The Chimes (5 page)

I hear him before I see him. The long-legged walk in from the balcony. Lucien comes in and it’s hard to look at him first thing. When you go from darkness into light, it’s the same, isn’t it? I see his profile first, then the sharp swing of his arms. He passes the kettle to me and I take it, hang it by its hook over the wire that sits inside the cookstove mouth.

Then there’s the ripple in the air that signals it’s almost Chimes. A kind of hitch or lift, a clearing of the throat before a grand announcement. And a question comes up with it. It rises out of the silt of sleep in my head. Not sure if it’s my voice or someone else’s.
The arrival in London
, it asks,
what was it like?
I look to my side as if there might be someone there to tell me where it comes from, what it means. But not enough time to puzzle it now, as in the middle of the room Lucien’s arms lift up and with them the first notes of the Carillon. It is Onestory.

A leap of joy inside me, fierce and bright. I open my mind and let the music and the words come. The rhythm as familiar as breathing. The chords sure and full of beauty. Lucien makes the solfege, spells it out by hand so that we see it and hear it inside at the same time. That is how it works.
Doh Me Lah
.

What happens in the time of dischord?
the music asks.

And we sing the right response:

‘
In the time of dischord, sound is corrupt.

Each one wants the melody;

No one knows their part.
’

Onestory tells it like it’s always still happening. Always here and always telling the tune. Every piece of it just a strand of the bigger melody. But that’s taught too:
The part is the whole, and the whole is the part.
The way I think of it, Onestory is a circle that connects up the end to the beginning. No before and no after. Start at one point and sooner or later you’ll meet yourself coming up the other side.

‘
In the time of dischord, there is no score.

Music without meaning

Knocking at the door.
’

How does sound become corrupt?
the Carillon asks.

‘
In the time of dischord,
worship only words.

Greedy is the lingua.

Greedy are the swords.

‘
In the time of dischord, worship only talk.

Devil in the music.

Put the sound to work.
’

What happens in the cities?
the Carillon asks.

‘
Sound becomes the weapon, sound becomes the gall,

Sound becomes the screaming,

All the cities fall.
’

The answer is harsh and punishing. At the height of dischord, at Allbreaking, sound became a weapon. In the city, glass shivered out of context, fractured white and peeled away from windows. The buildings rumbled and fell. The mettle was bent and twisted out of tune. The water in the river stood in a single wave that never toppled. What happened to the people? The people were blinded and deafened. The people died. The bridge between Bankside and Paul’s shook and stirred, or so they say. The people ran but never fast enough. After Allbreaking, only the pure of heart and hearing were left. They dwelled in the cities. They waited for order; they waited for a new harmony.

The words are simple, because words are not to be trusted. Music holds the meaning now. No one is unaccounted for. Even us, plundering the last of the Lady from the under.

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

Calm and consolation.

Bright and balm.
’

The notes come off my tongue as they always do. Repeat it forte, over and over and over, until it’s locked in a place deeper than memory. A great calm enters with it. The ragged worry of the morning’s waking, the blur and the striving, they all drop away.

‘
Out of dischord’s ashes, harmony will rise.

Order of the Carillon.

Music of the skies.
’

I don’t know if it’s just me that does it, but sometimes I try to see Onestory as a line that starts in one place and moves to another. I can’t, though. I never can. It’s blasphony to try, I think. Instead, it moves round its circle and through its changes, and each moment is always happening – the glass floating, or the bridge stirring, the people running.

Dischord lives with us, even in the harmony of the Order. You can see the fallen buildings of Allbreaking if you look to the other side of the river. The bridge between Bankside and Paul’s shakes and stirs. The people run but never fast enough. There is no bridge between Bankside and Paul’s now, but in the streets and markets, the kids sing the old forecast, like it is still taking place, like it is always taking place.
London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. London Bridge is falling down, my fair Lady.

At Prime we get dressed for the under. Wool longjohns first, jeans over that. On our feet, another layer of wool to wick the water and keep warm. I put poly overshoes on over this, then gaiters. Brennan binds stickwrap round his feet, then gaiters. Says it keeps the water out better, though I have my doubts.

We pack matches, canteens of fresh water, a stack of oatcakes in some greased paper, some dried strips of rabbit meat.

It’s a lean line of us that emerges from the storehouse. All dressed the same, our faces pale as dawn. Quiet out on the race. The flat tables of cracked concrete stretch right down to the wrecks of the two cranes that guard the way in. The water runs in a narrow inlet right along, dividing our side of the dock from the city almost like an island. The mettle struts of what must have been a bridge once, wrongly tuned and bent out of shape.

The sky is white and still. We walk past the old twisted cranes and from there, speeding now, pushing a bit, we take the Liver Street steps three at a time.

