The Light Ages by Ian R. MacLeod Read Free Book Online Page A

with new healings and legends hatching at every milestone. The squirrels hopped from tree to tree and the birds sang above Goldenwhite’s lordly procession as the forest spread endlessly before them, its soft darkness laced with gold and shadow. Any moment now, the next turn or that afternoon at the latest, they would reach the place she spoke of, the place she promised, which wasn’t London at all, or even really England or Albion, but Einfell …
    My mother sat there for a long moment as the words fell away, the fingers of her left hand gently kneading the small grey scar on her palm which I had sometimes noticed but which she would never explain. The candle shifted and glinted. The songs and the forest receded. A dog down the street was barking, a baby was crying. The wind whispered in the tiles, gently stirring the attic cobwebs. And deep down, beneath everything, rising up through the bricks and timbers of Brickyard Row, was that other sound. SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM.
    ‘Tell me more.’
    She kissed my forehead and laid her fingers across my lips to silence me. Their tips flesh smelled faintly of the hearth. ‘You’ve had enough wonders for one night, Robert.’
    But I never had.
    Then there was a Midsummer Fair down on the rivermeads, and the heat in the house on that long-awaited summer’s morning, and sitting at the kitchen table, and studying my mother across its surface as she bustled about in her apron, and my wondering if she really would keep her promise to take me to see a real, live dragon. And then we’re outside in the simmering light, we’re down across the stone and liveiron bridge that gave this town its name—and standing on the far meadow on the quiet Nineshiftday before the Halfshiftday when the true glories of the fair will supposedly start. There are patched tents with sun—faded stripes. There are ropes of engine pipe coiled amid the cowpats like lost bits of intestine. There are shouts and sounds of hammering. There are wagons sprawled everywhere. The engines that will drive the rides, small things by the standards of Bracebridge, were slumbering and clacking, barely smoking, unattended by their masters. There was a sense that we’d come too early, that nothing was ready. Still, an aproned man took our money as, my left hand clutching my mother’s, my right a sticky ball of aniseed, we stumbled across the parched grass in search of my dragon.
    A smell of shit and fireworks as we stood before a large hutch propped on bricks amid spindly thorns in the corner of the field. The creature gazed back at us through the peeling wooden bars from its bed of damp newspaper. One eye was sheened with a silver cataract, but the other, greenish-gold and slotted like a goat’s, bore the dim light of something like intelligence. It yawned as it watched us, and its jaws made a crackling, splitting sound. Its teeth were rotten. A storm of flies buzzed up and re-settled as the thing stretched the cramped pinions of its wings. Its flesh wasn’t scaled, but grey, although patched with odd, sharp clumps of bristle.
    Was this a dragon? I trudged home, inconsolable. Father was still out, and Beth was at school, and the house felt stale and empty even as my mother banged the door behind her. Joining in my mouth and heart with the dull bitter taste of aniseed came a distant pounding.
    SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM.
    ‘Come on, Robert. It wasn’t that bad, was it? At least you saw the dragon. Tomorrow, the day after, we’d never have got through the crowds.’
    I shrugged, staring at the scars on the kitchen table. I didn’t know then how such brutes were created: that, in its way, it was a fine achievement for some beastmaster to have twisted the body of a cat or pig or dog or chicken so it grew to such an extent that its origins were almost unrecognisable. But I sensed that it represented an act of pollution—that it came from the very opposite of the fierce fires of aspiration from which, in the time and the place