Chapter 4: The Casting Book
The Hulda took eleven blows to break.
They did it in the Torggl yard, because that was where she was and nobody wanted to move her twice. Shoe and the Moser cousins rigged a frame of larch poles over her (dry larch; Floris had checked it himself) and hauled an iron weight up to the top of it on a pulley, a great black pear of a thing the Wardens kept for this and nothing else, and half of Brenndal came to watch, the way they'd have come to a hanging.
Theres pulled the pin for the first blow. She didn't say anything first. She looked up at the weight, and knocked the pin out with the heel of her hand, and the weight dropped, and the Hulda made a sound Floris would hear for a long time afterward: not a ring, the crack had taken her ring, but a deep split grunt like a tree going over. The crack opened a finger wider. That was all.
"Again," said Theres, and they hauled the weight up again.
He pulled the pin for the second. She'd looked at him and held it out, and he understood that he was being asked, and took it. It was heavier than it looked. He thought, absurdly, as he knocked it out: this is my mother's half. Whatever was left of it. Then the weight came down and the Hulda's waist gave with a noise like a door kicked in, and she lay on the cobbles in two pieces, and the crowd, which had been very quiet, began here and there to talk.
Shoe and the Mosers did the rest. Nine more blows and she was rubble: plates and lumps of old bronze, green on one side and gold on the broken faces, which the carters loaded into barrows for the Gostner furnace. The canons came off in one piece, with a slab of the crown still on them. Floris stood looking at it. The G and the wren side by side, raised in the bronze, a little blurred by thirty-eight winters of weather.
"Take it," said Theres beside him.
"It's yours."
"It's half yours." She said it flatly, looking at the barrows, not at him. "So I've been told."
The great strickle took two people to walk.
It was the old Hulda's board, the biggest thing in the Gostner rafters, twice the length of a man and as thick as a door, and it hung from a spindle like a ship's mast set into a socket at the bottom of the Gostner pit, which Shoe and the Planks had spent four days digging out two yards deeper. The core of the new Hulda stood on the floor of the pit like a brick beehive. You laid the loam on, and then you each took an end of the board and walked it round, and round, and the board cut away whatever was not bell.
"Slower," said Theres.
"I'm going your speed."
"You're going your speed and it's very nearly mine. Slower."
He went slower. They walked the board round the core like two people carrying a door round a small room, and the loam curled off the edge in a ribbon as wide as his hand and fell in a soft grey heap at their feet. Above them Zenzi was on the lip of the pit with the bucket, and from across the river, now and then, came Shoe's voice in the Pranter yard, swearing at the press beam. It carried.
That had been Kofler's idea, the beam. The Hulda was too big for his lathe; he'd said so the day after Rope Day and assumed it was the end of the conversation, and Kofler had looked at him the way she looked at a mule she was thinking of buying and said: what size of beam do you want? The Torggl press had not pressed a grape in sixty years. The Wardens had voted it to him on the Tuesday, two against, and on the Wednesday eight Moser and Plank men had carried it over the Lower Bridge on their shoulders, singing, and laid it in the Pranter yard, and Shoe had stood looking at it with his hands on his hips for a full minute before he said, very quietly, "Silt."
"Your grandmother," Floris said, to the board, "had a voice like a cart."
Theres didn't stop walking. "She did."
"My mother used to say that. An old witch with a voice like a cart."
"She wasn't old. She'd have been fifty." They went round once more. "She wasn't a witch either. She was the best founder in the valley for forty years. In the worst of the bad years she gave six bells in one summer, and she was sick for a week after every one, and she still came down every morning and swept the strickle."
"And she had my mother give twenty-three in five years."
"Those were bad years."
"My mother was sixteen when she started."
The board went round. The loam fell.
"I know how old she was," Theres said. "Look up."
He looked up. The old smoke-black beam over the pit, and the columns of chalk on it; he had looked at it a hundred times without reading it. Up at the far end, past Agnes Gostner's tall capitals, there was a short column in a different hand, a rounder one, faded nearly to nothing. Twenty-three names. At the top of it, in the same round hand, C.P.
He stopped walking. The board stopped. Theres, at the other end, stopped too.
"You can stand there," she said after a while. "We'll start again from where the loam's still wet."
They started again. He walked the board round and didn't look up. It was harder than he'd thought it would be, not looking up.
"You asked me why I came up the pass at half price," he said.
"I asked. You told me whose yard you were renting."
