‘That day …’ I heard myself begin.
‘What day?’ My mother raised the back of her hand to rub some imagined smudge from her face. ‘You mean that Midsummer? Remember when it was so hot and we went down early to a fair by the rivermeads to see that poor old dragon. You were so—’
‘The day this year when we went on the train, Mother! I saw a man coming out of one of the guildhouses on that Fourshiftday. You looked up and … And I met him when I was down at Mawdingly & Clawtson that Halfshiftday. His name’s Grandmaster Harrat and he’s in one of the great guilds. He keeps … Well, he asked me how you were. He seems to know you.’
My mother closed her eyes for a long moment before finally shaking her head. ‘No, Robert. I have no idea who you mean.’
The fire spat a few angry sparks. Smoke drifted. My eyes began to sting.
‘But couldn’t we … ?’
‘Couldn’t we what, Robert?’ She sounded distant and angry, less than ever like the person I thought I knew. ‘Get the trollman to come and take me off to that ghastly asylum? Sell me as a living specimen to some guild?’
‘Whatever it was,’ I said, ‘whatever happened, it must be down to that place. Down to Mawdingly & Clawtson. They should be made to pay. Or you could escape with Mistress Summerton and live with her and that Annalise girl. It doesn’t have to be like this, does it? You could be …’
She sighed. I could tell that this was weary ground, long gone over, made stony and arid. ‘And what about your father’s job, Robert—the way he is, if we start kicking and complaining, don’t you think they’ll just take any excuse to be rid of him? Him without work and me stuck up here and Beth tied, and you too young, quite frankly, Robert, to do anything other than draw stupid conclusions. How do you think that would be? Where do you think that that would leave us? I wish I’d never ever taken you to see Annalise and Missy at Redhouse.’
I shrugged, hurt by her sudden anger.
‘Things can’t be changed,’ she said. ‘Everything is as it is. I’m sorry, Robert. I’m just like you. We all are. We all wish it was otherwise. And I wish I’d never seen that damn shackle and that stone … But, please, for me, leave it alone.’ There was still a rasp in her voice even as she attempted to make it softer. It was as if the foulness of this air had got into her. ‘And it’s so strange here now. I hate myself. I hate this room. Just lying here on this mattress, in this bed. So I know how you feel about me, Robert. This is …’ She shook her head at the impossibility of finding the right word and I heard bones snapping and creaking as she did so—as if she, like everything else here, was thinly magicked, cheaply made. The rhythmic motion went on. Long before she’d ceased, I was grinding my teeth, balling my fists, clenching my sphincter, wishing she’d stop. ‘And I remember when I was young, Robert. How I used to love my bed, and the dreams it brought me! I can sometimes see this valley, before the magic was stolen from its stones. Perhaps those stupid people of Flinton are right, after all. Perhaps Einfell wasn’t so very far from here. I almost see it now, Robert, those fairy princes wandering through these very walls, smiling and dancing. Goldenwhite, bridesmaided by unicorns and all the fragile beasts of the air. I can still hear her terrible laughter ringing amid the trees …’
She cocked her head like a strange bird. She drew in a slow breath which rasped and bubbled.
‘It’s as if that other world is all around me, Robert. And I’m separated from it by nothing but the thinnest veil of evil air. I can smell the sunlight, almost touch …’
Her fingers contracted on the counterpane. They let go, tensed again, let go, tensed, in a rhythm I knew. I could see the tendons sliding beneath the near-transparent flesh like ropes.
‘Yes, I loved my bed, Robert, when I was a child,’ she said eventually. ‘And my dreams. It was my entire wish to stay in bed forever. Can you believe that? I never really wanted my life to start. But I was always busy, Robert, there was never enough time, always the cows or the chickens. I loved my bed as a child because I never had enough time in it. It was a big old thing, of good solid wood, a whole territory of my own with white valleys and the peaks of mountains. When I grow up, I thought, when I’m grown and tall enough, I’ll be able to press my head against the board at one end and worm my feet out into the air at the other, I’ll be able to claim it all. The funny thing is, I can do it now. But here in this bed, and only recently. Do you want to see, Robert? D’you want to see just how far I can stretch myself?’
