Chapter 3: Rope Day
"Enough," Theres said.
"Enough for what?"
"Enough to beat you." She turned back to the false bell. The coat had started to skin at the shoulder while she stood there being stared at, and she wet her palm in the bucket and worked it smooth again, and kept her back to him, which was a stupid thing to do with the one man in the valley she could hear perfectly well with her back turned. "Put your forks away. Zenzi'll be back with the pine and she'll want to know what they're for."
"Those were the little Obexer and the Wieser," he said. "I asked the girl which bells you'd given last. I'm sorry. I had to know."
"Why?"
He didn't answer that. She heard a boot scrape on her cobbles and thought he was going, and then he said, much closer, "I won't say anything. To anyone."
"What do you want for it?"
"Nothing."
"Nobody in Brenndal wants nothing."
"I'm not from Brenndal," said Floris Achterberg, and this time when she turned round he really had gone, and was out on the bridge with his hands in his coat pockets, not humming.
She waited for it all week. Hasl Moser said good morning to her on the Torggl steps the way he'd said it for twenty years, too loudly, because she was a Gostner, and nothing else. Nobody spoke to her more slowly. Nobody touched her elbow to get her attention. Old Waldner told her a joke about a Tschurtschenthaler and a goat, and she missed the end of it and laughed in the right place, and he never knew.
On the bridge, the lowlander nodded to her and she nodded back.
By the end of the week she would have preferred it if he'd told them.
She poured on the twelfth of May, ten days before Rope Day, in the late afternoon, which was when her grandmother had always poured, because the light in the shed was gold then and you could see the colour of the metal.
The furnace had been going since before dawn. It was a squat brick thing built into the shed's end wall, its hearth sloping down to a tap-hole stopped with clay, and Zenzi had fed it pine and charcoal all day while the bronze went from a heap of ingots and broken bell to a slow red porridge to something that moved like water and gave off a light you couldn't look at. From the tap-hole a clay channel ran across the floor to the pit, where the mould was buried to its crown in rammed earth with only the pouring cup and the throat showing: two holes in the ground, one wide, one narrow, side by side like a nose.
There were more people in the shed than she liked. Hasl Moser, because a Warden had to witness the metal weighed in and the pour made, so that nobody cast a heavier bell than the trial allowed and won by it. Old Waldner and two of his grandsons, because it was going into his ringing-house. And Floris Achterberg, leaning on the doorpost, with Shoe behind him eating something out of a paper.
She had not invited him. He'd stood in her door at four o'clock and said, "May I?" and with Hasl and the Waldners all watching to see what she'd do, she had said, "Don't touch anything," because sending him off would have been a scene.
"Ready," Zenzi said. She had a face on her like a turnip lantern, pale and lit from underneath. It was her ninth pour and it was always like that.
Theres took the tapping bar. "Stand back from the channel."
They stood back. She put the bar's point to the clay plug and leaned on it, and the plug gave all at once, as it always did, and the metal came.
It came out of the furnace like something that had been waiting. It ran down the channel in a bright thick rope, skinning and breaking and skinning again, the colour of a sunset through a window, and the heat came off it so hard she felt her eyebrows tighten. It reached the pouring cup and went down into the dark and the ground took it. You could hear the mould breathe as the air went out of it, a long hollow sigh up through the throat, and a puff of white came off the rammed earth where the last damp in it boiled. Then the cup was brimming, and she knocked the dam down across the channel with the bar, and it was done.
Four hundredweight of bronze, under the floor, red.
"Straw," she said.
Zenzi was already kneeling at the throat. Theres knelt opposite. The heat coming up the pipe was a dry wind; the straw caught at once and burned down to the girl's fingers, and Zenzi lit another.
Theres put the fork in her teeth and struck it on her heel. The little Waldner came up through the bone. She took the fork out, leaned down to the throat and sang it.
She knew straight away it was wrong.
She couldn't have said how. The note went down the pipe and it felt like the note, it felt the way it always felt, but there was something under it, a roughness, like running your thumb along a board and finding the grain lifted. The fork was still going in her hand. She put it to her teeth again without stopping singing, which you could not do, which made the note shake, and the fork said one thing in her jaw and her own voice said another, and she couldn't tell which of them had moved.
