Refoundation

I. Karstein

LAW OF THE CITIES · Article Twelve

"A city stands as long as its bell hangs."

Written in the Council Book ahead of the first page; to be read by the Landammann on taking over the book. Year 955.M41.

Ludger Tessmar counted the town halls as he had counted them for fifty-three years, with his eyes, without moving his head.

He stood on the knoll that was called Council Hill, because the Council had chosen it on the first evening without discussing it, and below him the column was entering the plain of Karstein, in the dust, in the order the dawn strike gave them. Kaltenau first, grey from the road. Sommerach, with the washing at the rear hatch, which the wind filled out. Hohenwart. Lindgrund. Falkenried, Eschenbruck, and last his own, Torgelow, with the twine on the spectacles and the flank he touched by hand every morning, as one touches a horse. Seven. He had counted them before the first had passed beneath him, and he counted them once more, because it was part of his office to know the number three times over.

When he had taken over the Council Book, in the year 924.M41, there had been nine. He had been thirty-four and had inherited the table, not the twine, which he had tied himself later, and he had opened the book at the first page, where above the date stood the line every Landammann read aloud on taking office. He had read it without understanding what it demanded. He understood it no better now. He had only learned that a sentence one says every evening stops, at some point, telling one anything, and from then on begins to hold one.

Every evening he spoke five names. He knew them in the order in which they had fallen, and he had learned, in thirty-one years of the Roll of the Fallen, not to lengthen the pauses between them, because the crowd read every stretched pause as a message. Even so he had noticed, this year, that they had grown longer. Not in the voice, which stayed the same. In the people who stood there and waited until the next name came, and who, in that waiting, took a little more of the answer off his hands from one evening to the next.

The fortress lay before him in the plain like a star that someone had driven into the ground. He saw three rings of grey stone, forty metres high in the outer wall and lined at the North Gate with guns that did not move, and behind the wall, in the outer court, a heap of twisted metal from which a hull stuck up, without turret, askew, like a house that had once stood. Thin smoke rose from the chimneys of the core. That was the fortress of Karstein, which a regiment of the Guard had lost seventy years ago, and which now belonged to a warband of the Iron Warriors that nobody had ever heard speak.

The directive was in his left coat pocket, where he had put it that morning without reading it a second time. He had no need to. The courier had handed it to him on the march, a short sheet with the stamp of the Section, and he had skimmed it as he walked. Hohenwart and Lindgrund, consolidated into one formation, are to advance to the assault on the North Gate and the second gate. The remaining cities hold the line. It was phase two. It was the sentence he had dreaded for a year and expected for two weeks, and now that it was here it seemed small to him, as if it had been set too tightly.

The Council had dealt with the announcement the evening before, after the vox message from the Sector Staff, and the directive merely confirmed what had been said there. It had been the shortest session of the year. He had reported, and the burgomasters had listened, and the burgomaster of Hohenwart, Notker Stalder, a stocky man with a snow-white beard and the face of a baker, had laid his hand flat on the table and said: "The Council does not object." He had said it without emphasis. Then the one from Lindgrund, Urs Kägi, gaunt, with the grey face of a man who has gone too long without eating, had laid his hand flat and said the same. They had both said it as if it were no question, and Tessmar had not known what to say, and so had said nothing.

The column passed beneath him. He heard the grinding of the tracks, a sound he had known for fifty-three years like his own breath, and which today carried a note that he did not want to name. It was too even. He heard nine town halls in it, although there were only seven now, and listened for the two that were missing. There was no difference.

Behind the town halls came the wagons. He saw the tarpaulins, dark with dust, the children in the hatches, the women at the reins, and among the wagons his own, the one from Torgelow, on which lay the freight that had travelled for three years under its tarpaulin, in the straw, and whose edge the sun caught for a moment, a dark flash of bronze. On the drawbar of that wagon, as every day, sat a boy.

He knew him from the decision in his book, line thirty, without a name, and had never spoken to him. He was a boy of eleven or twelve, thin and dark-haired, in a jacket that was still too big for him, with a cord around his neck on which hung something he did not let go of. He belonged to Sommerach and yet sat there every day, since they had left Ordrath, without anyone having decreed it, and nobody had sent him away. He did not look at the fortress. He looked at the tarpaulin as one looks at a person who is sleeping.

"Landammann."

The Weibel of Torgelow, Gantner, came up the slope with his limp, cap in hand. "The Guild has taken up position. The Council is waiting."

