The Bells Page 4

  One was a handsome giant, with a halo of fair hair, a thick gray beard, a smile fixed upon his face. The other was smaller, pale. He chewed his lip. He wrung his greasy hands. They both wore black tunics, drawn with leathern belts. The giant’s tunic was sopping, for he had saved me from the river and then thumped my chest until I revived.

  “It is Moses swimming in the Nile,” said the giant, his grin as warm as the sun. He offered me a massive hand. “Come and be our king.”

  I cowered from the hand, dreading any touch but my mother’s. In any case, the smaller man quickly batted the larger’s hand away. “I said you should not touch him,” he muttered.

  “He’s just a boy,” the giant said, and he bent down and clutched both hands around my ribs, his thumbs pressing into my heart. His hands were warm and soft, yet every muscle in my body tightened. He held me up like a goatherd might inspect a kid. I was entirely naked, washed clean by the river. “What’s your name?”

  I did not answer. In fact, I could not answer—the villagers had only ever called me “that Froben boy” or “the idiot child.” I kept rigid and hoped that he would put me down so I could run away and find my mother. He shrugged. “Well, Moses is a fine enough name for boys swimming in rivers. Mine is Nicolai. The wolf here is Remus. We are monks.”

  I looked from the one man to the next, trying to extract a meaning from this term. Monks? I found nothing in common between the two except their tunics.

  “All right,” this Remus said, impatiently, his face screwed up as if against a noxious smell. “He is alive. Send him on his way.”

  “No!” the giant cried. “Are you so heartless?” He swung me down so I sat in the crux of his elbow and forced my cheek against the wet wool of his tunic until I itched from ear to hip. His heart thumped into my ear.

  “You’ve done your duty. You saved his life,” Remus said.

  Nicolai’s body recoiled in shock. “Remus, someone threw him in that river!”

  “You don’t know that. He could have fallen.”

  “Did you fall into the water?” the giant asked me. I did not answer—in fact, I did not even hear, for I was mesmerized by the beating of his heart, so much slower and deeper than my mother’s. The heart of a bull.

  “Come on,” Nicolai urged. “You can tell me. Who threw you in?”

  I closed my eyes. My heart was slowing, matching itself to the measured rhythm of the giant’s. My muscles loosened and, without willing it, I melted into his arms.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Remus said. “He’ll probably lie to us in any case. Watch your purse.”

  “Remus!”

  “You must leave him here.” Remus pointed at the grassy bank.

  “Here? Naked in the grass? How can you say that? What if those monks who found me on their doorstep had left me there? Where would you be now?”

  “I would be reading in my cell. In peace.”

  “Exactly. And instead you are seeing the world.”

  “I don’t want to see the world. I have told you that before. I want to go home. We are two months late.”

  “Another day won’t matter.”

  “Put him down.”

  Nicolai turned his back to Remus. He carried me several steps along the bank. I opened my eyes and looked up into his face. He peered down with the friendliest gaze I had ever seen. His breath was like a warm draft flitting up a cliff. “Remus is right,” he whispered to me. “He always is, and that’s why no one likes him. But I won’t just leave you here. Point me toward your home, and I’ll help you find your father.”

  I started so violently that Nicolai nearly dropped me. I looked around in a panic, worried I might see Karl Victor crouching in the grass.

  “My God,” Nicolai said. “That’s it! Isn’t it? It was your father! Remus,” Nicolai shouted, rushing back to the scowling, smaller monk. “His father threw him in!”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “He tried to kill his own son. That means this boy is an orphan. Just like me.”

  Remus covered his face with his hands. “Nicolai, you are not an orphan anymore—have not been for forty years. You are a monk. And monks cannot take in children.”

  Nicolai considered this. His beard bristled as he smiled. “He can become a novice.”

  “Staudach will not have him.”

  “I will speak with him.” Nicolai nodded confidently. “Make him understand what is at stake. His father tried to kill him.”

  “Nicolai,” Remus said calmly, as if explaining a simple formula, “you cannot take this child.”

  “Remus, he was floating down the river. Sinking. He would have drowned.”

