Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod

by Ian R. MacLeod

  Although it took him most of his life to know it, Nathan Westover was the last of the master millers on Burlish Hill. Growing up, he never imagined that anything could change. The endless grinding, mumbling sound of the mill in motion was always there, deep within in his bones.

  He was set to watch a pulley which was threatening to slip.

  “See, how it sits, and that band of metal helps keep it in place…” His mother, who often saw to the lesser workings of the mill, explained. “It’s been doing that for longer than I and your father can remember. Now, it’s getting near the end of its life…” The pulley turned, the flour hissed, the windmill rumbled, and this small roller spun on in slightly stuttering way. “…and we can’t stop the mill from working when we’re this busy just to get it fixed. So we need someone to keep watch—well, more than simply watch—over it. I want you to sing to that roller to help keep this pulley turning and in place. Do you understand?”

  Nathan nodded, for the windmill was always chanting its spells from somewhere down in its deep-throated, many-rumbling voice, and now his mother took up a small part of the song in her own soft voice, her lips shaping the phrases of a machine vocabulary, and he joined in, and the roller and the pulley’s entire mechanism revolved more easily.

  Soon, Nathan was performing more and more of these duties. He even learned how to sing some of the larger spells which kept the mill turning, and then grew strong enough to lift a full sack of grain. He worked the winches, damped the grist, swept the chutes, oiled the workings. He loved the elegant way in which the mill always re-balanced itself through weights, lengths, numbers, quantities. Fifteen men to dig a pit thus wide down at school in the village meant nothing to him, but he solved problems which had anything to do with grain, flour, or especially the wind, in his dreams.

  Sometimes there were visits from the rotund men who represented the county branch of the Millers’ Guild. On these occasions, everything about the mill had to be just so—the books up to date, the upper floors brushed and the lower ones waxed and the sails washed and all the ironwork shiny black as new boots—but Nathan soon learned that these men liked the mill to be chocked, braked and disengaged, brought to a total stop. To them, it was a dead thing within a frozen sky, and he began to feel the same contempt for his so-called guild-masters which any self-respecting miller felt.

  On the mill’s third floor, above the account books with their pots of green and red ink, and set back in a barred recess, leaned a three volume Thesaurus of spells. One quiet day at the end of the spring rush when sails ticked and turned themselves in slow, easy sweeps, his father lifted them down, and blew off a coating of the same pale dust which, no matter how often things were swept and aired, soon settled on everything within the mill.

  “This, son…” He cleared his throat. “Well, you already know what these are. One day, these books will be yours. In a way, I suppose they already are…”

  The yellowed pages rippled and snickered. Just like the mill itself, they didn’t seem capable of remaining entirely still, and were inscribed with the same phonetic code which Nathan saw stamped, carved or engraved on its beams, spars and mechanisms. There were diagrams. Hand-written annotations. Darker smudges and creases lay where a particularly useful spell had been thumbed many times. Through the mill’s hazy light, Nathan breathed it all in. Here were those first phrases his mother had taught him when he tended that pulley, and the longer and more complex melodies which would keep back those four apocalyptic demons of the milling industry, which were: weevils, woodworm, fire and rats. As always with things pertaining to the mill, Nathan felt that he was rediscovering something he already knew.

  There were slack times and there were busy times. Late August, when the farmers were anxious to get their summer wheat ground and bagged, and when the weather was often cloudless and still, was one of the worst. It was on such late, hot, airless days, with the land spread trembling and brown to every cloudless horizon, and the mill whispering and creaking in dry gasps, that the wind-seller sometimes came to Burlish Hill.

  Nathan’s father would already be standing and waiting, his arms folded and his fists bunched as he watched as a small solitary figure emerge from the faded shimmer of the valley. The wind seller was small and dark, and gauntly pale. He wore creaking boots, and was wrapped in a cloak of a shade of grey almost as thunderous as that of the sack he carried over his thin shoulders, within which he bore his collection of winds.

  “So this’ll be the next one, eh?” He peered forward to study Nathan with eyes which didn’t seem to blink, and Nathan found himself frozen and speechless until his father’s hand drew him away.

  “Just stick to business, wind-seller, shall we?”

  It was plain that his father didn’t particularly like this man. After all, every miller worth his salt prided himself on making the best of every kind of weather, come storm or calm, glut or shortage. Still, as he unshouldered his sack and tipped out a spill of frayed knots, and especially on a such a hot and hopeless day as this, it was impossible not to want to lean forwards, not to want to breathe and feel and touch.

  “Here, try this one…” Spidery fingers rummaged with the hissing, whispering, pile to extract the grey strands of what looked, Nathan thought, exactly like the kind of dirty sheep’s wool you saw snagged and fluttering on a bare hedge on the darkest of winter days. “…That’s a new, fresh wind from the east. Cut through this summer fug clean as a whistle. Sharp as a lemon, and twice as sweet. Delicate, yes, but good and strong as well. Turn these sails easy as ninepence.”

  Already, Nathan could taste the wind, feel it writhing and alive. Slowly, reluctantly, his father took the strand in his own hands, and the wind-seller’s mouth twitched into something which was neither a smile or a grin. “And this one…Now this will really get things going. Tail end of a storm, tail end of night, tail end of winter. Can really feel a bite of frost in there, can’t you? ’Course, she’s a bit capricious, but she’s strong as well, and cool and fresh…”

  It was nothing but some bits of old willow bark, torn loose in a storm and dampened by trembling puddles, but already the windmill’s sails gave a yearning creak. Nathan’s father might grumble and shake his head, but the haggling which followed all of this conspicuous advertisement was always disappointingly brief. They all knew, had known since before the wind-seller’s shape had first untwisted itself from the haze of the valley, that—strange things though they were, the knotted breath of forgotten days—he would have to buy some of these winds.

