The Light Ages

by Ian R. MacLeod

  ‘I’ll tell you more one day,’ she said as we climbed the brick-paved steps beside the deserted market. ‘But I, too, will have to leave Redhouse and Bracebridge soon. And you must live your own life. If you do that, perhaps our paths will cross …’

  I watched Mistress Summerton pick her way through the market litter. She glanced back beside a shop’s lit frontage and raised her hand in a final wave, then turned up a side street and dwindled into a waft of shadow. The wind was still rising, tearing at the clouds as I headed back towards Coney Mound. Slowing my steps, I gazed up at the sky. For once, even the face on the moon seemed to be smiling, but the red star in the west had vanished.

  XII

  MY LIFE, IN THE DAYS, shifts, seasons, years that followed, remained steadfastly unremarkable. Father returned to his work on East Floor at Mawdingly & Clawtson, and to his drinking, whilst Beth managed to beg an assistant’s job at a school at Harmanthorpe despite twice failing her exams. I even think that I went more regularly to Board School again myself, and perhaps brutalised my schoolmates less, although I have little recollection of learning anything, or of friendships made. Life, seemingly, became normal again, although our neighbours on either side left Brickyard Row, and Father never slept in the front bedroom again, although the dragonlice vanished from its walls. He kept to his chair instead, his place before the kitchen range, growling at anything or anyone who obstructed his petty whims as his hair greyed and he became increasingly disgusting in his ways. The bedroom remained cold and empty, its door swollen permanently ajar on its rusted hinges, the wrecked wardrobe still heaped in the corner.

  Five years passed in this way, with little of incident to record other than the changes that came upon my body as it began to grow towards manhood and strain my hand-me-down clothes. Looking at myself, fingering the down on my belly and my chin, I sometimes remembered the distant chime of Annalise’s words in the gardens of Redhouse, and felt amused, and disappointed, at the loss of something I could never quite place. But I was resolute in my forgetting. My pleasures came in those days from wandering the top of Rainharrow, tramping heedlessly and alone over the bracken until I was exhausted, or out in the backyard chopping firewood on winter evenings. I sometimes toyed with the idea of following the tracks towards Tatton Halt. But my footsteps always began to slow as I neared the edge of Bracebridge. All below me lay the grey and smoking factories, and the pounding which filled my blood. I’d had enough of broken dreams, and I knew in my heart that Redhouse would be empty.

  I was still a physical lad, filled with angry energy, unexpressed disappointments. Yet also at that time, long after I should have been concentrating on guild exams, or smoking on street corners and flirting with the girls, I was still often a knight from the Age of Kings, riding out in my imaginings on a fine mount of silver-white into unspoilt lands which went on forever. I was a lonely figure even in that distant landscape, who shunned the courtly dances in favour of paths in deep woods, craggy mountains. There, hanging back in a stir of leaves or a drift of moonlight, I would glimpse the one other being who still mattered to me. My mother, a presence always receding yet never quite gone. Once, on a whim which wouldn’t have lasted if I’d allowed myself time to think about it, I took the steam charabanc to Flinton. All the way, jolted and sore, I kept telling myself that the place would be nothing, just some cheap neighbouring town famed only for its ugliness and its coal production. Still, as I climbed down and saw its turning wheels and slagheaps, I still felt a cold wash of disappointment. This wasn’t Einfell.

