The Light Ages

by Ian R. MacLeod

  Back on the surface we passed across yards and through doorways to a large high room where all the noise of the factory suddenly fell away. I stood swaying, dazed by cool semidarkness. Lines of young women sat working amid greenish wafts of aetherglow. The paintshop girls—for girls was all they mostly were, filling in the time between school and childbearing whilst their hands and eyes were good enough for this impossibly delicate work. Elbows nudged. There were giggles.

  ‘Your mother used to work here, you know.’

  I could well imagine my father swaggering towards this paintshop on some excuse of an errand—slicking back his hair and checking his reflection in a water butt before breezing through the door and setting eyes on the face of my mother, upward-lit by the wyreflame of whatever cog or valve she was then working on.

  Grandmaster Harrat then took me to his own office, which looked out on the forgotten world of trees, gaslamps and drays. A fire was warming the hearth. There was a smell of sallow-wood and leather.

  ‘So, Robert,’ he said, lighting a cigar and breathing a circle of smoke, ‘do you still think Mawdingly & Clawtson is big?’

  I was staring around at the books and the vases and the paintings. A mermaid combed her hair on a rock.

  ‘And what did you think of the aether engines?’

  ‘They were …’ What could I say? Then a thought struck me. ‘The engine ice coming from the walls—doesn’t that mean the aether’s nearly exhausted?’

  There was a pause. ‘I think you should wait until you’re a guildsman before you speculate on such matters, Robert. But here …’ Placing his cigar in a cut glass ashtray, he flipped open a wooden box—beautiful to me in its simplicity—which lay on his desk. He removed a steel spindle from it and held it out, the points digging into the tips of his broad, soft fingers. The spindle had a colourless sheen and thickened at the centre. ‘Engine silk, Robert. This is what your father’s life on East Floor at Mawdingly & Clawtson is dedicated to—or at least, to making the machines which make the machines that finally make the engine silk. Mine as well, seeing as the Guild of Savants ensures the precise and efficient extraction of aether ..

  Grandmaster Harrat grabbed something that couldn’t be seen and trailed it out with a looping gesture. A faint glimmer of firelight laced the air.

  ‘Go on. Touch—but be careful. That’s it … Imagine you’re stroking a cat ..

  Light as the wind, the stuff whispered through my fingers.

  ‘Strange, isn’t it, that aether travels better along something so pure, so frail; through the fetter, to the shackle, then up through the engines and all those yards of rock to the surface of this world? And of course, there’s aether in the silk itself—aether, Robert, to carry the aether—can you see it glimmering? This was what the Grandmaster of Painswick really laboured to produce all his life. All the rest …’ He waved a hand, encompassing everything which lay beyond the panelled walls of his office. ‘It’s all just motive power, pressure. Yes, the weave of the engine silk in the shackle’s the key …’

  I nodded.

  ‘Of course, this particular spool is useless, contaminated.’ Gently, he untangled the engine silk from my fingers and wound it up again. ‘A mere tradesman’s sample …’ He placed the spindle back within its box, then lifted up his cigar, ruefully studying its cold black end. ‘And your father, of course. Your father …’ At that moment, the familiar howl of the shift siren rippled the air. This being Halfshiftday, work on the outer floors finished at noon. ‘And then there’s your mother. Is she better?’

  ‘Better? I—’

  ‘You must send her my wishes. We all …’ Grandmaster Harrat mused, pursing his thick lips, running a thumb down the front of his fine waistcoat, his eyes far away. ‘We all wish that things could have been different. Will you tell her that for me? That we wish things could have been different?’ Once more, he laid his soft hands upon my shoulder. ‘You will tell her that for me, won’t you?’

  VII

  MORE SNOW CAME ON CHRISTMAS EVE. Curdled clouds writhed across the valley and the men trudged home early as the chimneys blocked and the yards piled up, hunched like the negatives of ghosts against the teeming white. The shops closed, the roads and the rails became impassable. Bracebridge found itself isolated. Even the shift sirens didn’t bother to sound. The only noise, as I lay shivering that night in my freezing attic and watched my window fill up with snow, was a dense, endless hissing.

