The Light Ages (3 page)

‘Come in, lad. What are you staring at? And shut that bloody door…’

I did as Master Tatlow said, clumping forward across the boards of the headmaster’s study towards the desk at which he was sitting.

‘And why are you shivering? It’s not cold, is it?’

A fire was crackling. I could feel its heat on the side of my face.

‘Name, lad? Address … ?’

Of course, he must know that already. Such was my faith in the wisdom of the guilds.

‘Well?’

‘R-obert Borrows,’ I squeaked. ‘Three Brickyard Row.’

‘Borrows … Brickyard Row. Well, you’d better come around to this side of the desk, hadn’t you?’

I did as the trollman said, and he swivelled around in his borrowed chair to face me. The knees of his trousers, I noticed, were bagged and shiny. His face had a similar look; creasy and glossed and worn nearly through.

‘Any known deformities or strange behaviours? Have you or your family at any time to your knowledge been exposed to raw aether? Wens? Birthmarks?’ I did have several small dots and moles scattered across my body that I’d have liked to have told him about, but Master Tatlow was reading from a list on grimed card, and had already moved on. He gave his nose a wipe. ‘Well, go on, lad. Roll up your sleeve.’

Ridiculously, my fingers started to struggle with the button of my right cuff until a sigh from Master Tatlow stopped me. Blushing furiously, I rolled up my left sleeve. My wrist looked thin and white. A stripped twig. Master Tatlow unclipped the lid from his battered leather case and produced a small glass jar and a wad of cotton. The air filled with a bright, sharp smell as he sprinkled it.

Amazingly, he handed the wad over to me. ‘Rub that on your wrist.’

As I applied the stuff to my skin, I felt the chill of destiny come upon me. It was just as I expected. There was no pain, no reddening. An even whiter patch of skin and blue vein shone. Master Tatlow was unimpressed. ‘Now drop it in the bin.’

‘Isn’t that … ?’

Misunderstanding, he attempted a smile. ‘You’ve probably heard from your friends that Testing hurts. Don’t believe any of it. It happens to everyone. It even happened to me …’ From the same leather case, he produced another jar, smaller this time. It seemed to be empty for a moment, then it filled with silver light. I felt an odd singing in my ears, a pressure behind my eyes. This time, it truly was blazing with the characteristic wyreglow of aether; which is bright in a dimness such as that room, and throws shadows in daylight. In the silence which blossomed as he opened out a device which looked like a combination of a bracelet and horse’s bridle and slipped it over my left wrist, I could hear, more plainly than ever, the pounding of Bracebridge’s aether engines. SHOOM
BOOM
SHOOM
BOOM.

The aether chalice had a screwthread which attached itself to a brass protrusion of the leather collar enclosing my wrist. Master Tatlow held my arm firm. ‘Now, lad. D’you know what to say?’

We’d spent the last two shifterms rehearsing nothing else.

‘The Lord God the
Elder
in all his Power has granted this
Realm
the Blessing for which I now Thank Him with all my
Heart
and will Honour with all my
Labours.
I solemnly promise that I will Honour all Guilds, especially my
own
and that of my Father and all his Fathers before him. I will not bear
Witness
against those to whom I am
Apprenticed.
I will not traffic with
Demons, Changelings, Fairies
or
Witches.
I will praise God
the
Elder and all his
Works.
I
will
Honour each Noshiftday in his Name, and … and I will … I will accept this Mark as my own Sign of the Blessing in the Infinite Love
of
the God and the Stigmata of my
Human
Soul.’

Still gripping my arm, Master Tatlow gave the aether chalice a twist.

For a moment, there was nothing. But his attention was fixed on me as it hadn’t been before. I gave a surprised gasp. It felt as if I had been driven through with a frozen nail. It rocketed into my mouth in spears of blood and pain. SHOOM …
BOOM …
Then everything contracted again, and I was standing there beside the desk and level with Master Tatlow’s face as, with a twist of the chalice and a brisk snap of clasps, he withdrew from my wrist the thing which had tortured me.

‘You see,’ he muttered. ‘Wasn’t so bad, was it? You’re just like all the rest of us now. Ready to join your daddy’s guild.’

