The Light Ages (11 page)

‘I’m sorry ..

‘No, no, no, Robert! I’m so very pleased that you took the trouble to look in. I really enjoyed our little chat that—when
was
it?—that morning not so long ago. Time flies …’ He steered me towards a seashell-shaped sofa. From here, I could see beyond the large doorway through which he had come into an even bigger room where many faces, thin and fat, old and young, as varied and animated as a crowd scene in a painting, were lined before a landscape of silver salvers, cut glass decanters, half-ruined arrangements of confections and flowers. One of them, I was sure before he sat back and was lost in the melee, bore the pointed, sour and unmistakable visage of Uppermaster Stropcock.

‘It’s a tradition that we meet up here on feastday afternoons. Guild members and a few chosen friends, although this year, the weather being what it is, there are some empty spaces. Still .. Grandmaster Harrat rubbed his hands. The talk in the next room door clattered like rain. ‘How are things at home, Robert?’

I stared blankly at him, perched on this slippery silk sofa. After today’s wanderings, this place was simply too much for me. But Grandmaster Harrat’s eyebrows were still half raised in expectation of some answer to his seemingly simple question. His dewy cheeks were almost trembling.
Things at home …
What was I supposed to say—that my mother was becoming a changeling? A bubble of dark anguish began to form, growing as this previously unthought idea threatened to engulf me. I fought it down. My eyes stayed dry. I kept his gaze until he looked away.

‘Everything’s fine,’ I said.

‘I’m pleased to hear it, Robert. And, tell you what, you’re a bright lad and I truly admire your pluck for coming here. This of all days, as well. I’d like us to meet again when I have more time. I only live on Ulmester Street. It’s really just around the corner.’ He stood up and rummaged in his pockets. ‘Here’s my card …’

I took the soft wedge. The ink didn’t smudge. It was ornamented with the signs of his guild.

‘Perhaps next shifterm—Halfshiftday afternoon. How does that sound? You and I could get to know each other—it could be our secret.’

For want of anything else to do or say, I nodded.

‘And before you go, Robert.
Before you
go …’ Grandmaster Harrat puffed out his cheeks. He stood up and walked over to a tall, flower-entwined jar painted with Cathay dragons, lifted its lid and took something round from its interior. ‘Have this. It’s nothing! Just chocolate. And I’ll see you, yes? Just as we’ve said. Just as arranged … ?’

The butler re-emerged and I was shown from the guildhouse with a heavy sphere in one hand and Grandmaster Harrat’s card in the other. I’d peeled back the gold foil and began to eat the chocolate inside before I realised that it had been marked with coastlines, rivers, mountains. But, by then, I was too hungry to care. I’d eaten the whole world and felt light-headed and sated by the time I reached Brickyard Row. Beside all the other houses, ours looked dark and empty. I kicked my way down the alley and went in though the back door, working it open with the usual push and pull. The lamp was hooded and the loose tiles clattered beneath my feet. The only light in the kitchen came from the glow of the stove. Father was half asleep beside a long row of beer bottles.

‘Where the bloody hell have you been all this time?’

‘Just out. Nowhere.’

‘Talking like that! Don’t you dare …’ But he was too tired and drunk to be bothered to leave the warmth of his chair. I dragged off my boots and went upstairs. The night thickened as I passed my mother’s room. I could hear her breathing—
Ahhh, ahh;
a rhythmic sound like a perpetual surprise—and I could sense her listening even though she hadn’t called out my name. My stomach tensed as, instead of shooting past on my way to bed as I usually did, I found myself pushing back the wheezing door.

‘Where have you been? I heard shouting …’

‘Just out wandering.’

‘You smell of chocolate.’

The golden wrapper still crackled in my pocket. ‘Something I found.’

I stood there, looking down the length of the bed. Despite the stillness of the night, the fire was burning poorly in the grate as if the wind was against it, filling the room with a sooty haze. Everything was too wide, too dark, and the air stank of chamberpots, coalsmoke, rosewater. But she’d made an effort to look her best, with clean sheets folded around her and the pillows stacked behind.

‘I’m sorry about lunch, Robert. That I went on so—’

‘You shouldn’t—’

‘I just wanted today to be special. I know things have been hard for us lately. Disappointing.’

‘Really. It’s all right.’