  I wandered down into the kitchen on Christmas morning, stiff and cold, my fingers blue, my teeth chattering, to find the stove dead even though Father, as he always did now Mother was ill, had slept in front of it. Grunting awake, sour and angry as he struggled to get water from the frozen bucket to dose his previous evening’s excesses at the Bacton Arms, he eventually set about re-lighting it whilst Beth scraped up breakfast. Still, we were all grateful for a day when we didn’t have to work.

  I clambered over the drifts to the bakery at the end of the road a few hours later and stood beside the dry, delicious heat of the old furnace with its smoothly bellied bricks as neighbours chatted and the younger children ran about outside and occasionally came in crying after some accident, barely recognisable beneath their crustings of snow. Collecting the roast was my usual job on feastdays and Noshiftdays, and one that I generally enjoyed; happy, for once, to share the companionship that life on Coney Mound fostered. But today I was the subject of smiles and sympathetic questions. When the family roasting pans emerged from the ovens in a glorious aroma I found that spare bits of meat, parsnip, sausage and real potato had been added to ours. I ploughed my way home through the snow, the hot tin clutched to my chest like the core of my anger.

  Beth had laid a fresh cloth over the kitchen table, and put sprigs of holly and berry along the dresser. The fire was finally burning, although spitting and huffing from its night of neglect, and father was staring at yesterday’s or the day before’s paper, the page folded around into a neat, exact square. I counted the places Beth had laid.

  ‘What about Mother?’

  ‘Oh, I expect she’ll ..

  Then a sound came through the thin ceiling. A thump, followed by a dragging slide. Then a pause. Then another slide. To our shame the three of us simply gazed at each other as Mother bumped and shuffled downstairs. Finally, she emerged at the bottom, swaying, her skin grey, her face slick with sweat, her hair lank, her blue eyes blazing. Her hands seemed longer and thinner, slipping across the walls as she fought for support. ‘I thought I might as well make the effort, today being today …’ Belatedly, my father and Beth clustered around her, helping her over to the table and propping her up with pillows like a doll before the extra place that I set out for her. Her feet, I noticed, looking down as father sharpened the cedarstone-handled family knife with a flare of black-white sparks, were bare, the nails blue-black, and the Mark on her left wrist was a mere blemish. The ladle clicked as Beth served out the differently cut bits of other families’ vegetables, and there was a loud hiss as father opened his bottle of ale. A thin trickle of blood oozed out from the centre of meat when he sliced into it.

  ‘You know,’ Mother said, ‘I was wondering if we really do need to get Robert a new coat when I’m sure that Mistress Groves told me last summer that she had a spare one that been barely used by any of her children …’ Her voice was thin and quick, like the sharpening of that knife. ‘I’ve had so much time to think,’ she went on. ‘It’s surprising what comes to you … Remember a couple of years ago, when I asked … ? Not that I mean to tell you how to live your lives ..

  Mother hadn’t eaten and her hand shook rhythmically as she tried to drink a glass of thawed water. Then she began to cough, covering her mouth with her toad-like hands as her fingers dangled long strings of mucus. This frail and disgusting creature who seemed, as the light thickened into an early dusk, to give off her own dark glow from within webbings of skin as translucent as clouded glass, wasn’t my mother any longer, and I hated her for it. I wanted to smash some
thing in my rage, to kick away the table, break furniture, to claw down the sham walls of this world.

  I went outside as soon as I could. The snow looked grey and thunderous now, heaped under the dimming sky. And Bracebridge was deathly quiet, funeral quiet, Christmas quiet; its edges furled and smoothed, the houses eyebrowed like old men, the trees and bushes bowed under huge caterpillars of snow. I trudged on, hands stuffed into my pockets, breath steaming, unconsciously following the route down into lowtown that my mother and I had taken those few—those many—shifterms ago. Here was St Wilfred’s, still big and squat and ugly with its buttresses sunk into the earth like claws, the tombstones trailing back in rows through a heaving sea of bluish-white; orderly corpses queuing patiently for resurrection, distinguishable only by their dates of birth and death, membership of one or another guild. High Street was empty. Below and beyond, down the hill where the snow banked in deeper waves beneath the white glower of Rainharrow, there was none of the usual bustle and noise. The gate that led to the pitbeast pens was shut and chained, and the great animals lay dim and quiet on their beds of straw.

