Chapter 1: The Throat
The straw caught on the third try, which meant the metal under Theres's knees was still red.
"Now," Zenzi said, or Theres saw her say it. The girl was kneeling on the far side of the throat with the straw pinched between finger and thumb like something she'd stolen, its end curling black in the heat that came up the clay pipe. The pit stank of hot loam and singed hair. Forty pounds of bronze lay buried under their knees, a hail bell for the Tschurtschenthaler orchard, and it would only stay red long enough to take a note if nobody wasted time saying now.
Theres put the fork between her back teeth and bit down.
It was a lowland fork, steel, with a little anchor stamped on the shank, and she was not supposed to own it. She struck it on her boot heel. The note came up through her jaw into the bones behind her ears, thin and very clear: the little Obexer, high as a wren. She had heard it with her ears when she was a girl. Now she heard it with her teeth.
She took the fork out, leaned over the throat until the heat stood on her face like a hand, and sang.
You did not sing loudly. Her grandmother had smacked her for that, the first time, at fifteen: the bell is not across the river, girl, it's under your chin. You sang the way you'd talk to a sick animal, low and steady, the note held on an open mouth, and you went on holding it while the bell decided.
For a while there was only her own voice going down the pipe, and the tick of the cooling loam, and Zenzi not breathing.
Then the bell took hold.
It always felt the same, and she had never found a way to tell anyone what it was like. A fishhook was close. A fishhook set somewhere behind the ear, and the line drawn out slow and even, and the note going down it out of her and into the dark metal like water into dry ground. She kept singing. You kept singing until the hook came free. If you stopped early the bell came out dumb and the note was gone from you anyway.
It came free.
Theres sat back on her heels. Her jaw ached. Across the throat Zenzi was grinning at her and whistling, the long falling whistle apprentices did to check a gift, the little Obexer and the note below it and the note below that. Theres watched the girl's lips pucker and her cheeks hollow, and heard the bottom two notes perfectly well and the top one not at all. Where it should have been there was a small clean nothing, like the gap where a tooth had been.
Twenty-seven.
"Is it in?" Zenzi said. She knew it was in. She liked hearing it said.
"It's in." Theres held out her hand without looking and the girl put the straw in it. Dead. The heat had gone out of the throat. "Cap it. Then wet the sand round the shoulder, it's drying too fast on the yard side. Then go home and eat something."
"You eat something."
"I'm going to." She was not going to. She was going to sit on the edge of the pit for a while with her hands between her knees, which was what she did after, and which nobody was allowed to see. She got up to fetch the chalk.
The beam over the pit was black with sixty years of smoke and the chalk showed on it like frost. Her grandmother's tally was up at the far end in the old woman's tall hard capitals, faded to ghosts. Her father's was shorter, because he'd been a poor singer and the valley had known it. Theres's own column ran down the post nearest the furnace door, where she could see it from the pit: every note she'd ever given, written as the bell that held it. The Wieser. The Kofler little. The two Moser sisters. The Brenn Bridge. And on, and down, twenty-six names.
She wrote Tschurtsch. under them, because the post wasn't wide enough for the rest, and drew the line through it. Then, because it was a habit, and because she didn't trust the number to stay true if she didn't check it, she counted the short column on the other side of the post. The notes she still had.
Five. And Hulda's, which wasn't on the list, because it was never going to be spent on anything but the Hulda.
"You were flat at the start," said a man behind her. "A hair. You came up onto it."
Theres turned round.
There was a stranger in the foundry door with the light behind him. For a moment he was only a long dark coat and a hat held against the chest, the way people stood in foundries when they'd been told it was rude to come in and had decided to come in anyway. Then he came down the two steps into the shed and was a man about her age or a few years over it, lean in the face, with the yellow-brown hair that came out of the delta like river silt. A lowlander. He was looking at the throat, not at her.
Behind him was Hasl Moser, the Wardens' clerk, red to the ears.
"Theres," Hasl said. "I knocked."
She had not heard him knock. She did not say so. What she said was, "Again," to the stranger, flat, the way you'd tell a boy to carry the sack again because he'd dropped it.
"You were a hair flat," the lowlander said. He said it pleasantly, as if he were giving her the time. "On the way in. Then you heard it and came up. It's a very good correction, most people couldn't. I only wondered if it costs you more when you do that. Or if the bell doesn't mind."
Every word of it came through to her. That was the first strange thing. Most voices reached her these days like a wall with stones gone out of it, so that she built the rest from lips and faces and what people usually said, and was usually right. His came whole, every stone in place, a light dry voice with the delta's flat vowels in it, pitched low and easy, right where she could still hear best. It was like being handed a letter in clear copperplate after a month of other people's scrawl, and she would have liked very much to throw the fork at him.
"Hasl," she said. "Who is this?"
