The afternoon—for the villagers, at least—passed in a timeless, happy whirl. Much beer and wine was drunk, and the children's livid cordials seemed equally intoxicating. Trees were climbed; many by those old enough to know better. Stones, and a few of the silver trays, were skimmed across the lake. Then, yet more food was borne out from the house in the shape of an almost impossibly large and many-tiered cake. The huge creation was set down in the shade of one of the largest of the oaks that circled the lawns. Nodding, nudging, murmuring, the villagers clustered around it. The thing was ornamented with scrolls and flowers, pillared like a cathedral, then spired with fourteen candles, each of which the servants now solemnly lit.
An even deeper sigh than that which had signaled the lighting of the cake passed through the crowd as Fiona Smith emerged into the space that had formed around it. Nathan hadn't consciously noticed her presence before that moment. Now that he had, though, he was immensely struck by it. He and many of his classmates were already taller and stronger than the parents whose guilds they would soon be joining. Some were already pairing off and walking the lane together, as the local phrase went, and even Nathan had noticed that some of the girls were no longer merely girls. But none of them had ever looked anything remotely like Fiona Smith did today.
Although the dress she wore was similar in style to those many of the other women were wearing, it was cut from a substance that made it hard to divine its exact color, such was its shimmer and blaze. Her thick red hair, which Nathan previously dimly remembered as tied back in a ponytail, fell loose around her shoulders, and also possessed a fiery glow. It was as if an entirely different Fiona Smith had suddenly emerged before this cake, and the candle flames seemed to flare as though drawn by an invisible wind even before she had puffed out her cheeks. Then she blew, and all but one of them flattened and died, and their embers sent up thirteen trails of smoke. Smiling, she reached forward as if to pinch out the last remaining flame. But as she raised her hand from it, the flame still flickered there, held like a blazing needle between her finger and thumb. Then, with a click of her fingers, it was gone. The entire oak tree gave a shudder in the spell's aftermath and a few dry leaves and flakes of bark drifted down, some settling on the cake. The villagers were already wandering back across the lawn, muttering and shaking their heads, as the servants began to slice the object up into spongy yellow slices. They were unimpressed by such unwanted displays of guild magic, and by then, no one was feeling particularly hungry.
Without understanding quite how it had happened, Nathan found that he and Fiona Smith were standing alone beside the remains of the cake.
"You're from up there, aren't you?” She nodded through the boughs toward the mill. “Bet you'd rather be there now, eh, with the sails turning? Instead of down here watching a good day go to waste."
Although it was something he wouldn't have readily admitted, Nathan found himself nodding. “It was clever,” he said, “what you did with that cake."
She laughed. “All those faces, the way they were staring! I felt I had to do something or I'd explode. Tell you what, why don't we go and have a look at your mill?"
Nathan shifted his feet. “I'm not sure. My father doesn't like strangers hanging around working machinery and it's your birthday party and—"
"I suppose you're right. Tell you what, there's some of my stuff I can show you instead."
Dumbly, Nathan followed Fiona Smith up toward the many-windowed house, and then through a studded door. The air inside was close and warm, and there were more rooms than he could count, or anyone could possibly want to live in, although most of the furniture was covered in sheets. It was as if the whole place had been trapped in some hot and dusty snowfall.
"Here.” Fiona creaked open a set of double doors. The room beyond had a high blue ceiling, decorated with cherubs and many-pointed stars. “This....” She shook out a huge, crackling coffin of packaging that lay scattered amid many other things on the floor. “This is from Father. Ridiculous, isn't it?” A sprawled china corpse stared up at them with dead glass eyes. Nathan had always thought dolls ridiculous, although this one was big and impressive. “At least, I think it's from him. His handwriting's terrible and I can't read the note."
"Your father's not here?"
"Not a chance. He'll be in London at one of his clubs."
"London?"