"I am coming."

He stood a moment longer. Then he looked at the fortress, at the hull in the outer court, and he thought, without meaning to, of the sentence on the first page of the book, which he had never understood and which at this moment, as every evening, he did not need to understand. He went down the slope, into the dust, into the column, into the grinding of the tracks, and counted the town halls as he walked, once more, until he was at seven again.

II. The Siege

KITCHEN BOOK · Torgelow · ninth day before Karstein

Oven built, bricks from the outer rampart. Bread from the oven: ninety loaves, all whole. The oven stands still.

Note by the kitchen mistress: The first time since Askerhold an oven that does not travel.

They dug in, and the fortress watched them do it.

It was a sight that Tessmar did not get used to in the first days. The town halls drove out onto the plain one after another, at intervals, as one pushes loaves into an oven, and the Guild dug trenches round them, bench beside bench, and then came the sappers of the Guild, the men who otherwise mended bridges and roads, and sank the hulls of the city tanks into the ground up to the tracks, so that only the turrets, the stern walls and the hatches of the council chambers stood out of the earth, in a ring of heaped clay. For two hundred and fifty-four years the Cities had dug in nowhere: they stood where they were put, with engines warm, ready to leave. On the fourth day they had cut steps into the clay. On the eighth day the steps were laid with boards.

He watched them settle in, with an unease that he kept to himself.

The washing lines, which otherwise hung on the hooks of the hull walls and travelled with the column, were given posts. These were driven into the ground, straight, three paces apart, and the line was tied with knots that did not have to come undone again within the hour. The kitchens built ovens. He had taken it for a rumour when he was told that the Torgelowers had built one, with bricks from the outer rampart, and on the ninth day, on his way to the Council, he had caught the smell and stopped, in the middle of the clay passage, with his hand on the wall. It was the smell of bread from an oven that had not travelled. He had last smelled it as a child in Ulmersfeld, and he did not know where to put it.

In the council chamber of Sommerach they were teaching again. They had pushed the benches to the wall and laid the floor with boards, and the blackboard hung on its hook beneath the brass, and the children were drawing Karstein. He had heard it from Sattler, on the third evening, when she brought him the timetable to sign, without a smile, with the precise face she kept for authorities. "Today we draw something we can see," she had said. "They have never drawn anything that they can see."

He had looked in, from the entrance, without disturbing the lesson. Thirty children on the benches, with exercise books on their knees, and through the open hatch they saw over the rampart, the sky, the star of grey stone on the plain, and each had painted a different Karstein. One boy had drawn the fortress but put the town halls into it, into the core, in a row, as if they were at home there. One girl had painted no walls, only a single gate, open, with a light behind it. And on the last bench, beside the hatch, sat the boy with the cord and drew nothing. He looked at the fortress. He held what he wore around his neck in his right hand.

The fortress was silent.

That was what kept him awake at night. He had expected shots, shelling of the trenches, the guns at the North Gate that the courier had mentioned, everything an enemy does who sits in a fortress and sees people digging in front of it. Nothing came. For twenty days they did not fire, and no soldier of the Cities fell, and no child. One saw them on the walls, a grey figure here and there, in armour so dark that it swallowed the light, and in the band of warning colours on the arms, black and yellow, like those on a gate that is not to be opened. They stood there, upright, without movement. Sometimes at night he saw lights in the fortress that changed in a pattern he could not read, and that, when one looked at it for long, looked like a sum.

Time, he thought, was working for the fortress.

On the nineteenth day the order came: assault on the twenty-first, at sunrise. He read it standing, at the hatch, and gave it to the Council, and the Council did not object. Stalder and Kägi sat side by side, the two whose cities had been made into one formation, and they spoke to each other once, briefly, across the table, as if quarrelling over who was to be allowed to go first. Stalder would take the North Gate. Kägi the second. It decided itself, like a road one has long been walking towards.

On the evening before the assault Stalder came to him.

He came without announcing himself, through the clay passage, with a loaf under his arm wrapped in a cloth, and he entered the council chamber of Torgelow, where Tessmar sat alone at the table, and laid it down before him. He was a man in his mid-sixties, round, with the white beard, his hands floured, and he looked as if he had baked bread all night, when in truth it had only been an afternoon. "The first from my oven," he said. "From ours. We finished building it yesterday." He paused. "In all my life I have never had one that stands."

"Has it turned out well?"