  Other summers passed, and other winters. I heard, in the way that you pick up these tales as you grow older, that there had once been a Halfshiftday back in the seventies of this Age when the unthinkable had occurred and the aether engines of Bracebridge had stopped pounding. Several buildings had collapsed in the aftershock, but they had long been rebuilt. The occasion already seemed half-mythical. Not that I cared. Not that I wanted to know. There was something about this whole town, even in its rumours and dreams, which disgusted me, and although the assumption must surely have remained that I would become a toolmaker, my father was slow to take me again to Mawdingly & Clawtson. Understandably, he had become disillusioned with the scant mysteries of his lesser guild. Still the Fiveshiftday came when the task could no longer be avoided, although we both seemed to trail behind each other as we headed towards the back gates of East Floor. It was a hot summer morning. The air tasted of dust and ash and metal even before the siren blew and the machines started turning. There was no chance now of my bumping into poor Grandmaster Harrat, but I soon grew bored standing beside my father, and found myself looking down the smoking, sun-streamed aisles in the expectation that I would soon have to renew my acquaintance with the vile Stropcock. But the uppermaster who arrived was a fatter creature named Chadderton, who was amiable in the unconvincing way of people who want to be liked. Instead of that upper office with the brassy haft, Chadderton took me to the deserted works canteen and picked at his nails and flicked through timesheets. Stropcock had gone, it seemed. Not merely from East Floor, but from Mawdingly & Clawtson and Bracebridge.

  Later, I was shown around the other floors and levels and depots in the company of another lad from my school who suffered from a permanent nose-drip. The paintshop seemed smaller. The girls looked more like the pouting and spotty creatures other lads of my age were flirting with than the princesses of my childhood imaginings. Everywhere else was incomprehensibly busy and noisy. I was left briefly alone in a yard after my soon to be colleague had been sent off, his dewdrop dangling, and amid much suppressed hilarity, to find a left-handed screwdriver. I took slow breaths in the hot beating sunlight, trying hard not to believe in the life into which I seemed to be irresistibly falling. But this particular yard was familiar, and when I turned and saw a long whitewashed wall at its far end, I understood why. It had changed slightly since my vision. The old iron gate now had a seamlessly welded chain to complement the heavy padlock. A strange and empty surprise dulled and then quickened my heartbeat as I walked up to it. The arch inside had been blocked in and the brickwork was cruder and newer than the rest of the wall, oozing mortar like filling from a sponge. I strained to squeeze my hand between the bars of the gate to touch it, but it was set an inch further back than I could reach. Filled suddenly with a sense of someone watching, I turned around, rubbing my grazed knuckles. But there was nothing but blind black windows, broken gutters, guild graffiti, peeling paint. SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM. The ground shuddered beneath me. Part of me wanted something else to happen, but I was mostly relieved when the dew-drop swinging lad returned red-faced and empty-handed from the toolroom stores.

  In the shifterms which followed, I began to frequent the iron bridge on the turn of Withybrook Road which spanned the main railway line heading south out of Bracebridge, to climb down across the trembling cables and buttresses until there was nothing but roaring, expectant air beneath, and wait, and wait. Balanced thus as the trains swept by, I already felt as if each clattering wagon was pulling me away. I knew that I would eventually jump, and I watched myself day by day as I went about my life with an outsider’s curiosity, wondering when the precise moment would come when I made that final leap, and where that leap would take me.

  It finally happened on a spring Twoshiftday night in late March the year 90, when the rails shone clear under the moonless stars, glinting and joining like a river. I’d been sitting with my feet dangling over the parapet, dressed as I was always dressed in my ragged hand-me-down clothes, scarcely a boy now, or even a youth, but nearly a man—whatever that meant. I had brought nothing with me, although it seemed now that I’d always known that that was how it would have to be. The air was warm and the town behind me had a steady, purposeful glow, stacking up roof on roof from Coney Mound to the edgy, shifting gloom of Rainharrow. Placing my hand on the oiled and belted stanchions, engraved, beneath their filth, with the guilded charms, I could feel the faint tremor which always came through this thinly made str
ucture in the quiet moments between trains.

  If anything, Bracebridge looked better to me than it had in years as I gazed back at it. The lights, the smoke, the chimneys; all suddenly twined together and became something else, something more, a ghost-vision, lost and blazing in the starlight. Perhaps it was that which finally drove me on as I heard the rumble of a coming train; the sense that I could stay here forever in this limbo of waiting, dreaming of lost lands, touching old stones, visiting old places. Soon, the roar of the engine filled the air as the waiting tracks shone clear. The train swept below, the hot glow of its furnace and the blurring heat of smoke followed by the first of many open aether trucks. The straw heaped around the caskets looked soft as fleece and I gauged the timeless moment of my leap from the rocking beat of the wheels against the tracks, by the pulse of my breath, and for the last time, before I released my hold and let the air take me, by the rhythm that pervaded all of Bracebridge.

  SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM.

  Then I was flying.

  PART THREE

  ROBBIE

  I

  I LAY LOOKING UP as the stars slipped through the trees, urging the train to carry me south. The wheels clanged. The truck creaked and rocked. Occasional scraps of steam blew over from the distant engine. The straw that prickled my neck was laden with a drowsy, summery smell. Within its bolts and scrolled iron bands, the rough wooden box of the aether casket looked shockingly cheap. But, staring up at it in the grey darkness, spread-eagled in the straw with my head tilted back, I fell asleep as easily as I had in years.

  The air was gauzily damp when I awoke. I climbed to the edge of the truck and peered over the side at a landscape tiered with mist, dabbed with smudges of cattle. Sometimes, we passed stations, but the signs flashed by too quickly for me to read. I was already somewhere, I supposed, consulting the vague map I kept in my head, in the Midlands. The hills were lower here; shallow rises that folded into each other like green limbs. The houses, from what I could make out of the few I saw, were squatter than those I was used to, the bricks of their walls a brighter red which seeped into the mist. Some had thatched roofs pulled down over their windows. Even the trees were different, with huge oaks quite unlike the stunted versions around Bracebridge and many other bushes, some already in flower, which I couldn’t name. None of this was quite familiar, yet neither was it entirely strange, and I loved each bridge and fence and puddle for not being Bracebridge.

  In places on my long journey, viaducts cast breathtaking shadows from spiderwebs of iron, and the train clattered through tunnels where the swooping telegraphs shone out through noise and smoke. As the sun climbed and the rattle of points became more frequent, we entered an area of small towns. People were about now, in the fields and on the roads, in carts and gigs and wagons. I studied the aether casket more closely, the rough wood and the metal bands and fixings. I pressed my ears against it in the vague hope that I might hear some sound other than the onward rush of the rails. The casket only stood about a yard and a half high, and was about the same in depth and width. An adult man could have spanned it with his hands—probably even picked it up, for I had a dim recollection of hearing that aether itself has no weight. But I had no idea why each of the caskets had to be wadded in straw and laid in long separate trucks when it was plain that, physically, they could easily have been piled together. The greyish lumps attached to the hooped joins binding the sides of the casket, which I had imagined in the earlier darkness to be padlocks, were in fact seals made of clay. Rough handfuls had been lumped around the join, then stamped. The swirls and figures reminded me of the tiny wax ones that had been strung around Grandmaster Harrat’s aether vials. Absently, I began breaking off flakes of clay with my fingernails until a bleak, sudden shock roared through me from the power of its protective spell and I cowered, feeling my bladder loosen as urine soaked my trousers. Huddled shivering in the far corner of the truck, my hands clasped around my knees, I gazed at the casket as the last of the mist cleared.

  The day passed and my long journey passed with it. The landscape shifted into broader, flatter planes where the fields flashed with furrows. The scent of the air grew more luxuriant. There were huge orchards of mossy-leafed waterapple trees. Their starkly uptilted boughs, still bereft of their tumescing burdens, looked like black avenues of hafts as the sun fell through them. Tall, odd structures began to appear, with huge, sail-like arms turning against the afternoon sky. Every one was set on a raised hillock, and beside these lay sluices and pools, some of which flared with the afternoon’s milky brightness whilst others cast pools of shadow like flurries of smoke. Unmistakably, these were aether settling pans, and the towers beside them could only be windmills, drawing aether from the menhirs on which they perched.

