Anna Smaill - The Chimes

I am too tired to fight. She takes my parents’ picture and places it among the others.

After that, things seem to both slow and speed.

In the memories Mary gives me, the Order closes in on Ravensguild.

Village crosshouses chime local curfews. One by one the evening meetings of memory keepers and villagers are broken and dispersed. In memory I sit and watch with other memory keepers as the door to my home thuds and splinters and finally cracks. A browncloaked arm comes through, clasps the door handle, turns.

In memory I stand straight as a tall, browncloaked man with a broken nose stops me and orders me to strip with a sneer. ‘Where are the memories, witch? Where are you hiding them?’ he asks.

In memory I see a fellow keeper pushed out of his village and barricaded in a wooden hut in the fields outside it. I hear his cries and chants as I walk past each day. His words lose meaning as he loses memory. What could I smuggle into that place? I wonder. What would help him? But I do nothing. Chimes takes it all, until he’s free to go. Memorylost, starry-eyed, thin as a stick and covered in rags.

And I go back and forward along what I guess is time like a ribbon stretched. Once into a pale and clear-skied time of silence where I watch people walking streets emblazoned and lit in streams of code. Letters everywhere. People carrying small, flat boards backlit and breeding code, and code on vehicles that move without fire or horse. Code in the very sky itself that is revealed as flat and depthless as a blank page.

I see people at Allbreaking as I have always imagined it. Glass stirring in an instant so it breaks white and clean as ice. People striving to shield their bodies from the deep phase of chords that take root in cavities of chest and lung. The bridges rocked as if by giant hands.

I recognise the massive redbrick ruin near Pancras on the edge of its vast collapse. People young and old pour out of its cracked glass doors and into a broad stone courtyard. They cover their ears and go down into their last hunches. And the huge mettle statue that is hunched there still watches them, measuring, always measuring, as he seems to be, the silent ringing of an invisible string into pure and perfect fifths.

I see as if watching from a far-off window a field in London, Lincoln’s Inn or Coram’s, as brownrobed members of the Order move on it. It is night and they walk among the memorylost and they stoop to each and gag them. From the distance their movements are gentle. Bind them and blind them with cloth, tie their hands behind their backs, corral them and herd them like animals from the square — going where? — the blank figures walking.

Everywhere I see flame, as memories are burnt in their thousands. And everywhere, through the ones that remain, the Carillon tolls and it takes on a tone I had never before heard. I understand as if for the first time. Chimes are tolling out death. Human death and the death of stories.

I emerge finally from the tide. Tired like after a long run in the under. But weak too, as if from hunger or missing blood or air.

I catch Lucien up on the memories I have been given, and he places them carefully in the stickwrap bag from Mary. They look so jumbled and meaningless in there. A small mettle bell without a clapper. A handful of lead and some para squares lettered with code. A burnt book. A bundle of twigs bound in red string. A picture of a child painted on cloth. Flotsam and jetsam.

‘Last one,’ says Mary. ‘Are you ready, my dear? You look all in.’

I take a deep breath and pull my shoulders down. The story I will need to tell is all there in that bag, but I feel uncertain whether I can untangle it, what I can make out of it.

‘The last one is here.’ She points to her closed left hand, fingers shut in tight keeping. ‘But I need my last one in exchange.’

Without waiting, she picks up my memory bag.

From it, she brings forth a candle. It is my memory of the night in the narrowboat. Our bunks next to each other. His hand, that strange moment when the distance between us was crossed. The hardest journey of all of them. The feel of his hair against my hands. His face in the tawny light. The taste of his mouth.

‘No!’ I say, forte. ‘I need that one. I have to keep it.’ I am so tired that I feel my knees bending.

‘What is it?’ asks Lucien.

‘A love token?’ says Mary, her beaklike mouth pursed. ‘I understand, my dear, but we have an agreement.’

‘The candle,’ I tell Lucien, because there is little point being embarrassed now, if I will forget it anyway. ‘From the narrowboat.’

Lucien takes my hand. His is dry and cool. He squeezes my fingers hard and he brings his head close to mine. His breath against my ear.

‘I won’t let you forget.’

But I am filled with dread. What if he is not able to stop it? I look up at Mary.

There is no choice. Even if there were a choice, there is barely enough of me left to make it.

‘Take it,’ I say. ‘You’ve got it all now.’

She inclines her head, places my last memory on the shelf and moves toward me. She extends her hand and waits until mine is open before pressing the object into it and closing my fingers one by one.

‘The last one,’ she says, and smiles at me.

I breathe in and wait for the memory to take me, but nothing happens. I clench my hand tighter, close my eyes. But there is no movement.

I open my eyes.

‘This isn’t a memory,’ I say. ‘I kept my side of the bargain. Where’s yours?’

She is looking at me again with the wry, amused look on her face.

‘It’s more important than even a memory, lovely. It’s a little piece of acquired wisdom from one memory keeper to another.’

I open my fingers. On my palm is a clot of thread. Wool, cotton, silk, different colours all knotted together tight and hopeless.

‘What the hell is this?’

‘It’s a question,’ she says. ‘The question is, even if you have all of these memories, this grand and noble history of ours, how will it help? What is to make it anything but another version of events, another Onestory?’

I stare at the knot of threads on my hand. I feel raw and empty and blank. Some part of me refuses to think, refuses to engage in her puzzle.

She comes in close. ‘A clue, my dear. Where is the Order’s weakness? What is it they are afraid of?’

The tangled heap of threads is an irritation, a stupidity. It gives me a headache just thinking of untangling them, and then what would I do with it?

And like that, like a candle being lit, or a chord being struck, I understand the answer to her puzzle. I stare at her.

Mary nods to encourage me.

‘Yes?’

‘Mess,’ I say. Both Lucien and Mary have their eyes turned to me. They seem to sway in the lanternlight, but it’s just me.

‘They can’t stand mess,’ I say again. ‘Human mess. They can’t abide the things that don’t fit into a perfect harmony, a tidy chord. They wanted to perfect us. Their music doesn’t have a place for mistakes and errors, for people who love the ones they’re not meant to love, for babies with noses that run and those who are deaf and alone. In the end it can’t fit in things like grief and loss and stickiness and dirt.’

I think of the members of the Order I have seen with their shaved heads and their spare, nearly skeletal, frames. Their paleness not Lucien’s living pale, but of cloisters and practice rooms without sun.

‘And bodies. They are afraid of bodies. Because bodies betray us. They grow and change and they love and they leak and they get tired and sick and old and they shake and die.

‘They are afraid of these things,’ I say, ‘because they are afraid of dischord.’