Free The Light Ages by Ian R. MacLeod

with the heads of dogs chewed at corpses. Creatures with pendulous breasts and faces like melting lanterns flew on broomsticks through the air. The print beside it was dense, and filled with funny f s and s es. One page had a bigger illustration of what I thought at first was a flower until I saw that what I’d imagined to be the stamen was a figure writhing at a stake amid the black petals of flames.
    ‘What’s that you’re looking at?’ With a quick movement, Annalise snatched the book away. She studied the title on the spine. ‘Compendium Maleficarum … That’s all so out of date.’ With an effortless gesture, she tossed it so far across the library that it seemed to vanish into the moted air. Then she stood up, hands on hips, giving me a grey glimpse of her knickers. ‘Well? Are you coming?’
    I followed as she pushed open a window then dropped down into the wilderness gardens outside. Here, more of the crystal piled amid the flowerbeds in the clear afternoon air, a dense foam amid which great-headed chrysanthemums nodded and roses bloomed. Annalise grabbed a peach from the bough of a tree which was like a glittering white umbrella. Knocking the encrusted fruit against a red brick wall, cracking it open like a nut, she tossed it to me. Juice flooded my palm as I bit into it.
    ‘You can learn all sorts of interesting things from books without having to go anywhere,’ Annalise said matter-of-factly as we sat down on a lawn beside the silvered mass of a fountain. ‘I mean, I could tell you more about that thingamajig place where you live—’
    ‘—Bracebridge—’
    ‘—from a book than you’d ever find out just by living there.’
    I shrugged, plucking at the daisied grass.
    ‘And then of course, there’s all the other things that people get up to.’ Annalise hugged her knees. ‘Men and women, I mean. When they want to rub up against each other and make babies.’
    ‘I know all about that. Still,’ I conceded, ‘you can tell me if you like.’
    ‘Well …’ Annalise leaned back on her elbows and studied the sky, her hair falling pale gold now, almost like the foam, her dress nearly managing to be white. She was completely unembarrassed by her subject—but at the same time, she clearly understood that what she knew was well worth telling. I supposed, watching her as she talked, that she couldn’t have been totally isolated here. But, as the grass shone and the widows of the warty house glowed, as Annalise’s explanation of the act of human reproduction ranged bizarrely over the complicated terrain of some language that she had taken from those books, I didn’t want our shared afternoon to be anything other than totally unique.
    ‘Then the labia minor … And thus engorging the corpora cavernosa … Whilst attaching to the non-striated ..
    I listened, genuinely absorbed by the sound of these, long, lovely, intricate words which spoke of rituals far more exotic than I could imagine the adults of Bracebridge—let alone my own parents—performing. Her voice was slightly breathless, high-pitched, and suffused with an odd personal accent that didn’t belong to any particular time or place.
    ‘Of course, the zygote ..
    And as she talked, leaning into the sunlight beside that fountain which sparked and gushed in frozen waves, the off-white strap of her dress slipped from her shoulder. Her skin there looked almost clean and was flecked with golden hairs. Annalise had stopped talking. She looked at me for a moment, blinked, then yanked up her dress. She jumped up and walked off down the sloping garden, where lumpy balustrades gave way to a steeper drop. I scampered to catch up with her, grabbing branches, leaping from rock to root.
    ‘It wasn’t always like this,’ she called as I crashed after her. ‘Lots and lots of people used to live here. It was probably much bigger than Bracebridge …’
    There had, indeed, once been a village beside the river down below this big house, although it was