The Chimes (36 page)

The few people out at this hour pay little attention to us. Traders sluice the frontages of shops with buckets of water, their eyes kept low. As we enter the Lady’s silence, I begin to hear movement in the streets, a high murmuring passed from voice to voice.

We walk through the market place, past the instrument makers, down a narrow, gently curving street. We follow the curve. And then subito, like in a dream where the thing you fear is in the room with you all along, the tower rises above us at the end of the street.

The face of honey-coloured stone seems to stretch forever against the clouds. Heavy at the base and narrowed toward the top. At first glance it is blank and unified, a solid mass. But stepwise closer I see the sheer weight of it is built up from stone upon stone of different sizes. Stones broad and thick, flat and flagged, some like cobbles, some small as teeth. The honey-coloured stones of Oxford’s Allbreaking. They’re pieced together so clean and perfect that you can hardly see the gaps. The look of it fills me with dread. Power lives in it. Power and a cleverness I can’t understand.

We follow the broad foot of the wall, walking in its shadow until we round its curve and there are no streets beside us. We have entered a wide open square in which the wall stands clear and tall and proud. At its centre is the circular building of the scholar’s memory from before Allbreaking. The place where the Order started burning code. The wall cuts through the circular building, grows round it, making of it a gatehouse and the entrance to the Citadel.

We follow Martha, who walks without falter through the press of people that stand in the square. Throated murmuring of speech all around me, but I can’t make out words. When I trip on a loose cobble, Martha catches me sharp by my elbow, walks me forward.

As we reach the gatehouse, the murmuring heightens and I realise that people are craning their necks, looking up to the ramparts above. Then I feel a steady throb of Pale coming forward, nearing the wall from the other side. The pulse of silence comes forward; then it breaks into three separate points. Then the trio of silence is climbing. The crowd murmurs and subito, above, the early sun catches on white robes and pale silver.

Three members of the Order stand on the ramparts. They are magisters, members of the elect. I recognise them, the white robes, the tall proudness. But they are different, different from any I saw in London. They stand on the ramparts with their blind eyes uncovered instead of behind dark paraspecs. And their transverse flutes are not of silver as the ones they carry in London, but are made of pure palladium.

The crowd’s murmur forms a low continuo. The magisters play the announcement in unison. It carries far off into the city. Two pactrunners. Escapees. Traitors. Traced from London and a narrowboat they travelled on seized. Warning. Vigilance. Reward. Among the people standing below, the announcement is whispered, whistled, passed from voice to voice and breath to breath.

We stand in front of the rounded gatehouse. My heart is going presto as I think of Jemima and Callum and I do not look at Lucien.

Martha steps forward toward the closed doors; then she takes a short wooden baton, like the stick of a tambor that hangs there by a linen cord, and knocks a complex rhythm on the door’s mettle ring.

After a slow beat a small door within the door swings open and a man’s face looks out. He is wearing white robes and over them a garment of fine woven mettle. His expression is that of a martyr to unbearable boredom. He takes in Martha, her clothes, Lucien and me standing behind her. Then he opens his mouth. I expect a speech, but his question emerges in melody. His voice is pompous and reedy and mannered, and he sings a long interrogative phrase in which I catch only glimpses of meaning. Martha waits and then sings back. Answering phrases, clipped and stout and impatient.

The man nods with the same lazy worldweariness and then gestures at us. He asks in words, as if for our benefit, ‘And these two? What are they doing?’

Martha bows her head. ‘Kitchen prentisses for the Orkestrum, sir. Hired yesternoch and due to start training today.’

The guard narrows his eyes. ‘They look old for prentisses,’ he says.

Martha nods. ‘You’re right, sir. Yet they won’t ever be more than prentisses, either of them. This one’s slow, poor lad’ – she gestures at me – ‘and that one’s been blinded since he was small. But they’re steady workers, or so I was told. And they come at a good rate.’ She winks.

The guard turns to speak to a person behind him. Then he looks straight at Lucien and me, ignoring Martha. He studies our faces.

‘We’re looking for two young men from London,’ he says. ‘Traitors to the Order. Word is, they’ve arrived in Oxford. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?’

We are both silent.

He looks at Lucien. ‘You,’ he says.

Lucien keeps his head low.

‘I’m speaking to you,’ the guard says. ‘Where were you working before this?’

In the pause that follows I wonder whether there would be any point in running. Then Lucien speaks in a voice that isn’t his, a voice with low-lying muddy vowels.

‘In the kitchen of the Child,’ he says. ‘I’ve scrubbed pots there since last year’s festival Chimes.’

The guard pauses. ‘And who’s the landlord there?’

There’s another pause, but this time Martha interrupts.

‘Every man and his dog knows Annie Kerwood, sir. I have a better question for you. Who’s going to explain where the magisters’ supper is if I don’t get these two to the kitchen?’

The guard flicks his eyes over us again, but he feels he’s done his duty and the boredom has returned to his face.

‘Get them in, then.’ And he waves us through.

Martha sings and signs a few notes of respectful obeisance. They are cut short by the quarterdoor swinging back into its place. Then there is a creak as the vast wooden gates open a fraction, as if for an entrance only reluctantly allowed. Martha shoulders the door and we walk in past her.

Out of the shadow of the wall we walk.

And we are inside.

The Citadel

Where we are is a place of open space. Greenness. Grace. Before us are curving paths laid out between carefully pruned low hedges. Along each edge of a wide green square lie covered corridors in the same honeyed stone as the wall. The heights and proportions of the stone construction seem to follow an invisible grammar. Through the corridors, and through the patterns of light and shadow the arches cast, figures stroll in white, carrying their instruments in silence or playing them. Conversing in melodies tossed from voice to voice. Speaking together in solfege with hands that move more rapidly than I can read. They are tall, and their movements are graceful.

