The Chimes Read online

  She was right, Netty. There is no place for me here. No place, and the thread I followed my way in on hangs loose already. My mother not two days dead and I have failed her. The city slips outward around me in its awful din and its smell of bilge and rosin.

  Then I hear it again.

  That whisper of silence somewhere in the south. A cool current through the clutch and noise. It comes like the promise of a place I can draw breath.

  I use my hands to carve through the crowds and through the melodies. I take corners as they come, moving blind. Past boarded buildings and vendors and more people. Across a broad street with grand buildings. Through duos and trios of musicians, their instruments flashing silver, maple, gold. Down a narrow grey alley, into a park, two spiked fences vaulted, a push through the scrub and at last, over a wide concrete road, there it is.

  A river like a clear, flat highway. A river wider than I’ve ever seen. Greybrown water. The boats like toys on it and the ripples pushing through as it runs east to west. Calm, like it’s been there forever and seen everything.

  My arms shake as I look, like I’ve just put down something that was much too heavy. This is where I’m standing when I hear the sky’s half-cough half-shiver. The warning so deep in bodymemory that my muscles are the first to answer. I have lost track of the tolls and it is a narrow minute from Vespers – and Chimes.

  At Matins the Carillon sounds Onestory piano – quiet, amabile. Onestory is antiphony: question and answer, call and response. Our voices fill in the melody gifted by the Carillon. We give the right answers, always the same and the same for all. If life is music, as it is, Onestory is the bass. Which is to say the burden, the constant truth beneath everything. There to walk on and also to steer with, each and every morning.

  At Vespers, though, Chimes is another thing altogether. Solo and forte, strong enough to bring you to your knees, put you in your place. Different every time, and always changing.

  Across the road is a stone platform guarded by two strange catlike creatures made of black stone. One has its face broken clean off. The other still wears its whole smile, calm and pretty as a girl. A glance at the catgirl but no time to make a better acquaintance as I slip beside her and through the twisted mettle bars that keep me from the water. I crouch tight at the top of the stairs that walk down into the water’s mouth. The best I can do is empty my mind as the air pulls in and out like a tide, like a set of lungs, and the smell of pepper comes.

  Chimes is like a fist. It unclutches, opens. Starts like a fist, but then it bursts like a flowering. Who can say if it’s very slow or very fast? Chimes is always different, and even after the thousands of times, I couldn’t venture to say what it’s like.

  On the south side, people have come out of buildings and houses to form a ragged line along the bank. They stretch up one by one into the great calm of the music. My arms stretch up too, kin with the joints and muscles of those distant strangers.

  It’s the melody simple first. We follow in solfege. Hands in concert as the sky is carved by it: Soh Fah Me Doh Ray Me Soh Fah Me Me Ray Doh Doh Soh Soh. Then the melody is repeated, but turned upside down. Then it comes again, but up an octave and another voice takes the inverted melody and they weave together. The chords wash over. They clean and centre me. The weight of the tonic goes down my spine and into the ground.

  Follow the melody through its variations, through its opening and flowering. It tells of harmony and beauty. It tells of a beauty wider than any of us. My mind opens with it and everything there is in the world is shown in perfect order in the music. There is no space for any other thought.

  The sides of the river unfold. The forward and backward of all objects walk out and present themselves – brick, man, boat. The river thickens as if it’s going to curdle – as if you could walk out on it, right over the crenelling waves and eddies.

  It is not painful, not exactly, but nor is it without pain. I’ve seen men crying, certainly. But who’s to say what it is they’re crying for? It is so strong that one by one we crouch. Our foreheads in our knees, our skulls open to the sky.

  Riverstone

  The melody simple returns at the very end. Like a firm hand nudging me awake.

  I open my eyes, blink my way clear of the blur and the ache. Above, the wide grey sky is held in pink bars of sunset. The step I am sitting on is a rough brownish grey, one of a flight that goes down to a river the same colour as the stone. My memory bag is stowed between my knees, and there is a muddy burberry over my shoulders. Fear grips me. Vast chords echo clean and upright through the far and near of my head. I try to push under them, into the stilled watery hush. Nothing. I wait and breathe and lento it comes back, up out of the murk. I am in London. I have arrived.

  I look down at my hands. In them is a bar of chocolate wrapped in gold mettle foil and purple paper. The chocolate has melted through the foil and into the creases of my palm. I see a woman holding a skillet and punishing it with a steel pad. Her face is grey and cold. ‘Who is your mother, then, when she’s at home?’ she asks, and turns her back on me.

  My mother. I look for her outlines. All I get is the feel of her standing next to me in a light-filled earth-smelling room. She smiles and crooks her hand at me as if to say, ‘Over here, Simon, come.’ I pick up my bag, feel the weight of the memories inside. I will have to trust them. A task, I think. A thread to follow.

  The sounds and songs of the city are beginning to fill the air, and the tide is ebbing, so I walk back along the concrete way. With the river at my side and the city crouching heavy and dense with song above, I feel a measure of calm. I will find a park or a crosshouse yard to sleep in down on the embankment, away from the clutch of people. I will find a prentisship tomorrow. I will trace my way back through my objectmemories. I won’t forget. Then it comes again. The silence sits up and calls me from deep in the river.