"It is an oven." He smiled. "I am a baker, Landammann. I was a baker before I became burgomaster, and I have stayed one."

Tessmar broke the bread. It was still warm, and it was good, as a simple thing is good, and he ate a piece, and Stalder watched him. "It is good," said Tessmar.

"Then it is good." Stalder nodded and went to the door, laying his hand flat against the frame as he went, as one does when leaving a room one means to return to. He stopped there. "Landammann."

"Yes."

"The Cities stand."

"Still," said Tessmar.

He sat a long time over the bread. He did not finish it. He wrapped the rest in the cloth and laid it beside the book, and in the column for the day, in which otherwise only figures stood, he wrote a line that the Council Book made no provision for: Bread from Hohenwart, good.

III. Hohenwart

VOX LOG OF THE COUNCIL · Day twenty-one

05:52 Hohenwart to Council: We are going. 06:34 Hohenwart to Council: North Gate open, hull in the gateway. 06:51 Hohenwart to Council: The Cities stand. 06:51 Council to Hohenwart: Still.

06:52 to 07:30: no report.

On the morning of the twenty-first day seven bells rang over the plain of Karstein, and Tessmar counted them on Council Hill, with the radio beside him in the grass.

He had counted them so often that for every stroke he had the picture of the stern wall where the bell hung, the bronze, the iron bell-frame, the hand that swung the mallet. Kaltenau, bright. Sommerach, soft. Hohenwart, the third, with the short, firm strike of a man who says a sentence once and sticks to it. He listened to it. He heard Lindgrund, the fourth, and then the last ones, and he counted seven, and in the silence after the seventh, which settled over the trenches, he noticed that he had held his breath.

He had been twelve when he first waited for a stroke that did not come. That was in Torgelow, in the days after Ulmersfeld, on the drawbar of a covered wagon where someone had set him down because there was no place where he could have been set down otherwise. He had listened every morning and counted, and one had been missing, and he had waited for it. On the third morning he had stopped waiting. He had been told later that it was so with most.

Then they set off.

Hohenwart first. He saw it through the glass that Gantner had handed him and which had been cleaned so often that the lens was dull in one place. The town hall crept out of the rampart, hull raised, turret forward, and beside it, left and right, in a line, the quarters, ten Leman Russ, and behind them, in a ring in which every man looked at the next, the Guild. In the commander's hatch stood a man with a white beard. He had laid his hand on the rim, flat, and looked straight ahead, over the land, at the gate.

It was so quiet that he heard the tracks, even at five hundred metres, and every single link.

The fortress spoke when the van was within four hundred metres.

He had expected it and was not prepared. It came from the wall, from the towers at the gate, from the guns that had stood motionless for twenty days, and it came staggered, in a rhythm one could read from the impacts. Every hit lay one pace behind the last. The row of impacts travelled through the line of the quarters, from left to right, as a scribe finishes writing a line without lifting the pen, and where it had passed, a Leman Russ no longer stood. He counted. Two. Four. Six. He saw a tank burning, and then a second, and the Guild closed around the town hall like a person putting his arms around something.

The fortress did not aim. It calculated.

He saw a bench of the Guild that ran ahead with the mortar, and he saw an impact take it out of the picture, as cleanly as if it had never stood there. He saw a town hall that did not stop. It drove on, through the fire, hull low, until it was beneath the towers, and it took the gate on its back. He heard it across the distance: a long, wet crash, like a tree being felled, and then nothing, and then the sound of a gate giving way.

"Hohenwart to Council," said the vox.

It was Stalder's voice. It was calm, as calm as every evening when he said the figure of his city, and had not a trace in it of anything one could have explained. "North Gate open. Hull in the gateway."

Tessmar took up the set. He saw, through the glass, the town hall in the gate, askew, with its hull wedged between the towers, so that it could no longer be closed. He saw that the stern bell-frame was empty. He saw that at the place where the bell had hung a hole gaped in the wall, black, with plates sticking out, and that in the gateway on its side lay something round, dark, a piece of bronze that a shell had broken in two.

"Hohenwart to Council," Stalder said once more, and in the background one heard something that was a rushing and a roaring and metal that was tilting. "The Cities stand."

Tessmar pressed the button. "Still," he said.

It was the only thing he could say, and he said it without a pause. Then he heard nothing more. He held the set to his ear for a long time, until Gantner laid a hand on his arm, without pressure.