  The main entrance of Mawdingly & Clawtson was lightless and empty, but beyond that, down where Withybrook Road looped north, lay another entrance which, even today, remained fouled with slush and fallen coal, shining in the lamplight, glistening in the wyreglow of the settling pans, darkly hollowed by the pristine snow. Somewhere, the balehounds began to howl. There was a pressure in my heart. My legs trembled. I could feel it now, rising up into me through the ground, through everything—SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM—that dull endless thudding.

  I took a different way back, sliding along the banks of the Withy beyond the yards, then climbing up through the streets at the edge of hightown where the members of the better lesser guilds and those of the ordinary guilds lived in their solid houses built of thick courses of proper brick. Through windows I glimpsed children playing in the hearthlight, families clustered around pianos. Reaching High Street, I looked up at the great guildhouses which climbed beyond snow-softened lines of railings, their windows glowing. Scarcely knowing what I was doing, squinting up at the signs until I found the house of the Great Amalgamated Guild of Savants, I pulled on a freezing copper bell chain which nearly tore the flesh from my hands.

  A man with a bulbous chest furrowed his eyes at me as the lighted guildhouse laddered up into the winter sky. He was a butler; the sort of creature I knew little about.

  ‘I’ve come to see someone. His name is Grandmaster Harrat.’

  I could see calculations flashing across the man’s face. To let this grubby little urchin in, or kick him into yonder drift?

  ‘If you’ll just wait in the hall. Wipe your feet first ..

  Trailing muddy snow, I tramped inside and stared about me in disbelief as the butler wafted across the parquet of a hallway which glimmered with soft lights, incredible ornaments.

  ‘Robert! And today of all days!’ Grandmaster Harrat hurried through a doorway, his arms outstretched as if in an embrace. His waistcoat and his face were almost equally florid. ‘What a pleasant surprise!’

  ‘I’m sorry ..

  ‘No, no, no, Robert! I’m so very pleased that you took the trouble to look in. I really enjoyed our little chat that—when was it?—that morning not so long ago. Time flies …’ He steered me towards a seashell-shaped sofa. From here, I could see beyond the large doorway through which he had come into an even bigger room where many faces, thin and fat, old and young, as varied and animated as a crowd scene in a painting, were lined before a landscape of silver salvers, cut glass decanters, half-ruined arrangements of confections and flowers. One of them, I was sure before he sat back and was lost in the melee, bore the pointed, sour and unmistakable visage of Uppermaster Stropcock.

  ‘It’s a tradition that we meet up here on feastday afternoons. Guild members and a few chosen friends, although this year, the weather being what it is, there are some empty spaces. Still .. Grandmaster Harrat rubbed his hands. The talk in the next room door clattered like rain. ‘How are things at home, Robert?’

  I stared blankly at him, perched on this slippery silk sofa. After today’s wanderings, this place was simply too much for me. But Grandmaster Harrat’s eyebrows were still half raised in expectation of some answer to his seemingly simple question. His dewy cheeks were almost trembling. Things at home … What was I supposed to say—that my mother was becoming a changeling? A bubble of dark anguish began to form, growing as this previously unthought idea threatened to engulf me. I fought it down. My eyes stayed dry. I kept his gaze until he looked away.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ I said.

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it, Robert. And, tell you what, you’re a bright lad and I truly admire your pluck for coming here. This of all days, as well. I’d like us to meet again when I have more time. I only live on Ulmester Street. It’s really just around the corner.’ He stood up and rummaged in his pockets. ‘Here’s my card …’

  I took the soft wedge. The ink didn’t smudge. It was ornamented with the signs of his guild.

  ‘Perhaps next shifterm—Halfshiftday afternoon. How does that sound? You and I could get to know each other—it could be our secret.’

