The Light Ages (6 page)

‘Come on, Robert. It wasn’t that bad, was it? At least you
saw
the dragon. Tomorrow, the day after, we’d never have got through the crowds.’

I shrugged, staring at the scars on the kitchen table. I didn’t know then how such brutes were created: that, in its way, it was a fine achievement for some beastmaster to have twisted the body of a cat or pig or dog or chicken so it grew to such an extent that its origins were almost unrecognisable. But I sensed that it represented an act of pollution—that it came from the very opposite of the fierce fires of aspiration from which, in the time and the place called Einfell of which Goldenwhite had sung, all such creatures of artless magic had once dwelt.

‘The world’s full of surprises.’ My mother leaned her hip against my chair, she rested her elbows on the table, her fingers tracing the greyish scar on the heel of her right hand. ‘It’s just that some of them aren’t … Quite the surprise you expect them to be ..

And the nights rolled on through the days of autumn when all the guildsmen of Bracebridge paraded with their drums and their fifes, their hats and their sashes, and the lesser guildhouses opened their doors so we children could marvel at the jewelled books and ornate reliquaries. And then the cold winds blew in over Coney Mound, and stripped the leaves off the birches, and plumed the clouds above Rainharrow. And I smiled to myself each night when my mother clambered, half-backwards, awkward as always, down the ladder through that trapdoor which led from my attic, her candle guttering and fading but the dreams, the hopes, the inexpressible words, still clinging to me. And I wriggled my toes deeper into the coat lining that her body had warmed, and pushed myself away from the stirrings and the murmurings of Coney Mound and the deeper pounding which always lay beneath it, counting off the months and shifterms and days until I was adrift with the moon and the stars, looking down over the smoking chimneys of all of Bracebridge and the night-time wyreglow of its settling pans.

From there, and the edges of sleep, slight at first as grass stirred by the wind, then gathering and shrill, the night express came sweeping through the valley. And I was there on the footplate with the steamaster, guiding his great engine as it swept through the meagre little station of our meagre little town. Bracebridge—a blur of allotments, wasteheaps, fields, yards, factories, houses then on into the hills, the wild barren hills with their strange lights and howlings and cool scents of peat and heather, pouring along the tracks with an aethereal glow. The train would glide beneath the boughs of forests, rush through Oxford and Slough and all the smokestack cities of the south, then clack on over great rivers and unnamed estuaries on huge arches; it would haul the reflected amber beads of its carriage windows past sandbanks and sailboats and rush-pricked marshes. It would bear me far away from Bracebridge, yet always closer to the edge of some deeper truth about my life which I always felt myself to be teetering on.

And I was sure that truth would be marvellous.

‘G
ET UP, ROBERT!’

I shifted, stiff and cold, from the uncomfortable position in which I’d been lying. I regathered the old coats that had pooled about me, then shuffled on my elbows across to my triangular attic window.

‘Come on!’ The clotheshorse rumbled in the kitchen. ‘It’s late morning!’

It was a day at the last edge of summer. For the first time that year, the lumpy glass of my window had frosted, was scrolled over with white patterns which pulsed and re-formed in my breath. I untangled my hands to touch, making circles across the pane. Swimming down below the birch trees, a distorted version of the town was clouded with gouts of smoke and steam.

‘We’re going out!’ My mother was at the foot of the stairs now. ‘You’ll miss breakfast!’

Banging around to show activity, I pulled on my trews, shirt and jumper. It occurred to me that, late though the hour clearly was, my mother might still expect me to go to Board School. Today, though, was clearly uncharted territory. I could tell that just from the sound of her voice.

I studied her warily across the kitchen table as I ate my breakfast. We had the house to ourselves, with Beth already doling out slates in her training as a teacher’s assistant at Harmanthorpe and Father at work at Mawdingly & Clawtson. She was wearing a dark blue skirt and a fresh white blouse beneath her apron. Her hair was pinned up differently, or perhaps just with greater care. She shifted and arranged things with even more than her usual air of someone whose mind was on other things. As she bustled about, I noticed that she’d grown so thin recently that the sides of her apron met around her back.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Out.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘You’ll see.’