It was midday when Lindgrund drove through the open gate and took up position in the outer court, under the shelter of the inner wall. At four in the afternoon the fire from the towers fell silent. In the evening, as they counted what remained of Hohenwart at the edge of the trenches, the kitchen mistress of Hohenwart came to him, the ladle still in one hand and a sheet in the other, and read out what she had added up, without raising her voice: "Hohenwart stands at two hundred and eighty-four."

He wrote it down. There had been four hundred and eighteen, that morning. He let the pen hang over the paper until the ink dried at its tip.

In front of the town hall of Torgelow they stood in rows, in the last light. He climbed onto the crate. In his coat pocket lay the cloth with the rest of the bread that he had not eaten, and he felt it through the fabric, gone hard, with an edge that pressed. He did not open the book. He spoke the names, one after another, Halmstadt, Gerrinsfurt, Ulmersfeld, Brendeck, Westerhall, and at the sixth he left the pause as long as it was at each, and not a breath longer.

"Hohenwart is read. Her bell hangs no more. Her name rests until sunrise."

"It rests," they said, and from what remained of Hohenwart it came quietest, almost without sound, from sixty-five men in grey jackets and from women and children who kept their heads lowered, and Tessmar had, for the length of a breath, the taste of bread in his mouth.

IV. Lindgrund

COUNCIL BOOK OF THE CITIES · Session in battle · Council room of Torgelow · Day twenty-three

Muster call: Kaltenau stands at 581. Sommerach stands at 393. Lindgrund stands at 416. Falkenried stands at 569. Eschenbruck stands at 539. Torgelow stands at 551.

Occupied: six chairs. Empty: six.

The Council sat in battle because Kägi had demanded it.

He had put the motion on the morning of the twenty-third day, still in the dark, in the clay passage outside the council chamber of Torgelow, with his hand on the frame and that grey face which in the lamp looked as if it were made of ash, and he had given no reason. He had not needed to. They sat at the table of loading planks that had been sunk into the clay floor, the twelve chairs in a circle, and six of them were empty, without anyone looking. Outside the plain lay in the first light. The second gate lay closed in the inner wall, which Hohenwart had not had to break through, a gate of plasteel, twenty metres high, and behind it, in the core, waited whatever waited there.

Tessmar said: "Muster call."

They gave their figures. They gave them calmly, one after another, in the order in which the bells struck, and when they came to the third, to Lindgrund, Kägi said: "Lindgrund stands at four hundred and sixteen," in the dry tone in which he said everything, and added nothing. Torgelow came last. Tessmar looked into the faces. He had not seen Falkenried, the small, round woman, so quiet for a long time, and Eschenbruck did not look up until it was his turn.

"I put the motion," said Kägi, "before the going. Where to put us, if we do not come back."

Nobody spoke. The council chamber was warm, and it smelled of wet wool and bread, and above them, in the earth, something struck at long intervals that had nothing to do with them. "It is better if one knows beforehand," said Kägi. "After Hohenwart we needed two days. I do not want my people standing about the district for two days when it comes to that. The Guild, the crews, the wagon train. By heads, onto the five that remain. Whether we remain, the second gate decides. Who takes us, the Council decides."

So spoke a man who keeps lists, and Tessmar knew the tone. He had first heard it fifty-three years ago, as a child, at a table in Torgelow, from a Weibel with the list in his hand, who had said that the Ulmersfelders would go to whoever needed them most, and who had said it as a reckoning, without pity, because it could not be said otherwise.

"I put it to the vote," he said.

Five open hands lay flat on the table, one after another, without anyone hesitating. Kaltenau, the old man, who did it with a nod that moved his whole face. Ruch, the scar white. Falkenried. Eschenbruck, with the pale scar beneath the hairline where once a bandage had been. Torgelow, heavy, with his thumb over the edge of the plank. Kägi looked at the hands, and something passed over his grey face that Tessmar could not name.

"Then it holds," said Kägi. He stood up. He laid his hand flat on the table, briefly, in salute, and looked at the empty chair that was Hohenwart's, and at Brendeck's, and at Westerhall's, like a man who, in passing, counts the places where he has left something.

He went out. They heard his steps in the clay passage, heavy, unhurried, and then the town hall of Lindgrund, setting off in the grey of dawn.

The session went on as it had always gone on in fifty-three years, with the agenda that the scribe had written the evening before. There were the concerns of the day, the bread ration for the Hohenwarters, the water, the sappers deepening a trench, and they spoke of them in the calm tone in which one speaks of the weather while the earth shakes overhead. Tessmar listened. The vox set lay between them on the plank, like a knife at a meal.

