The Light Ages (60 page)

‘That was the whole
point,
Saul, of what Anna and I did.’

‘Was it? And I thought it was all about money. That place of yours, by the way, the town you went up north to—what is it,
Broombridge?—
I’ve also heard that the factory there has stopped working.’

‘It never did work. It hasn’t for years.’

‘Well, that’s the old regime for you. Lies and illusions.
This
is the new.’

Beyond the open doors, the telegraphs drooped dimly into the swarming mist. The rest of London, for all that we could see and smell and hear of it, might have vanished.

‘You will stay, won’t you?’ Saul said. ‘Now that you’re here. You, and Anna. I could do with some trustworthy citizens to make up for the useless rabble we’ve got here at the moment.’ He’d finished swivelling in his chair, and was looking at Anna. Without moving, without speaking, she seemed to be receding. Saul’s gaze grew puzzled. A question started to form on his lips.

‘Where’s Blissenhawk?’ I asked.

‘Oh, he’s up in Northcentral. He’s trying to find the right spells to get the presses for the
Guild Times
working. Not that we’ll call it that now. By the way, didn’t you say you travelled through Kent?’ He inspected a wet paperweight. ‘Didn’t happen to see Maud by any chance?’

‘I’m sorry, Saul. Kent’s bigger than London. It’s a whole county.’

‘It was just a question. Anyway …’ Carefully, he placed the paperweight back down on the polished cedarstone. ‘There’s so
much
to be done. Two days’ time and it’ll be New Year, and you’d be surprised how many citizens are debating whether the Age should start officially then. But that would mean we’re still in the old Age now, wouldn’t it? Some even say we should begin with Butterfly Day. Frankly, it’s all just numbers.’

‘I’m sure it is.’

‘Still, it’s odd when you think about it. All that talk about Ages, and the people who went on about dates were mostly right. One hundred years ago almost to the day as if some greater force has been guiding us. I’d say it was fate if I believed in such things.’

‘But you don’t …’

‘Why should I? I’m a man of this New Age, Robbie, whenever it officially starts and whatever it’s called. But there’s a lot of superstition about. All kinds of things. There’s talk of a dragon—not some little fairground freak, but a huge thing you could ride on—circling Hallam Tower.’ He chuckled. ‘And then there’s World’s End. A lot of the citizens are planning on gathering over there this afternoon. After all, that’s where the old Age started ..

Look at me now, and look at Citizen Anna, as we tumble from Dockland Exchange and head west and south in the muffled light of that last afternoon, when the sun, smaller and paler and colder than the moon, is breaking through for the first time in days. Down by the embankment, there is a holiday air. The ferries have burnt out and are keeled sideways through the shattered ice. Funnels like sarsens, masts like fallen steeples. The wreckage of recent days rises from the frozen river. A beautiful brass bedstead gleams, its coloured covers swarming beautiful wings. Everywhere, tiny and intricate, figures scurry. Children play football and race toboggans, but the main tide is across the ice, which is puddled and treacherous, and towards World’s End. There are trays for sliding down the white hills and baskets for picnics, although the latter seem suspiciously light. These could be—and probably are-the same families I saw taking the drowned ferry in the spring.

Anna and I crossed the river just ahead of the crowds. We had a purpose and we knew the way. Whilst people were still dragging benches up from the ice or merrily clacking through the turnstiles past the open fencing, we were fighting the roses and tin cans towards the little house amid World’s End’s far ruins. The door still bore a permissory order from the Gatherers’ Guild. I tore the thing off as we banged on it, but that still left a darker rectangle on the wood, and the damning rustmarks of the nails.

‘Well,’ she said once she’d finally emerged. ‘At least you’re still both alive.’

‘We need to leave here, Missy,’ Anna said.

‘You’re right.’ The whole cottage seemed to creak and exhale. ‘I should have gone from this place Ages ago.’ She turned back inside and we had little choice but to follow her. Now, there wasn’t even a fire going.

‘You both look tired. Can I get you tea?’

‘Missy ..

But there was a slow certainty about her movements as she made us sit down and wait whilst she pumped the spirit stove and filled the kettle. From outside, I could hear shouts and the crackle of glass, but this seemed to be Mistress Summerton’s moment, and Anna and I were trapped inside it.