Even as I backed out, half falling, my mother began to push away the pillows and blankets that Beth had neatly arranged. There began a cracking and popping as bones slipped and moved and her body began to elongate, the sheets spilling from her flesh like milk from a slate.
VIII
THE DAYS TUMBLED OUT; a whole new year, waiting. The pitbeasts were brought out to try to clear the rails which led south around Rainharrow and we bobble-hatted children came to watch, whooping and shouting as the great animals with their glossy grey flanks, their small eyes glimmering with ancient dark, were hauled from the yards on wooden sleds and dragged as far up the valley as the drays could bear them. The day slowly darkened and the rails, as they often did through winter shifterms in Bracebridge, remained impassably blocked with snow. But the guildsmen seemed happy—and we children, our feet insensible, tired and wild and frozen, snowballed down from the evening hills. It was the time of day when twilight and aether light reached a kind of equilibrium, when lanterns were first lit and all of Bracebridge seemed to fizz and shimmer, losing substance and seeming to hover in the fading air.
There was more snow in the days and shifts that followed, although it was never that bluish white again, but fouled and darkened by the sooty labours of our shut-off town. At school, once the pipes had been thawed and the floods were washed out and the few books it possessed were hung out to dry like weary bats, I was beginning to acquire something of a reputation for playground toughness. Mother’s a troll … Mother’s a changer … But I learned how to strike out with a wild anger which scared all but the biggest and dullest.
Thus I was buoyed up with a sort of dogged aggression when I visited Grandmaster Harrat’s house—entering the foreign area of highest hightown, a place of small parks and statues and glimpses of the river, seizing the brass front knocker and striking it unhesitatingly against my dark reflection on the varnished door, although I sensed at the same time that I was risking something by doing so. But Master Harrat seemed more himself here than he had at Mawdingly & Clawtson, or even at his guildhouse. He lost that aura of playing a role that people who are unhappy in their work so often maintain. He chuckled, he pursed and smacked his lips, he moved quickly—wearing a dressing gown, of all things—his embroidered slippers squealing excitedly on the polished floors. The house itself was anonymous despite its obvious and well-made solidity, a lifeless place of unornamental ornaments and stuffed animals kept in glass domes, dusted by maids I never saw because they were always out for their free Halfshiftday afternoon. But my most abiding impression is of a smell. It brushed against me as I entered the hall and lingered as I spooned luxurious amounts of sugar into my tea and gorged myself on marzipan cake in the drawing room. It was partly a warm smell, coppery and smooth, and partly like the sweet rankness of decaying flowers. At first I thought it came from the gas mantles with which the house was illuminated, strange as even they were to me then. But it had a thundery oppression, a darker tang.
‘Electricity!’ Master Harrat exclaimed, standing up, leaving his own cake uneaten, his tea unsipped. ‘It’s the way of the future, Robert. You must let me show you …’
At the back of the house, beyond an enormous empty kitchen, he kept a workroom in a long space lit by several mossy skylights. All around us, vials and jars and lenses glinted.
‘Electricity’s invisible, of course—and quite harmless … That is, if treated as you would any volatile chemical. And not that it is a chemical …’ He hovered there, looking about at his many implements as if
they surprised even him. ‘Gaslight is a thing of the past, Robert. It was never safe, never ideal, and the demands of the higher-guilded classes are always increasing. Yes, the future, Robert. The future … !’
The next part of our ritual on that and other Halfshiftday afternoons was for Grandmaster Harrat to clear a space on one of his workbenches, and then, promising that he would only take moments, muttering and tutting for hours, tying and twisting copper wires and rolling out acid-filled cauldrons, turning devices which seemed like copper-wound adaptations of my mother’s wringer until the smell of his exertions mingled with all the other scents filling this long room. At the end of it all, Grandmaster Harrat would touch two ends of metal.
