RAMPION IN THE BELLTOWER by Merrie Haskell page 6/8
They lost track of the prince's party when it moved into the shadows of the taller buildings near the palace; then the stork brought another fish, a dace fresh from the canals, and the carilloneurs were busied with dinner. The sun was fully set when they finished the dace and the last of the ramps; they both went to look into the square again.
"It is harder to bear, now that I feel safe and alive again," the grandfather said, and though Rampion felt neither fully safe nor fully alive, she understood. She put her hand on his shoulder, and he covered her hand with his. They watched together as new actors assembled below to enact the old play: plague-dead crept from shadows, dragging their unwilling prey--rats and cats, men and women, other plague-dead--to cook them over their bonfires.
"Why do we watch?" Rampion asked.
"I owe the innocents my witness," the grandfather said at length. "When I meet them in Heaven, I will be able to say I didn't turn away."
Rampion drew up a chair and sat beside him while he continued to speak, the words coming haltingly and yet sometimes tumbling over one another. "I don't mean for you to think that you have to watch, child," he said, his voice the same strong, rumbling voice she'd loved since he first told her stories in it. "Not everyone need be a witness."
Below them, by the livid light of the largest fire yet, there was a flash of the prince's scarlet livery. The plague-dead had caught a soldier: one of the prince's men. "Oh no," Rampion said, a faint gasp that turned into a moan. She counted two, three, four more soldiers, and then the prince himself, bleeding, broken, dying.
She leapt up, knocking her chair back, and ran to the clavier to pound her fists on the batons, hard and angry. Too many bells, too hard a ringing: a great, muddy clash of music, like discordant thunder. Bell-thunder became real thunder then, louder and faster than the first time, and she wondered at it. The clavier-room lit with blue-white light, and Rampion whipped her head back to see lightning striking in the square, and her grandfather's face bone-white in the brightness, his eyes amazed and staring.
She turned back to the keyboard, drawing music out of the bells now instead of dissonance, and lightning struck with each ringing of the Crucifixion. Not each strike of the batons elicited sound anymore; she wondered how many of the thin metal wires had snapped during her first, powerful strikes.
She thought she heard a voice in the cacophany, but attributed it to the madness of the moment, and continued to play, until the stork's hard beak pecked the back of her hands. Rampion stopped the senseless beating of the batons and spun around with her palms out to ward off the bird. The bird danced back, darting behind her grandfather, whose arms were waving frantically.
"Play for rain! Play for rain!" he screamed. Immediately she turned the tune from the heavy martial beat to the light dancing tune she'd used before. Thunder and lightning gave way to a drenching downpour. The clavier room went dark as the bonfires sputtered and died. For the first time since the plague struck, true night fell over the city.
Rampion let her tune trail off, though it resounded still in her head. She fumbled her way to the banked fire of the hearth to light a lantern. The last notes of the bells faded, leaving behind the sound of rain and the cries of the captives in the square.
"You have saved them," her grandfather said. "But they aren't yet free."
She gave a hiccoughing laugh that was half sob, and ran for the door. She flung the bar there aside and pelted down the stairs. She debarred the doors downstairs frantically in the flickering light of her lantern, and when she finally pushed back the campanile's brass doors, the thunder of their opening echoed around the square like canon fire.
She was wet through to the skin in seconds; cold rain poured down in much greater quantities than during her first effort. She tripped across the body of a plague-dead man and screamed, but he did not move. She shined [shone] her lantern on over him. His skin was black and burned and his flesh still smoked. Lightning? Her lightning?
She cast the lantern's beam around, and everywhere she saw plague-dead creatures who must have been killed by lightning. The memory of the stentorian measures of her first piece echoed again in her head, and thunder rolled in the distance. She banished those notes immediately, humming the dancing tune to herself; the thunder died away again.
The first of the plague-dead's captives she found had already passed beyond; Rampion moved past the young woman in blood-soaked rags, and found another young woman, still tied to a cooking stake but largely unharmed. Her eyes were huge and pleading; when Rampion untied her, she wept. "Help me," Rampion said. "Help me rescue the others." And she did.
They worked quickly together--the young woman wouldn't leave the circle of Rampion's wavering lantern light--and though most of the captives that they untied were nearly insensate, some were aware enough to aid them. The lower rooms of the carillon could hold them all, Rampion decided, and she urged them to take refuge there. Most did; some did not, preferring to instead risk further encounters with the plague-dead in the darkness in pursuit of their homes and loved ones.
Through it all, Rampion searched for the scarlet liveries of the prince's men.
The first soldier she found caused her heart to stop for a moment; he was burned, cooked already, his limbs and face gnawed past recognition. It was only desperate hope that made Rampion decide that this was not Prince Gilpin at first, but after a moment she realized that his body was the wrong shape entirely, being too blocky.
It was the first young woman rescued by Rampion that found the prince.
"Your Highness!" Rampion heard the woman exclaim, and turned to see her sink into a curtsy. He was an indistinct figure tied to a cooking stake at the far end of the square, and Rampion was bearing a child towards the safety of the campanile while the young woman untied the prince. She heard the low murmur of his voice, and saw the future with sudden, stinging clarity. He would marry this woman, grateful to her for his rescue, while Rampion lived alone in her belltower for all time.
The child cried in Rampion's arms, and she hurried her steps; inside the campanile doors, a soldier and a nun took the boy from her, and she turned immediately back to the chaos and the madness of the square. She passed the prince on the way back; he was aiding one of his soldiers, and the young woman was tripping alongside, looking dazed and far happier than she should.
Rampion was nearly past when the prince's hand shot out and gripped her arm. "Rampion," he said, and stopped. They regarded each other, trying to see faces made indistinct by the shadows and the rain. "That was your playing I heard, before the thunder." He'd always been able to discern her efforts from her grandfather's.
"Yes, your Highness."
"I owe you a debt, I think." He released her arm and she went on.
When those who lived were secure, the prince ordered the campanile locked; just in time, for the rain had increased in strength, and there was water up to Rampion's ankles flowing through the square before the brass doors were barred again.
She stood for a moment in the stairwell, watching the prince and the strongest of the survivors organize the others into neat rows in the lower rooms of the belltower--the rooms that her grandparents had lived in when her mother was young and her grandfather's legs could still climb stairs. She turned away when she saw they had no need of her and trudged upwards to tell her grandfather of what had happened in the square.
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