Anna Smaill - The Chimes

Brennan tugs on my shoulder. He pulls me from the path and behind the trunk of a large tree. I follow him into a crouch in the dirt. Then I follow his gaze.

Standing at the edge of the clearing, northeast of where we’re crouched, is a tall man in white robes and a brown travelling cloak. We lean close to the tree trunk and watch him. Over the brown cloak is slung the silver transverse flute that tells he’s a member of the Order. It glints in the light as he moves. His back is crooked, one shoulder slightly higher than the other, and it gives a swaggered threat to his stride.

As we watch, he circles through the clearing. He moves through the memorylost with some reluctance, as if loath to be so near. The thin figures step aside with a shambling, shy confusion as he goes. Some keep their heads down, and some follow with vacant eyes. The member of the Order turns from side to side. Occasionally he steps forward and then stops, his head cocked. He pauses like this several times as we wait still in the shadows.

Then the tall man is walking towards us. Long strides and soon enough I can see the grey in his close-curled hair. For a moment I believe he is coming for Brennan and me. But then he halts at a tree near the edge of the clearing. A woman is sitting there, unmoving. Hands resting flat and palm upward on her thighs. Her hair is long and her clothes ragged, and on her face is a blissed-out look quite different from the others’ daze. For a moment I think she is a moony. But she has no eyeband. Next to her is a girl about Abel’s age, her hair shaved so close you can see a cluster of crescent-shaped white scars through the stubble. She’s as calm as her mother, leaned into her shoulder like that and with eyes shut.

As I watch past the tree trunk, the member holds his right hand just above the height of their heads, and he caresses the air in a smooth wave up and down like it’s riding a current that flows over them both. The wave of his hands returns and crests again over the daughter.

His gestures are familiar. They are familiar to me because I see them every day. When Lucien’s standing in the under and waiting for the tune, he does the same. Listening, divining the Lady’s tide. Yet, this man’s movements are taut with anger. And, subito, some invisible wave breaks inside of him and he steps forward and pulls an object from his belt. Silver moving in his hand. A blade. From where I crouch I see him grip the woman’s shoulder with one hand. With the other he slashes upward in a single fluid thrust. The woman looks up at him, her mouth an O as he holds up the shirt he has slit from her back and shakes it. Drops it on the ground before her in disgust.

Then he turns and he looks straight up. The sun flashes across his dark paraspecs and the whole of his body is poised and held. For a long moment he stares right where we’re hidden. I hold my breath. Brennan tenses, as if ready to move, and I grip his shoulder hard as I can. Fear moves through me. Deep and chill.

At last the member turns away and whatever threat there was is broken. He moves on, past the stragglers and round the crosshouse. Brennan slumps beside and we sit there and I watch the wind make the trees flex and breathe. The man has dropped his strange errand and gone back to wherever he came from. Neither of us moves.

Then a sound comes out of the silence and the shuffling of the memorylost. It is a harsh scraping and it comes from inside the crosshouse. It is the sound of something hard being drawn over something rough. Arcs of it, each as long as an arm and with the full weight of a body behind. Raaaaaaasp. Raaaaaaasp . After that, a flurry of shorter scratches, like an animal struggling to free itself from something.

Brennan is rigid beside me. The sounds stop. Two beats more and the robed figure emerges from the crosshouse and disappears into the tangle of green of the park. When he’s out of earshot for certain, we rise without speaking. We cross the clearing and enter the small stone house.

The interior is gutted. Old rubble covers the dirt floor, and lines of black bloom along its walls. Circles of soot from many different fires, their various rings like the tidelines the river pushes up the bank and there forgets. The stone room smells of human dirt and broken things.

‘What was he doing?’ I say out loud.

‘Don’t ask me,’ says Brennan.

‘Have you ever seen a member of the Order outside the market?’

Brennan shrugs again.

‘He looked like he was prospecting for the Lady,’ I say.

‘Why in hell would he do that?’

I don’t know. He’s right. Members of the Order don’t look for it. They pay us to do the dirty work in the under. Or rather they pay the dealers, who pay us. It would make no sense for him to prospect here anyway. The Lady lives in the river.

It’s only when we leave the crosshouse that I see the member’s true leaving. We missed it when we entered because our eyes were blinded in the sudden dark. Scratched in deep across the broad back wall are two long sets of five horizontal lines, shapes trapped inside them like creatures in a cage.

I stand and stare for a while before my mind finds a way to explain what I’m seeing. Because it’s not often you see music written down, is it? And when you do, it’s on paper or parchment, not a wall. I can’t read the strange up-and-down dance of the notes, or grasp what meaning it is they protect. But even I can see that the stave is scratched in vicious and deep, with the force of anger. The song is a threat.

Before I know what I am doing, I reach into my bag and untwist the package of oatcakes left from the morning’s run, smooth out the greased paper. I burn a twig until there’s a good end to it. Then I scratch with its black onto the paper.

It takes a good long while to get the whole tune down. The notes won’t stay still in their grids. While I do it, Brennan stands by looking down at me. He waits tacet, every now and again picking a stone up from the dirt, weighing it in his hands, tossing it across the clearing. For all the world as if it’s what we do each time we come to Bow. Though I am almost certain that I have never seen a thing like this before.

We sing our way back to the strand, at last, Brennan carrying the rabbits slung across his neck in a collar of fur. The light is fading. I stand and watch and breathe a bit as the river runs. Its path is hollow, rising up and rising down, nothing to stop it filling. It’s a greedy thing, running both wide and deep. It’s that unneeding way of it that tells you how old it is. The same look in Lucien’s eyes and in other blank things.

It is dark and cold in the storehouse. In my quarters, there is a burberry lying on the floor under the hammock. I kick it toward the wall. Then I take out my memory bag. Its smell of linseed oil and damprot and a taint of woolfat from who knows where. I try to empty my head of thought and tune, but the roughcloth curtains are no shelter and the noises are strange. A creak in the wall beam as Clare or Abel turns in their hammock. A dry cough from Brennan’s quarters behind. A fox barks once out on the race.

I rub my palms together, listen to my breath. Try to find a still space in my head away from the pull of questions, but I can’t. I think about the three wrong notes that the last two days have sounded: the memory of Clare’s questions that throbs even now on my arm; the empty, silent field at Ropemakers; and the member’s message on the wall at Bow. Accidentals without meaning, or sign of some deeper shift or modulation I cannot read? And whose mistake is it, the awful jarred noise they make — mine, or someone else’s?