The Light Ages (62 page)

But what of the days which have followed, Niana, which we still count, despite all the talk, in the same twelve shifts? The discovery, once the first catalysation of engine ice had begun, of vast new supplies of aether almost at the heart of this city, and then in every other place where the stuff was to be found, was also the catalyst for the new regime. Citizen-helpers were needed to control this surprising new wealth, as well as citizens with the arcane skills required to retard the work of aether. And citizens to marshal the pitbeasts which would make the trenches, and citizens who worked in wood and citizens who worked in iron, and citizens to control engines, and of course citizens to guard the fences which were necessarily erected to keep all the other citizens out. Then there were the telegraphs to get working, and the trains and the trams.

They called these workers
servants of the nation
at first. Do you remember that, Niana? How the ex-guildsmen were re-recruited and given the privilege of extra food which was only necessary if they were to perform their vital work? And the organisations, the loose agglomerations of old rivalries and new loyalties which were formed in bars and in kitchens and ransacked guildhalls, we called those
unions.
I remember that as well. But somehow, as the thin skeleton of the old London began to smoke and clatter just as it always had, the word
guilds
crept back in. They were
new guilds
at first, or they were
non guilds,
and their members were
citizen guildsmen,
and that term, as it was shouted out on the first mornings of the new spring, was probably intended at first as nothing more than a jokey reference to the bad old times. But words are spells, Niana. Of course, you still sometimes see the word
new
or
re-amalgamated
on a letter heading or guildsign. And technically, I know, we are still all citizens, even the hopeless marts, for this has been legally established by the grandjudges in Newgate on a day when the corpses didn’t swing.

For things have changed and things have remained the same, and I realise now that this is the pattern which life always makes for itself The rebellious children who curse their parent’s lives soon end up whistling as they head towards the same factory, and the new tenements which were erected on the old slums of Ashington and Whitechapel have become slums again. There is a spell in our heads, in the earth, in the air and in the aether, and it is one that we can never unbind. Look at Bracebridge. In the days after the engines stopped and the long-standing fraud of the directors of Mawdingly & Clawtson was made public, you would have thought that that was the end of the town. But if you were to go there now, Niana, you would find that the place is as busy and ugly as ever. The settling pans still glow, and the long straw-bedded lines of aether trucks clack beneath the same iron bridge—probably watched by some confused and half-angry lad. The biggest change you’d notice about Bracebridge is Rainharrow. That hill is a bustling crater now, threaded in grey dust and the workings of machinery as the engine ice infused in its rock is extracted. And once every quarter hour, day and night, the ground shakes,
BOOM,
to a fresh explosion as more opencast is revealed. The workings are even administered from offices beyond an archway set with the twin friezes of Providence and Mercy. So the rhythm of life goes on, and my father smiles or scowls into his beer as he helps out at the Bacton Arms, and Beth scolds her pupils and stirs her ink and smiles to herself with thoughts of the shiftend and her colleague from Harmanthorpe.

Redhouse has changed more. In this Age when guildmistresses collect precious thimblefuls of glittering leavings from the seams of their husband’s workclothes to give to the local redeemer, when the very dust of the air of larger workplaces is distilled, such a prize could hardly go unclaimed. Go there now, and you’ll find that the old house and those cottages have all been ground to rubble for their engine ice by big machines, although, oddly enough, in a small square beyond the major workings, the statue beside which Annalise and I once sat remains. But the sound which fills the air there now is of chipping and hammering. It drowns out the hiss of the river, which in any case is polluted and changed.