I slid from the chair and went to visit the privy. The sky above the yard was blank grey and the air tasted coaly and dull. I studied the torn scraps of newspaper as I sat on the freezing seat, peeling them back sheet by sheet from the nail that impaled them to the wall. The ones I liked best were the bits of headlines. TRIAL. GLORY. TRAGEDY. I could pretend they were clues to what lay ahead in my own life.

Mother was waiting for me in the hall when I finally got back inside, already dressed in her coat and boots, umbrella dangled over one arm, a gingham-covered wicker basket hooked on the other. She let out a sigh as I fiddled with my laces, then snatched my hand and drew me quickly out into the street, closing the front door with a kick of her heel.

With the children at school, the men and women at work, Brickyard Row was almost empty. Thinning threads of mist pooled around the railings and hedges, forming a dim murk over the town through which a few whiter walls and bits of new roofing gleamed like dishes in a sink. A bald grey dray nosed its feedbag. An old woman sat out in her shawl on a front step, knitting. The dwarfish local chimneysweep whistled past, his familiar a tumbling sooty shadow. Further down the road, some lesser guildsmen were building new houses from the cheap single courses of brick that were commonly used along Coney Mound, making the signs and the whispers of their trade to bind the sloppy mortar.

Even in its better areas, Bracebridge was a resolutely unglamorous place. Prone to cold winters, short summers, gales and floods and droughts, the town had grown with the guilds. The grandmasters had found ways to make money out of the flow of the River Withy, then from coal and from steam and from iron, and from the precious aether which lay beneath Rainharrow’s damp and bony earth. They had re-employed the landless peasants to work in mills and factories, then changed the seven pagan-named days of old into the modern twelve-day shifterm with its full ten and a half days of labour and its little time of rest. Still, in Bracebridge they also built a new town clock, several inns, which they named after themselves and drew a healthy profit, and the large and ugly church of St Wilfred’s from which the faithful emerged on Noshiftday beaming from the visions of the hymnal wine, and which the rest of us attended with irregularity and a dim sense of foreboding.

All of these sights I witnessed on that Fourshiftday morning as my mother gripped my hand and we hurried down into the town. For all my dreamy journeys speeding south on the footplates of those night trains, the purposeful bustle of Bracebridge High Street was still a source of fascination to me. The air smelled of warm bread, dung, cabbages, mud.

Handcarts, carriages, wagons, steamwagons, horses, drays and endless pedestrians battled for space over the cobbles. There was a bigger dropping-whitened statue of the Grandmaster of Painswick, his raised right knee polished from the touch of many hands which still sought his blessing. And here, for those who could afford it, were more reliable means of alleviating the pains of existence. On cushioned display in a shop window reclined the speckled painstones I’d sometimes glimpsed rich and elderly guildmistresses clutching in their arthritic fingers. Permanent bliss (as I then imagined it) from nothing more than an egg of aether-treated granite, and chocolates next door, decorated with feathers like the wild natives of Thule. I’d have pulled my mother’s hand to slow her down on any more ordinary day, but the purposeful set of her mouth made me simply absorb what I could, stumbling and wondering as Rainharrow gazed down on us. Here, where the streets climbed up towards hightown, were the houses of the better guilds, signed like inns with their coats of arms and set behind spiked and glossy black railings. Dragged into their shadows, I looked up just as one of the polished doors swung open and a large man with mutton-chop whiskers, ordinary enough but for the exceptionally crisp cut of his brown suit, stepped out. My mother glanced up at him just as he looked down, and it seemed to me that a twinge of recognition passed between them.

We came to the bottom of the town, with its acreages of yard and factory. Even as the sun came out, the air thickened with tarry smoke and the dim, pushing sense of the subterranean nearness of the aether engines. We passed warehouses and an open yard where the pitbeasts were kept. Mother rummaged some coal from a nearby heap and pushed it through the bars. The scarred mole-like brutes lifted themselves on their rusty paddles, snuffling their snouts to take the black nuts with surprising delicacy, the dull heat of their breath like the warmth of an oven.