  “And you saved him. But taking him with us is a responsibility you cannot bear.”

  Nicolai shifted me so I was cradled in his arms, looking up at his halo of curly hair, the sky beyond. He stroked my cheek with a finger as thick as a bell rope. “Do you want to come with us?” he said.

  How was I to know what he offered? For all I knew, the world terminated at those distant peaks, and every village had a Karl Victor. If someone had told me that there were but a thousand men in the wide world, I would have thought, My God! So many! But I saw in this face above me such a look of hope. Say yes, his eyes said. Tell me you need me. I will not fail.

  I wanted to go home to my mother.

  “Nicolai, listen to me, you have made a vow—”

  “I can make another.”

  “That is not how it works. Such vows are perpet—”

  “I vow—”

  “Nicolai, don’t. You can take him until we find a safe place to leave him, but don’t—”

  Nicolai looked into my eyes. Such kindness. But where was my mother? Still lying on the floor of our hut?

  “I vow,” he said, “that whatever happens, I will protect you.”

  Remus groaned. He began to say more, but Nicolai could not hear him, because suddenly, as though my mother had felt my yearning, the bells of Nebelmatt began to ring. Nicolai and Remus both cringed as the pealing shook them to their cores. Remus hunched his shoulders and stuck a dirty finger in each of his ears. Nicolai covered one side of my head with a huge palm and pressed my other ear against his chest, but I struggled until he put me down. I stepped down to the bank of the Reuss and looked up at the mountains. My mother was alive!

  I ignored the kind man who had saved me from the river. Remus tried to pull him away, but Nicolai just stood and covered his ears and watched me—the little boy who was clearly not harmed by this sound that shook the ground beneath our feet.

  My mother was well enough to have pulled herself off the muddy floor and climb to her bells! She played them now so fiercely it was as though she played the mountains themselves with her mallets.

  A quarter hour passed, and then the same again. Remus stuffed his ears with scraps of wool and took out a book. Nicolai just watched me—fingers plugging his ears—as if I were a wild beast he had never glimpsed before. My mother rang her bells far longer than she was allowed. It had been many years since she was beaten for such excess. Now, I knew, the Nebelmatters crouched behind their doors, switches in their hands, ready to climb to the church as soon as it was safe.

  And still she played the bells. She stroked them more ferociously than I had ever heard. There was almost no pause between the strikes. Then I heard a sudden change: she had cracked the soundbow of the smallest bell. Still she did not stop.

  I heard that she was calling him. As my father struggled back up the rocky path, drenched in mud and sweat and shame, he would have heard the pealing as a judgment resounding throughout the world. And he would have hated her for every ring, just as he hated her for tempting him, for exposing his sin with a child, and for making him a murderer. With each ring, he must have sworn that he would silence her.

  She taunted him up the muddy track with the promise she would sound his guilt until he stopped her. I am sure she watched him coming, but she did not slow or soften the ringing. Tears ran down my face and I
screamed for my mother. “I am here!” I yelled. “I am alive!” But even Nicolai could not hear me. She beat those bells louder still, daring my father to climb to her tower and make her stop. In this tempest, the ground rumbled and the river crashed its waves around our feet, and I closed my eyes and imagined at the center of it all, my mother pounding her bells, summoning my father.

  Twenty years later, when I would first return to that valley, the legend of the priest who had saved the ears of Nebelmatt was still recounted in every tavern. They took me for a foreigner and told me of the gentle priest and the evil witch who laid siege to the town from her belfry, who rang the bells day and night until the villagers began to lose their minds. They told me how the holy priest climbed the track to that church and disappeared inside—God had given him unearthly courage. From the village, they saw his silhouette leap through the trapdoor into the belfry. She danced around him, striking her bells until his ears were blown useless by the noise. And then, in his silent world, he lunged at her, the nimble demon, as she darted among the devil’s bells. He grabbed her gown, nearly fell, tottered on the edge of the belfry, hanging on the merest scrap of fabric in his fist. He yelled for her help. She leapt at him, as if she would embrace him. Then every eye in the village watched them fall.