"Lindgrund to Council."

It was Kägi's voice, dry, calm, without haste. "We are at the second gate. It is giving way. We are going through."

"Understood," said Tessmar.

He heard the town hall over the vox, the grinding of the tracks, the call of a Weibel. He heard, not for long, but precisely, the walls. They spoke in the same rhythm as on the twenty-first, impact after impact, and he saw, without looking, how the row of hits travelled through the line of the quarters, and how the quarters thinned. The burgomasters sat at the table. Nobody had raised a hand. Ruch looked at his fist.

It lasted forty minutes. Then the vox came once more, and Kägi did not speak. There came a sound, deep, a grinding and bursting, and then a voice that was not his, a Weibel, young, rough, who said into the set as if it were someone he knew: "We are in the middle. The town hall stands. The burgomaster —" It broke off.

Tessmar took the set and pressed the button.

"The Cities stand," he said.

Nothing came back, only static. He held the set, and in the silence of the council chamber, in which one heard only the breathing of six people and the trembling above, the old man of Kaltenau said, rough, in a voice he had not expected: "Still." Then Ruch. Then Falkenried, Eschenbruck, Torgelow. They said it one after another, at the table, into the room, not into the set, as one gives an answer that the other can no longer hear and has nevertheless expected.

In the afternoon the walls fell silent. The warband, it was said later, had withdrawn into the core without anyone seeing it, like a guest who leaves without a farewell. The outer court belonged to the Cities. They counted what remained of Lindgrund, seventy men of the Guild and the crews, and in the evening he wrote the figure of the city in the book, two hundred and eighty-seven, and read the names before the town hall of Torgelow, seven, and at the seventh, which he spoke like the others, he heard himself and could not change anything about it.

He stepped down from the crate and went into the council chamber, where the chairs still stood. He counted them, as he counted everything. Five were occupied. Seven stood empty, in a circle, at equal intervals, and the armrests shone on all of them, on the first three, on Brendeck's, on Westerhall's, on Hohenwart's, and on Lindgrund's, which today was still warm.

V. The Hull

PETITION TO THE COUNCIL · received on day twenty-six

The survivors of Brendeck and of Westerhall request the hull in the outer court. Signed: Weibel Rüegg for Brendeck, Councillor Zumbrunn for Westerhall.

Number of signatories: 153 soldiers, 426 in the wagon train.

The hull lay in the outer court, where a regiment of the Guard had lost it seventy years ago, and Tessmar went with Gantner on the morning of the twenty-sixth day to see it.

From a distance it had looked like a hill. Close up it was a ship run aground. The hull was crushed in, torn open at the bow, so that one could see into the fighting compartment, where rust had made the walls a wallpaper of scales, the turret was missing, and on the ring where it had sat lay a nest of wire and cables in which a bird must have brooded, many years ago, and had not come back. The tracks were missing by half. It was as big as their town halls and smaller than any of them, because nobody lived in it.

They stood before it, in a line, as if they had been standing there for a long time.

They had come in the night and had not gone away at the dawn strike, the Brendeckers and the Westerhallers, as they called themselves, those who had found shelter in other cities and had eaten there and slept and lived, one winter, two, three. He saw Rüegg, the small tough one with the grey beard, who looked as if he had stopped in the cold, and beside him a tall red-haired young man, Wassmer, who had been twenty when the Ice Field burned, and at twenty-three had the hands of an older man. He saw Councillor Zumbrunn, around fifty, with the grey braid that hung out beneath her helmet, and behind her in three rows, in grey jackets and overalls and skirts, the Guild of Brendeck and that of Westerhall, one hundred and fifty-three people, women among them and men, their weapons on their backs, without orders, as if they did not know whether they were to stand or go. Behind them stood the wagon train.

It was a crowd such as had once stood before a town hall.

"Landammann," said Rüegg. He laid his hand flat on the flank of the hull, not on the table, because there was none, and under his hand the metal was the colour of ash. "We ask for that."

"What for?"

"For a town hall." He gave the answer as calmly as if he had never given it any other way. "We have looked. The ring is good. The hull cannot be saved, that is true, but the fighting compartment can. Missing are turret and gun and engine, the tracks and the council chamber. The engine is in the gate, with Hohenwart. Turret and gun are with Lindgrund. What is left of Hohenwart and of Lindgrund belongs to the Council, and we ask the Council for it."

