Chapter 2: Dumb Bells
Zenzi had been treading loam for an hour, and somewhere in the second half of it she had started singing a song Theres had never taught her.
Theres could only get pieces of it from where she stood at the core. The girl was up to her shins in the trough by the yard wall, skirts knotted at the knee, marching on the spot in the grey muck the way you trod grapes, and her mouth was making shapes that weren't valley shapes. Flat, open vowels. Something about a boat. Something, by the face she was pulling, extremely rude about the boat.
"Where did you get that?"
"Get what?"
"The song."
Zenzi went pink, which she didn't often. "Shoe."
"Who is Shoe?"
"The lowlander's lathe man. His name's Sjoerd, only you can't say it, it goes up your nose, so he says Shoe will do. He's got arms like a horse." She trod for a while. "He eats mice."
"He what?"
"On his bread. Every morning. He puts butter on it and then a handful of little pink and white mice, and eats it, crunch crunch." She did the crunching. "He says they're aniseed comfits and in Dordel babies get them when they're born. I had one. It was horrible. It was like eating a cough."
Theres put down the strickle. "When did you have one?"
Zenzi trod with tremendous concentration.
"You've been over the bridge."
"I took the goat hair back. The Plank boys sold him the half-wool, like you said they would, and he laughed when he saw it and said would I take it home because he couldn't bear to look at it." The girl's face was full of the Pranter yard and everything in it. "They've got a wheel, Theres. They've built it in the old shed. It's as big as the press in the Torggl and the crank takes two of them, and when the bell's cooled they're going to stand it on its head on the wheel and turn it like a cheese and shave the inside. He showed me the knives. They're like spoons with the edges sharpened. Shoe says he can take off the thickness of a hair and hear the difference."
"Shoe says."
"The Master says it too. He says Shoe has the best hands in Dordel and the worst manners." Zenzi wiped her nose on her wrist and left a streak of grey across her cheek. "He asked about you."
"Who did?"
"The Master. He asked how long you'd been giving. I said since before I was born." She looked up from the trough. "Then he asked how many."
Theres went back to the core.
It was the fourteenth day and the core was nearly there: a squat dome of brick on an iron plate in the middle of the shed, three coats of loam on it, with the spindle running up through it to the beam. On the spindle hung the strickle, a board as long as a man with its inner edge cut to the shape of the inside of a bell. You laid on a fresh coat and walked the board round, slowly, and it cut away whatever was not bell. That was all it was. Theres had been doing it since she could reach.
This board was her grandmother's. It was pear wood, black with handling, and along its top somebody had burnt WALDNER FOUR in the old woman's capitals, and a year from before Theres's father was born. There were twenty boards like it up in the rafters of the drying shed, every bell the Gostners had ever cast cut into wood, and when you took one down you took down every bell that had been swept from it.
She walked it round. The loam curled off the edge in a long grey ribbon and fell, and the smell came up: clay and horse and something sour underneath, which was the goat hair, which held it all together. Once round. Twice. On the third time the board found a soft place on the shoulder where the coat had gone on thin, and she stopped and filled it with her thumb and went round again.
"The Krone's put a board up," Zenzi said from the trough.
"I know."
"Have you seen it?"
"No."
"Gostner one to three," Zenzi said, in the voice of someone who has waited all morning to say it. "Achterberg six to one. Old Waldner's got two crowns on you, and the Moser cousins have got a crown on him between them, and Hasl Moser put a tongue on him and then came back the next day and put a tongue on you, so whatever happens he gets his tongue back." She giggled. "Frau Kofler won't bet. She says she's bet the tithe already."
"Frau Kofler is right."
"I put four tongues on you."
Theres stopped the strickle. "You haven't got four tongues."
"I had four tongues." Zenzi climbed out of the trough. Her legs were grey to the knee and she stood on the flags dripping, and her face had changed, and Theres knew before she opened her mouth what she was going to say, because she'd been saying it once a week since the Rough Nights. "I could give it. The Waldner. I've got all of mine. I could sing it true without biting anything."
There it was, out on the flags between them. The girl had seen the fork. Of course she had seen the fork.
"No," Theres said.
"You were fifteen."
"I know what I was."
"And your grandmother was fourteen, old Moser says, and her mother was..."
"And her mother was deaf as a post at forty and never once heard her grandchildren say her name. When you're twenty," Theres said, "you can give one. One. And I'll kneel at the throat and hold the straw for you myself. Not before."
"You'll have none left by then."
It was said the way fifteen-year-olds said things, straight out, not meaning to cut. It went in anyway, the way the strickle's edge went into a soft place in the loam and found it.