"This is Master Achterberg," Hasl said. "From Dordel. He's come about the Hulda."
"Floris," said the lowlander. He put out his hand. Theres looked at it. It was a founder's hand, she gave him that: the knuckles nicked white, a burn scar like a splash of wax down the side of the thumb, the nails cut to nothing. He took it back and put it in his coat pocket without seeming offended. "I'm sorry to come in on you. I've never seen it done. We don't, at home."
"No," Theres said. "I've heard."
Everyone had heard. The lowlanders had given their bells once, against the autumn gales off the sea. They'd stopped forty years ago, when their dikes got high enough that they could stop caring and some clever man in Dordel worked out how to turn a bell on a wheel and shave its insides until it sang in tune with itself, five voices stacked true in one strike. They made beautiful bells, people said. Bells you could weep at. They rang them for weddings and the hours and the drowning of kings, and not one of them had ever turned a hailstorm, because the lowlands didn't get hailstorms. The lowlands got rained on.
"The Wardens are sitting," Hasl said. "This morning. Now. Frau Kofler asked if you'd come." He was looking anywhere but at her face, as people did when they'd walked in on something private, and she understood he'd been standing in that door the whole time she sang. Ice take him, he'd tell the whole Torggl what the lowlander had said about flat. "She'd have sent word before, only the Master came up the pass last night and nobody knew he was coming."
"I wrote," said Floris Achterberg mildly. "In March."
Hasl went redder, which Theres would not have thought could be done. "Frau Kofler may have had the letter."
So they had known since March. Theres looked at the clerk until he found something on the floor to study. Then she wiped her hands on her apron, took the apron off, and hung it on the nail beside the chalk.
"Zenzi," she said. "Cap it. Wet the shoulder. Eat."
The girl's eyes were going from her to the lowlander and back like a cat at a window. "Are you going to the Torggl like that? You've got loam on your face."
"Good," Theres said, and went out past both men into the yard.
The Torggl had been a wine-press house before it was the Bell Wardens' hall, and it still smelled like one: old must and older wood, two hundred years of other people's harvests soaked into the beams. The great press stood along the back wall, a screw as thick as a man and a beam you could have laid a cow on. The Wardens sat at a table in front of it, under the black wooden thread of the screw, which Theres had always found encouraging.
There were nine of them this morning out of twelve: Kofler, Waldner, the Moser cousins, old Obexer with his bad hip, the rest. It was not yet nine o'clock and Ottilie Kofler had a bowl of burnt-flour soup in front of her and was eating it with the patience of a woman who meant to finish before anyone said anything she'd have to answer. There was caraway floating in it. A jug of barley coffee stood at her elbow, and a plate of black plent fried in lard that she was not sharing.
And there, on a pair of trestles in the middle of the floor, was the Hulda.
Theres had not seen her since October, since the night the crack went through her in the middle of the storm and the sound she made changed from a voice to a cough. They had lowered her out of the big ringing-house in November and hauled her down the terraces on a sledge behind four oxen, and nobody had known where to put her, so she had come here. She lay on her side on the trestles like something landed: two and a half tons of dark bronze gone green at the shoulder, the crack running up from her lip to her waist in a line you could have slid a knife into. Someone had hung a lantern over her. Someone else had set a pot of rowan sprigs at her crown, which was the kind of thing old women did for the dead.
Theres had meant to walk straight past her to the table. She found she had stopped.
Her grandmother had given this bell. Thirty-eight years ago, in the pit Theres had just climbed out of, with her sister Mena pouring. Hulda's note had been Agnes Gostner's last low note, and the bell had held off thirty-eight summers of hail on the strength of it. When Agnes was dying, very slowly, in the back bedroom with the shutters closed against a noise she couldn't hear, she had got hold of Theres's wrist and said: You keep yours. Whatever else you spend. You keep Hulda's for the Hulda.
Theres was fifteen. She had kept it. She had kept it through the black-hail summer and her father's death and the year the Brenn bridge went and the Moser sisters needed two bells at once, and on every one of those nights she had looked at the short column on the post, and at the one name that wasn't on it, and kept it.
"She's a beauty," said the lowlander, beside her. She hadn't heard him come up. "Even like that."
He had stepped round to the bell's crown, where the canons were, the heavy loops cast in one piece with the bell to hang her by. Between the canons were the founders' marks. Every given bell carried them, pressed into the wax of the false bell before the cope went over, so they came out of the pit raised in the bronze: the Gostner mark, a little bell with a G through it, which was on every bell Theres had ever made, and beside it, smaller, a bird with its tail cocked up.
Floris Achterberg put out one finger and touched the bird.
He did it very lightly, the way you'd touch a pan to see if it was hot. Then he took his hand away and stood looking at it, and his face did nothing at all.
