For all the many winds which 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 which 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 which 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 marvellous 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 realised was always the same, no matter what substance was from which the knot was formed. He followed the kinks which 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, which 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 which might once have been trapped within them wasn’t entirely lost, for when he undid them, they would let 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 towards 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 organised, 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 towards 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 which 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 which these men then started to use, the muttering of short phrases, the leaving of scrolls of symbols which caused machines and furnaces to break apart when they were re-started, 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 which 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 towards 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 towards 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 grey 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 a 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 metal, 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 had 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 which 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 was 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 realised 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 shovelling coal into the furnace, stoking up its heat, whilst others of their ilk smirkingly tended to the taps and levers which 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 towards the glare of the furnace. The wind which he held in his hands was one of his own best gatherings—just a few looped wisps of seed-headed grass, but 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 recognised the names she called. When she called them again, and added a few others, along with some hells and goddamits 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 towards 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 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 which 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 colours 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 fingers still twined. Looking down, he saw that they had unconsciously drawn a knot in the last unsinged twist of Fiona Smith’s glorious red hair.
The climb uphill had never been harder. His own flesh was burned. His lungs were clogged and charred with flame and soot. As he finally reached, half-crawled, across the summit, he realised that this was the first time he’d ever ascended Burlish Hill without sensing the moods of its air. Now that he did, hauling himself up and looking around at a world which, but for the fire which still blazed in the valley, lay dark at every point of the compass, he realised that that there wasn’t a single breath of wind—not, at least, apart whatever was contained within that last knot of hair he’d cut loose with a glowing claw of metal, and which his fingers now held crabbed in his pocket, and was far too precious to be released.
Nathan coughed. With what he little breath he had, he tried to call out to his mill. The sound was nothing: the mere whisper of dead leaves from some long-lost autumn. Impossible that this vast machine should respond to anything so puny, but, somehow, groaningly, massively, yet joyful as ever, it did. The sails began to turn. In a way, Nathan had always believed that the winds came as much from the mill itself as they did from the sky-arched landscape, but he’d never witnessed it happen so clearly as it did on that night. Invisibly, far beyond the moon and the stars, clouds uncoiled, horizons opened, and—easy as breathing, easy as dancing, sleeping, and far easier than falling in love—the keen easterly wind which most often prevailed across Burlish Hill, but which was never the same moment by moment, began to blow.
There wasn’t a trace of grain in need of grinding, but Nathan still attended to his mill. He released its shackles of winch and brake and pulley to set it turning wildly until the all mechanisms which he’d known and sung to for his entire life became a hot, spinning blur. The sound which the mill made was incredible—as if it was singing every spell in every voice which had ever sang it. He heard his father there within that deep, many-throated, rumble, calling to his mill in the strong, clear tones which he had once possessed, and humming as he worked, and sometimes laughing as he laboured for the sheer joy of his work. And the softer tones of his mother, and all the other mistress millers, was there as well. See, Nathan, how it sits, and how that band of metal helps keep it in place…Now, it’s getting near the end of its life…Nathan Westover heard the sound of that stuttering pulley, and then of his own unbroken voice, which had caused its turning to mend. All the winds of this and every other earth sighed with him, and the mi
ll’s sails swooped, and the world revolved, and the sky unravelled, and the stars and the planets span round in dizzy blurs, and the seasons came and went. He saw Fiona Smith, young as she was then, puffing out her cheeks before that huge cake at Stagsby Hall, when the place had still possessed lawns, and its oaks were unfelled. Saw her again at this very mill. I have a proposal to put to you, Nathan…Saw her as she was at the grain auctions, with the light from the tall windows flaming on her red hair, then sitting in that bizarre machine which rumbled across the countryside, when that same hair was twined with smoke trails of grey. Saw all of these things, but felt, above all, the warm, soft pressures of her body in those few glorious moments when he had once her held on this very millstone floor, and the hot, amazing reality of the taste of her lips and mouth against his own.
The mill roared and Nathan roared with it. Axles smoked, joined screamed, cogs flew, and then, as something final sagged and broke, the top face of the millstone itself bore hugely down on its lower half, screaming a brilliant cascade of sparks.
Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod Page 27