"Then I'll hold the straw with no ears," Theres said, "and you can tell me how it went. Wash your legs. You're dripping on my floor."
The smoke was Sjoerd's fault, and Floris meant to say so, if she gave him the chance.
He saw her coming from the top of the ladder, where he'd gone to look at the shed roof, which was sound in the way a sieve is sound. She came over the Lower Bridge at a walk that wasn't quite a march, in her leather apron with her sleeves rolled and her forearms grey to the elbow, carrying something out in front of her in both hands like a dead cat.
"Sjoerd," he said.
"I see her."
"It's the larch. I told you about the larch."
"You said use the larch." Sjoerd didn't look up. He was squatting at the door of the drying oven with his shirt off, feeding it from the pile of split wood they'd bought off a man at the bridge for a price that had seemed fair, and the smoke was coming out of the chimney in a thick yellow column, rolling over the river on the breeze and lying down across the Gostner yard on the far bank like a sick dog. "You said, Sjoerd, the larch is cheap."
"I said the larch was cheap."
"It's wet."
"I can see it's wet."
"So."
Floris came down the ladder.
She came in at the gate, past the dead pear tree, and stopped in the middle of the yard and held out what she was carrying. It was a slab of loam the size of a roof tile, grey underneath, and filmed across the top with black, as if someone had stood a frying pan on it.
"That," she said, "was on my false bell."
"Ah."
"There's a skin of that over my whole drying shed. You can write your name in it. Zenzi did. She wrote a word in it Shoe taught her that I'm not repeating." She was watching his mouth, not his eyes. He'd noticed it the first morning and noticed it again now, how her eyes went to his mouth when he started to speak and stayed there till he'd finished. "It's in the loam. If it bakes in, my bell comes out with a black skin on her and pits in the bronze. Then she rings sour. Then I lose."
"Then I win."
"Then you win," Theres Gostner agreed, "because you poisoned my loam with wet larch, and the whole Krone will know it by tonight, and the Wardens will hand you the Hulda, and nobody in Brenndal will buy so much as a cowbell off you for the rest of your life."
Sjoerd said something quietly in delta to the fire.
"It's the wood," Floris said. "We bought it off a man at the bridge. I didn't know. I'm sorry."
"A man at the bridge with one eye?"
"Yes."
"That's Gottfried Tschurtschenthaler. He sells wet larch to everyone who doesn't know him. He's been doing it for thirty years." She dropped the slab, and it broke in two on his cobbles. "Dry pine. Spruce if you have to. Buy it from the Mosers and don't let them sell you the bark."
"He was a Tschurtschenthaler?"
"I told you there were twelve."
"Are any of them honest?"
"The one with the orchard." She very nearly smiled; he watched her decide not to. "He's the one who paid me."
He ought to have let her go then. He knew it while he was saying, "Coffee?"
She looked at him.
"Real coffee," Floris said. "From Dordel, not barley. I brought a sack up the pass because I'd heard what you drink up here, and Sjoerd's been rationing it like it's his blood."
"It is my blood," said Sjoerd, to the fire.
She came in. He hadn't thought she would. She stood just inside the door of the old shed while Sjoerd, muttering, ground the beans in the little brass mill his wife had packed for him, and Floris watched her look at everything and pretend she wasn't: the walls, the pit at the far end that the Wardens' men had dug out for them, the drying oven, and the lathe.
The lathe was why he'd come up the pass with two carts instead of one. Its bed was oak, eight feet long, bolted to sleepers sunk into the floor. Its chuck was a great iron dish with four jaws to hold a bell upside down by the lip, and its crank took two men. Beside it on a bench lay the tools in their oiled cloth, the long-handled hooks Zenzi had called spoons. She'd been right. They looked like spoons.
She went over to the lathe and stood in front of it with her hands behind her back, the way people stood in front of a painting they suspected of being foreign.
"You cast them thick," she said.
"How did you know that?"
"You'd have to. You can't put bronze back." She bent and looked along the bed. "So you cast her a finger thicker than she wants to be on the inside, and then you shave her till she sings."
"Till she agrees with herself. Yes."
"How long does that take?"
"For a four-hundredweight?" He thought about it. "Two days. If Sjoerd's sober."
"I'm always sober," said Sjoerd, handing her a cup. "I'm from Dordel. Nobody in Dordel can afford to drink."
She took the cup and looked into it, and drank, and shut her eyes. Floris found he was holding his own cup in both hands like a boy at a fair.
"Which note?" he said.
"What?"
"For the trial. Kofler said the same note if we can. I'd like to manage it. Which note are you casting her to?"
"The little Waldner."
"Which is?"
She opened her eyes. "It's the little Waldner. It's the note the little Waldner has."
"In letters."