So I strode away from Board School through an autumn fog which was rolling in quick and cold and early, pausing only in Shipley Square to glare at a verdigrised statue of the Grandmaster of Painswick, Joshua Wagstaffe, who stood in indeterminate mid-gesture just as he stood in squares across all of England. Not, I thought, that I blamed the man personally for discovering aether. Someone else would have been bound to do so even if he hadn’t, wouldn’t they? And, if they hadn’t, where would the world be? Even the Frenchmen with their tails and the goat-eyed men of Cathay were said to have their spells, their guilds. The fog swirled around me, turning the people into ghosts, the houses and trees into suggestions of lands I would never see. When I got back to our house on Brickyard Row, I kicked open the back door and carried trails of them with me as I stomped into the kitchen.

‘There
you are …’ My mother came briskly from the parlour bearing the vinegared rag she’d been using to clean the brassware. ‘Wondered what all the noise was about.’

I dropped to the three-legged stool beside the stove and dragged off my boots. Suddenly, I was angry with her for not coming to the school gates to make a fuss of me like every other mother.

‘Well? Let’s see … ?’

I stuck my arm out for her, just as I’d done for Master Tatlow, and as I’d doubtless have to do for Beth and my father. It was a minor enough wound compared to the things I’d done to my knees and elbows, and ubiquitous amongst us guildspeople, but my mother studied the sore for longer than I’d have expected. Despite all her talk about a lot of fuss over nothing, she really did seem interested. In the light of our dull kitchen, the aether was still glowing. Finally, she straightened up, steadying herself against the cold range as she let out a long and surprising gasp, like a surfacing swimmer.

‘Well, it’s a big step. Now you’re like all the rest of us.’

‘Rest of
what?’
I squeaked.

My mother bent down again. She laid her warm blackened hands on my knees until I finally looked up at her and she gave me an unfathomable smile.

‘You should be pleased, Robert. Not disappointed. It proves—’

‘What?’

I was shouting, and close to tears. Normally, I’d have been a candidate for a swift smack and a long hour upstairs while I
bucked up my ideas,
but this afternoon my mother seemed to understand that my mood was deeper, and—despite all outward appearances—somehow not entirely pointless.

‘Testing is part of what we all are, here in England, in Bracebridge. It shows that you’re fit to be a guildsman like your father, just as it shows that I’m a guildmistress. It shows …’ But my mother’s blue eyes were slowly drawing away from me. The dull glint of the fire at my back pooled two red sparks beneath her irises. ‘It shows …’ She drew herself back a little, and rubbed at the corner of her mouth with her knuckles because her fingers were grubby with tarnish. ‘It shows that you’re growing.’

‘And what about all the stories you’ve told me … ?’

‘Those are for summer nights, Robert. And look outside—can’t you see? Winter’s coming.’

Then there was Noshiftday, and Father Francis stood at the door of St Wilfred’s church nodding to his congregation as he passed out white sashes for us spit-dabbed children to wear. Jammed together into the front pews, we elbowed each other and examined our raw wounds. Ahead of us, clumsily executed in marble by a local craftsman, a robed and bearded statue of God the Elder, the greatest guildsman of them all, gazed down at us. And then the singing began, and I gazed up at the gilt ceiling and the dull scenes in stained glass along the walls. George endlessly slaughtered his dragon with a look of bored disdain. Saints suffered terrible tortures in the name of their guilds.

Father Francis’s sermon must have been the one he gave at every Day of Testing, and his sing-song voice was familiar as a lullaby as it wafted over the pews. Then, one by one, we children were summoned to the altar. I squeezed along the bench when my time came, and managed not to catch my sash on the altar rail, but my thoughts were remote as I grasped the beaker of hymnal wine for the first time and Father Francis recited the promises of heaven. I could feel the eyes of the congregation around me, and the pounding of the earth beneath. I could see the smears that the other children’s lips had left on the beaker’s silver rim. I wondered what would happen if I spat it out. But I shuddered as I swallowed the tart red fluid. It was just as everyone always said: I saw a vision of heaven, where there is but one great guild and no work to perform, and where pure silver trains run through endless fields of corn whilst winged ships sail the clouds. I could easily see how regular church-attending could become addictive, but I knew even as I witnessed these scenes that they had been stirred into the alcohol of an aethered vat.