  I shake my head to clear it. Nothingness. Flashes of nothingness like quiet silvery blinks. The need to find that silvery silence grips me hard. Though I have no idea what it is or what it means, I walk towards it like it’s calling my name. And then subito I am running. Without any other thought and with my memories banging at my side. Until, past the embankment’s broken stone, the river is low and there is a huge bridge with blue mettle struts that swoop up into the sky and I can see the bed.

  My hands in oily greenness. Deep in the shell and rock and debris and mud. I claw so far down into the silt that the water soaks the pushed-up sleeves of the burberry I am wearing and I almost overbalance. Clenched handfuls of mud and shell and fragment pulled up and cupped under the silted surface of the water. I shake my hands from side to side so that the pieces sluice between them. There is a gulp in my throat, a lump there.

  The movement is in my bodymemory, so deep in muscle I don’t even think it. I push down again and I’m in our fields digging for used-up bulbs. Shells and stones prick and scrape against my fingers and palms. Pieces of mettle press under my nails. I push down into the glut of the river’s belly and bring fistfuls back to the surface to sluice. And then again, presto, with a rhythm forming as if there is a purpose to it.

  And it’s like my hands have ears. My fingertips reach out and at last touch something. Something that is smooth and cool. Alive in its silence, or with silence growing from it like roots. My hands close.

  When I lift them clear, I’m holding a lump slicked with muck and grit. The thing, whatever it is, pulses with milky light and a weird world-calming silence. I wipe it on the coat, spit on it, wipe again and hold it up in the fading light. A fist-sized nugget of silver mettle. All twisted as if it’s been kneaded by some great heat.

  I stand there and my heart slows and I feel the silence come into me and with it a kind of peace. Then there is a loud splash and I jump. About a foot from where I’m standing heavy ripples spread out in the oily water. I take a step forward and something flies past my ear and lands next to me in the dirt and grit with a thump. I stoop to look – it’s hard as a brick, slick
in greybrown mud. Then the world cracks open in stars.

  Pain in everything. Pain that is blackness. Blackness broken by stars, veined in red. It licks the side of my head and moves off to leave me still in the water at last. Tacet dark with the watery light and my head in the stillness halfway between strand and sky, halfway between water and air. And there is old code flickering down at me to say, , whatever there is of meaning in the letters blinking, and what is it? Bricked high and stretching up into whatever sky’s still left. Old letters blinking and old brick stretching, and my upsidedown mind shifts against my will and a snatch of song buried deep dislodged too late. With words that go together with the tune. In the quiet days of power, it says against my will too late, seven ravens in the tower.

  And subito I am with my mother. We are standing in a for­­cinghouse. She is singing the song to me in notes that I repeat after her.

  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.

  I wish to hold on to my mother’s voice with its dark vowels, but she is insistent and tells me that I must repeat it, that it is very important. The notes go down, down, down.

  Head in the river, I go down with the song into the place of cool darkness where mud will cover my eyes and stop my mouth and—

  Wrenching.

  A slap.

  Something shakes me and I spit out water, gulp in air. Rough hands roll and pull me and I’m out of the water and blinking light again.

  In front of me stand a pair of legs in ragged jeans. Then a face pushes into mine. It’s broken in a grin of contempt. Brown hair in hacked clumps. Anger rising like a smell. A thickset guy of pren­tiss age, anywhere between fifteen and eighteen winters on him.

  ‘What the god d’you think you’re doing raking our fucking turn?’

  Before I can move the prentiss drops his full weight onto my chest, pins my shoulders with his knees.

  The silver nugget.

  Something in me fights to keep it. I tighten my grip and try to roll, but he is too heavy.

  ‘You fucker. What’ve you got?’

  His mudgritted hands scrabble at mine, pulling up fingers one by one; then he wrenches the nugget from out of my grasp and I am left with nothing but a handful of thamesmuck.

  The look on his face as he holds it up to the waning light is strange. The mettle has given him confidence. He shifts his weight on my shoulders.

  ‘You’re on our run.’ The weight gets harder; his face pushes closer. ‘What do you think happens to riverscum we find on our run?’

  There is no guildsign on his shirt. He is not a prentiss at all. Which makes no sense. No guild means no work; no work means no bodymemory; no bodymemory and it’s a quick step to mem­­oryloss for certain. But his eyes are sharp, and his movements are smooth and sure.

  Then from behind him I hear a second voice. It says, ‘Leave him, Brennan.’

  It is cool and clear, the voice, like at the very end of Chimes when the pain shifts off and it’s just the notes hanging in the air.

  The one called Brennan shifts his weight from off my shoulders and sits back on his heels lento. I’m into a crouch so that I can run if I need to. His heavy threat behind me.

  But I cannot run.

  For one thing, Brennan is holding my bag. He has my mem­­ories. For another, I want to see the owner of the second voice. The one with the cool silver in it like the last notes of Chimes.

