Then they come into view. Walking down the street. Three boys and three girls. They walk side by side: boy — girl, boy — girl, boy — girl. They are all tall and wear plain white gowns. Over these a white tabard broidered with gold threads. Their heads incline slightly each to each. Across their backs they carry small transverse flutes in palladium.
They move at a steady pace. I breathe in deep of the stale beery air and hold my breath. The group passes. I hear them turn east and head back toward the Lady’s pull. We wait, hardly breathing, inside the doorway. After a while I see the door of one of the redbrick houses open and a woman comes out, woven shopping baskets held in each hand. Lucien relaxes his hold on my arm and we move away from each other.
‘Who was that?’ I ask.
‘Novices. Probably just about to be ordained. An excursion outside the walls.’
I stand still, dazzled by those golden balls juggled so briefly.
‘Come on,’ Lucien says after a moment. ‘I’ll show you where we wait.’
Lucien checks inside the entrance for memorylost; then he leads into the dark. The space is quiet and clean. It rings with the odd echo of stone floor and high arches. I hear mice scuttle. The beams are half broken, but the roof is sound.
It’s a small, simple crosshouse with aisles at north and south divided by stone arches. The blank walls above the arches are painted rough, like something has been covered up. A few figures in gold robes emerge in a shadowy line and make their still journey toward something long gone. Lucien leans against one of the brick-bottomed columns. There are piles of broken chairs. That will serve well for kindling later, I think. And I slump down. The light is fading. I am tired, but I sit on the floor and I take out the memories one by one.
All of the last slow days and nights in the narrowboat I have worked with them. I began by placing them out in front of me and looking without touch, trying to feel the weight of them in my mind that way. I thought about where they were from, how they might talk to each other. I tried to empty my mind of the other things that it was full of. The pale of Lucien’s bare back in candlelight. His clean, hard forearm cushioning his cheek in sleep. Faces that come up out of the murk of my mind. My father’s. Abel afraid, the scar showing white along his jaw. Groups of people moving like sheep across a green.
Tried to clear past all of that. Empty enough to go down. And I have gone down into the memories again and again. I think about what Lucien said, that it is a gift, that hunger to find how one thing links to the next thing. To wish to find an answer to the questions ‘How did this happen?’ and ‘Why?’
But this is not enough. I want something more than that. I want to show an all of us. And I want the story to hold and keep our separate strangeness and the broken pieces of all the human things that do not fit.
So far the story tells about the world before Allbreaking. It tries to conjure the density and slipperiness of written words. It talks of a world in which ideas are in formation and can be released and yet return at will each night. It shows the Order burning books and destroying words long before Allbreaking. It shows how Allbreaking started, and the bonfires of burning pages. It tells the bodies and faces of the people killed in the blasting chords, brought down in the buildings, drowned as the bridges collapse. It tells that the weapon was a Carillon built by the Order.
It shows the broken memories and the burnt memories and the memories scattered, and it shows those without memory, wandering lost and helpless, worse than blind. It shows members of the Order binding their arms and eyes with great gentleness before taking them to be killed.
It tells the legend of the ravens and the growth of the guild and its clever network, and of dead birds stuffed in buried mouths. It tells about the last keeper, Mary, in her memory palace of hoarded precious junk and nonsense.
It has all of the memories in it, the ones I exchanged for my own. It has babies born and people dying and missed. It has mess and dischord and pain, and it has falling in love. It has my father slumped beside my mother’s bed, holding tight to what he is already forgetting. It has Clare stockstill with terror in the crosshouse by the embankment, carrying nothing of her past except cuts and bruises and the blade of a broken plate.
This is the story I am working on. But it isn’t yet complete as I don’t yet have the right way to begin. I sit on the crosshouse floor and look at the objects. I see the different ways they could be put together and the way the story changes each time. The objects fall into their groupings and they talk to each other in different fashions depending on where they’re put and at first it makes me panic. I put the memories together again and again in their different patterns and try to understand which is the correct way. Then at last I see that there isn’t one. I see that if I am lucky and I do it right, the story will not ever come together in one final meaning. Because there is not yet any end.
When I surface, Lucien is watching me. I walk over lento and take a seat, and he pulls me rough toward him. I tip back my head so it meets the hard bone of his shoulder. I feel torn between the clear, strong pull of his body and the weight of the memories that sit in their temporary arrangement on the crosshouse floor.
‘You are working hard,’ he says.
I nod. It’s true. It is pulling something out of me. Going down, and surfacing. ‘What happens tomorrow?’ I ask.
‘Tomorrow we will try to get word to my mother.’
I have been pondering the question for a while, but it still feels awkward. I think what to say.
‘It would be useful if we knew more about why she got the ring out. You know, I could touch it — the ring I mean. Look at the memory.’
Lucien sits up straight. ‘Yes. I should have thought of it.’
‘I don’t know if it will work. If a person doesn’t need to make memory, it might not hold in the same way.’
‘But you can try,’ he says.
‘Yes.’
I must look as sick as I feel, because Lucien elbows me. Then he takes my hand, places the leather pouch in my palm, folds my fingers over it. ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen yours. I’ve heard yours.’
I take the pouch and open it. I feel the silver of the Lady slide down my fingers and through my joints. And with it I feel my arms go heavy, and slow and sure the deep rushing of water in my ears. Adagio, cantabile. I go down…
I am walking through a room. Maybe the most beautiful room I have ever been in. Pale plastered walls, high eaved ceilings. Light enters and shines into my eyes as I walk, so for some seconds I cannot see.
Someone is there behind me. I can hear their quiet threat. The threat is not just in their presence but in their hearing. What are they listening for? Hesitation? Fear? My feet tread a skilful bluff. Clear and measured and irreproachable.
There is a bed and it is covered in a white coverlet.
I look at the bed; then I allow myself to look at the person who is lying there.
‘Mother,’ I say. For it is her. Hold my eyes steady. Do not blink. There are small broidered figures along the edges of the bedspread. Some are playing instruments, and some are dancing. A small cellist with golden curls. They are caught in motion, as if time has stopped for an instant but will soon resume.