The Chimes

by Smaill, Anna

  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 potat
oes 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.

  What makes me wake is Lucien’s arms tensed tight round my chest. I hear that he is awake and listening. I hear the slow sound of mettle on mettle. A key in the lock and the handle turning.

  Lucien’s grip tells me to keep still. We’re in the corner of the coldstore. Between us and the door there are several ranks of shelves piled with dry goods. We lie in the dark. There is the hungry hiss of a match and a glow of light catches and blooms. A bare few footsteps and our small dark corridor is filled with candlelight. Lucien swears, shields his eyes and sits up.

  Martha stands there. She is out of breath, and her face has changed. It is fixed, and her eyes move in it like things trapped.

  ‘Where’s my sister?’ asks Lucien.

  ‘Not safe for her to come,’ says Martha. ‘Now that the magisters know you’re in the city, they are watching her. We can’t wait either. We need to move.’

  The cold presses in on us and I have the same feeling I had in the dead room. Like something dark and heavy is sitting on my chest.

  ‘What do we do now, then?’ I ask.

  ‘You come with me,’ Martha says.

  ‘Where?’ asks Lucien.

  ‘Somewhere she thinks you’ll be safe for a while. Safer than here.’ Then she sings a tune in her stout voice. It’s short and it plunges and winds. I see Lucien following it, dredging through memory, piecing the directions together. He waits and looks up at Martha.

  ‘She’s serious?’

  Martha nods.

  ‘The novice cells?’

  ‘That’s what she told me.’

  ‘I hope to hell she’s right,’ says Lucien. ‘We could not get any closer to the Carillon.’

  Martha gestures for us to take off our shoes.

  ‘Never quieter, boys. Never quieter in your lives,’ she says. ‘You don’t touch the ground. You float.’

  We follow her down the same stone corridor we came in on. But instead of continuing back to the garden, Martha turns left and down another two flights of stairs. Then through a series of corridors and down further flights, getting lower and lower until we enter a long, straight hall. It’s being used for storage – there are shelves filled with scores lining the walls.

  We are deep. Though the walls are sealed in plaster and painted white, I can feel the cold breath of earth coming through them. At the end of the hall is a heavy double door. Martha removes a key and unlocks it. She opens it wide and we walk inside.

  I hear space unfold in front of me.

  I hear Lucien’s lungs open as if a part of him has come home. For a moment I’m back in London, standing in our amphitheatre at Five Rover, waiting for the map to settle. What we hear is tunnels.

  In the mouth to the under, I wait for my ears to sharpen as I always do. The room we are standing in is not large, and it opens into a simple network at first, just one tunnel leading each way, left and right. Then I listen out further and I learn that this family of tunnels is as far from the crazed tangle of our territory, with its wormed maze, its spiderweb of ways, as it’s possible to hear.

  I can’t hear the full extent of them, but the opening phrases are as careful and precise as a partsong. They are concentric, coiling like the shell of a snail, and cut through with a grid of straight tunnels. Lucien turns to Martha and quietly sings the winding tune she gave us in the coldstore. She listens with care and then she nods to confirm that he has remembered right. We enter.

  We tread light and presto. Martha goes first with the candle, then Lucien, then me. The tunnels are rounded and easy to move in. They are taller than our heads and wider than an armspan, and they have little echo. They are lined in flat white tiles. Our tunnels were built, I guess, to carry other things. Water. Words. Carriages. Sewage. These appear to have only one purpose, to take people from place to place beneath the Citadel.

  We follow the tune as it winds, walking tacet. And I get the strange feeling that somehow we are not moving at all. There are no landmarks down here, nothing to offer cadence or modulation. The corridor never changes, just follows the same slow, patient curve. At regular intervals we pass the open mouth of another tunnel in the grid. Keep treading, never quieter. I think of Martha’s instructions and imagine that, after all, I could be floating. I have forgotten which way is up and which down.

  Subito, between Martha and me, Lucien stops.

