The Sound-Bow

by Christopher Marlowe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The great bell of Saint Gall had cracked at Easter, ringing the Resurrection, and the Council of Weissenach sent to the founder Jost Ammerbach to ask what a new one would cost them. He came up from the foundry by the river with his apron still on and clay to the elbow, and he did not sit when they offered him the stool.

"You ask what it will cost," he said. "Ask rather what it will be worth. You had a bell of a hundred and twenty hundredweight, and it was heard as far as the tile-works and no further, and when the wind was from the hills it was not heard at the tile-works. You want another of the same. I will not make it."

Burgomaster Teuber said that the Council had not asked him to make anything yet, only to name a price.

"Then I name one. Four hundred hundredweight of metal, and leave to dig my pit as deep as I need, and the old bells of this city given to me for the furnace. In return I will hang in Saint Gall a voice that the bargemen will hear at Kesselfurt, that the Prince-Bishop will hear at his table in Rotheneck with the windows shut. Rhodes had her Colossus, Babylon her walls, and Thebes the stone Memnon that sang when the sun touched it. Weissenach will have the bell that wakes the dead in other parishes. You are merchants. You know that a thing nobody has seen before is the only thing worth paying for."

The councillors looked at one another. Father Remigius, who sat at the end of the table as the Prince-Bishop's eyes, said mildly that bells were made for the glory of God and not of towns.

"Then God shall have three times the glory He had before, and some over," Ammerbach said. "Measure it how you like. By the pound, if you are a Christian of that kind."

They gave him what he asked, because he had never yet failed them, and because Kesselfurt was a rival on the river and its bells were better. The Council's clerk read out the list of what the city would surrender; the rest of the four hundred, he read, would be bought in new copper and tin from the Hamburg factors at the city's charge. Ammerbach stood and listened as a general listens to the names of the towns that have opened their gates.

Osanna herself, the cracked one, a hundred and twenty hundredweight. Gertrud, the vesper bell of Our Lady across the square, whose rope the sacristan's family had pulled for four generations. The Poor Sinners' bell from the gate-tower, that rang only when a man went out to be hanged, and had been rung eleven times in living memory. The school bell of Saint Agnes. The ferry bell from the landing stage. The mill bell at the weir. Two handbells of the leper house, now empty. And the Storm Bell in the Rathaus tower, which rang for fire and flood and soldiers, and which hung above the room where they were sitting.

"Not the Storm Bell," said Teuber.

"The Storm Bell above all," said Ammerbach. "It is good metal, old metal, the tin in it is Cornish, I have heard it and I know. And what is it for? To tell the town its roof is burning. When mine is hung, you will not need it. Strike mine once and every soul between here and the hills will be in the street."

"Saint Gall is half a mile from the Rathaus. The watchman cannot run half a mile with the town on fire."

"Then give him a horn," Ammerbach said, "and a pair of lungs."

Somebody laughed. The clerk wrote it down.

---

They brought him the bells through the summer, on drays, one by one, and laid them in the yard of the foundry on beds of straw like the bodies of drowned men brought up from the weir. He went among them in the evening with a lantern and a sledge. Bell metal is a proud metal and a brittle one; it will ring for a hundred years and break at a single blow if the blow is well placed. Ammerbach knew where to place it. He would walk round a bell twice, rap it with his knuckle and listen, and then lift the sledge, and the thing that had called Weissenach to prayer since the Swedes came would fly into seven pieces with a shout that set the dogs going all along the river.

His son Kilian, who was sixteen and kept the furnace books, counted the pieces and weighed them and wrote the weights in a column. Gertrud gave fifty-one hundredweight. The Poor Sinners' bell gave nine. The school bell four and a half.

Hensel the tower watchman came down on the day they fetched the Storm Bell. He was an old man, and the stairs of the Rathaus tower had put a hitch in his left knee, and he had walked the length of the town on it to stand at the foundry gate with his hat in his hands.

"I have rung her thirty-one years," he said. "I know her as I know my wife. Let me have her back when you are done. Melt the others."

Ammerbach did not stop working. "Your wife," he said, "is a pot of Cornish tin and Swedish copper, cast by a man whose name nobody in this town remembers. In a month she will be part of something greater than herself. There are women who would be glad of that."

"And if there is a fire before your month is out?"

"Then shout." He brought the sledge down. The Storm Bell did not break into seven, as the others had; she split clean in two, like a walnut, and the two halves rocked on the straw a long while, humming, until Kilian put his hand on one to stop it.