I breathe the old tea smell of the river and see the familiar shapes of the strandpickers, who walk like storks on straight legs with their backs hunched and their divining forks twitching. They’re like blind people, led by a rumour of the Lady’s whisper and rare generosity – the hint of a fragment left in thamesmud.

Onestory doesn’t tell you much about the Pale Lady.

When the weapon of dischord was destroyed – and most say that happened in the scar, out past Batter Sea – what they found in the remnants was palladium, the Pale Lady. The Lady was driven by the blast far and wide, and then she settled down, easy as you like, into the river. It’s there that we prospect her.
Because palladium goes to make the Carillon. Hundred per cent of her. Superfine.
Out of dischord’s ashes, harmony will rise.

What Onestory doesn’t tell you is that, in the time of dischord, they used the Lady for other things too. Where she’s less pure, she definitely got around. You can find small dabs of her in secretboards, and in lots of small, silent electricks. Fleet, one of the pacts to our west, have the pick of the old car graveyards, and though they don’t have any hope of securing the pure, there’s a lot of her hiding in the piping there. That kind of prospecting is messy, of course. You need aqua regia, and patience.

The easiest way to imagine the Carillon is as pipes. The Order each carry their own small pipe, or flute rather, which has the meaning
one part of the whole
. And in the Citadel, the heart is the Carillon, which is all the many pipes put together, and is what is called an organ, which is just another word for heart.

My name is Simon, I think. I live in the storehouse on Dog Isle, in the city of London. I am a member of Five Rover pact. We run in the under, and in the under we search for fragments of the Lady. We sound Onestory. We trade in the markets of London. We go silent for Chimes at Matins and Vespers.

In the Under

The bare edges of the morning are only just beginning to show as we enter through the stormwater drain near Five Rover. The mouth of the tunnel is wide and black. There are small ferns round it and moss like green velvet on the rocks beneath where water spills onto them. Lucien in first, then Clare, then me and Brennan and Abel last.

For the first four beats there’s still light with us. Then dark closes in. At first I don’t like its hands on me and I fight. Then I forget to fight, and the dark comes closer, gets friendly.

The tunnel widens into a small room. Our ears sharpen. Lento I can hear the amphitheatre and its shape. The air is cool and still and there’s a shiver to it – the wind moving through the tunnels and the echo from old mettle. I can hear the four main tunnelmouths. I can hear where they give onto the tracks of mettle rails, or the worming wet casings of the sewers and stormwater drains. Lucien hums and we move round so that he’s in the centre. Then Lucien listens for the Lady.

We all hear her in our own way. For me, the Lady’s voice is like a current of silence, far off. Not sure where the picture comes from, but often I think of it like mudflats at the very end of a grey day, when the water lies at the far edge of the sky. The line of silver, that’s the Lady. So thin you can’t quite make her out, but still you know she’s there from the shining.

But Lucien hears where she lies and where we will run to find her. This is what we wait for. I do not understand it. His mind running far, far ahead, tuned to her smallest shifts and scatters. Lucien hums a low note again. It’s the tonic, the home key. We sing it back to him as a chord, first major, then minor. Our hearing’s keener now and our singing sets up a low thrum in the amphitheatre that dies lento.

First, as always, he sings the haunted silvery tune that is the Lady’s song. To remind us of why we’re down here, what we’re searching for. The silver flashes for me as he sings it, almost as if it could light up the dark. Then he sings our bearings in his reeded voice. He starts with the melody of where we are, this dark room under the city, and from there his voice moves through several keys until he sings the exact shape of the river, the part that is our territory. This is for his benefit, not ours. Lucien is the only one of us who can hold the whole map in his head at once. After he has his bearings, he sings us the tune of where we will run, and where we will find the Lady.

Standing still in the darkness, I follow Lucien’s melody as far as I can as he sings. Standing still with my imagination running onward. To get to the curve of tune that tells of the Limehouse Caisson, he has moved back round to the fourth chord, setting that as the tonic, by gesturing across the circle to the wistful pulling tone of the flattened seventh. He sings the banks of the Thames from Wapping to Mill Wall. My body moves with it so I feel the weight of each chord in the muscle. How to explain? The tonic steady, stable like standing upright on solid ground looking forward, that’s your north. The fifth chord is that moment just on the edge of a new balance, one foot and one arm aloft, almost ready to swing round and upward to the new scale. North to east. And with each modulation, so on. I listen hard, feel the shifts in my body and in our planned direction, feel the melody swing me, modulate. He sketches our direction onward and outward in the pattern of notes and cadences we will follow under the river.

After a while my memory falters and I’m back to standing where I was all along, in the main amphitheatre with the network of tunnels spreading out their mystery around. Listening blind for the tune that will be our thread through the dark.