Anna Smaill - The Chimes

I do not want to cross the room to see what is waiting beyond that window, but I do it. I do it lento. I reach the para and look out, out across the grass and toward the tower of the Carillon. In the public square that stands between us and the tower, a wooden post has been erected. Two men in brown robes are working diligently, fastening something to the post. They are efficient. No movement wasted. At last they stand back to view their work, to ensure that it is done well, that it sounds a message clear for all to hear.

Lashed to the post is Martha. Rope crosses her body in a cruel pattern. Her head slumps down as if she were asleep, though she is not asleep and won’t ever sleep again. The rope crossed under her breast forms a stave and arrayed across it is a message in rough wooden beads. I do not need to read it to understand. Here is a traitor to the Order. There are dark streaks all over the once-clean robes from the blood that has run from her ears.

When Lucien turns at last from the window, he looks at his hands.

Then he looks up at his sister. Their faces mirror each other. Pale and broken. What is not spoken is clear in the room. Sonja says it at last.

‘Tomorrow before Matins,’ she says, ‘I will come. The door to the instrument has two guards only at that time. I know the key tune. We will have the benefit of surprise. Whatever they are afraid of, whatever they think you are here for, they will not believe it is this.’

I look at her. ‘Why?’ I ask.

‘Because it is beyond their imagining. I did not believe it myself. I am not sure I do even now.’

If she does not return, says Sonja, we should not risk an attempt to enter the Carillon. Lucien will need her to enter. If she doesn’t return, she says, we should try our best to escape with our lives. She sings us the most direct route through the tunnels to the least-guarded section of the wall.

Lucien returns to the practice console and every moment that passes I expect the knock at the door to come. I think of Martha and what killed her. I think of what Sonja warned, about the danger of entering the instrument. If a citizen’s eardrums could be destroyed by entering the tonic chamber, what will happen to somebody who attempts to play the Carillon untrained? The clammy feeling in my heart grows. What is he to you? asks Sonja. I love him , I say silently to myself.

And because my mind moves slow, it is only then I realise that since our entry to the Citadel, since we came into the arms of the Carillon’s silver shadow, we have not spoken of destruction. We have planned how we will play the story on the instrument. We have made the choice to broadcast what we know. But we have made no plan for how to destroy it.

I hear the echo of Mary’s rune in my head. Simple Simon went to look / If he could pluck the thistle. I think of the Carillon destroyed in fire and know that it was a false imagining, never possible. He pricked his fingers very much , I think. The plan we have had all along is only this. We have never expected to leave.

After Vespers Sonja returns. We wait in the cell together, listening to the silent symphony that Lucien musters in the inner room. We wait and I feel the tension build, lento but sure. We do not speak. Sonja’s face is tight with its old control and I think again of the picture I saw in my mind in the crosshouse. A high silver platform held up by an impossible invisible force.

The door in the wall opens. Lucien walks out.

‘I’m ready,’ he says.

We follow Lucien in, taking the chairs with us. Where before it was Sonja’s room, now it is somehow, undeniably, his. He commands the space as we enter. I can see that Sonja has noticed this. She is quiet and doesn’t meet my eyes.

My heart is beating presto and my scalp prickles. But Lucien is calm. He gestures to us to sit down; then he sits himself. He checks the stops on the console, turns the bellows on, arranges his feet at the pedals. He raises and drops his shoulders once, twice. Then he places his hands on the top keyboard and begins to play.

What is it, the difference between ordinary people and those with genius? Not just ordinary people either. Intelligent people, sensitive ones, exceptionally talented ones. Even people like Sonja who give everything and then more, who work harder than seems possible on the thing they love.

I have slept next to Lucien. He eats the same stuff as me, breathes the same air. He sweats, shits, bleeds, all the things that ordinary people do. But yet there’s something inside him that can make this music.

His hands pull music out of the air. They carve it up; they split the chords. They render what I wrote — what we wrote together — true and beautiful. Notes of dischord, notes that don’t fit neatly into their key or the expected line of a melody, but nonetheless true, and because of this beautiful. Listening to him play is the first time I understand what his hands are really for.

I sit and listen and I know that whatever comes at Matins, whatever the day holds, I am lucky that I can hear this thing that we have made. And I am lucky that when he finishes, he will step across the room and come back to me.

Then I turn to Sonja and I understand something else. I am lucky to feel the gladness of his gift. Because Sonja’s face is frozen and under the mask of control something hangs broken.

That difference, that indefinable difference between talent and genius. It is as fine as a hair, invisible to the eye and even, most of the time, to the ear. But in her face when she looks at her brother, I see that it may as well be a huge, uncrossable chasm.

Sonja sits straighter in her chair. She looks at Lucien. ‘Play it through again,’ she says.

In the Citadel, the violet hour of morning comes with peace and beauty.

Lucien and I sit side by side on the bed where we have lain through the night, not sleeping, not moving. Sonja paces the matting floor, muttering as if rendering an invisible account.

Then she stops.

‘We need to go,’ she says. Her face is tight, and her eyes hardly shift. Her hands pull at the folds of her robes. ‘The priests will be gathering for meditation in the hall.’

Lucien and I stand. He puts the white and gold tabard that Sonja has given him over his head and smooths it down. I look at him. He has become part of the Order.

‘What is your name?’ I ask him.

‘My name is Lucien,’ he says. He takes my arm and pulls me in close. ‘My name is Lucien. I live in the storehouse on Dog Isle, in the city of London. I am a member of Five Rover pact.’ He holds me chest to chest, arm to arm. Our foreheads meet. I breathe his breath and try not to let my fear pass to him. I grip his shoulders hard.

Sonja looks away. I take Lucien’s head, kiss him once, whisper luck in the raven’s tune. ‘Let Muninn fly home as he will,’ I say. ‘You must come back to me.’

Then they stand together at the door, tall, pale, dressed in their white. I see them framed for a second and I feel memory form then, all the other moments rushing in to collide, to bring the past into the instant of the present and make it ignite in the golden light. Brother, sister. Two faces, gentle and hard at once. Then they are gone.

The room is quiet. I feel nothing, just low fear that has become like breath to me. And emptiness. It’s like when you fall and hit the ground, or when someone lands a clean punch right in your stomach. The second after the air has been forced out, you feel nothing. It’s only on the first inhalation that the pain begins.