The Chimes Read online

  A book. Bound in leather like a score. She places it on the bench, and holding one hand with the other for steadiness, she opens it.

  From where I look over her shoulder I see that the page is covered with strange black shapes of code. I breathe in sharp.

  ‘Written words,’ she says, as if she’s lonely for them. ‘Coded ideas. Nobody understands them now.’

  ‘What were they for?’ I ask.

  ‘Code was a way of keeping thoughts still. Of helping them stay in formation. Everybody used to understand it, and they could write in it too. It meant that you could return to the ideas when you wanted. Code is a kind of memory.’ She strokes the pages and it’s as if the tremor in her hands calms a little. ‘My mother gave this to me, and now it’s yours.’

  She flicks past yellow interleaved pages for a while, and then she nods and I look. It is a picture of a fat man with a beard and two strange creatures clawing tight to his shoulder.

  I lean over close so I can see the grain of the colour on the thick pages.

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Birds,’ she says.

  ‘What?’ I say. It is a word I have never heard before.

  ‘Birds. They died out. These were the ones called ravens.’

  She begins to sing.

  ‘In the quiet days of power,

  seven ravens in the tower.

  When you clip the raven’s wing,

  then the bird begins to sing.

  When you break the raven’s beak,

  then the bird begins to speak.

  When the Chimes fill up the sky,

  then the ravens start to fly.

  Gwillum, Huginn, Cedric, Thor,

  Odin, Hardy, nevermore.

  Never ravens in the tree

  till Muninn can fly home to me.’

  The song is mournful. It does not make sense. When she finishes, she asks, ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘Listen,’ and she sings it again. ‘The meaning is simple,’ she says. ‘It stays simple so we remember. When Chimes came, the birds died. When the birds died, words died. When words died, memory died.

  ‘Gwillum, Huginn, Cedric, Thor. Those are the names the song lists.’ She turns the page of the book carefully. ‘Gwillum, Huginn, Cedric, Thor, Odin, Hardy, Muninn . . . There were seven of them, and they lived in a tower in the city of London. But two of the ravens were more important than the others. Huginn and Muninn. Huginn – that’s the word for an idea, a word picture in your head, something that flies in from outside. Muninn is different. The most important of all. Muninn is another way of saying memory.

  ‘Before Chimes, the ravens flew all over the world together. Free to fly and haunt and free to look and to understand what they saw. But however far they travelled, they would always return home. Muninn often the last of all, they say, because memory had the furthest distances to travel. Then one day they didn’t come back: Muninn was lost. And with Muninn, human memory, and written words. Ravensguild want to bring Muninn back.’ My mother closes the book. Then she thinks for a second and hands the book to me.

  ‘For memory,’ she says.

  I take it, hold it hard. I empty my mind, and using all my will, I tell the memory to stay in it. I bind it hard with our movements, my confusion, the smell of the forcinghouse, my mother’s words.

  ‘You see others’ memories,’ I say. ‘You keep them and you help the person to remember.’

  ‘Yes. But some memories are more important than others,’ she says. ‘Because some memories belong to more than just one person. Like the story of Huginn and Muninn. Some memories tell us about who we are. They need to be kept safe so that things can change for all of us.’

  All of us. I see the village square, the market place, the old crosshouse, the new assembly hall. I can see nothing bigger than that.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I ask.

  My mother studies me, as if measuring how much I will understand. ‘The world stretches far beyond this farm, Simon, and beyond the Citadel also. We have forgotten to think of ourselves in this way.’

  ‘What happens to those memories?’

  ‘I pass them on to someone with more skill than me, with more vision than me. Someone who will keep them for longer. I give them to a woman in London, and she passes them on to someone else, and in this way the network grows strong and the memories stay alive.’

  ‘What is Ravensguild?’ The name has a strange taste in my mouth, like copper. Like mettle and blood mixed. ‘Who is Ravensguild?’

  ‘We are,’ says my mother. With difficulty she rewraps the book in the cloth, places it back in the tin and uses the handle of the knife to hammer the lid back on. Then she puts the tin back under the workbench. Amid the other trugs and pots, it becomes invis­ible, hidden.