"It's just another place, you know.” Shrugging, Fiona aimed a kick at the doll. “And he's decided I can't stay here at school, either, or even in Stagsby. In fact, I'm sure he'd have decided that long ago if he'd remembered. That's why everyone's here today—and why I'm wearing this stupid dress. It's to remind you of who I'm supposed to be before I get dragged to some ridiculous academy for so-called young ladies."
Fiona crossed the room's considerable space toward the largest of all the sheeted objects which, as she tugged at its dusty coverings, revealed itself to be an enormous bed. Enameled birds fluttered up from its silken turrets as if struggling to join the room's starry sky. Nathan had seen smaller houses.
"This used to be Mother's bedroom. I'd come and just talk to her in here when she was ill from trying to have a son. Of course, it didn't work, so now my father's stuck with a girl for an heir unless he goes and gets married again, which he says will be when Hell freezes."
"All of this will end up as yours?"
Fiona gazed around, hands on hips. “I know what you're thinking, but my father says we're in debt up to our eyeballs. I'm sure that you Westovers have far more money than we Smiths, with that mill of yours. My grandfather, now, he was the clever one. Had a real business mind. He was a proper master smithy. He was high up in the guild, but he still knew how to work a forge. He used to show me things. How to stoke a furnace, the best spells for the strongest iron...."
"And that trick with the flame?"
Fiona looked at Nathan and smiled. Her eyes were a cool blue-green. He'd never felt such a giddy sense of sharing, not even when he was working hard at the mill. “I'll show you his old room,” she murmured.
Up wide, white marble stairways, past more sheeted furniture and shuttered windows, the spaces narrowed. Nathan caught glimpses through windows of the lake, the lawns, Burlish Hill, and then the lake again as they climbed a corkscrew of stairs. Cramped and stuffed with books, papers, cabinets, the attic they finally reached was quite unlike the great rooms below. Fiona struggled with a shutter, flinging sunlight in a narrow blaze. Nathan squinted, blinked, and gave a volcanic sneeze.
She laughed. “You're even dustier than this room!"
Standing in this pillar of light, Nathan saw that he was, indeed, surrounded by a nebulous, floating haze. “It's not dust,” he muttered. It was a sore point; the children at school often joked about his powdery aura. “It's flour."
"I know.” Something fluttered inside his chest as she reached forward to ruffle his hair, and more of the haze blurred around him. “But you're a master miller—or you will be. It's part of what you are. Now look."
After swiping a space clear on a sunlit table, Fiona creaked open the spines of books that were far bigger and stranger in their language than the mill's Thesaurus of spells. The same warm fingers that he could still feel tingling across his scalp now traveled amid the symbols and diagrams. Guilds kept their secrets, and he knew she shouldn't be showing him these things, but nevertheless he was drawn.
"This is how you temper iron.... This is an annealing spell, of which there are many....” A whisper of pages. “And here, these are the names for fire and flames. Some of them, anyway. For there's always something different every time you charge a furnace, put a spark to a fire, light a candle, even."
Nathan nodded. All of this was strange to him, but he understood enough to realize that flames were like the wind to Fiona Smith, and never stayed the same.
"Not that my father's interested. He likes to joke about how he got through his grandmaster exams just because of the family name. And I'm a woman, so there's no way I can become a smith
y....” She grew quiet for a moment, the sunlight steaming in copper glints across her hair as she gazed down at the vortex of flame that filled the page.
"What'll you do instead?"
"I don't know.” She looked up at him, fists balled on the table, her face ablaze. “That's the frustrating thing, Nathan. These of all times. All the old spells, you know, the stupid traditions, the mumbling and the superstitions and the charms and the antique ways of working, all of that's on the way out. Modern spells aren't about traditional craftsmen—not when you can mine the magic right out of the ground. That's what they're doing now, in places up north like Redhouse and Bracebridge, they're drawing it out of the solid earth almost like they extract coal or salt or tar or saltpeter."
Nathan nodded. He knew such things as mere facts, but he'd never heard anyone speak about them—or, indeed many other things—with such passion.
