The Chimes Read online

  ‘I wouldn’t call it treasure,’ I say. The feeling of breathlessness comes again.

  ‘What would you call it?’

  I wipe my hands on the legs of my jeans. Onestory must come soon, I think. And not soon enough. I am hungry for it. I stare hard back at Lucien.

  ‘What does it matter what I call it? It’s nothing. Junk.’

  He gives me a long, blind look; then he moves toward the cookstove and slaps the blades of his hands hard against his thighs as if to clean them. Ding and clink as he takes the empty kettle from its place over the cookstove. He was not on the balcony for water.

  ‘Are you taking over the gardening from Abel?’ I ask.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ His eyes flare. ‘What do you mean?’

  I have aimed in the dark, but I have hit something. ‘Mud on your hands,’ I say. ‘Perhaps you were weeding the tomatoes?’

  ‘No,’ he says. And he passes the kettle to me. His voice is cool and distant as ever, but there is something new in it. A mild and distant pleasure, like I’ve finally learnt a tricky bit of rhythm.

  I walk to the balcony door and slide it fully open to the burning light. It is not like burning, after all, I think, but blood. Sometimes a picture comes up in its own time from somewhere down below. And so it is that in front of my eyes where I should see the reddened sky, I see a white cloth with blood on it in streaks. Not the ban­­dage from my arm this morning but a garment, fine linen. I shake my head to clear it and I walk out into the day. A bubble on the surface is all. A bubble and a voice inside that emerges, then is lost, reclaimed by the speaking air.

  Before Onestory, it’s only Lucien who does not sit. He walks the room with his long stride. He stands at one moment with his head cocked, already intent; then he starts the walk again. I’m almost to the bottom of my tea where the dark bits swirl on the mottled enamel when he stops subito. He stands with his back to us for a while, then swings clear of his thought and strides into the middle of the room.

  Light in his sightless eyes and a hard smile on his face. He scissors at the knees and drops to a crouch, then holds up his arms to ask silence, though not a one of us is talking. The look on his face is full of craft and secret. The look that says, I have something I am going to share with you, and it is magnificent. His chest is bare. His fingers are long and pale. He bounces on the balls of his feet.

  ‘Good morning, men and lady,’ says Lucien in a stately drawl. ‘Are you ready for the day?’ Same as always, we draw together.

  ‘What is your name?’ he asks Clare, who is sitting to my right.

  ‘My name is Clare,’ she says.

  Lucien’s blind gaze moves on. ‘What is your name?’

  Brennan’s voice hard and tight like a drumbeat. ‘My name is Brennan.’ He shifts his weight, cracks his knuckles.

  ‘What is your name?’ Lucien gentles as he comes to Abel.

  ‘My name is Abel.’

  Then to me, same question, careful and courteous, like he’s asking an especial favour.

  ‘What is your name?’ he asks.

  ‘My name is Simon.’

  He winks.

  I stare at him. A wink is not part of the ritual. A wink is new and therefore wrong. But there is not enough time to puzzle it because it is nearly Chimes.

  After the run Clare leaves for the strand. It’s a while before I can catch her. I hasten a few steps to fall into her rhythm. She avoids my eyes.

  The run was tacet. Clare and I followed the first of the two strange, twisting melodies. Ours moved straight into the fourth chord and pushed on presto, skipping and meandering and returning almost completely on itself before branching straight out in a modulation to the dominant. From there it ran straight in clean, long strides, predictable but lovely. Clear as a bell, edging up towards the final cadence and the downward motif with the plaintive minor seventh. The Lady’s interval. And there was a good-sized nugget, not fully pure, but not bad, about 0.85. But no buzz between us as is usual, the charge of its finding unshared. After the run I consulted the pain in my arm again, had the same bright flash of memory. It does not let me alone. So I followed her.

  After a while of digging I whistle low underbreath to snag Clare’s attention. She turns. Her light brown eyes flat as riverstones.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, and she says, ‘Hey,’ back. Keeps walking. No slight, though. No anger as I’d thought.