He had prepared it. Tessmar saw it in the pauses, which stood in the right places, like steps that one has counted beforehand, and saw that he took his hand from the flank and put it back, as if he did not want to let go.

"You have no city," he said.

"No."

"There is no article that makes a new one."

"There is one," said Councillor Zumbrunn. She said it without raising her voice, with a mouth that smiled, barely, on one side. "The Twelfth, Landammann. I have read it every morning of my life above the blackboard. A city stands as long as its bell hangs."

"Your bell does not hang. Westerhall's lies in the peat."

"Brendeck's does not hang either," said Wassmer. He spoke for the first time, quietly, and his voice was rougher than Tessmar remembered it. "It lies, Landammann. On the wagon of Torgelow, under the tarpaulin, for three years. I carried it. I laid it on the wagon."

It sounded like information given to someone who has asked for it, even if he has not asked.

He walked around the hull. He took his time, for in fifty-three years he had learned that people reveal more when one turns one's back on them. He laid his hand on the hull, as he did on his own town hall every morning, and the metal was cold and dry, with a roughness that did not come from rust. At the stern, where the iron bell-frame should have been, the wall was smooth. No bell had ever hung there. He stopped.

Beside the stern, in the shadow, on a heap of scrap, sat the boy.

He had not seen him come. He sat there as he had sat on the drawbar, with his thin knees drawn up and the jacket that was still too big for him, and he had laid his ear against the wall of the hull, flat, as a doctor listens to a chest. His eyes were closed. In his right hand, at his chest, he held the little bell, whose clapper had been wrapped in a grey rag for years.

"What is he hearing?" Tessmar asked quietly. He asked Wassmer, who had stepped up beside him.

"Nothing," said Wassmer. "He is listening to it."

He looked at the boy for a long time, the stranger on whom he had abstained in the Council back then, and the reason for which he had done it would not come near him even now. He had taken him for a coincidence, and the coincidence had sat in his chest ever since. He took his hand from the hull.

"The Council will decide when the hull has a room in which it can sit," he said.

"Then we begin with the room," said Councillor Zumbrunn. She said it kindly. "We begin today, Landammann. If the Council says no, we will have washed a hull."

He looked at her, the woman who had led the second quarter in Westerhall, who had driven through the moor in a wagon and had known where to. He nodded. She turned and gave a sign with her flat hand, and behind her the wagon train moved as if it had waited for nothing else. He stood there a while longer. Then he heard, for the first time that morning, the sound he had been missing: hammers. Many, in different rhythms, on iron, in the outer court of Karstein, where for seventy years nobody had hammered.

VI. Refoundation

COUNCIL BOOK OF THE CITIES · Session on day thirty-one · Outer court of Karstein, in the hull

Decision: The city of Brendeck is newly founded, from the remains of Brendeck and of Westerhall. Burgomaster: Agnes Zumbrunn. Votes: five open hands.

Note by the Landammann: The name of the city remains as it stands on the bell.

For five days they hammered, and in those five days Tessmar stopped counting the sound.

Each morning after the stroke of the bells, five of them now, he went into the outer court, without announcing himself, and stood at the edge and watched. The engine came on the first day. They fetched it from the North Gate, where Hohenwart lay, from the stern of the town hall that stood wedged there in the gateway, and they laid it on a sledge of planks, in twenty hands, and drew it across the paving of the outer court, with the sound of an animal one does not wish to disturb. The turret came on the third day, from the second gate, where Lindgrund had stayed, in two pieces that were welded, and the gun with it, whose barrel, when it was raised, gave a single note, deep, under the sky of Karstein, which everyone took for metal.

He watched them build a house out of four cities.

The tracks were found at Eschenbruck, the plates for the walls in the hull of the destroyed town hall of Lindgrund, and the council chamber, which they vaulted, in the roof of a warehouse in the outer rampart. The iron bell-frame was missing. They had looked for one, and they had none, and on the fourth day Gantner came along the clay passage, with his limp, and gave Rüegg four track pins from the track of Torgelow, which he had knocked out of its own link with a hammer. "For the bell-frame," he said. He said no more. Rüegg took them, weighed them in his hand and nodded.

On the thirty-first day, after the dawn strike, the Council sat in the hull.

