The Chimes

by Smaill, Anna

  But then I see. Or rather, I hear. The hair is a stave. The beads are musical notes. The melody is writ upon her, and the melody is her death.

  I am kneeling. Something moves in me, an emotion I thought was beaten. ‘Don’t leave me,’ I say. What I want to say is, ‘Don’t leave me like he did.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sonja,’ she says. Her eyes are calm and remote.

  Then a cold touch at the back of my neck, my hand on hers. And a tune that comes from her lips and leans into the arms of silence.

  I’m too deep. Deep in the black water that is pushing down heavy on me. I cannot see which way to go up or down.

  I kick up toward the light, but it is wrong and the pressure deepens. A rushing comes and it is not the rushing of movement but of blood in my ears.

  A hand shaking me. Too fast. Too soon. And I can’t stop the ascent. I feel the bones in my skull move and my vision blur and then I’m out and the hand shaking me is Lucien’s.

  He’s leaning right over me, his hands clamped round my head.

  ‘Simon,’ he is shouting. ‘Simon.’

  I can’t answer for a few seconds. Lucien’s voice is drowned out in the sudden thumping in my ears as the pressure ebbs. I feel his hands leave my face and go to my throat to test my pulse. I lie there, let the world find its right sides again.

  ‘What happened?’ he says. I hardly know his voice. ‘You keeled over. I couldn’t hear your pulse.’ He touches my forehead, then my chin as if reassuring himself I’m there. ‘And you’re bleeding,’ he says. ‘Where’s it coming from?’

  I reach up and my nose is wet.

  ‘It’s the pressure. I have to dive down to get there. When I come back, it feels like something bubbling.’

  ‘You scared me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Then the memory comes back. I will have to tell him.

  ‘Lucien,’ I say.

  He sits back on his heels, his hands streaked with my blood. His whole body has gone still. As if he can tell by the sound of my voice.

  There’s nothing else in the crosshouse but the silence.

  ‘It’s not your mother’s memory,’ I say. ‘And it’s not yours either. It’s Sonja’s.’

  Lucien stares blank. ‘But it’s my mother’s ring,’ he says. ‘She never took it off.’

  I think through the pictures of the memory lento. I want to tell him exact. ‘I was walking down a white corridor. It was, I think, inside the Citadel. Then I was with your mother in a room at her bedside.’ I pause. I don’t know how to say it. ‘Your mother’s hair . . .’ I start.

  Lucien pushes himself to standing. He does it presto like if he moves fast enough, he can push away from what is coming. But when he speaks, his voice is calm.

  ‘Her hair was combed out and twisted, and it was threaded with glass beads,’ he says. ‘Her hair was like a stave, and the beads formed a melody that sounded along it.’

  I nod.

  ‘I always hated that ritual,’ he says, and his calm scares me. ‘How can you take a person’s life and make a single melody from it? Everything they’ve ever said or done. All they were to other people. As if a tune can sum that up.’ He spits on the ground. ‘The magister musicae composes all of them, you know. And then he sings them into death. People he probably barely even recognises. People he wouldn’t have deigned to speak with. Whose names he never even knew.

  ‘I hate it. A neat glass tune for a life and how grateful we are all meant to be. But it’s just lies.’

  He stops. His shoulders are shaking. His voice is cold, as if I am a student and he has been given the task of stripping away my illusions. ‘Grief is not a note to be sustained after death,’ he says. ‘The threnody becomes the melody simple of the funeral mass. I must have been in London when they played my mother’s, then. I didn’t even get to hear it.’

  I sit next to him. He looks up like he is surprised. His eyes are dry and staring. I take his hand.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. Then, ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Was it easier?’ he asks. ‘Knowing you would forget them?’

  I don’t answer that. Just sit with him while he cries.

  Sonja

  The next morning is cold and sharp. I wake on hard ground in the corner. From where I lie there’s a clear view of the wooden cross at the end of the room. The wooden man on it stretched somewhere between life and death. The look on his face like the rigor of chimesickness. Lucien’s arm lies over my shoulder and my chest. I lie as still as I can so as not to disturb him.

