by Smaill, Anna
Lucien returns to the practice console and every moment that passes I expect the knock at the door to come. I think of Martha and what killed her. I think of what Sonja warned, about the danger of entering the instrument. If a citizen’s eardrums could be destroyed by entering the tonic chamber, what will happen to somebody who attempts to play the Carillon untrained? The clammy feeling in my heart grows. What is he to you? asks Sonja. I love him, I say silently to myself.
And because my mind moves slow, it is only then I realise that since our entry to the Citadel, since we came into the arms of the Carillon’s silver shadow, we have not spoken of destruction. We have planned how we will play the story on the instrument. We have made the choice to broadcast what we know. But we have made no plan for how to destroy it.
I hear the echo of Mary’s rune in my head. Simple Simon went to look / If he could pluck the thistle. I think of the Carillon destroyed in fire and know that it was a false imagining, never possible. He pricked his fingers very much, I think. The plan we have had all along is only this. We have never expected to leave.
After Vespers Sonja returns. We wait in the cell together, listening to the silent symphony that Lucien musters in the inner room. We wait and I feel the tension build, lento but sure. We do not speak. Sonja’s face is tight with its old control and I think again of the picture I saw in my mind in the crosshouse. A high silver platform held up by an impossible invisible force.
The door in the wall opens. Lucien walks out.
‘I’m ready,’ he says.
We follow Lucien in, taking the chairs with us. Where before it was Sonja’s room, now it is somehow, undeniably, his. He commands the space as we enter. I can see that Sonja has noticed this. She is quiet and doesn’t meet my eyes.
My heart is beating presto and my scalp prickles. But Lucien is calm. He gestures to us to sit down; then he sits himself. He checks the stops on the console, turns the bellows on, arranges his feet at the pedals. He raises and drops his shoulders once, twice. Then he places his hands on the top keyboard and begins to play.
What is it, the difference between ordinary people and those with genius? Not just ordinary people either. Intelligent people, sensitive ones, exceptionally talented ones. Even people like Sonja who give everything and then more, who work harder than seems possible on the thing they love.
I have slept next to Lucien. He eats the same stuff as me, breathes the same air. He sweats, shits, bleeds, all the things that ordinary people do. But yet there’s something inside him that can make this music.
His hands pull music out of the air. They carve it up; they split the chords. They render what I wrote – what we wrote together – true and beautiful. Notes of dischord, notes that don’t fit neatly into their key or the expected line of a melody, but nonetheless true, and because of this beautiful. Listening to him play is the first time I understand what his hands are really for.
I sit and listen and I know that whatever comes at Matins, whatever the day holds, I am lucky that I can hear this thing that we have made. And I am lucky that when he finishes, he will step across the room and come back to me.
Then I turn to Sonja and I understand something else. I am lucky to feel the gladness of his gift. Because Sonja’s face is frozen and under the mask of control something hangs broken.
That difference, that indefinable difference between talent and genius. It is as fine as a hair, invisible to the eye and even, most of the time, to the ear. But in her face when she looks at her brother, I see that it may as well be a huge, uncrossable chasm.
Sonja sits straighter in her chair. She looks at Lucien. ‘Play it through again,’ she says.
The Carillon
In the Citadel, the violet hour of morning comes with peace and beauty.
Lucien and I sit side by side on the bed where we have lain through the night, not sleeping, not moving. Sonja paces the matting floor, muttering as if rendering an invisible account.
Then she stops.
‘We need to go,’ she says. Her face is tight, and her eyes hardly shift. Her hands pull at the folds of her robes. ‘The priests will be gathering for meditation in the hall.’
Lucien and I stand. He puts the white and gold tabard that Sonja has given him over his head and smooths it down. I look at him. He has become part of the Order.
‘What is your name?’ I ask him.
‘My name is Lucien,’ he says. He takes my arm and pulls me in close. ‘My name is Lucien. I live in the storehouse on Dog Isle, in the city of London. I am a member of Five Rover pact.’ He holds me chest to chest, arm to arm. Our foreheads meet. I breathe his breath and try not to let my fear pass to him. I grip his shoulders hard.
Sonja looks away. I take Lucien’s head, kiss him once, whisper luck in the raven’s tune. ‘Let Muninn fly home as he will,’ I say. ‘You must come back to me.’
Then they stand together at the door, tall, pale, dressed in their white. I see them framed for a second and I feel memory form then, all the other moments rushing in to collide, to bring the past into the instant of the present and make it ignite in the golden light. Brother, sister. Two faces, gentle and hard at once. Then they are gone.
The room is quiet. I feel nothing, just low fear that has become like breath to me. And emptiness. It’s like when you fall and hit the ground, or when someone lands a clean punch right in your stomach. The second after the air has been forced out, you feel nothing. It’s only on the first inhalation that the pain begins.
I wait with my empty lungs for time to start again, for breath to start again, dreading the pain and wanting it to come, and yet not knowing what it will look like when it finally does.
I wait for the dead sound of the fourth toll that signals Matins. I try to imagine where Lucien is, whether they have entered the inner chambers. I try to believe that his gift will protect him from the Carillon’s assault. I am sure time has passed, but it is impossible that Chimes would be late.
