VI
Midwinter loomed. There was more snow, a glazing of icy rain, and my father took me with him to Mawdingly & Clawtson one cold December Halfshiftday. Other guildsmen with faces I dimly recognised came to join us as we walked through the coalyards and sidings, swinging their leather kit bags, crashing their boots through the refrozen slush. The back entrance into the factory was quite unlike that to the main front office, with its ceramic friezes of Providence and Mercy, where I’d sometimes been sent to collect the wages. So this is the lad, is it? Looking after yer poor Ma, then, are yer? The men kept asking me questions they plainly didn’t want answered. Come to be shown then, have yer, eh? Then, as an aside. Quiet little blighter, ain’t he?
The men who shared what was known as East Floor belonged to a variety of guilds. There were ironworkers, once known as smithies, and ferrous engineers, and platers, and ironmasters whose hands sometimes turned black and scabby, and enginewrights and finishers with missing fingers, all tangled together through processes which the foremen and the managers, themselves members of other guilds, or higher branches of the same ones, strove to control and contain. It was complicated and arcane, with hallowed meeting times, cryptic awards, spaces between walkways where one or another species could eat their lunch or hang their coats, but the overall impression which struck me as my father rolled up his sleeves and slipped the gears that would begin to turn his crude iron machine, was of an environment even more vicious and chaotic than my schoolyard. The men’s voices grew loud as they chanted incantations and common curses over the rattle and whine of their machinery. They seemed both proud and contemptuous of what they did, slapping gritty oil from tins and making odd signs of control when a pulley began to slap too loosely or a strut of metal threatened to shear. The few guildless marts who swept the floors and swatted dragonlice and cleaned the swarf were spat at, tripped, flicked with grease.
My father’s boss, an uppermaster named Stropcock who had a rat’s pointed face and a large clip of pens bulging from the top pocket of his brown overalls, came up and said something over the noise which I guessed from the twisting of his lips was to do with showing me around. He then dragged, half threw me along grubby corridors where various lesser guilds had their offices. Forcing open a door, he tumbled me into a dim office which was stacked with half-open filing cabinets, rolled plans, greening mugs, tarnished trophies.
‘So we’ll be seeing a lot more of you, then, eh, laddie?’ he said somewhat breathlessly.
I shrugged.
‘Insolent little bastard, aren’t you?’
I shrugged again.
He lit a cigarette and flicked the match over my shoulder. ‘Lad like you, what makes you think that you’re good enough for the Lesser Toolmakers anyway? Your father wasn’t. Dead fucking lucky, I’d say he was, to get in at all.’
I just stared at him. I really wasn’t that bothered by what he was saying. If I’d been cunning enough, I suppose I could have taken a swipe at him and put an end to my chances of ever joining the Lesser Toolmakers. Little men, stuck in little positions of little authority, are always the worst. He coughed up some phlegm and I wondered for a moment if he was going to spit it at me before he swallowed it back, ground out his cigarette and stalked around his desk to where an oil-stained sheet lay tented over something many-pointed. He flipped it back. Beneath lay the antlered, aetherised brass of a haft. I’d heard of such things, glimpsed them in guildhouse displays, but I’d never been this close. About a foot and a half high, grown from aethered brass, it looked more than anything like the miniature stump and boughs of a wind-eroded tree. Uppermaster Stropcock stroked the tip of one of its horn-shaped protuberances with his nicotined fingers. His eyelids flickered. For a moment, until he regathered himself, the whites rolled up.
‘Know what this is?’
I nodded.
‘This, sonny, is my eyes and ears. Later, when you’re here good and proper, when you’ve backache from stooping and blisters on your hands and piles up your arse and your little head throbs from the noise, when you’ve seen some other lads from some other tinpot guild skulking off for an early snap, remember me. Eyes and ears, sonny, just remember. Eyes and ears. This isn’t school. We aren’t your pansy teachers ..
He stepped back. Ridiculously, it looked as if he was inviting me to touch the haft.
‘It’ll be the only time, laddie. So make the most of it ..
Slipping between Uppermaster Stropcock and the desk before he’d had the time to think better of it, I touched one of the thick brass spines. The thing felt smooth and warm and slightly greasy, like a well-used doorhandle. Then my flesh seemed to stick, to meld. And I sensed the factory pouring into me through the telegraphs and filaments that entwined it; sensed it as I had never sensed anything before. All the noise, all the work, all those lives. Mawdingly & Clawtson. SHOOM BOOM. That huge collision of effort which brought aether up from the ground. I was being sucked down. Through the wires, the telegraphs, the rails. The sensation was giddy and exulting. This was like my dream night-journeys. I was speeding everywhere across this realm. Hills and farms and valleys, and factories, factories, factories. Brick on brick and stone on stone, reinforced and bound and corrugated. And flesh on flesh as well. A great mountain of human endeavour. Bone grinding against bone and day against day in the endless procession of these Ages. And something else as well. Something dark beyond darkness, powerful beyond power, yet rising, rising…
The bolt of a whispered command kicked my hand away.
