The Light Ages (16 page)

‘It must be terrible.’

‘Sometimes, perhaps. But believe me, and despite everything, this is a better Age than many in which to be living. I haven’t been stoned, or burnt—not yet, anyway—and I have my small freedoms …

As we walked beneath the swaying trees and the Withy surged beside us, Mistress Summerton told me about her life. She’d been born, as best as she could reckon, nearly a hundred years before at the start of this Age, although she still had no knowledge of the precise circumstances. She took off her glasses then as we stood beside an old tree. In the half-light of the rivermeads, her eyes seemed brighter than ever. The soft brown irises seemed aflame, and the pupils were dark openings which went on forever. She even let me touch the flesh of her face and arms. It felt like thin leather, dry paper.

‘I don’t seem so odd, perhaps, now that I’m old. People who glance at me imagine I’m just antique and weathered. But when I was young, I didn’t look so very different. In fact, as far as I know, I was always this way. So it must have happened before I was born, or soon after. The Gatherers’ Guild has a Latin name for this condition, just as they have for every other one, and it seems that the change which happened to me is most common, although common isn’t the word, amongst the charcoal makers of the forests which lie towards Wales, and which supply Dudley’s furnaces. Hardly sounds like aethered work, does it, or even guildswork? But it is, and a spell can always twist against the person who makes it.’

‘But you were just a baby.’

‘So perhaps it was my mother.’ She paused. ‘In those days the guilds would pay good money for someone like me, someone who was new and young enough to be trained and used. I’ve heard that families were desperate enough to …
cause
an accident. But I don’t know. And at least they didn’t burn me on the hearth or put me out in the snows. So I suppose I should be grateful …’

Instead of her family and her home, Mistress Summerton’s memories of her childhood were filled with the strange house in which she was raised. It was essentially a prison, and those few who passed the lane on which it lay would surely not have known. It lay, as she was to discover eventually, at the wooded outskirts of the great city of Oxford, and had been constructed for the study of changelings in an earlier Age. With bars on its windows and bolts on its doors, hidden passageways, hatches and peepholes burrowed within its walls, it had long been empty by the time Mistress Summerton arrived, and her first memories were of the smell of damp, and the dulled murmuring of hidden voices.

‘I don’t know if you’ve heard the theories, Robert. That a changed baby such as I was will begin to speak the true language of aether if it is left alone ..

The matrons who tended her there were starched and gloved—masked, even, for fear of some unspecified damage that she might do to them—although, as Mistress Summerton grew older, there would be whole shifterms when she barely saw anyone. Food would appear each morning at her table. Mysteriously, her bed linen would be changed. Bizarrely, to her it was the ordinary humans who seemed possessed of magic.

‘But I was a strange and wild thing, too,’ she continued, ‘for what little power I have is like a kind of madness. I’m forever buffeted by the winds of the impossible—by thoughts, ideas, sensations. Little things fascinate to the point of obsession, whilst the ordinary matters of life are often dim as smoke …’ She paused, tapping out the contents from the dead bowl of her pipe, running her twig fingers along the stained ivory. She still had off her glasses, and her eyes, as she looked at me, were like the gleam of sunlight on winter fields.
‘How
can I make you understand, Robert?’

But I felt. I understood. As we walked beside the Withy, I could hear the muffled voices within the walls of that prison-house in Oxford louder than the rush of the river. At night, Mistress Summerton would gnaw the wood of her bedstead, and sit rocking on her haunches, moaning and howling. She ate with her fingers even when she had been shown repeatedly otherwise, preferred everything raw and bloody, and learned to speak the obscenities which the matrons muttered behind their masks.

It must have been a strange, impossible life. As the guildsmen studied her through their spyholes, she sensed their memories and thoughts, and felt the bells and bustle of the spired city in the bowl of the forest beyond. She sometimes heard trains sweeping north, and the shout of draymen’s voices, and the rattle of carts, although she knew little of what it all meant, other than that this was real life, and she was for some odd reason separated from it. For a while, even after she had learned to speak, they persisted with silence in the hope that she might still speak some spell which was new to them. But if she spoke people’s unsaid thoughts, she was beaten. If she moved something without touching it, her fingers were burned on the glass of a lamp. And she was probed and prodded as well. There was a man who sat humming whilst he bled her with leeches. There were others who presented her with cards inside envelopes, told her to read their contents, and strapped her in a chair before feathers and weights in bell jars and ordered her to move them whilst they discussed whether her powers might be increased through the removal of her sight. Having been abused for performing similar tasks spontaneously, she never knew quite what it was that they really wanted.

