The Light Ages (24 page)

‘The guildhouses. The rich. The guildhall meetings they all troop into to mutter, over fine wines that would pay to feed fifteen starving families, about how the average guildsman is fundamentally lazy …’ Blissenhawk growled, rummaging in his beard and puffing his chest, his ink-darkened palms flurrying. ‘So they sack a few poor bastards and get some others in for less. And no one argues because those that aren’t in guilds are desperate to get in, and those who are are terrified they’ll get chucked out of them …’

It wasn’t so unusual in the Easterlies to hear talk like this—especially from a disenfranchised guildsman. But this was different.

‘You know how long each previous Age has lasted? Best part of a hundred years. So we’re due a New Age.’ Even then, the way Blissenhawk said it, I could hear the capitals in that phrase. ‘And it’s going to be unimaginably different …’

CLACK
BANG
CLACK
BANG.

Blissenhawk had the skills, and still a little of the money, needed to spread the word. And the message wasn’t about injustice. The message wasn’t about borrowing things and calling each other citizen and pissing from rooftops. The message was that the world could and should and would be changed. This process wasn’t some vague idea, it was inevitable as the next sunrise because wise men not just in England but in the guilded nations across Europe and beyond had proved the disastrous unworkability of the present monetary system. We were standing in the darkness just before the glittering dawn. The only question remaining was exactly how this New Age would come about, and when. These were exciting times, the very end of history as we knew it, and, even though I still struggled to make sense of economic and political theory on which much of Blissenhawk’s talk was founded, I was grateful to be living through them. Blissenhawk’s words on that first night, and the food and the drink he plied us with, had left me feeling light-headed. And he was looking for some lads to help with the production of the newspaper he was planning—lads who could actually read and write more than their own name, which was rare enough in the Easterlies. And Blissenhawk
believed.
He still believed, even if five years had gone by since then and we were using another version of Black Lucy, and working from a different basement, and were still stuck in the 99th year of the same Third Industrial Age. But the signs were there. The signs were everywhere. Just last shifterm, and filling the
New Dawn’s
main page, there had been the biggest strike in the history of the Tidesmeet Docks, in which the members of not just two or three but fifteen separate guilds had united. In the riots that followed, four citizens had died …

CLACK
BANG
CLACK
BANG.

Would contend …
What I wanted to say, somehow, was that the arguments weren’t important. That the question of whether you ended up hitting your foreman over the head or joined arms with him as you marched down the street—that none of it mattered because … Because the New Age was coming anyway. But in that case, if everything was so inevitable, why was I writing this? ‘Looks like just what we need …’ Blissenhawk leaned over me. He smelled of solvent and linseed and the palms of his ham-like hands were glowing. Somehow, he got hold of enough aethered oil to keep this current version of Black Lucy clapping and churning although, even with his skills, it was hard work. In this hazy light, you could see the endless letters which decades of labour and ink had tattooed through the flesh of his palms. Whole armies of words, which we called to our bidding. ‘Take a look at this …’ He flapped out one of the lithographic sheets which he was now using to print the
New Dawn’s
cartoons. He dipped a roller and wetted it. ‘Pretty good, eh?’ he chuckled. All I could see was a blurred flash, but I knew it would be some plump guildsman bending over to show his arse whilst he leered over a cowering but gracefully drawn guildswoman; it always was. Saul could do such things in his sleep, and he certainly didn’t need to get up at four in the morning to make his contributions to the
New Dawn.
But a picture could get a message across far more effectively than words, especially when so many of the inhabitants of the Easterlies had trouble reading.

CLACK
BANG
CLACK
BANG.

‘What time is it?’ I shouted.

Blissenhawk scratched his beard and looked up at the barred windows. ‘Must be coming up for seven. Sure I just smelled the nightsoil cart going by.’

I wiped my pen. ‘I’d better leave this. I’m not getting anywhere. At least Black Lucy seems to be behaving.’

‘That she is …’ Blissenhawk wandered over to her, lovingly stroked the warm sleeve of a piston, adjusted the drip of a reservoir. I could see his lips moving although the sound was too quiet to carry. For all that his guild had cast him out, he still kept to himself the coos and phrases he used to urge his failing machine to produce one more edition.