---

The pit was dug at the foot of the yard where the ground ran down to the water, twenty-six feet deep and lined with brick, and the men who dug it found at the bottom of it an old horseshoe and the jawbone of a pig and nothing more. In it Ammerbach built the core of his bell: brick round an iron spindle, loam over the brick, and the loam turned smooth by a board cut to the inward curve he had drawn on the floor of the casting shed, a curve no wider and no narrower than he had dreamed it. Over the core he laid the false bell, a skin of loam and tallow the exact thickness of the metal that would one day stand where it stood. And on the false bell, in the third week, he laid the letters.

They were wax, cut in the shop by his journeymen from forms he had made in the winter. On the shoulder, where the eye of anyone standing beneath the bell would go first, went the words the Prince-Bishop had sent down in writing:

SOLI DEO GLORIA

And below them, smaller, the arms of the city and the date.

Father Remigius came down to see them laid, and read them, and went away content.

That night Ammerbach sent the journeymen home and kept Kilian by him, to hold the lamp. He went down the ladder into the pit with a second box of letters that he had cut himself, alone, in the room above the shop. They were larger than the Prince-Bishop's: twice the height, and of a heavier Roman cut. He laid them on the sound-bow, the thick lip at the very bottom of the bell, where the clapper would strike, so that every blow the bell received for as long as it hung would fall upon them.

IODOCUS AMMERBACHIUS ME FUDIT

He worked round the bell on his knees, pressing each letter into the tallow with his thumb, and Kilian moved round with him and held the lamp, and neither of them spoke until it was done.

"They will see it from the tower floor," Kilian said at last. "Anyone who looks up."

"They will hear it," said his father, "from Kesselfurt. Hold the light higher. The S has gone crooked."

---

The furnaces were lit in the middle of August and burned for three days, and on the third night the whole of Weissenach came down to the river to watch.

They stood on the wall and on the roofs of the tanneries and in the boats drawn up on the shingle, and the light from the furnace doors lay red on all their faces. The Prince-Bishop had come from Rotheneck in his carriage and sat in it at the top of the lane with the windows down. The Council stood together by the gate in their black. Hensel the watchman stood among the tanners with a brass horn hung round his neck on a cord, and looked as if he would have liked to throw it in the river.

Ammerbach had not slept. He walked between the three furnaces with a long iron rod, and opened each door in turn, and looked into a light that no one else in the yard could look into, and closed it again. He threw in the last of the tin by hand. The journeymen stood ready at the tap-holes with their bars. When the metal was ready, he did not say so. He stood a while on the edge of the pit, above the clay channel that ran down into the mould, and turned round and looked up at the faces on the wall and the roofs and the boats.

"Look well," he said, not loudly, but the yard was quiet and the river carried it. "You will tell your grandchildren you saw this. Tubal-cain, the first that wrought in brass, never poured such a river as this. Bezaleel, who cast the laver for the tabernacle, never heard such a voice as this will have. Nebuchadnezzar set his image up in the plain of Dura, and called the nations to bow when they heard the cornet and the sackbut. I call no one to bow. I call them to listen. Open."

The bars went in. The tap-holes opened, one, two, three, and the metal came out of the furnaces white and talking, and ran down the channels in three streams that met above the pit, and went into the earth with a sound like a crowd drawing breath. The heat of it came up the yard in a wall and the people on the river-wall stepped back from it all together. Smoke rose from the vent-holes of the mould, and then flame, blue and then yellow, where the last tallow burned off. It took eleven minutes. Kilian counted them by his father's watch. At the end the metal stood up in the risers, red and quiet, and Ammerbach put his hand flat on the heat above it, the way a man feels a horse's flank after a long run.

He did not go home that night. He sat on the edge of the pit until the sky was grey, and the people went home one by one, and the Prince-Bishop's carriage went back up the lane. In the morning the bell was in the earth, cooling, and could not be seen; and Ammerbach washed his face in the river and went to bed and slept for a day and a half.

---

A bell of that weight cools slowly. It must lie in the packed earth of its pit for weeks, giving up its heat a little at a time, or it will set unevenly and crack in the setting. Ammerbach knew it and was not patient. In the third week he had the men dig the packed earth out from round the mould, down to the lip, and on the fourth he broke away the cope from the crown himself with a mallet, piece by piece, until the bronze showed through the clay, dark and warm still, with the bloom of the fire on it like a plum. He stood on the crown in his stockinged feet. He had a shed built over the pit against the rain, of fir planks on a frame of oak beams, with the windlass for the lifting set in the roof-tree. He could be heard at night, the journeymen said, talking down there, though there was nobody with him.

It was a dry September. The river dropped and showed its stones. On the night of the twenty-second the wind came round to the east and blew for six hours without a pause, and at a little after one in the morning a tanner's boy at the top of Gerbergasse knocked over a lamp in a drying loft full of hides.

