The Chimes (42 page)

I sit on the grass and I know that I have to leave. I must search the rubble again, then the emptied rooms of the Orkestrum, then the tunnels, the corridors. I need to move now and keep moving lest the tense hope that’s subito sprung up in me collapses along with everything else. But I can’t seem to move. My legs do not respond.

I look up and through the crowds one of the whiterobed figures is walking toward me, steady and tall. He crosses the grass. I watch as he gets closer and I wait for his path to change, for his face to contort. Then at last my body answers and I scramble to my feet and after a while he reaches me where I stand. His body is marvellously whole. Unbroken. He stretches his hand out to mine and then his arms are around me and we stand like that for who knows how long, in the shadow of the broken instrument.

After is a different place than I had thought, if had let myself think of it at all. It is making the dangerous trip back into the instrument to rescue Sonja’s body, and it is Lucien cradling her in his arms. His face cracked open in grief and the whole desperate unknown expanse of it stretching out.

After is knowing there is time for grief, and that time will be filled with it. Their heads inclined like that so you can’t tell the difference between their pale curled hair. His hand to the curve of her face as if asking forgiveness. No help for any of it. Just a long path that we must go ahead on. It is the flint from Sonja’s own pocket that lights the bier.

Smoke from the burning instrument rises upward into the sky. It twists in the air. The sweet wood, fine-tuned and jointed, goes up lento. We stand and watch it burn and the smoke smells like incense.

Later, in that time called after, we walk unquestioned through the Citadel. We pass people on their hands and knees with their faces twisted, still howling out their despair in silence. The ringing in my ears lessens, but does not stop.

The gatehouse is unmanned. Through the para windows is the picture of an abrupt exit. A lute hanging from a chair, still swinging from its broidered strap. Scores scattered on the floor. On a bench a half-eaten sandwich sits on stickwrap.

Past the tower we walk and through the city. And it is coming alive lento in the early light. Children clutching their half and three-quarter viols and cellos. Instrument makers holding lathes, planes, polishing cloths. The stall holders in markets stare out over dropped fruit, the white blown leaves of sheet music, the unfurled bolts of cloth. Families in stunned lines, mothers grasping babies tight and holding them into their shoulders, shielded from the gauzy wings of the smoke that stretch now through the town and through the market.

People out and clustering everywhere on the streets. They have emerged from shops and houses, from crosshouses and concert halls and workshops. They stand blinking in the light, and on their faces is the echo of the story that has been sounded. And I wish that I could say it was a look of wonder, or relief, or enlightenment. That I could see understanding there; pain, but the pain that comes from understanding.

But instead it is like watching someone wake from a dream. The look on their faces is of something crumbling around them as they watch. The look of something taken away.

It is an awful knowledge. Even if what you are coming up out of is a nightmare, waking is hard. When you were deep inside the dream, all was decided for you. Out in the morning is something else altogether. Something you have to choose for yourself.

The sky is lightening as we walk. Lucien is tall beside me and I turn to look at him. He stops. We are standing on a hill just past the city.

I can see to the east where the sun is still rising, and the full expanse of the sky stretches out.

The sky is empty. I feel that I have never looked at it before, in the quiet like this. The trees around us move in the wind and the wind’s breath comes into me as we stand there and look out toward where the sun is taking its journey upward.

I see clouds moving. White and blown. Their rhythms are all different and unspelled. They tangle and reshape and you could give whatever meaning you liked to them. Whatever story you liked. I stand there and watch and I wonder if there’ll be a time hereafter when the birds will come back. Whether they will want to return into this new and unremembered silence.

Lucien is moving off already and I follow him. We walk over the green grass together. I do not have to ask where he is going, because I know already.

Down to the river.

Acknowledgements

Thanks and love to Sandeep Parmar and Imogen Prickett, who were there at the beginning and throughout. To my darling siblings Christopher and Esther, and to Natalie Graham, Jacob Edmond, and Nik
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u, K
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hu and Huia. Thank you to my parents Bruce and Barbara, to whom the book is dedicated. Thanks to Dawn and Allan Shuker, and to all the wonderful Williamses and Walronds. To Ayelet Gottlieb, Rowena Tun, Katy Robinson, Sienna Latham and Elizabeth Knox, for belief and encouragement. Thank you to my agent Will Francis, for his clear-sighted vision and general brilliance. Heartfelt thanks to the whole team at Sceptre and in particular to my editor Drummond Moir, who unerringly helped me towards the right resonances and rhythms.

Thank you to my daughter Lotte, who makes all the words new again. And to Carl, always, for your belief in me, and for your true, well-tempered love.