"I'm lucky. That's what my grandfather used to say. I'm lucky, to be living in this time.” She shook her head and chuckled. “The future's all around us, just like the world you must be able to see from up on your hill. And this, now this....” She pushed aside the book, and took down a large and complex-looking mechanism from a shelf. “He made this himself as his apprentice piece."
It took up most of the table, and consisted of a variety of ceramic marbles set upon a complex-looking arrangement of arms and gears, all widely spaced around a larger and even brighter central orb that might have been made of silver, gold, or some yet more dazzling metal.
"It's an orerry—a model of the universe itself. These are the planets, this is the sun. These tiny beads are the major stars. See...” As she leaned forward, their blaze was reddened and brightened by the fall of her hair. “This is where we are, Nathan. You and I and everyone else, even the Hottentot heathens. This is our planet and it's called Earth...."
Nathan watched as her hands, her hair, fluttered from light to dark amid all this frail and beautiful machinery, and his thoughts, and his lungs and his heart and his stomach, fluttered with them. Although he had no great care for matters of philosophy, he couldn't help feeling that he was witnessing something exotic and forbidden in this strangely Godlike view of the universe that Fiona Smith was describing. But it was thrilling as well.
"Now watch."
Leaning down close to the table, afloat in sunlight, she puffed her cheeks and blew just as she had blown at her birthday cake. But now, smoothly, silently, the planets began to turn.
"You try."
She made a space and Nathan shuffled close. Then, as conscious of the warmth of Fiona's presence beside him as he was of the blaze of the sun, he bent down and he blew.
"Is that how it really works?"
She laughed. “You of all people, Nathan, up on that hill, should understand."
Silently, seemingly with a will of its own, in gleam and flash of planets and their wide-flung shadows, the orerry continued to spin. Nathan watched, willing the moment to continue, willing it never to stop. But, slowly, finally, it did. It felt as if some part of his head was still spinning as, dazed, he helped Fiona close the shutter and followed her back down the stairways and along the corridors of her huge house. Everything, the sheeted furniture, the hot air, seemed changed. Outside, even the sun was lower, and redder, and it threw strange, long shadows as it blazed across the lawn. The world, Nathan thought for one giddy moment, really has turned.
* * * *
A space of desk near the back of the class at the village school lay empty when Nathan and his classmates returned to school, although there was nothing particularly remarkable in that. Soon, they all were leaving, drawn into the lives, trades, and responsibilities for which they had always been destined, and Fiona Smith's birthday party, if it was remembered at all, was remembered mostly for the drink and the food.
The windmill up on Burlish Hill turned, and the seasons turned with it. More and more, Nathan was in charge, and he sang to the mill the complex spells that his father's voice could no longer carry. The only recreation he consciously took was in the choir at church. Opening his lungs to release the sweet, husky tenor that had developed with the stubble on his cheeks, looking up at the peeling saints and stars, it seemed to him that singing to God the Elder and singing to the mill were much the same thing. Instead of calling in at the pub afterward, or lingering on the green to play football, he hurried straight back up Burlish Hill, scanning the horizon as he did so.
He could always tell exactly how well the mill was grinding, and the type of grain that was being worked, merely from the turn of its sails, but there was a day as he climbed up the hill when something seemed inexplicably wrong. Certainly nothing as serious as a major gear slipping, but the sweep of the sails didn't quite match the sweet feel of the air. He broke into a run, calling to his mother as he climbed up through the stairs and ladders inside the mill. The main sacking floor was engulfed in a gray storm, with flour everywhere, and more and more of it sifting down the chutes. Hunched within these clouds, gasping in wracking breaths, Nathan's father was a weary ghost.
Feeble though he was, the miller resisted Nathan's and his mother's attempts to bear him out into the clear air. He kept muttering that a miller never leaves his mill, and struggled to see to the rest of the sacks before the wind gave, even though the batch was already ruined. Finally, though, they persuaded him to take to his bed, which lay on a higher floor of the mill, and he lay there for several days, half-conscious and half-delirious, calling out spells to his machine, which still creaked and turned between periodic, agonizing bouts of coughing.