Then I hear a sharp knock at the door. A knock then a voice, cool and hard.
‘Simon? Simon Wythern? Open up. Open up or we will break this door.’
I reach to my ankle. Bodymemory feels for the knife that should be strapped there. But it has gone.
There is no moment of surprise. I walk and look out of the window, across the curved distance of the grass. Through it, people are moving in their ordinary days without any knowledge of any of this. I stand there halfway across the room and wait for them to break the door.
When they come, they are many. The poliss enter the room as if to fill it and the thought comes that I must fight, because the longer it takes to remove me, the more chance Lucien will have. Even as I think it, I see it is probably not true. But somehow I have been waiting for my pain and it is a relief when it comes even in this form. Through the legs of the poliss while I can still see clear, there is a whiterobed man who looks down with great disdain. ‘One pactrunner, far from home,’ is what I hear him say. ‘As she told us.’
When the poliss at last pull me from the room and the pain is singing high through everything, the words still come and go in my mind. As I’m dragged down the corridor of the decommissioned cells and into the sunlight’s pale violence. As they pull me across the public grass and round the cobbled square at its centre with the magister walking free and graceful ahead. All the way past Martha, slumped at the wooden pole, and the presence of her body and the crossed stave and the mockery of a threnody strung along it, I hear the words. As she told us.
Perhaps they’ve deafened me with their blows, I think, and the last thing I heard is what will stay. But who is she? I think. And they pull me towards the pale stone of the tower, and the arms of the Lady reach out as if to offer up their consolation.
Then I am pushed through doors of pale wood and into a massive hall.
I’m on my stomach, but against my will I look up.
The hall is fluted, elegant, like the body of one of the giant shells that are washed up on the strand sometime
s. Yet it is human. My mind struggles to understand the time that has been given to it, whole lifetimes between the laying of its first stones and its completion.
Columns stretch up as if they have grown out of the floor like immense trees. They are carved in hard white stone that somehow looks soft to touch. Three, four floors of fluted columns stretching up to a ceiling that seems to breathe and move like the many mouths of a giant creature. All white. I recognise the intricate lace stone carving on the walls as soundproofing. The mouths at the ceiling are open to swallow music. Light fills the hall through high windows, and the smell of incense is strong.
It was not Sonja who gave us away, I think. She was ready to release all of this, to give it up.
But what did we have to offer her in return, next to this beauty? the voice in my head says. No answers, no order. Nothing but mess, questions, fear.
In the middle of the hall, around a table of pale wood, sit the magisters, some in travelling cloaks, most in the white robes of the elect.
‘Bring him in,’ says the one in the centre, the one whose beard is the same white as his robes. I manage to get half to my knees. Because I want to see him. Something in me needs to see him. When I look, it is blurred. My left eye feels broken, and the pain in my head comes forte. I shut the broken eye and it is clearer. I can look then at the man of power who is sitting in front of me. The one responsible for so much death.
He is tall as they all are, and old. Very old. So old that you can see how his power has grown up slow around him. The weight of it in the room like looking at stilled time, the rings on a cut tree. The features in that face are long and sharp, eyes deep set in their sockets. Yet the horror of the face is not the age, but its wonderful smoothness and flexibility. Each line in the fine-grained flesh is exact, somehow articulate. Speaking. It seems to express a living and elegant discrimination. A face that has tasted of things if only so it can choose to renounce them.
Then a door opens in the east wing, the place where, in a crosshouse, the chapel would be.
I see two poliss walk across the floor. Pushed ahead of them with his hands tied is Lucien. A trail of blood from a deep cut on his temple follows the line of his face. I hear a noise leave my mouth. Behind the poliss, a tall man with a hunched back. Next to him stands Sonja.
Lucien is pushed toward the front of the table, directly opposite the magister musicae. Two blind faces stare at each other across the plane of wood. The hall is silent.
‘Who is this boy?’ asks the magister.
The hunched man leaves Sonja and walks forward to stand at the table.
‘This is my son, Lucien, your honour. I should say, he used to be my son. As you know, I believed he died of riverfever at the age of fifteen, before his ordination. I learn now that my wife smuggled him out of the Citadel and he has been living in London since. He tried to use my daughter, Sonja, his sister, to gain access to the instrument. He has brought shame on our family and on the Orkestrum. It would have been better if he had died as we thought.’
Lucien draws himself up slightly. He starts to say something.
‘You will not speak,’ says the magister musicae. ‘You have not been ordained and so have no right to utterance here in this hall.’ He turns back to Lucien’s father.
‘Your wife was Frieda, I think. She was from outside the walls?’
‘Yes, Your Honour. But she had embraced our ways. I had no indication that she was not loyal to the Order.’
‘Your ignorance is hardly an excuse and does little to recommend you.’
‘I am sorry, Your Honour.’
The magister musicae turns to face Lucien directly.
‘Due to your actions today, the Carillon is late. For the first time since Allbreaking, Matins will take place after sunrise. It is the only distinction you appear to have achieved in your short life. And a pointless one, as it will make no difference either in the Citadel or to the people in the cities. Chimes is always coming and always here.