I was almost sure there hadn’t been any fog when I’d arrived in the dark at the printshop three hours earlier, but now Sheep Street, Ashington was thickly veiled. The shabby buildings floated, the traffic was a blur of shapes and sounds. A typical London fog. But I was a Londoner now, and I could tell its types and flavours as well as the Eskimo is said to distinguish a thousand kinds of snow. There were brown fogs which left you choking. There were the cold grey ones which wormed beneath your clothing. There were the fogs of hot summer afternoons that stung your eyes, and the greenish stuff which crept slyly up from the river. But this fog was white, pure as milk. It beaded the threads of my worn coat and the brass buckle of my satchel. It tasted, as I licked my lips, almost spring-pure. The fog did something to the colours, to the bricks, to the faces. Changed, both faded and intensified, they flooded out. On a workhouse wall, quick with practice, I pasted up a poster advertising this Noshiftday meeting of the People’s Alliance. On another, I ripped down a rival poster put up by the New Guild Order. The factories were tooting. The trams were clacking and flashing, dark and light. Everything was new and misty and bright. On a morning such as this, it really did seem as if the New Age was already dawning. The buildings looked pale, pristine; the dreams of young architects. The children, as they scurried by towards the dripping iron gates of their school, were all laughing.

Yes, for once, the whole world seemed clear to me. I recalled Grandmaster Harrat’s words about the lazy lures of working with aether, the rigid conservatism of the guilds, about England’s inbuilt resistance to any kind of change which would cause the high guildsmen to adjust their grip on the haft of power, let alone risk having to lose it. And not only England. Throughout Europe, there were guilds much like our own, and there was industry, and there was aether. I had seen the produce coming in to the big wharves, borne on the same secret signs and whispers. With the spread of aether, France and Saxony and Spain—even Cathay and the Indies—had sunk just as we had into their dreams of industry, these same endless Ages, whilst beyond, through the haze of time and distance, lay lands remote, scarcely mapped and grossly underexploited; Thule and the Antipodes, the unknown heart of Africa, the frozen legend of the Ice Cradle. The world, the time, was ripe for us citizens to move out, to move on and grasp it …

But such thoughts couldn’t last. The mist was clearing as quickly as it had arrived. Smelling of mud and dogshit, the old London arose. Guildsmen who’d been laid off by Biddle and Co., the local maker of coils and springs, were standing outside the gates in Flummary Square, wandering in their workclothes even though there had been chains across the gates for two shifterms. I moved quickly on as they hawked and spat, smacked their fists and glared at me. To them, I was just some mart who had work when they didn’t. I’d grown used to such hostility. It was no use my stopping to explain that the collapse of the industrial markets was a symptom of the wrongness of society. Even Blissenhawk and the other orators who rose and fell from their soapboxes in the Easterlies on Noshiftdays would have kept their counsel here.

But at last the weather was warming. Spring was here. Soon, it would be summer. Blissenhawk had a theory that the New Age could only come in summer. Demonstrations and marches fizzled out too easily in rain, cold and darkness. I bought a copy of the
Guild Times
and studied its bland lies over breakfast in the booth of a local chophouse. Outside the window, a ragged family was dragging a cart filled with furniture. A clock fell off and shattered in an explosion of springs. They looked lost and heartbroken. But I had warm beer, cold meat, a roof and a bed to look forward to. I knew that I was lucky, and that these troubled times had mostly been kind to me.

