Anna Smaill - The Chimes

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.’

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,

Which made poor Simon whistle.

‘You need more than a whistle to destroy the Carillon, my dearling. Chimes are strong as mettle can make them. A dangerous nettle indeed. How do you plan to pluck her?’

Her smile is full of relish.

Lucien turns to me. The plan is a sketch in the air, thin as the broidered river of his mother’s map. Go to Oxford. Get a message to Sonja. Enter the Citadel with her help. And get inside the Carillon. Beyond that we have not talked.

The thought returns. I’ve been stuck in a dark room that I thought was the whole world. But now I see that, even if the doors in that room open, the difficult part is knowing which to choose. How does any of us know, after what has been taken away? And I see Clare again, on the strand, cutting her own path of story. I see the mirrorsmooth reflection of mudflats, a flatness unbroken. And I see that we cannot destroy the Carillon without returning some part of what has been taken from us.

‘We need memories,’ I say. ‘We need memories that tell the truth of the Order, and what they did in the time after Allbreaking.’ Lucien is looking at me. ‘We need to put them together so that they form a line that starts in one place and moves to another place.’

They’re both looking. It is Mary who breaks the silence. ‘Yes, and what then, my darling?’ she asks, coy and with cocked head.

‘Then it will smash the circle that is Onestory. We will return what’s been stolen by the Order and by Chimes — time past and time hereafter.’

‘And say I help you, my dear. What then? If you are successful, well and good — no need for Mary in that sweet hereafter. But what if you fail, as in all likelihood you will? What happens to Mary then? I’ll be here, still here. Still keeping the memories. That’s no good for me, I’m afraid. I’ll help you, but I’ll need something of yours in exchange.’

Neither Lucien nor I say anything.

‘I need to know that if you fail, you will return to me to take over your duties.’

I look at Lucien. There is no picture in my mind of a time in which we succeed, and none of one where we fail either. Would either of us survive it? Mary’s is a blind bargain, but I don’t see a way out of it.

‘Yes,’ I say, turning away from Lucien. ‘If we fail, I’ll come back.’

‘Good, good,’ says Mary. ‘That is honourable. And if we listen to the forecast, you’re a man who keeps his word.’ She winks conspiratorially at Lucien. ‘He’ll not let you down this one, smitten as he is.’

I flush against my will, but Lucien acts as though he is deaf as well as blind.