The chronologist, p.1
The Chronologist, page 1
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Copyright Page
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FIRST QUARTER
The Chronologist came to our town out of the time-haze according to the workings of a calendar that was entirely his own. He bore a metal staff and across his back was a leather tool bag, and word of his arrival passed swiftly from house to house. Rare though these visits were, they were greatly anticipated, and it was enough for most townsfolk to simply hear the phrase, He’s here, to know. People would rush out into the streets pulling on boots and snatching at clothes, some already clutching their precious timepieces for him to attend to—at least after he’d serviced the tower clock from which the hours of all our days were set.
I was a boy of eleven years and five months according to our reckoning on the morning I first remember the Chronologist arriving. I lived with my father, who was mayor of our town, in a rambling but comfortable house just off the main square. He was a plump and fussy man with a nervous moustache and a chronic tendency to misbutton his clothes. Since my mother’s death from the effects a of stray time-wind a few difficult seasons earlier, he’d moved out of the main bedroom they’d once shared, and now prowled about the house every night like a particularly heavy-booted ghost, his footsteps making a counterpoint with reassuring beat of the tall case clock in the hall. But he was diligent in his mayoral responsibilities, the most important of which by far was to attend to the tower clock.
Every morning without fail, he’d set out from our house and head on across the main square to open the pitted wooden door at the base of the tower beside the hunched buttresses of the old church, then ascend the ladders through their many levels to rewind the weights. I often went up there with him, up and up through the dusty haze filled with a deep, resonant, tock, although not so much out of any intrinsic fascination with the clock’s mechanism as because of the rare views these higher levels afforded of the time-hazed lands beyond the confines of our town.
Despite all our best efforts, it had already been full summer for far too long, with the lime trees dripping dusty sap, the crops wilting and the cattle barely giving milk, on the morning when word of the Chronologist’s arrival finally came. I scurried in my father’s wake as, buttoning his best coat sideways and pulling on his mayoral sash the wrong way round, he bumbled out into the main square and fought his way through the crowds to formally welcome the Chronologist to our town. After a preliminary twitch from his moustache, he attempted a stumbling bow, then launched into a typically rambling speech.
“Is it keeping good time?” the Chronologist interrupted, his voice sharp as turning gears.
“Good time…? You mean our tower clock? Well, as far as we can tell, sir. And inasmuch, I should say, as it isn’t keeping bad time. Although there’s no real way—”
“I shall go and check.”
Everyone fell back to let the Chronologist through. He was a tall, thin man with keen grey eyes, skin the colour of weathered bronze, a pointed chin, and a narrow nose. There was something weary about him, but his manner was rigorously precise. Even the way he walked to the regular beat of his staff on the flagstones as his tool bag swung to and fro at his back. I didn’t expect to be able to enter the clock tower on a day as rare and significant as this, but there was a moment of typical confusion as my father opened the door to let the Chronologist through, and I, amid a push of civic bosoms and bellies, was able to squeeze quickly in.
Of course, most of these town worthies weren’t up to the task of following the Chronologist all the way up through the tower, climbing ladder after ladder past the iron weights on their long chains to the floor beneath the bell that chimed the hours and the slow-turning hands of the clock-face that housed the mechanism itself, but my father was used to doing so. And so, as the Chronologist began to ascend after he’d pushed his staff through the strap of his tool bag like an antique sword, was I. Standing in the pigeon-cooing shadows as my father fiddled with his buttons and breathed too loudly through his nose, I was then able to watch the Chronologist at his work.
First, he set aside his staff and unstrapped his tool bag. Then he laid out a series of tools and knelt before the heavy winding spools and the many wheels and gears large and small that turned quickly or slowly or hurried back and forth—I didn’t then know the correct horological terms. His hands moved, I noticed, to something like the same tocking heartbeat as the clock itself. It seemed not so much an act of repair as a kind of healing dance. It was fascinating to watch, at least for a while, although the process, and my father’s noisy breathing—which of course also followed the same rhythm—went on. And on. I confess I grew a little bored. And in the absence of any other distraction, and trapped as I was in the tower, I did what I generally did when I came up here: clambered over to one of the narrow windows and gazed out.
First of all, there was our town itself, neatly spread below me as only I and the birds ever saw it. The red pantiles. The stilled weathervanes. The shadow-gullies of the streets. The occasional square with its green froth of lime trees. The town dump. Some warehouses and workshops. Then came the fields and the vineyards and the orchards in their neatly combed rows, and the sheep and the cattle tiny as toys, and the farmhouses with their ramshackle sheds and barns, and the dusty tracks that unravelled here and there but always turned back on themselves. But after that …
After the last hedge and scrap of farmland lay a boundary of unkempt wasteland that we had all been warned never to approach, let alone cross. But from up here, peering on through the time-haze, I believed I could make out a little of what lay beyond, and for one moment I was sure there were fields as prim and regular as our own, and the next I saw hills and sunlit meadows, and deep woodlands, and places of ravaged gloom. And beyond even this lay a staggering sense of ever-greater distance, where lights twinkled, and towers and spires far higher and more fabulous than our own gave off signal glints. I was sure that snowy mountains lay out there, too, and the fabled salty lakes known as oceans, and other places and realms beyond anything we in our town were ever permitted to know.
