Chapter 5: Two Throats
At three in the morning the bronze began to move.
Theres saw it before Zenzi did. She'd been watching through the spy-hole in the furnace door for an hour, the heat on her face so steady now that she'd stopped feeling it, and the heap in the hearth had gone from black to red to a glare that left a green ghost on everything when she looked away. The old Hulda was in there, every barrow of her. The new metal on top. And somewhere in the last quarter of an hour the heap had stopped being a heap and settled, all at once, the way snow comes off a roof, into something with a skin on it that wrinkled when the bellows breathed.
"Rod," she said.
Zenzi gave her the iron rod and she put it in through the stoke-hole and stirred, and drew it out, and looked at the bronze on the end of it, how it ran and how fast it skinned. Not yet. She put the rod down.
"Shoe'll see the glow," Zenzi said. It was the third time she'd said it. She was at the bellows, pumping with her whole body, both arms and one knee, a rhythm she'd kept for three hours without being told. "From his window. He sleeps over the shed. He'll see it in the sky."
"Let him."
"He'll wake the Master."
"Pump," said Theres.
The shed was full of the furnace's roar and its light and nothing else. The pit at her feet, the rammed earth, the pouring cup and the throat side by side in the floor, the long clay channel waiting dry and swept from the tap-hole to the cup. On the beam above, the chalk. On the post, her column. She'd written nothing on it yet. She'd write it after: Hulda, at the bottom of the long column, and draw the line through it, and then there would be a lowlander's voice in the valley that she'd see and not hear, and that would be that, and she would go up to bed.
At four she put the rod in again and it came out running like water off a spoon.
"Stand back from the channel," she said. "Right back. Up on the bench."
"There's two of us," Zenzi said. "For two and a half tons. Theres. There's meant to be six."
"There's meant to be a lot of things. Up on the bench."
Zenzi got up on the bench. Theres took the tapping bar.
The plug gave the way it always gave, all at once, and the metal came out.
It was nothing like the trial bell. The trial bell had come down the channel like a rope. This came like a river in spate, a great slow glaring tongue that filled the channel to its lip and moved down it with a sound she could hear even through her ruined ears, a deep wet seething like fat in a pan the size of the Torggl. The light of it went up the walls and showed every cobweb in the rafters. It reached the pouring cup and went down into the dark, and the ground took it, and the mould breathed out its long sigh up the throat.
Then, halfway down the channel, the clay cracked.
She saw it go. A black line across the channel's wall where the heat had got into a flaw nobody had seen, and the line opening, and a thin bright spill running out over the edge onto the floor, and the spill getting less thin. It was going to break through. When a channel broke the metal went where it liked, across the floor, into your boots, and what went across the floor didn't go into the bell, and a bell short of metal came out of the pit with a hole in her shoulder, and two and a half tons of the old Hulda would be scrap on a shed floor at four in the morning.
She dropped the bar and went for the sand.
The sand bin was at the far end by the door. She was halfway to it when someone came through the door and nearly into her, and took one look at the channel, and pushed past her, and was at the bin first.
He didn't say anything. He got the shovel into the dry sand and went back down the shed with it at a run and threw it on the breach, and went back for another, and another, while Theres stood with her hands empty, and then she was at the bin too, both of them shovelling, flinging dry sand on the bright spill until it went dull and crusted and stopped and the metal in the channel ran on past the crack and down into the cup.
The cup brimmed. Theres knocked the dam across with her boot.
They stood on either side of the channel, breathing hard. He was in his shirt and trousers and boots with no stockings, and his hair was standing up on one side, and he looked as if he'd come over the Lower Bridge at a dead run, which he had.
"Shoe saw the glow," Zenzi said from the bench, to nobody.
"Straw," said Theres.
She knelt at the throat. Zenzi knelt opposite. The heat coming up the pipe was a furnace's breath, and the straw went up like a match and burned to nothing, and the girl lit another, and that one held, curling and blackening at the end.
Theres took the Hulda's fork out of her apron pocket.
He knelt down on the loam beside her. Not touching. She could feel him there, the warmth of him through the warmth of everything else.
"Don't hum it at me," she said. "I can hear Hulda's. I've always been able to hear Hulda's."
"Then what are you afraid of?"
She looked at the straw. She had perhaps the time it took to say the Kettle Song through twice.
"It's your voice," she said.
"I know it is. I said so in the Torggl."
"You said you couldn't miss it." She didn't look at him; she talked to the round black hole of the throat. "Everyone in this valley comes to me in pieces. You came in at my door in April and told me I was flat, and I heard every word, because you were standing on the only floor I've got left. That's what Hulda's is. And I'm going to put it in this bell, so you can keep yours."
"Theres."
