Authors: Ian R MacLeod
Silence fell over us with the hiss of the rain.
‘Such a mess, Robert!’ Grandmaster Harrat began to shift things and lay them aside. Stoppers and jars clinked, clouding the air with their variegated scents. ‘But perhaps some of this will be useful to my guild. It does seem a shame to just leave it all here to gather dust …’ He spun the dial of his safe on the wall, and took out the tinkling vials of aether. ‘And what am Ito do with
this,
Robert, eh? This damnable stuff which dictates our lives.’ He placed the tray down on an empty bench. His shadow grew enormous, his face whitened. ‘Aether is everything, Robert. Aether
is nothing …’
With a sob and sweep of his hand, he dashed the tray to the floor. The precious vials shattered, their surprised contents fanning out through the shards with a syrupy thickness, exploring the dusty floor with shining fingers. How many engines would this bind and power, I wondered, as Grandmaster Harrat stood there, ridiculous in his slippered feet amid the blazing puddle, splashes of the stuff on his trousers, dribbles on his face and hands. He looked around at the room, his uplit features twisted in a sudden disgust. With a growl, he lunged out at one of the demijohns of acid which lay nearby. It rocked back and forth for a moment as if considering whether to fall. Then it did, and a smoking pool lapped from its lip to mingle with the aether. The scene grew extraordinary as Grandmaster Harrat dislodged more and more of his precious chemicals until they formed a swarming froth. Tendrils of smoke and gas writhed.
‘It was a job that was given me ..
He began to talk without prelude, and to pace the swarming room, his feet leaving trails of wyreglow.
‘But you must understand, Robert,’ he said, ‘it was the job I was given when I was in my first senior appointment at Mawdingly & Clawtson. A guildmaster came to see me here. He was waiting inside this house one night, standing in the hall even though the maids denied letting him in. So I knew instantly he had power. It was as if, even before the spell was made, the power of that thing was upon him. And he had a face like—a face I can’t quite remember somehow, Robert, even though he was standing close to me and I could smell the rain on his fine cloak. He spoke the words of my guild, Robert, secret words of command, and I knew that he was one of the men who rule me as surely as the tides are ruled by the moon. And of course I was thrilled, excited. Of
course
I was—who wouldn’t be?—even though I couldn’t remember his face properly although his cloak was black and I could still smell the rain as if the storm itself had brought him …
‘We sat and talked, Robert, and he explained in a cool voice what the problem was, and what he wanted of me, and he drew out drawings and photographs I could scarcely believe, and spread them on my table and we pinned them down with porcelain dogs. And we lit the lamps and talked, and he was polite and decent, in the way that men of such power always are. And I was happy to be trusted ..
Acrid smoke coiled around Grandmaster Harrat. His slippered feet crunched the glass. He was a fleshy negative; both darkness and light.
‘Of course, I understood that he had no need to give his name, or even to mention which particular guild he came from. But the truth is, I was already too wrapped up in the details of how we might use the power of the chalcedony to care about the propriety of what we were doing. Even before I’d opened up the crate, I saw it all so clearly, and the design he wanted, and how Bracebridge and perhaps all of England might be changed by that glowing stone. My hands fairly danced across the blueprints. They almost drew themselves, and yet I was so proud of them. After all, what could be wrong with improving the extraction of aether? What’s wrong with doing your best? Isn’t that what, as guildsmen, we all owe the shareholders of Mawdingly & Clawtson? How was I to know that the engines would stop and the thing would react?’
Grandmaster Harrat’s words were muffled by sobs now. His face glistened with tears and aether.
‘But part of me always
knew
it was wrong, Robert. Part of me did, and the rest of me didn’t. It was like a secret I kept from myself. I suppose I could have asked, I could have challenged, I could have complained. But who to? And what for? There was never any real need—and I had no idea that things would happen as they did, and then keep on coming back to us in this way for so long after … You
must
understand, Robert. You must forgive me…
Grandmaster Harrat gave a blubbering sob and blundered towards me, a figure of flaming white. I stumbled back. I felt the touch of his hands on my chest and shoulders and ducked away. But he floundered on, tumbling through shelves. He stood for a moment amid the fog in the centre of his workroom, teetering like someone on the edge of a precipice until his slippered feet gave and he fell forward, skidding on the heels of his hands and then down onto his face and belly in shining pools of aether and acid.