  It’s a while before Matins. The window at the end with the chips of coloured glass still in it shows no light shining through. I would gladly lie still with Lucien’s arm over me until next Allbreaking, but I can tell by his breath that he is already awake. He sits, stretches.

  I watch him. He stands and shakes the stiffness out of his legs, and then he walks from one side of the crosshouse to the other, turns and returns to stand just behind me, out of the line of my sight.

  ‘I dreamt that I could see,’ he says. ‘I was due to go on stage to play the Carillon for the induction ceremony. I was all ready and I sat down. And it was as if my fingers were sick. The muscles acted against me. They didn’t believe anymore what I was doing. I could hear the music, but it meant nothing. There was no time in it, and no time for it. No future and no past . . . I can’t explain it. I knew it wasn’t part of any world outside of the concert chamber. There were red velvet drapes drawn, beautiful heavy velvet. They were there to keep out light. And they were keeping out time, and death also.

  ‘I was so desperate to leave the stage. I couldn’t even remember what I was meant to play. But I didn’t have anywhere else I could go, and I didn’t know what to do, so I sat down and played the piece through. I could see the audience’s faces, and they were horrible. There was nothing inside them. No pleasure or disappointment or anything. And it was like I was crumbling on stage, cracks forming in my fingers and through my head, and I knew I would break at any moment.

  ‘I tried to tell them. It seemed they should understand – they could see it in front of them. But I couldn’t stop playing. My fingers wouldn’t let me. The playing was ugly and clumsy, but I couldn’t stop. I wanted to shout out that they needed to let me stop, but I couldn’t. And they just kept staring, waiting for me to finish.

  ‘I must have finished at last, because at some point the hall, the magisters, the students, all of them rose up in one single movement to applaud. I saw their dead eyes and their hands clapping and it was just the same empty sound and it meant nothing. So there I was dying, and they clapped. And I realised that not a single person among them, including my father, cared who I was, cared if I lived or died.’ He takes a breath. ‘That is the life of the Order. I’ve been deaf to it as well as blind. We go on as before,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing else we can do.’

  ‘We need to get a message to Sonja,’ I say.

  Lucien is silent for a while.

  ‘There used to be a viol maker across the east side of the market place,’ he says. ‘He was the best in the city. He and his prentiss used to enter the Citadel every eightnoch to sell bowhair and strings to the Orkestrum and do repairs. I am sure he is still alive.’

  ‘We gave the last of our tokens to Callum,’ I say. ‘We’ve nothing to trade for a favour.’

  ‘Then you will have to rely on your good looks and native charm,’ says Lucien.

  After Matins I leave Lucien, whose eyes will betray him, and I head east toward the pull of the Lady. The streets are filled with people. I watch the ones carrying shopping baskets and follow their path until I reach an open market in a large cobbled square.

  Buyers walk calmly, and talk is muted. All the flinty chaffer and dash of bargaining is missing. No roughcloth on the cloth vendor’s cart, just linen in pale creams and whites. Gold and silver broderie thread on large wooden reels. The traders’ eyes slide over me, too full of their own dignity for spiel or swagger.

  Off the market st
reet and down the wide avenue to its east. All of the shops are large and well kept, and they’re hung with the guildsigns of instruments. Highboy. Trompet. Clarionet. Flute. The thick, clear para windows are polished bright and behind them strange and inventive displays. I stop at a casement backed in rich blue velvet. Dozens of trompets hang inside, tied by invisible thread and spinning tacet, sending out sparks and rays of golden light across the street.

  Basson. Klavier. Slip horn. Cello. I stop in front of a red door. Viol.

  A low chime from the doorbell and I’m inside. Candles bright against the dark of the windows and the smell of rosin rich and piney in the air. Scent of glue and varnish and the warmth of wood. Viols hang on the walls, their scrolls resting between specially turned pegs. The bows lie in a field of green velvet inside a low case. They are wonderfully beautiful, inlaid with ivory and coloured stones. I can see through to the adjoining workshop. A bench covered in leather. Two heads, one grey and one blond, inclined over a curved piece of wood, the belly of a viol.