  For want of anything else to do or say, I nodded.

  ‘And before you go, Robert. Before you go …’ Grandmaster Harrat puffed out his cheeks. He stood up and walked over to a tall, flower-entwined jar painted with Cathay dragons, lifted its lid and took something round from its interior. ‘Have this. It’s nothing! Just chocolate. And I’ll see you, yes? Just as we’ve said. Just as arranged … ?’

  The butler re-emerged and I was shown from the guildhouse with a heavy sphere in one hand and Grandmaster Harrat’s card in the other. I’d peeled back the gold foil and began to eat the chocolate inside before I realised that it had been marked with coastlines, rivers, mountains. But, by then, I was too hungry to care. I’d eaten the whole world and felt light-headed and sated by the time I reached Brickyard Row. Beside all the other houses, ours looked dark and empty. I kicked my way down the alley and went in though the back door, working it open with the usual push and pull. The lamp was hooded and the loose tiles clattered beneath my feet. The only light in the kitchen came from the glow of the stove. Father was half asleep beside a long row of beer bottles.

  ‘Where the bloody hell have you been all this time?’

  ‘Just out. Nowhere.’

  ‘Talking like that! Don’t you dare …’ But he was too tired and drunk to be bothered to leave the warmth of his chair. I dragged off my boots and went upstairs. The night thickened as I passed my mother’s room. I could hear her breathing—Ahhh, ahh; a rhythmic sound like a perpetual surprise—and I could sense her listening even though she hadn’t called out my name. My stomach tensed as, instead of shooting past on my way to bed as I usually did, I found myself pushing back the wheezing door.

  ‘Where have you been? I heard shouting …’

  ‘Just out wandering.’

  ‘You smell of chocolate.’

  The golden wrapper still crackled in my pocket. ‘Something I found.’

  I stood there, looking down the length of the bed. Despite the stillness of the night, the fire was burning poorly in the grate as if the wind was against it, filling the room with a sooty haze. Everything was too wide, too dark, and the air stank of chamberpots, coalsmoke, rosewater. But she’d made an effort to look her best, with clean sheets folded around her and the pillows stacked behind.

  ‘I’m sorry about lunch, Robert. That I went on so—’

  ‘You shouldn’t—’

  ‘I just wanted today to be special. I know things have been hard for us lately. Disappointing.’

  ‘Really. It’s all right.’

  ‘And you smell of warm rooms, too, Robert.’ Her nostrils fluttered. ‘And fine food, fruit, firelight, good company … It’s almost like summer. Come here.’

  I walked slowly around the bed, fighting a sense of panic.

  ‘
You don’t look in on me as often as you used to ..

  Her pale arms snaked out and I felt the claws of her fingers caressing the back of my head. Their pressure was irresistible. I bowed down, and veils of filthy smoke seemed to fall around me. ‘You’re a stranger now, Robert.’ Her voice hollowed to something less than a whisper as she drew me in. Don’t let it end this way … She stank of sweat-sour blankets, unwashed hair—and she was hot, hot.

  Letting go, beckoning me to sit down on the mattress, she asked me about what she was starting to call life downstairs: how Father was managing; if I thought Beth was coping as well as she claimed. The conversation, as we attempted to reassure each other and I stared at the pulse of the big vein which now protruded from her temple instead of meeting her changed eyes, was plain and predictable. I could have filled in her words before she said them. Mother didn’t need my replies.

  I picked at the sheet’s loose stitching. Once-good material, probably a wedding gift, it was almost worn through from all the times she had washed it in the zinc tub. And Mother’s fingers, I saw now, looking helplessly down at them, were smudged black. I glanced over at the fire, at the scuttle Beth had filled with the cheap, gritty coal we made do with here on Coney Mound. A few lumps had fallen across the hearth, whilst others lay flaked and scattered on the rag mat beside the bed. I heard a scratching movement in the walls, in the corner, and glanced over, expecting a rat, or mice. But the thing which vanished into the crack beneath the wainscot was many-legged. Fattened on the madness of aether beyond the size of any ordinary insect, it had a long, glossy back: a dragonlouse.