Mistress Surnmerton walked on for a while, silent, as if this was the end of her story. The stale echoes of that dreadful prison-house in Oxford faded. The trees ceased their tapping at the barred windows, and the air smelled again of soot and mud and privies and cabbagestalks. At some point, we had turned back along the bank. Beyond the bridge, Bracebridge was waiting again, grey in the greying light.

‘Did you escape?’ I asked.

She stopped and turned to me and pushed back her coat. She began to undo the buttons and strings of the front of her smock. It was a bizarre gesture, and I found myself backing away, my skin chilling with fear. What, after all,
was
she? Here I was, on the dark bank of this rushing river with a creature who—but then I began to see. A tattoo was emblazoned on the gnarled and flattened skin of her thin chest. A cross and C glowed out from the twilight. ‘I’ve never escaped,’ she said, and buttoned herself up again. ‘England is as it is, Robert, and the guilds control me just as they control you, and your father—and your poor, poor mother. Oh, I’m free now from my daily labours after what you’d call a lifetime of service. The Gatherers’ Guild don’t imprison us all in places like Northallerton. In fact, they’ve forgotten about me down in Redhouse, and an old fool like Tatlow is hardly ever likely to find out again ..

Despite everything, I was still filled with questions. I pictured her returning to Redhouse today. Even after what I’d heard and seen, the place I imagined on that dull winter’s afternoon was filled with joy and sunlight. And Annalise would be there. I saw her in that same dress, although it had grown cleaner, whiter …

‘I’m afraid that Annalise has had to leave Redhouse, Robert. She’s not with me any longer. She—well, she had to begin her life. Things couldn’t go on as they were for her, living with an old thing like me, and in hiding. I just hope I’ve given her the life she wanted. Of course, I miss her, and you two obviously got on so well. Things have been difficult for her. Did she tell you anything about how her life began? And has something else happened?
What
have you learned?’ Suddenly, we had stopped walking. Mistress Summerton’s glasses filled with the black currents of the river. She stretched her neck forward. Her body seemed to lengthen. It began to shrivel up, change, extend. I saw, unwilled, the spectacle of Grandmaster Harrat’s dying, heard the flicker and crump as his house exploded.

‘What happened was—’

‘No, don’t
say!’
She shrunk back into herself; seemed, almost physically, to push me away. ‘It’s time to forget and move on. Both of us have had enough for now of terror and disappointment ..

Her charcoal hand brushed my shoulder and all the visions and questions seemed to drain from my mind. Mistress Summerton was right. Annalise had gone from Redhouse. My mother was dead, and so was Grandmaster Harrat. I still sensed that all of these events were somehow joined, but these mysteries seemed like nothing more than shadows from the past, and I still believed then that the future was something quite separate; to be moulded, changed. We walked the rest of the way back along the bank towards Bracebridge. Boatmen on the piers across the water paused in coiling their ropes and the tying of their windspells to watch our passage; this lad and a small, elegant woman in a long coat. Perhaps, I thought, they imagined she was my mother.

‘I’ll tell you more one day,’ she said as we climbed the brick-paved steps beside the deserted market. ‘But I, too, will have to leave Redhouse and Bracebridge soon. And you must live your own life. If you do that, perhaps our paths will cross …’

I watched Mistress Summerton pick her way through the market litter. She glanced back beside a shop’s lit frontage and raised her hand in a final wave, then turned up a side street and dwindled into a waft of shadow. The wind was still rising, tearing at the clouds as I headed back towards Coney Mound. Slowing my steps, I gazed up at the sky. For once, even the face on the moon seemed to be smiling, but the red star in the west had vanished.

M
Y LIFE, IN THE DAYS,
shifts, seasons, years that followed, remained steadfastly unremarkable. Father returned to his work on East Floor at Mawdingly & Clawtson, and to his drinking, whilst Beth managed to beg an assistant’s job at a school at Harmanthorpe despite twice failing her exams. I even think that I went more regularly to Board School again myself, and perhaps brutalised my schoolmates less, although I have little recollection of learning anything, or of friendships made. Life, seemingly, became normal again, although our neighbours on either side left Brickyard Row, and Father never slept in the front bedroom again, although the dragonlice vanished from its walls. He kept to his chair instead, his place before the kitchen range, growling at anything or anyone who obstructed his petty whims as his hair greyed and he became increasingly disgusting in his ways. The bedroom remained cold and empty, its door swollen permanently ajar on its rusted hinges, the wrecked wardrobe still heaped in the corner.