The
New Dawn
was going well; nowadays it paid for itself and sometimes even generated a surplus. But all of that money had to be channelled back into the People’s Alliance, into booking rooms and paying off the police and helping out the members who’d lost their work or been injured in brawls and demonstrations. Saul and I still earned most of our living doing the sort of drudge duties which guildsmen and their apprentices were either too proud or too lazy to perform for themselves. Over the years, there had been items which needed collection, lunchtime deliveries of jugs of beer and warm pies which we had longed to drink and eat. There had been kingrats to trap; the beasts could leap prodigiously, and seemed always to go for the fingers, genitals and eyes. There had still been occasional borrowings. The work was always hard, dangerous, foot-aching, and the London of my Bracebridge dreams receded into tramstop waits and worn shoes and weary nights in tuberculosis boarding houses. Occasionally, pricked by sentiment, I would send my father and Beth a small cheque and a telegraph to assure them that I was still alive, but I kept the details of my life secret, just as any good citizen should, especially when using the telegraphs. What kept me in London now was a different vision to the one which had brought me here, although occasionally—just as this morning, and in the gleaming roofs of tenements and warehouses, in the impossible rise of Hallam Tower, in the wyreglow of sunset—I still sometimes glimpsed it. But life went on. The years had passed for Saul and Maud and I in that surprising way that they do. We still went each Midsummer to the fair in Westminster Great Park, but I never saw Annalise there, or anywhere.

I was fortunate. I had enough time and change in my pocket to eat my breakfast, stare out of the chophouse window, and shake my head over the fantastic nonsense they still printed in the
Guild Times.
Not that my life was easy. Not that I was remotely rich. Apart from anything else, I had no ambition to succeed in a Age which would soon be upturned, uprooted. The fog had gone entirely when I left the chophouse and the sky had settled low above the rooftops and was dimly pulsing. I shouldered my satchel and headed north and west across Doxy Street towards Houndsfleet, where I now collected rent. Money was evil stuff; the root of so much that was wrong with our society. I understood that all too well. How could I not do so, working in place of a previous rentman who’d got his brains clubbed out in an alley?

In Houndsfleet, behind terraces with house names hung above tiny porches—
Larkrise, The Willows, Freida’s Farm, Greenforest—
lay the pens where London’s Guild of Works kept its armies of pitbeasts, and their curious smell hung in the air. Each morning, a dire circus parade of these animals trundled past the net curtains on dray-pulled wagons. Horny and savage, uniformly blind and scarred, they dribbled trails of shining ordure through the slats of their cages across which Houndsfleet’s prim residents would step as they headed off to go about the business of their many guilds. In physical terms, being a rentman was easy work for me. I hopped across flowerbeds. I ignored the shouts of aggrieved horticulturists and truanting children. I made my peace, through bribes of biscuit and the ends of my boots, with the cowardly and pompous little dogs. At least I wasn’t catching kingrats.
Ah, it’s you …
I was scarcely a face to these people, and I watched the guildsmistresses’ slippers flop into back kitchens and listened for the chime of the broken-spouted teapot where they innocently kept their money. Then back again that evening for those who were out, or pretended to be. The youngest child sent to the doorway. The pause and tinkle and the rumble of drawers in search of what should, should,
should—
if only I hadn’t married the bastard—be there …

I’d come to understand the warning signs of a forthcoming eviction. The slight extra tension in a guildsmistress’s fingers before the last precious shilling was released, the sleek off-meat odour of a bubbling sheep’s head when the rest of the street were tucking into chops. A glance outside along the pebbledash, work-callused hands pushed through hair, then reaching towards me, although often as not at that moment the dog would start barking, the baby crying, the kettle singing, and the dim idea of some other exchange which would put right the columns of their rentbook would remain the ghost of a possibility. These guildswomen offered their bodies like tear-stained parcels of regret, and I scarcely needed my inherent caution to refuse them. Over the years, since my near-priceless encounter with Doreen, I had learnt to take the occasional relief which I needed with cheerful efficiency from the women who openly plied their trade. Money changed hands there, too, but at least there was something straightforward—almost clean, medicinal, hygienic—about those exchanges.

After a non-existent lunch, I reached Sunrise Crescent. There were tight distinctions along these Drives, Gardens, Walks and Avenues, where members of the Copyists’ Guild shared bedroom walls and dustbins with Actuarial Registrars and Lesser Certified Accountants. They all thought that they were above each other, and especially above the sorts of non-guildsmen (they couldn’t bring themselves to think of me as a mart) who made his living collecting rent. So I always noticed the ones who treated me like a human being. For this reason, Master Mather, who’d lived alone at number 19 on Sunrise Crescent before his eviction last winter, had come to my attention.