the Carillon itself. Because how else can we give back the story of what has been stolen? I hear his voice speaking the story low to her, and the smoke of the story seems to spread and spread through the half-light of the crosshouse and wend through the pillars toward me. Burnt books, burnt words. Memories that move in flame through the night sky. If we borrowed the Order’s lesson of fire, would that do it? Wood struts around the Pale pipes and bells? A tall scaffold. I listen to the foxes calling to each other outside.

At last Lucien has finished speaking. Sonja steps away from the chair like someone who has forgotten how to walk. I go forward and let myself look at her. I figure I have earned the chance to judge what she has decided for us. In her eyes, when I see them, there is something new. Whatever Lucien told her, there’s a hunger in her now like she has smelt the smoke as well and wants to follow it to the flame. Maybe something in her wants to burn too.

Lucien looks across at me. ‘Will you help us?’ he asks.

She pauses; her hands clench and unclench. And at last she nods.

‘Yes.’

Past the Wall

Sonja leaves us only with the instruction to wait. She will find some way to get us inside.

And so we wait. We sing the composition. Lucien downsounds my memories. I share stale bread with the foxes, and I try not to think about what is waiting for us behind that golden wall.

Past Vespers I’m sitting watching the foxes in the crosshouse yard when a large, stout shape looms over me framed in the sun’s last rays. The shape moves and there’s a flash of sun on clean white cloth. ‘Do you know how to scrub dishes?’ it says.

I shield my eyes and blink.

It’s a solid, strong-armed woman with dark hair. She’s wearing the robes of the Order. On her, they don’t look austere or graceful. Just aggressively, impossibly
clean
.

She stands in front of me for a few seconds, then, as if concluding my answer is not worth her time, walks past me toward the door of the crosshouse.

‘Hey,’ I yell. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

She stands in the door, turning her head this way and that on a well-fleshed neck, looking for something else altogether. Someone else. She blinks in the dark of the crosshouse. She looks back to me.

‘Where is he?’ she asks. ‘Where are you hiding my boy?’

I come up behind her at the doorway, and as I do, I witness the wholly unexpected vision of Lucien walking slowly across the flagged floor of the crosshouse and into the woman’s arms.

Martha spreads a cloth on the dusty floor between the pews and the cross. On it she puts a meat pie, two cheeses, half a dozen small wrinkled apples, a bottle of currant wine and some strange cakes that are seemingly made from nuts and eggs and air.

Lucien and I eat as if we have been starved for weeks, which, when you think of it, is not far from truth. All the while Martha barely lets Lucien out of her grip.

I am transfixed by this strange sight. She squeezes him, ruffles his hair, pinches the muscles of his arms like she’s planning to bid on him at market. I keep waiting for Lucien to snarl as she prods and pokes. To assert his rightful dignity. But the snarl doesn’t come. I try to keep my laugh stifled, but he hears it in my throat. He looks at me and rolls his eyes, shrugs.

Martha’s questions come in a steady rattle, as constant as her pinches. Where was her boy, and how has he been? She thought he was dead and never had word. And did he get the ring? And did he remember her when he was in the city? And what did he do all that time?

But the questions are odd, I notice after a while. Like some of the ruins in London. There are houses and buildings you would swear have been untouched by Allbreaking. But when you walk and see them side-on, it’s their front preserved only, perfect stone with open-eyed windows and nothing behind. And it makes me understand how much stronger my own memory has become.

Martha asks about the man who took Lucien to London. She remembers the colour of his horse, what he wore. But when Lucien asks about his mother and her death, about Sonja and how they got the ring out of the Citadel, Martha’s answers are vague. At one point she talks of someone called Frieda, how worried she has been about Frieda’s illness. Lucien blinks, and subito I realise that Martha is speaking of Lucien’s mother as if she were alive. Her eyes cloud then and she returns to stable ground, to the matter of the boy in front of her, how tall he has grown, how handsome. She recommences her squeezing. What hair he has. And so tall.

When we have eaten and finally sit in silence, she turns to me at last.

‘You didn’t answer my question, lad,’ she says.

‘What question was that?’

‘Can you scrub pots?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘What’s your name, then?’

‘Simon,’ I say.

‘And you’re a friend of Lucien’s, from the city?’

I am dazed with food. I smile at her. It is a strange question really. A question from a world where people have time and leisure and space between themselves, space to sort and choose. I didn’t choose Lucien, I think. Lucien was there always. His voice speaking out of the darkness.

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘Good. He’ll need one where he’s going.’

‘Why do I need to know how to scrub pots?’ I ask.

‘You both will,’ she says. ‘Or pluck chickens. Or peel carrots, or what have you.’ She pulls a flat bundle of pressed material from her bag and unfolds it. Two linen tunics, gathered and trimmed close at the sleeves. Dark breeches. She tucks one of the tunics under her chin and smooths it down over the steep bluff of her chest, ironing out the creases. I take the other and hold it up, look at the guildsign. Kitchenhand. Potboy.

‘There was a call out for kitchen prentisses yesternoch,’ says Martha. ‘Two needed. I’ve taken it upon myself to recruit them.’ She reaches into a pocket and takes out a pair of bone-handled scissors, soap, a razor. She puts them down between us and gestures at me. ‘Cut his hair and shave yourselves, both of you. I’ll be back tomorrow before Matins.’

The water in the font is freezing. You have to laugh or you’d scream instead. Lucien dunks my whole head under and scrubs my hair hard with the solid bar of soap that Martha left. ‘No one will believe you’re a well-brought-up serving lad with such a ridiculous amount of hair,’ he says. And he’s quick but not as quick as me. I catch him at the chancel and show no mercy.

When we’re washed and shaved as clean as cold water can get us, he cuts my hair. The crosshouse is quiet, the only sound is clumps of my hair falling on the dirty floor. He turns my skull with precise, hard fingers as he cuts. Then he wipes the scissors on his robe and blows out the candle.

At half-toll before Matins we’re waiting for Martha, dressed in the tunics and breeks. Lucien is too tall for his and his wrists show a couple of inches below the gathered sleeve ends.

When she arrives, Martha tuts and mutters about what to do with Lucien’s eyes. Paraspecs are only worn by the Order here. Finally she rips a band from the edge of her own petticoat, folds it twice and ties it tight over his eyes. He looks like a moony.

‘If anyone asks, you lost your sight to fever when you were five,’ she says.

We follow her through the just-waking city. Through the streets of houses and in towards the thronging silence of the Carillon.