Anna Smaill - The Chimes

I listen. I wait.

Nothing comes. I close my eyes again. I hear a rhythm first and then nonsense syllables that roll in my mouth.

‘ Gwil-lum Hu-ginn Ce-dric Thor ,’ I say.

Lucien looks at me, wondering.

I hold my hands in front of me and study them. The echo of the movement is in the muscle. Grip and twist. Easy and sharp. What were we doing?

And subito I have the answer and as soon as I do, I see that it could not be anything else. Not kneading bread. Breaking bulbs. A clean break and the smell of white sap. A drawing of an animal with a hooked beak, wings spread. Wings .

Seven ravens in the tower , I think.

‘ Seven ravens in the tower ,’ I say out loud.

I look at Lucien. His eyes are bright. Then I say the whole thing out without stopping.

‘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.’

Lucien’s face glows in the half-light. He places his hand on my shoulder so I feel the weight of it right down my back. ‘Thank you, Simon,’ he says in a low voice, and there is nothing of joke in it.

‘I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘What does it mean?’

‘Do you trust me, Simon?’

I look at him. In the under, we follow Lucien. Follow him like blind faith. In the under, when the map flares up around like a fire with the door open and the arms of the tunnels reach out, it’s all you have. A following that’s almost like falling. And once you’ve felt it, nothing else has much pull anymore. Why would it? What else opens up your veins like that, pulls the sky in, fish-hooks the stars into such brightness?

I nod.

‘Then listen. I don’t know what the song means. I know the tune and I know its threat. But I need you to remember what your mother told you about it.’

I stare at him. He has slipped the leather cord between his hands and I watch the patterns he is making, triangles moving and being cut in half and then in half again. His hands muddy, like he has just dug something out of the earth.

I realise that there is something else he needs to know.

‘We saw a member of the Order in the burial-ground crosshouse, Brennan and I, when we went to sing the snares.’

His hands halt with the pattern of crisscrossed cords between them. ‘What night was this?’

I think hard, count back. ‘A thrennoch ago, I think.’

‘Not at Ropemakers, at Bow?’

‘Yes. Ropemakers was empty, no snares, no people, which I thought was strange. He was walking among the memorylost. He…’ I try to see it again, the movements he made. ‘He looked like he was prospecting for Pale. He listened to the air around the memorylost. Then he disappeared out of the yard and back into the crosshouse. We heard something scratching on stone.’

‘And then?’

‘After he was gone, we checked the crosshouse. We wanted to see what he was doing. What made the sound.’

‘And?’

I describe what the member scratched in the wall at the entrance. The staves the length of a broad armspan. Then I pause, turn presto and leave the balcony. On the shelf behind my hammock, the folded paper is sitting where I left it. When I hand it to Lucien he says nothing. I watch as he opens the paper. He shades his brow and squints hard and then he traces the deeply lined scratches. After a while his pale eyes flinch and then flare. I have not asked him if he is able to read music. For some reason I do not need to.

‘It’s formal,’ he says. ‘A kind of fugue.’

I wait for him to say more.

‘An old form. What used to be called a ricercar . Which means “to search out”. The first few notes are a name. Then the last part means forze , or “power”. The way it’s put together is what makes the message.’ He pauses. ‘We will have to move presto now. We need to know all that you can remember about your mother. We need to know more about what the song means. We don’t have much time. Every spare moment you have, try if you can to remember. I will downsound it with you.’

‘Yes,’ I say. I wait, but Lucien is tacet, still in thought.

‘Well?’ I ask.

‘Well what?’

‘What does the message mean?’

There is something unspoken in his pause and he looks straight at me, testing, waiting.

‘There are a couple of ways you could read it. But in the vernacular the simplest reading is: Lucien, we will find you .’

Today we start off at a quick jog. Though everything underneath and above it has changed, the rhythm of the day stays the same. I wake. The pact wakes. We sound Onestory. We run in the under. The tune is bright and cocky at first, moving stepwise up the tonic chord into the large tunnelmouth to our direct north. It’s a stormwater drain, but a large one, quite dry.

We run easy, barely crouching, side by side. The echo of our splashing feet in the tile tunnel keeps us company. Sometimes the splashing seems to be coming from ahead of us, and sometimes from behind. And then I’d swear that I hear a third lot of footfalls, speeding and slowing, as if trying to get us to lose our pace. Strange sounds are part of the under. Sometimes you see strange things too. Glowing patches moving with us as we run, floating across the path. Maybe it’s gas burning off. Maybe the spirits of pactrunners who’ve died down here.

The tune takes us further down the tunnel, deep into the heart of the map. Its beat fits to our jogging rhythm. I hear it thumping in my blood too. Then the tunnel starts to bend and we both hear the modulation to the fourth chord coming in mind’s ear. The modulation that spins around the home key and shows us which tunnel to take. It’s an easy path. The first tunnelmouth that looms up ahead is the one that fits our cadence. Due west. Without a word, we both veer off the main tunnel and enter its dark mouth.

Narrower, now. The calm, clean echo of the tiles changes into a harsh clang. It’s mettle, filled with the sharp note of rust, a strident, bright smell that pitches us on faster. The melody fills the tunnel right up and takes on an orange ferrous darkness and ringing speed. Try not to trip over your own feet as they outpace you.

Clare takes the lead, shifts us through some tricky cross rhythms and time changes. It’s jaunty, full of darting offbeat flurries. After five bars of the same four-four time, there is a quick near-blind corner and then the path doubles back awhile. Then it breaks into a triplet rhythm, three-eight, for about the same distance. Each version of the tune darts out into another tunnel juncture.

We are breathing presto when we reach the final spurt of the first subject. From there, it’s into a drawn-out, restful melody with long strides all heading northwest. Clare sets our pace at a rolling trot. I put my hands to the walls and feel rough concrete then slim wiring along it, at about the level of my head. It’s a comms tunnel.

The lines of wire, someone said, I don’t remember who, used to be how sound travelled. I don’t understand this, as they are not tight stretched like cello or viol strings, but slack and covered in stickwrap.

After a while we’re coming near to where Lucien sang the Lady’s cadence. I start to listen for her as we run, wait for the telltale drops of silence, the silver shiver.