She'd been flat with the little Obexer, he'd said. A hair. She'd come up onto it. She had not known she was flat. She had come up onto it by luck.
The hook hadn't set. She could feel it not setting, the bell lying under the floor not taking hold, the window going by. Zenzi's straw was still catching, for now. Theres sang. She pushed the note up a hair and felt it go wrong the other way, and brought it down.
Somebody knelt beside her on the loam.
He didn't say anything. He put his mouth to her ear, turned away from the pipe so that nothing of his went down it, and hummed the little Waldner.
She heard it. Every hair of it. It came into her ear as true as a plumb line, and beside it her own voice was a hair under, and she could hear that now too, the two notes rubbing like the halves of a bad hinge. She tried to come up to him and overshot. Came down. Couldn't find the place. Her own voice was too loud inside her head and his was outside it, and the space between them was the width of a hair, and she couldn't get across.
So she took her hand off her knee and put two fingers on his throat.
She did it without thinking, the way you'd put a hand on a wall in the dark. Under the hinge of his jaw, where the voice was. His skin was hot from the throat's heat and rough with a day's beard, and she felt him go still under her fingers, and then the hum went on, steadier than before, and she could feel it. Not hear; feel. A fine fast buzz under the pads of her fingers, the exact shape of the note, the way she felt a fork in her teeth.
She matched it. She brought her voice up until the buzz in her fingers and the buzz in her chest were the same buzz, and nothing was rubbing anywhere.
The bell took hold.
The hook set and drew. She sang the little Waldner down into the dark with her fingers on a lowlander's throat and her eyes shut, and felt the note come out of her, slow and even, the line paying out, until it came free.
When she opened her eyes Zenzi's straw had gone out.
The lowlander was still humming. She could see it. She could feel it under her fingers, the buzz going on, fine and steady. And she couldn't hear a thing. Where his voice had been a moment ago there was a clean hole the exact size of it, and through the hole she could hear the furnace ticking and Shoe's paper rustling in the doorway.
The last thing she would ever hear on the little Waldner was him.
She took her hand away. He stopped humming. They were kneeling very close on her shed floor with the heat coming up between them, his face a hand's width from hers, and he looked as though he'd been struck and was waiting to find out where.
"It's in," Zenzi said. "Isn't it? Theres. It's in?"
"It's in," Theres said. "Cap it."
By Saturday the Krone had taken its board down and put up another one. Gostner and Achterberg, even money. And underneath, in Toni Gasser's handwriting, a side bet.
"A wedding by the harvest," Zenzi said. "Four to one. Old Waldner's put a crown on it. So have the Plank boys. Hasl told everyone about the throat. He did the bit with your hand. They made him do it twice." She looked at Theres's face and added, rather quickly, "I haven't bet on it."
Theres was eating her soup. She went on eating it.
"Shoe has," said Zenzi.
His bell came out of the pit clean on the Sunday. On the Monday he and Shoe stood her on her head on the lathe, and Theres, who had told herself she would not look, found that if she leaned out over her bedroom sill she could see lamplight in the Pranter shed late both nights, and two shapes going round at the crank.
On the Tuesday evening he rang it.
He did it in his yard, the bell slung from a beam on a chain and struck once with a wooden mallet, just to hear her. Theres was on the river road coming back from the Mosers with a sack of charcoal on her shoulder, and she knew he'd done it because everyone on the road stopped. A woman with a goat. Two carters. Old Obexer on his stick. They all turned toward the Pranter yard at once, like cows in a field when the gate goes, and then the sound reached her.
She couldn't hear the strike. She'd known she wouldn't; it was the little Waldner, and the little Waldner was gone. But a bell is not one note, he'd said in the Torggl, it's five, and the other four came to her across the river one after another and stood in the air.
