The City of Mute Bells

In the City of Mute Bells, even the dust fell quietly.

Isolde noticed it on the first street. It lay in a gray velvet drift on the cobbles, a finger deep, and her boots sank into it without a sound. She had wrapped them in strips of the Library's blanket before they left the steps; they all had. Odile had gone further. She had stuffed her apron into the hollow of her pot lid and tied the whole thing to her belt with a string so that it could not rattle, and now she walked with her elbows tucked to her sides and her shoulders hunched, like a girl in a church who has just remembered she has a cold.

Nobody spoke. They had agreed on that on the Library steps, by signs, and the agreement had been a short one. The air was dead. The sky was a dull bronze bowl. The houses leaned over the lane on either side, dark and shuttered, with their roofs knit together overhead so closely that only a thin crooked strip of metal sky showed between. And above them, from every cornice and bracket and gable end, the bells hung down.

They were everywhere. Some were small as teacups. Some were the size of barrels, green with age, their lips furred with verdigris. They hung over the doors like lamps. They hung from the chimneys like fruit. And every one of them was muffled, its clapper bound in a wad of gray felt tied with cord, so that nothing about it could swing.

Isolde walked under a thousand silent bells and felt each one watching her.

…

The rhyme was written in hands.

She found it in the third street, on the wall of a long low building with a flat roof and a row of tall arched windows. It had once been a school, or a hall of some kind, and over the door a wooden sign still hung, scorched black at one corner, painted with a single outlined palm. Inside, the walls were bare plaster. And across the plaster, in rows, in charcoal, someone had drawn a thousand hands.

They were done with great skill. Each hand was open, or closed, or curled, or pointing; each had its fingers set in a particular way, with the thumb crossed or lifted, and every one was a different shape. They ran in neat horizontal lines like a page of text, five to a row, with a small dash between each group. At the foot of the wall, painted in red ochre on the plaster, was a chart of the hands with their letters beside them.

Signs. A whole alphabet.

They spoke with their hands, thought Isolde, with a small cold shock. The whole city. The bell-ringers.

She took out her notebook. Brannoc, who had learned a few gestures in a Redhand prison once, looked over her shoulder and shook his head. He didn't know this one. She worked it out herself. She did it standing, with the charcoal skidding on the page, glancing back and forth between the red chart and the black rows, letter by letter, as she had once worked through the Fourth-Century grammar. It took half an hour. She had to stop twice, with her heart in her throat, as a gust of wind stirred the bells in the street and sent a whisper of dry dust through the door.

The hands said:

Silence keeps the sleeping town;

Ring the bells, and they come down.

Tread as softly as your breath;

Louder noise invites your death.

All the bell-men, long ago,

Rang for joy and rang for woe.

Yet the Ringer heard them all;

Now he comes at every call.

Stay as quiet as your heart;

Beat for beat, and stay apart.

She straightened. She did not have to look at the first letters. She wrote them anyway, in a column, with her hand not quite steady: S. T. A. Y. S.

Stays.

She turned the page. She wrote it out.

WHAT IS LOCKED AWAY CANNOT HEAL UNTIL SOMEONE STAYS.

She looked at it for a long time.

It was a statement. It had a subject, and a verb, and a condition, and it was quite perfectly plain. It said that something locked away could not be healed until someone stayed. Stayed where? Stayed with whom? She did not know. But the word lay in the dim like a bell with its clapper bound, and all the hairs on her arms stood up.

Stay.

A hand touched her shoulder.

She turned. Valerian stood behind her. He had read it. She saw it in his face, in the stillness of it, in the strange fixed look about the eyes, as of a man who has put his foot on a stair that was not there. He did not speak. He lifted his hand and made a sign. It was swift and graceful and certain, two fingers across the palm, a quick turn of the wrist.

Stay, said the hand.

She stared at him.

He had not looked at the chart. He had not paused to think. His fingers had moved by themselves, as a pianist's move over a tune he has played ten thousand times. And as she watched, he looked down at his own hand with a puzzled, sick expression, and then at the wall, and then, slowly, at her.

You know it, she signed back. She had learned it a moment ago. She did it clumsily, with one finger crooked. You know this language.

His mouth moved. He did not answer.

…

The names were on the wall of the next room.