I
WAS BORN ROBERT BORROWS
in Bracebridge, Brownheath, West Yorkshire, late one August Sixshiftday afternoon in the seventy-sixth year of the third great cycle of our Ages of Industry, the only son and second child of a lower master of the Lesser Guild of Toolmakers. Bracebridge was then a middle-sized town which lay on the banks of the River Withy. It was prosperous in its own way, and perhaps indistinguishable from many another northern factory town to the eyes of those who glimpsed it from the carriages of the expresses which swept through our station without stopping, although, at least in one respect, it was unusual. Derbyshire might have its coalfields and Lancashire might have its mills, Dudley might swarm with factories and Oxford with cape-flapping dons, but for this particular corner of England it was aether which governed our lives, and the one inescapable fact that would strike anyone who visited Bracebridge at that time was the sound, or rather the non-sound, which pervaded it. It was a sensation which passed into all of us who lived there and became part of the rhythm and the substance of our lives.

SHOOM
BOOM
SHOOM
BOOM.

It was the sound of the aether engines.

The water wheels that had driven Bracebridge’s first aether engines up on Rainharrow had long been still; their wheels and pistons had rusted, their catchpools lay empty, the shattered windows of their drive houses stared down at the factories that had sprawled in their place. Down in the valley, there was always smoke and sound and furnace glow. Inside the floors of Mawdingly & Clawtson, dervish governors spun, pulleys hissed and chains clattered. Driven down from Engine Floor three hundred feet into the earth, pristine as a jewel yet thick as a ship’s mast and ten times as heavy, a great vertical axle turned, bearing force to Central Floor far below where the ears and lungs of those who laboured there were continually flayed by the deep, demented beat of the triple arms of the aether engines which they and this factory—all of Bracebridge, in one way or another—existed to serve.

Fanning out from the riven rock, the three steel and granite pistons bellowed back and forth—SHOOM
BOOM
SHOOM
BOOM—
drawing out the aether. Connected to those pistons and thin as spiderweb, skeins of engine silk carried the substance to the surface. There, the energy was dissipated in the cloudy waters of the first of many quickening pools, then stirred and filtered until the final vials were packed in lead-lined chests and borne on slow trains west and east and north but predominantly south across England, there to be put to any of ten thousand possible uses, the benefits of which, it always struck me, Bracebridge itself seemed surprisingly bereft.

Of course, it used to be said that we all took aether for granted then, but in Bracebridge it was
working
of aether that we took for granted; the slam of iron and the howl of shift sirens and the clump of men’s boots and the grind of engines and soot on the washing and, beyond all that, beyond everything, the subterranean pounding of those engines. It compacted the flour in the larder and tilted the flagstones in the hall. It cracked flowerpots and crazed pottery. It shifted dust into seashore patterns and danced rainbows on the fat globules in the cream. It secretly rearranged the porcelain dogs on the mantelpiece until they crashed to the hearth. SHOOM
BOOM
SHOOM
BOOM.
We carried the sound of those engines in our blood. Even when we left Bracebridge, it came with us.

The house in which I lived, the third in the terrace along Brickyard Row, with a steep drop through scratchy copses of birch into lowtown and with many other Rows and Backs and Ways slanting up Coney Mound behind, had stood for most of the Third Age of Industry by the time my parents moved in. Bracebridge then was at the height of a new surge of expansion, and such terraces, facing each other across yards and alleys and the corrugated roofs of outside toilets, had been deemed the most efficient method of housing the workers who were needed to service the new, subterranean engines that were then being built to mine the deep-set aether seams. Apart from my own small upper space, there were two main rooms on each of the two floors, although the house always seemed more complicated than that, riddled with odd corners and alcoves and bits of cupboard and crisscrossings of chimney. The core, from which rose most of the heat, smell and noise which fogged my attic, was the kitchen, which was dominated in turn by the black iron range. Above it were generally strung clots of rag, shoes dangling by their laces, sage and sallow, bits of fat and ham, sagging bladders of waterapples, wet coats and anything else in need of drying, whilst the oak table glowered at it from its own darker corner; a rival, lesser, deity.

Upstairs lay the front bedroom which my parents occupied, and my elder sister Beth’s single back room. The rear of the house was north-facing, the narrow windows admitting views only of walls and dustbins and back alleys. I was lucky, really, with my little attic at the front. It was my own private territory. Lives were pressed close together in Brickyard Row. The walls were thin, their bricks porous to smoke, smells, voices. Somewhere, there would always be a baby crying; somewhere else, a man shouting, or a woman crying.