The Chimes (40 page)

Perhaps they’ve deafened me with their blows, I think, and the last thing I heard is what will stay. But who is
she
? I think. And they pull me towards the pale stone of the tower, and the arms of the Lady reach out as if to offer up their consolation.

Then I am pushed through doors of pale wood and into a massive hall.

I’m on my stomach, but against my will I look up.

The hall is fluted, elegant, like the body of one of the giant shells that are washed up on the strand sometimes. Yet it is human. My mind struggles to understand the time that has been given to it, whole lifetimes between the laying of its first stones and its completion.

Columns stretch up as if they have grown out of the floor like immense trees. They are carved in hard white stone that somehow looks soft to touch. Three, four floors of fluted columns stretching up to a ceiling that seems to breathe and move like the many mouths of a giant creature. All white. I recognise the intricate lace stone carving on the walls as soundproofing. The mouths at the ceiling are open to swallow music. Light fills the hall through high windows, and the smell of incense is strong.

It was not Sonja who gave us away, I think. She was ready to release all of this, to give it up.

But what did we have to offer her in return, next to this beauty?
the voice in my head says. No answers, no order. Nothing but mess, questions, fear.

In the middle of the hall, around a table of pale wood, sit the magisters, some in travelling cloaks, most in the white robes of the elect.

‘Bring him in,’ says the one in the centre, the one whose beard is the same white as his robes. I manage to get half to my knees. Because I want to see him. Something in me needs to see him. When I look, it is blurred. My left eye feels broken, and the pain in my head comes forte. I shut the broken eye and it is clearer. I can look then at the man of power who is sitting in front of me. The one responsible for so much death.

He is tall as they all are, and old. Very old. So old that you can see how his power has grown up slow around him. The weight of it in the room like looking at stilled time, the rings on a cut tree. The features in that face are long and sharp, eyes deep set in their sockets. Yet the horror of the face is not the age, but its wonderful smoothness and flexibility. Each line in the fine-grained flesh is exact, somehow articulate. Speaking. It seems to express a living and elegant discrimination. A face that has tasted of things if only so it can choose to renounce them.

Then a door opens in the east wing, the place where, in a crosshouse, the chapel would be.

I see two poliss walk across the floor. Pushed ahead of them with his hands tied is Lucien. A trail of blood from a deep cut on his temple follows the line of his face. I hear a noise leave my mouth. Behind the poliss, a tall man with a hunched back. Next to him stands Sonja.

Lucien is pushed toward the front of the table, directly opposite the magister musicae. Two blind faces stare at each other across the plane of wood. The hall is silent.

‘Who is this boy?’ asks the magister.

The hunched man leaves Sonja and walks forward to stand at the table.

‘This is my son, Lucien, your honour. I should say, he used to be my son. As you know, I believed he died of riverfever at the age of fifteen, before his ordination. I learn now that my wife smuggled him out of the Citadel and he has been living in London since. He tried to use my daughter, Sonja, his sister, to gain access to the instrument. He has brought shame on our family and on the Orkestrum. It would have been better if he had died as we thought.’

Lucien draws himself up slightly. He starts to say something.

‘You will not speak,’ says the magister musicae. ‘You have not been ordained and so have no right to utterance here in this hall.’ He turns back to Lucien’s father.

‘Your wife was Frieda, I think. She was from outside the walls?’

‘Yes, Your Honour. But she had embraced our ways. I had no indication that she was not loyal to the Order.’

‘Your ignorance is hardly an excuse and does little to recommend you.’

‘I am sorry, Your Honour.’

The magister musicae turns to face Lucien directly.

‘Due to your actions today, the Carillon is late. For the first time since Allbreaking, Matins will take place after sunrise. It is the only distinction you appear to have achieved in your short life. And a pointless one, as it will make no difference either in the Citadel or to the people in the cities. Chimes is always coming and always here.

‘I remember you. A gifted boy. You still bear the mark of your birth, I hear. Your talent was fine. You had the skill to rise high, to gain the immortality that only music can bestow.’ He stops speaking, closes his eyes. ‘I cannot tell you how many times I have seen the same error. They mistake the individual hungers and desires, the wants and needs of the solo player, as a source of meaning. Think they can live for themselves and for the pleasure of others. Yet there is no truth in that; there is no way forward. Where did the cult of personality take our predecessors? Into a mired, frantic world without foothold of truth or understanding.

‘You may look at our decisions here, but you are not adequate to understand them. You will never grasp the principle of hier­archy, the sacrifice of the individual for the greater good. We have opened the people to the possibility of a higher, an enduring, beauty. We have shown them that perfection is within their reach.

‘Some might say it has been punishment enough for you to leave the Citadel, to witness and partake of the corruption of city life, to lose your education, your skill, your chance to pursue the high and only ideals. But to my mind it is not enough.’

He points to a young man in white robes who sits down the length of the table from him.

‘Magister Joachim is our youngest magister. Look at him closely. He is what you could have become.’

The young man inclines his head slightly, as if embarrassed to be singled out.

