B00DW1DUQA EBOK, page 14
‘Leave the tools,’ said the master. ‘The boy will use them now.’
‘Leave them?’
‘Leave them.’
The man stared at the tools in his hands for a moment, his brow furrowed as if he was trying to understand some difficult idea. Then he set them back down. He walked away from Finn and the master, back around the table towards the doorway to the Octagon. Finn expected him to look around as he went, see the room one last time, say goodbye to the other artificers, but he went with his eyes fixed ahead of him, saying nothing. In a few moments he was gone.
Finn sat down on the wooden chair, still warm from the old man. The pieces of another valve were being laid out on the table before him. He tried to see how they might fit together, how the mechanism operated, but could not.
‘Instruct the boy,’ said the master, talking to a woman who sat next to Finn, working on a valve of her own. The woman nodded. She was younger then the old man. Perhaps the same age as his mother. But her face was expressionless, no warmth to it, as she glanced up at Finn. She had her brown hair tied back in a rough sheaf, giving her face a taut appearance. Her hands were as calloused as the man’s had been. Once she completed the valve she was working on, she turned to Finn.
‘Right handed? Take the valve body in your left hand, and one of the pressure clips in your right. There’s a slot right inside you have to hook it into. Twist it around as you push and it will snap into place.’
Finn stared at the objects before him, trying to understand what he was being told. The valve body was obvious enough but there were any number of metal pieces that might be pressure clips.
‘Here,’ said the woman, irritation clear in her voice. She picked up a crescent-moon shaped metal strip with a saw-like edge and gave it to Finn. ‘Place this end in the trunk tube and twist it into place.’
Finn tried to follow the woman’s instructions. He managed to work the clip into the hole but couldn’t get it to clip into place.
‘Press harder,’ said the woman. ‘You have a child’s fingers.’
Finn tried to twist the clip around. It was hard inside the narrow valve tube. He scraped off skin from around his knuckles, exposing delicate pink flesh that pooled with blood.
‘Harder. This should only take you a moment,’ said the woman.
There was a snap as the clip fitted into place and, immediately, a shock of pain in Finn’s index finger. He cried and let the valve thump down to the table. His finger was bleeding openly, the pain raw. It looked as if its tip had been sheered off by the serrated edge of the clip.
The woman smiled and held up her own right hand. The curved end of her middle-finger was gone too, although it was healed over now.
‘You’ll get the hang of it,’ she said. ‘Once the bleeding has stopped, try the other clip. The trick is to pull your finger out of the way at just the right moment.’
Finn wrapped a rag around his bleeding finger, the oil on it making his wound sting. He squeezed hard to staunch the flow of blood.
He looked around the room. No-one paid him any attention. It seemed no-one had even heard him cry out over the background thrum. Master Owyn had left. Directly opposite him sat Bellow and Croft, each of them lost in concentration, struggling to get their own clips into place. Finn watched them, waiting to see what would happen; whether they, too, would catch the ends of their fingers. He could probably warn them by shouting across the room. He decided not to. With comic timing, both managed to work their clips into place at precisely the same moment, dropping their valves and yelping in unison. Finn couldn’t stop himself smiling at the sight of them.
‘The man who sat here,’ said Finn to the woman. ‘What was his name?’
‘No talking,’ she said, her attention back on her next valve.
Above the woman’s head, on the wall, was a great, brass counting frame made up of rows and rows of black metal beads sliding along horizontal runners. He studied it, trying to make sense of it. Each row was numbered. Finn watched as one of the trolleymen picked up a long wooden rod and flicked some of the beads to the right, consulting a piece of paper as he did so. The man glanced across at Finn, then clacked all the beads on another of the rows back to the left.
A tally of how many valves you produced. He could just make out a green, oval plaque next to his row that said 56. His number. He returned his attention to his valve. The bleeding had stopped now. He lifted another clip and prepared to work it into place.
