It rumbled past. Big wheels. A big engine. It really did shake the earth. Then it stopped just a few yards past him, spitting and huffing, and a door at its back flung open.
"I'm guessing you're heading the same way that I am, Nathan Westover,” a voice called. “Why don't you give your feet a rest?"
Dazed, Nathan stepped out from the edge of the ditch. He climbed in.
"You look as if you've....” Grandmistress Smith's eyes traveled over him.
"It's been a hard season."
"That it has. I'm just back from London, from burying my husband. We'd grown fond of each other, contrary to how people talk, and he was a decent enough man. Neither do I make a habit of picking up men from the roadside on my travels, although I hear that's how the tale is told."
Nathan had heard no such tales, and his chest was proving difficult in the sudden change of air within this hot compartment which was padded with buttoned velvet, and lit from some strange source. The woman who sat opposite was dressed entirely in a shade of black far deeper than that he remembered she had once worn on her sole visit to his mill. No silks or trimmings. Her hair had dimmed as well; trails of gray smoked through it. Only the flame in her eyes was unchanged.
"I suppose,” she murmured, “you think we're deadly foes?"
"Isn't that what we are?"
She waved a hand. “Merely competitors, like your fellow millers. And it was never as if—"
"Fellow millers!” Nathan wheezed. He cleared his throat. “There are few enough of us."
"But when you say us, Nathan, why must you exclude me? We make the same product. I bid for the same grain in the same halls. And you and I.... There's a new science. It's called phrenology, and it allows you to determine a man's—I mean a person's—nature merely from studying the bumps on their head. I've had it done myself, and mine reveal me to be stubborn and obstinate, often far beyond my own good interests.” She attempted a smile. “And you....” She reached across the carriage. Her fingers brushed his bald scalp. “You're an easy subject now, Nathan. One hardly needs to be an expert to understand that you're much the same. And I suppose you remember that offer I made....” The steam carriage, which was a clumsy, noisy thing, jolted and jostled. “Of sharing our skills. It could still be done. Of course, I have to employ men from the new guilds to see to the many magics and technicalities of running a steam mill. In all their talk of pressures, recondensing, and strange spells—I can barely understand what they mean even when they're not talking the language of their guilds. Once, I could snap my fingers....” She did so now. There was no flame. “And that mill of yours. The dusty air—anyone can see what it's doing to you. We could still...."
She trailed off. The machine rumbled on through the night, splashing through puddles, trailing spark and flame.
"There's no point, you know,” she said eventually as they neared Stagsby. “You can't resist things that have already happened. Those men, the ones who give themselves that stupid name and are causing such damage. They imagine they're playing some game, but it isn't a game. The Enforcers will—"
"That's not what counts—someone has to put up a fight against steam!"
The lines deepened around her eyes. “You're not fighting steam, Nathan. What you're fighting is time itself."
* * * *
More than the grain and the flour, more even than the mill, the winds were Nathan's now. Work or no work, whatever the state of the air and the clouds, they encompassed him and the mill. He talked to them in their lean-to, unhooked them, stroked their bruised and swirling atmospheres, drew them out. As the rest of the world beyond his hilltop went on with whatever business it was now engaged in, Nathan's mill turned, and he turned with it. He laughed and he danced. Strident winds from a dark north bit his flesh and froze his heart. Lacy mares’ tails of spring kicked and frisked. His winds swirled around him in booming hisses as he sang out the spell that made them unbind, and they took hold of his and the mill's arms. In that moment of joyous release, it seemed to him that he was part of the air as well, and that the horizons had changed. There were glimpses of different Lincolnshires through their prism swirl. He saw the counterglow of brighter sunsets, the sheen of different moons. It reminded him of some time—impossible, he knew, too ridiculous to recall—when, godlike, he'd looked down on the brightly flowing tapestry of the entire universe, which spun like some great machine. He saw the ebb and flow of cities. He saw the coming of flame, and of ice, and the rise of vast mountains pushing aside the oceans. He saw glass towers and the shining movements of swift machines along shimmering highways of light. He believed he glimpsed heaven itself in the sunflash of silver wings amid the clouds. The visions faded as the mill took up the strain of the wind, but they never left him entirely. They and the winds returned to him as he lay on his bunk and snatched at flying fragments of impossible sleep. They came to him more quietly then, not with a scream and a screech and a growl, but in a murmur of forests, a sigh of deserts, a sparkle of waves, a soft frou of skirts. They breathed over him, and he breathed with them, and he let them lift him in their fragrant arms. In and out of his dreams, Nathan laughed and danced.
