The Light Ages (37 page)

‘Who?’

‘It’s all just history now, isn’t it? That’s the most marvellous thing about these times!’

George gestured towards the grey haze. He had plans and detailed designs for new garden suburbs. Neat, pretty and hygienic rows of individual cottages where families and groups of workers could live, ruled by nobody but themselves and the fair exchange of their produce and skills. Village greens near the heart of London. I realised, as George and I talked and we wandered, that we weren’t perhaps so very far apart in our hopes after all.

‘How’s Anna?’

‘She’d be here today if she wasn’t doing something to help Sadie with her wedding.’

‘You mean … ?’

‘Oh, yes, Anna’s quite a supporter of the need for change. She signed the Twelve Demands just like all the rest of us. Well, I mean apart from Sadie, of course—and
she
really couldn’t, now, could she?’

We walked on across the hot hills. I was bemused and irritated to think that Anna and her jaunty chums were all leaping upon the bandwagon of change. What could they possibly know, or believe? But at least I got the impression from the remote, admiring and puzzled way George still talked about Anna that things had gone little further between the two of them than that kiss I had witnessed at Walcote House. In fact, even that was hard to believe now. I could, after all, have been mistaken. If Anna and George were what my mother would have called an item, they were a strange one. But then, Anna was always Anna. That was the whole point …

Whilst George and I wandered the blazing Kite Hills on that hot afternoon, her presence seemed to stay with us. I thought of her here, in a long summer dress and a summer smile and plain girlish sandals not so unlike the ones she had once worn at Redhouse. I could picture the glint of sunlight on the soft down of her bare arms. The bathing pools today were predictably popular, and George and I, unenthusiastic swimmers both, were happy to sit in the watery shade of the trees beside the Men’s Pool as male bodies of every shape and size and haftmark sluiced in democratic confusion. He told me about his father, and his failures in the Architects’ Guild, which had stemmed from a belief that the workmen of the lesser guilds would do a better job if they were better paid. George had inherited that same belief and developed it in this new climate of change. He’d never make an orator any more than I would—he was too quiet, too deferential—but as his eyes watched the play of sunlight on those pale and hairy bodies, he spoke passionately of his belief in the need for change.

‘And the
nobility
of the workman, Robert. Look at them!’ He shook his head; wondering, amazed. ‘The beautiful nobility of the common working man …’

Something scratched at my window one night. It could have been a bird, a stone, but the noise was somehow more specific. It was as if someone had called out my name. I lay there, feeling the pressure of the night welling up from the tenement beneath me in coughs and groans.

The grimy glass was wedged far open; a tiny target. I unpeeled myself from my sheets and leaned out. Sadie was clutching the whisperjewels at her throat in the dark yard below. She smiled and waved.

I pulled on a few clothes and headed down the dark hot gullet of the stairs. Sadie stood by the dry water butts in a long coat of silver fur. It shivered about her as if it was still alive as she brushed her lips against mine in a kiss which was too quick to decipher.

‘It’s an informal engagement present from Isumbard,’ she explained about the coat as we sat in a hired cab and she lit a cigarette. ‘I’m promised it’ll be as warm in winter as it is cool now. Oh, I know it’s ridiculous! And don’t ask me what animal was killed to make it …’

‘I saw you in the papers—’

‘Bloody awful, that photograph wasn’t it? My nostrils look like bloody railway tunnels. Tonight I felt I had to get out. Just away from Northcentral.’

The sweating bricks of Ashington clopped by. I could feel the heat of the horse wafting back over us, jostling with the presence of all the other bodies which had filled this carriage.

‘We had to do this promenade along Wagstaffe Mall. And all the people were supposed to wave. Not that many turned up, though, but someone threw a lump of paving at me. Look …’ She slid back the collar of her coat to show me her shoulder. There was a surprisingly large and angry-looking bruise. ‘They didn’t report
that
in the
Guild Times,
of course …’ She reopened her bag to light another cigarette, then realised she already had one going. ‘Filthy habit. I have to bribe the maid to go out and get them for me. She’d be in almost as much trouble as me if she got found out. Every time I have one of these things I tell myself that it’s the last …’ She sighed out a blissful, guilty, plume.