"We don't use letters." But she put the cup down on the lathe bed, and after a moment, without any fuss at all, she sang it: one note, quiet and held, the way he'd heard her sing into the throat. Her voice was low for a woman's and as plain as bread, and there was nothing wrong with the note.
"C," Floris said. "A little sharp of ours. We tune low at home. It's the damp." He hummed it back to her and she nodded once, as if he'd passed something, and picked up the cup again.
"Who taught you the Kettle Song?" she said.
He had known she would ask. He'd known on the bridge two weeks ago, the moment he heard himself start to hum it with her standing behind him at the corner, and thought: you fool. He'd been humming it for thirty years. It came out of him when he walked the way breath does.
"Everyone in the delta knows the Kettle Song," he said. "It came down with the tin carts. In Dordel they sing it at closing in the Weighhouse taverns, and none of them has ever seen a kettle that size."
"Not with the holes in."
So she had heard them. Some of them. He drank his coffee and looked at the lathe.
"My mother," he said.
"She was a giver."
"She was a lot of things." He set his cup down beside hers. "She was from up here, somewhere. She didn't talk about it much. But she sang all day, and she sang everything the way she could sing it, so that's how I learned it."
It was not a lie, quite. Somewhere was Brenndal; he was standing in it. Somewhere was this yard, which his mother had described to him so often that on the first morning he'd walked straight to the dead pear by the gate and found the nail in its trunk where she used to hang her apron. Somewhere was a bell on two trestles in a wine-press house with a bird on its crown, the same bird she'd drawn in flour on the top of his birthday bread every year until her hands got too bad. He had stood in the Torggl with his finger on it and his face, he hoped, doing nothing at all.
She was still watching his mouth. He had a sudden need to give her something to look at that wasn't any of that.
"She used to tell me she'd given half a note once," he said. "To a great bell, her and somebody else together. Half each. I was six. I thought it was the best story in the world. I made her tell it every night." He smiled. "You can't, can you? Give half a note."
"No," said Theres. "If you stop before the bell lets go, she comes out dumb and you've lost all of it."
"That's what I thought."
"Who was the somebody else?"
"She never said." That was true. It was the only part of the story his mother had never told, however he begged. "She'd say, an old witch with a voice like a cart. And laugh." She had also told him the Ice was an old woman with forty cats who lived in a cave and knitted weather, and he'd believed that till he was nine.
Theres finished her coffee and put the cup down. "Thank you," she said. "Pine. Not larch."
"Pine."
She went to the door. He turned his back on her, deliberately, and bent over the bench where the tools lay, and said to the oiled cloth in an ordinary voice, "Mind the second step, it's rotten."
"I know," said Theres behind him. "I nearly went through it coming in."
He straightened up. She was on the step, looking back at him, puzzled, as if he'd warned her about a step she'd already climbed. Then she went out.
So he was wrong. Good. He'd been ready to be wrong; he had his mother in his head the way some men had a tune, and he heard her in places she wasn't. Floris went to the door to watch her go. She crossed his yard toward the gate, past the broken slab of loam, past Sjoerd, who had come out with a rag over his shoulder and picked up one half of it.
"Master Gostner," Sjoerd called after her. "You've left your loam."
She didn't turn round. She didn't slow down. She went out of the gate and over the bridge at the same walk she'd come in on, and Sjoerd stood holding the slab and looking at her back.
"Proud, that one," he said.
"Yes," said Floris.
But his mother had walked on like that too. In the street, on the quay, in the kitchen with the kettle shrieking behind her, she had walked on with her back very straight while people called after her, and if you went round in front of her and said it again, she would look at your mouth and say, quite sharply, Again, as if you had mumbled. Theres had said it to him the first morning, in the foundry door. Again. He had put it down to the way they talked up here.
He'd heard her answer him just now with his back turned. Every word.
Sjoerd threw the loam on the midden. "Pine," he said. "I heard. Where do I get pine?"
"The Mosers," said Floris. "Not the bark."
The forks lived in the bottom drawer of the chest in Theres's room, under her winter stockings, in a roll of brown velvet tied with tape. She had bought them in Dordel at nineteen, on the third day of rain, from a stall under the Weighhouse arches where an old man sold spectacles and scales and tuning forks to the delta's bellwrights. Thirty-three of them, steel, every one stamped with the little anchor, the old man's whole stock from the top of a girl's voice to the bottom of it. She'd paid six crowns for the roll and eaten nothing but bread for the rest of the trip, and she had never shown them to anyone. No valley founder would own a lowland fork. A valley founder had her ears.
She untied the tape by the light of the candle and unrolled them on the bed.
