The Harmony of Silence

16 min

The silent ones came to the orchard at the ferret’s hour.

They drifted in, tall and twitchy and unpredictable, sniffing the air, their eyes darting from tree to tree, fingers jerking as if in mental calculations. Dark figures against the thickening fog, they scrounged around, indifferent to anything but the disturbed harmonics and their own blither thirst. People froze at their approach, afraid a sudden movement would draw their attention. I lowered my basket, watching six grey shadows blow past. Somebody risked sneaking into the manor to alert the foreman. The old man stood now on the threshold as if his presence could have prevented the silent ones from barging in. But they ignored the building and wandered deeper into the orchard.

It didn’t take long for their entourage to show up. Back at the gate, the first claw appeared, a large man with a mallet and an assortment of pliers under his belt. He looked bored, almost uninterested. He watched the silent ones with the serenity of a shepherd who knew nothing could threaten his herd. Another person joined him at the gate, a dark-skinned man dressed in the brown caftan of a crier. He pulled out a husker and shared it with the claw. In turns, the men dipped their fingers and dabbed their lips, talking amiably. Others would come soon, more claws and criers, but there was no rush yet: the silent ones were still roaming chaotically; it might take them hours to find the clog.

A silent one brushed past me, his eyes unfocused, concentrated on something behind the last line of apple trees. I tried to imagine what he looked like before he had been called. The skin on his cheeks, grey from blither, was still smooth, still unwrinkled around the sunken eyes. From knotted clusters of remaining hair, I could tell he used to be a redhead. The upper arms still had some muscle—a farmer boy, perhaps. The scars that ran from the corners of his lips down his neck gleamed with chilling rawness. A young man, not much older than Kylian was when I met him, silenced forever, cleansed to lucidity, attuned to follow the harmonics. He stopped abruptly, jerking to look at me as if guessing that I tried to peer behind his greyness to see the human he once was. Or sensing I was a blasphemer, a plotting heretic. I shuddered. I carried nothing but my clothes, my pockets empty, but didn’t the criers tell stories of even the teeth being removed? I held my breath, my spatial awareness sharpening to detect the slightest of motion: would the claw by the gate leap to do this one’s bidding? But the silent one turned away and walked on.

All around the orchard, people shifted, some creeping closer, compelled to keep the silent ones in sight despite the debilitating fear, others trying to put more distance between themselves and the eerie searchers. Two of the ghouls halted by a pear tree, inspecting a ladder. The picker, who got down in time but didn’t manage to retreat to a safe distance, inched away from them, shaking. In the distance, another silent one was bent over a rake. I didn’t have rakes on my list. Scythes, shears, and axes all disappeared early on, but those were dangerous tools. And rakes? I wouldn’t be surprised, though: more and more inconspicuous objects had been removed lately.

A new claw had joined the pair by the gate, and the three of them stood idly, leaning against the iron fence, betting, no doubt, on which of the silent ones would home in on the clog first. They would find something, for they never left empty-handed. I risked a glance towards the tool shed, my pulse quickening. What if they found my cache? No individual part of Kylian’s invention had ever attracted their attention, and I kept the pieces spaced apart, but what if they stumbled upon them? What if the claws came to tear down the shed and put his foot wrong, and a loose stone in the foundation slipped out to expose one of the precious bundles? I almost wanted to see what would happen then. Would the silent ones change their tune, identify a new clog? Would the claws dismantle the manor looking for more, or would they leave it for the foreman to deal with? The shame of this visit would guarantee his wrath. Didn’t libraries burn at the hands of the librarians?

One of the silent ones—my silent one, the redhead—changed his direction abruptly and hobbled towards the shed. I suppressed an urge to make a step to intercept him. If my theory was correct, I had to be as far from that shed as possible so as to not give him a clue. I forced a few deep breaths to calm down. Everyone in the orchard was on edge. Everyone was scared. I just had to be no more agitated than my fellow pickers. The silent one walked straight on, determined. He could still turn, distracted by a sharp movement. But the tool shed was a tempting object, large and obvious. It would not remain uninspected. My heart thundered in my ears.

If this silent one walked right in to find the device parts, wouldn’t it be proof in itself? Wouldn’t it mean their sense of harmonics was real? The components all came from sites of previous removals, which should have guaranteed their harmlessness, but in a pristine environment, these previously inoffensive objects could still disturb the harmonics enough for the silent ones to detect them. But such a sensitivity demonstration wouldn’t have been enough for Kylian. He wanted to see the harmonics, observe the effect the unclogging had on them.