  A few paces ahead, Martha halts and looks back at where Lucien is frozen. My throat closes. A dead sound chimes inside me. Then I hear what Lucien has heard.

  In the under in London, it is the sound that signals the end of a run, a pleasing glow of luck and reward. Here it means something else.

  Far ahead in a tunnel perhaps two from ours in the concentric spiral, there is a pulse of silence. Its whispered hush comes to us through mettle and tile and stone. Martha has not heard yet, but she can read the fear in our eyes. No one moves. I barely breathe. Far ahead in its tunnel, the line of Pale is moving. It moves smoothly at a walking pace. Northeast.

  At first the panic drumming in my ears makes me mishear, but after a few breaths I understand. The Pale is moving away from us. As if it will help him on his way, I try to imagine the magister’s steady tread, the glowing flute slung askance his white robes. It is moving, far ahead, in the same direction we are going. Then it turns down one of the bisecting tunnels, farther off. I watch Lucien’s eyes. They are fixed, as if even their movement might reveal our presence.

  The constellation of silence traces its journey and we wait. It moves away from us. Steady but sure the silence fades. I feel the blood begin to move more calmly through me and I let my muscles ease a bit. I breathe.

  And then I freeze.

  In the candlelight, Lucien’s eyes have widened and flared. I train my ears again. The pulse of silence flickers on the edge of my hearing. It is still. Still with the magister’s listening. I look at Lucien and he at me. In the moment that passes, far off in that northeast corridor, the silence makes a small movement back towards us. Almost grudging, like someone pulled back to a task they would rather avoid. The Pale turns and begins its tread back.

  Lucien’s jaw is rigid. The bones of his face are raw and stripped. Some awful recognition has bloomed in his eyes. Lento, lento he reaches into his tunic and pulls a leather cord from round his neck. What it draws up is a leather pouch. Muddy from where it was buried in the paratubs on the balcony of the storehouse on Dog Isle. Inside it is the silence of his mother’s ring, and inside that the smaller silence of the guildmedal. A tiny droplet of quiet signalling out to the keen ears of whoever is now walking steady towards us, at the pace of someone who has no earthly need to hurry.

  Lucien’s anger as clear as speaking. To have come so far. To have come so far and to have made such a mistake. All I can think is that if we are going to be taken, I don’t want the last sight of Lucien to be in this tunnel, underground, far from sun and air.

  Then subito Martha is standing between us. She grips Lucien’s hand open and sees the po
uch, the stitched tune. She cannot hear the Lady’s homing pulse, but she knows what it contains. In the tunnel’s slowed time, Martha pulls the pouch from Lucien’s hand. She doesn’t look at him or at me, but walks past us and back down the corridor.

  The last sight I have before I push Lucien forward into a run is that of Martha standing solid at the next tunnelmouth, waiting for the coming wave of silence to swallow her.

  Out of the tunnel Lucien and I push and fall, and Sonja is there in the corridor at ground level. She is crouched pale against the wall and leaps to her feet as we shoulder the wooden door. She grabs me and pushes me ahead and I’m almost stumbling as I go.

  Three doors and we enter the last and we’re inside, locked in soundproofed quiet.

  I’m shaking. I see my hands through a blur as if they’re apart from me. I try to clench to stop it. I rest them on my knees, but that’s useless as the tremor is in my legs too. It seems to be in my whole body.

  Lucien sits a foot away with his head bowed. He has wrapped his arms around himself. His hands are tight to his upper arms and they’re kneading, punishing the flesh. I get up and go to him, try to pull his hands clear, but he pushes me away, doesn’t look up.

  Sonja is silent.

  ‘Martha?’ she asks. I nod.

  ‘What happened?’ And I tell her.

  Lucien looks up then. His eyes are wild and strange in a way I can’t remember seeing them. ‘It was my fault,’ he says. ‘I made it happen. I cannot believe I was so fucking stupid.’ He pronounces every syllable mercilessly clear. ‘I carried that thing the whole way from London. I brought it with me into the Citadel.’