The Chimes (12 page)

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Authors: Anna Smaill

BOOK: The Chimes
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Oddments in thamesmud, these memories. Unlinked and unmeaning. And then I put them together in a line.

The arrival in London?
the voice asks. I sweep through the debris in my head. Do it like Harry’s hand does to clear shell and stone. Empty so that the pictures can rise. I see myself standing in mud on a long road. What road was it? What was I doing there? I was leaving the farm I had grown up on. Why? What happened to my parents?

I feel the grip of my mother’s hand, shaking. I see her worsen with the shaking. I see her speak to me in the pause of the spasms.

I see myself travelling to London alone. No, not alone. With a carter, on the back of a cart. He gives me his burberry and I go into the noisy streets. I was looking for someone, something, but I couldn’t find it. Then Chimes came and everything was stripped clean and quiet.

And I heard the silence of the Lady and I went, for the first time, down to the river. To the strand. Then my head knocked half through by the blow of a thrown stone. Down by the ruins of the tower, Brennan threw a stone that hit me. With my head in the river I heard a song.

The first time I laid eyes on Lucien he stood, pale and blind, with the light in his hair. Then the edge of his mouth twitched up. Half-grin, half-smirk.

And then he said something else, under his breath and to me alone.

‘That song,’ he said. ‘It’s worth your life in these parts.’

I didn’t understand what he meant. I didn’t say anything, just kept my eyes empty like I know how to do. And he waited, examined me somehow, though without sight. Then the moment passed and the edge returned to his voice.

‘Forgive Brennan,’ he said. ‘He is very protective of our territory.’

The voice in my head is Lucien’s. The questions are Lucien’s. The song is how he chose me. It is where his questions started and the place to which they always circle back.

The darkness that has kept me covered for so long pulls back. In the half-light that is not yet understanding, I stand up. And finally, finally I walk out to the balcony where Lucien is waiting for me.

The moonlight falls on his face. When his voice comes, it is as clear as Chimes.

‘The arrival in London,’ he asks, ‘what was it like?’

‘I was standing alone on the roadside in the rain,’ I say.

The words seem to come from someone else, or some bit of me I can’t touch or feel. Like bodymemory from a missing leg or finger. ‘I was waiting for somebody to come along the road and give me a ride to London. I waited for a long time before a carter stopped. He handed me his burberry and I put it on, and we went into the city.’

‘Good. Where were you waiting?’

Saltflats in the horizon. Flat fields. A farmhouse with a red door.

‘Outside of London. Essex.’

Lucien is doing something with his hands, twisting a bit of leather cord. He knots it and threads it between his palms. Then he does something complicated and quick with his fingers so that the cord stretches between his open hands like a noose.

‘Why were you leaving the farm?’

I pause. A white shape moves up in me. I don’t want to look at it, but I have to.

‘They died. Both of them. My mother first.’

‘What did they die from?’

‘First my mother’s hands started to shake. It wasn’t bad at first; she could still work. She could do solfege at Chimes, make bread. Then it got worse. She could hardly hold a pencil.’ My voice fades. I stare at my own hands until they blur in front of my eyes.

‘After that she couldn’t walk and had to stay in bed. Then she could hardly talk. Then she found it hard to breathe.’ I try to keep my voice calm. I rub my eyes. ‘She died, and then my father. I don’t remember his death. It must have been soon after.’

And they were buried twice. Once in the ground, once in my memory. My heart hurts. What had I felt before in that spot? Numbness. Hard and lifeless like a dry riverstone.

‘I am sorry, Simon,’ Lucien says. He pulls the cord from his hands so that he can sign the mourning cadence of the formal solfege.

Then he looks at me harder, measuring.

‘Simon,’ Lucien says, ‘after your arrival in London, how did you find us? How did you find the pact?’

‘I didn’t find you. You found
me
. I heard the Lady, and I went down to the river. I was trying to find where the silence was coming from. Then Brennan bloody well knocked me out.’

Lucien laughs. ‘Brennan saw you. If I remember right, he said, “There’s some Walbrook scum on our turn, right in broad daylight.” Before I could stop him, he threw the stone. He hit you and you fell into the water and stayed there. I thought he might’ve killed you. When we got closer, he saw what you were wearing. Farmclothes. So we knew you weren’t Walbrook. Not Effra or Neckinger either. You weren’t even some prentiss who’d stolen a leisure hour for mudlarking. It wasn’t chance or mistake had brought you to the Pale. You heard the Lady and you went straight to her.’

‘But you didn’t ask me to join the pact because of my hearing,’ I say.

To put the memories down like this in a line that starts in one place and moves to another, to know that they live outside me in Lucien’s keeping – not just hoarded in a memory bag. It rings through me that thought, like his voice does. ‘It was the song that came to me when I was head down in the river. You recognised it and warned me against singing it.’

‘Yes. That’s right.’

‘Well, what does it mean?’

He shakes his head lento. ‘That’s what I need you to tell me. Can you sing it?’

‘No.’ But as I say it, words come into my head.


In the quiet days of power
,’ I say. All at once I am certain. ‘That’s how it starts.’ Then I stop. ‘I don’t know what comes next.’

‘Take your time,’ says Lucien.