  No new priest was ever sent for. The bells were melted back into hoes.

  But on that day, standing by that river, as I screamed up to my mother that I lived, what I imagined was very different. She struck her bells so hard that there, at the center of that noise, I was sure the world began to lose its firmness, the waves of sound rent apart my parents’ every fiber. I alone, above the pealing, heard my father’s scream echo off the mountains. Perhaps this was the moment his eardrums burst. But that child was certain his father screamed because his body was torn apart by the waves.

  The bells did not ring again. Was she gone? Somehow I knew she was. The echoes around me hummed for several minutes. Just as every drop of ocean water was once a drop of rain, I heard then that every sound in the world had once been in my mother’s bells: the tinkling river, the whoosh of swallows darting after flies, the warm breath of the kind monk standing behind me. She was gone and she was everywhere.

  Nicolai gently coughed. He lifted me as I crumpled into his arms. With each cry and sob, he held me tighter. When Remus opened his mouth to protest, Nicolai simply showed him a giant palm. The ugly monk closed his mouth and shook his head. Nicolai carried me to the road, where stood the three largest horses I had ever seen. Remus slunk after us. Nicolai swung both of us onto the lead horse, and placed me between his massive thighs.

  “Hold tight,” he said. I could not see anything to hold, and as the horse took his first rocking step, I yelled in fright and tried to leap to the safety of the ground. Nicolai pulled me back. I closed my eyes, sloshing tears down my cheeks, and tried to picture my mother’s face, but I could not hold it in my mind. Instead, for comfort, I listened to the hollow thump of Nicolai’s gentle kicks into the horse’s ribs, the slurp of the monstrous hooves in the mud, the swish of the horse’s mane. And I looked ahead, down the bleary road, and wondered how far my mother’s bells had reached.

  We turned off the road at Gurtnellen, and in that town of three hundred souls, I thought we had reached the center of the universe. Men wore clothes that were gray or white instead of brown. One of them withdrew a watch, and I took its tick-tick-tick as the beating heart of some tiny pocket beast. A lady, leaving a house made of stone, opened a parasol—whoop—that made me clasp Nicolai’s thick arm in fright.

  Remus muttered to Nicolai that a naked boy on a monk’s lap was a sight that could cause us trouble, and so, from a tailor, Nicolai bought me linen underclothes and woolen breeches. The linen was as soft as a feather, but the breeches were as uncomfortable as Karl Victor’s belt around my neck. Later, we went into a tavern and ate plates of steaming stew and drank wine. After eight or ten glasses of the sour stuff, Nicolai stood with one foot on his chair. “Gentlemen,” he said to the traders and farmers in the room, “let me teach you what I learned in Rome.” He clapped his huge hands together, dropped his chin, and, in a booming bass, sang such a silly song in a language I took for gibberish that I smiled for the first time in many days. The other men in the room cheered and clapped, but Remus turned red and, after a second song, pulled us on our way.

  We slept in inns along the road. I wrapped myself in blankets on the floor, and Nicolai and Remus slept in beds. When I sniffled in the night, Nicolai always woke and curled beside me on the floor, whose planks creaked beneath him. “Little Moses,” he’d whisper in my ear, “this is a massive world, full of joys, each one just waiting for you to claim. Don’t worry, there’s nothing more to fear. Nicolai is with you now.”

  On the third day, we passed out of Canton Uri into Canton Schwyz, and walked along Lake Lucerne, which I knew must be full of fearsome beasts. But even the imagined monsters of those depths were more familiar to me than the civilization we encountered. The world was so much vaster than I had ever envisioned. I stored every sound away with the frantic urgency of the miser who finds a money box spilled in the street: the lap of waves, the oarlock’s whine, the soldiers’ measured march, the boom of their musket practice, the wheezing of a plough through mud, the wind through a field of spring oats. Traders passed us speaking a thousand different tongues, and Nicolai told me how they had crossed the Alps to Italy.