A sudden calamitous noise startled me out of my reverie, but it was merely the bell striking its hourly chime. The Chronologist, I saw, was no longer attending to the clock mechanism but walking around it and studying it from various angles, as an artist might a portrait or a potter a pot. My father, of course, took this as his signal to engage the poor man in yet more conversation about things that, to me, still nursing my visions of the lands beyond our monotonous little town, didn’t matter at all. Even more irritatingly, the Chronologist deigned to join in with this pointless babble, his work up here presumably finished, although his tool bag remained open and his tools were still neatly laid out.
They gleamed appealingly on the dusty wooden floor. Many I recognised——files, screwdrivers, pincers, and the like; even a small can of oil—but some I did not. There were spikes and prods attached to little boxes. There were tiny nests of steel and glass. One or two even pulsed with lights of their own. I studied them with curiosity, thinking of the impossibly distant flashes I had glimpsed through the time-haze, and wondering if they were somehow linked. Now that his attention was distracted, I even considered quietly pocketing one of these treasures as a small souvenir. But my nerve failed me. After all, he would be bound to notice, being so orderly and precise.
But then I saw the dog-eared corner of a book poking out from the flap of his open tool bag, and decided it looked so old and yellowed it was unlikely to be missed. I’d crept forward and pocketed the thing before I could have second thoughts. Soon after, my father finally stopped his chatter, and the Chronologist slipped his tools back into his tool bag, and we made our way back down the many ladders toward the square with its eager clusters of clock-clutching townsfolk.
I watched as a chair and a trestle table were set up under the wilting lime trees, and people queued up to have their timepieces serviced by the Chronologist’s clever hands, and the dog-eared book I’d shoved into my pocket was forgotten as a far more dramatic idea began to form in my head. Keeping back so as not to be noticed, I followed the man as he went from door to door amid a gaggle of town worthies to service a few larger mechanisms such as the grandfather clock in our hall. Then, as ever, or so it seemed, his work was done, and it was time for him to leave.
The Chronologist’s departure was far less heralded than his arrival. Apparently, most townsfolk cared little about where else he went or what he did once he’d set our days and hours back to their regular beat, and he, I imagined, would want to slip away without enduring another of my father’s interminable speeches. So his only companions
The children were a silly bunch, shoving and giggling and skipping. They soon grew bored, or tired, or hungry, or otherwise distracted, and fell away. I, though, quietly and at a distance, kept on his trail. Out from the town with its tall houses and railing-framed squares, then on through a scatter of markets, mills, and foundries, then beside storage yards and other such hinterlands, and on into the fields beyond. Still, the Chronologist walked on in his usual brisk manner, between low stone walls and rambling hedges along tracks ridged and dusty after this prolonged summer’s heat, past several farmsteads where dogs barked and geese hissed, until the horizon ahead began to loom and grow dim. But he, if anyone—or so I reasoned—must know the way through.
The sky darkened and the tracks gave out and the last fields fell away, and there were only sharp snags of bramble and choking swathes of ivy and burning patches of stinging nettle, and my sense of direction was vague. I could still go on, or so I told myself, as long as I followed the figure shimmering ahead, but I was being stalked by an increasing sense of dread. A wind was rising, too, along with an even colder stirring that raked inside my scratched and stung flesh. Where was I, and what was I doing? I no longer knew, and my resolve failed me. I turned and stumbled back from the looming time-haze, and ran and ran until I reached familiar fields, and staggered, aching and gasping, the rest of the way home.
SECOND QUARTER
Clouds closed across the sky next morning. By noon it was raining, and by nightfall there was a definite chill in the air. Soon, what was left of our crops finished ripening, and the meagre harvest was taken in, and not long after the lime trees began to shed their ragged leaves, and everyone in the town rejoiced that temporal regularity had returned. At least, apart from me.
When I finally remembered it, the book I’d stolen from the Chronologist’s tool bag proved to be a disappointment. I’d hoped for some kind of clue as to who he really was—or, better still, a map or guide to the worlds beyond the time-haze—but it was nothing more than a very old, dry, and extremely technical manual on the servicing, maintenance, and repair of various types of timepiece. It was deeply irritating.
I also I found myself irritated by many other things, not least my father’s bumbling inability to manage his own buttons, let alone our town, and the pointless and repetitive tasks we children were expected to perform at school. After all, I had already seen much farther than here, and believed I would see farther still. Why should I have to endlessly draw and redraw the same street maps of our town, or memorise the weights of every recent harvest, or count the number of seconds in each hour, or copy out calendars from years long erased?
