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

by Ian R. MacLeod

  It was the same at the next auction, and the one after that. Against all tradition, Grandmistress Fiona Smith—a woman, and no member of any the recognised agricultural guilds—was bidding on her own behalf. Not only that, but she was far better at getting the auctioneer’s attention than anyone else in the room. Worst still, the masculine reserve of these country guildsmen meant that they withdrew from bidding against her at prices which were far too low. Essentially, she was getting her grain on the cheap because of how she looked.

  Nathan was shocked to discover that seemingly sensible men could act like such fools. If a batch of corn or oats was selling at a price he knew to be ridiculous, he made sure he made a better bid. Sometimes, he pushed things too high, and the red head which absorbed so much of the hall’s attention would give a negative shake. Still, grain was grain, and he had the stuff stored at his own expense until he found the time and the energy to have it delivered and ground. He’d always thought of himself as hardworking, but in that season and the ones which followed, he surprised even himself. The mill turned as it had never turned, and there was always something more which needed to be done, and even a decent wind wasn’t always enough for him. On days when there was a moderate easterly, or a keen breeze from the north, Nathan still found himself looking up in frustration at the slow turn of his mill’s sails. Finding a wind hanging hooked in his lean-to which made a close enough match to the one which was already blowing was an entirely new skill, although it was one he did his best to learn. Sometimes, on the right days, the whole mill span and thrummed with a speed and a vigour which he’d never witnessed. It was thrilling, and the needs of the many mechanisms dragged the songs from his throat until he was exhausted and hoarse. On other days, though, the winds fought angrily, and the mill’s beams creaked and its bearings strained and its sails gave aching moans. Such strains inevitably increased the wear on the mill’s components, and the costs and demands of its maintenance soared.

  On cold winter nights, when there was now still grain in need or grinding, or flour which somehow had to be dried off before it could be sold, he dragged himself to the desk with its books of spells and accounts at which his father and many other generations Westovers had sat. But the nib trembled, his lungs hurt, and the red and green figures could no longer be persuaded to add up. He’d once never have thought of leaving any job half-completed, but now he staggered off to snatch the few hours sleep with the coloured inks still warring. Then he dreamed of storms of figures, or that the mill was storm itself, and that the air would never stir again across all of Lincolnshire if he didn’t work its sails.

  Nathan had got little enough in reply on the rare occasions when he’d mentioned the wind-seller to his fellow millers. Did the man come to them on those same still, hot days on which he always seemed to visit Nathan? That hardly seemed possible. Was there just one wind-seller, or were there several of their species or guild? And where exactly did he come from—and what essential substance was it, after all, from which his winds were made?

  A flat, hot day. The mill groaning and creaking, and Nathan’s bones filled with an ache for the time—it seemed only moments ago—when there was always too much grain, and never enough hours in the day to grind it. This summer, though, he’d had to rein in his bidding in order to keep up his repayments to the bank, whilst the carts had borne their grain less regularly, and in smaller amounts, up Burlish Hill. The farmers never looked Nathan directly in the eye or told him what they were doing, but the evidence was down there in the valley, in a pounding haze of noise and heat. Could people really work in such conditions, when the day itself was already like a furnace? Nathan wiped his face. He hawked and coughed and spat, and worked the bloody phlegm into the dry ground of Burlish Hill with the heel of his boot. Only last week in Gainsborough, he’d been having a bite of lunch at one of the inns beside the market before taking the train which now reached Burwell, only five miles of Stagsby itself. His bread roll had tasted gritty and sulphurous. He’d spat it out.

  A distant engine chuffed across the landscape, trailing its scarf of steam. Somewhere, a whistle blew. Nathan coughed. No grist in need of grinding, but he still had half a mind to unlock the lean-to and take out whatever winds he had left in there, just for the ease they brought to his breathing, and the cool feel of them twisting in his arms…

  A grey shimmer was emerging from the valley, and it was too stooped and solitary a figure for his heart to begin to race. Nathan remembered his fear and excitement back in the times when his father had been master of this mill, and every spell had been new, every wind fresh and young. Still, it was good to think that some things didn’t change, and he almost smiled at the wind-seller; almost wished him a cheery goodday.

