I am explaining something. I gesture up at the sky. I am talking about Chimes. ‘They come down from the sky,’ is what I am saying. ‘And they take something with them. The birds are leaving. When was the last time you saw a starling?’
I extend my hand with the bell held dangling from its ribbon.
‘This is what they do,’ I say. And I shake it. There is no sound. I turn the bell over on my hand for my companion, whoever it is, to see.
‘Chimes makes of us silent instruments,’ I say. I shake the bell. Tacet. It has no clapper.
Each time I come up out of memory I feel pressure pushing down on me. It builds up between my eyes and then rises like bubbles. Each time I come up, Mary swoops across. She stands over me as I hold my memory bag open, and she waits to take one of mine.
After the burberry, I pull out a dog collar. It’s the memory of our first dog, who used to run in circles when she saw me and pee in the corner out of excitement, and who died when I was still young.
Then my recorder. Which is actually several memories, though I don’t bother to protest. Each part — beak, body, flue — has its own associations. As I hand it over, I see the day I chose it. The ceremony held in our village crosshouse. All the children paired with their instruments. Klaviers for the clever; trompets for those with brass; a beaked recorder for a farmboy with no prospects. I see my mother teaching me the fingerstops in the kitchen along with solfege. Then playing duets with my father. And, finally, I see my audition for the pact in the storehouse on Dog Isle.
Mary takes the paralighter my father gave me that is the memory of our first trip to London together for trade. I remember the pleasure of its sound and the spark as I sat across from him in the cart and flicked its burred wheel again and again. My irritation when he told me off for wasting petrol.
And other memories large and small, important and incidental. None of these scare me, though. I can live without them, I think. I feel lighter, a bit weaker, but still myself.
At last I fetch out a piece of wood with a sketch on it. Two figures in pencil, the outlines drawn over and over until the impression they give is of blur and movement.
‘You can’t take this,’ I say. ‘It’s my parents. It’s the memory of my mother dying of chimesickness. That’s important and I need it.’
Lucien’s hand moves to my shoulder again. Things are leaving me. I am floating. A feeling of tugging in my arms and legs.
‘It’s just one memory,’ Mary says. ‘One family. One boy. One mother. One father.’ She waves my protest away. ‘How many memories like it do you think there are here? What makes yours more important?’
I am too tired to fight. She takes my parents’ picture and places it among the others.
After that, things seem to both slow and speed.
In the memories Mary gives me, the Order closes in on Ravensguild.
Village crosshouses chime local curfews. One by one the evening meetings of memory keepers and villagers are broken and dispersed. In memory I sit and watch with other memory keepers as the door to my home thuds and splinters and finally cracks. A browncloaked arm comes through, clasps the door handle, turns.
In memory I stand straight as a tall, browncloaked man with a broken nose stops me and orders me to strip with a sneer. ‘Where are the memories, witch? Where are you hiding them?’ he asks.
In memory I see a fellow keeper pushed out of his village and barricaded in a wooden hut in the fields outside it. I hear his cries and chants as I walk past each day. His words lose meaning as he loses memory. What could I smuggle into that place? I wonder. What would help him? But I do nothing. Chimes takes it all, until he’s free to go. Memorylost, starry-eyed, thin as a stick and covered in rags.
And I go back and forward along what I guess is time like a ribbon stretched. Once into a pale and clear-skied time of silence where I watch people walking streets emblazoned and lit in streams of code. Letters everywhere. People carrying small, flat boards backlit and breeding code, and code on vehicles that move without fire or horse. Code in the very sky itself that is revealed as flat and depthless as a blank page.
I see people at Allbreaking as I have always imagined it. Glass stirring in an instant so it breaks white and clean as ice. People striving to shield their bodies from the deep phase of chords that take root in cavities of chest and lung. The bridges rocked as if by giant hands.
I recognise the massive redbrick ruin near Pancras on the edge of its vast collapse. People young and old pour out of its cracked glass doors and into a broad stone courtyard. They cover their ears and go down into their last hunches. And the huge mettle statue that is hunched there still watches them, measuring, always measuring, as he seems to be, the silent ringing of an invisible string into pure and perfect fifths.
I see as if watching from a far-off window a field in London, Lincoln’s Inn or Coram’s, as brownrobed members of the Order move on it. It is night and they walk among the memorylost and they stoop to each and gag them. From the distance their movements are gentle. Bind them and blind them with cloth, tie their hands behind their backs, corral them and herd them like animals from the square — going where? — the blank figures walking.
Everywhere I see flame, as memories are burnt in their thousands. And everywhere, through the ones that remain, the Carillon tolls and it takes on a tone I had never before heard. I understand as if for the first time. Chimes are tolling out death. Human death and the death of stories.
I emerge finally from the tide. Tired like after a long run in the under. But weak too, as if from hunger or missing blood or air.
I catch Lucien up on the memories I have been given, and he places them carefully in the stickwrap bag from Mary. They look so jumbled and meaningless in there. A small mettle bell without a clapper. A handful of lead and some para squares lettered with code. A burnt book. A bundle of twigs bound in red string. A picture of a child painted on cloth. Flotsam and jetsam.
‘Last one,’ says Mary. ‘Are you ready, my dear? You look all in.’
I take a deep breath and pull my shoulders down. The story I will need to tell is all there in that bag, but I feel uncertain whether I can untangle it, what I can make out of it.
‘The last one is here.’ She points to her closed left hand, fingers shut in tight keeping. ‘But I need my last one in exchange.’
Without waiting, she picks up my memory bag.
From it, she brings forth a candle. It is my memory of the night in the narrowboat. Our bunks next to each other. His hand, that strange moment when the distance between us was crossed. The hardest journey of all of them. The feel of his hair against my hands. His face in the tawny light. The taste of his mouth.
‘No!’ I say, forte. ‘I need that one. I have to keep it.’ I am so tired that I feel my knees bending.
‘What is it?’ asks Lucien.
‘A love token?’ says Mary, her beaklike mouth pursed. ‘I understand, my dear, but we have an agreement.’
‘The candle,’ I tell Lucien, because there is little point being embarrassed now, if I will forget it anyway. ‘From the narrowboat.’
Lucien takes my hand. His is dry and cool. He squeezes my fingers hard and he brings his head close to mine. His breath against my ear.
‘I won’t let you forget.’
But I am filled with dread. What if he is not able to stop it? I look up at Mary.
There is no choice. Even if there were a choice, there is barely enough of me left to make it.
‘Take it,’ I say. ‘You’ve got it all now.’