  I try to find the words. The daily ones don’t fit what I want to ask.

  ‘Clare,’ I say, ‘you know what you told me yesterday?’

  She turns her face. Its planes are so familiar, somehow managing to be both still and defiant at once. Her lower lip is pushed out stubborn and her eyes squinted as in thought.

  ‘Not sure what you’re speaking of,’ she says. She turns and swings the iron in her hand with a flick and she’s already looking ahead for the next spot in the mud. Then she’s down on her knees in it, and brings forth today’s treasure, which is a flat mettle board with a cracked glass face and a long para-covered cord trailing from it. I see the luck of discovery in her face. I step forward and there is the suck of mud on my feet and somehow it is urgent that she remember.

  ‘You said Lucien was in my room. That he asked something about my memories.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She smooths muck from the broken glass like she’s soothing it. ‘Doesn’t sound like something I’d say, does it?’

  Then I do something I hadn’t planned. I reach out and grab her wrist hard at the narrow bone.

  ‘It doesn’t sound like you; it was you. You heard it and you asked me and I made a memory of it. Why did you let it go already?’

  She pulls away. Her eyes are very fierce and sharp in her sharp-chinned face and part of me is afraid of her and what the thoughts are beneath those eyes.

  ‘Leave it, Simon.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what you’re speaking of, so you don’t have any choice.’ She raises her chin like a dare and shakes her wrist as if she’s trying to shed any trace of my grip.

  ‘Is this stuff more important to you? You’re so ready to leave everything else behind?’

  As soon as I say it I am sorry, because Clare is my friend and I don’t want to cause her pain.

  She has straightened.

  ‘I want to understand,’ I say, though it’s not clear to me what I am trying to understand. I start again. ‘Your arms,’ I say, and again am useless to say anything further. At night in the hammock, the shutters hold back any of the light of the moon and the river. The darkness dissolves it all. The storehouse, the sky, the river, all of the pact, until you’re just hanging in a silence that goes on, will go on, forever. And you’re falling. I think of Clare falling again and again through that bottomless dark.

  ‘You think I don’t know it’s rubbish?’ she says. ‘You think I don’t ask myself for more every time?’ She presses the point of the tyre iron against her leg. ‘You’re no different from me with your broken things, so don’t come proffer your pity here.’

  I step back, wrap my arms against myself in the cold. I push down on the covered wound and I think of the raised white lines walking down Clare’s arm.

  Then I hear footsteps behind me and I see Brennan’s shadow stretch long in the strand. There is something in its bearing of a favour to ask.

  I look to Clare, but she is intent already, bent at the waist and digging. She walks on and I let her go.

  In the Crosshouse Yard

  Once you get over the broken entrance gates at Bow, the burial grounds are thick and full of life. Today I find the overgrown lush tangle a relief somehow. Plants with their leaves held up like hands, ones with huge coloured flowers like trompets. All among the trees and vines big white stones growing up crooked like teeth.

  We walk among them. Some of the stones are in shapes made to look like they’re not stone at all but cloth, or leaves, or an open book. Some are made to look like creatures with breasts like a girl and strange parts branched ou
t behind. I notice these everywhere today. Figures with muscled branching growths on their backs that even though made of stone, look full of light and air. I stop for a while and stare. Most of the stones have old code on them, moss-covered and meaningless.

  What I know and would prefer not to is that they’re mem­­ories of dead people. Not ones they owned themselves, like Clare’s oddments, but each a memory of the person, out in public for all to see. Public memories all in the open, so many gathered in one place. It makes me feel sick to think of it, and that people would wish to stroll through the dead like entertainment for a leisure hour.

  Brennan stood beside me on the strand as I watched Clare go, black paracord dripping muck from the strange old electrickery she’d mudlarked. As soon as I turned to him anger flooded up. Rich, like a relief to find something that I could finally do.

  ‘I’ve got to check the snares at Ropemakers,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah? And what the hell has that to do with me?’

  ‘I can’t remember all of the tune.’