They worked for six hours, then after a short break another six. Then another six. Half the day, all told. By the end, Finn’s head throbbed and he could barely keep his eyes open. Three of his fingertips were bandaged. He followed Graves, Croft, Bellow and the others out of the room and back into the refectory for more food. This time, at least, he was hungry and very, very thirsty. He ate the lumpy stew without talking to any of the other boys. At least the others all looked exhausted, too. With any luck they would be too tired to bother him that night.
In the end they came for Boyle in the next bed that night. Finn lay with his head under his covers, listening as the other boy cried out in pain. Graves, Bellow, Croft and a couple of others took turns punching Boyle through his bedclothes. The contents of his cupboard were thrown out of the window. They threatened to hurl Boyle out, too. The rest of the boys said nothing and did nothing. Finn, relieved they weren’t attacking him, did nothing either. What could he do?
Plans for escape, for the destruction of Engn, buzzed around in his exhausted mind. He wondered if Connor had ever slept in this room. He shut out the sounds of Boyle’s bed being lifted and turned upside with the boy trapped underneath it. Within moments, he fell into exhausted asleep.
The small brass case Master Owyn had given him on the first evening woke him at three quarters to the sixth bell. Finn slept with it under his pillow, now, terrified he wouldn’t hear its gentle buzzing. It was a clock of sorts but with no dial or hands, no features at all except for a small square hole on one side. And, embossed in tiny figures on its base, the number 520. You could hear a gentle ticking and whirring from inside it if you put it to your ear. The little device woke Finn every morning, so that he could ring the sixth bell to wake up all the others.
He rose and dressed as quietly as he could. A thin light slanted in through the window. The other boys were stationary shapes underneath their blankets, breathing peacefully as he crept past. Boyle, next to him, hadn’t managed to right his iron bed. He lay asleep on just his mattress, knotted up in a tangle of sheets and blankets.
Finn stepped out of the dormitory, closing the door as gently as he could. He crossed to the door on the far side of the balcony. He ran as quickly as he could, conscious of the great gulf of space beneath him. The balcony, like the winding steps, had little in the way of support to hold it up. Through the other door was the cramped spiral of wooden steps Master Owyn had shown him. They led up higher and higher before opening into a small, dusty room filled with wooden crates, cobwebs and broken beds. A small, square skylight above his head gave him a view of the clock tower overhead and, elongated by the oblique angle, the face of the clock he had to time himself by.
The big hand of the clock leapt a whole minute at a time. Finn had been told to wait for the moment it jerked onto one minute before six, then race off immediately. He then had exactly that minute to run down the spiral stairs and start pulling on the bell-rope. If he ran he would get there just in time.
Engn was a place of bells. A bell was always ringing somewhere, clanging nearby or tolling in the distance. Very often two or three would argue away at the same time, trying to shout over each other. The bells, Master Owyn had said, told everyone what to do, where to go. There was a language to them. A code. Each had its own particular tone or timbre. Some were leaden, booming roars. Others rang out reluctant notes, repeated at long intervals. Some were barely audible. But each was different. The boys would be in the refectory, or milling around in the Octagon, when Master Owyn would stop speaking and cock his head, listening. The Quarter Bell, he would say, or The Change Bell. Hurry now.
To Finn, there was never any discernable difference to the background clamour of near and far bells. It seemed incredible everyone ended up where they were supposed to be. What happened if bells were missed, or late, or early? Did everything just stop working?
It was his job to sound the Sixth Bell to wake up the other apprentices. He’d been told very clearly to make sure he rang it at just the right moment. If he didn’t, everything else would get out of sync
‘Why don’t I just wait downstairs by the longcase clock and time the bell by that?’ he’d asked the master after he’d been given these instructions. Master Owyn had scowled at him. Trapped with him there in the tiny room, Finn had been suddenly afraid.
‘Know best do you boy? You have to do it this way, by the tower clock. That’s the way it’s always been done.’
‘Yes, Master.’
