Anna Smaill - The Chimes

I stand taller, look for the right words. A stammer, I think. Proud and poor. Nervous as hell.

‘You… you go into the Citadel often, I think, sir?’

‘What business is it of yours?’ he says.

‘I need to speak to someone… to get a message to them.’

‘And I need three hundred tokens and a new coat. What of it?’

‘Her name is Sonja,’ I say. I think of what Lucien has told me. ‘She’s tall. She talks as if she is somewhere far off and much better, but her eyes look like she’s trying not to laugh. Her hair is blonde. Paler than his.’ I gesture to the prentiss through the open door. ‘She’s high born, a member of the Orkestrum. I need to get a message to her.’ I think of Lucien. The strain in my voice is real at least.

A small smile comes to the viol maker’s mouth.

I push my hands through my hair. ‘You will know her if you see her,’ I say. ‘She is beautiful. Tall. Her father is high up in the Order. She plays the cello.’

‘And does this beautiful, tall cellist know you exist?’ the viol maker asks. He walks to the case of bows and picks one up, tests the balance. ‘Why would she accept a message from a boy so clearly beneath her in status?’

My face returns to the truth of my own doubt.

‘She spoke to me once,’ I say, drawing myself up again. My voice is tight, trying for dignity. ‘In the market place. I bumped into her and she dropped her bag and the scores went everywhere. She was very angry at first, but I helped her gather the music. We talked.’

Strangely enough, as I say it, I see it. The tall girl bending in anger and the white pages of music flying from her grasp. The awkward bulk of the cello case resting sidelong on the cobbles. ‘Look, it probably meant nothing to her, but I need to speak to her one more time. Please.’

If I’m not mistaken, there is a softening in his face.

‘And if I were to see this Sonja, what then?’

‘Would you tell her that Lucien is waiting for her?’ I sing the message, the name, the location of the crosshouse.

‘Lucien,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘An odd name for a rough lad. I’d forget about love and get yourself prentissed if I were you. You’re too old to be out of work.’ He nods at my chest, bare of guildsign. ‘Knock at the bakery, three doors down. They had a call out for prentisses yesternoch.’

‘Will you tell her?’

‘Not that you have a hope in hell, but if I see her, I’ll sing your ditty. I was young once, however little I remember of it. Now, get yourself down to the bakery and say I sent you.’

I nod my thanks.

‘And keep your memories close,’ he says.

It is late evening, after Vespers. Lucien tells me of vast libraries with corridor upon corridor of leather-bound scores. He speaks of chamber concerts given by the magisters in gilded and lamplit rooms. He talks about the Orkestrum, where the students move from room to room with the tolls of the Carillon, and from lecture to rehearsal to lesson. Days spent deep in music, living and breathing it until it shapes your dreams.

‘Meditation is a form of hearing,’ Lucien is saying. ‘A heightened form. You clear your head of all thoughts. When the music comes, you try to see it shining between your eyes. Like threads stretched taut and the notes as coloured beads threaded on. When you get very good, it’s as if you can see inside the music, through it. You bring the music alive, bring it into being. As if you’re the one composing.’

I watch him speak. His eyes are fixed on the candle. The shadows are on the planes of his face.

‘I can see you, you know, Simon,’ says Lucien.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I wasn’t sure if you knew this. I mean not with my eyes but with my ears. I can hear your face. What you look like. I can hear your breath too.’

Subito he turns to the door. There is nothing there.

After several beats I hear it also. Low footsteps around the side of the crosshouse. Lucien stands, motions me into the north wing, which is shadowed by the stone arches.

In the dark, the door creaks open and there is the faint whisper of robes on stone.

A girl stands just inside the door holding a lantern.

My description to the viol maker was accurate. She is tall, almost as tall as Lucien. Her hair is blonde and her nose a sharp line. She holds her head with her jaw tilted up. She is dressed all in white, her robes as austere as those of the novices we saw. Her hair is cropped but not short enough to remove the curls that stand around her head. Her expression is empty, no expression at all. Not calm, not cold, not angry, not afraid. It reminds me of nothing so much as the dead room we found at the heart of the weapon.

‘Who is he?’ she says, looking direct at Lucien. And I realise she means me. She has not looked my way.

Her voice is blank too, but under is an old emotion, something soured, painful.

A quick exhalation of breath from Lucien.

‘Come out, Simon,’ he says to me.

‘You’ve been away too long, brother. I suppose in the city you’re the only one with any hearing. Deafness isn’t tolerated long here.’

I walk back down the arched corridor until I stand behind Lucien, in the shadows. Sonja sets the lantern on a nearby pew without taking her eyes off her brother. She looks around the room like a soloist who had hoped for a bigger audience. Her movements are precise, as if her physical body is just a hindrance she has mastered.

‘It poses an interesting question, doesn’t it?’ she says.

I can read Lucien’s impatience clear from where I stand. But there is no sharp answer. I am surprised to see him incline his head in a half-bow. And then I see that he is scared of her. Not of her anger, but of what has caused it. He is afraid of the hurt he’s given her by leaving. The damage there not far from the surface still, not quite hidden. It lends her a strange power.

‘What question?’ says Lucien.

‘Why am I even here speaking to you, when you’re dead? You are dead, aren’t you? Dead, all these many years of — what was it? Riverfever? It was too risky for me to see your body. They are so afraid of contagion in the Citadel.’ She laughs. ‘Poor Lucien.’

Lucien regards her steadily. ‘But you are here. You got the ring out to me.’

‘Yes,’ she says, as if reminded of a past whim. ‘My mother’s ring.’

‘ Our mother’s ring,’ he says.

‘I saw her before she died at least. Though it was you she was thinking of.’

Her laugh isn’t for humour, I realise then, but for giving herself pain.

‘Tell me what happened,’ says Lucien.

Sonja shrugs. ‘She died,’ she says. The words staccato in the cold crosshouse.

‘I know that much,’ says Lucien. ‘Tell me what happened.’

‘It was about a year after your mysterious death. They all assumed that she was mourning you, that that killed her. The magisters attributed such crass sentimentality to her low upbringing no doubt. They were wrong, though, as it turned out. Whatever she died of, it wasn’t sentiment.’ She pauses. ‘What else is there to tell? She gave me the ring when she was dying. It was her way of telling me you were still alive and that she’d lied all that time. She meant it for you.’

‘How do you know?’

Sonja sighs. ‘Because she sang it,’ she says. When Lucien says nothing, she continues. Like someone used to waiting for the other to catch up. ‘Do you remember the game we used to play?’

‘The singing game? In the Purcell Room?’

‘Yes. Do you remember the tune?’

‘Of course,’ says Lucien. ‘It wasn’t really fair, that game, you know. I could hear you without the melody. But you refused to change the rules. I sang Ray Me to signal you. Then you had to answer Ray Me Doh .’