I close my eyes. Why was I coming into London, and what did it have to do with the song? Pictures float up and pull apart and come together again. Then at last I see a picture of my mother standing next to me. We are working. I feel the rhythm of it in my hands, a grip and twist like kneading bread. Then my mother singing.

I listen. I wait.

Nothing comes. I close my eyes again. I hear a rhythm first and then nonsense syllables that roll in my mouth.


Gwil-lum Hu-ginn Ce-dric Thor
,’ I say.

Lucien looks at me, wondering.

I hold my hands in front of me and study them. The echo of the movement is in the muscle. Grip and twist. Easy and sharp. What were we doing?

And subito I have the answer and as soon as I do, I see that it could not be anything else. Not kneading bread. Breaking bulbs. A clean break and the smell of white sap. A drawing of an animal with a hooked beak, wings spread.
Wings
.

Seven ravens in the tower
, I think.


Seven ravens in the tower
,’ I say out loud.

I look at Lucien. His eyes are bright. Then I say the whole thing out without stopping.


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.

Lucien’s face glows in the half-light. He places his hand on my shoulder so I feel the weight of it right down my back. ‘Thank you, Simon,’ he says in a low voice, and there is nothing of joke in it.

‘I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘What does it mean?’

‘Do you trust me, Simon?’

I look at him. In the under, we follow Lucien. Follow him like blind faith. In the under, when the map flares up around like a fire with the door open and the arms of the tunnels reach out, it’s all you have. A following that’s almost like falling. And once you’ve felt it, nothing else has much pull anymore. Why would it? What else opens up your veins like that, pulls the sky in, fish-hooks the stars into such brightness?

I nod.

‘Then listen. I don’t know what the song means. I know the tune and I know its threat. But I need you to remember what your mother told you about it.’

I stare at him. He has slipped the leather cord between his hands and I watch the patterns he is making, triangles moving and being cut in half and then in half again. His hands muddy, like he has just dug something out of the earth.

I realise that there is something else he needs to know.

‘We saw a member of the Order in the burial-ground crosshouse, Brennan and I, when we went to sing the snares.’

His hands halt with the pattern of crisscrossed cords between them. ‘What night was this?’

I think hard, count back. ‘A thrennoch ago, I think.’

‘Not at Ropemakers, at Bow?’

‘Yes. Ropemakers was empty, no snares, no people, which I thought was strange. He was walking among the memorylost. He . . .’ I try to see it again, the movements he made. ‘He looked like he was prospecting for Pale. He listened to the air around the memorylost. Then he disappeared out of the yard and back into the crosshouse. We heard something scratching on stone.’

‘And then?’

‘After he was gone, we checked the crosshouse. We wanted to see what he was doing. What made the sound.’

‘And?’

I describe what the member scratched in the wall at the entrance. The staves the length of a broad armspan. Then I pause, turn presto and leave the balcony. On the shelf behind my hammock, the folded paper is sitting where I left it. When I hand it to Lucien he says nothing. I watch as he opens the paper. He shades his brow and squints hard and then he traces the deeply lined scratches. After a while his pale eyes flinch and then flare. I have not asked him if he is able to read music. For some reason I do not need to.

‘It’s formal,’ he says. ‘A kind of fugue.’

I wait for him to say more.

‘An old form. What used to be called a
ricercar
. Which means “to search out”. The first few notes are a name. Then the last part means
forze
, or “power”. The way it’s put together is what makes the message.’ He pauses. ‘We will have to move presto now. We need to know all that you can remember about your mother. We need to know more about what the song means. We don’t have much time. Every spare moment you have, try if you can to remember. I will downsound it with you.’

‘Yes,’ I say. I wait, but Lucien is tacet, still in thought.

‘Well?’ I ask.

‘Well what?’

‘What does the message mean?’

There is something unspoken in his pause and he looks straight at me, testing, waiting.

‘There are a couple of ways you could read it. But in the ver­­nacular the simplest reading is:
Lucien, we will find you
.’

Wandle in the Under

Today we start off at a quick jog. Though everything underneath and above it has changed, the rhythm of the day stays the same. I wake. The pact wakes. We sound Onestory. We run in the under. The tune is bright and cocky at first, moving stepwise up the tonic chord into the large tunnelmouth to our direct north. It’s a stormwater drain, but a large one, quite dry.

We run easy, barely crouching, side by side. The echo of our splashing feet in the tile tunnel keeps us company. Sometimes the splashing seems to be coming from ahead of us, and sometimes from behind. And then I’d swear that I hear a third lot of footfalls, speeding and slowing, as if trying to get us to lose our pace. Strange sounds are part of the under. Sometimes you see strange things too. Glowing patches moving with us as we run, floating across the path. Maybe it’s gas burning off. Maybe the spirits of pactrunners who’ve died down here.

The tune takes us further down the tunnel, deep into the heart of the map. Its beat fits to our jogging rhythm. I hear it thumping in my blood too. Then the tunnel starts to bend and we both hear the modulation to the fourth chord coming in mind’s ear. The modulation that spins around the home key and shows us which tunnel to take. It’s an easy path. The first tunnelmouth that looms up ahead is the one that fits our cadence. Due west. Without a word, we both veer off the main tunnel and enter its dark mouth.

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