Anna Smaill - The Chimes

Then, ‘No, the fingering’s wrong. If you do it like that, you won’t be able to keep it sustained. Here, swap the thumb under.’

Then, ‘Here.’ And another demonstration. After a while they are playing music. I hear the complicated runs as they swap places back and forth.

‘Use the pedal to play the cantus firmus here. It’s louder than the manuals. No. You need to use the other stop for it. That’s right.’

I sit in the chair and I doze off and on. They work together through all the minor hours of the night.

I come awake at some point and Sonja is curled up like a cat on the rush matting with her cloak over her and Lucien is thundering silently away. His elbows are out like wings and I can tell he’s playing the Bach prelude. He moves from the top keyboards to the bottom in fluid movements. Again and again. Then he breaks and plays repeated phrases, selecting different stops. His feet tread light on the pedals.

I sit and wonder for a while. In the two or so hours since I was awake, he has gone from awkwardness to near-mastery.

Before Matins tolls Sonja leaves, as she must, to return to the Orkestrum. Anything else would arouse suspicion, and they will be listening closely to her movements, she says. Keep to the room, stay away from the windows. If anyone comes to the door, do not answer.

Lucien is practising what we have written so far. Putting the music into the Carillon’s voices, changing the story into imaginable and unimaginable sound.

I hear him singing repeated phrases, the tamping sound of the keys moving, presto and then lento. Every now and again he comes out to me to check a story, a phrase, a detail. I play it on Sonja’s recorder. Then he disappears and it transmutes into that soft, deadened sound, the keys hitting muted strings.

I count the tolls, and time creeps on. I lean against the tiled walls of the practice room and I wait.

At None Sonja knocks a trick rhythm to signal us and then opens the door. She is carrying a plate of bread and a bowl of thin vegetable soup with herbs. She places it on the floor where I’m sitting. Her face is white and strained.

‘I’m sorry it’s not much,’ she says. ‘I said I had a headache and needed to return to chambers. I couldn’t take more without making them suspicious.’

‘What is happening in there?’ I ask, gesturing toward the Orkestrum.

Her words are clipped. ‘It is hard to know. Things continue as normal. There is no word of Martha. But they have started searching the students’ quarters. We do not have much time.’ Then she breaks off. ‘Where is Lucien?’ she asks.

I point to the practice room. ‘He has not left there all day.’

Sonja goes into the inner room briefly, then comes out. She is tacet for a while after, and when she speaks it is as if we are continuing an argument.

‘You know that it is very dangerous for anybody without the correct training to enter the sacrum musicae,’ she says. ‘Let alone to be in the tonic chamber, to play the instrument.’

I suppose that I did know that. If Chimes can damage human ears and minds as far away as London, it follows that to be within the Carillon would be much worse. I have tried not to think about it.

‘But Lucien is not untrained,’ I say. ‘He was selected as a novice. He started the training process. And what about his gift? He was marked to play the instrument from birth.’

Sonja looks at me. She speaks piano.

‘You really have no idea, do you? Of what is required. Of the kind of sacrifice involved. To play the instrument, the priests give up everything. Not just family or time or a so-called ordinary life. They give everything to the Order and to the Carillon. Their hearts, their bodies. Their minds.

‘When Lucien left the Citadel, that’s when his real training would have begun. He would have started with four hours of meditation a day. Broken up into blocks at first. Then the rest devoted solely to practice and study. The novices must master all instruments. A mastery that outshines that of the finest soloists you can hear in the cities. They study until they know rudiments and counterpoint inside and out. They fast and they meditate and they work. And after five years they’re allowed to enter the sacrum musicae. Not to play, not to even touch the instrument. They are allowed to enter the first of the seven chambers.’

She stands straighter. ‘At any time in the Order, there are only three or four priests who are able to enter the tonic chamber. Always at least three, never more than four. And that includes the magister musicae, the one who composes the Chimes you hear every day in the city. Being in there while the Carillon is sounding would break a citizen’s eardrums.

‘You have no comprehension of this world. None at all. The sacrifice they make is immense. It is beautiful.’

She is so unhappy. She stands in her fine robes and my mind flashes up a picture of the first time I saw Lucien, covered in thamesmud, his roughcloth clothing, his shoulders broadboned and lean and his hair full of light.

‘The sacrifice might be beautiful,’ I say, and I try to keep my voice somewhat gentle. ‘But that’s because it is chosen. Because it is made freely. We don’t have that choice. Our memories are taken from us by Chimes without choice or will.’

The look she gives me is one of pure hate. Her neck lengthens and she tilts her head back in a familiar imperious manner.

‘Do you think I don’t know that? Why do you think I’m helping you, though it could cost my life? Certainly it’ll cost me everything I’ve ever worked for.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

‘I don’t think you understand enough to be sorry,’ she says. ‘To you this is all evil, all built on loss and suffering.’ She fixes me with dark, fierce eyes.

‘But the Order is not evil.’ She pauses. ‘Not at heart. The ideals it holds are good. Beauty. Truth. Knowledge. And they are generous. At heart they are generous. Why do you think Chimes is told for all, if not to share this knowledge? The magisters want what is best for the people. It is not their fault that people are not always able to choose the best thing for themselves.’

Like something made of clockwork, her familiar speech slows and she runs out of words. As if trying something for the first time, swallowing a new substance, she takes a deep breath. I see with a shock that there are tears in her eyes.

When she speaks, her voice has changed.

‘I wish she had got me out too. He was always the chosen one. Me, she was happy to leave to rot.’

I shake my head.

‘I’ve seen your memory,’ I say. ‘Your mother’s death. She gave you the ring because she knew that you would do the right thing. Your task was harder. And you had no one to help you. You had to see past what was there in front of you all along.’

Sonja is crying. It comes hard to her. She jerks away so I can’t see her face. After a while she wipes her eyes with impatience and a kind of scorn and turns to me, her face white and set.

‘What is he to you?’ she asks. But before I can answer she continues. ‘I have seen how you look at him, so perhaps you can understand. I missed him. I missed him very much.’

She turns, then, back to the window at the end of the room. She stands still and then she crosses the room toward the window like someone pulled.

I stand up. Something in her stillness is new and wrong. A look in her face like she’s been hit across it. Her mouth moving and her eyes wide and too bright. I begin to walk towards her, but she is moving already, away from the window and pushing past me. She reaches the basin at the side of the wall and she vomits into it.