So perhaps I’m wrong about things staying the same, Niana. And you must excuse me if I wander from my subject and seem to change my mind. Such behaviour, as I was saying only recently to Grandmaster Bowdly-Smart, is a prerogative of privilege, and that other kind of age. From his humble beginnings, from his struggle to become an uppermaster and his realisation after the loss of his child that mere hard work is wasted, from his blackmailing of Grandmaster Harrat to his handling of the Telegraphers’ Guild’s imaginary money, Ronald is, as he will readily admit, a parable of all that was right and wrong with the old Age. He lives a worthy life now, semi-retired and dabbling in this and that investment as people must if new wealth is to be created, and his wife thrives better than ever in what she calls
the social whirl.
For every invitation she accepts, she must turn down a dozen others, and Grandmaster Bowdly-Smart and I both laughed over our whisky as we wondered which it was she enjoyed the most, whilst outside the adopted child they call Frankie shouts to his nanny in coarse tones as he plays. For the one small change we have both noticed is that a rougher accent is now socially acceptable. Indeed, on a recent visit to Walcote House, many of the bright young things were affecting such voices. Unlike the rest of the world, they sometimes even actually call each other
citizen,
although they only mean it as a joke.

Still, I have to admit that I sometimes feel a slight queasiness at the thought of my friendship with Grandmaster Bowdly-Smart as I gaze across his grounds from the windows of my sparkling new car and head on through the streaming lights of this city with its colours and great new buildings and the flashing trains and trams. I wouldn’t call it an
unease,
Niana, because I always feel that in disowning Uppermaster—I mean
Grandmaster—
Bowdly-Smart, I would be disowning part of myself. It is more the slight but vertiginous loss of balance I would probably feel if I were to live long enough to stand at the top of that new ziggurat they’re building in the centre of Westminster Great Park, which will dwarf Hallam Tower, so I’m told, in height, and would swallow even the largest of the guildhalls in breadth and depth. Feeling at a loss in the Age you’re in is, after all, a rich old man’s luxury; something to nourish and cherish when all others pall.

You might find it strange, Niana, in view of his exalted position, but the person I feel most comfortable with nowadays is the Greatgrandmaster of the Reformed Guild of Telegraphers, Architects and Allied Trades. He, more than anyone, and when he can find the time to muse on such abstract matters, will concede that this isn’t the Age he intended. Sometimes, he’ll say, he still awakes with a start and finds himself lost and dwarfed by his huge rooms and the extraordinary circumstances of his life. But the people still love him almost as much as they did on that day in January when he was liberated from his comfortable prison-house and borne through the streets of the Easterlies. The citizens were so happy to see him. Here, at last, was a symbol both of this new Age’s innocence, and yet also of the old.
Not going to sing down any more churches, are you?
they asked. Of course, George being George, he smiled and looked uncomfortable, just as he still would now if anyone had the courage to say such a thing to him. Compared to me, compared to Saul—compared, yes, even to Uppermaster Stropcock—his rise has easily been the most vertiginous. But then, he was the highest placed at the start. And marrying Sadie—well, they were already friends, they were at ease in each other’s company, and it was entirely necessary for the union of their reformed guilds. And Sadie was a respected figure herself after the fine show she had put up in defending Walcote House against what it was once again becoming acceptable to term as a
mob.

I even think they were happy as a couple. Only last shifterm, I stood with the greatgrandmaster at her grave near the stables where her beloved Starlight is also buried. What? Oh, yes, Niana, her unicorn made it back to Walcote House, although he was never fit to be ridden again. But Sadie’s greatest joy for the remaining years of her life was to ride. It was how she died. Tragically early, of course, but then George and I agreed as the perilinden trees hissed in the breeze that growing old gracefully would never have been one of her strengths. The private truth of their marriage, beyond the fact that they were genuinely dedicated to each other, is something across which he continues to draw a veil. I’m sure Sadie had lovers, new discoveries, but I’m also sure that none of them supplanted her feelings towards her husband, and towards Anna Winters.

Bald and red-faced, no longer the tall young man of twenty five years ago, the greatgrandmaster now somewhat resembles a more portly version of Greatmaster Porrett. But, inwardly, I think he remains the same Highermaster George. The pain and suffering of the disadvantaged still cause him grief. Above all, he still
hopes.
I often think that is why his people tolerate so much in this new Age, and why, despite that failed bomb attack of last winter, they still mostly love him. I’m not sure that I ever did
hope,
Niana, in the way that he did, but I think that he still trusts me enough to let me warn him that his revels will soon become more common knowledge than they already are. People have a clear vision of their greatgrandmaster, and it doesn’t extend to his being the ringmaster at male orgies.