  Brennan bashful for once, shamed that I have kept it better when Lucien gave the tune to him in particular after Onestory.

  But both of the snares at the wooded edges of Ropemakers Fields were empty. The green itself was flat and clean and empty too, and no sounds in the air. The thought of that lingers with me like a taste or a colour that I have no words for. Something off-key about it. We followed the Cut to the east and to the graves instead. Left the browngreen of the river for the dull, flat grey of the streets, and there was the small kick in my insides of leaving territory, as always. A sick, weakened tug that makes me want to retch a little. But some way from market day and no meat in the storehouse for supper.

  Brennan swears now.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Sing the first phrase again?’

  I repeat the phrase and he follows on from there. The first cadence closes by a slim white-barked tree between two fallen mossed gravestones. Each of the pair has a small, fat rabbit in it, not at all aware of its fate. Brennan holds them soft, gives each neck a sharp turn.

  With some coaching, Brennan remembers the phrase to the next two and it takes us along a path and down some overgrown cobbled steps and into a clearing free of graves. In the middle is an old crosshouse, its roof burnt black and gapped. All around on the stubbled ground are the hunched bodies of memorylost. The sound as we walk of them crooning to each other in half-words, scraps of melody with no meaning. And another sound. That of legs and arms pulled in tight to the body’s keeping again and again. At odds with tarp or roughcloth. The sound is familiar.

  I see the picture in my head of Ropemakers Fields, the green flat space silent and empty. I click my fingers as I do when I’m trying to call up a rhythm. That field, stripped of bodies. Doesn’t it usually look much the same as the view in front of me now? Clusters of bodies, tarps and blankets bundled. People all densely packed together. Seeking desperately whatever comfort bodies give when you’ve no other form of meaning. And that sound, the jerking of limbs. That sound with some underneath meaning I am too deaf to hear. That is usually at Ropemakers too.

  Brennan tugs on my shoulder. He pulls me from the path and behind the trunk of a large tree. I follow him into a crouch in the dirt. Then I follow his gaze.

  Standing at the edge of the clearing, northeast of where we’re crouched, is a tall man in white robes and a brown travelling cloak. We lean close to the tree trunk and watch him. Over the brown cloak is slung the silver transverse flute that tells he’s a member of the Order. It glints in the light as he moves. His back is crooked, one shoulder slightly higher than the other, and it gives a swaggered threat to his stride.

  As we watch, he circles through the clearing. He moves through the memorylost with some reluctance, as if loath to be so near. The thin figures step aside with a shambling, shy confusion as he goes. Some keep their heads down, and some follow with vacant eyes. The member of the Order turns from side to side. Occasionally he steps forward and then stops, his head cocked. He pauses like this several times as we wait still in the shadows.

  Then the tall man is walking towards us. Long strides and soon enough I can see the grey in his close-curled hair. For a moment I believe he is coming for Brennan and me. But then he halts at a tree near the edge of the clearing. A woman is sitting there, unmoving. Hands resting flat and palm upward on her thighs. Her hair is long and her clothes ragged, and on her face is a blissed-out look quite different from the others’ daze. For a moment I think she is a moony. But she has no eyeband. Next to her is a girl about Abel’s age, her hair shaved so close you can see a cluster of crescent-shaped white scars through the stubble. She’s as calm as her mother, leaned into her shoulder like that and with eyes shut.

  As I watch past the tree trunk, the member holds his right hand just above the height of their heads, and he caresses the air in a smooth wave up and down like it’s riding a current that flows over them both. The wave of his hands returns and crests again over the daughter.

  His gestures are familiar. They are familiar to me because I see them every day. When Lucien’s standing in the under and waiting for the tune, he does the same. Listening, divining the Lady’s tide. Yet, this man’s movements are taut with anger. And, subito, some invisible wave breaks inside of him and he steps forward and pulls an object from his belt. Silver moving in his hand. A blade. From where I crouch I see him grip the woman’s shoulder with one hand. With the other he slashes upward in a single fluid thrust. The woman looks up at him, her mouth an O as he holds up the shirt he has slit from her back and shakes it. Drops it on the ground before her in disgust.