"The Weighhouse Bank holds my foundry," Floris said. "It has since my father died. I had a bad year, and then another, and the bank was very kind about it, and then it stopped being kind. I've twelve men in Dordel who are waiting to hear if they've still got a place to go in the morning. Two hundred crowns would have kept them a year. Three hundred, halved with you, keeps them till spring, if Sjoerd eats less." He felt the board drag as she slowed. "That's the reason. The other reason is that I wanted to see if I could stop it. Up here. The giving. I've wanted that since I was nine years old. I didn't think about it much, I just wanted it, the way you want to stamp on a wasp."
"And now?"
"Now I've seen hail turn to rain on a line across a hillside you could stand astride," he said. "And I don't know anything."
She didn't answer. They walked. After a while she began to count under her breath, the way she did, the turns of the board; he could see her lips moving. At twelve she stopped, and put her hand flat on the new loam to feel it, and nodded.
"Fire," she said, up at Zenzi.
Floris wanted the old Hulda's weights. He wanted the tin to the ounce and the thickness at the sound-bow and the lip, to know how much to cast her over, and Theres said they were in the casting book, and went up to the loft over the drying shed to get it, and sat down on the floor under the rafters with it open on her knees and didn't come down for an hour.
The casting books were kept in a chest by the loft's one window, wrapped in oilcloth against the damp, one for each master: her grandmother's, her father's, her own. She knew her grandmother's book the way she knew the Kettle Song, without ever having read it straight through, and she had never once turned to the Hulda; nobody recast a great bell twice in a lifetime. Every bell Agnes Gostner ever cast was in it, weight and metal and note, and the board it was swept from, and the date it was poured, and a line for the giving.
She turned to the Hulda.
There were the weights, in the old woman's capitals. Copper and tin. The waist, the sound-bow, the lip. Board: Hulda's. Poured: M. Gostner. Note: Hulda's. And then the line for the giving, which on every other page in the book said Given: A.G., and on this page said:
Given in two throats. A.G. — C.P. Each the half.
Theres sat and read it until she could have chalked it on the beam with her eyes shut.
Under it, smaller, crammed into the margin in a hand that had been in a hurry:
It holds. She hears Hulda's from the next room. So do I. If this is known in the valley every vintner will have his bell given by his whole family and pay a founder for the pouring and nothing else. C.P. sworn to it.
She turned back a page. Then another. The bad years: nineteen bells in the four years before the Hulda, every one Given: C.P. Whole. One girl, one throat, one note at a time. That was the trade; that was how it had always been done. Then she turned forward past the Hulda and found four more, the same summer and the autumn after. Given: C.P. Given: C.P. One throat each. After the old woman knew. She had knelt at the throat with the straw, knowing two could do it and each lose half, while the Pranter girl gave four more notes alone; because if two throats could give a bell, the valley would not need a Gostner to give one.
And then, under the last of them, a line by itself at the bottom of an autumn page, not about any bell:
C.P. gone over the pass with the tinman. Let her.
Theres closed the book.
She sat for a while longer with it on her knees in the dust and the slant light from the window. Down in the shed she could hear his voice, saying something to Zenzi about the fire. It came up through the floorboards whole, every word, the floor of it on Hulda's note.
She hears Hulda's from the next room.
She could take the book down now and show him the page, and say: your mother wasn't telling you a bedtime story. She could say: my grandmother rang her out on purpose. She could say: it can be shared. And he would look at the page, and then at her, and she knew exactly what he would say next, because he was a man who had come up a mountain to stop people losing things, and he'd say: then we'll share it. Half each. Hulda's, between us. And for the rest of her life his voice would come to her from the next room, and he would carry half a hole in his own, because of her.
Or she could give it whole, herself, as a Gostner had always given it, and have nothing of him at all. And he'd keep everything.
She wrapped the book in its oilcloth and went down the ladder.
"Well?" he said. He was at the core with a bucket. "Have you got them?"
"Copper thirty-nine hundredweight and a quarter," Theres said. "Tin eleven. Three fingers and a half at the sound-bow. I've written it down for you." She gave him the paper. She did not give him the book. "She was thin in the waist, you were right. We'll put a finger on."
The false bell went on in June, and the lettering after it.
It was the part of the work she'd loved best as a girl, and the part her father had always let her do: the wax. You rolled beeswax and tallow out thin on a slate and cut the letters from it with a hot knife, and pressed them one by one round the false bell's waist where you wanted them to stand out of the bronze, and the cope went on over the top and took their shape, and the fire melted them out. The old Hulda's words were in the casting book in her grandmother's capitals and Theres knew them anyway. Every child in the valley knew them. HAIL TO RAIN, RAIN TO THE RIVER.