  The viol maker takes his time in looking up. When he sees me, he hands the woodplane to his prentiss and says something under his breath.

  Then he walks into the showroom slowly, rubbing his hands on a cloth.

  ‘What can I do for you, young man? A new string, perhaps? A block of redpine rosin? Or does something else catch your eye?’ There is humour in his words, but he moves with caution, a wary eye on the precious goods around me.

  The prentiss watches from the workshop. He has taken in my ragged clothes and grimy face and is waiting to be entertained. I will not disappoint.

  I stand taller, look for the right words. A stammer, I think. Proud and poor. Nervous as hell.

  ‘You . . . you go into the Citadel often, I think, sir?’

  ‘What business is it of yours?’ he says.

  ‘I need to speak to someone . . . to get a message to them.’

  ‘And I need three hundred tokens and a new coat. What of it?’

  ‘Her name is Sonja,’ I say. I think of what Lucien has told me. ‘She’s tall. She talks as if she is somewhere far off and much better, but her eyes look like she’s trying not to laugh. Her hair is blonde. Paler than his.’ I gesture to the prentiss through the open door. ‘She’s high born, a member of the Orkestrum. I need to get a message to her.’ I think of Lucien. The strain in my voice is real at least.

  A small smile comes to the viol maker’s mouth.

  I push my hands through my hair. ‘You will know her if you see her,’ I say. ‘She is beautiful. Tall. Her father is high up in the Order. She plays the cello.’

  ‘And does this beautiful, tall cellist know you exist?’ the viol maker asks. He walks to the case of bows and picks one up, tests the balance. ‘Why would she accept a message from a boy so clearly beneath her in status?’

  My face returns to the truth of my own doubt.

  ‘She spoke to me once,’ I say, drawing myself up again. My voice is tight, trying for dignity. ‘In the market place. I bumped into her and she dropped her bag and the scores went everywhere. She was very angry at first, but I helped her gather the music. We talked.’

  Strangely enough, as I say it, I see it. The tall girl bending in anger and the white pages of music flying from her grasp. The awkward bulk of the cello case resting sidelong on the cobbles. ‘Look, it probably meant nothing to her, but I need to speak to her one more time. Please.’

  If I’m not mistaken, there is a softening in his face.

  ‘And if I were to see this Sonja, what then?’

  ‘Would you tell her that Lucien is waiting for her?’ I sing the message, the name, the location of the crosshouse.

  ‘Lucien,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘An odd name for a rough lad. I’d forget about love and get yourself prentissed if I were you. You’re too old to be out of work.’ He nods at my chest, bare of guildsign. ‘Knock at the bakery, three doors down. They had a call out for prentisses yesternoch.’

  ‘Will you tell her?’

  ‘Not that you have a hope in hell, but if I see her, I’ll sing your ditty. I was young once, however little I remember of it. Now, get yourself down to the bakery and say I sent you.’

  I nod my thanks.

  ‘And keep your memories close,’ he says.

  It is late evening, after Vespers. Lucien tells me of vast libraries with corridor upon corridor of leather-bound scores. He speaks of chamber concerts given by the magisters in gilded and lamplit rooms. He talks about the Orkestrum, where the students move from room to room with the tolls of the Carillon, and from lecture to rehearsal to lesson. Days spent deep in music, living and breathing it until it shapes your dreams.

  ‘Meditation is a form of hearing,’ Lucien is saying. ‘A heightened form. You clear your head of all thoughts. When the music comes, you try to see it shining between your eyes. Like threads stretched taut and the notes as coloured beads threaded on. When you get very good, it’s as if you can see inside the music, through it. You bring the music alive, bring it into being. As if you’re the one composing.’

  I watch him speak. His eyes are fixed on the candle. The shadows are on the planes of his face.

  ‘I can see you, you know, Simon,’ says Lucien.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure if you knew this. I mean not with my eyes but with my ears. I can hear your face. What you look like. I can hear your breath too.’

  Subito he turns to the door. There is nothing there.

