The Light Ages (39 page)

The cloth of the woven banner was fine but slippery. It floated up in the hot drafts which tunnelled across the hall every time someone opened the doors.

‘Hold this while I knot it ..

The design was complex and hard to make out amid the folds. ‘This material’s so difficult to work, even now I’ve almost finished it.’

‘You
made all of this?’

She gave a small nod which was both mocking and knowing.
Of course I did, Robbie.
After all, she was Anna Winters, who could turn her hand to anything, from playing the piano to dancing to this, yet never chose to make a special show of any of it. Outside, the gritty afternoon billowed on. But she and I were the centre beyond the storm. Stillness radiated across the marvellous cloth from Anna’s graceful hands.

‘You’ve been with Missy, haven’t you?’

I looked at her a little more warily. ‘How can you tell?’

‘That flower.’ Her fingers brushed my lapel, and I saw that Mistress Summerton’s rose was dusted with a sparkling dew of engine ice. ‘But I’m glad you went to see her today. She’s lonely over there, although I know she’d hate me for saying it. And I should go more often. I feel guilty for not doing so.’ She lowered her voice as George breezed over to see how we were doing. ‘But you’ll understand it’s hard.’

Cradled in the quiet light, Anna worked on. The cloth slipped through my fingers. The needle rose and fell.

‘I think I do,’ I said eventually.

‘Do what?’ She looked up at me, small silver earrings swinging on their threads from the lobes of her ear.

‘Understand why you live as you do.’

She smiled, nodded, continued working. Anna Winters, who was here simply because this was what people of her kind in Kingsmeet were doing today, and because she wanted to be supportive towards her friend George and, perhaps, even towards me and all the rest of us citizens who had struggled so hard for change across the Easterlies. Not that she believed in this New Age, and not that she didn’t. She was Anna Winters, and she thrived on how people felt, and on making them happy, just as she was doing now for me. The needle sank and rose. The banner unravelled across her lap, waterfalling in beautiful pools, and the motion of its making was so soothing that I felt as if I was being put together, mended, made whole.

‘What do you think will happen?’ I asked.

She paused in her sewing. ‘I don’t know.’ She looked up at me. Her green eyes dimmed, then brightened.
All this talk of change, and what difference would any of it make for me?
Mistress Summerton’s words came back to me. But Anna looked entirely wonderful, serene and cool. ‘Do you?’

I shook my head. ‘Look, Anna—’

‘You’re going to tell me to be careful, aren’t you? That’s what everyone seems to be saying today.’

I smiled.

‘But it’s you I worry about,’ she said. ‘And George over there. And all the people like you and him, which seems to mean most of London at the moment. Hopes are such brittle things, and they can hurt you when they break.’ The needle gave a final dip. She took the thread and tugged at it with her teeth. It made a sharp momentary indentation in her lower lip which I longed to smooth away. Now.’ She stood up. The cloth rustled about her. ‘It’s time. Take this end for me, will you?’

The cloth spread out from Anna and I as we walked away from each other across that little Kingsmeet hall. There was scattered applause and firework
oohs
and
ahhs
as we unfolded the great long night-blue banner with its patches of russet colour and its gold and silver threadings. It shimmered and fluttered in the drafts like those kites on the Kite Hills, ready to take flight into this New Age. I’d expected it to form some picture or slogan, but Anna’s banner fluttered in gold and abstract swirls. Look at it one way, and you saw a comet-crossed night sky. Look at it another, and there were the folds of distant mountains, the spells of some arcane guild, the faces of children. The teasing, glittering colours invited you to see whatever you wanted to see in them. I realised that, from her own unique standpoint, Anna had cleverly captured the very heart and spirit of this coming Midsummer Day.