I often went upstairs to my mother’s old bedroom when I returned home from school. Typically, my father had done nothing to deal with the ravages the time-winds had inflicted—the blistered paintwork, the contorted ceiling, the furniture bleached to bony heaps, the bed blackened into something that was scarcely a bed at all—but that suited my mood. I remembered how angry I had been when her affliction first became evident. After all, she was so quick and lively and pretty and smart. So why did she now need a stick to walk with, and why was her back so stooped? I would visit her up there when her condition worsened and she retreated to her bed, much though I hated to witness what she had become. She barely recognised me, her eyes were vague, and the hands that clutched my own were sharp and dry as twigs. Sometimes, though, although I wished she wouldn’t, she’d begin to speak in a crackling, quavering voice that came and went like dry leaves. Gabbling nonsense, or so it then seemed, of the times when the arrow of time flew straight and true.
Marvels and miracles. Machines bigger than houses or smaller than ants. Some that could peer so far into the sky that the past itself was glimpsed. Others that looked so deep into the fabric of everything that the quivering threads of reality could be examined, then prised apart, to see what lay beyond. And it was through one of these rents, or so her whispers told me, that a hole of sheer nothingness widened, and the fabric of everything warped and twisted, and the time-winds blew through. Worse still, at least for me, the curtains stirred as if these words called to them, and the peeling wallpaper flapped, and the ceiling receded like an upturned well, and the claws of her nails drew blood. I stopped going up there, but soon the entire house was rent with her screams until one morning there was sudden silence, and absolute relief, and after what little was left of her was buried beyond the farthest fields, my father and I could go back to pretending that our days were ordered exactly as they should be.
But they weren’t. And, more than ever now, I longed to escape. My plan, as I first conceived it, was simple. I would set out along the all-too-familiar streets of this town and then carry on across the fields into the shimmering wilderness beyond until the time-haze swallowed me whole. There were, admittedly, some problems with my absence being noticed too soon—all the more so when my daylight habits were tied to following my father to the clock tower and going to and from school. So I would have to leave at night, and along the quieter back streets, in case I was noticed by some interfering busybody, and then avoid the barking dogs and honking geese of the various farms. There was also the issue of my father’s ever-wakeful prowling, but the man was so set and regular in his habits that even his nightly pacing had a predictable pattern that, by listening to the familiar creaks and footfalls as they came and went, I was soon able to anticipate.
This was it, then. My destiny was set. I didn’t even feel afraid on the spring night I finally got up from my bed and crept through the house in delicate counterpoint to the beat of the tall case clock and my father’s thumping prowl, pulled on my coat and boots, lifted the oiled latch of the front door, and headed out of town along the darkest and quietest back streets. Or, if I was afraid, what I feared was that my plan would fail.
But that didn’t happen; I simply walked on through the bland night along muddy tracks toward the strange vortex beyond, once again following the route that the Chronologist had taken when he left town. A breeze began to stir around me, warm at first, and scented with nothing but mud, manure, and grass. Then it grew colder and deeper, touching my thoughts and bones, and the paths dissolved and the way ahead grew ragged and rough. But I had prepared by dressing in my stoutest clothes and I did not turn back as I fought my way through the clawing vegetation, not even when the stars above me began to churn and melt.
When I paused to look back, all I could now see was a shimmering, twisting curtain. And ahead of me … ahead, there were neat fields and slumbering rooftops, all captured in the soft spring dark. This town, I saw, had a clock tower much like our own, and the way toward it avoiding the hissing farmyard geese and barking dogs was oddly familiar. Then came the same streets, the same squares, the same buildings, and then the same rambling house, where the front door latch was oiled, and I was easily able to avoid my father’s continued pacing on my way upstairs, and climb back into bedsheets that were still warm.
THIRD QUARTER
Spring passed into summer with dreadful, predictable monotony, and everyone commented on how wonderfully set and regular the seasons had become since the Chronologist’s visit. But he had then left this prison, walked away from it as easily I might walk home from school, and the constant repetition of my days was an unbearable drudge.
Oh, how I hated the cowardly way I had turned back from following him on that fateful day at the end of the long summer before! I relived the moment again and again, and cursed my own fearful stupidity—and the tower clock’s stolid reliability, which meant that he wouldn’t return anytime soon, and perhaps throughout all the rest of my tedious life. Affecting an interest I certainly didn’t feel in the affairs of our town, I tried asking my father about the Chronologist’s habits one morning over breakfast. If, after all, he only came according to the workings of a calendar that was entirely his own, how did he know when, or when not, to come? My father twitched his moustache and dabbed ruminatively at a blob of egg on his mis-buttoned shirt. This was, apparently, a most astute question of a kind which marked me out as a strong candidate for mayor of this town in whatever passed here for the future. The way these things worked, at least to the best of his understanding, was that the Chronologist came because he knew his presence was required. Although precisely how that happened, he had no idea.
