The song is mournful. It does not make sense. When she finishes, she asks, ‘Do you understand?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘Listen,’ and she sings it again. ‘The meaning is simple,’ she says. ‘It stays simple so we remember. When Chimes came, the birds died. When the birds died, words died. When words died, memory died.
‘Gwillum, Huginn, Cedric, Thor. Those are the names the song lists.’ She turns the page of the book carefully. ‘Gwillum, Huginn, Cedric, Thor, Odin, Hardy, Muninn… There were seven of them, and they lived in a tower in the city of London. But two of the ravens were more important than the others. Huginn and Muninn. Huginn — that’s the word for an idea, a word picture in your head, something that flies in from outside. Muninn is different. The most important of all. Muninn is another way of saying memory.
‘Before Chimes, the ravens flew all over the world together. Free to fly and haunt and free to look and to understand what they saw. But however far they travelled, they would always return home. Muninn often the last of all, they say, because memory had the furthest distances to travel. Then one day they didn’t come back: Muninn was lost. And with Muninn, human memory, and written words. Ravensguild want to bring Muninn back.’ My mother closes the book. Then she thinks for a second and hands the book to me.
‘For memory,’ she says.
I take it, hold it hard. I empty my mind, and using all my will, I tell the memory to stay in it. I bind it hard with our movements, my confusion, the smell of the forcinghouse, my mother’s words.
‘You see others’ memories,’ I say. ‘You keep them and you help the person to remember.’
‘Yes. But some memories are more important than others,’ she says. ‘Because some memories belong to more than just one person. Like the story of Huginn and Muninn. Some memories tell us about who we are. They need to be kept safe so that things can change for all of us.’
All of us. I see the village square, the market place, the old crosshouse, the new assembly hall. I can see nothing bigger than that.
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
My mother studies me, as if measuring how much I will understand. ‘The world stretches far beyond this farm, Simon, and beyond the Citadel also. We have forgotten to think of ourselves in this way.’
‘What happens to those memories?’
‘I pass them on to someone with more skill than me, with more vision than me. Someone who will keep them for longer. I give them to a woman in London, and she passes them on to someone else, and in this way the network grows strong and the memories stay alive.’
‘What is Ravensguild?’ The name has a strange taste in my mouth, like copper. Like mettle and blood mixed. ‘Who is Ravensguild?’
‘We are,’ says my mother. With difficulty she rewraps the book in the cloth, places it back in the tin and uses the handle of the knife to hammer the lid back on. Then she puts the tin back under the workbench. Amid the other trugs and pots, it becomes invisible, hidden.
She turns to me and her look is either a challenge or an invitation, I can’t be sure.
‘You are,’ she says.
The Dead Room
Trade at Barrow
I wake some time before Matins. I wake with the taste of copper in my mouth, like I’ve been sucking on old mettle. And with the echo of Lucien’s arm over my shoulder as I helped him to cross the race. There are other things I newly wake with. A sadness that is different altogether from the cloudy sediment dread bears up. It is dark and solo. I can’t see the bottom of it. And another thing I don’t recognise, a kind of hunger to grab another person and press them as deep into knowing as I’ve gone.
Up until now I’ve been stuck in a dark room that I thought was the whole world. Now there are doors in the room, and the doors lead into new rooms. How far back does it go? What is in the centre?
Then I let myself think of Lucien. I see myself waiting on the race. Lucien hunched in sickness. The both of us standing in another storehouse — the secret twin to ours. I feel his weight on me. And that thought sends light into my arms and fingers. I lie still, letting things settle as they will.
Out in the storehouse, I can hear the others moving. The coiny clink of the kettle, the scrape of the cookstove ashes. Abel whistling a tune known only to himself, holding some half-buried song of his own past.
I push aside the roughcloth curtains and let them fall behind me. All is as it ever was. Clare cuts bread at the counter, measures tea and spice. Brennan skewers bread on the toasting forks. Everything the same.
But the way I see it is different. I see the fine layer of dust across the surfaces, and I see the patterns on the wood. For the first time I see the storehouse in one glance and it is narrow. Even the thick, rough, oil-stained walls feel thin somehow, hardly a shield from the outside world. I shiver. The pact has changed too. We are not one whole, held together by breath and song, but five people, all afraid, all alone.
Abel is young, too young even for a prentisship. Brennan moves with a kind of pushed-down anger that is hardening and going sharp. Clare is too thin. I see all this as if for the first time. And I see the scars on Clare’s forearm. Faint white raised lines walk along under the fair hair. She pours spiced tea and her sleeve rides up and I see fresh cuts, red and pained-looking, scored like a stave, like the notches on the door panel, too neat for accident. Cuts that fade from red to pink to white. Cuts to keep memory, to measure time. Pity moves in me. I look away.
Lucien comes from the balcony, stops at the door and counts notches. Is he different also? Has he changed? Yes, I think. I wait for something to tell me what the distance is between us now, but all I learn is a jangling note. Fear, but fear with a sharp edge. Not dull or murky but bright and pressing. Is that what I’ve gained? Lucien sits. His body the same and different. His wrists and forearms clear and real. The jangling fear is mixed with something else. The happiness begins again inside me and signals in a white flash across some border to the happiness of last night. The two join together and make a new territory, a completely different key, white searching notes. A door opening. Hereafter.
I look for a signal from Lucien, but there is none.
‘By my count today is a day for trade,’ he says. ‘So trade it is. We will go together to the market at Barrow.’ He hums the tune that reminds us of the path from the storehouse, the vast crosshouse of South Walk a flourish of stern minor notes.
‘Good,’ says Clare. ‘We cooked the last rabbit yesternoch.’ And Lucien nods, grave and absentminded.
I stand still at the edge of my quarters. He can’t be serious. The Order are looking for him. There is a prize of two hundred tokens set for him. And he talks of going into the city to trade?
‘Simon,’ Lucien calls over his shoulder to where I am standing. A different voice, his old voice. Imperious and distant. ‘Join us, if you please. Onestory commences.’
And as if the measure is inside him, the Carillon sounds for ensemble. The pact gathers round in a sung chord. We are a guild. A world. Small, fragmented, afraid, perhaps — but we come together in the downsounding as one.
Down the race, past the cranes and onto the river. Abel not yet well enough to join us and our footfalls sound hobbled and absent without his tread. By Limehouse Caisson, Clare crouches in the muck where it’s brown and cold and agleam, dips her hands to the river like she wishes she could go right in. Brennan and I walk on. Lucien, up ahead, bites at the air to taste it and see where the wind’s coming from.