She did this some nights. Not often. When the house was quiet and she couldn't sleep and the short column on the post had gone round her head enough times. She went down the roll from the top, the high forks first, and struck each one on her knee and held it to her ear, and then, when it gave her nothing, set the stem against her teeth and bit.
The top one she could hear, a thin bright note with no name, too high for any bell the valley wanted. Then a long run of dead. Even in her teeth, dead; they buzzed against the bone with no note in them at all, only the feeling of one, like a fly against glass. Eight together, the last of them the little Obexer that had gone out a fortnight ago. Then the little Waldner. That was the trial bell. She held it to her ear a long time.
She went on down. She knew what she'd find and she found it. Six dead, and then one she could hear, the Spitz, which she'd kept back for no reason she could have given. Five dead. The Bruder, named for a bell at the pass hospice that nobody down here had ever had cause to copy. Four dead. Mena's, low and round, which she had kept for nothing in particular, only to have one more down there. Three dead.
And the last fork in the roll but one (the very last had been dead since she was twenty), the big one, as long as her hand and heavy, which she struck and held to her ear, and heard.
Hulda's note came out of the steel into the candlelit room, low and steady, as if somebody were standing very close to her in the dark and humming.
She held it. It began to die away, and she struck it again, and it came up again, and she sat on the bed with the fork at her ear and her other hand flat on her knee, and understood something she had been not quite understanding all afternoon.
He had turned his back on her. In his shed, with his face to the bench, he'd said mind the step, and she'd answered him, and he'd straightened up and looked at her as if she'd done something odd. She'd gone over the bridge thinking about it. People did not, as a rule, turn their backs and speak to Theres Gostner, because she didn't answer them, and they thought she was proud, which she had decided long ago was better than the truth. But she had heard him. She'd heard every word he said all afternoon, the lathe and the coffee and his mother and the half a note, the way she had in the foundry door. Not because he spoke clearly. Plenty of people spoke clearly.
It was the note. This note, under every word he said, the way a floor is under a room. He talked on it. He stood on it, and everything else in his voice was built up from there, and so it came to her whole, when every other voice in the valley came in pieces.
Theres let the fork die in her hand. She thought of her grandmother's fingers round her wrist in the dark back bedroom. You keep Hulda's for the Hulda. She thought of the bell on its trestles in the Torggl with the rowan at her crown. When the new Hulda was cast, whoever cast it, a Gostner would have to give her; no other founder in the valley had that note left to give. Theres would stand at the throat and sing Hulda's note into her, and feel the hook set, and feel it draw out.
And after that the lowlander would go back to Dordel or not, and either way, for the rest of her life, his voice would come to her like everybody else's. With the floor gone out of it.
Well. That would be a mercy. She rolled up the forks, tied the tape and put them back under the stockings, and blew out the candle, and lay a long time with her eyes open, saying so.
He came across in the morning while she was laying the first coat on the false bell. She heard him at the gate, which was to say she heard him say "You were right about the Plank boys," over the wall, in that voice, before she'd seen him at all.
"I'm usually right about the Plank boys."
"They tried to sell me a goat. A whole goat. I don't know what they thought I'd do with it."
She didn't turn round. She had loam on both hands and the coat was going on well, smooth and even, the false bell's thickness building up over the core a finger at a time, and if she stopped now it would skin before she came back to it. "Zenzi's at the Mosers' getting pine for you. You can thank her."
He didn't answer.
She worked. She laid the loam on with the flat of her hand and smoothed it up toward the crown as her grandmother had taught her, as if calming a horse. The yard was very quiet. Behind her she could hear the river, a little, the low part of it, and a cart somewhere on the Torggl lane. Nothing else. He might have gone. He had a way of going without saying so, she'd noticed, of being there and then being across the bridge humming.
She turned round to see.
He was standing just inside her gate, by the water butt. He had a fork in his hand. It was a lowland fork, steel, she could see the anchor from where she stood, and he'd just struck it on the butt's iron hoop, because the tines were a blur in the morning light. He was holding it out toward her at arm's length, very still, the way you'd hold out a bit of bread to a bird.
She could hear nothing at all.
She looked at the blur of the tines. He looked at her. He didn't say anything. He struck it again on the hoop, and held it out again, and she watched the tines blur and slow and go still in a yard full of river and cartwheels, and kept her face exactly where it was, and he watched her keep it there.
He put that fork in his coat pocket and took out another, and struck it.
Nothing.
"Floris," she said. "What are you doing?"
He put the second fork away. His face wasn't pleased, she saw. She'd thought it would be pleased. It had the look her father's had when the cope came off a bell and he saw a flaw in her, low down by the lip, where it couldn't be mended.
"How many have you got left?" he said.