The streets of the Easterlies were quiet tonight, and strangely wyredark. Wondering if Sadie had any idea of the risk she was taking, I told her about the coming Midsummer, and how it was exactly a hundred years since the opening of the Exhibition at World’s End which had signalled the start of this Third Age. It was so obvious that this should be the time when this Age should turn again that the only surprise was how long it had taken anyone to think of it. Then there were the Twelve Demands. Rumour had it that two had already been semi-officially conceded, and that the guilds had negotiated with the new workers’ councils over the details of several more. The Age was collapsing like a paper fist, and it really did seem that the great gathering which was now being planned in Westminster Great Park on the coming Midsummer Day would bring about its spontaneous demise. The occasion would be bright, joyous, uplifting. So many things were planned. The united brass bands of many guilds. Mass marches of apprentices. Makers of the previously obscure Arthropod Branch of the Beastmasters’ Guild were even planning to release a new kind of butterfly. But there were always the few, the greedy rabble, who would give anything, revolution included, a bad name. And Sadie and her kind, with their huge houses I know,’ she sighed, ‘we’re bloated parasites sucking the very lifeblood out of the tired and over-exploited workers whom we treat little better than the bondsmen of the Fortunate Isles. And we should all disappear from the face of the earth forever. I’m really not sure if we’d be any better off at Saltfleetby, or our little cottage by the Lakes …’ She counted off some of her many residences until she ran out of fingers. ‘That is …’ She studied the end of her cigarette before tossing it from the carriage in a bounce of sparks. ‘If you seriously expect anything to
happen.
Oh, I know George is all for some better Age, and Anna now as well, so it’s become almost
de rigueur ..

The beetle-black gleam of Northcentral rose over the Easterlies. There was no sign of Hallam Tower. It was if as if tonight it had absorbed itself in a vast single dark and timeless pulse as Sadie talked of an upturned world, where even she, too, might think of joining in with the marching banners.

‘But anyway, I really have to stay in London. There’s so much to sort out. I never realised how complex it is, to get married. I mean, I can’t even settle on my choice of
bridesmaids—
apart from Anna. There are so many people just waiting to feel upset …’

Marriage wasn’t really the right word. I was reminded, as Sadie talked of ceremonies and valedictions, of the occasions early in my time in London when I’d watched the great iron freighters being tugged in to their berths at Tidesmeet. It was a slow dance, ponderously elegant, a great meshing of powers. Even now, in this Age’s twilight, the guilds were circling each other in bellows of money and might.

‘It’s all to do with paint, Robbie …’

Apparently, the spars of the big telegraph pylons you saw striding everywhere across the country were seriously rusted. The solution, in the typical make-do-and-mend pattern of the guilds which even I had come to recognise, was to team up with Greatmaster Porrett’s Guild of Distemperers, which had access to aethered technologies which could not only delay rust, but undo it—replace the damage of neglected decades with new growths of fresh steel. Part of that teaming up was Sadie.

‘You won’t believe the ceremonies! And the ridiculously unflattering clothes and hats I’ve had to wear! I’ve even had to swear allegiance to Isumbard’s grubby little guild. Part of me, the Telegraphers’ Guildmistress that I am, rebels against it. But Mummy just sighs and mutters about duty, and Daddy’s not ever there. But, I mean, we’ve even had to hand over some of our chalcedonies ..

‘What are they?’

‘Oh, they’re just these big crystals. About so large …’ She illustrated with a twirl of her cigarette and the shape she made in the dark was a spell, a vision of the heavy crystal which I had once glimpsed Grandmaster Harrat holding, his face lit with wyreglow and awe. ‘They’re like, I don’t know—bigger versions of these whisperjewels.’

‘Or painstones, or numberbeads?’

‘Oh, yes, that’s right. Those things accountants waste their lives fingering. But chalcedonies are
much
bigger and more powerful. It’s where the great guilds store their spells ..

I fell into silence. This, I supposed, was the time when I should ask Sadie to speak to the man she called Daddy about the entirely reasonable nature of the Twelve Demands. Who else would ever get such a chance? But I sensed the futility of the conversation even before I began it; not just Sadie’s powerlessness, but the greatgrandmaster’s as well. The guilds existed above and beyond the people who served them, even those at the highest level. I tried to picture the greatgrandmaster from my brief glimpses of him at Walcote House. All I saw was an ordinary man, with his hair unconvincingly dyed, a smile he put on his face like a mask, and the shade of something bigger and deeper and darker behind, which both was and wasn’t him, and which was beyond power and reason. For the first time, a cold rush of worry passed over me about what might really happen in London on this coming Midsummer.

