The Light Ages (36 page)

‘Well, that’s …’ This obviously wasn’t the usual cause for congratulation. ‘I mean, who’s the—’

‘It’s Greatmaster Porrett. And, before you try to be polite—yes, I do mean that withered old man with the stupid violin. His previous wife died a couple of years ago trying to give birth to a child, poor thing. So now it’s my turn.’

‘You make it sound like you have no choice.’

‘Of course I don’t! I’m Grandmistress Passington, daughter of the greatgrandmaster and all that kind of thing. I’ve always been groomed to get married to someone who will strengthen the Telegraphers’ Guild, although I must say I had rather hoped he would be a little more presentable than Porrett. Still, he’s a sweet old sort in his way. Used to sit me on his lap when I was a little girl and stuff me with chocolate-coated peppermints …’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Perhaps now you’ll believe me. There’s more to being rich than judging vegetable contests and waving at snotty-nosed children on guildays. But then I suppose it really all probably boils down to doing your duty. I don’t know the full details, but basically we Telegraphers need the money, and Greatmaster Porrett’s guild, which is the something or other of thingy and involves chemicals, has it.’ She gave a smile. ‘After all, times are hard. Doesn’t sound so very complicated, does it, if I put it that way?’ She laid a hand on my arm. Her fingers brushed my face. They bore the scent of tears and wine, sweat and cigarettes. ‘But let’s forget that now ..

I let her lean against me. She felt warm, substantial, real. I sniffed the crown of her hair. For a moment, I was back dancing with her and Anna on that Midsummer evening. And then I was here, and Sadie was still pressing against me. ‘Oh, I wish it was winter,’ she murmured. ‘Even if I’ll have to get married, I can at least ride Starlight …’ She sighed against my chest. The ribbons in her pale blond hair tickled my nose. My hands, unwilled, strayed across her shoulders. There were ribbons there as well, holding the top of her dress. ‘You must come at Christmas. Everything’s so different at Walcote in the hunt season. The snow. The blood. The cold.’

‘What do you hunt, Sadie?’

‘Dragons.’

I traced the tight, slick ribbon at her shoulder. All the wonders of Walcote House could pass though me now. All that mattered was this knot with which my fingers struggled. Then something gave. The ribbons parted, and she pulled away. Her right breast was fully bared and she seemed curiously complete and entirely beautiful as she stood there, and yet somehow not quite Sadie. This was nothing like the economic exchanges in the back rooms of by-the-hour hotels. The moment, as I raised my hand to stroke her flesh and her nipple tautened, was charged as some secret guilded ritual. Then, with a laugh, a turn, Sadie ran out of the stables.

‘Come on, Master Robert!’ A voice in the trees, already fading. ‘You’ll have to catch me!’

The trees hung heavy, draining the stars as I blundered between them. A stone nymph reared up. Tied around its finger, trailing like a long drop of blood, was a red ribbon. There were faint sounds, night murmurings. I reached a clearing. In the centre rose a sundial, its shadow strewn with the fading glow of the stars. Tied to its apex was another ribbon. I sensed laughter not far off. Thorns thrashed my face. Another ribbon dripped from the bough of a tree, stirring as my breath heaved. I plunged on. It was no longer quite dark now, but filling with the light of pre-dawn in waves of glittering grey. The sky, the forest, were shifting in thickening mist. Then there was a strange, salt, sweet-sickly smell as the way sloped rapidly down and the trees fell away.

‘Where are you?’

There was a roaring in my ears, and the ground was soft and giving. I looked down and saw foam-flecked sand.

Here.

Everything was suffused in hints and glimmers. And there she was, standing naked in the waves. I understood now, from the paleness of her skin, from the fineness of her features, from the power of the wishfish, exactly who Sadie had come as. She was Anna Winters, Annalise, clothed in a gauze of golden-grey and rising like a goddess from the foggy sea. Needy and breathless, I waded towards her.

‘Well, Master Robert? Was I worth the chase?’

But the voice was still Sadie’s, and the wet hair was peroxide. I blundered into her, still half expecting dreams, smoke, but finding instead the chill reality of her flesh as she shivered and we embraced. The tide surged around us. Her knowing fingers unbuttoned me. We kissed. I wanted her now, but the waves were too strong and it was difficult to keep standing. We fell into the freezing foam and dragged ourselves to the sand, where I pulled off the remains of my sodden clothing. We made love. Sadie had her little moment. I, eventually, the wet sand rubbing my knees, had mine. I fell back. A bigger wave crashed over us. We looked at each other, and laughed, and got to our feet.