As poor luck would have it, the winds then fell away. It grew hot as well. The skies seemed to slam themselves shut. Much more now for the sake of his father than for the mill itself, Nathan longed for a breeze. He searched for the hidden key to the lean-to, and he found it easily in a tin of nails; just the sort of place he'd never before have thought to look. The few knots left inside the small, close space hung like dried-up bats on their iron hooks, and part of Nathan felt that he had never seen anything so weathered and useless, and part of him already felt the strange, joyous surge of the winds that each clever knot contained. There were no spells in the miller's Thesaurus to tell him how to unbind a trapped wind, nor the sounds that he should make as he did it, but doing so came to him easily as laughing and crying as he stood on the millstone floor. The air changed in a clamor of groans. The mill's sails creaked and bit and turned. At last, there was work to be done, and Nathan got on with doing it with a happier heart. He knew without climbing the ladders that his father's breathing would be easier, now that the mill was working properly all around him once again.
Although he was too exhausted to make use of it, Nathan released another wind at twilight purely for the glory of feeling the pull and draft of it through all the mill's leaky slats and floors. More than usually, this one lived up to the wind-seller's tales of bright spring mornings and the shift of grass over cloud-chased hills. When Nathan finally climbed the ladders to see his father, his mother—who had sat all day beside him—was smiling through her tears. He took the old man's hand and felt its hot lightness, and the calluses that years of handling sacks and winches had formed, and the smooth soft gritting of flour that coated every miller's flesh, and he smiled and he cried as well. They sat through the old man's last night together, breathing the moods of the mill, watching the turn of the stars through the hissing swoop of its sails.
* * * *
Nathan's mother went to live in an old warehouse beside the dunes at Donna Nook, which had once stored southern hops before the channels had silted up. He visited her there on saints’ days, taking the early milk wagon and walking the last miles across the salt flats. Although she was wheezy herself now, and easily grew tired, she seemed happy enough there spending her days talking of brighter, breezier hours, and better harvests, to the widows of other millers. In those days, the Guild of Millers still took care of its own, but of course there were no master millers there. Nathan knew, had long kno
wn, that a miller never left his mill.
But he was a master miller now—even if the ceremony of his induction that he'd envisaged taking place beneath the golden roof of some great guild chapel had dwindled to a form signed in triplicate—and he gloried in that fact. Heading back from Donna Nook toward Burlish Hill in darkness, he would find his mill waiting for him, ticking, creaking, sighing in its impatience to take hold of the breeze. Often, he sang to it out loud even when no spells were needed. It was only when he was with other people, he sometimes reflected, that he ever felt alone.
The mill was Nathan's now, and that made up for most things, even though there was less and less time for the choir. The spells in those whispering books, and every creak and mood and scent and flavor, every seed of corn and every grain of flour it produced, shaped his life. When he rested at all, it was merely to taste the breeze as he stood on top of Burlish Hill. From there, on the clearest of days, you really could see all of Lincolnshire, and gaze down at the huddled roofs of Stagsby, and the rippling windflash of the lake that lay beside the closed and shuttered windows of Stagsby Hall.
Everyone remarked on Nathan Westover's energy in the seasons that followed. Millers were never known to take an easy bargain, but few drove them as hard as he did. Farmers and grain dealers might have gone elsewhere, but here was a miller who worked to whatever deadline you set him, and never let any of the sacks spoil. On nights of full moon, you could look up and see the sails still turning. It seemed as if he never slept, and then he was to be seen early next morning at the grain markets at Alford and Louth, making deals to buy and sell flour on his own account, driving more and more those notoriously hard bargains, clapping backs and shaking hands in ways that earned money, but also respect.
FSF Magazine, May 2007 Page 2