The Chimes (20 page)

‘It’s easier if you wait until some of the feeling comes back. You’re going to be all right. You’ve had the worst of it.’

I shape the one word that I have in my head and somehow push it past my lips with the hope he will understand.

‘Eyes.’

I can hear him shuffle toward me, maybe on his knees. Then I feel cold fingers on my face. The fingertips of two hands touch just at my cheekbones, just under my eye sockets. I try to flinch away. The touch moves on to my eyelids and then to my chin and forehead. Then there is a cool, distant feeling, almost unrelated to me, where I think my hands are. I feel movement as Lucien picks them up and places them on my chest. Both of them lie over my heart, and I can feel their outline and relief.

‘There shouldn’t be any lasting damage to your eyes. You’ll start to regain sight soon. But it’s dark in here. Hold on.’ I hear rustling and Lucien’s hands pat at my shoulders. ‘Do you have the lighter, the one your father gave you?’ he asks.

I hiss an approximate ‘yes’.

‘Can I get it?’ he asks.

I hiss again and feel him tug my shoulders to remove the pack. I want to tell him it’s in the outside pocket, but he finds it presto and I hear the rolling burr-bite of the wheel and see the blue para in my mind. The flint sparks and I strain to see through the dark.

‘Anything?’

There is only blackness.

I muster a grunt and then wait to hear the wheel bite again. Still just blackness. Grainy, world-ending, silent dark. This time Lucien waits without speaking. I feel the touch under my eyes again, and the cool pressure on my forehead and chin, and a small segment of melody that I do not know.

‘Come back, Simon,’ Lucien says, and he strikes the flint a third time and I see it haloed in the black, a small, dull orange glow of flame.

I try to lift my head. I want to tell Lucien that he has to let the light burn, that it is very, very important to do so. I have never felt so alone, not even on my first arrival in London. But the light flicks off and I am blind again. Helpless.

Then he begins to talk.

‘It wasn’t meant to go like that, Simon. Please believe me. I knew it was a risk bringing you here, but the wind was from the south all day and I didn’t think it would change.’

He pauses, waits, as if he’s listening for a response. Then he whistles. It’s a few notes from the start of our usual comeallye, and it sends a jolt of homesickness through me. But the notes behave strangely. They enter the room and then they stop. Each note stands dry and separate and dead. There’s no resonance at all. Nothing like the silver hush that comes off the Pale Lady. This is as if sound had ceased to exist altogether, even while it’s occurring. The silence climbs right into your ears, packs them full like wool, or something even drier: cotton, sand, dust.

So many questions that I can’t put them in order, so I start with the most obvious.

‘Where are we?’

‘In the under, near to Batter Sea. The pipe I rescued you from just now runs straight, roughly east to west. If you imagine the scar is the centre of the wheel, there used to be a series of pipes that moved off it like spokes. We were in one of those. As far as I can tell, the scar must have been the site of a forge, where the pressure was generated. They must have needed a huge amount of power to get the airflow.’

None of it makes any sense.

‘You mean the scar from Allbreaking? Where the weapon of dischord was destroyed?’

‘Yes, I do. But it wasn’t destroyed. Not completely. We’re inside what’s left of it.’

Onestory gives you meaning. It helps you understand what it means to live in the time of the Order, and it helps you understand your place. This must be why Lucien always sounded it with us, I think, even knowing what he did. It helps you keep going ahead. But we follow it like we do the weather. It’s always there and it’s always coming, but it’s also distant. When you spend most of your life in the under, the weather doesn’t make much matter anyway.

And now, somehow, the time we’re living and the time of Onestory have come hard up against each other. As if Onestory has erupted right out of our downsounding and into the night. Here is the weapon that destroyed cities, that brought down Parliament and London Bridge, that put the Thames into a standing wave. It is here and now and real and not just song. And we are sitting inside it.