For all the many winds that he'd bought from wind-seller on his last visit, Nathan knew he'd been less than frugal in their use. Sometimes, on the days of hard sky and mirage earth, he'd look out for that characteristic silhouette climbing up the little-used path from the valley, but the man never came, and part of Nathan already knew that he never would—not because of the indiscreet questions he'd asked, nor for the money he now couldn't afford to give him, but because the man's trade was like that of the millers themselves, and was thus in decline. Why, Nathan had even heard it said that sailors, who were surely the other main market for the produce of the wind-seller's guild, were now installing clever and brassy devices on the decks of their ships that could summon a wind to fill the sails when there was no wind at all. Partly, that sounded like the blurry talk of smoky barrooms, but that, as far as Nathan could see, was how so much of the world had become. He still looked out for the wind-seller on those sour days of bad air that seemed to come all too frequently now, but he knew in his heart that a figure would never shape itself out of the smoke and haze of the valley below. Those last purchases, this marvelous glut, had been like the rush of flour in the chutes when the hoppers were nearly empty. Soon, all that would be left was dust.
Nathan horded his last winds as a starving man hordes his withering supplies. He toyed with them in his mind, carried them about with him, inspected them, sniffed them, sang to them, got the tang of their currents in his mouth. Still, the moment of their release had to come, and it was all over too quickly. And just how were they made—where were they from? The question might now seem immaterial, but it wouldn't let Nathan go. He studied the knots ever more carefully, not only for their feel and bluster, but also the exact nature of their bond. Of course, he'd always known how to undo them—that came to him as easily as winching a sack of grain—but their tying was something else. His fingers traced the long, wavering pattern, which he realized was always the same, no matter from what substance the knot was formed. He followed the kinks that were left in the exhausted scraps once the wind had gone. With so few left, and the wind-seller so absent, it even seemed worth trying to see if he couldn't capture a few small winds himself.
Small they were. He was sure that something vital was lacking even if, as the wind-seller himself had once seemed to say to him, that something had already been bled from the very ground. Still, and guilty though he felt, Nathan would sometimes desert his mill for a few hours to gather grasses, or wander the hedgerows of the landscapes below in search of strands of sheep's wool, deer pelt, castings of snake's skin: anything, in fact, that could reasonably be knotted, and through which the winds might once have blown. The knots strained his fingers. They hurt at his heart. They blurred before his eyes. Yet, whatever it was that might once have been trapped within them wasn't entirely lost, for when he undid them, they would le
t out a sigh, the breath of lost season's air. Never sufficient to drive anything as big as his mill, but enough to bring an ease to his breathing on the most difficult nights when his lungs seemed to close up inside him, and to add some flare and spectacle to the conflagrations wrought by the Men of the Future.
Although the wind-seller never came, Burlish Mill had other visitors now. Men with canes and women with extravagant hats, borne almost all the way to Stagsby from the midland cities, first class, would climb Burlish Hill on summer afternoons and smilingly ask what exactly the cost was for a guided tour. He was slightly less brusque with the painter who lumbered all the way up the slope with his boxes, canvases and easel, but all his talk of setting down for posterity was off-putting, and Nathan sent him back down as well. Dismissed, too, was the man who lumbered up with a wooden box set with a staring glass eye, within which, bizarrely, he claimed he could trap and frame light itself.
His trips to Donna Nook had grown less regular, and the last occasion he chose to see his mother was the sort of bitter, windy winter's day when he'd have spilled the hoppers with the sacks of grist he knew his mill longed for, had he any left. After the confinement of the train, he'd hoped that the air along the coast would make his breathing easier, but he felt as if he was fighting some new, alien substance as he hunched toward the old hop warehouse, which now had sand sliding in through its lower windows. His mother wasn't up in her little room, and the fire was out. Stumbling, wandering, he finally found her hunched and gazing seaward from the crest of a dune. Her body was dusted, as if by a coating of the finest and lightest of flours, with a layer of frost.