But Blissenhawk may already be publishing this news. Oddly, seeing as he started his career as a guildsman and never really diverted from plying his printer’s trade, he remains truest to the rebellious spirit of the late last Age. Believe it or not, Niana, people now actually
collect
old editions of the
New Dawn,
smudged and browned though they are, and filled with my rambling, semi-literate rants. I’ve seen them laid in glass cases. People claim that they are invaluable historical documents, and fine investments, although, in truth, Blissenhawk’s latest publications are little different. I came across an edition recently, and found it both sexually and politically offensive. It’s banned, of course, but I’m sure he would have it no other way.

Saul, of us all, has led the wisest life. In the darkest days of the old Age’s last winter, he did the many things which were probably necessary. But, as the years progressed and the disputes between rival groups of citizens became re-entrenched in the monumentalities of wealth, he was able to withdraw. In his renewed courtship of Maud, he was as patient and determined as he had been in planning the Christmas Night Revolt. But I was still surprised when he announced that they really were moving to the country. I visited them often to begin with. I was guildsfather to their first child, who must now be of an age to have children of his own. We still exchange those cards which have now become the fashion at Christmas and Butterfly Day, ornamented with brief expressions of how we really must meet in the coming year. But I’m happy to know that he’s still with Maud, with their horses and their debts and their problems with the harvest and the arthritis which I believe is coming to affect his back and hands. He no longer draws, but then, who does find the time, in this Age, to do such things?

As for me, Niana, I suppose I’ve coped well enough with this New Age. I’m wealthy, as you see, although I find it easier these days to count my numberbeads than I do my blessings, or to get good service in a restaurant. Too often, I’m drawn back into the past. Anthony Passington, for example, still often visits me in my dreams. He glides along the corridor of an impossibly vast mansion to lay a hand on my shoulder, but he’s a dark wraith; he never speaks. When I awake, the emotion which most fills me is grey disappointment that I was never able to know him. After all, he did the decent thing when he realised that the illusion of his guild’s wealth was collapsing. Even back in his youth, when he came upon that chalcedony which Mistress Summerton had forged, he already understood that aether was running out. And how could he have known that the experiment he organised to reverse that process would go so badly? What would have been gained, if he had shouldered the blame? So he carried on living instead, and the engines slowly failed, and with their failure came the lie, which he must surely have known in his secret heart would eventually be his undoing.

So in a way I miss the old greatgrandmaster who hardly spoke more than a few brief words to me, and who never was the monster I wanted him to be. The true darkmaster never was as simple as a mere human being. I know that now, although I’m sure there was a little of him in Anthony Passington, just as there was in Grandmaster Harrat, and Edward Durry and in my mother and Mistress Summerton and perhaps even Anna—and most certainly in me.
He
still comes to me as well. I see my darkmaster in the reflections I catch mirrored at the edge of my failing sight in the shops along Oxford Road, and in the sunken mask which gazes back at me from my many windows in the long, electric night. And I see him in you as well, Niana, and I see him in the deeds of the guilds and in all the workings of this new Light Age. For the darkmaster was aether, and it was aether which conspired, through the chain of our lives, to remake itself and become fully powerful once again. A spell to make many spells. What, at the end of the day, could be more natural?

The dark-white wyreglow of aether stalks everywhere, Niana. I see it in the dazzle of noonday and I see it in the darkest corners of the night. It prowls my memories, and the shape it most often assumes is Mistress Summerton, and I love her and I hate her for all that she was and wasn’t, just as I must love and hate you for being and not being the same.

Dimly, the wind bites through me, although I find I cannot shiver now, not even when Niana lays an impossibly cool hand across my face. Shadows swirl. My sight amazes.