The Chimes (38 page)

‘Why did you need the key?’

Sonja stands straight beside the soundproofed wall. She is talking only to Lucien now.

‘Do you know, I used to feel so sorry for you. Because however clear you could hear it, you’d never see the gardens. The way they plant them so the textures and colours of the flowers and trees all speak together. Nobody else would probably ever admit that to you. “Blind of eye is true of ear” and mothers pray for children with milky eyes, after all.
But I was always glad that I could see.’ She pauses, leans back a little.

‘They ignored me. Not just the magisters in the Orkestrum, but Mother and Father when we were growing up. I didn’t blame you for it. It wasn’t your fault, and you were special, of course. Destined for great things.’ She pauses, the hesitation of somebody not accustomed to sharing thought. ‘As long as there was you and me, I didn’t care much about them.

‘After you died, they continued to ignore me. It suited me by then, though. They ignored me, so I ignored them. The less attention anyone paid me, the more time I had.’

‘For what?’

A slight halt from Sonja. She is letting him in on something very private.

‘For practice.’

‘What do you mean? Why practise here, away from everything? Why not in the Orkestrum?’

She looks hard at him and I see a glint of pride. She does not answer his question straight away.

‘I wasn’t born with your gift. But I knew that I wanted it. And I had something you never had, brother.’

‘What?’ says Lucien.

‘Perseverance. I know how to work. I’m not afraid of my lack of gift. I wasn’t called to be a novice. When I got over that, it struck me. What was there to stop me teaching myself what they would learn?’ She straightens her shoulders.

Lucien nods. ‘You mean you followed their training? Meditation? Composition?’

‘Yes. And the instruments. I taught myself the viol and the bass. Then brass. I learnt the trompet and the slip horn. I wake two hours before the Orkestrum for meditation. It’s hard.’

She closes her eyes. She is thinking how useless words are to explain what the endeavour makes her feel. But it’s plainly visible. She is lit from within. A dread certainty and humility shines along her cheekbones. Along with a fear that something, someone will take it from her.

Lucien nods again, not smiling, not saying anything.

She stands and walks to the door in the opposite wall, opens it and goes through and lights a lantern. Lucien and I follow behind. It is another soundproofed chamber twice as large as the outer room. On the left and right sides of the wall, hung by turned wooden pegs, are instruments. A heavy maple cello. A lute. A bass viol leaning roundbellied in the corner. The military lines of brass trompet and slip horn shine up high above the strings. There is a transverse flute of silver. A clarionet neat in black and gold.

Taking up the whole front wall is a huge klavier. At least, it looks to me at first like a klavier. But instead of a single keyboard, it has seven, one on top of each other, ranked in terraces. On either side of these are neat rows of wooden pegs with rounded handles that jut out of the instrument’s flat sides. Beneath the piano stool are pedals, dozens of them, and then another keyboard at foot level, made of slim, long levers of light and dark wood.

Sonja walks toward it. She takes a cloth from a pocket and polishes the keyboards. She does it with pride and deference. I know that she is watching Lucien, waiting for his reaction. Her movements have changed again. The precision has lost its sharpness and returned as grace. It’s too bright for Lucien to see, I realise, and I am unsure how much detail he is able to hear.

Sonja solves this problem by sitting at the stool. She reaches to the side of the instrument and makes a series of adjustments to the mechanism there. Then she places her hands on the central keyboard. The instrument is so large it seems to swallow her.

A second’s pause and then a muted miracle of voices springs up. Her hands play clustered chords and her feet too, moving deft over the lower pedals like a dancer. It is a simple Bach prelude. Halfway through, she changes the stops and the plain voices are joined and sustained by throaty woodwinds. The simple melody doubles and twists like a wonderful heavy rope of gold.

At the end she sits back, her hands still alive and alert on the keyboard. She doesn’t look away, but every part of her is listening for Lucien’s response.

If only she could see him, it would feed whatever she is hungry for. Lucien’s face is wide in wonder.

He walks forward to stand beside her. ‘May I?’ he asks. Sonja nods. He places his hand carefully on the upper keyboards, runs his fingertips over the drawerknobs to left and right.

Sonja takes Lucien’s hands and places them in the correct configuration on the central keyboard. With efficient movements she lowers the stool for him. He sits and his attitude is one of reserve, almost constraint. His head is bent and he listens close to what Sonja is telling him.

In undertaking to learn, to teach herself the skill reserved only for the Order’s elect, Sonja has done something I would have never thought possible: she has surprised her brother.There is nothing much for me to do but sit and watch and be silent. The room has filled with a buzz of excitement and concentration that rises off the pair of them and threads through the honeycomb of the wall’s carving.

Sonja is blinking fast. She has dragged a chair in to sit next to Lucien at the stool. He plays an experimental scale. She flexes her fingers back, elbows him out of the way, demonstrates something. Lucien nods twice, replaces his hands on the instrument, repeats a phrase. ‘Like this?’

Sonja has turned the bellows off now, so the instrument does not sound, but it is clear that for the two of them, there is no impediment to the music. In their heads, it is as clear as a bell and echoing into the soundproofed chamber.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ says Sonja.

Then, ‘No, the fingering’s wrong. If you do it like that, you won’t be able to keep it sustained. Here, swap the thumb under.’

