Anna Smaill - The Chimes

He points to a young man in white robes who sits down the length of the table from him.

‘Magister Joachim is our youngest magister. Look at him closely. He is what you could have become.’

The young man inclines his head slightly, as if embarrassed to be singled out.

‘Magister Joachim, when you enter the inner chambers, this boy will accompany you. He has been away for so long that he has forgotten the transformative power of music. Before you reach the sacrum musicae, you will leave him in the fifth of the inner chambers, the dominant. You will seal the door. He will listen to your concert from within the instrument.’

‘ No .’ Sonja breaks out of her father’s hands, half falls forward. There is silence from the table. ‘No. Please,’ she says.

The old man looks up, fixes his blind gaze on her.

‘You did not ask leave to speak here.’

‘Your Honour, I am sorry. He is my brother. I know that he has betrayed the Order, but if you make him listen from the dominant chamber, it will deafen him. He has no training. He will die.’

I stare at her. She must have known all along that our quest was without hope.

‘I am sorry, discipula. We practise mercy as a rule here. There is no benefit to be gained from cruelty. It is ugly, and it aids no one. But your brother abandoned the Order. This is a betrayal from within and must be recognised as such. Grief is not a note to be sustained beyond death. Perhaps you might choose to see this not as a punishment but as a reclamation, an atonement. The instrument will open to him for a last time. Perhaps in its embrace he will learn what was lost.’

I see Sonja open her mouth and close it again.

I move forward.

‘It was not him. It was my idea,’ I shout. ‘He had no memory of this place. I made him come. Take me instead.’

The magister musicae does not address me. I am beneath his notice.

Lucien turns and he looks at me and holds my gaze. His face is calm and open. He holds his bound hands out from him, and in the narrow air that he can command, he conducts the solfege for my name and then the solfege for forgiveness. I hear it in my head in his voice. I hear it in my head as the single chord inside me that cannot be understood or broken into its different parts. I hear it as love.

The poliss take him. They leave the hall. The young magister goes too, and Sonja’s father pushes her to follow also. ‘To your quarters,’ he says.

I go to my knees then, and my last glimpse of Lucien is the straight pitch of his neck bending as one of the poliss cups his head to push him under the low door that leads towards the Carillon.

I stand in the hall. The stone is cold and empty of life; the ornament is toothed with cruelty; the golden light is cheap.

I feel a hand at my back pushing me forward. I stumble, clumsy. Lucien has gone from me. My body feels made of wood.

‘What to do with the pactrunner?’ says a voice.

I force myself to speak.

‘Take me as well. Let me die with him.’

‘You would profane the instrument. That punishment is only for one who was born here.’

The magister musicae is speaking, but I cannot see him. In front of my eyes are bright moving lights. They are inside my eyelids, moving with them.

I see shapes on the fringes of the brightness, but nothing is clear, a dull throbbing in my brain.

‘As I said, we practise mercy in the Order, as a rule.’ His voice is fastidious, cold. ‘Take him back to London and leave him. He will soon forget what has happened here.’

Hands on my shoulders again. The voice comes again.

‘But no,’ it says. ‘Leave him for now. It may near to deafen him, but what other time would a layperson be privileged to hear the instrument at such close quarters? Such an opportunity will only come once in a lifetime. Who are we to prevent it?’

The hands are removed and I am allowed to slump down.

Pain climbs into a corner of my skull and sets up a rhythm of throbbing. I close my eyes, but the lights cluster and play, following their tracking behind their lids.

I pull my hands taut against the rope as hard as I can, not because I think I can free myself, but because I need to feel something, anything, or I will go mad. Lucien , says the deep throb in my skull. Lucien .

In the hall around me is silence. A new silence, that of their cruel, hallowed ritual. I pull my hands taut. I bring my head to the cold tile.

Silence opens. The smell of pepper fills the air. A dry cough in the upper reaches of the vaulted ceiling. A dead chord breaks the air.

It is Chimes.

Head in the water is peace. I go down, down, down into a place of cool darkness. But in the darkness there is a different voice. It is singing. I think for a while it is my mother’s voice, and then it becomes Lucien’s voice, and then I understand that it is neither of these.

The voice is the voice of Chimes, the melody simple. It is not song at all, but the clearest and sweetest of the bells sounding wordlessly. The words are those that come into my head with the tune as somehow, at last, I hear it.

‘In the quiet days of power,

seven ravens in the tower.

When you clip the raven’s wing,

then the bird begins to sing.

When you break the raven’s beak,

then the bird begins to speak.

When the Chimes fill up the sky,

then the ravens start to fly.

Gwillum, Huginn, Cedric, Thor,

Odin, Hardy, nevermore.

Never ravens in the tree

till Muninn can fly home to me.’

The tune comes once, twice. It is raw and simple. It has the open fourths and fifths of a folk tune. There is no harmony or embellishment, just the tune sounding simple and sweet.

Sounding down from the instrument and to me. What my ears tell me is impossible. My mind freezes with it. It cannot be true. Lucien is within the terrible embrace of the instrument, and he is playing.

Around me, in the hall, people are running. I do not follow their movement. I keep my head down.

The guildsong comes to an end. Its end is a crashing chord and the chord is pain. It is jagged and crooked. It is broken and splintered and uneven, and it’s sustained for so long at such a pitch that I think my ears are going to burst.

The chord is death and sorrow and torture. Like millions of people all screaming at once. Just when I think I can’t stand any more, the harshness fades and crumbles. It doesn’t resolve. That is the wrong word. It doesn’t move into harmony, but it breaks, and as it breaks, it shows the possibility of change. It walks forward. It carries the pain into the next chord, but it softens there and there is sweetness again.

Those two chords are like gatekeepers. And then the story starts.

It starts with water. A river flowing. It flows from the source down to the sea. Its source is a field, trees all around, flat, undulating green grass. And under a tree a spring. The spring is the origin of the river, and the river is memory.

It was the only way I knew how to tell it. The water is born up where the river starts, and it is fresh and new. It springs up, and there is birdsong. Lucien has put this in with the highest stops of the instrument. I have no idea how close they might be to life, but I somehow recognise them straight away. The sound bubbles up through the air. It’s free, clear and free, flying around up there.

It is so strange listening to Chimes use music that isn’t ordered and dense, perfectly neat and rich in counterpoint and all the voices sounding at once that I forget for a while, listening to the simple running melody and its new, true meaning.