There was the hum, low and round, an octave under, like a big animal breathing. There was something above it she couldn't name, bright and a little sad, that might have been the one he called the tierce. Something higher still that came and went. And every one of them was so exactly in tune with the others that they didn't sound like several notes at all but like one thing seen from several sides; and in the middle, where the strike should have been, was the hole her own voice had made, and she found she didn't mind it. The bell was so true round it that the hole was the right shape.
It went on for a long time. Longer than any valley bell. When it was gone the woman with the goat said something to one of the carters and they both laughed, a little embarrassed, and walked on.
Theres put the sack down on the road and sat on it.
On Rope Day the whole of Brenndal went up the terraces.
They went up in the morning, after the old ropes had been brought down from every ringing-house in the valley and burnt on the bonfire outside the Torggl, and the ash shovelled into sacks to strew on the vines for luck. The new ropes went up on the founders' shoulders, as they always had: coils of fresh Moser hemp with a red wool beard bound on near the tail where the ringers' hands went. Theres carried the Waldner rope herself, and old Waldner walked behind her the whole way with a grandson on each arm, telling her the Tschurtschenthaler joke again, so that she could miss the end of it again.
Across the gully the lowlander was climbing the Kofler path with a rope on his shoulder, and Shoe behind him carrying something long and coiled and dull red that wasn't a rope.
"Copper," said Zenzi, who had been over the bridge again. "For lightning. He's nailing it down the Kofler house from the roof to a plate in the turf. In Dordel they've had them on every tower for thirty years and never lost a ringer. He says lightning likes copper better than ringers." She considered. "Shoe says that's because ringers are mostly beer."
They hung the bells at noon and every house on the terraces rang together for a little, to wake the ropes, and then they ate. Rope bread, braided and salted, with speck and a soft white cheese, and last year's wine out of the barrel. People sat on the terrace walls in rows with their legs hanging, said "Good summer" to each other, and watched the Rotgrat, which was the whole point of the day.
At two o'clock the Rotgrat began to smoke.
It started, as it always did, as a little white flag off the top of the ridge, the kind of thing a stranger would have called a pretty cloud. By half past it was a column. By three it had flattened out on top into the shape every child in Brenndal could draw before it could write its name, and someone on the wall below Theres said, quite cheerfully, "Kettle's got its lid on," and the terraces began to empty toward the ringing-houses.
The first stones came at a quarter to four. She saw them before she felt them: a grey curtain walking down off the scree, the light in front of it going yellow, the swallows that had been everywhere all afternoon suddenly nowhere. Then the curtain reached the top row of vines and turned white.
"Ring," Theres said.
There were four of them in the Waldner house: herself, Zenzi, and the two Waldner grandsons, who were big lads. They took it in turns, two on the rope and two resting, and the rope never stopped. You pulled down on the beard and let it fly and caught it and pulled again, and above you the bell went over, and over, and you did not stop because your shoulders hurt or your hands had blistered or you were frightened. You stopped when the storm stopped. Ringers in the old days had died at the rope, her grandmother said, sooner than let go of it, and been found in the morning with their fists closed.
She put her hands on the beard and pulled.
Through the louvres she could see the hail coming down the slope at them, the stones the size of hazelnuts and then of walnuts, bouncing knee-high off the terrace walls. She could feel it on the roof over her head, a roar in the boards like gravel tipped off a cart.
And then, quite close, there was a line on the slope.
It ran across the Waldner vines in a long curve, thirty yards below the house and then forty and then fifty as the bell went on. On one side of it, the white. On the other, rain: plain grey rain, heavy, the kind you'd curse on a market day, coming down in rods and running off the walls in brown spouts. The leaves inside the line were dark and wet and whole. The leaves outside it were rags.
She'd been seeing it since she was four years old on her father's shoulders. It still made her want to sit down on the floor.
"Look," said Zenzi, at the louvre. "Theres. Look at his."
Across the gully, a long stone's throw off, the Kofler house stood on its knoll with its door open and the new copper strap down its side like a red seam. She could see the rope going and the ringers' arms, and the bell over the doorway swinging fast and steady and beautifully even. And all round it the hail was coming down on the Kofler vines exactly as if no bell were there at all.