Today he had a couple of moments to spare. The hand on the clock above him has just swept onto the notch three minutes away from six. There was time to try out his plan. He scraped one of the wooden boxes across the floor and set it underneath the skylight. Standing on top he reached up and tried to push the small window open. It was very heavy, its frame thick lead, but he managed to budge it a little. He looked around for something he could use as a wedge. Using a tube of black iron from a broken bedstead, he managed to lever the skylight upwards so that it stood vertically upwards. Finn poked his head through the gap.
A wind, cold in the early morning, chilled his face. He gazed out across a vast new world; a landscape of slate slopes with gutter-rivers running through it, the peaks of the roofline its mountains. Clumps of moss for bushes and woods clung to everything but the vertical cliffs of the grey stone buildings. He could see for miles, across acres and acres of roof. It was a wonderful sight. He felt the urge to climb outside and run across those slopes, just as he had once raced over the hills and valleys at home. Perhaps there was even a way to get back to the outer walls of Engn, to escape, by leaping across them.
One of the great wheels turned just off to his left, its relentless churning motion filling him with alarm for a moment, making him think something was flying towards him. Along the ridge of the rooftop, a line of large crows watched him with suspicious eyes. He marvelled that they chose to say in Engn when they could just fly away. Beyond them, visible between the ridge and the rampart of the clock tower, he could see a dome. Some green metal covered its curved surfaces and it had windows set all around its base, forty or fifty of them. The dome must be huge. Finn tried to work out where it was in relation to the rooms and halls he knew. It was then he noticed the silhouette of someone in one of those distant windows, watching him.
The head and shoulders of a figure, black against the lighted interior. Finn ducked down, knowing it was too late. Who was watching him? Master Owyn, perhaps, checking up on him? Or someone else? Perhaps it was Connor. Finn peeped back over the lip of the skylight. The figure still stood there. Now it moved. It opened the window, catching the rising sun in a blinding glint. Against the light inside, Finn still couldn’t make out who it was, but now he could see the figure waving. No, not waving, beckoning. Telling Finn to come.
He looked around. What did it mean? And how could he possibly reach the dome? The skylight was big enough to poke his head through but his shoulders certainly wouldn’t fit. He looked down at the frame of the window from the outside, to see if there was some weakness, some way of making the opening larger, but there was nothing. When he looked back up, the figure was gone, the window in the dome closed once more.
A bell began to chime, a deep metallic boom in the cold air. Finn looked up at the clock. It was already the sixth hour. He had missed his cue. With a gasp he hauled the skylight shut, jumped from the wooden box and hurled himself down the stairs.
He reached the rope in record time. The longcase clock still hadn’t ticked over to one minute past. Finn began to tug on the thick rope snaking up into the campanile over the dormitory, working the swinging bell up to speed until, finally, it began to clang and clang to wake the other boys. He pulled on the rope for a minute and then strode off for breakfast before any of them came down.
His stomach fizzed with anxiety that someone would have noticed the late bell. He couldn’t face eating the bread and butter laid out for them on the long wooden tables. Master Owyn, strolling around the edges of the room with his hands behind his back, glanced at Finn but said nothing. The other boys arrived in a clamour of shouts and laughter.
Finn began to relax. Chewing a mouthful of bread, he thought about what he’d seen. It couldn’t have been Master Owyn in the dome because the master was here. Who, then? One of the other boys playing a trick on him? But that wasn’t possible either. The others were as trapped as he was. Someone else he hadn’t even thought of? Perhaps the stories about the wreckers were true after all, and one of them was trying to reach him?
He sat and thought about all this, and about Connor, and about the tests the gatekeeper had mentioned, until a bell rang to tell them it was time to return to work in the Valve Hall.
Chapter 13
The following day, after their third stretch of valve construction, Finn and the other boys clattered into the Octagon to play scrum. In theory it was a ball-game, with two clear sides and a definite set of rules. The ball was a sack of leather, sewn into a rough sphere and filled with some sort of stuffing. A doorway on each side of the Octagon was used as a goal, the aim of the game being to wrestle the ball into the opponent’s doorway. In practice the game generally descended into a mass brawl, with a cluster of pushing, shoving, kicking boys lurching around the Octagon and the ball somewhere within.