  The rhythm of the train grew less regular as the rails fanned out. Evening was closing in, and the scents in the air were once again changing. Other trains clacked by, the black heads of their engines flashing over me. What was to happen when this train finally stopped? What excuse could I give when I was discovered? But the trucks lurched on, and the sky darkened; sooty blackness closing over a sky of no stars, no moon. I peered out from the truck again. All I glimpsed at first were walls, roofs, houses—scraps of a scene so dim and bleak that I almost feared that the journey had twisted in on itself and brought me back to Bracebridge. But further off, blazing at the sky’s black edges, were haloes of impossible light. This, surely, had to be London. Even a bumpkin like me knew that there was no other city in all England of such challenging size, beauty, ugliness. The trucks jostled, then stopped entirely in one cataclysmic jerk. We had stopped amid a sea of gaslit rails. I ducked down when I heard the crunch of boots.

  ‘… sure I felt something back down the trucks a few hours back. I still think we should …’ The boots paused. I heard the pop of lips as the man spat.

  ‘Can’t check every fuckin’ one, can we?’ Another, shriller, voice.

  They were passing right beside my truck now. I could smell sweat, tobacco.

  ‘Could always let the fellas out, couldn’t we? Let them buggers have a sniff ..

  I risked looking out as the crunch of their boots faded down the track. The stoker was long and thin, the steamaster short and fat. The track curved slightly inwards, and I could watch their progress towards the covered wagon at the train’s far end. Then, I heard a muffled baying, followed by the slide and boom of wagon doors. I scrambled through the straw to the truck’s far side and half jumped, half fell, to the track, letting the impetus carry me on across the rails to the downward slope of an embankment, submitting to the will of gravity until I was scrambling through Age-old refuse and searing patches of cuckoo-nettle towards a fence as the gruff howl-bark of the released balehounds grew louder behind me. The beasts were almost at my heels as my fingers closed on rusty chains and I began to scramble up. Then I was over, and falling, until the ground hit me, and once again I was running.

  The dark land rose and fell by small, difficult increments, dips transforming themselves into rises, hollows tumbling me down into mud. Slowly I became aware of lights coating the blackness ahead. The filthy ground grew firmer, whilst the air, which had been so bad at times that I could scarcely breathe, became fogged and smoky. I had entered an area of buildings of a sort, and alleys. It was a steepening maze, but by instinct, sick of the mud, still fearing the balehounds and dazed and sore from the burn of the cuckoo-nettles, I took ways that led up. Most of Bracebridge, even its poorest parts, was built of brick, but many of these buildings were of wood and wattle and daub-reinforced and remade and propped up as they started to leak and sag and tumble. The windows mainly consisted of shutters or waxed paper and the frontages leaned over each other, pressing their brows together as if in senile thought. There was an overwhelming sense of closed-in rot and damp and age.

  The people were different, too—what little I saw of them. Faces floated at windows. Voices called. I felt that I was being watched, followed, that a space was constantly opening b
efore and behind me as I stumbled up steps and waded the stinking rills of open drains. I flapped through curtains of wet washing. Once, I was sure, hands clamped on my arms. There was wild laughter. But they slipped from me as I began running again.

  I finally found myself hunched and breathless in a sort of square. The buildings which framed it were uneven, and gleamed with pinpoints of light. From them, fizzing through the night, mingling and rising, came sounds and smells of life; of voices shouting and buckets banging, of burnt fat and fried fish and bad drains. People lived here, just as they lived everywhere. Pricked by loneliness, I wandered across to where an old pump dripped on the paving. I worked the handle, and buried my face and hands in the gouts of strange-tasting water. Drenched and dizzy, I looked again at this square, and these walls ridged like broken teeth with their pale lights ebbing and flowing. Then a human-seeming shadow came towards me and rasped the paving with a boot. Something struck my shoulder. I gave a yelp. The shadow shifted. Something else hit my back. Something sharp gashed the side of my face.

  ‘Look …’ I croaked, spreading my arms as the massive buildings began an ancient, lumbering dance around me. ‘I’m new here. Is this London? I don’t know what—’

  A bigger stone struck me.

  ‘I was just trying to—’