The Chimes (28 page)

‘Well?’ she asks. Her voice is eager. ‘What did you see?’

I look at her, the wrinkles, the clawlike hands, and fear fills me. I am not the person in the forecast. I am not the person Lucien thinks me. I am not meant to be here. I wonder if I could make something up, broider a tale to tell her.

‘I didn’t see anything.’

‘Didn’t hear anything either?’

‘No.’

Disappointment crosses her face and disappears.

‘But it takes a while. You have to be patient. You’ve only done it once before, you say?’

‘Yes, but it was only a moment. Maybe I imagined it.’

‘Another one, an easy one.’ She sweeps off again through stacks of memories. I watch her move back and forth between two piles, looking. She locates a mettle urn and holds it up to her eyes and shakes it. Then she empties its contents – old jewellery, coins, chess pieces – and uses a broken wooden peg to pick through. Finally she plucks out something and brings it back to me. I see from the look on her face that wheels are turning in her mind again.

She opens her palm and on it I see a roughmade bracelet. It is gold with a chip of red stone. For some reason it sets up a strange ringing inside me.

‘Here you go, darling. Better to start small.’ She nudges me. ‘London is waking. Daylight is breaking,’ she sings. ‘Ding dong the bells are going to chime. Quick smart now.’

I look at the bracelet and I know I have seen it before. Is that how it starts? I take it obediently, fight the rise of sickness in my throat. I squeeze my fingers tight around it and I push myself into it, into the story of it, the past of it. A small gold bracelet. A tiny dark red stone lit in its band.

A long while passes and I open my hand. I have pressed the bracelet into my hand so hard that it marks red then blue in the flesh of my palms. My fingers are numb. I have failed. But as I release it, I know where I have seen it before. The answer is simple and impossible. My mother had one just like it. A chip of red stone in a light gold setting.

‘It’s my mother’s,’ I say flatly. ‘How did it get here?’

She leans in. Her breath smells of strong tea. ‘Did you see? Did you see? Did you see?’

‘No. I didn’t
see
. I remembered it,’ I say. ‘Isn’t that enough? My mother used to wear it on Sundays. My father gave it to her. How in hell did it get here?’

‘Then you were right the first time,’ she says, and her face closes. ‘You are not the one after all. Not for the forecast and not to keep my memories.’

I feel angry. I am tired of questions, of being tested. I am sick of the very idea of ransacking memory, which is private and silent and should remain so.

‘It is my mother’s bracelet,’ I say into Mary’s face. I stand up. ‘I’m keeping it.’

‘But you must give it back. It’s not meant for you. I should have never let you touch it. Her husband gave it to me. They were happy. Red was her favourite colour. Red tulips. Red amaryllis.’

‘It’s not yours to remember,’ I say, and I push her away.

‘He wanted her memory to stay alive, and so it will, with me. Go back to London. Be happy with your blind friend while you can. Shut your eyes at Chimes. Keep your memories close.’ She claws the bracelet from me and clasps it to her lips.

‘Take this instead.’ From under her cloak she takes the leather pouch she snatched from me at the door. ‘Take it back with you. I am the last keeper and the guild is gone. Dead. Buried. Long, long ago.’

She pushes it into my hand and I feel the animal texture of the leather, the silent reproach of the Lady.

And as I hold it, something shifts.

A familiar feeling comes into me. Water rising. Darkness rising. Rushing in my ears and a swoop as air and earth change sides. Through the haze I see her staring at me. I feel myself fall and there is nothing I can do to fight. I go down . . .

I emerge and I am standing in front of a small stone crosshouse next to a wooden hall. It is familiar. It takes me a beat to see why – it’s our village crosshouse in Essex. Where we went every morning for Onestory and every evening for Vespers. But it is different. The wooden wall is unpainted and raw-looking. I can smell pine and the sap bleeds in places from the wood. I search for a way to understand this. It comes to me. The hall is new. It has not yet been weathered by wind or sun. It has just been built. I am inside a memory that is not my own. That occurred before I was born perhaps.

I look around and I am surrounded by people I do not know. The ground in front of the hall is churned-up bare mud, not the grass I remember. The raised beds that my parents donated bulbs for each year are not there.

People are massed around and pushing against each other. There is a low droning sound of voices. It doesn’t rise or fall, but plays a constant thrum, like water at a slow boil. It is a mix of two notes – fear and excitement.