"That's my great-aunt's," Theres said. "Mena. She poured the Hulda. Grandmother gave her."
"Mm," said the lowlander.
"Master Gostner," said Ottilie Kofler from the table. "Master Achterberg. When you've both finished admiring the corpse."
What it came to, once Kofler had finished her soup and Hasl had read the minutes of the last sitting and old Obexer had asked twice what was going on, was money.
The Hulda had to be recast; there was no mending a crack like that. You broke the old bell up and put her back in the furnace with new metal and poured her again, and that cost: copper, tin over the pass on mules, a new frame in the ringing-house because the old one had rotted while nobody was looking. And the founder's fee, set in Agnes Gostner's day at four hundred silver crowns, which had not gone down since.
"Four hundred and twenty," Kofler said, looking at a paper. "That was your figure, Theres."
"Metal's dearer. Tin's up a third since the Wardens last bought."
"And Master Achterberg's figure," Kofler said, "is two hundred."
Theres looked at him. He had sat down at the end of the bench nearest the press with his hat on his knee, and he looked back at her apologetically, like a man who has stepped on your foot in a crowd and can't get off it because of the crowd.
"Two hundred," she said. "For a bell of two and a half tons."
"And a tenth," Floris said. "I'd cast her a little heavier. The old one's thin in the waist. It's why she cracked."
"She cracked because a storm took the top off the Rotgrat and threw it at her for six hours."
"That too." He turned the hat over on his knee. "I have the metal. I bought it at Dordel prices and brought it up with me, it's in the carters' yard behind the Krone. I have my own crew. I need the Wardens to rent me a pit, and I need ten weeks. And I won't need anybody's ears."
He said that last to the table, not to her, and he said it quite gently, and the room went quiet in a way she could feel through the bench.
So that was it. Not the money, or not only. The Wardens had grown up the same as she had, in a valley where every other family kept a deaf grandmother in the corner, and everyone knew which houses were founders' houses because you could hear them from the road: in a givers' house everyone shouted. They had all stood on the terraces on Rope Day and watched a Gostner walk up to the big ringing-house with the new rope over her shoulder, and seen how she watched their mouths when they wished her a good summer. And here was a man telling them it could be done for half the price and nobody need lose anything at all.
"In Dordel," Floris said, "we stopped giving bells forty-one years ago. A bell has five voices in it, if you listen: the hum, the strike, and the tierce and the quint and the nominal above. Out of the pit they fight each other, and that's what you hear when a bell sounds sour. On a lathe you can shave the inside a hair at a time until they agree, and a true bell carries. I rang one in Dordel square that was heard on the coast."
"And when it was heard on the coast," Theres said, "what did the weather do?"
"It was a fine day."
Somebody at the table laughed. Waldner, who laughed at most things. Theres didn't.
"Dordel doesn't get hail," she said. "Dordel gets rained on, politely, from the sea, and then it stops. I've been to Dordel. I bought tin there when I was nineteen and stood on your quay three days waiting for a ship, and it rained on me the whole time like a cousin who wants to borrow money. Nobody in Dordel has their vines stripped to the canes in twenty minutes. Nobody's barn catches. Nobody's boy gets caught out on the Obexer meadow with the cows when the stones come down the size of eggs." She did not look at Obexer, who had buried that boy. "A dumb bell is a very lovely noise to listen to while that happens."
"A dumb bell," Floris repeated. He looked delighted. "Is that what you call it?"
"It's what it is."
"In Dordel," he said, "a dumb bell is a thing the gymnasts lift. Clapper out, two bells on a stick. To make the arms strong."
Waldner laughed again. So did one of the Mosers. Kofler said "Quiet," without heat, and they were.
"I'm not saying a true bell turns hail," Floris said, to Theres. Only to her now, as if the table had gone home. "I've never seen hail turned. I'm saying nobody here knows why yours do. You give a note, and it's a given bell, and the storm breaks round it. Good. But you've never once rung a bell that was tuned true. So you can't know what part of it is the note and what part is only a bell that carries. And you've been paying for it for three hundred years with your ears."
"You think we're idiots."
"I think you're very brave. And I think you might have been paying for something you never needed to buy." He held up both hands before she could speak. "Might. I'd like the chance to find out."
"With my valley's harvest."
"With one bell," said Ottilie Kofler.
They both looked at her. She had pushed the soup bowl away and was wiping her fingers on a cloth, one at a time, as if she'd been waiting for this since breakfast. She probably had.
"Nobody is risking the Hulda on a man who's never seen hail," she said. "Sorry, Master Achterberg, but there it is. And nobody," she said, turning the cloth toward Theres, "is paying four hundred and twenty crowns to a founder without asking first whether there's a cheaper way. It's my grapes and Waldner's and everyone's at this table that pay the tithe, a tongue a cask, and I've seen the tithe books. So. Each of you casts a hail bell. Four hundredweight, same weight, same note if you can manage it. Gostner's goes in the Waldner ringing-house and Achterberg's in mine across the gully. They're the two highest on the terraces, they get the weather first. First storm of the Ringing, both of them ring, and we watch. Whichever keeps its slope clean casts the Hulda."