I told people Kylian was my nephew, but we weren’t related. How else could we explain what a woman like me was doing in the company of a man half her age? We met in the enclave back when there was still an enclave, having been tenants to the same sessor. For months, I knew him as a quiet young man from upstairs, a student to a clockmaker, polite but untalkative, and I liked it about him. In other circumstances, I would have never befriended him. But the enclave yielded, and the Cleansing came to the sessor’s house. When the gaunt creatures swarmed in to probe the common room, I knew what to expect—I came from the deanage, I had pages and pages of my list already filled. But it was the first encounter for Kylian. I saw how his fists clenched when a silent one pressed his finger to the wall, indicating that the clog was behind it. I shot Kylian a warning look, urging him to remain sensible and not to interfere when the claw put his mallet through the planks. It must have seemed absurd to him, people destroying innocent property to prevent unseen harm. But our fear was real and unmissable, and Kylian controlled himself. The claws tore walls to get to the source of the clogging, which turned out to be a valve in the furnace. The removal left the house unheated and open to the elements in the middle of winter. That same night, huddled in blankets over a single candle, I showed Kylian my list.

The criers claimed the removal made the world better by letting the harmonics flow freely, but all I saw was comforts dismantled and appliances rendered useless. Old, forgotten dangers reared their lethal heads. I watched the world slip back into the Simple Ages.

In the early days of the Cleansing, some deans tried to question the choice of targets, the nature of clogging, the very existence of harmonics themselves. But the claws’ mallets smashed heads as easily as they smashed walls, and the questions ceased. The deanage closed before I could advance to a full dean, but I knew enough to separate facts from speculations. My list had facts. The first to be removed were the obvious weapons: the combustion arms, the large edges, the hunting gear. Next, the propulsion cars got targeted, trains and boats and wagons going out of operation. Then, the aiding mechanisms were broken: the cultivators, the washing machines, the cookers—things that saved time, that offered leisure. The criers announced these triumphs loudly, making a grand show of destroying the clogs, but I witnessed enough removals to notice omissions. Books were taken. Stationery disappeared from shops, first by direct unclogging, then—because the tradesmen were afraid to keep them in stock. Knowledge was more dangerous than swords and pistols. The dayschools closed. Fine surgeries shrank into spitals. The deans became farmers.

The removal kept people busy, one festering scratch—one persistent cough—away from perishing, chained to a single place and ignorant. Docile. This was the harmony they laboured to establish.

Did they do it on purpose? Who knew how the hazed minds of the silent ones worked? Maimed out of any kinship with humanity, they goaded each other, pursuing goals we couldn’t fathom. Did each receive instructions before the boiling blither ran down their throats to silence them forever? Did they submit willingly into the hands of their siblings for this culmination of relentless craving, an initiation terrible and inevitable and final? Who directed them—the claws? No, I had seen the claws’ eyes: they were terrified of the silent like everyone else. The criers? Criers knew nothing; their stories changed like the wind. Both claws and criers followed the silent ones because proximity offered an illusion of safety.

Perhaps there was no director. Perhaps the silent ones operated blindly, drunk on the elucidating liquid, mimicking each other without thought, following the scent of fear and chancing on random objects. This was my theory, a guess that Kylian did not favour. The removal raids were an act that required not just an audience but participants. The silent ones roamed in people’s homes while the owners were present. They took their time to pick their targets, reacting to the building stress, sensitive to the unease of those whose property they inspected. They chose what was the most precious, what would hurt the most. Harmonics, if there was such a thing, came from people, not objects.

I craned my neck to see the shed. The silent one, the redhead, stood staring at the wall. I knew that pose—the hunched shoulders, the body locked with tension—and if I recognized it, so would the claws. There were four of them now by the gate, and two more women criers, ready to let the world know about another victory against the clogging. They watched the other silent ones for now. The haggards still wandered about, their threadbare smocks flapping. Wasn’t it ironic how this lot could go barefooted even in the middle of Harshary, be it blizzard or rainstorm, and stay impervious to lung fever? Two figures lingered by a cart full of pears, examining its wheels. Would rubber become the next scarcity? Would we go back to the iron-bound wood? But the ghouls didn’t seem interested enough; the time for the rubber hadn’t come yet. They would walk on, and the moment the claws glanced towards the shed, they would see that the redhead had identified the clog. The silent ones needed no consensus, only certainty.

