The Light Ages

by Ian R. MacLeod

  Tired and afraid and disappointed, I followed the dim strings of lowtown’s gaslights and the milky wyreglow of the quickening pools, and climbed the familiar streets past St Wilfred’s. The cobbles were wet, each glinting with a fleck of that red star. The houses were black. The air was silent. Then I heard something screaming, and my heart chilled. It sounded as if claws were being dragged across the surface of the night. Then the noise emerged from the alley opposite me and became a dark figure. Its eyes, like the cobbles, burned with twin flecks of red light, and the air seemed to grey and shimmer around it. The night shrank and pulsed. I was sure at that moment that the devil himself had decided to walk Coney Mound, or at the very least that Owd Jack, aged and pained beyond belief and yet still living, had come to reclaim me. SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM. Stretching its rags, the thing shuffled towards me. And I ran. I was leaning against the gate of our back yard and catching my breath in ragged yelps before I realised that I’d only glimpsed the Potato Man. This was, after all, the time of year for him.

  ‘You’re late.’

  My sister Beth barely glanced up at me as I slumped down before the kitchen range. She thumped a dried-up meal on the table as I worked off my boots. I studied the chipped plate. A slice of shrivelled bacon. Some fibrous lumps of sea-potato, that ever-ready standby of the poor. Not even a slice of bread.

  ‘Where’s Mother?’

  ‘She’s upstairs.’ Beth’s look stopped any further questions. And she wasn’t wearing the inky pinafore she usually wore when she’d been working at her school. Picking at my food, I tried to remember whether anything had been different about this morning other than my own preoccupation with my secret plans for the day.

  ‘Can I go up and see her?’

  Beth bit her lip. Her wide, pink-cheeked face was framed by black, glossy, carelessly cut hair. ‘When you’ve finished eating.’

  Father came in from work soon after and headed straight upstairs without bothering to wash. Hobnails thunked across the ceiling, followed by the rake of a chair, his voice raised in a question, what might or might not have been the murmur of Mother’s reply.

  The fire in the range spat and crackled. The sounds from the other houses of pots banging, doors opening and closing, people talking, washed in through the thin walls. Redhouse seemed further away than ever. Father came down and shook his head at the withered food Beth offered. Hunched in his chair, he lit a cigarette and stared at it until a worm of ash dropped to the floor. It was silent above us now. The evening crawled by. I went into the scullery to wash my plate, then crept up the stairs on my blistered toes, trying hard as all the usual creaks popped and clattered not to make a sound. The landing swayed in the lanternlight that came from my mother’s room. Not wanting to go in now, just wanting to get to my bed in the attic and put this day behind me, I crept past the half-open door.

  ‘Robert?’

  I hesitated. The floor creaked again.

  ‘That is you Robert. Come in …’

  My mother looked ordinary enough, propped up by an extra pillow and wearing her better night-gown. Her eyes flickered to the shadows that bulked in the room’s corners, then back to me.

  ‘You look tired, Robert. That scratch on your cheek. And you smell different. Where have you been?’

  I shrugged. ‘Just the usual …’

  Her hands lay above the blankets, thin and delicate as a bird’s. The right one grasped the cloth, was slowly contracting and relaxing. SHOOM BOOM. The rhythmic motion stopped when she realised I was watching. A dull shudder passed through me.

  ‘Anyway, you’d better get to bed.’

  She tilted her head slightly, offering her cheek. Her skin felt brittle and hot.

  My mother’s new frailty became a kind of normality as Coney Mound settled into another winter. One by one, she gave up her various part-time jobs. Money became shorter and Beth, stuck with all the extra work that had fallen to her, failed her Guild of Assistant Teachers’ exam. After long hours of frigid rage, Father managed to complete the necessary forms to apply for the hardship funds set up by the Toolmakers’ Guild and a cheque was issued. Meagre though it was, it paid for occasional visits by that black frock-coated harbinger of death and uncertainty, a Master of the Physicians’ Guild. I watched the doctor rummaging in the glimmer of his bag, bottles clinking, his steel glasses and bald head shining with the glow of his useless potions, his meaningless spells, before he applied the drainings and poultices that always left my mother filler and more fretful.