Now, the nights when he did the work of the Men of the Future were his only escape from the needs of the mill. More and more, he came to think of the world beyond Burlish Hill as a dark and moonless place, erupting with hot iron and black mountains of clinker and coal. The Men of the Future had grown better organized, and the targets of their visitations were kept secret from all but a select inner group to which Nathan had no desire to belong. He was happy, although he knew that happy wasn't really the word, simply to meet in some scrap of wood or of heath, and to take the long, silent march toward another citadel of smoke and fire. There were so many of them now, and with so many purposes. Not just weaving and milling, but threshing, road-making and metal-beating: so many new technologies and spells. Sawmills were powered by steam—printing presses, even—and with each threatened trade came a swelling of their ranks. Pale, slim-faced men from far towns, workers with skills that Nathan couldn't even guess at, were taking charge, and they knew far better than their country colleagues how best to destroy a steam-driven machine. It wasn't about sledgehammers or pickaxes, or even explosives. Such brutal treatments were time-consuming, inefficient, and loud. Far better, they murmured in their slurring accents, to use the powers and magics of the devices themselves. Nathan could appreciate the cunning of setting a millstone turning so its two faces tore and clashed themselves apart. Could see, as well, how clever it was to put lime in a cold furnace, or molasses in a water vat, although some of the more arcane skills that these men then started to use, the muttering of short phrases, the leaving of scrolls of symbols that caused machines and furnaces to break apart when they were restarted, seemed too close to mimicking the work of the new steam guilds themselves. But something had to be done, and they were doing it, and these new Men of the Future continued to encourage the use of the small winds Nathan brought himself. Not that they were essential, he understood, to the work in hand, but their ghostly torrents, which lit up these damnable mills and factories with strange, fresh atmospheres, had become something of a signature of their work across Lincolnshire.
The nights when they met were never ordinary. There was always a similar mix of fear and hopeful excitement. They were, Nathan sometimes reflected, like midnight versions of the summer trips that families from the cities took on the railways to the lakes, the hills, the coast. Some Men of the Future even caught the day's last train to get to their next meeting place, then the morning's milk run to head back home again, and here they all were tonight, gathered once again in some typically remote spot, although the distance of travel had been much shorter than usual for Nathan. He even knew the farmer on whose land they were now standing; he'd once been a good source of trade.
Faces down, backs hunched, the Men of the Future shuffled toward their target in wary silence. As ever, the night was moonlessly dark, but to Nathan these were familiar roads. He didn't count himself a fool, and had long anticipated the night when they would head toward Stagsby. A year or two before, he'd have probably left them to get on with their work and returned to his mill, or perhaps even tried to persuade them to wreck a different machine. Not now. When he was heading home through a gray dawn after one conflagration, a passing grain merchant had halted the hairless beasts drawing his wagon to ask the way to Stagsby's Mill. Nathan knew from the scent of the sacks alone that here were several days’ work of good barley, and offered the man an uncharacteristically cheery good morning. The merchant stopped him short when he began his directions. He was looking, of course, for the steam mill down in the valley; not that other thing—just a relic, wasn't it?—up on the hill.
Burlish Hill was nothing more than a presence in the darkness as the Men of the Future passed through the village, where no murmurs were made, no lights were shown. Then came a faint gleam of iron as they met the closed gates of Stagsby Mill. But, just as Nathan had witnessed before, one of the thin-faced men at the head of their procession murmured cooingly to the bolt, and the metal wilted and the gates swung open.
There was no lawn, no trees, only bricks and mud, now at Stagsby Hall. But Nathan, as he turned and blundered into the men around him, couldn't help remembering, couldn't help trying to look. This was the most dangerous time of their work. One night, there would surely be mantraps, men with guns, regiments of Enforcers, or those poisonously fanged beasts like giant dogs, which were called balehounds. Indeed, many of the Men of the Future, especially those of the old kind, would have relished a fight, and there was a brief flurry when the eyes of some living beast were sighted in the pall of dark. Then came suppressed laughter, the glint of smiles. Nothing more than a donkey, old and mangy, tethered to an iron hoop. Once again, their secrecy seemed to have held.