I left a little later and walked back through London. The sun was lower. The winds swirled black and orange and pounded against the walls of the yards. Something would happen tomorrow. That was true now beyond certainty. But how? And what? A trickle of sweat chilled my back. I was just off Doxy Street by now, and close to Ashington, and walking beside a bow-fronted row of poulterers and cheese merchants. They were shut now, probably had been all day, and the street was empty of all life and traffic. For once, in London, I was entirely alone. The shadows were climbing out from under the eaves as the sun sunk deeper in its veils. They stretched smoky fingers to tug at my clothes and retreated in crazed shrieks of glee. As I took a short cut along a side alley, I had to resist the stupid urge to look back, or to flee. The wind had tipped over the dustbins and was banging them about, flinging their contents into filthy heaps. I was picking my way over them when I sensed that something had followed me into this alley. I spun around to face it, and I saw, with an odd sense of triumph, that a figure really was standing behind me amid the spilled tins of rancid fat. It was a guildsman. Darkly dressed. Darkly cloaked. He wore no hat or hood, but his face was hard to make out although I knew that his eyes were upon me, and that they were amused, and knowing, and predatory. He stood there in the hot shadow darkness of that stinking alley, radiating the sick, draining complacency of knowing everything that I would never know.

‘Who are you?’ I tried to yell, although it came out as a whisper. ‘What do you want?’ I stumbled back around the tumbling, clanging dustbins towards him, careless, despite my fear, of anything beyond the need to know. ‘Why are you doing this? Just tell me. Just ..

Then the wind gave an even mightier surge and my feet slipped in the spillages of rotting cardboard. When I regained my balance, my hands scrabbling along the walls, all that was left of my dark guildsman was a twirl of engine ice and London rubbish.

G
ET UP, ROBERT! IT’S LATE MORNING.

My eyes prickled open to absorb the stained ceiling of my tenement room. This was Midsummer Day, and the wind had drawn back and it had rained in the night, puttering restlessly through my dreams. Saul was singing on the floor below as he washed at his basin and Maud sounded bright and cheery for once as she lumbered about with her growing belly. At long last, her sickness was fading. She was blooming into pregnancy, and eating enough for twins, as Saul cheerily said.

Outside, the engine ice of World’s End’s hills had become a coat of varnish in the night’s rain. The whole world seemed almost impossibly stark and clear. On Sheep Street, we joined up with Blissenhawk and left Maud to tend Black Lucy in preparation for the last ever edition of the
New Dawn.
Then, arm in arm, gathering ranks, we headed west. By the time we’d passed out of Ashington the crowd was so big that it welled up like a river over the edges of Doxy Street. Rumour was rife, sweeping us back, pushing us forward. The Twelve Demands had already been conceded! The money system had been changed! The dollymops were with us, in their gladdest of rags. So were the Undertakers, in their black top hats. And the Lesser Beastmasters, with their familiars on their shoulders; miniature furry citizens, chirping and waving tiny flags.

I’d never known such a walk to Northcentral. Hallam Tower flashed as always, a beckoning black star. We surged from Cheapside and along Wagstaffe Mall where the greatest of all the great guildhalls rose in terraces of pink Italianate stone. But the Goddess of Mercy who surmounted the final spire of the Gearworkers’ Halls had somehow acquired a hat and a scarf Even she was a citizen today, and the sunlight was spinning around her, rising with the cries of guildsmen of every kind and glinting on the vast dome of the Miners’ Chapel, where the catacombs were said to be made of carved and polished coal. But this wasn’t a time for the suppositions of old. Those high gates, these studded wooden doors, they would soon all be flung open. This was the Midsummer to end all Midsummers. This was the end of the Third Age.

There was to be no fair this Midsummer in Westminster Great Park. As the crowds teemed in from all parts of London, there were the first flurries of disappointment. After all, once the guildgates had opened and the Twelve Demands had been accepted and the Age had officially been changed, what was to be done with the rest of the day? But the perilinden trees, now that you thought of it, made for fine climbing with their knobbed silver bark and their leaves which tinkled like glass as you crawled amongst them. And all those incredible flowerbeds, the lanternflowers and the moonivy—they were good for the picking, come to think of it. Guildmistresses from Whitechapel paraded with garish topknots of petal and leaf, dancing and kissing strangers, tipsy on nothing but the wild peculiarity of the day. Those crashing fountains, they were for bathing in! Of course they were-and always should have been. Naked children and many who were old enough to know better were soon cavorting amongst the spouting dolphins.

There were banners everywhere. Placards. Flags of guild association. I searched for Anna’s glittering blue-gold creation, but Saul had grabbed my sleeve. It was time to gather with Blissenhawk near the gates of the Guild of Works where all the huge crates of our petition would be presented. It was noon. The bells and clocks began to blast. Bronze figures emerged from their clockwork doors high on guildhouse towers. The Twelve Demands for twelve o’clock. It fitted perfectly. Everywhere, now, there was a regathered purpose in the crowd.

