Anna Smaill - The Chimes

The deep, low throbbing sounds of the early summons. Like someone clearing their throat before they talk. There are a few minutes before it starts. Most of the memorylost look around blankly and seem not to guess what is coming. But streams of people emerge from the hillpaths and from the houses that give onto the heath. Up the threadbeaten grass of Parly Hill they climb. The hill is rounded under the smoky grey sky, and the streams of people are like ants moving up to sweetness.

‘Are you coming?’ I ask Steppan. ‘You need to join the ensemble for Chimes,’ I say. ‘You can follow my solfege. It might help you learn.’

The boy shrugs. ‘Can’t,’ he says. ‘My father might wake and not know where I am. He wanders off.’

I leave the two of them and join one of the ant trails of people. When I reach the crown of the hill, it is full already, but I find a space out of arm’s reach of any of the other citizens. Mud shows through the grass like thinning hair on a bald head.

Tingle of anticipation in my thumbs and in my own skull. Smell of pepper. Then a run of bright notes pierces through the white smoked sky. It’s so loud it pitches into us, through all heads. And every man, woman, child or prentiss comes still and bright-eyed and rings clear to their own tone like a mettle tuning fork struck sharp and clean and held up to the heavens for all to hear.

In the under, there is togetherness. We are linked by cooee and by the sightlines of the tunnels and by the magnetic shadow of the Lady. It is now, now, after practice in my quarters when the black rushes in like panic. It washes through the storehouse and I imagine Clare and Abel and Brennan and Lucien floating silent in the night, cocooned in their own hammocks, suspended in the black. I can’t feel where my body begins and ends. Do I still have legs? Arms? Fingers? What if I forgot them?

The pain in my arm pulses in a rhythm that must be my heart. Breathe into it, hum a snatch of melody underbreath. I ran the empty streets back to Dog Isle after Chimes, followed the tune turned inside out though I hardly needed it — the river is the tonic of all tunes and my body swings back to it like the needle of a compass. I entered the storehouse. Down at the end, Abel had the viol low on his collarbone and his head cocked to one side. Lucien was teaching him a tune. The look on Abel’s face all eager and young — his hair standing up from his head and his bow arm too high above the wrist as always.

It gets darker and darker. At last all is black apart from the small circle of my candle. I know the panic as well as I know my breath. Fear that the dark will take me whole and swallow me without a blink. Fear it’ll leave nothing, not even my name. There’s another urge also. It tugs against that need for remembering and says, Let go, open up to the dark, let the clean order of Chimes take you.

When I came through the door, I was still half winded from the run and they turned for a moment but hardly saw me, their faces all candlelit and calm. The tune they were playing was sad. After a while Abel had it by heart and they played the thing right through so that Lucien’s voice was free to weave around and I listened in spite of myself. I listened for a while and the melody took me to a place I didn’t know, somewhere with pale fluted ceilings and golden light. Now in my quarters, the thought comes that Lucien was singing for my ears especially. That there was some message in the tune for me. I know this to be folly. I take the bag in my hands.

In the depths of the roughcloth, none of the shapes has any meaning. They’re just things I reach for like a strandpicker in thamesmuck. When my hand takes hold of the right one, a picture will flash up true as a bright note, clear as an unmudded stream. I don’t know how it works. Maybe the object comes first; then the memory follows. Or maybe I choose the memory and my hand finds the right object to match. I do one each night only. And I can’t take it with me into the morning.

I search through. I grip thick cloth, a heavy garment. The unravelled edge of a leather buckle. Up into the flickering light it comes. An old burberry. The colour of a dirty parcel. Enormous and the lining frayed and sleeves dipped deep in mud. A voice comes in my head. The arrival in London , it says, what was it like?

A rushing in my ears then, a lightening. The sounds of the river fade and the dark drives upward and I feel myself swing suspended up and out and away from the storehouse and down…

I am standing alone on a roadside in the rain.

Everywhere is mud. My whole body is heavy with sleep and with sadness. I look down. On my feet are farmshoes of rope and roughcloth, and they are covered with thick crusts of mud. A roughcloth bag bumps at my leg.

The fields around me are lines of grey along the horizon as I wait. I have been standing forever when a horse and cart at last come to a stop and the horse takes its brief breather to snort and fill the air with steam.

The rain is so heavy the horse’s coat is almost black, the feathers round his feet strung out in whips of mud. The carter sitting in the back there gestures ‘get up’ and I get up into the cart presto. When I’m sat in the back midst the wool bales, the carter passes me an old burberry.

‘Thank you,’ I sign. He shrugs and flicks the reins. He shrugs once and then two times more, not out of choice. The look of his muscles dancing makes me sick to my stomach. Because I know that clutch somehow, in my own body. An echo of hands that are gripping and fighting. Trying to hold on.

The road stretches ahead of us and there is a lesson in it, if I was in the mood to learn. It holds no pressed shape, whether that’s of raindrop or footfall or hoofprint. The road is a river, always the same and always changing and I must go ahead on it—

I come into the flickering light of the storehouse with an abrupt break. Something has pulled me out — a sound, or the new silence after a sound has been cut off. I train my ears like we do in the under. Bare calls from the river, half human, half animal. The sounds of a body turning against a blanket in sleep.

‘Who’s there?’ I whisper to the silence.

There is no reply.

I get up and hold the candle to cast light into the corners of my quarters, but there is nothing except the tail of a wind that lifts the edge of the roughcloth curtain. And a feeling that is empty and hard. A question that sounds in my mind.

Arrival, I think, and am afraid. There is no before, no after , says Onestory. Which makes ‘arrival’ blasphony. Yet my mind snags and catches on the word like it’s a splinter.

Darkness and silence. Somewhere in the deep black above me a blurred light. It reaches its fingers down and I swim up toward it. Then from underneath a tug at my legs. Something clings, tries to pull me back. Panic rushes in like water and I kick sharp. Kick hard until I am free and then push up presto to the surface, hungry for air, for light.

And I am awake.

Lie still and listen. Hardbitten half-echo of coldness. Foursquare solid walls to each side and the march of the wooden roof beams above, black with old oil. Creak of hammock as I sway. The light in the curtained room is grey and blurred, and down below is a river of sleep without the hardness of a yesterday to push off. But something has come up. Wrapped tight round my legs like wrack or weed brought to the surface. A dull brown garment, a coat, streaks of mud all over as if it’s been long buried and dug up. And there’s a sharp pain in my left arm.