  The man flapped his old cloak. He seemed to give a shiver as he studied the hot, dry horizons. “The hardest of all seasons, eh?”

  Nathan shrugged. Almost every farmer said something similar to him when they came up here. It was usually a prelude to their explaining how they couldn’t afford his normal rate, and it was scarcely in his interest to agree with them. But Nathan found himself nodding. This really was the hardest of all seasons.

  “I’ve a hundred remedies…” The wind seller unshouldered his sack, and there they all were beneath: a knotted multitude of rags, but such beautiful things, especially on a day such as this. Storms and airs and breezes hazed about them in a thousand hurrying tints of blue and black and grey. Nathan knew how to drive a bargain, and the Elder knew he wasn’t in position for extravagances, but he couldn’t help feeling stirred, drawn, excited. And was it his own wheezing breath or that of the mill itself which gave off that needy groan?

  Nathan barely heard the wind-seller’s patter about his products. He of all people didn’t need to be told about the poetry of the skies. He lifted a tarred and bunched handful of a northerly rope that wasn’t from the north at all, and felt the bitter bliss of it swirling around him, then the soft twine of a southwesterly blown in from far beyond every southwesterly horizon. Its breath in his face was the laughing warmth of a kiss. He bore them all, great stirring armfuls of them, into his stone lean-to, and hooked them up on their iron hangers, where they stirred and lifted with a need to be let loose. It was sweet work, delicious work, to hold and be taken hold of by this knotted blizzard of winds, and Nathan found that he no longer cared how many he really needed, nor what he could afford. By the time he’d finished, there was nothing left beyond the sack itself, and, had the wind-seller offered it to him, he’d have taken that as well.

  Nathan was sweating, gasping. He was possessed by hot spasms, shivers of cold. How much had he actually paid for this glut? He couldn’t recall. Neither did he particularly care. But as the wind-seller whistled through thin lips and laid the empty thing of rag across his back, Nathan felt that today he was owed something more.

  “Tell me, wind-seller,” he asked, although he knew that such questions should never be asked outside those who belonged to a certain trade or guild, “exactly how is it that your winds are made?”

  “It was your father I used to deal with, wasn’t it?” The man’s cold gaze barely shifted, but it took in all of Nathan, his mill, and his hill. “Although you and he might as well be the same. Same mill, same man, same sacrifices, eh? But it’s always slightly behind you, isn’t it?—I mean the best of all days, the keenest of winds, the sweetest of grain. It’s never quite where you’re standing now. And the longer you work, the more you give up, the more time hurries by, the more it seems that the strongest breeze, the whitest clouds, always came yesterday, or the day before.”

  “You’re saying your winds are taken from the past?”

  Twisting his neck, the wind-seller gave a shake his head. “Time was, there were no sails up here, no millstone—and no miller, either. But the winds still came, and the sun rose and fell. Back then, people saw things clearer. You, miller, you’ve merely given up sweat, and years, and the good state of your lungs to keep this mill turning, but for those people
it was the seasons and then the sun itself which had to be turned.” The wind-seller laughed. It was a harsh sound. “Imagine—the blood which was let, the sacrifices they made, to ensure that spring arrived, that the next dawn came! But the past is gone, miller—used-up. It’s as dry and dead as this ground, which has been seeped of all its magic. What we’re left with are the husks of our memories. Just like this sky, and this land…”

  Nathan watched the wind-seller shape sink down into the valley’s haze. Might as well, he reflected, have tried talking to the winds themselves.