She was pressing the last R onto the waist by lamplight, late, with the drying fire ticking and the whole shed smelling of hot wax and loam, when he came in with two cups of his blood-coffee and sat on the edge of the pit and watched her.
"Is that all of it?" he said.
"That's what she said."
"We say something at home," Floris said. "When we pour. Not on the bell. Just at the furnace. And the river to the sea. It's what the Dordel founders say, because everything comes down to us in the end. Your hail and your rain and your rivers. The whole of the mountains comes down to us in the end and we put it in the sea."
She looked at him.
"I'm not asking," he said. "It's your bell."
"It's Kofler's bell." She took the knife off the coals and cut sixteen more letters, and a comma, and pressed them on after RIVER while he watched. Then she sat back on her heels. HAIL TO RAIN, RAIN TO THE RIVER, THE RIVER TO THE SEA. "There. Now it's too long. It'll go round the waist and run into itself."
"Then it's a circle."
"Then it's a mess."
"Theres," he said.
He didn't often say her name. She'd noticed that. He said Master Gostner in front of the Wardens and you the rest of the time, and when he said Theres it came to her the way everything he said came, whole and clear, set down on that low floor of his voice. He'd come down off the edge of the pit and was holding out his hand, and in the palm of it was a twist of paper, and in the paper was a scrap of brown wax, cut to the shape of a bird.
"I cut it last night," he said. "I've been carrying it about all day like an idiot. She should have one. The old Hulda had one. You can say no."
Theres took it off his palm. It was very small and very well cut, a better wren than she could have made, the tail cocked up. She stood and found the place on the crown beside the G, where it had been on the old one, and pressed it on with her thumb until it held.
When she turned round he was standing right behind her, closer than she'd thought, and she didn't step back.
She'd wondered, she found, for weeks, how it would be done. If it would be done. She had been half sure it would be some long business of looks and nobody saying anything, and that she'd be bad at it. It wasn't. He put one hand on the side of her face, loam and wax and all, quite carefully, the way he'd touched the wren on the Torggl trestles to see if it was hot, and waited; and she leaned the last inch herself, because she had spent sixteen years waiting for people to finish what they were saying.
He tasted of his terrible lowland coffee. His hand on her face was warm, and the drying fire ticked, and somewhere up on the Torggl lane somebody was singing their way home from the Krone, and she heard about a third of it and didn't care.
When she drew back he was looking at her as if he'd struck a fork and was waiting to see if she'd hear it.
"Again," Theres said.
He laughed. It startled out of him, short and helpless, the laugh from the first morning, and she felt it under her hands where she'd got hold of his shirt. Then he did as he was told.
The Wardens sat on the twentieth of June to fix the pour.
It was a full sitting, all twelve, and half the town on the benches at the back, because it was the Hulda. The press was gone from behind the table; there was a long pale scar on the floor where it had stood, and without it the Torggl looked bigger and poorer, like a house after the bailiffs. Ottilie Kofler had a plate of fried plent and was not sharing it.
"Saturday," she said. "That's agreed. Gostner pit, Gostner furnace, the metal's in. Master Achterberg's crew to help with the tap. The Wardens to witness." She ate a piece of plent. "And the giving. Master Gostner."
"I'll give her," Theres said.
"Of course you will," said Kofler, and wrote it down.
"No," said Floris.
He was on his feet at the end of the bench. Theres hadn't seen him stand. She'd seen him come in late, with loam still on his boots, and sit at the end without looking at her, and she had thought: he's tired, the lathe ran past midnight. She had been thinking about Saturday. She'd been thinking about it for three days, about the throat and the straw and the hook drawing out, and about what would be left of his voice after.
"I'm sorry," Floris said. He was speaking to Kofler, not to Theres. He was speaking carefully, and gently, and very clearly, the way he'd said I won't need anybody's ears in this same room in April. "I'm sorry, but someone has to say it, and she won't. She's got four notes left. Four, and Hulda's. She can't hear the little Waldner now, or most of what anyone in this room has said tonight. She lip-reads. She bites a fork to find the pitch. When she gave the trial bell she went flat at the throat and couldn't hear herself, and I had to hum it in her ear, and you all know that, because Hasl did it for you at the Krone with the hands."
Nobody laughed.
"She'll stand at the throat on Saturday," he said, "and if she misses it by a hair the Hulda comes out dumb and she's lost Hulda's for nothing. And if she doesn't miss it, she's got four left, at thirty-one. I've watched what that comes to. I watched it in my own house till two winters ago." He took a breath. "I have all of mine. I've never given one. Let me give her. Hulda's is in my voice. I couldn't miss it if I tried."