  Although no one else believed them, master millers swore they could taste the flavour of the particular wind which from which any batch of flour had been turned. The wind prevails from the east on Burlish Hill, unrolling with a tang of salt and sea-brightness from the blustery North Sea, but no wind is ever the same, and every moment of every day in which it blows is different, and setting the mill to just the right angle to take it was, to Nathan’s mind, the greatest skill a master miller possessed. Even as you sang to your mill and anchored it down, it responded and took up the ever-changing moods of the wind in her sails. But the feelings and flavours which came from the wind seller’s winds were different again. On dead, dry afternoons when the sky was hard as beaten pewter, Nathan’s father would finally give up whatever makeweight task he was performing and grumblingly go to unlock the lean-to at the mill’s back to where he kept the wind-seller’s winds.

  The things looked as ragged now then they had when they fell from the wind-seller’s sack—nothing more than dangling bits of old sea-rope, the tangled vines of some dried-up autumn, the tattered remains of long-forgotten washing—but each was knotted using complex magics, and what else were they to do, on such a day as this? Already writhing and snapping around them—grey, half felt, half seen, and straining to be released—was the longed-for presence of some kind of wind. Up in the creaking stillness of the main millstone floor, and with a shine in his eyes which spoke somehow both of expectation and defeat, his father would b
reak apart the knot with his big miller’s hands, and, in a shouting rush, the wind that it contained would be released. Instantly, like the opening of an invisible door, the atmosphere within the mill was transformed. Beams creaked in the changed air and the sails swayed, inching at first as the main axle bit the breakwheel and the breakwheel bore down against the wallower which transported the wind’s gathering breath down through all the levels of the mill. The further sky, the whole spreading world, might remain trapped in the same airless day. But the dry grass on Burlish Hill shifted and silvered, and the mill signalled to every other hilltop that at least here, here on this of all days, there was enough wind to turn its sails.

  The winds themselves were often awkward and capricious things; unseasonably hot and dry, awkwardly damp and grey. They seemed to come, in that they came from anywhere at all, from points of the compass which lay beyond north and south, east or west. Even as they began gladly heaving the contents of all the waiting sacks into the chutes, the atmosphere within the mill on those days remained strange. Looking out though the turning sails, Nathan half-expected to see changed horizons; to find the world re-tilted in some odd and awkward way. Lying in his bunk in the still nights afterwards when the winds had blown themselves out, he pictured the wind-seller wandering the grey countrysides of some land of perpetual autumn, furtively gathering and knotting the lost pickings of a storm with those strange agile fingers, muttering as he did so his spells over rags and twigs.

  The other children at the school down in the village—the sons and daughters of farmers, carpenters, labourers, shopkeepers, who would soon take up or marry into the same trade—had always been an ordinary lot. Perhaps Fiona Smith should have stood out more, as Nathan often reflected afterwards, but she was mostly just one of the girls who happened to sit near the back of class, and seemed, in her languorous demeanour, to be on the verge of some unspecified act of bad behaviour which she could never quite summon the energy to perform. Nevertheless, she could hold her own in a fight and throw an accurate enough stone, at least for a girl. If he’d bothered to think about it, Nathan would have also known that Fiona Smith lived at Stagsby Hall, a structure far bigger and more set-apart than any other in the village, which had a lake beside it which flashed with the changing sky when you looked down at it from Burlish Hill, but he envied no one the size of their homes; not when he had all of Lincolnshire spread beneath him, and lived in a creaking, turning, breathing mill.

  He was surprised at the fuss his parents made when an invitation came for the Westovers and seemingly every other person in Stagsby to attend a party to celebrate Fiona Smith’ fourteenth birthday, and at the fussy clothes they found to wear. As they walked on the appointed afternoon towards the open gates of Stagsby Hall, he resented the chafe of his own new collar, the pinch of the boots, and the waste of a decent southerly wind.

  It was somewhat interesting, Nathan might have grudgingly admitted, to see such an impressive residence at close hand instead of looking at it from above. Lawns spread green and huge from its many golden windows towards dark of woods, and that lake, which, even down here, reflected the near-cloudless sky in its blue gaze. There were indecently under-dressed statues, and there were pathways which meandered amongst them with a will of their own. Of greater importance, though, to Nathan and most of the other villagers, was the food. There was so much of it! There were jellies and sausages. Cheeses and trifles. Cakes and roast meats. There were lurid cordials, sweet wines and varieties of ale. Sticky fingered, crusty faced, the younger children took quarrelling turns to pin the tail on a blackboard donkey, and those of Nathan’s age soon lost their superiority and joined in, whilst the adults clustered in equal excitement around the beer tent. There was also a real donkey, saddled and be-ribboned and ready to be ridden. But the donkey whinnied and galloped as people attempted to catch it, kicking over a food-laden table and sending a mass of trifles, jellies and cakes sliding to the grass in a glistening heap. The adults laughed and the children whooped as the donkey careered off towards the trees, watched by the stiff-faced men and women in tight black suits, whom, Nathan had divined by now, were the servants of Stagsby Hall.

  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 which 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 signalled the lighting the cake passed through the crowd as Fiona Smith emerged into the space which had formed before 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 which made it was hard to divine its exact colour, such was its shimmer and blaze. Her thick red hair, which Nathan previously dimly remembered as tied back in a pony tail, 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 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 towards 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 so 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 towards 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 which 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.”