The Men of the Future reached the doors of the machine itself, which gave as easily as had every other barrier. Inside, there was a warmth and a gleam to the dark. The furnace was still murmuring, kept banked up with enough coal to see it through to next morning without the need to relight. There was living heat, too, in the pipes that Nathan's hands touched. He'd been in enough of such buildings by now for some aspects to seem less strange, but this one, especially when the doors of the furnace were thrown open and light gusted out, stirred deeper thoughts. After all, grain was ground here. Although this place was alien to him, aspects of it—the strew of sacks, the smell of half-fermented husks, the barrels of water with their long-handled scoops for damping down—were entirely familiar. But there was something else as well. Nathan sniffed and touched. He was so absorbed in whatever he was thinking that he crashed his head on a beam and let out a surprised shout. Faces glared. Voices shushed him. Rubbing his bare forehead, he realized what it was. This place was cramped, awkward, and messy compared to some of the machines they'd recently targeted. After all, Stagsby Mill had been working down in this valley for almost twenty years, and was getting old.
He watched as the thin men set to their work, quietly shoveling coal into the furnace, stoking up its heat, whilst others of their ilk smirkingly tended to the taps and levers that controlled pressure and heat, murmuring their own secret spells. The heat grew more solid. New energies began to infuse the bricks and irons of the engine house. The main rocker let out a protracted groan. A hiss, a gesture of quick hands, and Nathan was summoned toward the glare of the furnace. The wind that he held in his hands was one of his own best gatherings—just a few looped wisps of seed-headed grass, b
ut it felt soft and sharp as summer sunlight—and he felt sad to release it, much though he knew that it had to be done. Teeth of flame gnashed as he tossed it into the glowing mouth. The furnace gave a deep roar. Coughing and gasping, he was shoved back.
The Men of the Future were in a rush now, but eager and excited as they bustled out. Back in the safety of the cool darkness, they turned and looked, shading their eyes from the open enginehouse door's gathering blaze. There were jeers and moans of disappointment when a shadow blocked the space ahead; some idiot was standing too close and spoiling the show.
"Martin, Arthur, Josh!"
A woman's voice, of all things, although none of them recognized the names she called. When she called them again, and added a few others, along with some hells and goddammits for good measure, it became apparent that she hadn't expected to find herself alone. There was derisory laughter. So much for the hired thugs and the balehounds, although, as Grandmistress Fiona Smith stepped across the puddled mud toward the gaggle of men who hung back in the deeper darkness, it became apparent that she was holding a gun.
"You're trespassing! I warn you—I'll use this thing....” The gun was hefted, although it was plainly an old device. “This isn't just filled with swan shot."
The laughter grew louder. This was all simply adding to the show. The grandmistress glanced back when sudden light speared from every aperture of the building behind her.
"What exactly have you done to my—"
Then the entire engine house exploded.
Nathan ran, fighting his way through the searing air, the falling bricks and earth. The blaze was incredible—it was like battling against the sun. A figure lay ahead of him, although it shifted and shimmered in a wild dance of flame and smoke. He grabbed it, drew it up, hauling it and himself across the burning earth that seemed to be turning endlessly against him until, finally, he sensed some diminution of the incredible heat. Coughing, gasping, he laid Fiona Smith down on the rubble and mud beside what had once been the lake of Stagsby Hall. The water was scummed now, licked into rainbow colors by the leaping flames at his back, but he fumblingly attempted to scoop some of it over her blackened and embered flesh before he saw that it was already too late. Little flamelets and puffs of smoke played over Fiona Smith's charred body, but the fire was leaving her eyes. He leaned close, hands moving amid the glowing remains of her hair, and in that last flicker of her gaze, there came what might have been a twinge of recognition, then a final gasping shudder of what felt like release, relief. Nathan's hands still twined. Looking down, he saw that his hands had unconsciously drawn a knot in the last unsinged twine of Fiona Smith's glorious red hair.
FSF Magazine, May 2007 Page 5