‘I think that was worth it,’ Sadie said as she crouched to wash the sand from her buttocks. The mist was thinning now as quickly as it had come. Her dress was strewn a little further up the tide, billowing and glinting like a huge jellyfish. She looked different now, and matter-of-factly human, with snakes of hair and seaweed stuck to her blue-mottled flesh. ‘You took your time, and that counts for a lot to us girls. It’s a rare thing, believe me ..

I smiled to listen to Sadie as she chattered on. I knew I was a considerate lover in the way that she meant, although the dollymops on Doxy Street complained if you spent too long between their thighs. I always enjoyed more these brief moments afterwards—and Sadie looked no different to those working girls now, talking to me and washing herself in much the same matter-of-fact way, with her nipples blued and her belly creased and orange-peel-like corrugations showing on her thighs. Perhaps it was true after all. Perhaps, underneath it all, people really were the same.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ She peeled a wet hank of hair back from her cheek. ‘Have I still got a starfish stuck to my back or something?’

I kissed her cold forehead. ‘You’re lovely as you are. You don’t need to pretend to be anything.’

‘Well …’ But for once, it was Sadie who was lost for words. The horizon was a trembling lip of light.

I went in search of my clothes.

‘M
ORNING, CITIZEN!’

It was the Oneshiftday after my return from Saltfleetby when I first heard this greeting—unforced, unironic, not said in the emphatic tones which members of the People’s Alliance used it—called out workman to workman across the street. I walked on, my bag and my worries lightened, whistling a tune I couldn’t place, towards Black Lucy and Blissenhawk and all the empty columns of this shift’s
New Dawn.
Perhaps this really would be the summer when the Third Age of Industry would end. No one quite knew how such changes came about, for the turnings were spaced at least a century apart, and the histories were vague. As a child, I’d imagined that greatguildsmen would look out of the windows, sniff the morning air, and decide that England needed a fresh coat of paint … I knew that the First Age of Industry had started with the execution of the last king, the second with some massive and complex re-organisation of the guilds, and that the start of the third had been signalled by the triumphant exhibition at World’s End. But how? Why? Even in the pages of the
Guild Times,
let alone those of the
New Dawn,
there was no consensus.

‘Morning, citizen!’

The buildings quivered. The Thames shrank and exhaled. It was a summer of visions and portents. A real hermit took up residence on Hermit’s Hill and started proclaiming the end, not just of the Age, but of time itself. Church attendances went up and the dark seemed denser when you passed the tall open doorways, scented with a new variety of hymnal wine. A tree in the courtyard of one of the great guildhalls which hadn’t budded for five centuries fulfilled some old prophecy and came into leaf Almost all the citizens of the Easterlies seemed to have signed a huge petition calling for change known as the Twelve Demands. Dry thunder rattled over the Kite Hills. The evenings smelled close and foetid and muddy, and the gaslights simply added to the yellow swell of heat. The days were so hot now that people took to sleeping through them and coming out at night, and many of the shops remained open, and everyone was spending. Prices had increased so much recently that, in an odd kind of way, the value of money suddenly seemed less important. The masthead of the latest edition of the
New Dawn
said
4 Pence, or Something Useful in Exchange,
and Saul and I often returned home with shrivelled marrows and bent cigarettes.

‘So …’ Saul lit a cheroot and waved away the match as we sat outside one evening in a bar which had tumbled into Doxy Street. ‘When are you going to tell us all about that shiftend of yours down by the seaside?’

‘There really isn’t much to tell. The people are much like the ones you see here, only with more money and worse accents. They’re …’ I thought about Walcote House—the soft carpets and high ceilings and dissolving walls. Just the other day in the
Guild Times,
I’d noticed an announcement of the marriage of Grandmistress Sarah Elizabeth Sophina York Passington to Greatmaster Ademus Isumbard Porrett of the General Guild of Distemperers, which would take place at Walcote House on something called the Feast of St Steven. Innocence, really was the overriding impression I’d taken back with me from Walcote House to London. Those people were like children and they would still be dancing, laughing, clinking crystal glasses, when the mob came to beat down their doors …

‘Go on—and there must be an article in all of it somewhere. Better than that weird thing you wrote last shift about Goldenwhite and the Unholy Rebellion. I mean—who believes in fairy stories?’