  After several beats I hear it also. Low footsteps around the side of the crosshouse. Lucien stands, motions me into the north wing, which is shadowed by the stone arches.

  In the dark, the door creaks open and there is the faint whisper of robes on stone.

  A girl stands just inside the door holding a lantern.

  My description to the viol maker was accurate. She is tall, almost as tall as Lucien. Her hair is blonde and her nose a sharp line. She holds her head with her jaw tilted up. She is dressed all in white, her robes as austere as those of the novices we saw. Her hair is cropped but not short enough to remove the curls that stand around her head. Her expression is empty, no expression at all. Not calm, not cold, not angry, not afraid. It reminds me of nothing so much as the dead room we found at the heart of the weapon.

  ‘Who is he?’ she says, looking direct at Lucien. And I realise she means me. She has not looked my way.

  Her voice is blank too, but under is an old emotion, something soured, painful.

  A quick exhalation of breath from Lucien.

  ‘Come out, Simon,’ he says to me.

  ‘You’ve been away too long, brother. I suppose in the city you’re the only one with any hearing. Deafness isn’t tolerated long here.’

  I walk back down the arched corridor until I stand behind Lucien, in the shadows. Sonja sets the lantern on a nearby pew without taking her eyes off her brother. She looks around the room like a soloist who had hoped for a bigger audience. Her movements are precise, as if her physical body is just a hindrance she has mastered.

  ‘It poses an interesting question, doesn’t it?’ she says.

  I can read Lucien’s impatience clear from where I stand. But there is no sharp answer. I am surprised to see him incline his head in a half-bow. And then I see that he is scared of her. Not of her anger, but of what has caused it. He is afraid of the hurt he’s given her by leaving. The damage there not far from the surface still, not quite hidden. It lends her a strange power.

  ‘What question?’ says Lucien.

  ‘Why am I even here speaking to you, when you’re dead? You are dead, aren’t you? Dead, all these many years of – what was it? Riverfever? It was too risky for me to see your body. They are so afraid of contagion in the Citadel.’ She laughs. ‘Poor Lucien.’

  Lucien regards her steadily. ‘But you are here. You got the ring out to me.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, as if reminded of a past whim. ‘My mother’s ring.’

  ‘Our mother’s ring,’ he sa
ys.

  ‘I saw her before she died at least. Though it was you she was thinking of.’

  Her laugh isn’t for humour, I realise then, but for giving herself pain.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ says Lucien.

  Sonja shrugs. ‘She died,’ she says. The words staccato in the cold crosshouse.

  ‘I know that much,’ says Lucien. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘It was about a year after your mysterious death. They all assumed that she was mourning you, that that killed her. The magisters attributed such crass sentimentality to her low upbringing no doubt. They were wrong, though, as it turned out. Whatever she died of, it wasn’t sentiment.’ She pauses. ‘What else is there to tell? She gave me the ring when she was dying. It was her way of telling me you were still alive and that she’d lied all that time. She meant it for you.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Sonja sighs. ‘Because she sang it,’ she says. When Lucien says nothing, she continues. Like someone used to waiting for the other to catch up. ‘Do you remember the game we used to play?’

  ‘The singing game? In the Purcell Room?’

  ‘Yes. Do you remember the tune?’

  ‘Of course,’ says Lucien. ‘It wasn’t really fair, that game, you know. I could hear you without the melody. But you refused to change the rules. I sang Ray Me to signal you. Then you had to answer Ray Me Doh.’

  Sonja ignores this. ‘When Mother died, she gave me the ring and she sang your name. Not in the official melody, but in that tune. Ray Me Doh.’

  Lucien wrinkles his brow and subito I’m watching a whole world I do not know. The vast territory of secrets that has passed between them. A picture floats up of them walking in lockstep like the idling novices, their heads inclined. I feel for a moment apart, alone.

  ‘I didn’t know she had heard us.’

  ‘Neither did I. It took me a while to understand what she meant. Of course, it was obvious. She was telling me that you were still hiding, that if I listened hard enough, I would find you.’