  He’s standing a few paces back on the strand. He is lean and tall and pale, and he’s wearing too-large trousers made from green roughcloth, and no shirt. His trousers are pulled in with a thick leather strap. He has wide, bony shoulders and there is light in his curled hair.

  But none of that matters. What I stare at are his eyes. They are so pale he must be close to blind, each with a pinprick blank pupil in the middle of its milky white. With these strange sightless eyes he looks straight at me. He walks forward and when he is close, he stops and proffers his hand. The gesture is like a mockery of introduction, and I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of a response. He stands there for a little; then the edge of his mouth twitches up.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse Brennan,’ he says. ‘He’s very protective of our territory.’

  They take me to a storehouse on a place they call West India Key. In the middle of the room is a drum with a glowing fire in its belly. The wood of the floor is cut out from round it, and the drum has been lowered into that and banked with riverstones to keep in warmth. A big black beaten-up teakettle hangs from a mettle wire strung over the drum’s open head.

  Another one of them is in the room, standing still as a frighted rabbit in the light of the stove. They call him Abel and the leader cuffs the back of his head friendly enough as he passes. He is a good few planting seasons younger than me, with a thin-lipped scar down the far side of one cheek that ends a narrow step from the vein under his jawbone. Whatever happened was a close-run thing.

  The storehouse is warm. On one side, hammocks hang from the roof beams. I am floating with tiredness in the warmth, and I have my coat and my bag close by. I wind the leather straps round my hands, pull them tight to my fingers so the blood gets painful and the pain keeps me awake. I see the one called Brennan notice what I am doing, shift his eyes back to the fire.

  The leader’s pupils are larger here, as if he can see more in the half-darkness of the storehouse. He sits both inside and outside the small circle of light. And then he interrupts the silence.

  ‘So, what’s a lone farmboy doing prospecting in London?’

  I don’t say anything.

  ‘Did you lose your parents in the market?’

  The small one called Abel speaks then, piano. ‘Maybe we let him get his bearings awhile, Lucien?’ he says. ‘He looks half drowned.’

  ‘We took pity on him on the strand. We’ve given him dinner. We have been altogether very friendly and hospitable. But you know, Abel, we can’t afford to keep a houseguest.’ Lucien glances at me and the corners of his mouth twitch again, as if we’re both in on a grand joke.

  ‘He got lucky today stumbling on the Lady like that. But look at him – just another scumsifter. Likely doesn’t even know his rudiments. I’d bet in a dark room he couldn’t tell his nose from his arse.’

  I’m angry, as I see he means me to be.

  ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ I say, slow and cold. I am treading water.

  He fixes me in his gaze and I see again how strange his eyes are – almost white, and with that bright, sharp pupil. There is something wild and clear in the eyes and they make the hairs on the back of my neck prick.

  ‘So you had no idea what you were fighting for down there? You just didn’t want anybody else to get their hands on it. Is that right?’ He comes closer and there’s a smell of woodsmoke off him. In his hand the silver nugget. ‘I’m afraid we all have to let it go, sooner or later,’ he says.

  I look at the nugget lying on his palm, milky silver and its strange grip of silence.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You should pay more attention at Matins,’ he says. ‘This is the mettle in the river. What rose out of dischord’s ashes. This is what they pay us for.’ He closes the mettle in his palm.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You don’t need to understand, farmboy.’

  ‘What’s it for?’ I ask. ‘Who buys it from you?’

  He looks at me as if unused to questions. His expression has changed and he speaks lento now. ‘What do you need to make harmony? A conductor. And for the biggest harmonies of all? A superconductor – the Pale Lady.’ His mouth quirks like it’s another
joke I don’t understand.

  ‘The Order wants it, of course, and the Order pays. We harvest it from the river and the Order buys. The Lady goes to build the Carillon,’ he says. Watching me. Though watching is not correct. Listening, rather. Ears keen to the measure of my blood and breath.

  The Lady goes to build the Carillon. It’s strange, but at Chimes my mind never moves to the instrument. I don’t think of where the sounds are coming from – of what is playing. Only of the music leaping through until every part is commingled and one. Not pipes or bells, but the air’s own orkestra. A sky shrouded in curtains and the chords pulling them back and back until all is revealed clean and bare.

  There’s tacet in the storehouse for a while. Lucien breaks it. ‘What’s your instrument?’ he asks. Brennan raises a brow. He’s surprised by the question.

  ‘The recorder.’

  Brennan sniggers and Lucien silences him with a raised hand.

  ‘Get it, then, if you please.’

  The flames are flickering and the lamps that hang from the beams sway in the wind coming in off the river. They cast long shadows all over the wooden walls. The two called Abel and Brennan go to their hammocks and come back, Brennan with a round, flat tambor about two handspans in width, Abel with a viol.

  I reach inside my bag. A moment of panic, but the case is still there, undamaged. I unfasten the small brass clasps. Inside, the leather is lined with blue velvet that fits neat to each part of the recorder. Fits the chestnut wood, the ivory-tipped beak. In there it’s cold and separate, but as soon as I pick it up, it feels light and warm and alive. My hands find their places without thinking, each finger in its stop. Happiness pricks in the fleshy part at the base of my thumbs.