‘Magister Joachim, when you enter the inner chambers, this boy will accompany you. He has been away for so long that he has forgotten the transformative power of music. Before you reach the sacrum musicae, you will leave him in the fifth of the inner chambers, the dominant. You will seal the door. He will listen to your concert from within the instrument.’

‘
No
.’ Sonja breaks out of her father’s hands, half falls forward. There is silence from the table. ‘No. Please,’ she says.

The old man looks up, fixes his blind gaze on her.

‘You did not ask leave to speak here.’

‘Your Honour, I am sorry. He is my brother. I know that he has betrayed the Order, but if you make him listen from the dominant chamber, it will deafen him. He has no training. He will die.’

I stare at her. She must have known all along that our quest was without hope.

‘I am sorry, discipula. We practise mercy as a rule here. There is no benefit to be gained from cruelty. It is ugly, and it aids no one. But your brother abandoned the Order. This is a betrayal from within and must be recognised as such.
Grief is not a note to be sustained beyond death.
Perhaps you might choose to see this not as a punishment but as a reclamation, an atonement. The instrument will open to him for a last time. Perhaps in its embrace he will learn what was lost.’

I see Sonja open her mouth and close it again.

I move forward.

‘It was not him. It was my idea,’ I shout. ‘He had no memory of this place. I made him come. Take me instead.’

The magister musicae does not address me. I am beneath his notice.

Lucien turns and he looks at me and holds my gaze. His face is calm and open. He holds his bound hands out from him, and in the narrow air that he can command, he conducts the solfege for my name and then the solfege for forgiveness. I hear it in my head in his voice. I hear it in my head as the single chord inside me that cannot be understood or broken into its different parts. I hear it as love.

The poliss take him. They leave the hall. The young magister goes too, and Sonja’s father pushes her to follow also. ‘To your quarters,’ he says.

I go to my knees then, and my last glimpse of Lucien is the straight pitch of his neck bending as one of the poliss cups his head to push him under the low door that leads towards the Carillon.

I stand in the hall. The stone is cold and empty of life; the ornament is toothed with cruelty; the golden light is cheap.

I feel a hand at my back pushing me forward. I stumble, clumsy. Lucien has gone from me. My body feels made of wood.

‘What to do with the pactrunner?’ says a voice.

I force myself to speak.

‘Take me as well. Let me die with him.’

‘You would profane the instrument. That punishment is only for one who was born here.’

The magister musicae is speaking, but I cannot see him. In front of my eyes are bright moving lights. They are inside my eyelids, moving with them.

I see shapes on the fringes of the brightness, but nothing is clear, a dull throbbing in my brain.

‘As I said, we practise mercy in the Order, as a rule.’ His voice is fastidious, cold. ‘Take him back to London and leave him. He will soon forget what has happened here.’

Hands on my shoulders again. The voice comes again.

‘But no,’ it says. ‘Leave him for now. It may near to deafen him, but what other time would a layperson be privileged to hear the instrument at such close quarters? Such an opportunity will only come once in a lifetime. Who are we to prevent it?’

The hands are removed and I am allowed to slump down.

Pain climbs into a corner of my skull and sets up a rhythm of throbbing. I close my eyes, but the lights cluster and play, following their tracking behind their lids.

I pull my hands taut against the rope as hard as I can, not because I think I can free myself, but because I need to feel something, anything, or I will go mad.
Lucien
, says the deep throb in my skull.
Lucien
.

In the hall around me is silence. A new silence, that of their cruel, hallowed ritual. I pull my hands taut. I bring my head to the cold tile.

Silence opens. The smell of pepper fills the air. A dry cough in the upper reaches of the vaulted ceiling. A dead chord breaks the air.

It is Chimes.

Head in the water is peace. I go down, down, down into a place of cool darkness. But in the darkness there is a different voice. It is singing. I think for a while it is my mother’s voice, and then it becomes Lucien’s voice, and then I understand that it is neither of these.

The voice is the voice of Chimes, the melody simple. It is not song at all, but the clearest and sweetest of the bells sounding wordlessly. The words are those that come into my head with the tune as somehow, at last, I hear it.

‘
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.
’

The tune comes once, twice. It is raw and simple. It has the open fourths and fifths of a folk tune. There is no harmony or embellishment, just the tune sounding simple and sweet.

Sounding down from the instrument and to me. What my ears tell me is impossible. My mind freezes with it. It cannot be true. Lucien is within the terrible embrace of the instrument, and he is playing.

Around me, in the hall, people are running. I do not follow their movement. I keep my head down.

The guildsong comes to an end. Its end is a crashing chord and the chord is pain. It is jagged and crooked. It is broken and splintered and uneven, and it’s sustained for so long at such a pitch that I think my ears are going to burst.

The chord is death and sorrow and torture. Like millions of people all screaming at once. Just when I think I can’t stand any more, the harshness fades and crumbles. It doesn’t resolve. That is the wrong word. It doesn’t move into harmony, but it breaks, and as it breaks, it shows the possibility of change. It walks forward. It carries the pain into the next chord, but it softens there and there is sweetness again.