‘So London’s changed, has it? Is it the place you’d hoped for, eh? Are all the bad guildsmen gone, or turned into good ones?’ Her vanilla pod thumb hooked around the saucer as she handed me a cup. Perhaps she doesn’t need the fire, I thought, as she eased herself down in her low chair beside the dark, dead grate, for she radiated heat as much as Anna now seemed to exhale cold. White winter sunlight streamed in through the window, tumbling with dust and frost to catch on the old tins lined along the shelves above her. In the changing light, this place could almost have been the room in Redhouse to which she had first led me and my mother.
And you must be Robert … Annalise will be here at any moment …

Mistress Summerton lit her pipe and exhaled two jets of smoke. ‘Passington’s dead, isn’t he? Such a pity, really, although I suppose the time to go comes to us all. Did he tell you much?’ The smoke settled in layers. Outside, there was a tearing crash. The little house shook faintly. The dottle glowed as she sucked again on her pipe.

‘Missy?’ Anna leaned forward. The light blazed on her face. ‘What are you saying?’

‘The whole of England’s running out of aether—you still haven’t quite grasped that simple fact, have you, Robert? The guilds have sucked it all out of the ground. It was vanishing even when I was born. But yes, I had my dreams in that sour prison in Oxford which you two chose to visit. I dreamed of a world beyond power and wisdom …’ The room shimmered and darkened. The sun had set a little lower. ‘But instead I have lived this life of
duty.
This life of
labour.
It was aether which had made me this way, and it was aether which destroyed me, not because it existed, but because there wasn’t
enough.
Plans and blueprints for machines that wove hosiery which I had to waste my life fixing. Implements that scarcely work. Pointless trophy plants. Clumsy guilded spells.
That
was the legacy of aether.
This
was the life I had. And then, when I was wearying of it and feeling myself strained and stretched out, I was taken at last to Redhouse, where a clacking, dying, engine was extracting the stuff. Of course, the people there were as stupid as they are everywhere, but they were also uncommonly trusting. You—Robert—you know what aetherworkers are like. I mean, look at Anna’s own father. So when the engines began to fail and strain, when output declined—well, they must have tried many things …’ She paused. ‘But they were wildly optimistic in what they asked me. Their engines were running down, but how could I turn back the draining of aether? But, to be honest, I lied to them because I was happy fiddling with their machines to make my spells. And the village was a pretty place, with a fine big house which was already wanting roofwork and the cottages down by the river, even if the engines did clack and creak. And I was nearly treated with respect. They were almost kind to me, were these people, which is the best that most can manage for my kind. Of course, they still called me a troll ..

The chair creaked. Her pipe bubbled. The lowering light of the winter sun had thrust her into a deep pall.

‘You always told me never to use that word, Missy.’

‘What other word is there? Changeling—elf, goblin, fairy or witch? But you’ve led a lucky life, haven’t you, my proud, expensive Annalise? So perhaps you haven’t heard these words, or at least only in jokes. You haven’t been spat at through the bars of cages, you haven’t heard the whispers behind the walls or the curses along the aisles of factories as you’re led like a tame ape. I hate the word only because it’s used up and useless and filled with spite. But it’s what we
are-
that’s the most terrible thing. We’re freaks, all of us, from the most bloated monstrosity at St Blate’s to you, Annalise. The world of love and life and happiness is taken from us even before we’re given the chance to grasp it. This isn’t
our
Age, Anna, and the next one won’t be either. Look outside. And listen. All I’ve smelled these last days coming across the river from London is shit and smoke …’
Shit and smoke …
There was an echo now, a weight, to Mistress Summerton’s voice. ‘Things change, but they get worse instead of better.
There-
that’s the wisdom of Ages for you, Robert, my Anna. It’s something I should have realised long ago. Perhaps then I would never have bothered with making and casting that spell.’

‘What are you talking about, Missy?
What
spell … ?’ But I knew. ‘The chalcedony.’

