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father tried to kill him.”
    “Nicolai,” Remus said calmly, as if explaining a simple formula, “you cannot take this child.”
    “Remus, he was floating down the river. Sinking. He would have drowned.”
    “And you saved him. But taking him with us is a responsibility you cannot bear.”
    Nicolai shifted me so I was cradled in his arms, looking up at his halo of curly hair, the sky beyond. He stroked my cheek with a finger as thick as a bell rope. “Do you want to come with us?” he said.
    How was I to know what he offered? For all I knew, the world terminated at those distant peaks, and every village had a Karl Victor. If someone had told me that there were but a thousand men in the wide world, I would have thought, My God! So many! But I saw in this face above me such a look of hope. Say yes , his eyes said. Tell me you need me. I will not fail .
    I wanted to go home to my mother.
    “Nicolai, listen to me, you have made a vow—”
    “I can make another.”
    “That is not how it works. Such vows are perpet—”
    “I vow—”
    “Nicolai, don’t. You can take him until we find a safe place to leave him, but don’t—”
    Nicolai looked into my eyes. Such kindness. But where was my mother? Still lying on the floor of our hut?
    “I vow,” he said, “that whatever happens, I will protect you.”
    Remus groaned. He began to say more, but Nicolai could not hear him, because suddenly, as though my mother had felt my yearning, the bells of Nebelmatt began to ring. Nicolai and Remus both cringed as the pealing shook them to their cores. Remus hunched his shoulders and stuck a dirty finger in each of his ears. Nicolai covered one side of my head with a huge palm and pressed my other ear against his chest, but I struggled until he put me down. I stepped down to the bank of the Reuss and looked up at the mountains. My mother was alive!
    I ignored the kind man who had saved me from the river. Remus tried to pull him away, but Nicolai just stood and covered his ears and watched me—the little boy who was clearly not harmed by this sound that shook the ground beneath our feet.
    My mother was well enough to have pulled herself off the muddy floor and climb to her bells! She played them now so fiercely it was as though she played the mountains themselves with her mallets.
    A quarter hour passed, and then the same again. Remus stuffed his ears with scraps of wool and took out a book. Nicolai just watched me—fingers plugging his ears—as if I were a wild beast he had never glimpsed before. My mother rang her bells far longer than she was allowed. It had been many years since she was beaten for such excess. Now, I knew, the Nebelmatters crouched behind their doors, switches in their hands, ready to climb to the church as soon as it was safe.
    And still she played the bells. She stroked them more ferociously than I had ever heard. There was almost no pause between the strikes. Then I heard a sudden change: she had cracked the soundbow of the smallest bell. Still she did not stop.
    I heard that she was calling him . As my father struggled back up the rocky path, drenched in mud and sweat and shame, he would have heard the pealing as a judgment resounding throughout the world. And he would have hated her for every ring, just as he hated her for tempting him, for exposing his sin with a child, and for making him a murderer. With each ring, he must have sworn that he would silence her.
    She taunted him up the muddy track with the promise she would sound his guilt until he stopped her. I am sure she watched him coming, but she did not slow or soften the ringing. Tears ran down my face and I screamed for my mother. “I am here!” I yelled. “I am alive!” But even Nicolai could not hear me. She beat those bells louder still, daring my father to climb to her tower and make her stop. In this tempest, the ground rumbled and the river crashed its waves around our feet, and I closed my eyes and imagined at the center of it all,