The Light Ages (17 page)

In the shifterms which followed, I began to frequent the iron bridge on the turn of Withybrook Road which spanned the main railway line heading south out of Bracebridge, to climb down across the trembling cables and buttresses until there was nothing but roaring, expectant air beneath, and wait, and wait. Balanced thus as the trains swept by, I already felt as if each clattering wagon was pulling me away. I knew that I would eventually jump, and I watched myself day by day as I went about my life with an outsider’s curiosity, wondering when the precise moment would come when I made that final leap, and where that leap would take me.

It finally happened on a spring Twoshiftday night in late March the year 90, when the rails shone clear under the moonless stars, glinting and joining like a river. I’d been sitting with my feet dangling over the parapet, dressed as I was always dressed in my ragged hand-me-down clothes, scarcely a boy now, or even a youth, but nearly a man—whatever that meant. I had brought nothing with me, although it seemed now that I’d always known that that was how it would have to be. The air was warm and the town behind me had a steady, purposeful glow, stacking up roof on roof from Coney Mound to the edgy, shifting gloom of Rainharrow. Placing my hand on the oiled and belted stanchions, engraved, beneath their filth, with the guilded charms, I could feel the faint tremor which always came through this thinly made structure in the quiet moments between trains.

If anything, Bracebridge looked better to me than it had in years as I gazed back at it. The lights, the smoke, the chimneys; all suddenly twined together and became something else, something more, a ghost-vision, lost and blazing in the starlight. Perhaps it was that which finally drove me on as I heard the rumble of a coming train; the sense that I could stay here forever in this limbo of waiting, dreaming of lost lands, touching old stones, visiting old places. Soon, the roar of the engine filled the air as the waiting tracks shone clear. The train swept below, the hot glow of its furnace and the blurring heat of smoke followed by the first of many open aether trucks. The straw heaped around the caskets looked soft as fleece and I gauged the timeless moment of my leap from the rocking beat of the wheels against the tracks, by the pulse of my breath, and for the last time, before I released my hold and let the air take me, by the rhythm that pervaded all of Bracebridge.

SHOOM
BOOM
SHOOM
BOOM.

Then I was flying.

I
LAY LOOKING UP
as the stars slipped through the trees, urging the train to carry me south. The wheels clanged. The truck creaked and rocked. Occasional scraps of steam blew over from the distant engine. The straw that prickled my neck was laden with a drowsy, summery smell. Within its bolts and scrolled iron bands, the rough wooden box of the aether casket looked shockingly cheap. But, staring up at it in the grey darkness, spread-eagled in the straw with my head tilted back, I fell asleep as easily as I had in years.

The air was gauzily damp when I awoke. I climbed to the edge of the truck and peered over the side at a landscape tiered with mist, dabbed with smudges of cattle. Sometimes, we passed stations, but the signs flashed by too quickly for me to read. I was already somewhere, I supposed, consulting the vague map I kept in my head, in the Midlands. The hills were lower here; shallow rises that folded into each other like green limbs. The houses, from what I could make out of the few I saw, were squatter than those I was used to, the bricks of their walls a brighter red which seeped into the mist. Some had thatched roofs pulled down over their windows. Even the trees were different, with huge oaks quite unlike the stunted versions around Bracebridge and many other bushes, some already in flower, which I couldn’t name. None of this was quite familiar, yet neither was it entirely strange, and I loved each bridge and fence and puddle for not being Bracebridge.

In places on my long journey, viaducts cast breathtaking shadows from spiderwebs of iron, and the train clattered through tunnels where the swooping telegraphs shone out through noise and smoke. As the sun climbed and the rattle of points became more frequent, we entered an area of small towns. People were about now, in the fields and on the roads, in carts and gigs and wagons. I studied the aether casket more closely, the rough wood and the metal bands and fixings. I pressed my ears against it in the vague hope that I might hear some sound other than the onward rush of the rails. The casket only stood about a yard and a half high, and was about the same in depth and width. An adult man could have spanned it with his hands—probably even picked it up, for I had a dim recollection of hearing that aether itself has no weight. But I had no idea why each of the caskets had to be wadded in straw and laid in long separate trucks when it was plain that, physically, they could easily have been piled together. The greyish lumps attached to the hooped joins binding the sides of the casket, which I had imagined in the earlier darkness to be padlocks, were in fact seals made of clay. Rough handfuls had been lumped around the join, then stamped. The swirls and figures reminded me of the tiny wax ones that had been strung around Grandmaster Harrat’s aether vials. Absently, I began breaking off flakes of clay with my fingernails until a bleak, sudden shock roared through me from the power of its protective spell and I cowered, feeling my bladder loosen as urine soaked my trousers. Huddled shivering in the far corner of the truck, my hands clasped around my knees, I gazed at the casket as the last of the mist cleared.