The sound of all the clocks and bells rang clear in the magic air across all of London. The striking of a New Age, golden as this sunlight. The crowd drew back from the silver-tipped railings and gates of the Guild of Works as a wave does in the moment before it beats the shore, then drove forward again. The soot-weeping building beyond the gravelled paving and the elongated statues wasn’t the most graceful of the great guildhalls, but it was certainly one of the biggest. I was near the front of the crowd as the last beat of noon faded and every soul in England, it seemed, waited for something to happen.

When it did, it came from behind us, and we heard it first as a surprised, delighted sea-roar rippling out from some distant spot as we all craned our necks to see exactly what was happening there. Nothing at first. Then a ripple of colour over the flags and banners and the white trees. The colours swelled up, filling a corner of the sky. They were varied, changing, impossibly beautiful. It seemed as if Anna’s banner had grown and had taken flight, but it was a long moment before those of us at the front of the crowd were able to work out what this spreading rainbow really was. When we did, we joined in the cheering and laughed as the new creation of the long-neglected Arthropod Branch of the Guild of Beastmasters plumed into the air. Butterflies, just as promised, and they were huge and blue and red-golden. And in the instant of their release, in that glorious upward sigh of colour, this unique Midsummer Day had at last acquired a name. In the history books, in the songs which mothers sung over cribs, on plaques which we were sure would soon appear on the very paving on which we now stood, this would forever be Butterfly Day.

The creatures fanned out across London with a soft fluttering. The blue sky returned. The cheering ceased and joy settled back on our lips, and with it came a renewed anticipation. We looked once more towards the great gates of the Guild of Works as, in the quiet first minute of that first afternoon, the thing which we had long dreamed of, but which some nagging corner of our minds had always felt to be impossible, finally happened. With a screech and a shudder, a flash of bronze and the grinding of some hidden mechanism, the guildgates began to open. The crowds were silenced, awed. Apart from the cries of babies and querulous questions of children, apart from the hiss and clatter of the fountains and the soft tinkle of the perilinden trees back across Westminster Great Park, a deep stillness reigned. On this moment of Butterfly Day, cheering would have been wrong. We wanted to know. We wanted to see. When there was a sound, it came from within the guildgates, and from behind the wings of the great, squat building. It was the clop of hooves.

In a flash of helmets and breastplates, a nod of crimson plumes, they emerged; the cavalrymen, astride hundreds of the beautiful black horses I had glimpsed yesterday at Stepney Sidings. The two streams which came from either side of the guildhouse merged and jingled through the gates and spread out in a double line on the far side of the railings. Once more, silence reigned. I could see what would happen now. A captain with an especially large red and white plume to his helmet was already dismounting. Now, he would come forward, and, in the face of this threat of force, a delegation of citizens would soon be formed. They would go forward and the guildgates would close on them and the rest of us would be left waiting. There, inside that huge, jumbled building, there would be discussions and compromise. There would no longer be Twelve Demands, or ten or eight or six. And the old Age would continue. Still, even I had to concede that it was a brave act by that captain of the cavalry, to dismount and walk alone towards the vast line of us citizens. Even with his plume, the swing of the sheathed sword, he looked small and almost insignificant.

‘Is there anyone …’ He paused. ‘I only ask that—’

It was at that moment that the first rock was launched at him from the crowd.

Much happened after that on Butterfly Day, but most of it was blood, storm, confusion. Those who were there to witness it perhaps knew less than the many others who later claimed to have been. The severed limbs. The pounding hooves. The savage balehounds. Or that brave captain, stuck down and engulfed by the mob. But for me, in the enormous push of the crowd, my main concern was not to be trampled. I didn’t resist when I was pushed back towards Prettlewell Fountains; there, at least, there might be something solid to hold on to instead of this treacherous pavement. I’d lost all sight of Saul, Blissenhawk and anyone else I knew. Then I heard a voice I recognised. It was Highermaster George, and he was atop Prettlewell Fountains. He’d clambered up from the seething mass of bodies which had surged over the marble lip into its waters and stood high above the frothing mermaids. Dripping around him like strands of vivid blood as he shouted and waved were the torn and leaking remains of Anna’s banner.