My breathing gets calmer after a while. I hold up my hands and I can see them clear at last. The knuckles a raw, violent pink. There’s no pain yet because they are not yet fully part of me.

Again there is silence, and then Lucien’s voice, chanting. Sounding.

‘
Mettle in the river, out of breaking’s harm.

Calm and consolation.

Bright and balm.

‘All we know of the Lady is what Onestory tells us. We know that she came from Allbreaking, when the weapon of dischord was destroyed. But how? That is a mystery. After Allbreaking there she was: mettle in the river.
Out of dischord’s ashes, harmony will rise.
Tell me, Simon. What have you just seen?’

‘A tunnel of palladium.’ I pause. ‘Are you saying the weapon of dischord was made out of the Lady?’

‘Yes,’ says Lucien. He looks at me lento, waiting for me to make the next step. ‘We are harvesting pieces of the old weapon, the first weapon.’

I stop for a second, as there is something wrong with what Lucien said. There is only one weapon in Onestory.

He moves closer to me and his voice is hard in my ear.

‘The tunnel is not a tunnel, but a pipe. The wind in it was enough to make it sound, though at a far lower volume. And that’s what made you sick for a while. The weapon was a vast instrument, made out of palladium.’

I blink presto, testing my eyes, unwilling to understand.

‘The weapon was a Carillon,’ he says. ‘Or you could put it another way. The Carillon is a weapon.’

I struggle. I am still shaking from the fear of blindness. I think of everything that I have learnt of the Order, through Lucien and through my memories. But even knowing that, I’d believed, deep down, in the part of my own spine that rings to the chords of Chimes, that the Carillon was driven by harmony and beauty. I cannot grasp that it might be meant to hurt.

‘Look,’ says Lucien, and he holds up my lighter again. The walls are made from highly carved white tiles, their grooves deepened by shadow. The tiles’ hollowed trenches create intricate, orderly patterns, swoops and curves and curlicues. Where the light moves, it looks as though the shapes are growing and receding.

‘I can’t hear anything. It’s completely dead.’

‘Exactly.’ He flicks the light and we’re back in dark. ‘The Lady is a conductor. She is used to make the pipes of the Carillon. But the reason the Order needs her is twofold. In the Citadel, she is also used to insulate. She can convert sound into silence, or soften the effects of sound.

‘If your hearing was perfect, you would hear a web of silver lines running right along the tiles, twining through them. So fine they’re almost not there. They are threads of the Lady, running through the walls. Throughout the Citadel there is soundproofing like this.’ He snaps the flame to again so his face is illuminated. ‘In the city, it’s illegal to hold the Lady except to trade. This is why. If citizens learnt of this, they might use her to protect themselves from Chimes.’

‘How do you know?’ I ask. I look at his fierce, hooded, unseeing eyes. Lucien springs fully formed out of the Thames. Lucien emerges clean and pale, untouched by Chimes. Lucien leads us with his miracle hearing under the city, to the Lady each time.

‘Lucien, you need to tell me who you are.’

He looks at me, steady. ‘I think you know.’

‘You’re of the Order.’

He nods.

I don’t know what to do next. We are sitting in an abandoned corridor under the Thames, next to the true weapon of Onestory. And Lucien is a member of the Order.

‘You’re beginning to look feeble.’ Lucien finds the supplies I packed at the beginning of the night and unwraps the sandwiches. ‘Here, eat.’ Then I hear the lighter strike again and the yellow glow of a candle comes.

I obey. The goat’s cheese is sharp, and the bread is nutty, and it surprises me that it tastes so good. I wait for a while before I speak again.

‘Tell me,’ I say again. And he does.

‘You must doubt it could have any good in it, Simon, but when I was young, it was only that way.’

‘Why did you leave? How did you come to London?’

‘First you have to understand some things.’ Lucien draws a breath, lets it go. ‘In the Order, if you’re born without sight, it’s a sign that you have a gift for hearing. I was born like that, and I was born into music, and I never asked why or what it meant. I just felt lucky. I had another language I could think in effortlessly, one that opened up the world in truth and beauty. I knew that I would never run out of it, you see.