"And there's a book," she said, very fast, because the straw was burning down, and if she didn't say it now she'd sit in a back bedroom for forty years deciding not to. "My grandmother's. The Hulda's page. Given in two throats, A.G., C.P., each the half. Your mother wasn't telling you a story. They sang it together and it held. And after it my grandmother had her give four more alone, so nobody would ever know it could be shared. She hears Hulda's from the next room, it says. So do I."
The straw in Zenzi's fingers had burned a third of the way down.
He was looking at her, very close, in the furnace light, as if a bedtime story had walked into the room and sat down.
"Me," he said. "She could hear me from the next room. Whichever room I was in." It was nearly a laugh; it didn't come all the way out. "I thought it was because she loved me."
"The straw," said Theres. "Floris."
He looked at it. Then at her.
"Will you?" she said.
She'd never asked anyone for anything at a throat. You didn't. The throat was yours, and the hook, and the line, and what went down it, and you did it alone and wrote it on the post afterward, and sat on the edge of the pit with your hands between your knees where nobody could see.
"Yes," said Floris.
She put the fork in her teeth and struck it on her heel, and Hulda's note came up through her jaw, low and steady, like a man standing close behind her in the dark and humming. She took it out. She didn't need it. Neither of them did.
They leaned down over the throat together, his shoulder against hers, and sang.
For a moment they were two notes, the width of nothing apart, and she felt them rub; and then she put her hand flat on his chest without thinking, the way she'd put two fingers on his throat in May, and felt the note in him, and came onto it, and they were one.
The bell took hold of them both.
It was the same and it was not the same. The hook set, behind her ear, where it always set, and drew; the line paid out, slow and even, the note going down it into the dark. But it drew half as hard. Someone else had a hand on the line and was taking half the pull, and she knew who, because under her palm she felt him go rigid as the hook set in him for the first time in his life, and felt the note shake in him and hold. Good man. You didn't stop. You kept on until it came free.
It came free.
They sat back on their heels at the same moment, like two people who'd been pulling on one rope and had it let go.
Zenzi's straw had gone out. The girl was looking from one to the other with her mouth open and her face wet.
"Is it in?" she said. Then, because nobody answered: "Is it? Both of you? Is it in?"
Theres opened her mouth to say it's in, and stopped, and listened.
The furnace was ticking down. The river was going by outside in the dark. And Hulda's note was still there. Not gone, the way the little Waldner had gone, a clean hole the size of it. It was there, quite clearly there, only further off: as if someone were singing it in another part of the house, behind a wall, through a door left open. She could hear it if she listened. She could hear it the way you hear someone moving about downstairs when you're nearly asleep.
"Zenzi," she said. "Whistle it."
Zenzi whistled it, the long falling whistle, down to Hulda's and holding there; and Theres heard it from the next room.
"It's in," said Floris.
His voice came to her the same way. Every word, whole. Further off than it had been, as if he'd stepped back through a doorway; and a good deal louder than it needed to be, because he couldn't hear the floor of it now himself and didn't know how hard he was standing on it.
"You're shouting," Theres said.
"Am I?" He put a hand up to his own throat, wonderingly, the way she'd touched it, and said, "Am I?" again, much too loud, and then, "Silt. I am. I can't tell. Is this what it's like? Is this what it's always like?"
"Only half," said Theres.
He looked at her, and began to laugh, really laugh this time, sitting on the loam of her shed floor in his shirt at half past four in the morning with dry sand all down his front. It was the loudest laugh she had ever heard in her life. She heard all of it.
"So can I give half of one?" said Zenzi. "When I'm twenty? Can I give half?"
"When you're twenty," Theres said, "you can give a quarter."
The Wardens came at seven, because the whole of the valley had seen the glow in the sky over the Gostner chimney at four in the morning and drawn its own conclusions. Ottilie Kofler came with Hasl and a basket, in which there were rolls and a crock of goat butter and a pot of rowan jam, because she hadn't known whether she was coming to a bell or a funeral and it was too early in the day to be wrong about it.
She stood in the shed door and looked at the pit, and the sanded crust on the channel, and the two of them sitting on the edge of it.
"Who gave her?" she said.
"We did," said Theres.
"Both of you." Kofler looked at the lowlander. "Two."
"Two throats," Theres said. "Each the half. It's in my grandmother's book. I'll show you. I'll show the Wardens. I'll show anyone." She hadn't known she was going to say the last part until it was out, and then it was out, and she found she didn't want it back.
Ottilie Kofler stood in the door for a long while with the basket on her arm. Theres could see her doing the sums. It was a thing worth watching, Kofler doing sums; you could see the columns go down behind her eyes.
"So the whole Warden board," she said slowly, "could give a bell between them, could they. A sliver each."
"Twelve slivers," said Floris, too loudly. "It would have to be twelve very good singers."
"Waldner can't sing," said Theres.
"Then eleven slivers and Waldner."