He gave a gurgling sigh and struggled to get up. But already his palms were smoking, his face was melting. The rain sluiced the skylights, wyrelit and glowing as Grandmaster Harrat howled and writhed in the froth. I saw the stump of an arm glistening with flakes of aetherised glass. I saw the stripped flesh of his chest like an anatomical drawing. He was sinking, dying. His bones, white and pristine, still clawed and moved as his flesh dissolved around them.
More by touch than by sight, I stumbled to the edge of the room. Misty tendrils of light drifted up from the floor. Flakes of the aetherised glass clung to my feet. My hand, my eyes, were burning. The storm beat on. Bloody fingers slipping, I twisted on the taps of the workroom gas mantles. I tumbled into the kitchen, and up and down the stairs, falling into rooms, dragging at sheets, scattering ornaments and twisting on more gas taps. I was sobbing, groggy, half poisoned, but the darkness seemed to will me on. Finally, gasping, I saw the muddy marks in the hall that my boots had made when I entered. I dragged back the door and huge hands seemed to throw it back into its frame as I stumbled into the night.
Ulmester Street was empty, swept by rain and darkness, its curtained windows uncurious as I tumbled down towards lowtown, my clothes glimmering and acid-shredded. Then, like an intensification of the storm, came a low, deep, rumbling from behind me. I stopped and I looked back up the hill as intense light flickered over the rooftops, freezing the churning motion of the clouds. Everything that Grandmaster Harrat had stood for—the hissing gas lamps, the fires glittering in fine mirrors, the wyreglow of aether, those struggling maggots of electricity—seared my eyes in one driven surge which was followed by a crackling and roaring, and the fall of masonry.
M
Y MOTHER’S COFFIN GLEAMED.
It was good wood, paid for with guild money—the same money which had paid for the stone, freshly carved amid all the others in the Lesser Toolmakers’ section of Bracebridge graveyard. Father Francis made the signs of his guild as it was lowered into the wet earth and muttered of the welcome which my mother would already have been granted in heaven, where she would be free of her guildswoman’s burdens and labours—free to do all of those vague and happy things amid fine houses and wheatfields which I knew that, without all the commonday tasks of everyday life, she would regard as empty and pointless.
Filled with child’s boredom at this drawn-out occasion, I puffed my cheeks and looked up at the cloudy sky and down towards the lines of houses. The hymnal wine which I’d tasted today had been stale and sour. The dreams it brought were nothing more than the cold and damp and musty pages of unread Bibles. And nothing had changed. Nothing ever changed here in Bracebridge. The crooked factory chimneys still smoked. A cart clattered down Withybrook Road, rocking with empty barrels. The ground still pounded. Beth struggled with the booming wind to keep on her borrowed black hat. A few of the women, neighbours mostly, were crying, although the men’s faces could have been chiselled out of stone; even now, they would not show emotion. A gaggle of children watched us across the low wall, just as I had watched other funerals, wondering what it would be like to stand here before a hole in the ground. I was still wondering.
Already, workmen were clearing the foundations of Grand-master Harrat’s house on Ulmester Street across the hill in hightown which, solid though it was, had been ruined beyond all prospect of repair by the gas explosion. From what I had heard, there was scarcely more sense of surprise at his death than at my mother’s, nor any suggestion of a linkage. Domestic gas light was rare in the houses of the people of Bracebridge, and commonly viewed as so unreliable that, had Grandmaster Harrat known, he would surely have despaired of ever persuading us of the benefits of anything as strange and new as electricity. He hadn’t belonged in Yorkshire. He was from London, he wasn’t married, and, although I doubted if many people in Bracebridge were familiar with the word, a faint sense of the camp clung to him like the odours of eau de cologne and battery acid. Amid all of this, the fact that he invited young boys to his house on Halfshiftday afternoons would have seemed trivial, if it had been known of at all. He was dead, and that was the end of it. Perhaps he was being buried in the distant crypt of some great guild’s chapel at this very moment. For all I knew. For the little I then cared.
Father Francis finished his words and people began to drift away, heading for the hall, which was really a long shed, up on Grove Street where there would be a spread of cold meats, with ginger beer for the children, sweet sherry for the women, strong brown ale for the men. I remained standing with the last of the mourners, reluctant to let this empty moment slip away. The yew trees at the far side of the graveyard stood tall and dark, like watching figures. Then one, as my gaze lingered, changed, and
became
a figure, small, and half shrouded in a broad-brimmed hat and coat. It approached, picking its way between the memorials.