We approached the railway station, where the telegraph pylons clambered across embankments. The lines were busy today, glowing wyreblack against the brightening sky. Licking the coal dust from her fingers, my mother studied a timetable she took from her coat pocket, then, seeming to reach no particular conclusion, bustled me into a waiting room with dark wood panels and long lines of patient, empty benches, and an arched window giving a glimpse of a room filled with brightness and bustle. She rapped on the window with the handle of her umbrella. Standing level with the counter, I gazed up at the marvellously profuse nose-hairs of a master from the Railworkers’ Guild who, after much consulting of pages, issued us with two thick rectangles of notched card which smelled of new ink and smudged as I touched them; they seemed like the very essence of far-away, even if I’d gathered that we were only taking a local train to some barely-heard-of station.

We clanged across scrolled iron walkways. Bracebridge station was surprisingly grand, speaking of ambitions which the town itself had never quite fulfilled despite its profusion of aether. We sat waiting on a bench on the far platform whilst a few engines fussed in the goods yard. The sun grew brighter. The pigeons cooed. The settling pans, just beyond the first line of rooftops, glowed darkly at the edge of the sky. The stark rails shone empty. Mother rapped the tip of her umbrella on the rough flagstones. Tip
tap.
Tip
tap.

‘Where are we going, anyway?’

‘You’ll see.’

The wires eventually hissed and the signals nodded as our train arrived, three low wooden carriages clacking by until the engine at the rear lay before us. It was plated red, but small and rusty and elderly, its boiler hissing and straining, leeching a salty rime of engine ice, the crystalline growth which aether exudes as its power is exhausted. It looked much nearer the scrapyard than the factory—and nothing like the sleek southbound expresses of my night-time visions. Porters hauled sacks and trolleys. The engine hiccupped and shuddered. We climbed aboard, settling on the barely padded bench of an otherwise empty carriage. I gave an inward shiver as the whistle screamed and the station began to slide away in grunts of steam. I’d have been happy for this journey to continue forever, to watch Bracebridge vanish as the thorny hedges swept by, dream-like, beyond the rippled glass, as the land rose and my mother stared out whilst I imagined increasingly complex versions of a tale in which she and I were fleeing some implacable foe and leaving Bracebridge for good.

The fields grew sparser. The backs of the bigger hills reared up, topped with versions of Rainharrow’s stone crown. Scarside, then Fareden and Hallowfell. It seemed as if our journey was just beginning—but then the track fanned off along a single line and the train slowed as the view from our window was blocked by a rusty sign: TATTON HALT.

A cold wind whipped around my legs as we stood on the empty platform and the train huffed on up the valley. Thin clouds hurried over the hills. The only evidence of humanity was the whispering line of the single telegraph that strode with the rails into the distance and the scarred remains of an old quarry.

Our feet crunched along a stone track leading east. Mother walked quickly, a brisk black figure swinging her basket and umbrella whilst I stumbled behind, unused to this big landscape where the hills barely changed their aspect. And something was different, something wasn’t right. Even the ground itself seemed … As the grass bowed and the path became more sheltered, narrowing into a gully, the realisation that we had left the pounding of the aether engines grew within me. Here, amid huge boulders and oak and holly, the wind boomed with a distant roar and the air became warmer as green and gold branches laced overhead. It gave off an implacable sense of age and clarity—and a strange, engine-less peace. Orange, red and gold berries glittered in the bushes. We came to a clearing where willows stooped beside a river and my mother flapped out the gingham towel as we settled on the greensward to eat. I unwrapped egg sandwiches from their greaseproof parcels and breathed in their homely smell, which is of farts and kitchens, then took out the angel cakes that lay flattened in the bottom of the basket like ruined oysters, vanilla cream oozing from their sides. The river flashed. My mother watched as I ate.

We walked on beside the bank. Around a bend, still following the path that had defined our way, we came across a mossy-bricked wall. It was clearly ancient and the trees had grown around it, cloaking its lower courses with crackling drifts of leaves. There was oak and birch. There were dense masses of holly. There were late dandelions, tansy and browning nettles and wild protrusions of bramble tipped with insect-eyed blackberries. The forest shade deepened as we followed the wall’s curve towards a gatehouse, twisting and ivied, and an open wrought-iron gate. The wild greensward beyond was pooled by the shadows of trees. We both hesitated. Stepping through into the grounds, there was a sense of trespass. I looked up at my mother, but her mouth was set.