The bell had been Theophilus’
idea. Sarah had, in fact, argued against
it, telling him that there was no way the church would need a bell – it was the
only one in the Colony and everyone knew where it was, so, if, by some miracle,
people actually wanted to attend a service, they’d probably already know when
it was. Theophilus had insisted,
however, reminding her that bells could be useful for lots of reasons, not just
calling people to worship. And indeed,
here she was acting out reason number seven: calling the faithful to action.
She reached the top of the
ramshackle spire, all adrenaline and breathlessness, to survey the bell they
had cobbled together out of old pieces of scrap. They had never been able to clean all the
rust and corrosion off, but their few test rings had demonstrated that the bell
still worked and that it could be heard all over the Colony. They hadn’t rigged it up with a proper rope
pull – there hadn’t really been time, so Sarah had to lift the heavy metal
ringer – a piece of old piping – and ring the bell herself. The first swing was hard enough, but, as the
sound of the bell – crude beyond belief, pealed out from the bell loud enough to make her ears ring, she
knew she had to keep going.
So the bell rang: insistent,
incessant, incendiary; and, one by one, they came to answer it.
“What is that?” Frostfire asked, eyes flaring, “what’s going on?”
“It looks like not everyone is
planning to surrender,” the Former Baron replied nonchalantly, “how
inconvenient.”
Those who had stood frozen in
the square, watching Frostfire with looks of fearful incapacitation, were
slowly coming to life, looking around them as if they were wakening from a
dream, trying to find the source of the sudden noise. Then, without saying anything or making any
kind of fuss at all, a couple of women, one of them from the militia, slipped
off into the alleyways.
“Where are they going?” the
Stoneskin asked as a young man disappeared after the women. Then another.
And another. Ellis watched as
Frostfire grew more and more agitated, his look of supreme, arrogant
confidence, crumbling piece by piece. It
wasn’t going to vanish straight away – Frostfire had come in with an ego like
plate armour – but it was tarnished now and edged with uncertainty. And anger.
“Where are they going?” he asked
again, glaring at the Former Baron as if his eyes might burn the truth out of
him.
“Well,” the old man replied,
“since the church bell is ringing, I’d imagine that they’re going to church.”
“What’s a-? It doesn’t matter,
take me there!”
The Former Baron shrugged. “If you insist. Ellis, will you lead the way to the church?”
So many of them. Sarah couldn’t quite believe it, even as she
saw them arriving through the streets from her vantage point in the tower,
still the ringing of the great bell. She
had seen the numbers at her services increase, of course, and beyond the point
where she could readily identify each individual member of her expanding
congregation, but she had no idea that, out of that ever-changing number, there
could be this many people to answer her call.
They stood in front of the
church like some sort of army. She
recognised a few faces, saw the makeshift uniforms of the militia here and
there, but there were so many of them, the effect was less of a crowd of
familiar people as it was of just a throng, a multitude: faceless and restive.
Most of them are probably just reacting, she reminded herself. They couldn’t all be from her congregation,
and even if they were, how many were regular attendees?
And yet, did that matter? Wasn’t at least part of the purpose of those
services to rally people together like this, to help them get through the
darkness. She wanted to save them, of
course, the same way she had been saved – down to the very core of what it
meant to be human and that simple response to the one who had made them: yes,
or no – but there was always a first step before taking a long journey and
sometimes you had to head in what seemed like a completely different direction
if you wanted to take the best route to your destination. She glanced at the crowd again.
These are the ones you have given me.
She let the bell ring out and
stepped around to the other side of the belfry.
They all looked up at her, ready and waiting.
And I hadn’t prepared anything to say, she thought, before saying
it all anyway.
By the time Ellis had led the
small group to the square in front of the church, the bell had long since
fallen silent. True, he hadn’t taken
them there with any great pace. There
was something of the funeral procession to their movements – a sort of solemn
inevitability that he hadn’t been able to push past and, for some reason,
Frostfire hadn’t complained. Perhaps he
had felt it too. His slate-scaled
expression was unreadable, but his eyes burned with anxious curiosity. That tower
of confidence was still crumbling, then.