  She turns to me and her look is either a challenge or an invitation, I can’t be sure.

  ‘You are,’ she says.

  The Dead Room

  Trade at Barrow

  I wake some time before Matins. I wake with the taste of copper in my mouth, like I’ve been sucking on old mettle. And with the echo of Lucien’s arm over my shoulder as I helped him to cross the race. There are other things I newly wake with. A sadness that is different altogether from the cloudy sediment dread bears up. It is dark and solo. I can’t see the bottom of it. And another thing I don’t recognise, a kind of hunger to grab another person and press them as deep into knowing as I’ve gone.

  Up until now I’ve been stuck in a dark room that I thought was the whole world. Now there are doors in the room, and the doors lead into new rooms. How far back does it go? What is in the centre?

  Then I let myself think of Lucien. I see myself waiting on the race. Lucien hunched in sickness. The both of us standing in another storehouse – the secret twin to ours. I feel his weight on me. And that thought sends light into my arms and fingers. I lie still, letting things settle as they will.

  Out in the storehouse, I can hear the others moving. The coiny clink of the kettle, the scrape of the cookstove ashes. Abel whist­ling a tune known only to himself, holding some half-buried song of his own past.

  I push aside the roughcloth curtains and let them fall behind me. All is as it ever was. Clare cuts bread at the counter, measures tea and spice. Brennan skewers bread on the toasting forks. Everything the same.

  But the way I see it is different. I see the fine layer of dust across the surfaces, and I see the patterns on the wood. For the first time I see the storehouse in one glance and it is narrow. Even the thick, rough, oil-stained walls feel thin somehow, hardly a shield from the outside world. I shiver. The pact has changed too. We are not one whole, held together by breath and song, but five people, all afraid, all alone.

  Abel is young, too young even for a prentisship. Brennan moves with a kind of pushed-down anger that is hardening and going sharp. Clare is too thin. I see all this as if for the first time. And I see the scars on Clare’s forearm. Faint white raised lines walk along under the fair hair. She pours spiced tea and her sleeve rides up and I see fresh cuts, red and pained-looking, scored like a stave, like the notches on the door panel, too neat for accident. Cuts that fade from red to pink to white. Cuts to keep memory, to measure time. Pity moves in me. I look away.

  Lucien comes from the balcony, stops at the door and counts notches. Is he different also? Has he changed? Yes, I think. I wait for something to tell me what the distance is between us now, but all I learn is a jangling note. Fear, but fear with a sharp edge. Not dull or murky but bright and pressing. Is that what I’ve gained? Lucien sits. His body the same and different. His wrists and forearms clear and real. The jangling fear is mixed with something else. The happiness begins again inside me and signals in a white flash across some border to the happiness of last night. The two join together and make a new territory, a completely different key, white searching notes. A door opening. Hereafter.

  I look for a signal from Lucien, but there is none.

 
; ‘By my count today is a day for trade,’ he says. ‘So trade it is. We will go together to the market at Barrow.’ He hums the tune that reminds us of the path from the storehouse, the vast crosshouse of South Walk a flourish of stern minor notes.

  ‘Good,’ says Clare. ‘We cooked the last rabbit yesternoch.’ And Lucien nods, grave and absentminded.

  I stand still at the edge of my quarters. He can’t be serious. The Order are looking for him. There is a prize of two hundred tokens set for him. And he talks of going into the city to trade?

  ‘Simon,’ Lucien calls over his shoulder to where I am standing. A different voice, his old voice. Imperious and distant. ‘Join us, if you please. Onestory commences.’

  And as if the measure is inside him, the Carillon sounds for ensemble. The pact gathers round in a sung chord. We are a guild. A world. Small, fragmented, afraid, perhaps – but we come together in the downsounding as one.

  Down the race, past the cranes and onto the river. Abel not yet well enough to join us and our footfalls sound hobbled and absent without his tread. By Limehouse Caisson, Clare crouches in the muck where it’s brown and cold and agleam, dips her hands to the river like she wishes she could go right in. Brennan and I walk on. Lucien, up ahead, bites at the air to taste it and see where the wind’s coming from.