  Sometimes, though, she would still be up when I got home, sitting by the parlour fire with a blanket over her legs and another over her shoulders which now seemed to rise too narrowly and too high. Occasionally, she would even be on her feet and moving about, ignoring Beth’s protests as she tried to get on with some household task that she had convinced herself was being neglected. She was clumsy enough at the best of times but I remember one evening soon after the first snowfalls when I came in and found her standing at the kitchen table, trying to crack eggs into the bowl. A scatter of crushed shells lay around her and yokes and whites drooled from her fingers, glistening in the faint darkness that now always seemed to surround her as if she was receding into a dream. I stayed out late the following evening. That year, that winter, I stayed out late on many nights.

  VI

  MIDWINTER LOOMED. THERE WAS MORE SNOW, a glazing of icy rain, and my father took me with him to Mawdingly & Clawtson one cold December Halfshiftday. Other guildsmen with faces I dimly recognised came to join us as we walked through the coalyards and sidings, swinging their leather kit bags, crashing their boots through the refrozen slush. The back entrance into the factory was quite unlike that to the main front office, with its ceramic friezes of Providence and Mercy, where I’d sometimes been sent to collect the wages. So this is the lad, is it? Looking after yer poor Ma, then, are yer? The men kept asking me questions they plainly didn’t want answered. Come to be shown then, have yer, eh? Then, as an aside. Quiet little blighter, ain’t he?

  The men who shared what was known as East Floor belonged to a variety of guilds. There were ironworkers, once known as smithies, and ferrous engineers, and platers, and ironmasters whose hands sometimes turned black and scabby, and enginewrights and finishers with missing fingers, all tangled together through processes which the foremen and the managers, themselves members of other guilds, or higher branches of the same ones, strove to control and contain. It was complicated and arcane, with hallowed meeting times, cryptic awards, spaces between walkways where one or another species could eat their lunch or hang their coats, but the overall impression which struck me as my father rolled up his sleeves and slipped the gears that would begin to turn his crude iron machine, was of an environment even more vicious and chaotic than my schoolyard. The men’s voices grew loud as they chanted incantations and common curses over the rattle and whine of their machinery. They seemed both proud and contemptuous of what they did, slapping gritty oil from tins and making odd signs of control when a pulley began to slap too loosely or a strut of metal threatened to shear. The few guildless marts who swept the floors and swatted dragonlice and cleaned the swarf were spat at, tripped, flicked with grease.

  My father’s boss, an uppermaster named Stropcock who had a rat’s pointed face and a large clip of pens bulging from the top pocket of his brown overalls, came up and said something over the noise which I guessed from the twisting of his lips was to do with showing me around. He then dragged, half threw me along grubby corridors where various lesser guilds had their offices. Forcing open a door, he tumbled me into a dim office which was stacked with half-open filing cabinets, rolled plans, greening mugs, tarnished trophies.

  ‘So we’ll be seeing a lot more of you, then, eh, laddie?’ he said somewhat breathlessly.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Insolent little bastard, aren’t you?’

  I shrugged again.

  He lit a cigarette and flicked the match over my shoulder. ‘Lad like you, what makes you t
hink that you’re good enough for the Lesser Toolmakers anyway? Your father wasn’t. Dead fucking lucky, I’d say he was, to get in at all.’

  I just stared at him. I really wasn’t that bothered by what he was saying. If I’d been cunning enough, I suppose I could have taken a swipe at him and put an end to my chances of ever joining the Lesser Toolmakers. Little men, stuck in little positions of little authority, are always the worst. He coughed up some phlegm and I wondered for a moment if he was going to spit it at me before he swallowed it back, ground out his cigarette and stalked around his desk to where an oil-stained sheet lay tented over something many-pointed. He flipped it back. Beneath lay the antlered, aetherised brass of a haft. I’d heard of such things, glimpsed them in guildhouse displays, but I’d never been this close. About a foot and a half high, grown from aethered brass, it looked more than anything like the miniature stump and boughs of a wind-eroded tree. Uppermaster Stropcock stroked the tip of one of its horn-shaped protuberances with his nicotined fingers. His eyelids flickered. For a moment, until he regathered himself, the whites rolled up.

