The Light Ages Page 2

  Kindly forget your preconceptions, grandmaster, she responds, although her lips are barely moving. We’re not really trolls, you know—or at least we’re not monsters.

  I twist myself on the springs of this couch to demonstrate to her that my pockets are empty. But as I do so my fingers close on something chilly. Remembering, lifting it out, I watch it flower, light as fog, on my palm. The cheaply magicked promissory note that that poor girl gave me. The words and the seals sparking, fading.

  You see, grandmaster?

  Niana blurs into a windless grey gale as she snatches it from me. Then she floats off, holding it to her nose as if it really was a flower, inhaling as I suppose we have all done at some time or another to discover if there really is a smell of wealth, a scent of power, a perfume of money. An odour which is in fact nothing but sweat, smoke, the dullness of liquor; the same staleness you’ll find lingering on your clothes after attending a ball at the grandest of mansions.

  Niana absorbs whatever is left of the paper flower’s fading substance. And it’s growing duller in here now; the afternoon is fading, and so is Niana. The brass bowl of aether strengthens in response, throwing out more of its characteristic wyrelight as she wafts amid hanging tins and bottles and curtains. But I fear that this is still all just a refinement of whatever joke that she’s playing, and worry, as I notice that the immodest rents and tears across that ancient wedding dress give glimpses of black nothing, that she’ll simply keep me waiting here forever.

  ‘I know, grandmaster, that a wide and empty space seems to stretch between us. But it’s like the walk you undertook this afternoon through the Easterlies. If you follow the wrong or right roads, it’s never so very far to get to the place you dream of. In fact, who truly knows where the boundary ends, or where it begins? But you’ve seen the ordinary people, grandmaster, that so many others of your kind choose to ignore. After all, you were once one of them. The marts in the Easterlies. You know how dim they too can become even though their flesh remains unchanged …’ She chuckles. My skull rings with the sound. And if you knew how you looked now, grandmaster, in that night cloak, in those night boots, with hollows for eyes, with your sagging jaw and the night odours of age and death that even now are starting to cling to you …

  Barely any light flows now through the clouded porthole. But for the sea-whisper of Niana’s voice, I could almost be alone. Even that old wedding dress has slipped into the spinning shadows. A waft of mist, Niana bends to inspect the contents one of her teachests. As she lifts out clattering spears of old curtain rod, clots of rag and swarf, I try to keep in check that rising sense of excitement that always comes over me at these moments.

  ‘It was here, I’m sure,’ she mutters prosaically.

  I give an involuntary sigh. It’s odd, but part of me suddenly wishes to be gone from here now, to hurry back up through the streets to my fine house on Linden Avenue, my fine grandmaster’s life—but the sense remains dim, and it fades entirely as Niana drifts closer to me now, glinting, changing. She’s all the creatures and wonders I dare or dare not imagine, and her smile uptilts. The fact is, I’d much rather be here-waiting for a true moment of exchange.

  ‘Tell me, Niana, don’t you miss—’

  —The smell of fresh grass in spring, grandmaster. The jewelled feel of frost at Christmas. Beetles bright as brooches. Clouds changing and unchanging. Running down a hill when you can’t stop from laughing. But I’m glad for my cup of stars, grandmaster. And I’m glad that you come here-you and your sort, even if I pity you all for your small requests, your little desires. Why, after everything else you guildsmen have to go through, should you want to be taunted by trolls, changelings, half-real hags, vampires, Methuselah mermaids?

  ‘It isn’t like that. I don’t want—’

  What do you want, grandmaster?

  ‘To know—’

  But I’ve given you my gift, grandmaster, by taking what you offered. I’ve done everything you asked of me. Now it’s your turn. To take what I have, you must also give as well.

  All in all, a typically ridiculous changeling bargain. Here I sit, on this empty bridge above the speeding river as Niana shapes the air with symbols no guildsman would ever recognise. They billow silver about me. They blossom in a summer storm. And I can feel the iron around me straining and growing, this ruined bridge returning to the life it never attained in the failing last Age, forming and striding huge across the water as the whole city changes and the wastetips recede. And with it gathers the thrilling hum of an approaching engine. It comes clattering over the girders and beams, trailing clouds, sparks, and pounding, pounding.

  The deep holes of Niana’s eyes are upon my face as she crouches before me. She blinks once, twice. She smiles.

  So tell me, grandmaster. Her fingers curl around me like smoke. Tell me just how it was that you became human …

  PART TWO

  ROBERT BORROWS

  I

  IT WAS THE BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT of my life. At the ripe age of eight, and on a typically freezing October Fiveshiftday, all of my dreams had been dashed from me. Afterwards, I stood outside the Board School railings and watched my classmates exchange shrill barks of relief and laughter amid the smoke and fog. For all of us, today had been a special day, our Day of Testing, and we all had the Mark, the stigmata—puffy on our wrists, blistered and bleeding like a cigarette burn—to prove it.

  A steam tractor blared its whistle and lumbered past, the weight of its wheels wheezing the cobbles, the steamaster’s face a black mask. Worrying mothers blustered through the throng, bleating out the names of their offspring. Said you were a silly to worry, didn’t I? But my mother wasn’t there-and I was glad now that she wasn’t coming, because I’d avoided the embarrassment of having my head kissed and my face spit-cleaned, all for the sake of something we’d been endlessly told was nothing, normal, ordinary. The other mothers soon drew into gossip or headed back to their laundry and their children swirled into hostile clusters as they remembered the guilds and loyalties of fathers. Elbows dug, shoves and glances were exchanged. Knowing that I would soon be swept into this myself, I turned around the railings and climbed the spoil heap at the back of the school, from where there would have been a fine view down across the graveyard and the valley if today’s fog hadn’t obscured it.

  I rolled up my left sleeve. There it was. The scar you saw on everyone once they had reached my age, although it still had the fresh look of outrage. It was the wound which lasted a lifetime and provided ineradicable proof of my undimmed humanity. The Mark of the Elder was God’s ultimate blessing, if Father Francis was to be believed. The shocked rings of inflamed skin around its edges still glittered with tiny crystals of engine ice. Of course, it would never fully heal. That was the point. There would always be a faintly glowing scab there which I could pick at and study in the dark, which I supposed would be consolation of sorts.

  And I’d been looking forward to the arrival of the trollman, even though he was a harbinger of pain. First, there were the rumours of his coming. Then the police who appeared with their lists of names on leather clipboards, and the sound of their boots in our alleys, and the bang of their nightsticks on our doors. All of this, and the rumours. Deformed offspring hidden in dungeons and attics; Brownheath shepherds of sixty or more who’d somehow managed to avoid this process for their whole lives. And trolls, changelings—so many you’d expect to find them teeming around every street corner instead of lingering at the edges of your dreams. Of course, these stories came as regularly as the trollman himself, but I wasn’t to know that then.

  His name, disappointingly, was Tatlow—and a plain Master at that, from something which was technically known as the Gatherers’ Guild. He must have travelled most of Brownheath to earn his strange living with his carpetbag and his small mahogany case of implements, flashing his official pass before settling down each night in the room of a different inn. Next morning, he’d be woken by the clatter of wagons, and would run his finger alo
ng those painstakingly acquired lists to appraise the day’s work, until, as I envisioned it, his stumpy digit would settle on my own name; Robert Borrows …

  ‘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 sc
enes 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.

  II

  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.