“Well,” he said, as they stepped
out before the tallest building in the Colony, the monument to idealism and
thrown-together architecture that was Sarah’s church, “here we are. This was where the bell was ringing.” He pointed up to the belfry, just to make the
point clearer. There was no sign of
whoever might have been ringing it.
“There’s no one here,” Frostfire
observed.
“And yet, this is definitely the
right place,” the Former Baron added.
“So where is everyone?” Gulliver
asked, drawn in by the mysterious events now as much as any of them, it seemed.
“And interesting question,” the
Former Baron agreed, “do you know what else is interesting?”
Frostfire glared at him. “This is just some game to you, isn’t it?”
“Oh, no, it’s deadly
serious. I understand that well
enough. The problem is not my
understanding of the situation, but yours.
Anyway, since we’re here, humour me.”
“What!?”
“Humour me! About the
interesting thing! Go on, what else is
interesting, right here, right now?”
The flaring intensity of
Frostifire’s blue-white eyes showed that he was rapidly losing his patience. Ellis wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to be
there when it finally ran out.
“Fine! What is interesting?”
“Well, you see, I find it just
fascinating that, of all the places this church could have been built, Sarah
chose to build it here.”
“So what?”
“So, this is the highest part of
the Colony – see if you look that way you can just see over the walls at your
camp,” he pointed, “just. over. there.”
“And?”
“Well, it also happens that this
place is farthest from the walls, so, whatever happens next, your army is going
to have a good view and yet won’t be able to do a thing about it.”
The Spiketail’s eyes flared wide
and terrible then, and Ellis thought that some kind of furious violence would
be unleashed upon them all, but it was at that exact moment that he heard Sarah’s
voice, loud and clear above them, call out, “Now!” and the square flooded with
people, hundreds of them, or so it seemed, each armed with the first thing they
could find: a broom handle, a frying pan, a piece of old piping – whatever they
could get their hands on – and though each was the same as they had been
before- struggling, hungry, scared, it seemed they had something else in them
as well. Hope, Ellis, realised, hope
and determination, and, just like that, Frostfire was surrounded, bound
with ropes and held hostage.
Out beyond the walls a cry went
up. Outrage! Intolerable!
Arrows were launched, the Mosskind fired their guns and yet the
stalemate – somehow – the stalemate remained the same.
“Arrogance is a very dangerous
thing,” the Former Baron commented, as Frostfire was brought, bodily, forward
by several burly men, “it can lead one to under-estimate one’s enemies for a
start, or worse, blind one to one’s friends.”
Frostfire snarled, but was immediately gagged by a pair of militia. “There’ll be time for talking later,
Frostfire - over tea, perhaps! Take him
away for now.”
“Siren, Ellis, Gulliver,” he
called and, one by one, they approached, confused. “Open up the stores,” he continued, “let
these people celebrate a little.”
Gradually the square
emptied. First just those with
Frostfire, then those accompanying the Former Baron and the others and then, a
while later, when the noise of the others grew too loud and excited to resist,
the rest trickled away. Sarah stared
down at the emptiness and wondered. She
wondered that she had gathered so many to follow her simple words of
encouragement – that that was all that was finally needed after her work of
weeks to give them the strength to take action on their own. She wondered that Frostfire had been captured
so easily, that he had entered the Colony unaccompanied in the first place! Had they really looked that weak?
But most of all Sarah wondered
at the look in the Former Baron’s eye when it was all over and he spoke of the
stores they had been holding back, the stores that made everything they had
experienced for the past month at best a charade for their enemies, at worst
and terrible, cruel lie.
And the others knew, she realised, they knew and they didn’t tell me…
She wept, then, until the tears
stopped coming and they dried onto her cheeks, like lacquer on the armour of
her resolve.
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