‘Penny for them. Here.’

To be companionable, I smoked one of Sadie’s cigarettes.

‘You know, Robbie. I almost hope you’re right. I hope it does all come tumbling down and I can go and work somewhere as a milkmaid and get varicose veins. But it won’t happen. It won’t ..

‘But you’ll be careful these next few days, won’t you?’

‘As long as you promise as well.’

Then we talked, as we could always talk, of Anna. We both agreed, from the perspectives of our vastly different knowledge of her, that the link, the association, whatever the thing was, between her and Highermaster George had little to do with what might ordinarily be thought of as love, or at least the physical kind. They were both too—too
something—
Anna especially, we assured ourselves, but George as well … The carriage had moved out from the Easterlies, crossed Doxy Street, meandered west. I really had no idea where we were heading until we stopped with a jolt beside a kind of ruined dock.

The drawn-back waters of the Thames beyond were bright against the darkness, winding in islets through the grey cratered mud … But I
knew
this place, although the entrance which had once been festooned with bunting was now chained and gated, and no light now came from the sea-urchin dome of the ballroom.

‘I do so love empty places …’ Sadie raised the heavy links which held the gate. I caught the gleam of her whisperjewel necklace as her breath made an impossible cloud of frost and the padlock fell away. ‘Of course, it’s quite disastrously unsafe ..

The arrowing boards swayed drunkenly, rising and tipping like a stormy wooden sea. Next winter when the Thames rose and froze again, a heavy tide in the spring, and all that was left here would be borne away.

‘What went wrong?’

‘I think it was just money. Too much expense and not enough profit. What an
Age
this is Robbie! Remember when you and I danced here with Anna? But everything seems long ago now. Help me across this little bit, will you?’

Teetering like tightrope walkers across the remaining solid boards, we reached the ballroom itself, where the doors hung off their hinges and the black floor inside was scrawled with dust, bird-droppings, the wreckage of crashed chandeliers. We stumbled around for a few moments, breathless, almost laughing as we pretended to dance until some sense that the building was watching made us stop. The slope outside was so steep that we had to grip hard to the railings as we explored the walkways. But then Sadie leaned against them and pulled me to her and I felt the chill brush of her coat against my face. My hand slipped inside the furs and her breathing grew windy in my mouth as I found her breast, the spidery sharpness of that whisperjewel chain. The warm hardness of the charms sang in my ears as I stroked them and glimpsed again the tunnelling corridors of Walcote House. Then suddenly, the whole structure of the ballroom gave a shuddering, agonised creak, and we pulled away, shivering in the heat.

‘I think we should be going.’

‘No! Listen …’ Sadie tucked her hair back behind her ear. ‘Shssuh. Can’t you hear?’

Then I heard it. The dim beat of the music like an undersea bell. The sigh and rise and exultation. The scented rustle of summer nights. The ballroom remembered; of course it remembered. Its ghosts danced around us in twirling gowns.
Come on Robbie, you can dance, can’t you?
And I could. Then the structure gave another protracted, agonised groan and the night air collapsed around us.

‘Thank you for being the gentleman that you are back there and not taking, ah,
full
advantage of me,’ Sadie murmured as she smoked and the carriage rocked me back towards Ashington. ‘Not that I would have minded, but things have changed since that nice time we had in the spring at Walcote. It’s all to do with this damn wedding. The ceremonies and spells …’ She gave me a smile. Sad and unfathomable. ‘You see, I’m a virgin again.’

A
HOT WIND WAS BLOWING
on Midsummer Eve just as it had been blowing all the night before. No one had slept, and the tin roof was trying to lift off the old concrete-floored workshop where the morning’s meeting took place.
Shoom Boom
as Blissenhawk and spokesmen for the various groups with whom we had formed a wary bond stood on precariously raised packing cases above the objections and the rants and the points of order. Doubtless there were other meetings taking place in empty warehouses and factories across the Easterlies in which tomorrow’s activities were being planned. The wind was flying in from the south, hot and strong as the searing African deserts from which it surely came. It carried with it the rooftop roar of a hundred other cities where, in France, across the Lowlands and the lands of Saxony, there were sure to be similar eruptions of change.