‘I remember you. A gifted boy. You still bear the mark of your birth, I hear. Your talent was fine. You had the skill to rise high, to gain the immortality that only music can bestow.’ He stops speaking, closes his eyes. ‘I cannot tell you how many times I have seen the same error. They mistake the individual hungers and desires, the wants and needs of the solo player, as a source of meaning. Think they can live for themselves and for the pleasure of others. Yet there is no truth in that; there is no way forward. Where did the cult of personality take our predecessors? Into a mired, frantic world without foothold of truth or understanding.
‘You may look at our decisions here, but you are not adequate to understand them. You will never grasp the principle of hierarchy, the sacrifice of the individual for the greater good. We have opened the people to the possibility of a higher, an enduring, beauty. We have shown them that perfection is within their reach.
‘Some might say it has been punishment enough for you to leave the Citadel, to witness and partake of the corruption of city life, to lose your education, your skill, your chance to pursue the high and only ideals. But to my mind it is not enough.’
He points to a young man in white robes who sits down the length of the table from him.
‘Magister Joachim is our youngest magister. Look at him closely. He is what you could have become.’
The young man inclines his head slightly, as if embarrassed to be singled out.
‘Magister Joachim, when you enter the inner chambers, this boy will accompany you. He has been away for so long that he has forgotten the transformative power of music. Before you reach the sacrum musicae, you will leave him in the fifth of the inner chambers, the dominant. You will seal the door. He will listen to your concert from within the instrument.’
‘No.’ Sonja breaks out of her father’s hands, half falls forward. There is silence from the table. ‘No. Please,’ she says.
The old man looks up, fixes his blind gaze on her.
‘You did not ask leave to speak here.’
‘Your Honour, I am sorry. He is my brother. I know that he has betrayed the Order, but if you make him listen from the dominant chamber, it will deafen him. He has no training. He will die.’
I stare at her. She must have known all along that our quest was without hope.
‘I am sorry, discipula. We practise mercy as a rule here. There is no benefit to be gained from cruelty. It is ugly, and it aids no one. But your brother abandoned the Order. This is a betrayal from within and must be recognised as such. Grief is not a note to be sustained beyond death. Perhaps you might choose to see this not as a punishment but as a reclamation, an atonement. The instrument will open to him for a last time. Perhaps in its embrace he will learn what was lost.’
I see Sonja open her mouth and close it again.
I move forward.
‘It was not him. It was my idea,’ I shout. ‘He had no memory of this place. I made him come. Take me instead.’
The magister musicae does not address me. I am beneath his notice.
Lucien turns and he looks at me and holds my gaze. His face is calm and open. He holds his bound hands out from him, and in the narrow air that he can command, he conducts the solfege for my name and then the solfege for forgiveness. I hear it in my head in his voice. I hear it in my head as the single chord inside me that cannot be understood or broken into its different parts. I hear it as love.
The poliss take him. They leave the hall. The young magister goes too, and Sonja’s father pushes her to follow also. ‘To your quarters,’ he says.
I go to my knees then, and my last glimpse of Lucien is the straight pitch of his neck bending as one of the poliss cups his head to push him under the low door that leads towards the Carillon.
I stand in the hall. The stone is cold and empty of life; the ornament is toothed with cruelty; the golden light is cheap.
I feel a hand at my back pushing me forward. I stumble, clumsy. Lucien has gone from me. My body feels made of wood.
‘What to do with the pactrunner?’ says a voice.
I force myself to speak.
‘Take me as well. Let me die with him.’
‘You would profane the instrument. That punishment is only for one who was born here.’
The magister musicae is speaking, but I cannot see him. In front of my eyes are bright moving lights. They are inside my eyelids, moving with them.
I see shapes on the fringes of the brightness, but nothing is clear, a dull throbbing in my brain.
‘As I said, we practise mercy in the Order, as a rule.’ His voice is fastidious, cold. ‘Take him back to London and leave him. He will soon forget what has happened here.’
Hands on my shoulders again. The voice comes again.
‘But no,’ it says. ‘Leave him for now. It may near to deafen him, but what other time would a layperson be privileged to hear the instrument at such close quarters? Such an opportunity will only come once in a lifetime. Who are we to prevent it?’
The hands are removed and I am allowed to slump down.
Pain climbs into a corner of my skull and sets up a rhythm of throbbing. I close my eyes, but the lights cluster and play, following their tracking behind their lids.
I pull my hands taut against the rope as hard as I can, not because I think I can free myself, but because I need to feel something, anything, or I will go mad. Lucien, says the deep throb in my skull. Lucien.
In the hall around me is silence. A new silence, that of their cruel, hallowed ritual. I pull my hands taut. I bring my head to the cold tile.
Silence opens. The smell of pepper fills the air. A dry cough in the upper reaches of the vaulted ceiling. A dead chord breaks the air.
It is Chimes.
Head in the water is peace. I go down, down, down into a place of cool darkness. But in the darkness there is a different voice. It is singing. I think for a while it is my mother’s voice, and then it becomes Lucien’s voice, and then I understand that it is neither of these.