  Then he turns and he looks straight up. The sun flashes across his dark paraspecs and the whole of his body is poised and held. For a long moment he stares right where we’re hidden. I hold my breath. Brennan tenses, as if ready to move, and I grip his shoulder hard as I can. Fear moves through me. Deep and chill.

  At last the member turns away and whatever threat there was is broken. He moves on, past the stragglers and round the crosshouse. Brennan slumps beside and we sit there and I watch the wind make the trees flex and breathe. The man has dropped his strange errand and gone back to wherever he came from. Neither of us moves.

  Then a sound comes out of the silence and the shuffling of the memorylost. It is a harsh scraping and it comes from inside the crosshouse. It is the sound of something hard being drawn over something rough. Arcs of it, each as long as an arm and with the full weight of a body behind. Raaaaaaasp. Raaaaaaasp. After that, a flurry of shorter scratches, like an animal struggling to free itself from something.

  Brennan is rigid beside me. The sounds stop. Two beats more and the robed figure emerges from the crosshouse and disappears into the tangle of green of the park. When he’s out of earshot for certain, we rise without speaking. We cross the clearing and enter the small stone house.

  The interior is gutted. Old rubble covers the dirt floor, and lines of black bloom along its walls. Circles of soot from many different fires, their various rings like the tidelines the river pushes up the bank and there forgets. The stone room smells of human dirt and broken things.

  ‘What was he doing?’ I say out loud.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ says Brennan.

  ‘Have you ever seen a member of the Order outside the market?’

  Brennan shrugs again.

  ‘He looked like he was prospecting for the Lady,’ I say.

  ‘Why in hell would he do that?’

  I don’t know. He’s right. Members of the Order don’t look for it. They pay us to do the dirty work in the under. Or rather they pay the dealers, who pay us. It would make no sense for him to prospect here anyway. The Lady lives in the river.

  It’s only when we leave the crosshouse that I see the member’s true leaving. We missed it when we entered because our eyes were blinded in the sudden dark. Scratched in deep across the broad back wall are two long sets of five horizontal lines, shapes trapped inside them
like creatures in a cage.

  I stand and stare for a while before my mind finds a way to explain what I’m seeing. Because it’s not often you see music written down, is it? And when you do, it’s on paper or parchment, not a wall. I can’t read the strange up-and-down dance of the notes, or grasp what meaning it is they protect. But even I can see that the stave is scratched in vicious and deep, with the force of anger. The song is a threat.

  Before I know what I am doing, I reach into my bag and untwist the package of oatcakes left from the morning’s run, smooth out the greased paper. I burn a twig until there’s a good end to it. Then I scratch with its black onto the paper.

  It takes a good long while to get the whole tune down. The notes won’t stay still in their grids. While I do it, Brennan stands by looking down at me. He waits tacet, every now and again picking a stone up from the dirt, weighing it in his hands, tossing it across the clearing. For all the world as if it’s what we do each time we come to Bow. Though I am almost certain that I have never seen a thing like this before.

  We sing our way back to the strand, at last, Brennan carrying the rabbits slung across his neck in a collar of fur. The light is fading. I stand and watch and breathe a bit as the river runs. Its path is hollow, rising up and rising down, nothing to stop it filling. It’s a greedy thing, running both wide and deep. It’s that unneeding way of it that tells you how old it is. The same look in Lucien’s eyes and in other blank things.

  Woodblock

  It is dark and cold in the storehouse. In my quarters, there is a burberry lying on the floor under the hammock. I kick it toward the wall. Then I take out my memory bag. Its smell of linseed oil and damprot and a taint of woolfat from who knows where. I try to empty my head of thought and tune, but the roughcloth curtains are no shelter and the noises are strange. A creak in the wall beam as Clare or Abel turns in their hammock. A dry cough from Brennan’s quarters behind. A fox barks once out on the race.