  Along the road, beggars swarmed around our horses and strained toward Nicolai and Remus with bony fingers, moaning like goats. Nicolai threw them coppers. Remus made as if he did not hear them cry. I feared they would pull me off the saddle and cook me in a stew. I began to understand that in this world there were a million people with a million fates, most of them unlucky. And here was I—no father, no mother, no home I could return to.

  VI.

  In the mornings, Nicolai woke us with his chanting of Matins. He was fastidious in his observance of the Holy Offices, steadfast in his completion of the weekly Psalm cycle. He carried no other book on his journey than a thin, leather-bound Rule of St. Benedict, which he did not need, for he had committed it to heart through daily readings over almost forty years. Remus and I stayed in bed until he had finished his prayers. Then we breakfasted on porridge, great hunks of cheese, and ale.

  Each day, as we mounted our horses, we observed a moment of silence, our hearts heavy with our future, but Nicolai always relieved us quickly of this burden. He began to talk, and did not cease until the candle was blown out at night and we were asleep.

  “Have you ever been to Rome?” he asked me on one of our first days together. Remus snorted at the question. I shook my head.

  “What a place! One day we will go together, Moses—you, me, and the wolf. Despite his heart aching for his own bed, Remus surely wants to return. You see, in Rome they have whole libraries full of books no one reads—that’s why the abbot let us go. Remus has taken it upon himself to read every book in the entire world, no matter how boring or useless the material.”

  “This from a man who believes that libraries should offer their patrons wine,” Remus muttered without looking up.

  “And well they should,” Nicolai said. “Then I would gladly stop by to read a page or two.” He spread his arms wide and leaned gently back so he could bask for a moment in the sun. His laughter shook the horse. “But just for a few minutes! There are enough books in Saint Gall for me—more than enough. Rome, Moses! Rome! The dust of gods lingering in every corner! Such music! Opera! How could I waste a moment with a book!”

  He told me that we were on our way back to their home, this St. Gall, which was so named because a man called Gallus from a place called Ireland had gotten a fever and stumbled into a forest there more than a thousand years before. The place was an abbey—a word repeated often between Nicolai and Remus, and so I was eager to learn its meaning. Other facts I gleaned about this place: its cellars were stocked with the world’s finest wines; the beds were softer than any in Rome; i
t had the greatest library in the land, and Remus had read every book in it (Nicolai had read three); it had a distasteful thing called an abbot, which was a man named either Coelestin von Staudach or Choleric von Stuckduck—which, I could not be sure. Mostly Nicolai referred to him only as Stuckduck.

  Nicolai told me that most people called Remus Dominikus, but that his friends (of which there was only one at present, but I could be the second if I wished) knew that his real name was Remus and that he had been raised by wolves. I did not doubt it: Remus continued to scowl at me at regular intervals, though as we rode, his face was mostly hidden by his book; his horse seemed well trained to follow Nicolai’s. On several occasions Nicolai instructed Remus to read aloud to us, and the sounds he spoke were like magic spells in some wizard’s language. I was always thankful, when, after a minute or two, Nicolai would interrupt him and say, “Remus, that is enough. Moses and I are bored.”

  Though Nicolai spoke so fondly of the abbey, he lamented the end of their travels. The day we left Lake Lucerne behind and began to ascend into the hills, Nicolai suddenly stopped the horses. “Remus,” he said, “I have changed my mind.”

  “Do not stop so abruptly,” Remus said, not looking up from his book. “It makes me sick.”

  Nicolai stared back into the southern horizon, as if he saw something troubling there. “We must turn back,” he said. “I do indeed wish to visit Venice.”

  Remus looked up sharply. The name of that city clearly alarmed him. “Nicolai, it is too late for that. Months too late. We decided for the abbey.”

  “I gave in too easily. I should have made you go.”

  “Nicolai, continue on.” Remus spoke as if to a child.

  “Remus, I must visit Venice before I die.” Nicolai banged his fist into his thigh.

  “Another time.” Remus looked cautiously back down at his book.

  Nicolai pulled our horse so close to Remus’s that his knee rubbed that of the other monk. The reading monk did not look up, though he twitched his leg away. At the same moment, Nicolai reached over and snatched the book.