‘And you smell of warm rooms, too, Robert.’ Her nostrils fluttered. ‘And fine food, fruit, firelight, good company … It’s almost like summer. Come here.’

I walked slowly around the bed, fighting a sense of panic.

‘You don’t look in on me as often as you used to ..

Her pale arms snaked out and I felt the claws of her fingers caressing the back of my head. Their pressure was irresistible. I bowed down, and veils of filthy smoke seemed to fall around me. ‘You’re a stranger now, Robert.’ Her voice hollowed to something less than a whisper as she drew me in.
Don’t let it end this way …
She stank of sweat-sour blankets, unwashed hair—and she was hot, hot.

Letting go, beckoning me to sit down on the mattress, she asked me about what she was starting to call
life downstairs:
how Father was managing; if I thought Beth was coping as well as she claimed. The conversation, as we attempted to reassure each other and I stared at the pulse of the big vein which now protruded from her temple instead of meeting her changed eyes, was plain and predictable. I could have filled in her words before she said them. Mother didn’t need my replies.

I picked at the sheet’s loose stitching. Once-good material, probably a wedding gift, it was almost worn through from all the times she had washed it in the zinc tub. And Mother’s fingers, I saw now, looking helplessly down at them, were smudged black. I glanced over at the fire, at the scuttle Beth had filled with the cheap, gritty coal we made do with here on Coney Mound. A few lumps had fallen across the hearth, whilst others lay flaked and scattered on the rag mat beside the bed. I heard a scratching movement in the walls, in the corner, and glanced over, expecting a rat, or mice. But the thing which vanished into the crack beneath the wainscot was many-legged. Fattened on the madness of aether beyond the size of any ordinary insect, it had a long, glossy back: a dragonlouse.

‘That day …’ I heard myself begin.

‘What day?’ My mother raised the back of her hand to rub some imagined smudge from her face. ‘You mean that Midsummer? Remember when it was so hot and we went down early to a fair by the rivermeads to see that poor old dragon. You were so—’

‘The day this year when we went on the
train,
Mother! I saw a man coming out of one of the guildhouses on that Fourshiftday. You looked up and … And I met him when I was down at Mawdingly & Clawtson that Halfshiftday. His name’s Grandmaster Harrat and he’s in one of the great guilds. He keeps … Well, he asked me how you were. He seems to know you.’

My mother closed her eyes for a long moment before finally shaking her head. ‘No, Robert. I have no idea who you mean.’

The fire spat a few angry sparks. Smoke drifted. My eyes began to sting.

‘But couldn’t we … ?’

‘Couldn’t we
what,
Robert?’ She sounded distant and angry, less than ever like the person I thought I knew. ‘Get the trollman to come and take me off to that ghastly asylum? Sell me as a living specimen to some guild?’

‘Whatever it was,’ I said, ‘whatever happened, it must be down to that place. Down to Mawdingly & Clawtson. They should be made to pay. Or you could escape with Mistress Summerton and live with her and that Annalise girl. It doesn’t have to be like this, does it? You could be …’

She sighed. I could tell that this was weary ground, long gone over, made stony and arid. ‘And what about your father’s job, Robert—the way he is, if we start kicking and complaining, don’t you think they’ll just take any excuse to be rid of him? Him without work and me stuck up here and Beth tied, and you too young, quite frankly, Robert, to do anything other than draw stupid conclusions. How do you think
that
would be? Where do you think that that would leave us? I wish I’d never ever taken you to see Annalise and Missy at Redhouse.’

I shrugged, hurt by her sudden anger.

‘Things can’t be changed,’ she said. ‘Everything is as it is. I’m sorry, Robert. I’m just like you. We all are. We all wish it was otherwise. And I wish I’d never seen that damn shackle and that stone … But, please, for me, leave it alone.’ There was still a rasp in her voice even as she attempted to make it softer. It was as if the foulness of this air had got into her. ‘And it’s
so strange
here now. I hate myself. I hate this room. Just lying here on this mattress, in this bed. So I know how you feel about me, Robert. This is …’ She shook her head at the impossibility of finding the right word and I heard bones snapping and creaking as she did so—as if she, like everything else here, was thinly magicked, cheaply made. The rhythmic motion went on. Long before she’d ceased, I was grinding my teeth, balling my fists, clenching my sphincter, wishing she’d stop. ‘And I remember when I was young, Robert. How I used to love my bed, and the dreams it brought me! I can sometimes see this valley, before the magic was stolen from its stones. Perhaps those stupid people of Flinton are right, after all. Perhaps Einfell wasn’t so very far from here. I almost see it now, Robert, those fairy princes wandering through these very walls, smiling and dancing. Goldenwhite, bridesmaided by unicorns and all the fragile beasts of the air. I can still hear her terrible laughter ringing amid the trees …’

She cocked her head like a strange bird. She drew in a slow breath which rasped and bubbled.