  ‘Know what this is?’

  I nodded.

  ‘This, sonny, is my eyes and ears. Later, when you’re here good and proper, when you’ve backache from stooping and blisters on your hands and piles up your arse and your little head throbs from the noise, when you’ve seen some other lads from some other tinpot guild skulking off for an early snap, remember me. Eyes and ears, sonny, just remember. Eyes and ears. This isn’t school. We aren’t your pansy teachers ..

  He stepped back. Ridiculously, it looked as if he was inviting me to touch the haft.

  ‘It’ll be the only time, laddie. So make the most of it ..

  Slipping between Uppermaster Stropcock and the desk before he’d had the time to think better of it, I touched one of the thick brass spines. The thing felt smooth and warm and slightly greasy, like a well-used doorhandle. Then my flesh seemed to stick, to meld. And I sensed the factory pouring into me through the telegraphs and filaments that entwined it; sensed it as I had never sensed anything before. All the noise, all the work, all those lives. Mawdingly & Clawtson. SHOOM BOOM. That huge collision of effort which brought aether up from the ground. I was being sucked down. Through the wires, the telegraphs, the rails. The sensation was giddy and exulting. This was like my dream night-journeys. I was speeding everywhere across this realm. Hills and farms and valleys, and factories, factories, factories. Brick on brick and stone on stone, reinforced and bound and corrugated. And flesh on flesh as well. A great mountain of human endeavour. Bone grinding against bone and day against day in the endless procession of these Ages. And something else as well. Something dark beyond darkness, powerful beyond power, yet rising, rising…

  The bolt of a whispered command kicked my hand away.

  ‘That’s enough, lad. Don’t do to be greedy …’ The oily sheet wafted down again. ‘Just don’t forget, eh?’ He hitched up the sleeves of his jacket, unbuttoned the filthy cuff of his shirt. ‘—See these, eh?’ Sunset-coloured bruises embroidered the insides of his palms and writhed up to the blistered navel of his stigmata. ‘See, these, laddie. Marks of the haft. And don’t you ever bloody forget them.’

  My head buzzing, I followed Uppermaster Stropcock back along corridors and across a wide yard traversed by hissing pressurised pipes. Clanging up an outer stairway in his wake, I bumped into the greasy seat of his trousers when he halted halfway.

  ‘Uppermaster Stropcock!’ I heard an oddly accented voice above us exclaim. ‘And how are we on this less than bright morning?’

  ‘Fair to middling, sir.’

  Stropcock backed down the stairway, forcing me with him. ‘Thank you! I’m most obliged,’ the voice continued. ‘And who have we here?’

  Stropcock shuffled back and a large man with muttonchop whiskers, a mop of reddish hair and a brown woollen suit stood regarding me.

  ‘Just the lad of one of the workers I’m showing around.’ Then he added in a loud whisper, leaning down, ‘This here, sonny, is Grandmaster Harrat,’ as if this personage was too important to speak his own name.

  ‘And what do you think of our factory?’ Grandmaster Harrat asked.

  ‘It’s …’ I glanced around at the filthy buildings. ‘Big.’ Uppermaster Stropcock sucked in a breath. ‘He’s only the Borrows lad.’

  But Grandmaster Harrat laughed. ‘Tell you what, Ronald. I’ll take young Master Borrows from you and show him around myself’

  ‘But—’

  ‘If that’s all right with you? I mean, I take it that it is?’ Grandmaster Harrat laid a hand on my shoulder, leading me across the yard before Uppermaster Stropcock had had a chance to reply. ‘What’s your first name?’ he asked, in a surprisingly gentle, almost wheedling, voice.

  ‘Robert, sir.’

  ‘And you must call me simply Tom. It’s not as though you work at Mawdingly & Clawtson yet, Robert, is it, or you’ve yet been inducted into a guild? So there’s no need for formality, is there? We can just be friends …’ The hand, which still lay on my shoulder, squeezed me gently. Tom—it was a ridiculous suggestion. I could never think of him as Simply Tom. He’d always be Grandmaster Harrat.