‘Electricity, Robert,’ he would wheeze. There on a workbench, clamped within lizard-like jaws, a whisker of filament would turn faint orange for a while until, with an agitated, almost aether-like spark, it died. Of course, I was used enough to my father’s intermittent enthusiasms to show the requisite admiration. But Grandmaster Harrat had visions of houses, streets, towns, cities, lit by this feeble yellow glow.
‘Imagine, Robert, if the trams in London were driven by electricity! Imagine if the trains which ply between our towns and the engines which drive our factories were powered thus! Think how clean the air would be! Think of the purity of our rivers!’
I nodded dutifully.
‘We have endlessly stuck, Robert, in these Ages of steam and industry, all these last three hundred years. Where are the new advances?’
Grandmaster Harrat was in full flight now. I barely had to shrug to keep him going.
‘I’ll tell you where they are, Robert—they’re here,’ he tapped his skull, ‘and in workshops such as this which our guilds dare not sponsor. And why, Robert?—I’ll tell you why. Because the guilds cannot see beyond aether. It makes things too easy for them. Why should there be progress when life is so good for those who grip the haft of power? But the future lies ahead of us, Robert, beyond the ruins of a squandered past. Squandered on gas, Robert. Squandered on coal and steam. Squandered, above all, on the vagaries and inefficiencies of aether …
‘Think of this land of ours—think of the way it’s been shaped the best part of these last three hundred years since the Grandmaster of Painswick made his discovery. Yes, we’ve progressed, if progress you call it. We’ve learned how to harness the power of coal and gas and steam, we’ve learned how to turn out ten thousand versions of the same tatty object from one factory. Of course, and above all, we’ve learned how to use aether. Only the poorest starve, and I hear that nowadays only the weakest and most dissolute and unfortunate are sent to the workhouses. Yes, there’s fresh water for most, and interior plumbing in the better houses of the few, and the worst epidemics are almost always confined to the grimmest quarters of our great cities. I could catch a train from here, and in a few hours I could be in Dudley or Bristol. I could have a message sent there by telegraph almost instantly. But I could have been standing here saying almost exactly the same things a century ago! We haven’t progressed, Robert! Yes, there are new products, new fads, new styles and fashions—even the occasional new idea if anyone would dare to publish it—but none of it really counts as anything but more and more of the same. We in England and in the other so-called developed nations of Europe are as fossilised as the strange sea creatures you sometimes find in a lump of coal, and as stonily resistant to change. And I’ll tell you why, Robert—it’s because of aether. It’s because of lazy engineering. When you can make something work with a coating of wyreglow and a spell, why ever worry about improving it, eh … ?’
Grandmaster Harrat’s monologues always went along these lines. He seemed to me to be torn between hope and frustration—with frustration generally winning out. But beneath all of that, I sensed a deeper sadness. Something, I felt, had been done which couldn’t be undone. Some wound, some worm, which was endlessly turning inside him. Something which related to me, to Bracebridge, to aether, and my mother.
Through that winter and into the damp early spring in the year 85 of that Third Age of Industry, my wanderings around Bracebridge grew wider. I felt as if I was claiming the place, mapping it out before I left it. I would climb over the scrolled and filthy cables of the road bridge which spanned the rail tracks as they curved south beyond the factories. The sulphurous heat of the engines blasted beneath and I would ponder as the wagons clacked by—especially aether trucks, with their straw bedding looking soft enough to break my fall—when the best moment would be to make my leap, and the places to which that leap might take me.
By then, I was missing a lot of school; a fact which the teachers were able to accept without challenge, knowing as they all did of my mother’s worsening illness, and welcoming as they probably did one less sullen face at the back of class. Mother’s a troll … Mother’s going to Northyton … Grabbing apples and tins of polish from stalls at the Sixshiftday market and throwing them uselessly over walls, braving the blast on that shuddering bridge, smoking stolen cigarettes, facing up to the balehounds as they launched themselves at the fences, wading carelessly through the cuckoo-nettles and sweating through nights of agonised sleep—my whole life seemed filled with a sense of breaking through many small, invisible barriers. At each new turn in the street I was half expecting to find the trollman standing there; not Master Tatlow but someone terrible and tall and in a vast dark cape, as I imagined him, with his face an endless shadow. I took to carrying a knife, but the thing was blunt, cheap, unaethered, and it soon broke in my pocket. I was like one of Grandmaster Harrat’s filaments; charged and ready to erupt into spitting flames.
