Anna Smaill: The Chimes

‘So you had no idea what you were fighting for down there? You just didn’t want anybody else to get their hands on it. Is that right?’ He comes closer and there’s a smell of woodsmoke off him. In his hand the silver nugget. ‘I’m afraid we all have to let it go, sooner or later,’ he says.

I look at the nugget lying on his palm, milky silver and its strange grip of silence.

‘What is it?’

‘You should pay more attention at Matins,’ he says. ‘This is the mettle in the river. What rose out of dischord’s ashes. This is what they pay us for.’ He closes the mettle in his palm.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t need to understand, farmboy.’

‘What’s it for?’ I ask. ‘Who buys it from you?’

He looks at me as if unused to questions. His expression has changed and he speaks lento now. ‘What do you need to make harmony? A conductor. And for the biggest harmonies of all? A superconductor — the Pale Lady.’ His mouth quirks like it’s another joke I don’t understand.

‘The Order wants it, of course, and the Order pays. We harvest it from the river and the Order buys. The Lady goes to build the Carillon,’ he says. Watching me. Though watching is not correct. Listening, rather. Ears keen to the measure of my blood and breath.

The Lady goes to build the Carillon . It’s strange, but at Chimes my mind never moves to the instrument. I don’t think of where the sounds are coming from — of what is playing. Only of the music leaping through until every part is commingled and one. Not pipes or bells, but the air’s own orkestra. A sky shrouded in curtains and the chords pulling them back and back until all is revealed clean and bare.

There’s tacet in the storehouse for a while. Lucien breaks it. ‘What’s your instrument?’ he asks. Brennan raises a brow. He’s surprised by the question.

‘The recorder.’

Brennan sniggers and Lucien silences him with a raised hand.

‘Get it, then, if you please.’

The flames are flickering and the lamps that hang from the beams sway in the wind coming in off the river. They cast long shadows all over the wooden walls. The two called Abel and Brennan go to their hammocks and come back, Brennan with a round, flat tambor about two handspans in width, Abel with a viol.

I reach inside my bag. A moment of panic, but the case is still there, undamaged. I unfasten the small brass clasps. Inside, the leather is lined with blue velvet that fits neat to each part of the recorder. Fits the chestnut wood, the ivory-tipped beak. In there it’s cold and separate, but as soon as I pick it up, it feels light and warm and alive. My hands find their places without thinking, each finger in its stop. Happiness pricks in the fleshy part at the base of my thumbs.

I walk into the circle and Lucien turns to me.

‘Do your best to keep up,’ he says.

Without accompaniment he starts to sing.

He sings and time stands still, as if he is walking on water. His voice is stark and true, and in it there are stretches of empty skies and a bright rime of salt.

The tune starts with a glee and a lilt. The words don’t say much, but I can follow the melody’s meaning. It is about when innocence is really blindness. How when you want something very much, so bad you can taste it, your mind likes to trick you that it’s in your grasp.

That is the gleeful, lilting, funny bit. But then the second theme comes, and that’s bitter. It is about when the beauty is false and yet you still somehow desire and still cannot have it.

Lucien sings the first theme through once again with no words now and no solfege, just sounds that curl and change. Then, lightly, Brennan comes in on the drum. He lays down a four-four rhythm. Then he spreads and patterns it until it tells the same story. But his part has a relentless tread: the warning of what will be lost, and the punishment to come. Then Abel brings in another voice on the viol. It starts an argument with Lucien’s, a quickwitted patter of running triplets: scolding, blustering, mocking Lucien’s plaints.

And I listen. I listen until the flickering walls of the storehouse drop away and the three new figures with their intent faces and movements disappear. Abel and Lucien and Brennan disappear and all I can see is the melody unfold and the music tread.

In the midst, though, there is something missing. Something waiting. I can feel it, and with each moment it grows stronger. It is coming maybe from the three of them, who though they don’t look at me, are watching. But more than that, it is coming from the music itself. A whole voice is missing. The song has three parts: a yearning, a warning and an urgent scolding. But nowhere is there the voice of the beautiful thing, the one that is waiting to be found and claimed. The one they are all searching for.

I pick up my recorder and I start to play, even though I don’t know how to make the voice that is missing. When I have played all my feeling into the first part of the tune, I still don’t know, but by then it is too late and I no longer care, so I just play it. I play it high and reckless and free so that it flies above all the others. I play it with some of the anger I feel and some that I throw in for extra. I play a voice that has never known anything except for luck and beauty. I don’t know where it comes from, just that it was missing.

The tune goes on and on and on. Lucien pulls the song one way and then the other. He offers a new key, tells a joke, breaks into a new rhythm. After a while I hear that the viol has dropped out. And then the drum falls away and I hear that it is only Lucien’s voice and my recorder. I follow him. It is like running and running in the dark, without looking down. The dark streams out around me, exhilarating. For a while I run and it seems that I am following close behind the pale bright light that Lucien’s voice sheds. It is a running that is more like a falling. My stomach drops out.

And subito I get a glimpse of a strange new territory. Not the close, light-flickered wooden walls of the storehouse after all, but a vast illuminated maze like a spiderweb. And at that moment I see Lucien ahead, laughing in his mastery. His voice lights the maze. Or does it make the maze come into being?

I stop, breathless, and the heavy wooden walls come back and I can see Lucien looking at me through the cookstove flames. He draws a circle in the air with his finger, still singing. He slows and his voice drops piano and he sings the first verse through to the end. I stand there.

Across from me, through the fire, I see Brennan and Abel. They hold their instruments quite still, listening.

I blow air through my recorder, hold it in both hands and wait. Tired, as if I have run a long way. I do not like being tested. But the fire of their music is moving through my arms and chest and it warms me. Abel sits back down by the stove. He spits on a piece of cloth, then rubs at the rosin dust under the fretboard of his viol and looks sidelong at me, thoughtful. I watch his careful movements. Where did the tricky dry repartee of his playing spring from? His eyes go to Brennan and I see a look move between them. A look with a tacet agreement in it.

‘I see,’ says Lucien. ‘I see.’

Then he smiles a slow smile. And like an exchange for the mettle they took, he reaches into his pocket and tosses something to me that I catch. I open my hand. On my palm sits a small riverstone, dry and dull.

‘Not bad for a farmboy,’ he says. ‘Which is lucky for you. And lucky for us too, I suppose.’

Lucien makes a gesture and Brennan sits, and then he sits down himself and the fire makes gilded shapes over his face and the eyes that are strange and pale. He stretches his shoulders and folds his long legs and then by some half-shrug he shows that there is space by the fire for me to join them, if I wish.