‘I felt that I had to come,’ Mistress Summerton said, ‘but I knew, especially after what happened, that I couldn’t possibly be seen.’
‘They’ve probably forgotten already,’ I said. ‘Or they will have by the time they’ve had a few drinks up at the hall.’
‘You shouldn’t be so cynical, Robert.’
We watched as, across the graveyard, the last of the departing mourners made their way through the church gate. None of them seemed to notice Mistress Summerton and I. Perhaps, I thought, we both look like yew trees now. We turned the opposite way, down into lowtown and the market that, today being Sixshiftday, filled the main square. We didn’t speak for a long time and simply wandered amid the stalls as the awnings flapped and the sky hurried. Despite the heaviness of her coat, Mistress Summerton’s feet were shod in delicate shoes which seemed scarcely more substantial that Grandmaster Harrat’s slippers, although they remained far less muddy than the heavy boots and clogs that clumped around us. She wore fine long calfskin gloves and her glasses flashed in the sunlight. Dressed as she was on this grey day, no one would have guessed that she wasn’t just some little old guildslady. Aether can turn both ways—I felt I understood that now as Mistress Summerton sniffed the leeks and squeezed the loaves for freshness. Just like wyrelight, it can be bright or dark. It can make fine engines and bear messages along telegraphs and stop all of England’s bridges from collapsing. Or it can be the dragonlouse; the stinging, stinking, cuckoo-plant—the terrible troll which had come to occupy my mother’s bedroom. It can be all of those things. Mistress Summerton took my hand and drew me on past buckets of buttons from Dudley and mountains of sugar brought here all the way from the Fortunate Isles and blotchy heaps of waterapples which came down the road from Harmanthorpe. We admired the dried bunches of sallow and lanternflowers in a corner where the stallholder, in an almost unheard-of gesture, gave her a free posy to pin on her lapel. I cherished these moments, after everything that had happened.
We walked to the river, and Mistress Summerton leaned on the rough parapet of the bridge which had given the town its name as the wind swept in around Rainharrow and in from the Pennines, booming and echoing in its arches, shivering the racing water, bearing dead leaves and branches, the scents of coal and mud. The dry petals of the posy stirred and rustled.
‘I wish there was some better word,’ she said, ‘than sorry.’
‘I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.’
‘Say what you want, Robert, but don’t damage yourself by really thinking that.’
I swallowed. The wind burned my eyes. Then Mistress Summerton turned and put her arms around me. She seemed bigger as I buried myself against the leather smell of her coat. I felt warm and walled, and for a moment the day dissolved. I was floating, healed, in a different England of noonday silence, tiers of wonder, white towers … I stepped back, surprised to find myself still here, on this bridge with the wind and the river.
‘If we could all have made this land better than it is, Robert,’ she said, smiling, ‘don’t you think, after all these Ages, we’d have done so?’ She produced her clay pipe from her pocket and I watched as she struggled to light it, turning her back to the wind in the way I’d often seen men doing on their way back from the factories, but going through match after match until she finally got the bowl glowing. The spectacle of her struggling to perform such a task left me with a twinge of disillusionment. What kind of creature was she, if she couldn’t do such a simple thing? No wonder she hadn’t been able to save my mother.
We crossed the bridge and walked on the far side of river beside the half-flooded meadow. The white birds we called landgulls here in Bracebridge circled above the racing waters of the Withy.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I’ve always believed in your kind. It was Northallerton I didn’t think was real. But was my mother really a changeling?’
‘I don’t like that word, Robert. You’ll be calling
me
one next. Or a witch or a troll or a fairy.’
‘But fairies don’t exist—and you’re here.’
She smiled, then frowned beneath those flashing lenses, brown wrinkles drawing out from the shadows and across her face. ‘You know, I sometimes wonder about even that. Look at the way the buildings rise and fall here in Bracebridge, how the tilled fields change in anticipation of the seasons—and feel that pounding! All that passion and energy and industry! My life is diffuse, Robert. The frailty of reality is always with me. It blows through my flesh. Up at Redhouse, I’m like a old dog in an empty house, growling and barking at shadows …’