Five years passed in this way, with little of incident to record other than the changes that came upon my body as it began to grow towards manhood and strain my hand-me-down clothes. Looking at myself, fingering the down on my belly and my chin, I sometimes remembered the distant chime of Annalise’s words in the gardens of Redhouse, and felt amused, and disappointed, at the loss of something I could never quite place. But I was resolute in my forgetting. My pleasures came in those days from wandering the top of Rainharrow, tramping heedlessly and alone over the bracken until I was exhausted, or out in the backyard chopping firewood on winter evenings. I sometimes toyed with the idea of following the tracks towards Tatton Halt. But my footsteps always began to slow as I neared the edge of Bracebridge. All below me lay the grey and smoking factories, and the pounding which filled my blood. I’d had enough of broken dreams, and I knew in my heart that Redhouse would be empty.

I was still a physical lad, filled with angry energy, unexpressed disappointments. Yet also at that time, long after I should have been concentrating on guild exams, or smoking on street corners and flirting with the girls, I was still often a knight from the Age of Kings, riding out in my imaginings on a fine mount of silver-white into unspoilt lands which went on forever. I was a lonely figure even in that distant landscape, who shunned the courtly dances in favour of paths in deep woods, craggy mountains. There, hanging back in a stir of leaves or a drift of moonlight, I would glimpse the one other being who still mattered to me. My mother, a presence always receding yet never quite gone. Once, on a whim which wouldn’t have lasted if I’d allowed myself time to think about it, I took the steam charabanc to Flinton. All the way, jolted and sore, I kept telling myself that the place would be nothing, just some cheap neighbouring town famed only for its ugliness and its coal production. Still, as I climbed down and saw its turning wheels and slagheaps, I still felt a cold wash of disappointment. This wasn’t Einfell.

Other summers passed, and other winters. I heard, in the way that you pick up these tales as you grow older, that there had once been a Halfshiftday back in the seventies of this Age when the unthinkable had occurred and the aether engines of Bracebridge had stopped pounding. Several buildings had collapsed in the aftershock, but they had long been rebuilt. The occasion already seemed half-mythical. Not that I cared. Not that I wanted to know. There was something about this whole town, even in its rumours and dreams, which disgusted me, and although the assumption must surely have remained that I would become a toolmaker, my father was slow to take me again to Mawdingly & Clawtson. Understandably, he had become disillusioned with the scant mysteries of his lesser guild. Still the Fiveshiftday came when the task could no longer be avoided, although we both seemed to trail behind each other as we headed towards the back gates of East Floor. It was a hot summer morning. The air tasted of dust and ash and metal even before the siren blew and the machines started turning. There was no chance now of my bumping into poor Grandmaster Harrat, but I soon grew bored standing beside my father, and found myself looking down the smoking, sun-streamed aisles in the expectation that I would soon have to renew my acquaintance with the vile Stropcock. But the uppermaster who arrived was a fatter creature named Chadderton, who was amiable in the unconvincing way of people who want to be liked. Instead of that upper office with the brassy haft, Chadderton took me to the deserted works canteen and picked at his nails and flicked through timesheets. Stropcock had gone, it seemed. Not merely from East Floor, but from Mawdingly & Clawtson and Bracebridge.

Later, I was shown around the other floors and levels and depots in the company of another lad from my school who suffered from a permanent nose-drip. The paintshop seemed smaller. The girls looked more like the pouting and spotty creatures other lads of my age were flirting with than the princesses of my childhood imaginings. Everywhere else was incomprehensibly busy and noisy. I was left briefly alone in a yard after my soon to be colleague had been sent off, his dewdrop dangling, and amid much suppressed hilarity, to find a left-handed screwdriver. I took slow breaths in the hot beating sunlight, trying hard not to believe in the life into which I seemed to be irresistibly falling. But this particular yard was familiar, and when I turned and saw a long whitewashed wall at its far end, I understood why. It had changed slightly since my vision. The old iron gate now had a seamlessly welded chain to complement the heavy padlock. A strange and empty surprise dulled and then quickened my heartbeat as I walked up to it. The arch inside had been blocked in and the brickwork was cruder and newer than the rest of the wall, oozing mortar like filling from a sponge. I strained to squeeze my hand between the bars of the gate to touch it, but it was set an inch further back than I could reach. Filled suddenly with a sense of someone watching, I turned around, rubbing my grazed knuckles. But there was nothing but blind black windows, broken gutters, guild graffiti, peeling paint. SHOOM
BOOM
SHOOM
BOOM.
The ground shuddered beneath me. Part of me wanted something else to happen, but I was mostly relieved when the dew-drop swinging lad returned red-faced and empty-handed from the toolroom stores.