I wished I could leave my body behind and fly over to the shed to access the object the silent one had picked before the claws came to remove it. I wished I could pull out the precious bundles from between the cracks, and put together the device of Kylian’s design. Assemble the little crank that turned a tiny propeller, both leftovers from the decimated clockmaker’s shop. Put it inside the glass case—the final, overdue piece—a segment of a broken syringe I picked up in the spital, after they carried away the body. Pour in the salty water, a bottle Kylian had brought from his ill-fated trip to the shore—four days on foot in drenching rain—which we reduced by boiling to a little vial full of minerals and mixed-in soot. Insert a gasket, a ring Kylian had carved out of his gumboots, and that I had to reshape, ineptly on my own, to fit the syringe. Attach the eyepiece, an old keepsake from the deanage. Press it against the supposed clog, turn the crank to stir the liquid, and try to see how the little black particles realigned, bending around the previously unperceivable lines.

Kylian showed me once, in an alehouse, back when the breweries still had enough crucial parts to run, and we had some energy left after a day’s work. He placed his glass in the middle of our table, and we stooped over to look at the tiny bubbles against the glare of the lamp above. They rushed up with a slight curve as if encountering an invisible obstacle. They went straight up when the glass stood on the edge of the table. Proof, Kylian said, that a harmonic ran down from the lamp. Or, I joked, that a harmonic stretched between our foreheads. We agreed on one thing: neither of those needed unclogging.

People at the gate began to stir. The claws straightened, patting their tool belts. The huskers disappeared in their owners’ pockets. Small items exchanged hands—the bets were settled. The wait was over. The claws went first, with criers on their heels, closing on the shed where the redhead stood in his pointing pose.

A tide of relief washed over the orchard: the clog was found and it wasn’t anybody’s teeth. I felt it too. I had no parts hidden in the foundation that faced this side of the orchard, and the silent one didn’t crouch. Whatever the clogging object was, it wasn’t one of mine. The shed was an old thing, an ordinary construction and nobody’s property; even the foreman didn’t rush to its defence. He left the manor now to watch the removal with the assembling crowd. I had to join it too; it would have been suspicious of me not to.

I found a spot that offered a good view of the silent one’s face. He stood still, pointing not with his finger but with the tip of his nose, a hunting dog more than a man. The weathered wood in front of his face was the same colour as his shabby clothes. What did he see? What invisible tangles offended his senses? Would the removal improve the place or cripple it even further? Was desolation his ultimate goal?

The claw who came to the orchard first claimed the honour of unclogging. He walked up to the silent one slowly, his movements smooth and predictable, inspected the spot and pulled out his pliers in preparation. One of the criers crept in to join the pair, his brown back blocking my view. Necks stretched all around me. In another life, the crowd would have heaved and murmured; we remained silent. The claw huffed and grunted as he scraped the wood, prying something off. I could still see the silent one’s shoulders. They twitched at every screech and twisted, straining, and then dropped, and the claw lifted up his pliers. For a long moment, I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing. The big man held the pliers high above his head as if in triumph, and the silent one stood next to him, relaxed, but I couldn’t tell what it was they had removed. Only with the first words of the crier, his voice booming in the crisp autumn air, did I recognize the object. A nail! An old rusty nail was the thing that clogged the harmonics and threatened the normal functioning of the universe.

So many things had been removed since the beginning of the Cleansing. Blue flame burners, copper fittings and fine ironmongery. Yokes and pontils at the glass blower’s shop. Pumps that ran cold cabinets. Recipes for clean broths. Drawings that helped identify the right kind of moulds. Tubes and wands and needles strong enough to withstand boiling. And so many other items on my list, items that were only as precious as the lives they could have saved. And now—what?—a pointless, inconsequential nail?

I should have known. Everything of value was already taken. Loss spread far beyond direct removal. I ought to be angry, furious even, but I just felt tired.

The crowd dispersed. A single claw and a crier lingered behind to follow the silent ones who drifted on, eventually finding their way out of the orchard. The rest left with the removed clog to see it publicly destroyed, hammered out of existence. The pickers returned to their baskets under the stern glare of the foreman.

I walked back to my tree. I would inspect the hole tomorrow, when nobody was around. I would put together the hard-won components: The ocular lens, the last surviving artefact from the destroyed deanage. The crankshaft with a rotor from a clockframe that outlived its makers. The rubber seal that left a gaping hole in the last good pair of galoshes. The bottle of sooty seawater from a lagoon too frigid and windy and remote. The glass cylinder of a syringe that had nothing to inject for years. Five stanzas of a ballad I was too worn out to recite. I would assemble the device and peer at the swimming black dots in the light of the rising sun. I would look for guides and obstacles that governed their movement. Not to find a reason, an explanation or a motive, for there might not be one. Not to see if the device worked, because I believed in Kylian even when I disagreed with him. But to glimpse the future. To look at the tiny liberated spot and imagine how the rest of the unclogged world would look to those who worked so hard to quiet it. To learn if there was anything in store for us beyond the silent harmony of ruins.