  We passed through doorways into better-made corridors and rooms where the more specialised crafts were performed. Supervisors scampered around machinery to greet Grandmaster Harrat. Leaning over the workbenches, the silk buttons of his waistcoat sliding against my arm, he encouraged the guildsmen to perform some intricate portion of their duties. He spoke to the master of a familiar on west floor, who called his creature down from the spinning overhead maze of gears by pursing his lips into an inaudible whistle. The poor animal’s fur was caked in oil and it was missing the tips of several of its toes. The familiar licked itself half-heartedly, then studied me with wise sad eyes set in an almost human face. It looked as lost here as I felt, far from its home in the tropic jungles of fabled Africa.

  ‘You father works East Floor, doesn’t he?’ Grandmaster Harrat said after ordering me a large slab of chocolate cake in the tiled and elegant senior management canteen. ‘He’s a toolmaker … and your mother used to work in the paintshop?’ I nodded as I ate, my mouth full of sponge and saliva, quite amazed that he should have heard of us Borrowses. Then I risked asking him if he didn’t actually know Masters Clawtson and Mawdingly. This, like most of my comments, caused him to laugh. They were both, it seemed, long dead and buried. The factory was now owned by something called shareholders, which could mean individual people, or more often as not the guilds—or the banks where the guilds kept their money. Sticking out his bottom lip like a small boy as he swirled more sugar into his tea, Grandmaster Harrat ruefully admitted that he, as a senior member of the Metallurgical Branch of the Great Guild of Savants, was on something known as the General Board, which apparently made the decisions that shaped the destiny of Clawtson & Mawdingly, although, personally speaking, it was a part of his job that he hated. Studying Grandmaster Harrat again between the silver churches of the condiments, I realised that I had seen him before; stepping out of the door of that guildhouse and looking down on my mother and I on that morning that we had hurried to the station.

  I was taken to Engine Floor, where the engines that drove the aether pistons and much of the other major machinery were located, pouring out pressurised steam and motive power. We looked down as vast iron boilers throbbed and bubbled, their aetherised joints glowing in hot semidarkness with the power they controlled and contained. I stood before the largest and most ancient of these engines—presented was the word—whose huge, leaking iron body was lumped with barnacle-like encrustations of engine ice and rust. We looked down from the gantry where its ironmaster, who was as white and skinny as his charge was black and huge, worked stripped to the waist with braces dangling, stroking and willing his machine to bear impossible pressures.

  ‘That engine’s been here longer than any of us,’ Grandmaster Harrat shouted in my ear. ‘It used to have a twin, but that’s anot
her story …’

  At the core of Engine Floor lay the axle which powered the aether engines beneath. It was even thicker and blacker and vaster than I’d imagined, and so smoothly polished and oiled that it scarcely seemed to be moving. Grandmaster Harrat led me to a gated lift, and pulled a lever that sent the earth clacking up. For a while it grew almost silent as we dropped and joists and telegraph filaments slid by. Then a sound pushed everything else aside.

  SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM.

  The air pounded in and out of my lungs as we stepped out into a tunnel. Grandmaster Harrat wordlessly gestured the way that we should go as we stooped along a wet brick maze past the intermittent light of mesh-hooded lanterns. I caught glimpses of the grind and flash of coarse machinery. Was this foul burrow really where we obtained all that aether? Here, the air gasped, the wounded rock shuddered, the very earth twisted and groaned. Every forward step, every blink and breath, required an enormous effort. We reached a cavern of sorts. Here, on Central Floor, there was no sound but an endlessly repeated convulsion. The triple massive horizontal columns of the aether engines pounded before me on their steel and concrete beds, and Grandmaster Harrat led me beside their flashing pistons to their link with the Bracebridge earth, a great iron plug the size of a house bolted to the rockface which was called the fetter. From there, in a shadow-weave of engine silk, the engines were joined by a yard-long chrysalis of intricate metal known as the shackle. But my senses were overwhelmed. There was light and there was blackness, and I think I must have been about to faint. Probably noticing how pale I had become, Grandmaster Harrat steered me back along the almost quiet-seeming tunnels, and we waited at the lift gate as the pulley chains began to turn. I still felt ill and giddy as I looked back along those damp walls. Nubs of engine ice, I noticed, pushed out from them at intervals like the tips of pleading hands. Then the lift arrived.