The crowd moves like an animal, forward and back, testing its muscles. They are farmers, tradespeople, ordinary villagers. Their faces are both blank and keen, and I feel their special fear start to move in me. I push forward with the crowd, and when it pushes back, I resist and move through between those in front of me. I move in the smell of mud and sweat and woolfat and rosin. I push through the crowd until I’m breasting the front line. Ahead of the crowd stand a line of men in brown cloaks, a dam against the tide of villagers who are straining to see. The men are members of the Order. Their transverse flutes are slung across their backs with fine cord.

In the middle, between the members who stand solid and tall and calm like trees, there is a clearing of mud with three mounds of mudded dirt in the centre.

But they are not mud after all. One of the mounds turns against its earth trammels and I see that it is a human head buried up to the shoulders. In the clearing and in the middle of the circle of the Order, there are three people buried in earth, only their faces above. The faces are streaked in mud, the eyes and nose thumbed clear of it like the indentations in a child’s pinch pot, ready for kilning. On each head is a wreath of leaves, splashed with silver paint.

But none of this is the true horror. The true horror is that their mouths are silenced. Each is stopped with a dead creature. The still-living eyes of these buried heads strain as they fight to breathe against the obstruction.

The creatures are black, tawny, wild-looking. My head casts around for some word that will fix them. So black they are almost blue. Not rodent. Not cat. Not lizard. A snakelike head, a small beaded eye, a hooked beak. Blood at the corner of the beak. The words come to me unbidden. Bird. Raven.

And then I understand. The buried are Ravensguild.

I come to. Emerging out of the memory is like rising out of sleep, out of water, out of mud. There is a rushing as if of a great weight pushing down on me. Then a popping sound deep in my ears and the pressure shifts and I am blinking and back in the moonlight.

Mary stands in front of me. A look of hunger, almost jealousy, on her face. Her mouth is open and loose with emotion and I can see her gappy teeth.

‘Well,’ she says, eager. ‘Tell me. Tell me what you saw.’

‘I saw the dead of Ravensguild,’ I say.

She nods avidly. ‘How did you know? How did you know they were Ravensguild?’

‘Because they had been buried up to their necks and crowned with leaves,’ I say. ‘Because they had been gagged with dead ravens.’ I imagine feathers, the taste of dust and mites and earth. I feel the bile sting the back of my throat and I force it down.

Then she says, ‘Fetch him, your dear one out there. There is much to do. Much to do.’

Taking the Memories

Outside, the garden is empty. Moonlight raked across the overgrown lawn, under the oak only a pile of dry leaves. A bubble of fear rises in me, but I press it down. I want to call his name, but I let out a soft whistle instead.

Then I see him. He is lying down behind the oak, like a statue. His head pillowed on his arm and his eyes closed. He is sleeping. I have never, to the full extent of my memory, seen Lucien asleep. I stand and watch him awhile. His face is calm and beautiful. The thought that I should wish to protect him seems somehow as backwards as blasphony. But I can’t help it.

Lucien hears me watching and opens his eyes.

‘Well?’ he says. His voice is as clear and imperious as ever. My thought seems foolish, as I had known it would.

I say, ‘Come on.’

‘What?’ Awake presto, standing. ‘What has happened? You saw her? What did you learn?’

‘She wants to meet you,’ I say.

Inside, Mary makes more tea and examines Lucien.

‘Your friend here,’ she says to him after a while, gesturing with her thumb to me. ‘What is his name?’

The reversed echo of downsounding makes me twitch.

Lucien looks oddly bashful.

‘Simon,’ he says. He stares straight at Mary, though unseeing, as if I were not there and he must hold her gaze.

‘His name is Simon.’

My heart stops and starts, as though I’ve never heard him say my name before. His voice gives it a silvered edge.

‘And do you know what skill Simon has?’ Mary asks.

‘No,’ says Lucien. Then if my eyes tell me right, he blushes. ‘That is to say, Simon has many skills, but . . .’ Annoyance springs to his voice. He is not used to being the one who answers questions. ‘What do you mean exactly?’

Mary smiles and she winks at me as if she has caught Lucien out in some sort of game.

‘Simon can see memory. Like I can.
See
it! Not just his own, mind. Minds of others. That’s a rare thing, a fair thing, a precious thing. There were fewer of us in the guild, and then fewer still. Leaves on the tree after the winds came in . . . and I was all that was left. Last and lonely.

‘But now there’s Simon. Simple Simon. Simonides. And he will be the last after all. Not Mary.’

She says that thoughtfully, as if remarking on the weather. Then she comes to stand between us. ‘And now you two want to travel to the Citadel.’

Lucien is pale again, controlled.

‘Yes. To destroy the Carillon.’

Mary’s lips open in a strange smile, and she starts to sing again in her rough voice.

‘
Simple Simon went to look

If he could pluck the thistle;

He pricked his fingers very much,