  Once he’s had his fill of morning air, he starts off at a pace that tells us follow, and so we do. And I see that he is leading us somewhere else, not straight to market, but to Harry.

  Harry’s been on the river forever. Always under one of the bridges, though you can never guess which. I try to catch up to Lucien, fall into step beside him without it seeming forced or unusual to the others, who are running behind. But Lucien moves presto under the bridges, always a few beats ahead until we’re at last into the lea of Cannon Street. And there he is, Harry, swaddled in roughcloth, his beard threaded with shell and weed. Just up from the half-wash of the river, where he can sift and sort the pebbles he uses for his forecasts. His trolley is pushed up between the rotted struts of the bridge, and inside are the blue stickwrap bags where he ports his memories. He has his little kettle and sterno on to boil thameswater for tea. It smells of tide and leaves.

  Lucien has the pact wait out on the strand, but he hooks his finger at me to come with him. ‘What are you doing?’ I ask piano, underbreath. He says nothing.

  The air under the bridge is thick with woodrot. We crouch on the sand and pebbles, and Lucien shows Harry his palms, so I follow suit. Lucien hums a greeting piano and reaches in his knap for a pouch of drum, which he unrolls from its stickwrap and proffers. He does it as if he’s ignoring Harry, as if it were by accident we are there at all. Harry murmurs and mutters like an old housebound dog, sore because you’re able to get up and come and go when you want.

  It’s dark enough that Lucien can see a bit in the hood of the bridge. The stones are brown and green like the river made all the colour emerge. It all returns to the river anyway – stonegrey, greybrown, mudbrown, stonegreen. Water moving slow there, and time too.

  ‘All’s well?’ Lucien asks.

  ‘All’s well. All’s well,’ Harry mutters, clears his throat, looks up. ‘Wandle on the move between Mill Wall and Five Rover yesternoch, I hear,’ he says. He grins at us. ‘Trust you met them?’ He comes forward for the baccy, only the flame of the sputtering blue sterno between him and us. There is a handful of white and orangey pebbles tinkered in his mettle cup and he shakes it. Holds it up to his ear as if it’s speaking to him.

  ‘Yes,’ says Lucien. His voice is impatient. ‘Harry, will you read the weather for us?’ he asks. ‘Drum for a forecast?’ He points at the pouch.

  There is a hesitation in my throat. Why is he asking Harry to read the weather? How can we learn anything from the old weatherman?

  But Harry is happy enough to oblige. He goes down on his haunches. He takes the cup and jangles it with his left hand while the old fingers of his right clear away a smooth place in the sand in front of us. He pushes away pebbles and branches and the few shells until there’s a space that’s sanded flat. In his mouth he mutters, then scatters the pebble runes.

  Runes land on the cleared sand. Harry cries out. Then before we can move, he sweeps a hand through the pattern of pebbles.

  ‘What is it?’ asks Lucien, presto and sharp. ‘What do you see there?’

  Harry on his arse. Fallen backward as if pushed in the chest. He scrabbles crabwise in the sand on his palms away from Lucien. Something incanted under his breath over and over. A fragment of Onestory, the refrain we repeat each morning.

  ‘The Order gives us harmony. The Order gives us the Carillon.’ Harry says it over and over like a child consoling itself.

  Lucien takes a few steps so he’s again close to Harry, who sits blankfaced and breathing presto so his chest pants up and down.

  ‘What did you see, Harry?’ asks Lucien with his quiet voice, the one you can’t refuse to answer. His hand on Harry’s shoulder white at the knuckles.

  The fear on Harry’s face weakens. He plucks at Lucien’s ragged jeans and looks pained. His voice takes on a whine, like a warped reed. ‘I can’t say it. Blasphony. Dischord. I can’t say it, Lucien.’

  Lucien leans in closer. He has a question at the ready. Lucien the questioner, I think. I lean in too.

  Harry shakes his head quick again. A mutter. A rune. A half-answer.

  ‘There’s a girl. Not of the city. Not of the city, you know. And she’s waiting.’

  Harry rights himself from his fallen crouch and goes to sit in front of his kettle, unfolds the drum and sticks a wad in his mouth. Chews for a while, then spits.