The room had gone quiet in the way she could feel through the bench.
He'd read the post, then. Of course he had; he'd stood under it for a month.
Theres sat with her hands in her lap and looked at the scar on the floor where the press had been. She could feel them turning. The benches at the back. The Wardens. Old Waldner, who had told her the Tschurtschenthaler joke three times. Hasl. Obexer. She didn't look at any of them. She watched the pale wood where the press had stood, and felt the room look at her, and for the first time in her life she understood what her grandmother had been doing in the back bedroom with the shutters closed.
Ottilie Kofler said something.
Theres saw her lips move. She saw the shape of her own name at the start of it. The rest she didn't get: Kofler was side-on to her, and had plent in her mouth, and the room was full of the noise of people shifting on benches, and in all of it, all the voices, there wasn't a single whole word.
"Again," Theres said.
She heard herself say it. She heard it go out into the Torggl, the way it had gone out a thousand times, sharp, as if Kofler had mumbled.
And Ottilie Kofler, who had known her since she was born, put down her fork, and turned in her chair to face her, and said it again very slowly, and much too loud.
"Is. It. True."
He caught her up on the Lower Bridge.
She'd gone out by the side door, past the benches, past old Waldner reaching out to touch her sleeve and thinking better of it, and down the lane without hurrying, and she'd known he'd follow and hadn't run. She stopped in the middle of the bridge with the river going under it, high and grey with the Ice's melt, and turned round.
"You had no right," she said.
"I know."
"You don't know. You've no idea. You think you do, because of your mother, and you don't." She found her hands had made fists and opened them. "Did you think I'd thank you?"
"No."
"Then why?"
"Because in ten years I wanted you to hear the river," Floris said.
The worst thing was that she could hear him, every word, with the river roaring under them. Hulda's note. On Saturday he would sing it down the throat of her grandmother's bell and lose it, and never once hear himself say a thing like that again; and she would hear every word he said for the rest of her life.
"You told them I couldn't hear them," she said. "In front of everyone. Hasl will do it at the Krone tonight. Kofler, saying it again. They'll do it at weddings."
"I told them because you'd have stood at that throat on Saturday and sung, and lost it, and smiled at me after, and gone on lip-reading the whole valley till you were sixty. You'd have done it alone. Because that's what your grandmother did, and her mother, and all of you up here."
"I'm not your mother."
"No," he said. "She at least got out."
The river went under the bridge. Somewhere downstream a dipper went in and out of the water off a stone, bobbing as if it were bowing to something.
"Give it, then," Theres said. "Give her on Saturday, with your perfect voice, and then put her on your press beam and shave her true and take your hundred and fifty crowns and go home to Dordel. That's what you came for."
She walked off the bridge. He didn't follow her this time. She didn't look back to see.
The casting book was where she'd left it, in its oilcloth, on the chest in the loft. She brought it down to the shed and sat with it under the lamp by the pit, the new Hulda buried to her crown in the rammed earth at her feet, the cope dry, the throat stopped with a twist of rag, and read the page again.
Given in two throats.
She thought about him at the throat on Saturday, singing Hulda's note down into the dark with that voice of his. The hook setting behind his ear. The line drawing out. He'd never felt it. He didn't know what it was like, to have a note go out of you like a lamp and know it wasn't coming back. And it was his own voice. The note his voice stood on. For the rest of his life he'd talk and not hear the floor of it; he'd sound to himself like a man talking in a house with the ground floor gone, all upstairs and draughts. He'd shout without knowing. Every giver's house in the valley was loud.
She would have liked him never to know what the fishhook felt like.
Then she thought about her grandmother deciding, in the back bedroom, which lie to tell.
Zenzi came in from the yard with an armful of charcoal and stopped in the door.
"I thought you'd gone to bed."
"Is the bronze all in the hearth?"
"Since Thursday. You know it is." The girl looked at the book, and at Theres's face, and at the furnace, cold, its door shut. Something went over her face slowly, the way the line went down the slope on Rope Day. "Theres. It's Wednesday. The pour's Saturday."
"I know when the pour is."
"He's meant to be here. The Wardens are meant to be here."
"Fetch me the long matches," Theres said. "And the bellows. And then you can go home if you like."
Zenzi didn't go home. She stood a moment longer in the door with the charcoal in her arms. Then she put it down, and went for the matches.
A great furnace took four hours to come to heat. Theres lit it at midnight.