"And the other," Theres said.
"The other casts nothing more for this valley." Kofler folded the cloth. "Not this summer. Possibly not after. I can't have the town keeping two foundries, Theres. There isn't the work."
There was more after that. Hasl wrote down that the Wardens would rent Master Achterberg the old Pranter yard across the Lower Bridge, which had stood empty since Theres was a child. There was a question of who paid for the trial bells (each founder for their own, and a hard look from Kofler at the lowlander, who nodded). Rope Day was in five weeks and two days; somebody worked it out on their fingers. A four-hundredweight bell wanted a week to cool in the pit. Theres was already counting backward, mould and core and drying, false bell and cope, the loam that had to be dug and wetted and trodden and left to sour, and she found that she had stood up.
"Keep warm," Ottilie Kofler said to her, which was what you said when someone was leaving whether you'd finished with them or not.
"Keep warm," Theres said, and went to the door, and found the lowlander there before her, holding it.
The morning had got on while they sat. The sun was over the shoulder of the Rotgrat and the light lay along the terraces, the vines just breaking bud, and the first mule train of the year was coming down the switchbacks from the pass with its bells going, which she could see better than she could hear. The air smelled of cut stone and dung and somebody's bread. Floris Achterberg came down the Torggl steps behind her, put his hat on, and fell into step beside her without being asked, as if he had business the same way. He might.
"Tschurtschenthaler," he said.
"What?"
"The bell you were giving this morning. The girl said it was for the Tschurtschenthaler orchard. I've been trying to say it ever since." He tried it again. He got about two-thirds of the way in and fell over the rest. "Is it a real name? Or do you all agree to say it to strangers?"
"It's a real name."
"How many of them are there?"
"Eleven," Theres said. "Twelve, since the thaw." She hadn't meant to answer. She walked faster. He had long legs; it made no difference.
"I'm sorry about flat," he said after a while. "That was rude. I hear it and I say it, it's a bad habit. My crew hate it. My foreman says I'd tell a man his mother was a quarter-tone sharp at her own funeral."
"Was she?"
He laughed, a short surprised sound. "No. She didn't sing at it. Being dead." Then, in a different voice: "She did sing, though. When she was alive. All the time."
They had come to the corner where the Torggl lane met the river road. Left was the Lower Bridge and the old Pranter yard beyond it, its roof half gone, nettles up to the gate. Right was the Gostner foundry and the smoke from her own chimney, thin and grey, which meant Zenzi had damped the furnace properly for once. Theres stopped.
"You'll want loam," she said. "There's a pit up behind the Moser barns. It's not as good as ours, but it's good. Tell them I sent you and they'll charge you double instead of triple. Horse dung you can get from the Kofler stables. Don't take goat hair from the Plank boys, it's half wool, they card it in." She didn't know why she was telling him. Because it was going to be hard enough to beat him without him blaming the goat hair, possibly. "And cut your strickle twice. The first one always warps up here. The air's drier than you're used to."
He looked at her. He had grey eyes, lighter than the rest of him, river-water eyes, and he was looking at her the way he'd looked at the bird on the Hulda's crown. As if he were trying to work out how hot she was.
"Thank you," he said.
"I want you to lose fairly."
"I know," said Floris. "That's what I'm thanking you for."
He touched his hat to her and turned left, toward the bridge, and as he went he began to hum.
She knew the tune before he was ten steps off. Everyone in Brenndal knew it. It was the Kettle Song, the one mothers sang over the cradle and drunks sang in the Krone at closing, about the Ice boiling up its weather in the high cirque and pouring it down on the valley like soup from a pot, which was the oldest joke in Brenndal and not a very good one. She'd sung it a thousand times. She hadn't heard its third line in nine years, not since the Brenn Bridge bell took the note it climbed to.
He hummed the first line through. In the second, where the tune went up to the little Waldner, he didn't go up. He stopped, left a space exactly the length of the note, and came in again after it, perfectly in time, as if the space belonged in the song. The little Waldner was one of her five. She would have heard it. There was nothing there to hear.
What he did with the third line she couldn't have said.
In the fourth, the low one, the tune turned at the end on Hulda's note. He didn't leave that out. He went soft on it instead, so soft she nearly lost him, as if the note were being sung from the next room, and then came back to his full voice for the last word and walked on over the bridge.
He wasn't forgetting. He wasn't flat. He was singing it the way he'd learned it, holes and all, neat as a hymn.
Somebody had taught that man the Kettle Song who couldn't hear half of it.