It was a small chamber off the schoolroom, bare and cold, with a bench along one wall and a high barred window. A long board had been nailed to the plaster opposite the door, carved with row upon row of tiny names, each in the Old Tongue, each with a date. The Roll of Ringers, said the heading, cut in letters a hand deep. Those who kept the bells.

She went along it with her finger. She read the names as a scholar reads, without hurry, lips moving soundlessly. She did not know why. She knew it as one knows that a tooth will hurt. Alder Fenn. Margery Oake. Josiah Tarn, called Little Joe. A hundred years of them. Three hundred. They were dated in the Old Tongue's dead calendar, a count of years she had to turn into figures on her fingers, and the dates went back, and back, to a time before the Quiet Hour, before the Order, before anything she had thought to name.

At the end of the last row, a little apart from the rest, a name had been scraped away.

It was not very well done. Someone had gone at the wood with a knife, in a hurry, in a rage, gouging out the letters one by one. Only the first of them showed, deep and clean at the head of the line, and the last. A long diagonal scar of pale raw wood. And on either side of it, quite clear, in the same neat Old Tongue as the rest:

V.

And, at the other end, the last two letters of the surname.

—tt.

She stood quite still.

V. —tt. Valerian Draycott. The knife had cut through the middle. But the head and the tail were there. It was the only entry on the roll that had been defaced, and it was the only one that she wanted to read.

"Don't," said Valerian, from the door.

He had spoken aloud. He had not meant to. She heard the sound go out of his mouth, thin and cracked and quiet, and saw him flinch as it hit the stillness. He stood in the doorway with his hand against the frame.

Why? she mouthed.

"Because I do not know what it means." His voice was almost inaudible. "And I find that I cannot bear to."

It's your name.

"I know."

You were a Ringer.

"I do not— I do not know. I— It is only that I—" He stopped. He drew a breath that shook. "Isolde. Please. We should go. There is something—"

The bells moved.

…

It started with one.

It was a small one, over the door of the schoolhouse, no bigger than a hat. The felt on its clapper stirred. A thread of dust drifted down from its lip. And all along the street, in the thin metal light, a thousand muffled bells began, very slowly, to sway.

There was no wind.

She felt the vibration in the floor, in the soles of her boots, in the roots of her teeth. It came up from the ground like the tread of a very large animal. She heard something that was not a sound but the memory of one, the way a struck bell goes on ringing after you have ceased to hear it. And far away, at the heart of the city, in a tower she could not see, something huge opened its mouth and breathed in.

"Run," said Brannoc.

It was the worst thing he could have done. He knew it as it left him. His face went gray. The word was a low one, a bare gasp, but it was louder than a heartbeat. It was louder than all four of them put together. It rolled out of the schoolhouse door and down the lane like a stone down a well.

All the bells on the street stopped swinging.

Then they began again, all together, in the opposite direction.

…

He came out of the bell tower at the end of the street.

She saw him through a crack in a shutter. They had thrown themselves into the nearest house, a dark narrow cottage with a table and four chairs and a stove, and crouched in the corner of the kitchen under a window, in a heap, with their hands over their own mouths. Odile was trembling so hard that her teeth rattled. Brannoc had his eye shut. Valerian had one arm round Isolde, and one across the old man, and a face like cut stone.

The Ringer, Isolde thought.

He was twelve feet high.

He was made of bells. She understood it as soon as he came into the street. He had no flesh that she could see, no face, no hands. He was a great hunched mass of dark bronze, assembled from a hundred pieces, bell on bell, bolted and riveted and hung in great loops from a central frame like a chandelier. His head was a bell. His shoulders were bells. His arms were bells, hollow and tolling, each as big as a barrel, and from the end of the right one hung a great clapper of black iron the length of a man.

He walked.

Each step rang. It was the most dreadful sound she had ever heard. It was not loud. It was a tone, long and low and pure, that went into the marrow and shook it, a note of such vast, grave, patient sorrow that she wanted to put her hands over her ears and her head between her knees. And beneath it ran a hundred smaller sounds, silver and tinny and sweet, as the little bells swung. He came down the street at a stately pace, tilting his head, listening. The great iron clapper dragged along the cobbles behind him and left a furrow.

He's looking for the noise, thought Isolde.

He heard Brannoc.

She pressed her face to Valerian's coat. She did not breathe. She counted her pulse, because she had nothing else to count. It was going very fast. Too fast, she thought. Louder than a heartbeat. If it's louder than a heartbeat— She forced herself to slow. She breathed from the belly, in, out, in, out, and the great bell-man stopped in the middle of the road and turned his head.