‘It’s as if that other world is all around me, Robert. And I’m separated from it by nothing but the thinnest veil of evil air. I can smell the sunlight, almost touch …’

Her fingers contracted on the counterpane. They let go, tensed again, let go, tensed, in a rhythm I knew. I could see the tendons sliding beneath the near-transparent flesh like ropes.

‘Yes, I loved my bed, Robert, when I was a child,’ she said eventually. ‘And my dreams. It was my entire wish to stay in bed forever. Can you believe that? I never really wanted my life to start. But I was always busy, Robert, there was never enough time, always the cows or the chickens. I loved my bed as a child because I never had enough time in it. It was a big old thing, of good solid wood, a whole territory of my own with white valleys and the peaks of mountains. When I grow up, I thought, when I’m grown and tall enough, I’ll be able to press my head against the board at one end and worm my feet out into the air at the other, I’ll be able to claim it all. The funny thing is, I can do it now. But here in
this
bed, and only recently. Do you want to see, Robert? D’you want to see just how far I can stretch myself?’

Even as I backed out, half falling, my mother began to push away the pillows and blankets that Beth had neatly arranged. There began a cracking and popping as bones slipped and moved and her body began to elongate, the sheets spilling from her flesh like milk from a slate.

T
HE DAYS TUMBLED OUT
; a whole new year, waiting. The pitbeasts were brought out to try to clear the rails which led south around Rainharrow and we bobble-hatted children came to watch, whooping and shouting as the great animals with their glossy grey flanks, their small eyes glimmering with ancient dark, were hauled from the yards on wooden sleds and dragged as far up the valley as the drays could bear them. The day slowly darkened and the rails, as they often did through winter shifterms in Bracebridge, remained impassably blocked with snow. But the guildsmen seemed happy—and we children, our feet insensible, tired and wild and frozen, snowballed down from the evening hills. It was the time of day when twilight and aether light reached a kind of equilibrium, when lanterns were first lit and all of Bracebridge seemed to fizz and shimmer, losing substance and seeming to hover in the fading air.

There was more snow in the days and shifts that followed, although it was never that bluish white again, but fouled and darkened by the sooty labours of our shut-off town. At school, once the pipes had been thawed and the floods were washed out and the few books it possessed were hung out to dry like weary bats, I was beginning to acquire something of a reputation for playground toughness.
Mother’s a troll … Mother’s a changer …
But I learned how to strike out with a wild anger which scared all but the biggest and dullest.

Thus I was buoyed up with a sort of dogged aggression when I visited Grandmaster Harrat’s house—entering the foreign area of highest hightown, a place of small parks and statues and glimpses of the river, seizing the brass front knocker and striking it unhesitatingly against my dark reflection on the varnished door, although I sensed at the same time that I was risking something by doing so. But Master Harrat seemed more
himself
here than he had at Mawdingly & Clawtson, or even at his guildhouse. He lost that aura of playing a role that people who are unhappy in their work so often maintain. He chuckled, he pursed and smacked his lips, he moved quickly—wearing a dressing gown, of all things—his embroidered slippers squealing excitedly on the polished floors. The house itself was anonymous despite its obvious and well-made solidity, a lifeless place of unornamental ornaments and stuffed animals kept in glass domes, dusted by maids I never saw because they were always out for their free Halfshiftday afternoon. But my most abiding impression is of a smell. It brushed against me as I entered the hall and lingered as I spooned luxurious amounts of sugar into my tea and gorged myself on marzipan cake in the drawing room. It was partly a warm smell, coppery and smooth, and partly like the sweet rankness of decaying flowers. At first I thought it came from the gas mantles with which the house was illuminated, strange as even they were to me then. But it had a thundery oppression, a darker tang.