The day passed and my long journey passed with it. The landscape shifted into broader, flatter planes where the fields flashed with furrows. The scent of the air grew more luxuriant. There were huge orchards of mossy-leafed waterapple trees. Their starkly uptilted boughs, still bereft of their tumescing burdens, looked like black avenues of hafts as the sun fell through them. Tall, odd structures began to appear, with huge, sail-like arms turning against the afternoon sky. Every one was set on a raised hillock, and beside these lay sluices and pools, some of which flared with the afternoon’s milky brightness whilst others cast pools of shadow like flurries of smoke. Unmistakably, these were aether settling pans, and the towers beside them could only be windmills, drawing aether from the menhirs on which they perched.

The rhythm of the train grew less regular as the rails fanned out. Evening was closing in, and the scents in the air were once again changing. Other trains clacked by, the black heads of their engines flashing over me. What was to happen when this train finally stopped? What excuse could I give when I was discovered? But the trucks lurched on, and the sky darkened; sooty blackness closing over a sky of no stars, no moon. I peered out from the truck again. All I glimpsed at first were walls, roofs, houses—scraps of a scene so dim and bleak that I almost feared that the journey had twisted in on itself and brought me back to Bracebridge. But further off, blazing at the sky’s black edges, were haloes of impossible light. This, surely, had to be London. Even a bumpkin like me knew that there was no other city in all England of such challenging size, beauty, ugliness. The trucks jostled, then stopped entirely in one cataclysmic jerk. We had stopped amid a sea of gaslit rails. I ducked down when I heard the crunch of boots.

‘… sure I
felt
something back down the trucks a few hours back. I still think we should …’ The boots paused. I heard the pop of lips as the man spat.

‘Can’t check every fuckin’ one, can we?’ Another, shriller, voice.

They were passing right beside my truck now. I could smell sweat, tobacco.

‘Could always let the fellas out, couldn’t we? Let them buggers have a sniff ..

I risked looking out as the crunch of their boots faded down the track. The stoker was long and thin, the steamaster short and fat. The track curved slightly inwards, and I could watch their progress towards the covered wagon at the train’s far end. Then, I heard a muffled baying, followed by the slide and boom of wagon doors. I scrambled through the straw to the truck’s far side and half jumped, half fell, to the track, letting the impetus carry me on across the rails to the downward slope of an embankment, submitting to the will of gravity until I was scrambling through Age-old refuse and searing patches of cuckoo-nettle towards a fence as the gruff howl-bark of the released balehounds grew louder behind me. The beasts were almost at my heels as my fingers closed on rusty chains and I began to scramble up. Then I was over, and falling, until the ground hit me, and once again I was running.

The dark land rose and fell by small, difficult increments, dips transforming themselves into rises, hollows tumbling me down into mud. Slowly I became aware of lights coating the blackness ahead. The filthy ground grew firmer, whilst the air, which had been so bad at times that I could scarcely breathe, became fogged and smoky. I had entered an area of buildings of a sort, and alleys. It was a steepening maze, but by instinct, sick of the mud, still fearing the balehounds and dazed and sore from the burn of the cuckoo-nettles, I took ways that led up. Most of Bracebridge, even its poorest parts, was built of brick, but many of these buildings were of wood and wattle and daub-reinforced and remade and propped up as they started to leak and sag and tumble. The windows mainly consisted of shutters or waxed paper and the frontages leaned over each other, pressing their brows together as if in senile thought. There was an overwhelming sense of closed-in rot and damp and age.