Finn stood on the edge of the pack now, watching as one of the older boys, Tanner, wrestled the ball away and began to pound towards the opponent’s goal. Tanner was a magnificent player of the game: strong, fearless, fast. He could keep running with four, five, six other boys hanging off him. Tanner always scored and all the newcomers were in awe of him. Finn grinned and cheered at the sight of him. Tanner was on his team today, while Graves, Croft and Bellow were on the opposing side.
Finn thought, once again, about the beckoning figure in the dome window. He’d looked again that morning but seen no-one. And what, exactly, had the figure been telling him to do? Was he somehow meant to find another route onto the roofs, pick his way across to the dome? There were large gutters that could act as paths, but did they reach right across? There might be some great drop down to the ground somewhere. Perhaps he was supposed to find some other means of escaping the Octagon and the Valve Hall. He couldn’t think how. In any case, perhaps that wasn’t it at all. Perhaps the test was to discover whether he ignored the invitation, whether he resisted temptation. How could he tell?
The doorway that led out of the Octagon, the one they’d come through the day they arrived, wasn’t too far away from where he was standing. The wrestling mass of boys was over in the far corner. He could creep out of the Octagon now without anyone noticing. He backed into the shadows of the wall. His heart thumped. He wondered if he dared do it. He remembered the day, long before, when he had stood on the branch of one oak tree and thought about leaping across to the next. He could do it, he knew. Was that what the figure in the dome wanted?
But if he did flee what would he do then? He’d never be able to find his way to the dome, or even back through Engn to the gates. He’d be crushed in some part of the machinery, or the Ironclads would find him and bring him back. He had no chance. But, still, it was tempting to try. Delicious to consider it.
‘Smithson!’
A chorus of voices brought him back to the Octagon. He’d stopped paying attention to the game. Bellow was charging towards him over the flint ground, the ball tucked under his arm, a throng of the other boys racing after him. Finn was suddenly the only player standing in Bellow’s way.
He could tell Croft and Bellow apart now. They were cousins, and had grown up on the same farm, their mothers, sisters. Croft was the shorter of the two. He had a scar across his upper lip, an old wound that twisted his face into a constant scowl. His cousin was taller, his face unmarred, handsome even. Bellow was, if anything, crueller than Croft. When they attacked one of the other boys it was Bellow who laughed out loud at each cry of pain.
‘Smithson! Stop him!’ It was Tanner, pounding after Bellow, but not close enough to catch him.
Finn trotted forward into Bellow’s path and prepared to try and stop the charging boy. Perhaps if he could hold him up for long enough the others would arrive to help. Bellow roared with delight and flew directly at Finn, one arm outstretched towards Finn’s face, hand clenched into a fist.
Finn wanted to turn and run. Bellow, stronger and taller, would send him flying. But he had to try and stop him. He hated to be beaten. He wouldn’t run. Bellow was only feet away now. The taller boy could have simply dodged around Finn, fending him off with his hand to score an easy goal but instead he charged directly at Finn, intending to knock him flat. That was Bellow’s mistake. Finn had learned a thing or two in all the games he’d played with Connor.
He waited until the last moment then, dodging underneath Bellow’s outstretched fist, hurled himself into Bellow’s legs. A knee caught Finn on the chin, making him bite his tongue hard, but he grabbed hold of the bigger boy’s knees and squeezed, preventing Bellow from running.
Bellow, carried forward by his own momentum, crashed face-first into the hard flints, the ball squirting out to one side. From his position on the ground, Finn saw Tanner pick it up and hurl it back into the throng, away from their goal. Tanner nodded at Finn then charged off to rejoin the game. Finn rose to his knees and then to his feet. Nearby, Bellow also sat up, his hands clutched to his nose and forehead. Blood seeped between his fingers.