‘All I was saying was that she was a leader of the people in her own way, too. It was a revolt, wasn’t it? And it did happen. She led her people. She was defeated at Clerkenwell.’

Saul chuckled. ‘Have you
been
to Clerkenwell?’

Of course I had—we both had, many times. But I’d never found what I’d been looking for, mainly because I still didn’t know what it was. A statue, a monument? I ordered another beer. Posters flapped on the walls in the hot night breeze; exhortations to come to gatherings and meetings long gone—if, indeed, they had ever taken place at all. Old scraps of the
New Dawn
or one of the dozens of other similar Easterlies papers bowled merrily along the gutters.

‘Have you heard about the fruitworkers of Kent?’ Saul was saying. ‘They’ve formed a collective. They make their own decisions. The signs are there’ll be a record harvest, and then they’ll be able to share the profits and re-invest. It’s a halfway house, I know, to true shared ownership, but I thought we might join them soon as this Age has changed. Not too many acres, of course. Just enough for me and Maud and the little ‘un …’

I was thinking of the Stropcocks—the Bowdly-Smarts—whose sour faces still seemed real to me in this glowing city now that Walcote Manor had receded.
‘What
did you just say?’

Saul chuckled. ‘Thought you weren’t with me there for a moment, Robbie. Maud’s expecting a baby … I’m going to be a daddy!’ He shot out a laugh, shook his head.

I went to a Workers Fair one afternoon that summer up on the Kite Hills. All the vast and hazy city lay spread below. Spires and towers. Hallam’s slow blink. And there really were kites on these hills—coloured flotillas which caught and bobbed on the hot wind and tugged at the puppetstring people below. One, the size of a small shed, but silken, shimmering, crimson, was temporarily grounded, and had gathered a cluster of onlookers.

‘Used to have one like that myself. Well, perhaps not quite so big ..’

I turned to see Highermaster George.

‘It was the most complicated thing I ever did, Robbie, getting that thing in the air. It was aethered, of course. Just like this one—see those strings.’

The kite roared up. We and the land seemed to drop away. ‘So,’ he said, squinting as the sun flared on his freckled scalp, ‘I suppose you’re here to sell the
New Dawn?’

I nodded, and George bought one of the copies I had under my arm, then surprised and flattered me by revealing that he’d already read it, including my own rambling piece. He did his best, he said, to keep abreast of what he called
the debate.
A little further down the hill, where the kites’ shadows danced in the air which rose off London like the heat from an oven, a straggle of marquees and awnings was basking. It was called a
Craft Fair for the New Age
and George was seemingly one of its leading lights. There were
Free Displays
and
Still Life Dances, Educational Talks
and
Exhibitions of Goods of the Highest Quality Not Produced by Any of the Guilds.
Contradictions abounded, although George’s tone was apologetic as he took me along the stalls. Concave cakes, dubious pottery done in a bread oven, lumpen carvings, knitted dolls and poker-work frames. We sat for a while on folding chairs in the headache heat of a tent and listened to a seemingly endless debate about how the calendar might soon be changed. Even God himself in the old versions of the Bible had only been expected to labour seven days—so why not go back to that system, and work for five and a half days, then rest on the other one and a half? Or even just work the five …

‘I know we’ve got a long way to go yet. Doesn’t compare to your years of hard work with that paper. But we’re experimenting with dyes, fresh processes …

George drew me away, still apologising, still explaining. The Kite Hills, he told me, had once been called the Parliament Hills after a group of rebels led by a man named Fawkes who had gathered here after trying to blow up the long-dead assembly which had once existed beside the Thames. Of course, the guilds had suppressed the name—the idea of a parliament, a real one in which properly elected representatives might control the way we lived, was far too dangerous.

‘And Goldenwhite—she gathered her army here as well, didn’t she?’

‘Hmmm …’ George smiled vaguely. ‘Just as you say in that
most
interesting article. Although I do wonder if the reference isn’t derived from Queen Boadicea.’