The Light Ages (10 page)

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 another 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.

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?’

M
ORE 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 something 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!’