They had cleared the fighting compartment, scraped the rust, laid the floor with boards, and the chairs stood in it, in a circle, so close that the backs touched: twelve, of ash wood, the seals burned into the backs. He looked at them. Five were occupied, by the burgomasters he had known for decades, with their hands flat on the armrests. Seven stood empty. On Brendeck's nobody had sat for three years, and it was the only one of the empty ones that the scribe wiped every morning.

"Muster call," he said.

They gave their figures. There were five, and he heard the gap that lay at the front, in the row, where the first name belonged.

Agnes Zumbrunn stepped into the middle without asking, with her braid over her shoulder, her helmet under her arm, and she said it without preamble, as calmly as if she were ordering bread. "We apply for what is in the petition. We want to be a city."

"Out of two that no longer exist," said the one from Kaltenau, the old man, and he said it without hardness. He had laid his hand down as a fist, loosely.

"Out of two that did exist."

"The Law of the Cities says," began the one from Eschenbruck, who had lost two tanks at Ordrath, "that a city stands as long as its bell hangs. It knows no refoundation. It does not say that one comes into being when a bell is hung up."

"No," said Zumbrunn. "It does not say so."

It went quiet. Tessmar saw her standing there and not speaking on, and he saw that she did not know what to say next. It seemed to him that he was watching a woman stand at the edge of a blackboard on which only the first sentence is written, and no second one occurs to her. "I do not know if it is true," she said at last. "We were Westerhall. We are where the bell hangs. I do not know whether that is a sentence one may say. We'll try it."

"And the names?" asked Falkenried, the small, round woman who had said nothing for a long time. "What becomes of the name in the Roll of the Fallen? Brendeck is in it."

"It will no longer be read," said Tessmar.

He heard it as he said it. He had not thought it over; it came from the part in which one knows things one has not looked up. "Brendeck is no longer in the row. I am taking it out."

"And Westerhall?"

"The name stays. Its bell lies in the peat."

He looked around the fighting compartment. It smelled of rust and machine oil, and through the torn-open hull the light of the outer court fell in a long strip on the floor, in which the dust stood. He thought of Ulmersfeld. It was a thought he had thought ten times in fifty-three years and ten times put aside: that there had been no hull then, in the year 902.M41, and nobody who would have asked whether one could be found. The Ulmersfelders had been taken into the other cities, by heads, as Kägi had requested for his own, and they had gone in and stayed. He had never asked what would have been.

"I put it to the vote," he said.

They raised their hands. Kaltenau, the old man, opened his fist. He laid it flat, with a nod that shifted his face. Ruch. Falkenried. Eschenbruck, after a pause that lasted a second, in which one could have counted how many words he had. Torgelow. Five hands on the table that had been carried into the hull, of loading planks, with the grain of the hands of many years.

Then the second question, the burgomaster. It was five again. Tessmar wrote it down, in the book that he had opened, with the pen he had inherited from his predecessor, and his hand did not tremble. He wrote: The city of Brendeck is newly founded. The word again he did not write. He looked for a long time at the place where it would have stood.

When he looked up, Zumbrunn was already standing at the hatch. She looked out into the outer court, where wagon train and Guild had gathered before the hull, calm, in rows, without anyone having demanded it. She breathed once.

"Brendeck stands at five hundred and seventy-nine," she said.

It was a voice he had known from the Council's vox since Westerhall, cracked, straight, the voice of a woman who counts what belongs to her, and who at this moment took into her mouth the name of another city that had never belonged to her.

"Here," said the outer court.

VII. The Bell

COUNCIL BOOK OF THE CITIES · Session on day thirty-two, after the dawn strike

Muster call: Brendeck stands at 579. Kaltenau stands at 547. Sommerach stands at 502. Falkenried stands at 529. Eschenbruck stands at 495. Torgelow stands at 552.

Occupied: six chairs. Empty: six. Addendum to the decision under Article One, year 953.M41: line completed.

They hung the bell on the evening of the thirty-first day, without spectators, in the last light.

Gantner pulled the tarpaulin off the wagon. He did it as he did everything, with the limp that one heard before one saw him, and with hands that had never taken off any cloth in such a way that it could have flapped, and beneath, in the straw, on its side, lay the bronze. It was dark with soot. The soot sat so firmly that three years of wind had not loosened it. On the shoulder, in large letters that one could hardly see any more, stood two lines, and Tessmar, who had not read them for three years, read them as one reads something one knows by heart. BRENDECK. WHOEVER HEARS, COMES.