No line, no rain: the white on everything, Ottilie Kofler's best terraces going to shreds under it, and Kofler herself standing in the door of her press-shed down on the lane with her hands on her hips. Theres couldn't hear what she was shouting. She could see it well enough. Most of it had Ice in it, and several of the words ended in Achterberg.
She couldn't hear his bell. She could imagine it, though. She'd heard it in his yard on Tuesday, all those voices agreeing with each other: the truest sound in the valley, ringing out over a ruined slope, and the hail coming down through the middle of it as if it were listening to music.
"It's dumb," Zenzi said, in a voice with a kind of awe in it. "It's beautiful and it's dumb."
"Change," Theres said. "Arms."
They changed. She sat on the bench with her hands open on her knees and watched the line on the slope, and let herself have a minute of being right. Then she took the beard back, because it was her turn.
At half past four the storm's heart came over the Rotgrat.
She felt it first in the rope. The bell above her seemed to drag; the air was so thick it was like ringing through water. The light went the colour of a bruise, and the roar on the roof doubled, and through the louvres the hail was no longer a curtain but a wall, stones like eggs smashing on the walls and leaping, and the line on the slope began to come back toward her.
Forty yards. Thirty. All three of them were on the rope now, Zenzi at the louvre calling the distance, and the line came on up the Waldner terraces eating them, a white bite out of the wet. The bell was not big enough. She had known it wouldn't be; four hundredweight would hold a hard storm, not this, the kind of storm that had cracked the Hulda. Twenty yards. It would reach the house and go over it, and the board at the Krone could pay out on nobody.
She pulled. Her shoulders had stopped hurting, which was worse.
"Theres," said Zenzi, at the louvre. Her voice had gone odd. "Theres, it's stopped."
It had. The line hung twenty yards down the slope, wavering, and the hail beat on it and could not get through.
Then it began to go back.
A yard. Two. She pulled, and felt something in the boards under her feet that she didn't understand: the bell going over above her, and with it, on the very same stroke, a second weight landing. A deep slow thrum in the floor that came exactly when hers came and doubled it. She had felt bells together before. They never landed together. They wandered in and out of each other like drunks walking home. This landed with hers stroke for stroke, like her bell's shadow.
"Zenzi. What's he doing?"
Zenzi looked. "They're ringing the same as us. When we go over, they go over. He's in the door with his arm up, bringing it down every time ours goes, so Shoe can see."
Same note, Kofler had said in the Torggl, if you can manage it. He'd managed it. And now he was ringing his true dumb bell in step with her given one, and the floor of the Waldner house was full of the two of them landing together, and the line was going down the slope.
Down past the Waldner bottom wall, where it had never in her life gone, and on onto the next terraces, the Obexer strip and the Moser cousins' vines. And sideways. That was what she would remember afterward. It went sideways across the gully, over the stream and up the far slope and across the Kofler vines, where the leaves that were left were suddenly wet instead of white, and up round the Kofler house on its knoll, and past it.
Ottilie Kofler stood in her press-shed door in the pouring rain with her hands still on her hips and her mouth open.
"Ring," Theres said, because the grandsons had stopped to stare. "Don't you stop. Don't you dare."
They rang till six, while the storm split on the valley like a river on a rock and went down either side of it, white over the empty high pasture and the scree, grey rain over every vine in Brenndal. At a quarter past five lightning came down on the Kofler house. Theres saw it through the louvres, a white crack standing straight up from the roof to the sky, and the copper strap went bright as a wire in a forge for the length of a blink, and the turf at the bottom of it jumped and smoked. The Kofler bell stumbled once, and went over again exactly with hers.
Floris Achterberg had been right about copper, and she would have to tell him so.
It was nearly dark when they came out. Everything dripped. The terraces ran with brown water and the air smelled of crushed leaves and wet stone and of something cold and clean coming down off the Ice behind the storm, which was the smell of it being over. Her arms hung off her like ropes.
The lowlander was coming across the gully on the footbridge with Shoe behind him. His shirt was wet through and one hand was wrapped in a rag, and he was smiling in a dazed way, like a man who's been hit on the head with something pleasant.
They met on the path below the Waldner house. Neither of them said anything for a while.
