by Smaill, Anna
‘And the magisters? How did they learn I was alive?’
For the first time since she started speaking, Sonja’s voice falters.
‘After I knew what she had meant, I studied the ring again. I found the hidden catch, and what was there in the space behind the stone.’
‘The guildmedal?’
‘No,’ says Sonja. ‘Not a guildmedal. It was a key.’
Lucien doesn’t show any surprise, just stands there waiting.
‘The small key to the broderie box in Mother’s room. I looked inside. Hidden at the bottom was a soundproofed bag. Inside the bag was a transverse flute. A novice’s flute. Made of palladium.’ Sonja looks hard at Lucien. ‘So I knew that I was right. You weren’t dead. If you were, they would have buried the flute with you.
‘But I made a mistake,’ she continues. ‘I didn’t lock the door.’ Her face changes. ‘They are never very far behind. Always listening. Two attendants were following me and they heard it too. They must have understood the flute’s meaning as clear as I did. There was nothing I could do about it.’
‘How did you get the ring out to me?’
‘As it happened, only one of the attendants alerted the magisters. The other came to my quarters that evening after Vespers.’
‘Martha.’
Sonja nods. ‘She didn’t say anything else that was useful, only that you had gone to London. It was she who insisted on putting the coin inside the ring for you. She said that you would understand. She seems to have forgotten a lot, but then she was never very disciplined.’
Lucien is looking at her. I see he is processing what she has told him. ‘Thank you,’ he says at last.
‘Don’t thank me,’ she says, sharp. ‘I didn’t do it to save you. I did it to bring you back. You need to stand before the magisters and learn what it is you have done.’
Lucien’s voice doesn’t shift in register. ‘Do you think the magisters want to hear why I left? What do you think they’ll do if they find me?’
‘I’m not in a position to speak on their behalf.’
Her voice is closed and tight, and it contains something I recognise. Something I know from experience: it is harder to be the one left behind.
I walk into the circle of light that binds brother and sister.
‘Lucien told me of you,’ I say. ‘He told me of your skill. He said that you were always smarter than him. So you must have seen yourself what is wrong with the Order. What the Carillon does.’ I say it presto and straight as if I’m speaking to Clare. It’s a mistake.
‘What did you say his name was?’ Sonja asks Lucien, not breaking her gaze to look at me.
‘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.
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 schola
r’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.