‘That’s enough, lad. Don’t do to be greedy …’ The oily sheet wafted down again. ‘Just don’t forget, eh?’ He hitched up the sleeves of his jacket, unbuttoned the filthy cuff of his shirt. ‘—See these, eh?’ Sunset-coloured bruises embroidered the insides of his palms and writhed up to the blistered navel of his stigmata. ‘See, these, laddie. Marks of the haft. And don’t you ever bloody forget them.’
My head buzzing, I followed Uppermaster Stropcock back along corridors and across a wide yard traversed by hissing pressurised pipes. Clanging up an outer stairway in his wake, I bumped into the greasy seat of his trousers when he halted halfway.
‘Uppermaster Stropcock!’ I heard an oddly accented voice above us exclaim. ‘And how are we on this less than bright morning?’
‘Fair to middling, sir.’
Stropcock backed down the stairway, forcing me with him. ‘Thank you! I’m most obliged,’ the voice continued. ‘And who have we here?’
Stropcock shuffled back and a large man with muttonchop whiskers, a mop of reddish hair and a brown woollen suit stood regarding me.
‘Just the lad of one of the workers I’m showing around.’ Then he added in a loud whisper, leaning down, ‘This here, sonny, is Grandmaster Harrat,’ as if this personage was too important to speak his own name.
‘And what do you think of our factory?’ Grandmaster Harrat asked.
‘It’s …’ I glanced around at the filthy buildings. ‘Big.’ Uppermaster Stropcock sucked in a breath. ‘He’s only the Borrows lad.’
But Grandmaster Harrat laughed. ‘Tell you what, Ronald. I’ll take young Master Borrows from you and show him around myself’
‘But—’
‘If that’s all right with you? I mean, I take it that it is?’ Grandmaster Harrat laid a hand on my shoulder, leading me across the yard before Uppermaster Stropcock had had a chance to reply. ‘What’s your first name?’ he asked, in a surprisingly gentle, almost wheedling, voice.
‘Robert, sir.’
‘And you must call me simply Tom. It’s not as though you work at Mawdingly & Clawtson yet, Robert, is it, or you’ve yet been inducted into a guild? So there’s no need for formality, is there? We can just be friends …’ The hand, which still lay on my shoulder, squeezed me gently. Tom—it was a ridiculous suggestion. I could never think of him as Simply Tom. He’d always be Grandmaster Harrat.
We passed through doorways into better-made corridors and rooms where the more specialised crafts were performed. Supervisors scampered around machinery to greet Grandmaster Harrat. Leaning over the workbenches, the silk buttons of his waistcoat sliding against my arm, he encouraged the guildsmen to perform some intricate portion of their duties. He spoke to the master of a familiar on west floor, who called his creature down from the spinning overhead maze of gears by pursing his lips into an inaudible whistle. The poor animal’s fur was caked in oil and it was missing the tips of several of its toes. The familiar licked itself half-heartedly, then studied me with wise sad eyes set in an almost human face. It looked as lost here as I felt, far from its home in the tropic jungles of fabled Africa.
‘You father works East Floor, doesn’t he?’ Grandmaster Harrat said after ordering me a large slab of chocolate cake in the tiled and elegant senior management canteen. ‘He’s a toolmaker … and your mother used to work in the paintshop?’ I nodded as I ate, my mouth full of sponge and saliva, quite amazed that he should have heard of us Borrowses. Then I risked asking him if he didn’t actually know Masters Clawtson and Mawdingly. This, like most of my comments, caused him to laugh. They were both, it seemed, long dead and buried. The factory was now owned by something called shareholders, which could mean individual people, or more often as not the guilds—or the banks where the guilds kept their money. Sticking out his bottom lip like a small boy as he swirled more sugar into his tea, Grandmaster Harrat ruefully admitted that he, as a senior member of the Metallurgical Branch of the Great Guild of Savants, was on something known as the General Board, which apparently made the decisions that shaped the destiny of Clawtson & Mawdingly, although, personally speaking, it was a part of his job that he hated. Studying Grandmaster Harrat again between the silver churches of the condiments, I realised that I had seen him before; stepping out of the door of that guildhouse and looking down on my mother and I on that morning that we had hurried to the station.
I was taken to Engine Floor, where the engines that drove the aether pistons and much of the other major machinery were located, pouring out pressurised steam and motive power. We looked down as vast iron boilers throbbed and bubbled, their aetherised joints glowing in hot semidarkness with the power they controlled and contained. I stood before the largest and most ancient of these engines—presented was the word—whose huge, leaking iron body was lumped with barnacle-like encrustations of engine ice and rust. We looked down from the gantry where its ironmaster, who was as white and skinny as his charge was black and huge, worked stripped to the waist with braces dangling, stroking and willing his machine to bear impossible pressures.
‘That engine’s been here longer than any of us,’ Grandmaster Harrat shouted in my ear. ‘It used to have a twin, but that’s another story …’
At the core of Engine Floor lay the axle which powered the aether engines beneath. It was even thicker and blacker and vaster than I’d imagined, and so smoothly polished and oiled that it scarcely seemed to be moving. Grandmaster Harrat led me to a gated lift, and pulled a lever that sent the earth clacking up. For a while it grew almost silent as we dropped and joists and telegraph filaments slid by. Then a sound pushed everything else aside.
SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM.
The air pounded in and out of my lungs as we stepped out into a tunnel. Grandmaster Harrat wordlessly gestured the way that we should go as we stooped along a wet brick maze past the intermittent light of mesh-hooded lanterns. I caught glimpses of the grind and flash of coarse machinery. Was this foul burrow really where we obtained all that aether? Here, the air gasped, the wounded rock shuddered, the very earth twisted and groaned. Every forward step, every blink and breath, required an enormous effort. We reached a cavern of sorts. Here, on Central Floor, there was no sound but an endlessly repeated convulsion. The triple massive horizontal columns of the aether engines pounded before me on their steel and concrete beds, and Grandmaster Harrat led me beside their flashing pistons to their link with the Bracebridge earth, a great iron plug the size of a house bolted to the rockface which was called the fetter. From there, in a shadow-weave of engine silk, the engines were joined by a yard-long chrysalis of intricate metal known as the shackle. But my senses were overwhelmed. There was light and there was blackness, and I think I must have been about to faint. Probably noticing how pale I had become, Grandmaster Harrat steered me back along the almost quiet-seeming tunnels, and we waited at the lift gate as the pulley chains began to turn. I still felt ill and giddy as I looked back along those damp walls. Nubs of engine ice, I noticed, pushed out from them at intervals like the tips of pleading hands. Then the lift arrived.
Back on the surface we passed across yards and through doorways to a large high room where all the noise of the factory suddenly fell away. I stood swaying, dazed by cool semidarkness. Lines of young women sat working amid greenish wafts of aetherglow. The paintshop girls—for girls was all they mostly were, filling in the time between school and childbearing whilst their hands and eyes were good enough for this impossibly delicate work. Elbows nudged. There were giggles.
‘Your mother used to work here, you know.’
I could well imagine my father swaggering towards this paintshop on some excuse of an errand—slicking back his hair and checking his reflection in a water butt before breezing through the door and setting eyes on the face of my mother, upward-lit by the wyreflame of whatever cog or valve she was then working on.
Grandmaster Harrat then took me to his own office, which looked out on the forgotten world of trees, gaslamps and drays. A fire was warming the hearth. There was a smell of sallow-wood and leather.
‘So, Robert,’ he said, lighting a cigar and breathing a circle of smoke, ‘do you still think Mawdingly & Clawtson is big?’
I was staring around at the books and the vases and the paintings. A mermaid combed her hair on a rock.
‘And what did you think of the aether engines?’
‘They were …’ What could I say? Then a thought struck me. ‘The engine ice coming from the walls—doesn’t that mean the aether’s nearly exhausted?’
There was a pause. ‘I think you should wait until you’re a guildsman before you speculate on such matters, Robert. But here …’ Placing his cigar in a cut glass ashtray, he flipped open a wooden box—beautiful to me in its simplicity—which lay on his desk. He removed a steel spindle from it and held it out, the points digging into the tips of his broad, soft fingers. The spindle had a colourless sheen and thickened at the centre. ‘Engine silk, Robert. This is what your father’s life on East Floor at Mawdingly & Clawtson is dedicated to—or at least, to making the machines which make the machines that finally make the engine silk. Mine as well, seeing as the Guild of Savants ensures the precise and efficient extraction of aether ..
Grandmaster Harrat grabbed something that couldn’t be seen and trailed it out with a looping gesture. A faint glimmer of firelight laced the air.
‘Go on. Touch—but be careful. That’s it … Imagine you’re stroking a cat ..
Light as the wind, the stuff whispered through my fingers.
‘Strange, isn’t it, that aether travels better along something so pure, so frail; through the fetter, to the shackle, then up through the engines and all those yards of rock to the surface of this world? And of course, there’s aether in the silk itself—aether, Robert, to carry the aether—can you see it glimmering? This was what the Grandmaster of Painswick really laboured to produce all his life. All the rest …’ He waved a hand, encompassing everything which lay beyond the panelled walls of his office. ‘It’s all just motive power, pressure. Yes, the weave of the engine silk in the shackle’s the key …’
I nodded.
‘Of course, this particular spool is useless, contaminated.’ Gently, he untangled the engine silk from my fingers and wound it up again. ‘A mere tradesman’s sample …’ He placed the spindle back within its box, then lifted up his cigar, ruefully studying its cold black end. ‘And your father, of course. Your father …’ At that moment, the familiar howl of the shift siren rippled the air. This being Halfshiftday, work on the outer floors finished at noon. ‘And then there’s your mother. Is she better?’
‘Better? I—’
‘You must send her my wishes. We all …’ Grandmaster Harrat mused, pursing his thick lips, running a thumb down the front of his fine waistcoat, his eyes far away. ‘We all wish that things could have been different. Will you tell her that for me? That we wish things could have been different?’ Once more, he laid his soft hands upon my shoulder. ‘You will tell her that for me, won’t you?’