Four men lifted it. Rüegg at the crown, Wassmer and two Guildsmen at the sides, and they carried it across the outer court to the stern wall of the hull, which was now a stern wall, and set it down on the landing of the ladder, where the new iron bell-frame sat, four track pins that smelled of Torgelow. They lifted it once more. Rüegg set the first pin, and the second sat, and the third, and at the fourth he said something that Tessmar did not hear, only saw the lips, and struck.

The bell hung.

It swayed once, a finger's breadth, in the bell-frame in which it would sit, and came to rest. It was so quiet that one heard the wind in the chain. Nobody spoke. Tessmar saw that the women of the wagon train, who had come in a row, as to a Roll, had folded their hands in front of their bodies, and that the children in the first row looked up, where otherwise they lowered their heads.

In the evening, at the Roll of the Fallen, he left out the fourth name.

He had not planned it. He stood on the crate, the book in his hand, and spoke them in turn, as he spoke them every evening, Halmstadt, Gerrinsfurt, Ulmersfeld, and the place where the fourth belonged came, and he let it go, without making a pause, without changing his breath, and said the fifth: Westerhall. It was the voice of thirty-one years. He heard more than three thousand people forgo a word that they had expected every evening for three years, for the length of a breath in which nobody said anything and everyone held something. Then came Hohenwart and Lindgrund, six names, and the It rests from the crowd, a little offset, thinner than he knew it, and yet at no point weak.

That night he did not sleep. He lay in the town hall of Torgelow on the bench, beneath the brass, and heard the outer court breathe, and he got up before the first light.

They gathered around the hull without anyone having called them. It was cold, and the sky above Karstein was grey and smooth as a river pebble, and from the wall came no sound. They stood in rows that were not straight, the Guild of Brendeck and that of Westerhall, in a row that no city had ever had, the women, the old, the children, and they looked at the stern wall, at the landing of the ladder, at the bell in the new bell-frame. He saw Sattler among the children of Sommerach, without a smile, with the precise face. He saw the boy.

He stood at the foot of the ladder, alone. He had the jacket on that was too big, and the cord around his neck, and he looked at the bronze as he had looked at the tarpaulin, in the wagon, for three years.

The burgomaster stepped forward, the mallet in her hand. She was half an hour early. She stopped on the lowest rung, her braid over her shoulder, and looked into the crowd, and said nothing, and it went on until the rim of the sun reached the wall of Karstein. Then she looked down at the boy.

She held out the mallet to him.

Nobody explained the gesture. Only Wassmer, beside him, said under his breath, as if Tessmar had asked: "Tilo." So that was his name. The boy looked at the mallet, then at her, and Tessmar saw something draw together in his face, a child understanding something it has not learned. He took the little bell in his left hand and climbed the ladder. He took the mallet in both hands. He was too small for it, and it bothered no one.

The sun came over the edge of the wall.

He struck.

The note went out across the outer court, bright, with a faint rasp in the decay, a crack that the bronze had had since the ice, and it stood in the air for a long time, in the silence of the rows, before it passed. Then came, after a pause that was exactly as long as before, the second stroke, from Kaltenau, swung by a man at another stern wall, and the third, soft, from Sommerach, and the fourth, from Falkenried, and the fifth, from Eschenbruck. Last Torgelow. He heard it in his breastbone.

There were six.

He had counted them without meaning to, on the five fingers of his right hand and the thumb of his left, and he saw that the people around him had done the same, and that none of them looked at their hands. The sun stood over the wall. He said, into the silence after the sixth stroke: "The Cities stand."

"Still," they said.

He went into the hull. The Council sat, and the muster call was quickly over, six figures that were given in the order of the stroke, and this time none was missing at the start. He wrote them down. Then he opened the book at the decision from the third year, at the line that had stood open since the day in Ordrath, because nobody had ever told him the name and he had never asked, and he dipped the pen.

He now thought he knew why he had abstained. In the days after Ulmersfeld he had sat in Torgelow at the edge of a table, twelve years old, a guest, and a Guildsman with black hands had passed him the bread without asking whether he deserved it, and since then he had not thought himself someone who has to decide who belongs. He wrote: Tilo, citizen of Brendeck.

He looked at the line for a long time. Outside, at the stern of the hull, something rang, high and thin, a single time, hardly louder than a drop on tin. He raised his head. Nobody called out. He waited to see whether it would come again, and it did not. Then he wrote the figure of the city in the column, five hundred and seventy-nine, in the handwriting he had had for thirty-one years, and it looked exactly like any other.