  Conversation after the markets in Lincolnshire bars always came free and loud. Nathan had never been one to seek out companionship, but now he found that there was some consolation to be had in sharing a glass or two, and then a few complaints, after another pointless day at the auctions. Grandmistress Smith was less of a novelty these days, and she won her bids less easily, for there were other steam mills at Woodhall and Cranwell, and an even newer, bigger, one in construction at South Ormsby. The world was changing within the giddy scope of one generation, and it wasn’t just the wind and water millers who were losing out. Elbowed in with them amid the hot jostle of sticky tables in those bars were hand weavers, carters—even smithies: for all that the Smithies Guild was hand-in-glove with the financiers who constructed these new machines, it was the high-ups, the pen pushers, the ones who wore out their fat buttocks by sitting at desks, who made a nice living, and devil take the old ways and local village business founded on decent, traditional skills. It was an odd coalition, both alarming and reassuring, and the talk turned yet more furious as the evenings darkened and business suffered and the drink flowed.

  Plans were hatched, then laughingly dismissed as more beer was bought. But the same complaints returned, and with them came the same sense of angry helplessness. Nathan was never a ringleader, but he and everyone else around those tables soon agreed that there were better ways to spend your time and energy than sitting uselessly in a bar. They were guildsmen, weren’t they? They had their pride. Better to go down fighting. Better still to resist wholeheartedly, and not go down at all.

  They met one night at Benniworth. In the morning, the precious furnace which had just been delivered was found transformed into a dented mass of metal as if by a hailstorm of hammerblows. They met again at Little Cawthorpe. A culvert beneath the embankment of the new railway which would bear coal from Nottingham far quicker than the old canals was blown apart, although the damage was far less than might have been expected, considering the amount of explosive which was used. Lincolnshire earth, as any farmer would have attested, was notoriously slow and sticky stuff to move. Something stronger and better was needed, and Nathan brought it with him the next time they met outside Torrington in an owl-hooting wood.

  “What you got there, miller?”

  Lamplit faces gathered around him, edging and prodding to get a glimpse of the oddly lumpen knot he held in his hand.

  “Something alive, is it?”

  “Something that’ll make them think twice about stealing the living off decent guildsfolk?”

  Nathan couldn’t bring himself to explain. He merely nodded, and felt the glorious lightness of a wind which had come from a point in the east to be found in no compass. These men didn’t really expect to understand. Theirs was a loose alliance, and they remained almost as wary of each others’ skills and secrets as of those they were campaigning against.

  They called themselves The Men of the Future by now, because that was the opposite of what their wives and neighbours shouted after them, and their target was another mound of earth, although this was far bigger than the railway embankment. Steam mills and their associated machinery were even greedier for water than the watermills they replaced, and a reservoir to supply one such new machine had recently been constructed here in Torrington, taking up good grazing land and creating more aggrieved men. As, shushing each other and stumbling, they came upon it through the moonless dark, the clay bank looked huge. They laid the several caskets at its base. Then they turned towards Nathan.

  “Whatever that thing is, might as well use it now, miller.”

  Nathan nodded, although his movements were slow. The wind which twisted in his hand gave off sharp scent of spring grass. Leaving it in this marshy spot was like destroying a treasured memory. But what else could he do?

  They scrambled back through darkness from the hiss and the flare of the fuse. A long wait. The thing seemed to go out. A dull crump, a heavy pause, then came flame and earth in a sour gale, and a white spume of water lit up the dark.

  The men cheered, but the rumbling continued, shaking the ground beneath their feet. Some were knocked over, and all were splattered by a rain of hot earth and stone. There was more fire, and then a boiling, roaring wave. They ran, scattered by the power of all the enraged elements which they had unleashed. It was lucky, it was agreed when heads were finally counted as they stood on a nearby rise, that no one had been buried, burned, drowned or blown away. It looked as if the dam was entirely wrecked. Several fields had certainly been turned into mire. People would have to listen to Men of the Future now.

  It was a long walk home. Drenched, muddied, Nathan kept to the edges of the roads although he scarcely expected to encounter any traffic on a night this black, but then he heard a rumble behind him. He turned and saw what seemed to be a basket of fire approaching. Then he saw that it was some kind of wagon, and that it was powered by steam. For all his increasing familiarity with such engines, he’d never heard of one which ran along an ordinary road, and curiosity made him made him reluctant to hide entirely from sight.

  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 travelled 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 grey smoked though 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 which 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 mare’s tails of spring kicked and frisked. His winds swirled around him in booming hisses as he sang out the spell which 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 span 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.