  Lucien looks at me and I can’t read his eyes. He straightens up from his crouch and pulls me too. I look back at Clare. A girl not of the city. The words say something and nothing. And I see that even now, in the newly opened room of what I remember, there are closed doors and hidden things.

  ‘Thanks, Harry,’ says Lucien.

  We clear the bridge, and Lucien blinks in the light, and we’re all walking two abreast again. In my uncertainty, what I feel is distaste for the old weatherman with his filthy jacket and stranded hair and his smell of salt and piss and mud. ‘Why thank Harry?’ I ask. ‘Harry ruins more runes than he tells.’

  And Lucien shakes his head and hits his hands once, twice against his legs to rid them of dirt.

  It’s not much further to Barrow. We walk triangled in the city for strength, unlike the two-file along the river or under, which is for longhear and narrowness, cooee and length. Lucien takes the lead. He can’t see much in the city light, even with paraspecs, but he’s cocksure and jaunty anyway. His sharp shoulderblades back like wings, and his head seems to rise on his neck. His curls are clear in the light. My heart goes up at that moment – a lift as I follow.

  As we near South Walk Bridge, I grab the chance to take my place again next to him. The others fall into pairs behind. He ignores me as we run, but we pull ahead of the others a little. I say to him, piano as I can, ‘You can’t go in the market, Lucien. They’re going to be there to take you. If Wandle know, others will too.’

  Nothing to show he has heard. The grey light flints off his dark paraspecs. He is listening for the footfalls around him, the distances from buildings, the plumbline of the river, myriad other infrasounds I can’t fathom.

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘But we need the money. You can do the trade for me. It isn’t hard.’

  He hears my protest before it emerges from my throat and he cuts it off with a gesture of his lifted hand. He lifts the pouch of Pale from round his neck and puts it over my head. Silence stops my argument.

  ‘Find a low-level dealer. Ellis, or the girl who fences for the Fleet runners. Umelia. Someone without brass. Not connected.’ He sings me their tradesongs. ‘We’ve got five debased nuggets between six and three ounces each and two smaller pieces of pure. Worth about thirty tokens together. Don’t get rid of it for more than twenty-five, but no less than twenty either.
Try not to draw attention to yourself. I’ll meet you at the storehouse after Chimes.’

  There is no discussion. Lucien pulls away so we are in single file for the bridge. He weaves us round a group of threshers who come along the bridge with bundles of rye on their backs. Their grey clothes blend them with the streets, and they’re chatting among themselves in their odd farm speech, not interested in us.

  There’s a glimmer of gold in the whiteclouded sky and we enter the first of the market streets. Lucien disappears into the crowds of tinkers, threshers, vendors and buyers. None of the others notice. Or if they do, they do not say.

  The noise hits as we enter. The frenzied din that is the opposite of the calm order of Chimes. A cloth seller sings, ‘Finecloth, roughcloth, wool, silk, linen,’ a flowing warp and weft of notes. Behind him, the potter sings of ochre and saltglaze, of platters and pots and beermugs. Twisting between is the drawn-out, coaxing whistle of a vendor who crafts memories, good-quality, purpose-made, built to last.

  We walk past the butchery stall in the dark caverns under the railbridge, with its warped steel and few remaining planks of soapy wood. He sells whole rabbit and pig. Neat red parcels of smallgoods drip on his clean white paper. Tails of shining sausages hang in their casings like a strange curtain behind, and he sings their provenance in a florid patter. Cow and deer is a laugh. More like dogs scrounging around the workshop sawdust, and a presto despatch into sausage heaven.

  ‘No one here yet,’ says Clare. She is bouncing on the balls of her feet, tense and fast. Her sharp teeth bare in her face, and riverwet hair tangled down her back so she looks like a small fierce animal.

  We each of us listen for signs of another pact, or some other clue that will lead us to the dealers. I whistle the comeallye as Lucien would. A subtle announcement of our presence to the soundfabric of the market, a signal to the pact to focus. They gather round me, their expressions open. I hand out our last tokens and split them off to scout bargains.