IX
GRANDMASTER HARRAT, IN HIS LONG WORKROOM, moved to draw the blinds back from the skylights.
‘Impurities, Robert!’ he said. ‘Imprecision! That’s what we must fight against … Think of lightning, Robert! I used to look out over the rooftops of Northcentral from my nursery when there was a storm and will it to strike Hallam Tower. And marvel, Robert … I used to marvel. There’s no fudge, no doubt. Even then, I could see the start of a new, different Age. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to explain ..
I watched as he leaned over one of the demijohns of acid and a droplet of sweat slid from his chin. Today, all the wires and efforts and smoking spills had failed to produce the slightest glow. But I didn’t care. Shifterm by shifterm, these visits had acquired a soothing predictability, and his failures were as much a part of it as the taste of marzipan. I’d learned by now to keep well back at the crucial moments from the sparks, the burning rubber and the huge chemical-filled jars. Electricity seemed to be dangerous and volatile, and all that Grandmaster Harrat’s experiments had convinced me of was that it would never work. After all, who would ever want to risk having this stuff charging through their house when they could rely on the safety of coal gas, lanterns or candles? All in all, though, I had come to look forward to these Halfshiftday afternoons as rare times of escape and tranquillity.
I could picture the scene back at home at this moment, or at any other moment lately. These last shifterms my mother had lapsed into a feverish coma, tossing and writhing, her eyes wide and white, her thin limbs stretching and aching as her jaw gaped and she struggled to breathe. Beth would be tending her now, just as she did every day and night. She braved the edgy darkness and the scuttling walls of that room. Beth would be wiping Mother’s face and limbs, heating the stone bottles and seeing to the fire and smoothing the wild sheets, holding those long impossible hands that no one else could bring themselves to touch. A few nights ago, the last time I had dared to look in there, my mother had been clawing at the vanishing Mark on her left wrist. The wall above the bed, even after Beth had finished mopping it, was still thinly streaked with hieroglyphs of blood.
‘I really thought we’d reached the essence this time, Robert .. Master Harrat’s voice and the clink of bottles drifted over me. ‘I really thought we’d managed it … Sometimes, I almost wonder if it will ever come about ..
He lo
oked at me. For once, he almost seemed to expect an answer. His glossy lower lip quivered for a moment and his eyes grew grave. He had a way of looking at me like this sometimes. I’d guessed by now that I wasn’t the first lad he’d brought back to his house to eat fairy cakes and watch as he fussed over his experiments. But there was more to it than that.
Grandmaster Harrat nodded to himself then, as if he’d reached some final conclusion. Without speaking he went over to a small, heavy door set in the walls between the gaslamps and spun a numbered dial. His silence in itself was unusual and I had no idea what to expect as, on a turn of oiled hinges, the room leapt with a blaze. Shadows tunnelled as he bore a tinkling tray to the desk. The vials it contained were like smaller versions of the pots that I had seen the women using in the paintshop at Mawdingly & Clawtson, but their wyreglow was much sharper; barely a glow at all, more a shriek of light which blurred into the other senses. The long room flared and grew dark as he placed them down. Each vial, I saw, peering closely at his elbow, bore a small seal.
‘Aether, Robert! Of course, I have to work with it every day to earn the pleasures of this house. I have to pretend to the shareholders that I know enough about its behaviour to maintain Mawdingly & Clawtson’s unparalleled reputation for aether of the highest charm. But I don’t know, Robert. And I don’t use it—it uses me. Give me electricity and light any day—pure, simple math. But we all must live with aether. It pervades this land. We all dance to its tune … And perhaps that’s always true even though I have striven these years for the simple and untrammelled logic of physics and engineering …’
The Light Ages Page 9