‘Not everyone who’s born blind becomes a member of the elect. You have to want it. But I did. It was like a light shining right through everything. The magisters began to treat me differently, give me space, ask my opinion about chord progressions or a complicated piece of rhythmic notation. I remember one particular day when it felt that everything I was learning was part of some bigger pattern. I was walking through the gardens and everything was music – leaves, trees, clouds. I was very happy. There was never a time that I didn’t expect to become one of the elect.’

‘The elect?’

‘All children born in the Citadel join the Orkestrum. That’s where you learn to play and understand and write music. The Orkestrum trains musicians for its own ensembles and orkestras, and some of those who go out into the cities to teach, or they become scholars and attendants. Each year a handful of students are chosen to be prentissed to composition for the Carillon. Then from that group, every ten years or so, a magister is selected. The magisters are the highest of the high, the most skilled. At the top of them all is the magister musicae. He is the one who organises the compositions for Vespers, composes the festival masses.

‘I felt certain that I would become a magister. I was very proud when I was selected from the Orkestrum to become a novice, but it wasn’t a surprise. I had been working towards it all my life. The week before we were to be ordained, all the novices spent time in solo meditation in their cells. We were each given a phrase from a Bach sonata to use as the theme for a new fugue. The best com­­position would be played at Vespers – a great honour.

‘It was autumn. When we weren’t working on the composition, we were meditating, practising. I remember the leaves changing and feeling as though my life was about to begin. Then somehow one night my mother managed to get in, past the attendants, and she woke me.

‘She told me that I was not going to be ordained after all, that I would leave the Citadel and travel to London. I was desperately angry. I didn’t understand. Then she told me she had learnt that the Carillon was harmful to people outside the Citadel. She told me that it was a weapon, like the one that caused Allbreaking. She gave me this.’

Lucien comes near to me again; he pulls something from his pocket and unfolds it. It is a square of cream linen.

A meandering blue line runs across the square in a rough downward slope from left to right. I look closer. It is made of tiny precise stitches that stand high enough above the cloth to be read by fingertip.

‘She came from the outside, you see,’ Lucien says. ‘She joined the Order young, through audition. Her family were broiderers in Oxford, employed by the Order to sew the magisters’ vestments. When she entered, she brought her attendant, Martha, with her.’

At both ends of the fine blue line, a bell is broidered in silvered mettle thread. The first bell is large, with cream lines radiating from it as if to show that it’s speaking. At the bottom of the tribu­tary that connects them, the smaller bell is stitched through with black lines of breaking.

I close my eyes. Open them again. ‘The line.’ I point to it, careful not to touch the cloth. ‘That’s the river.’

Lucien nods.

‘The top bell is the Carillon, in the Citadel. The other is the weapon. Here.’

‘Yes. She made the memory for me to take. She said that only someone from within the Citadel would be able to find it, that it would take a combination of good hearing and memory.’

‘But how did she know about it?’

‘There must have been a rumour. My father was high in the Order. Not a magister but a scholar, someone who travelled for research and to conduct auditions for the Orkestrum. He could have known.’

I think about what Lucien’s mother did. Going against everything she knew, sending a son alone to the city with its dirt and its struggle and without protection from Chimes.

‘My mother’s attendant rode with me to London. It’s only when I left the Citadel that I learnt there was no proofing outside. I tried to understand how the Order could allow it. For a while I tried to find a reason. Maybe they believed memory was unimportant. I knew magisters in the Order who lived inside music alone, whose lives went by without any events worth remembering. Maybe they believed life without memory was better, simpler.

‘But then I saw the other cost, the shaking. The pain. Chimesickness. And I knew that there wasn’t any explanation. The Order saw the Carillon’s toll and did nothing to stop it.