The Light Ages by Ian R. MacLeod Read Free Book Online
Authors: Ian R. MacLeod
all possible dreams.
Marvellous beasts rose from the soil like steam, there were fine white palaces, and beautiful plants jewelled every hillside …
‘So the Fairy Godmother appeared to Cinderella.’
‘Was she a changeling?’
A beat of pounding silence.
‘This is just a story, Robert.’
‘Then tell me something true. Tell me about Goldenwhite.’
‘Well …’
There was always both a smile and a hesitancy in my mother’s voice when she spoke about Goldenwhite up in my attic room. Like most working-class people, she harboured a fondness for the idea a woman of scarcely guilded beginnings who could rise to challenge, if only briefly, the might of the guilds. But my mother was a guildswoman as well, and her loyalties were tugged both ways at the thought of a creature who had been able to use the magic as naturally as breathing, and yet who had led an uprising which had approached the walls of London. Still, if I held my breath for long enough and crossed all of my fingers under the blanket and squirmed my toes in my own youthful spell, the pleasure of telling a good story would generally win.
‘Goldenwhite—well, that wasn’t her real name. But no one knows what her real name was, or what part of England she came from, although a great many places claim her. Even the stupid people of Flinton with their dreadful slagheap up the road with nothing but coal in their ground claim that she was born there can you believe that? But anyway. Goldenwhite was sixteen when people realised she was a changeling, although she must have known long before that. You see, she was quite ordinary to look at, even if she was pretty, and in those days, they didn’t have a Day of Testing …’
So Goldenwhite fled into the forests which then still covered so much of this land. There, she talked with the beasts, and she forded streams, and made the strange acquaintance of the people who would become her band of followers; changelings and madmen, the deformed and denied, marts of every shape and kind—everyone, in fact, whom the guilds and aether had damaged and dispossessed. And, drifting out through the tree-hung mists, shy at first but gaining strength and beauty from her radiance, gathered the creatures of every legend. Robin Hood and Lancelot and the Lady of the Lake; Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel, the Lord of Misrule and the Green Man. They were all there.
‘Goldenwhite, she promised her people a kingdom, and it was both a new kingdom and an old one. In some stories, she called it Avalon, and in others they say it’s Albion, although that’s just another name for this country of ours. But in the best tales, the ones you hear around these parts, it’s Einfell, and it’s a place which lies next door to this world which Goldenwhite had somehow visited when she was young, and had brought some of its light back with her when she returned. Einfell, it glowed out of her smile, and was the reason people flocked to hear her voice and feel her gaze which was like sunlight ..
I willed on the procession of Goldenwhite’s so-called Unholy Rebellion as her ragged army tramped south and finally looked down on the walls of London from her encampment above it on the Kite Hills.
‘By then she had met Owd Jack. And Owd Jack was a changeling as well. He had torture marks on his hands—holes like wood knots—and there was a sort of blackness about him, but he seemed much like the sort of folk Goldenwhite already had with her, and she was happy to have him along. Owd Jack was her general, and the battles that she fought there and won, they were Owd Jack’s doing …’
That was as dark and as bloody as things ever got in the stories which my mother told me. There never was a final battle outside the walls of London when Owd Jack betrayed Goldenwhite and brought her in chains to the men of the guilds. In our tales, she never did burn at the stake in Clerkenwell. Instead, it was a joyous journey, filled with surprises and miracles,
Marvellous beasts rose from the soil like steam, there were fine white palaces, and beautiful plants jewelled every hillside …
‘So the Fairy Godmother appeared to Cinderella.’
‘Was she a changeling?’
A beat of pounding silence.
‘This is just a story, Robert.’
‘Then tell me something true. Tell me about Goldenwhite.’
‘Well …’
There was always both a smile and a hesitancy in my mother’s voice when she spoke about Goldenwhite up in my attic room. Like most working-class people, she harboured a fondness for the idea a woman of scarcely guilded beginnings who could rise to challenge, if only briefly, the might of the guilds. But my mother was a guildswoman as well, and her loyalties were tugged both ways at the thought of a creature who had been able to use the magic as naturally as breathing, and yet who had led an uprising which had approached the walls of London. Still, if I held my breath for long enough and crossed all of my fingers under the blanket and squirmed my toes in my own youthful spell, the pleasure of telling a good story would generally win.
‘Goldenwhite—well, that wasn’t her real name. But no one knows what her real name was, or what part of England she came from, although a great many places claim her. Even the stupid people of Flinton with their dreadful slagheap up the road with nothing but coal in their ground claim that she was born there can you believe that? But anyway. Goldenwhite was sixteen when people realised she was a changeling, although she must have known long before that. You see, she was quite ordinary to look at, even if she was pretty, and in those days, they didn’t have a Day of Testing …’
So Goldenwhite fled into the forests which then still covered so much of this land. There, she talked with the beasts, and she forded streams, and made the strange acquaintance of the people who would become her band of followers; changelings and madmen, the deformed and denied, marts of every shape and kind—everyone, in fact, whom the guilds and aether had damaged and dispossessed. And, drifting out through the tree-hung mists, shy at first but gaining strength and beauty from her radiance, gathered the creatures of every legend. Robin Hood and Lancelot and the Lady of the Lake; Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel, the Lord of Misrule and the Green Man. They were all there.
‘Goldenwhite, she promised her people a kingdom, and it was both a new kingdom and an old one. In some stories, she called it Avalon, and in others they say it’s Albion, although that’s just another name for this country of ours. But in the best tales, the ones you hear around these parts, it’s Einfell, and it’s a place which lies next door to this world which Goldenwhite had somehow visited when she was young, and had brought some of its light back with her when she returned. Einfell, it glowed out of her smile, and was the reason people flocked to hear her voice and feel her gaze which was like sunlight ..
I willed on the procession of Goldenwhite’s so-called Unholy Rebellion as her ragged army tramped south and finally looked down on the walls of London from her encampment above it on the Kite Hills.
‘By then she had met Owd Jack. And Owd Jack was a changeling as well. He had torture marks on his hands—holes like wood knots—and there was a sort of blackness about him, but he seemed much like the sort of folk Goldenwhite already had with her, and she was happy to have him along. Owd Jack was her general, and the battles that she fought there and won, they were Owd Jack’s doing …’
That was as dark and as bloody as things ever got in the stories which my mother told me. There never was a final battle outside the walls of London when Owd Jack betrayed Goldenwhite and brought her in chains to the men of the guilds. In our tales, she never did burn at the stake in Clerkenwell. Instead, it was a joyous journey, filled with surprises and miracles,