‘Bravo, Robert! Perhaps, after all, you do have some abilities. Yes, there was a chalcedony at Redhouse, which the guildsmen had bought with the last of their profits. And they trusted me to use it because they thought I could rescue them from the death of their village even as their steeple whitened and the sheets on their beds froze. Not that I ever could, but I made and shaped that stone with the very last shudders of those dying engines, and I knew I was making something perfect—something that, although this village would die, could change this rotten world …’

Anna said nothing now, but her face was glistening as the sun’s last rays poured in from outside, tangling with her tears and the shadows of the roses outside.

‘And
he
came to me there at Redhouse. He came slowly as the swirl of the weir and the turn of the seasons. He was like a feeling, a messenger. Sometimes, he even stood beside me and whispered instructions, so solid did his presence become. He guided me with that spell, even though I didn’t know what he or it was, other than that it lay beyond these stupid villagers’ imaginings. It glowed out at me. Sometimes, as I gazed into my stone, it seemed the very essence of everything which had been stolen from me in that prison-house …’

Mistress Summerton gave a bitter chuckle. ‘Somehow, when the waterwheel finally stopped turning, I didn’t mind that the greater guilds took my chalcedony from me. In many ways, as Redhouse emptied and died and whitened, I still felt its presence, even though I knew that it had been stored and labelled in a casket in some remote warehouse. And I was left and forgotten—at last, the trollmen overlooked me, and that, too, was part of the spell. The stone still spoke to me, and I knew it would speak to others when its time came. And the little things which happened to me through those long and empty years of waiting—the visits from your mother, Robert, when she was a young girl—were all part of the same vast but inexplicable spell.

‘So when I heard that a high guildsman named Passington had come to Bracebridge, when the very air whispered to me that the stone itself had returned, I knew that something strange, magical, was about to happen. I took to lurking at the edges of the town. I even saw the young greatgrandmaster once, standing at twilight out by the sarsens in a fine black cloak much like the one you’re wearing, Robert. I even thought that it was
him,
the presence which had come to guide me before, but when I got closer, I realised he was just an ordinary man, and that he was the stone’s servant just as I was. And I felt the moment of the seizure of those engines like the stopping of my own heart. And I expected—well, I was too old to imagine that the trees would instantly brighten, that the sun would dance, that the clouds would uncurl. But it would be something,
something—
and I waited through the long day after until I saw two figures stumbling up the path towards my ruined house. It was your dying mother, Anna. The chalcedony had blasted its spell through her and she was turning into a frosted statue even as she walked, and your mother was with her, Robert—although your father, Anna, was already ruined and gone. But Kate Durry was with child. And I knew even then as we talked pointlessly of tending her that
you,
and not her, were the spell’s gift …

‘You came, Anna, just a term or so later as your mother died. But at last, in your eyes, Anna, in your thoughts, I saw the spell made flesh. A perfect human, but also a changeling, just as in the oldest of tales. Aether, in its fading, had conspired through me and its many other servants to bring you about. And you were wonderful, Annalise! You truly were. And I loved you then just as I love you now. I would have given you anything, done anything, just to let you live the life I’d never had. So I tended you, Anna. I raised you and I gave you love and I lavished … I lavished
everything, my
Annalise, although I’m not sure you ever entirely noticed. And I hoped that, in return, you would repay my faith and hope.’

‘Hope! Love! You make it sound like a contract, Missy.’

‘Haven’t I let you live the life you wanted? Haven’t I trusted the spell to work itself out? I spent my money on that life of yours—I even came back to this awful city and back into the clutches of the trollmen for
your
sake, Annalise. So don’t talk to me about hope and contracts and duty and love. I’ve done everything I ever could for you—and more. But perhaps I was wrong. Look where it’s got us, eh? Listen to those shouts. Even though this place is ruined, they still want to destroy it. And I look at you now, Annalise. You’re like that stone, you’re like your poor mother—you’re worn out. And what’s it all been for, eh? Just for politics, for the change of an Age?’

Anna sat back from the light and covered her face with her hands. Silently, she was crying.

‘I loved you, Missy.’

In a glitter of sparks, Mistress Summerton tapped out her pipe. The voices were louder now. Tearing. Pulling. Chanting. Something crashed against the roof.

I said, ‘We can’t stay here-’