“It’s an Old Town thing,” said the Lady Mayoress, vaguely. “Some sort of tradition.”
Bod walked on. Everywhere he went he saw people wearing the white flowers. On the other street corners, he passed the men who had been with the Lady Mayoress, each man with a basket, handing out the white flowers. Not everyone took a flower, but most people did.
The music was still playing: somewhere, at the edge of perception, solemn and strange. Bod cocked his head to one side, trying to locate where it was coming from, without success. It was in the air and all around. It was playing in the flapping of flags and awnings, in the rumble of distant traffic, the click of heels on the dry paving stones…
And there was an oddness, thought Bod, as he watched the people heading home. They were walking in time to the music.
The man with the beard and the turban was almost out of flowers. Bod walked over to him.
“Excuse me,” said Bod.
The man started. “I did not see you,” he said, accusingly.
“Sorry,” said Bod. “Can I have a flower as well?”
The man with the turban looked at Bod with suspicion. “Do you live around here?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” said Bod.
The man passed Bod a white flower. Bod took it, then said, “Ow,” as something stabbed into the base of his thumb.
“You pin it to your coat,” said the man. “Watch out for the pin.”
A bead of crimson was coming up on Bod’s thumb. He sucked at it while the man pinned the flower to Bod’s sweater. “I’ve never seen you around here,” he told Bod.
“I live here, all right,” said Bod. “What are the flowers for?”
“It was a tradition in the Old Town,” said the man, “before the city grew up around it. When the winter flowers bloom in the graveyard on the hill they are cut and given out to everybody, man or woman, young or old, rich or poor.”
The music was louder now. Bod wondered if he could hear it better because he was wearing the flower—-he could make out a beat, like distant drums, and a skirling, hesitant melody that made him want to pick up his heels and march in time to the sound.
Bod had never walked anywhere as a sightseer before. He had forgotten the prohibitions on leaving the graveyard, forgotten that tonight in the graveyard on the hill the dead were no longer in their places; all that he thought of was the Old Town, and he trotted through it down to the municipal gardens in front of the Old Town Hall (which was now a museum and tourist information center, the town hall itself having moved into much more imposing, if newer and duller, offices halfway across the city).
There were already people around, wandering the municipal gardens—now in midwinter, little more than a large grassy field with, here and there, some steps, a shrub, a statue.
Bod listened to the music, entranced. There were people trickling into the square, in ones and twos, in families or alone. He had never seen so many living people at one time. There must have been hundreds of them, all of them breathing, each of them as alive as he was, each with a white flower.
Is this what living people do? thought Bod, but he knew that it was not: that this, whatever it was, was special.
The young woman he had seen earlier pushing a baby buggy stood beside him, holding her baby, swaying her head to the music.
“How long does the music go on for?” Bod asked her, but she said nothing, just swayed and smiled. Bod did not think she smiled much normally. And only when he was certain that she had not heard him, that he had Faded, or was simply not someone she cared enough about to listen to, she said, “Blimmen ’eck. It’s like Christmases.” She said it like a woman in a dream, as if she was seeing herself from the outside. In the same not-really-there tone of voice, she said, “Puts me in mind of me Gran’s sister, Aunt Clara. The night before Christmas we’d go to her, after me Gran passed away, and she’d play music on her old piano, and she’d sing, sometimes, and we’d eat chocolates and nuts and I can’t remember any of the songs she sung. But that music, it’s like all of them songs playing at once.”
The baby seemed asleep with its head on her shoulder, but even the baby was swaying its hands gently in time to the music.
And then the music stopped and there was silence in the square, a muffled silence, like the silence of falling snow, all noise swallowed by the night and the bodies in the square, no one stamping or shuffling, scarcely even breathing.
A clock began to strike somewhere close at hand: the chimes of midnight, and they came.