Hensel saw it from the Rathaus tower. He saw the glow in the loft window, and the flame come out of the window and go up the outside of the loft, and he stood a moment with his hand out for a rope that was not there. Then he put the horn to his lips and blew.

A brass horn will carry along a street. It will not carry through shutters and over roofs to people asleep in their beds with the wind blowing across the town and slamming the shutters of its own accord. He blew it until his lips bled, and then he went down the tower on his bad knee and out into the square and began to beat on doors with his fist and shout, and by the time the square was awake Gerbergasse was burning end to end, and the wind had lifted the sparks off it and laid them along the drying sheds by the river, and the drying sheds were burning too.

It came down the bank to the foundry a little after three.

Ammerbach was in the pit when the cry went up; he had been sleeping there, on sacks, on the clay beside the bell. He came up the ladder and saw the river red from bank to bank and the shed roof over his head already smoking, and he began to give orders, and for a while they were obeyed. The journeymen pulled the pattern-loft down with hooks and dragged it to the water. Kilian ran the furnace books out of the office in his arms. But the wind was carrying fire in handfuls now, and the fir planks of the shed went up all at once with a sound like a sail filling, and one end of the oak beam that held the windlass burned through and dropped, and the windlass and the burning roof-tree came down through the shed into the pit and lay across the crown of the bell.

The town had come by then. They had a bucket chain from the river to the foundry gate, men and women passing from hand to hand, and they had saved the gate-house, and now they saw the beams burning in the pit and the bronze glowing red where the fire lay on it. They came down the yard with their buckets to save the bell.

Ammerbach saw what they meant to do and went to the edge of the pit and stood in their way.

"Stand off," he said. "Let it burn. Let the beam burn out and the pit cool and the bell cool with it. It has come out of a fire hotter than this one. Do not touch it. Do not touch it with water."

They did not understand him. The noise was very great: the roar of the sheds and the river-houses going, and the screaming of somebody's horses, and children crying somewhere in the street. A woman pushed past him with a full bucket. He caught her wrist and the water went over his own legs, and a man behind her shouted that the founder had gone mad, and two of the journeymen took him by the arms and drew him back off the edge, gently, as men draw back a mourner from a grave; and the bucket chain closed round the pit and the first water went down onto the red bronze of the crown.

There was a hiss, and a cloud of steam that came up out of the pit and hid the people standing round it. Then more water, and more, from the second bucket and the tenth and the fortieth, because they could not see through the steam whether the fire was out and so did not stop. Ammerbach did not struggle against the hands holding him. He stood in the steam and spoke without stopping, and Kilian, who was nearest, heard only some of it.

"Achilles had his heel," he said. "Samson had his hair. Babel went up brick by brick until the tongues fell out of it. You have none of you ever made a thing. Pour, then. Pour. You are pouring water on the sun."

The crack, when it came, was not loud. It was the sound a tree makes at night in a hard frost, a single report, flat and short, and after it a long low note that rose up out of the pit through the steam: the first sound the bell had ever made, and the only one it would make, and it went out across the burning water-front and the dark river, and on the far bank the cattle in the water-meadow lifted their heads.

---

The fire burned out with the wind at dawn. It had taken Gerbergasse and the drying sheds, nine houses on the river-wall, and the foundry roofs; it had killed the tanner's boy and an old woman in the house next to the loft, and a carter who went back for his horses. It had not crossed the square. Saint Gall stood with its tower empty. The Rathaus stood with its tower empty.

When the steam had gone out of the pit, Ammerbach went down the ladder. Kilian followed him with a lantern, though there was light enough now. The burned beams had been dragged out, and the clay of the cope was black and running with water, and the bell stood in it, huge, and whole all round its shoulder, where SOLI DEO GLORIA ran unharmed above the arms of Weissenach and the date.

At the foot of it, on the side towards the river, a piece of the sound-bow had come away: a slab of bronze as tall as a man and three times as broad, that had split from the lip and fallen outward into the clay and lay there on its back. The crack it had left ran up the waist of the bell in a line as fine as a hair.

Ammerbach knelt down in the wet clay beside the fallen piece and put the side of his hand against it, and wiped the mud off it with his sleeve, slowly, from one end to the other. The letters on it were sharp. The pour had taken them perfectly. They read:

IODOCUS AMMER

And on the bell, still standing, beyond the break, the rest went on round the lip in the grey light without him.

From the far end of the town came the sound of Hensel's horn, blowing for a fire that had been out for an hour.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Christophorō Marlōvō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Christopher Marlowe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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