He looked at the cottage.

…

She had never been so afraid.

It was an old fear. It was not the fear of a thing but of a certain kind of moment, the instant before a knock, the half-second before a fall. The Ringer stood. His bronze breath fogged on the cold. He had no eyes; he had only a great dark mouth under the rim of his head, the mouth of a bell, and the mouth was turned toward the window. It seemed to her that the whole of the street leaned toward it.

Under her cheek, she felt Valerian move.

It was a minute shift. He was gathering himself. She felt the cold begin to creep up from the floor, and the first thread of black unwind from his sleeve, and she knew with perfect certainty what he meant to do. He would go out. He would meet the thing in the road. He would try to pull it down with his bare shadows in a silence so complete that it would be a kind of death, and he would fail, because he could not do it without a sound, and because it was made of a hundred bells and every one of them would ring.

No, she thought. No, no, you can't.

She put her hand on his chest.

He looked at her. His eyes were wild and bright. He shook his head, very slightly, and she shook hers, and they remained there for a moment, locked, trembling, like two people on either side of a closed door.

Then there was a small, muffled, scuffling noise to her left.

She turned her head.

Odile was on her knees.

She had untied the string. She had drawn the pot lid out of her belt, and the apron slid from it onto the floor, and she knelt there in the dusty gray light with the dented tin disc in her two hands. Her round face was white and wet. Her freckles stood out on it like pepper. She was looking at Isolde, and her lips were moving. There was no sound. But Isolde had learned a little of the language of the hands, and Odile had been watching.

She was signing.

I'm sorry.

I'll be quick.

Tell Nan I was good.

"No," Isolde whispered. Not a sound came. Her lips shaped it. "Odile. No."

The girl smiled.

It was a small shaky smile, the same one she had given in the bell tower of the harvest village, over the rim of a pot lid, in the first hour of the first day. If you're a doll, I'll thank you to go away. If you're not a doll, I've got a pot lid and I'm not afraid to use it. She leaned forward. She kissed Isolde quickly on the forehead. Then she rose to her feet, and flung open the door, and ran out into the street with the pot lid held up like a shield, and brought the edge of it down, as hard as she could, on the cobbles.

The sound went through the city like a crack of thunder.

…

It was bright. It was brazen. It was a flat clangorous CLANG that rang from wall to wall and up the faces of the houses and out across the bronze sky, and every bell in Door Nine answered. They shrieked. They bellowed. They sang. The whole street rang like the inside of a struck drum, and the Ringer spun on his heel with a roar of tolling bronze.

"Here!" cried Odile.

It was the only word she spoke. It was loud and high and wild. She stood in the middle of the lane with her braids flying and the lid raised above her head, laughing, and she struck it again, and again, a clanging ringing rattle, and the great bell-man lowered his head and charged.

"Here! Here! Come on, you great lump, I'm here!"

She ran.

She ran away from the cottage, away from the schoolhouse, up the long crooked lane toward the far tower, banging as she went. The Ringer pounded after. The cobbles split under his tread. The clapper whirled. Isolde saw her turn the corner, a small figure in a gray apron, with her head thrown back and her pot lid clanging; she saw the great bronze shape reel round the same corner at her back; she heard, once, a high bright cry, and then a sound like a gate slamming in the wind.

Then there was only the tolling.

It went on for a long time. It was deep and slow and sweet. It was the sound of a bell that has struck something soft and gone on swinging. And above it, small and clear and utterly distinct, she heard a last clang, tinny and bright, the sound of a pot lid falling on stone.

She did not scream.

She would never know how. She knelt in the dust, with Valerian's arm locked round her chest and his hand across her mouth, and his face against her hair, and felt the whole of her body convulse. She bit his palm. She tasted blood. She did not make a sound. She wept without breath, without voice, in the dark of the cottage, with her eyes wide and her mouth open and her heart going like a hammer, and above her head a thousand bells hung still.

The tolling stopped.

She never knew how long they stayed there. She remembered only that when she lifted her head at last the street was gray and empty, and the Ringer was gone, and the dust lay smooth. At the corner of the lane, half-buried, something shone. It was a round dull piece of tin, bent at the rim, the size of a plate.

She crawled to it on her hands and knees.

It was warm. It was still faintly warm, as if a hand had only just let go.