The people were different, too—what little I saw of them. Faces floated at windows. Voices called. I felt that I was being watched, followed, that a space was constantly opening before and behind me as I stumbled up steps and waded the stinking rills of open drains. I flapped through curtains of wet washing. Once, I was sure, hands clamped on my arms. There was wild laughter. But they slipped from me as I began running again.

I finally found myself hunched and breathless in a sort of square. The buildings which framed it were uneven, and gleamed with pinpoints of light. From them, fizzing through the night, mingling and rising, came sounds and smells of life; of voices shouting and buckets banging, of burnt fat and fried fish and bad drains. People lived here, just as they lived everywhere. Pricked by loneliness, I wandered across to where an old pump dripped on the paving. I worked the handle, and buried my face and hands in the gouts of strange-tasting water. Drenched and dizzy, I looked again at this square, and these walls ridged like broken teeth with their pale lights ebbing and flowing. Then a human-seeming shadow came towards me and rasped the paving with a boot. Something struck my shoulder. I gave a yelp. The shadow shifted. Something else hit my back. Something sharp gashed the side of my face.

‘Look …’ I croaked, spreading my arms as the massive buildings began an ancient, lumbering dance around me. ‘I’m new here. Is this
London? I
don’t know what—’

A bigger stone struck me.

‘I was just trying to—’

And again. The boots rasped.

‘Whose
water
do you think this is, citizen?’

‘What?’

‘I said, give it back ..

Everything blurred as another stone struck my head. Then the figure was upon me. Arms roped around my neck and a hard object, a fist or another stone, drove into my face.

I lay somewhere, my eyes gummed and crusted, something rough over me, something angular beneath. But still I faded in and out of it. A new Bracebridge loomed over me, monstrous and changed. Lights flickered at the edge of my vision as the buildings danced. Everywhere, there were voices, poundings. I was back in my attic, and my mother was raising the pulley of the clotheshorse in the kitchen. Then she was on the stairs, and up the ladder, and leaning over, shaking me, shouting as she towered through foul smoke, screaming that it was all too late …

Water from the same pump from which I had tried to drink, the musty taste somehow instantly recognisable, splashed over my face. I was dragged up until I was sitting. A boy—no, a thin young man—was crouching before me, a tin cup in his hand, candlelight and the blue smog of some wider space fanning behind him.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Robert Borrows.’

He tilted his head. ‘Say again, citizen?’ His accent was strange. ‘Robert Borrows. I’m from Bracebridge.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘It’s in Brownheath. In the north. You mean you haven’t
heard
of it?’

‘Should I have done? Is it something fine and special, eh? So you’re Robbie, are you? I’m Saul by the way.’

I studied the face of Saul-by-the-way in this strange dim room. It was brown and angular and bony. His eyes were pale blue, alight. His clothes were tattered but had a raffish look, with hints of colour and braid picked out by the light of the candle and whatever pale but greater illumination lay behind. They were the kind of things a greatguildsman might have worn, long ago, before they were discarded.

‘This is
London,
isn’t it?’

He chuckled. His voice had a phlegmy rasp. ‘You really are lost, aren’t you, citizen? Poor bastard. Robbie from—where was it you said, Broombridge?’

I didn’t bother to correct him. I didn’t care what anyone called Bracebridge now. And I quite liked the sound of my new, slightly different name.
Robbie …

‘Why’d you hit me?’

Saul chuckled again. He reached into his pocket to extract a bent cigarette. ‘Why did
you
drink the pump water? Not that it belongs to
me,
of course. Obvious to anyone that water can’t belong to a single person. Comes from the sky, don’t it, just like grain comes from the ground. But the way things are around the yards in this current Age, it’s plain as the nose on your face that it wasn’t yours to just
drink …’
Saul stooped over the candle in its jam jar and blew a plume of smoke as I attempted and failed to follow his reasoning. In the gleam of light, I noticed that he possessed a puckered scar on his left wrist and felt a small surge of relief. Around him, pinned in their hundreds to beams and walls and odd eruptions of furniture, were scraps of paper. ‘And why come to the Easterlies in the first place?’