Then, ‘Here.’ And another demonstration. After a while they are playing music. I hear the complicated runs as they swap places back and forth.

‘Use the pedal to play the cantus firmus here. It’s louder than the manuals. No. You need to use the other stop for it. That’s right.’

I sit in the chair and I doze off and on. They work together through all the minor hours of the night.

I come awake at some point and Sonja is curled up like a cat on the rush matting with her cloak over her and Lucien is thundering silently away. His elbows are out like wings and I can tell he’s playing the Bach prelude. He moves from the top keyboards to the bottom in fluid movements. Again and again. Then he breaks and plays repeated phrases, selecting different stops. His feet tread light on the pedals.

I sit and wonder for a while. In the two or so hours since I was awake, he has gone from awkwardness to near-mastery.

Before Matins tolls Sonja leaves, as she must, to return to the Orkestrum. Anything else would arouse suspicion, and they will be listening closely to her movements, she says. Keep to the room, stay away from the windows. If anyone comes to the door, do not answer.

Lucien is practising what we have written so far. Putting the music into the Carillon’s voices, changing the story into imagin­able and unimaginable sound.

I hear him singing repeated phrases, the tamping sound of the keys moving, presto and then lento. Every now and again he comes out to me to check a story, a phrase, a detail. I play it on Sonja’s recorder. Then he disappears and it transmutes into that soft, deadened sound, the keys hitting muted strings.

I count the tolls, and time creeps on. I lean against the tiled walls of the practice room and I wait.

At None Sonja knocks a trick rhythm to signal us and then opens the door. She is carrying a plate of bread and a bowl of thin vegetable soup with herbs. She places it on the floor where I’m sitting. Her face is white and strained.

‘I’m sorry it’s not much,’ she says. ‘I said I had a headache and needed to return to chambers. I couldn’t take more without making them suspicious.’

‘What is happening in there?’ I ask, gesturing toward the Orkestrum.

Her words are clipped. ‘It is hard to know. Things continue as normal. There is no word of Martha. But they have started searching the students’ quarters. We do not have much time.’ Then she breaks off. ‘Where is Lucien?’ she asks.

I point to the practice room. ‘He has not left there all day.’

Sonja goes into the inner room briefly, then comes out. She is tacet for a while after, and when she speaks it is as if we are con­­tinuing an argument.

‘You know that it is very dangerous for anybody without the correct training to enter the sacrum musicae,’ she says. ‘Let alone to be in the tonic chamber, to play the instrument.’

I suppose that I did know that. If Chimes can damage human ears and minds as far away as London, it follows that to be within the Carillon would be much worse. I have tried not to think about it.

‘But Lucien is not untrained,’ I say. ‘He was selected as a novice. He started the training process. And what about his gift? He was marked to play the instrument from birth.’

Sonja looks at me. She speaks piano.

‘You really have no idea, do you? Of what is required. Of the kind of sacrifice involved. To play the instrument, the priests give up everything. Not just family or time or a so-called ordinary life. They give everything to the Order and to the Carillon. Their hearts, their bodies. Their minds.

‘When Lucien left the Citadel, that’s when his real training would have begun. He would have started with four hours of meditation a day. Broken up into blocks at first. Then the rest devoted solely to practice and study. The novices must master all instruments. A mastery that outshines that of the finest soloists you can hear in the cities. They study until they know rudiments and counterpoint inside and out. They fast and they meditate and they work. And after five years they’re allowed to
enter
the sacrum musicae. Not to play, not to even touch the instrument. They are allowed to
enter
the first of the seven chambers.’

She stands straighter. ‘At any time in the Order, there are only three or four priests who are able to enter the tonic chamber. Always at least three, never more than four. And that includes the magister musicae, the one who composes the Chimes you hear every day in the city. Being in there while the Carillon is sounding would break a citizen’s eardrums.

‘You have no comprehension of this world. None at all. The sacrifice they make is immense. It is beautiful.’

She is so unhappy. She stands in her fine robes and my mind flashes up a picture of the first time I saw Lucien, covered in thamesmud, his roughcloth clothing, his shoulders broadboned and lean and his hair full of light.

‘The sacrifice might be beautiful,’ I say, and I try to keep my voice somewhat gentle. ‘But that’s because it is chosen. Because it is made freely. We don’t have that choice. Our memories are taken from us by Chimes without choice or will.’

The look she gives me is one of pure hate. Her neck lengthens and she tilts her head back in a familiar imperious manner.

‘Do you think I don’t know that? Why do you think I’m helping you, though it could cost my life? Certainly it’ll cost me everything I’ve ever worked for.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

‘I don’t think you understand enough to be sorry,’ she says. ‘To you this is all evil, all built on loss and suffering.’ She fixes me with dark, fierce eyes.

‘But the Order is not evil.’ She pauses. ‘Not at heart. The ideals it holds are good. Beauty. Truth. Knowledge. And they are generous. At heart they are generous. Why do you think Chimes is told for all, if not to share this knowledge? The magisters want what is best for the people. It is not their fault that people are not always able to choose the best thing for themselves.’

Like something made of clockwork, her familiar speech slows and she runs out of words. As if trying something for the first time, swallowing a new substance, she takes a deep breath. I see with a shock that there are tears in her eyes.

When she speaks, her voice has changed.

‘I wish she had got me out too. He was always the chosen one. Me, she was happy to leave to rot.’