Kofler looked at him for a moment as if he'd given her a coin she didn't recognise. Then she came down the two steps into the shed and put the basket on the edge of the pit between them.
"Eat something," she said. "Both of you. And then Theres, you'll come to the Torggl with that book, and we'll sit. And Master Achterberg." She turned. "You're shouting."
"I know," said Floris. "I'm told it's only half."
When Kofler and Hasl had gone, Theres took the chalk off its nail. At the bottom of the long column on the post she wrote Hulda, and drew the line through it half the width of the others, because there was no other way to write it. She crossed nothing off the short side. Then she held the chalk out behind her without looking, and after a moment it was taken out of her hand, and she heard him drag the ladder across to the beam.
He wrote at the far end, past Agnes Gostner's tall capitals and the round faded hand that had written C.P. A new column. At the top of it F.A., and one name under it, and a short line through the name. Then he stood on the ladder a while with the chalk in his fingers, and drew a little bird beside the letters, with its tail cocked up.
They lifted the Hulda out of the pit on the ninth day, and dragged her over the Lower Bridge on the ox-sledge at a walking pace with half the town walking beside her, and stood her on her head on the Torggl press beam in the Pranter yard, and Shoe began to turn her.
It took four days. Floris had said two, for the trial bell, and laughed when he said four for this one, and then it took four. He couldn't hear her strike properly any more. He'd found that out the first evening, with his ear to her lip and Shoe at the crank, and stood up from it with an expression Theres had seen on her own face in her father's old shaving mirror. The hum he could hear, and the tierce and the quint and the nominal, perfectly, every hair of them; but the strike, the one the Hulda was named for, came to him now from somewhere else in the house, and you couldn't tune a bell by a note you had to strain for.
So Theres put her hand on her.
She stood by the lathe with her palm flat on the Hulda's waist while Floris struck her, and felt the strike come up through the bronze into the bones of her hand, the way she'd felt the fork in her teeth, and felt where it fought with the others. It was a roughness, like a burr on a file. "There," she said, and Floris, who could hear everything but the strike, said "There's the tierce, she's a hair flat on it," and Shoe took a shaving off the inside no thicker than a fingernail, and they struck her again. Four days of it. By the end of the second Theres could tell by her hand alone when the tierce was out, and Floris could tell by her face.
On the fourth evening Shoe stopped the crank and said, "Silt," very quietly, which in Dordel, Floris told her, was the worst word a lathe man had, and also, said that quietly, the highest praise.
When they struck her that last time the whole of the Pranter yard went still. A woman on the river road with a goat stopped walking. Theres stood with her palm on the bronze and felt nothing fight. Not a grain. Every voice in the bell standing exactly on the one below it, all the way down to Hulda's in the middle, which came to her faint and far off, and true.
Round the Hulda's waist the lettering stood out of the bronze where the wax had been: HAIL TO RAIN, RAIN TO THE RIVER, THE RIVER TO THE SEA. It went right round her and ran into itself, so the SEA came up against the HAIL with no room between, and there was no telling where it started.
"It's a circle," Floris said.
"It's a mess," said Theres, and put her other hand on it too.
The big storm came on the twelfth of August, the way it did most years, a week before the harvest, when the grapes were heavy and purple on the cane and the whole valley had its money hanging out on the slopes in the sun.
The Rotgrat began to smoke at noon. By two the Kettle had its lid on, a white anvil so big it took the light out of the whole sky, and the terraces had emptied toward the ringing-houses; and at a quarter past two the first stones came off the scree, walnuts, then eggs, and the Hulda began to ring.
Every bell in Brenndal rang with her. That had been Floris's idea, and Kofler's sitting, and a week of the Wardens in the Torggl shouting about it. Fifteen ringing-houses up and down the terraces, and in the door of each a ringer with one arm up, watching the big house on its shoulder of the hill, bringing the arm down every time the Hulda went over, so that every bell in the valley landed with her on the same stroke. Theres stood in the big house and pulled the Hulda's beard and felt them come in, one after another, through the beam and the boards and the soles of her feet: one deep slow beat, the whole valley's worth of bronze landing at once.
The storm came down on Brenndal and parted.
It went down both sides. White on the scree, white on the high pasture and on the Ice, which would not mind. And rain on every vine in the valley. Grey, heavy, market-day rain, drumming on the leaves and running off the walls in brown spouts and down into the Brenn, and the Brenn, which would take it down through the gorge and out of the mountains, and on, and down, to the delta and the sea.
They rang until seven. When it was over Theres came out of the big ringing-house into the dripping evening with no feeling left in her arms and found the whole slope below full of people, standing in the wet among the whole vines, looking up.
The lowlander was in the doorway behind her, with his shirt stuck to him and his hands blistered raw from the Hulda's rope.
"Theres," he said, at the top of his voice.
Half the terrace turned round to look.
"I heard you," Theres said. "I'm only in the next room."