"The copper," Theres said at last.
"Yes."
"It came down the copper."
"It likes copper," Floris said, "better than ringers."
Ottilie Kofler was coming up the path from the lane with Hasl Moser holding a sack over her head for a hood. She was soaked to the knee and her face was set like a cheese in a press. She stopped below them and looked from one to the other, the look she gave a cask she suspected of being short.
"Well," she said. "Which of you won?"
"She did," said Floris. "Mine did nothing at all until hers was going. You saw it."
"Mine was failing," Theres said. "It would have gone over the house in five minutes. His put it back."
"So you've both lost," said Ottilie Kofler, "and I'll pay accordingly." She wiped the rain out of her eyes with the side of her hand. "You'll cast the Hulda. The two of you. Her pit, her mould, her note, whatever it is you do with your chin over a pipe, Theres. Then you'll put her on his wheel and shave her till she sings. Between you I'll pay three hundred crowns and not a tongue more, and you can split it how you like, and if either of you wants to argue, I am going home to my fire to have a cry about my vines and you can argue with Hasl."
She went off down the path in the dark under her sack. Hasl gave them both a look of enormous sympathy and followed her.
"Three hundred," said Floris, after a while, "is a hundred more than I asked."
"It's a hundred and twenty less than I did."
"You asked too much."
"You asked too little, and you knew it, so they'd come to you." She was too tired to be angry about it; it sat in her chest like a stone at the bottom of a pond, a long way down. "Why does a man come up the pass with two carts of Dordel metal to cast a bell at half price?"
He didn't answer straight away. They had started down the path together without either of them deciding to, the way they had from the Torggl, and the water ran past their boots in a little brown stream. Behind them the grandsons were coming down with Zenzi between them, singing the Kettle Song, badly, every line.
"If we're going to cast her together," Floris said, "you should know whose yard I'm renting."
"The Pranters'."
"My mother was Cilli Pranter."
Theres stopped walking.
She knew the name. Everyone her age knew it, the way you knew the name of a cliff someone had fallen off. The Pranter girl. Her grandmother had said it perhaps four times in Theres's hearing in fifteen years, and every time as if she'd found it in her mouth like a stone in the bread. The Pranter girl, the Gostners' apprentice, the best ear in the valley, who had given more bells in five years than most founders gave in twenty because those were the bad years; who had walked out over the pass one autumn night with a tin merchant from the delta and never come back, and left the valley a throat short for ten years. The Pranter girl took her ears to the lowlands.
"She was rung out at twenty-one," Floris said. He was looking down at the dark terraces, where the water was running off the walls. "She had three notes left when she came down to Dordel. My father's voice sat on one of them. She said that was why she married him. Me, she said, she could hear from the next room, whichever room I was in. She used to sit in the front window and sing the Kettle Song with the holes in, and the boys off the quay would stand outside and laugh at her, and she couldn't hear them, so she'd wave."
Theres said nothing. There wasn't anything that wouldn't have been an insult.
"That bird on the Hulda's crown," he said. "It isn't your great-aunt's."
"It's Mena's. Mena poured the Hulda."
"My mother drew that bird on my birthday bread," Floris said. "In flour. Every year until her hands went. She drew it on letters and on the flyleaf of every book in the house, she drew it in the steam on the kitchen window. She said it was a wren, because a wren is the smallest bird with the loudest voice." He looked at her at last. "Did your great-aunt Mena draw birds?"
Theres opened her mouth to say yes, and found she didn't know.
What she knew about Mena Gostner would have gone on the back of a wine label. Mena had poured. Mena had been the plain one. Mena had died before Theres was born, and nobody spoke about her much, and her mark was on the Hulda's crown because the bird was Mena's. Because Grandmother had said so. Theres had asked her once, very young, sitting on the end of the bed in the back room, whose is the bird?, and the old woman had looked at the shutters for so long that Theres thought she hadn't heard, and then said: My sister's. Whose else would it be.
Theres had been eleven. She'd believed her. It had not occurred to her that a deaf woman might hear you perfectly well and say nothing for a long time because she was deciding which lie to tell.