We proceed down the corridor and I snatch sideways glances at Lucien’s face, trying to read his expression. I try to see the buildings through his eyes, what it must be to return to their elegant proportions, the harmony of their colour and design. It twists strange in me. I wanted to hate this place for its cruelty and power, but I find the beauty working its way inside me. I want to walk straighter, as if my own rhythm has been altered in some subtle way by the austerity and calm.

Might Lucien realise his mistake in leaving this world? Would he not regret the disorder and dischord of London? And in me, what must he see? Somebody confused, rough, improbably shorn. I reach up to touch my head and its strange stubble.

I try to keep my eyes down. We follow Martha to the end of the many-arched corridor and through a set of windowed double doors. Then down a long, echoed marble hall and three flights of stone steps and into a long, cold corridor.

The floor is polished from many feet, and the echo tells me we are below ground. The corridor stretches ahead, and as we walk along it, I begin to hear noises. Water boiling. Feet shuffling. A curt voice calling out rapidfire orders. The ringing sound of someone chopping firewood.

A few steps from the corridor’s end, there is a narrow wooden door, and a stairwell that presumably leads back up into the light. Martha pushes us toward the stair and up the first few steps.

‘All of the kitchen staff live extramural,’ she says, somewhat out of breath. ‘They leave before Vespers.’ She turns to me. ‘Did you see that door down there?’ she asks.

I nod yes.

‘That’s the coldstore,’ she says. ‘When the other staff leave, hang back. Hide in there. It may be a few days, but Sonja will come for you.’ She hands me a mettle key. Then she pushes us before her, back down the few steps and through the open arched doorway.

The kitchen is dark and my first impression is of unformed shapes buzzing sharp and purposeful. Rich meat smells. Sharp bursts of laughter. And the heat of several fires. A thickset man in an oilspattered apron walks up to us. He speaks an order to Lucien, and when Lucien does not move, he pushes him forward with a rally of impatient blows, towards the end of the room, where there are sinks piled with dirty dishes.

A small woman walks up and speaks to Martha. When she has had her words, she grabs me by the shoulder, as if convinced I am blind also, and propels me forward with a sharp push towards another sink and an enormous pile of potatoes.

It is a stretched and sleepy afternoon in spite of the grip of fear beneath. The repetitive task and the noise and the sun coming in through the low grates and I find myself several times almost falling in sleep. I look for Lucien, but he has been shifted from washing dishes to some other chore and I cannot see him anywhere. Each time I pause in my task, I see the small woman’s eyes on me, measuring. The day is broken only by the tolls of the Carillon.

At one point in the long afternoon a magister enters. The silver of the Lady spills into the kitchen and at first I don’t understand it. I feel rather than hear the shrinking back of the kitchen staff against the walls. The faces people wear while working, the unguarded resting expressions of humour, irritation, boredom, each goes inward and closes, and a conscious hush comes from each so that their silence is somehow joined.

The magister treads out onto the silence like it’s a cloth beneath his feet. A small man, but the glow of white from his robes seems somehow immense in the unlit room. I cannot tell if this is a routine visit or not. Their eyes and faces do not offer any clue. When the magister speaks, his voice is fine and steady in pitch. Not forte or piano, but a carefully graded middle tone that does not strain.

‘There will be ten more of us for supper,’ he says. He looks to the thin woman who spoke to Mary when she brought us in. ‘Please open the additional bottles beforehand. And we will need an extra server, I think. Somebody presentable.’ That light tone, even, calm sends a shiver down my back. His milky eyes move lento across the kitchen, over my face. Then he walks a few steps forward and points to a boy beside me. ‘He will do.’

The mountain of potatoes never shrinks. It’s a toll before Vespers when a bright little melody flutes through the kitchen. It is clear what it means. All around me people step back from their tasks and stretch bodily. Subito the workers who have blended into their chores and the shared rhythm of the kitchen take their own shapes and movements. I watch a tall, thin girl pile kindling and coal in the mouth of the largest oven. Two boys push a wheeled trolley laden with meat back out into the corridor. The man who shoved Lucien counts knives back into a safe in the wall. I feel Lucien then. He is standing a few yards away, hanging polished copper pots of all sizes on a huge pendant iron rack above the central fire. I wait.

In pairs, the workers remove aprons and take their turns at the sink to wash their grimed hands. They leave by the sole corridor, talking, humming, laughing. I imagine them going out through that vast blank gate and back into their streets and homes, and it makes me feel stronger. The kitchen is half empty when I nudge one of the peeled potatoes at the bottom of the vast stack and the whole pyramid collapses. Potatoes bounce and roll like marbles over the scrubbed tiles and I swear convincingly.

Lucien and I on hands and knees. It’s empty enough in the kitchen now that nobody thinks to remark on how a blind pren­tiss can put his hands so unerringly on the scattered potatoes.

It’s after and we are standing in the freezing dark of the coldstore. Whole pigs hang from mettle hooks beside us. The candle’s shadows bloat and swell the lines of their flesh. I examine my blisters by touch. Walk round to see if there is anything we can use for blankets. Lucien, slid into a crouch against the wall, removes his blindfold with a grimace of relief and watches me. When Vespers comes, it is both strangely the same and entirely other. How to explain? The sounds come down from such dread proximity above our heads. Almost as if they are in the same room. I feel them in my body, but the resonance slides off from me. Like I am covered over in a sheet of clear para, it cannot touch. I follow Lucien’s solfege right through and my body never seizes.