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

by Ian R. MacLeod

  That memorable night, the villagers of Stagsby were already swirling like ants around what was left of the steam mill when they looked up and saw that the windmill up on Burlish Hill was also burning. Amid the chaos, a ragged line was established to pass hand by hand, slow bucket by bucket, what little was left of the waters of the lake. But the distance was too far, and the mill was already massively ablaze, its flaming sails turning against the night in what seemed to be no wind at all. The heat soon grew far too ferocious to approach, although many stood back to watch, such was the terrible, beautiful sight it made—like some great, mythic bird.

  Afterwards, there were many rumours. Most popular in Stagsby itself was that the steam mill had long been in decline, and that the grandmistress had been purposefully engineering its destruction to claim on the insurance when she’d been caught out by the suddenness of the blast. Also popular, especially amongst those who little idea of what insurance was, was that she’d been doing some extra overtime with one of her workers, if you get the meaning, when things had got, well, just a little too hot. And as for the old windmill—most likely it had been caught by a spark flown up by the blaze, and everyone knew that the place was half ruined anyway, and doubtless tinder-dry. All assumed, for want of any other sightings, that the miller himself had died inside his mill. The perfunctory official investigations gave people little reason to vary their views. The other theory, which was that the wealthy owners of the latest self-condensing machines had used the so-called Men of the Future as a means of destroying competition, received little credence, and then only amongst those who were in their cups.

  Soon, as the wind lifted the ash and bore it westwards, and the rain dissolved the charred wood and the grass re-grew, nothing but a circle of stone was left on Burlish Hill. Nor was the steam mill down in the valley ever reconstructed. Farmers now sold their harvests on wholesale contract to the big new factories, thus giving up their financial independence for what seemed, for a while, to be a good enough price. Stagsby Hall was acquired by one of the leading families of the steam guilds as a country retreat. Soon, its lawns were re-established and the lake was dredged and gleamingly re-filled; the interiors were extravagantly refurbished in the latest style. The ruins of the steam mill were shored up and prettified with vines and shaggy moss. Five years on, and they could have been a bit of old castle; a relic from an entirely different age. But much of this was hearsay. To judge by all the chuffing, huffing modern carriages which came and went that way through the village, parties were frequently held at Stagsby Hall, but they weren’t of the sort to which anyone local would ever be invited. You really had to climb up to the top of Burlish Hill to get any real sense of how fine the big house now looked. From up there you could still watch the clouds chase their reflections across the lake, and see the sunflash of its windows, and breathe the shimmer of its trees, but few ever did, apart from stray couples seeking solitude—for what, otherwise, would be the point?

  Weevils, woodworm, fire and rats are the four apocalyptic demons in a miller’s life, and, of these, fire is worst. But, Nathan reflected as, burned and breathless, he looked back up at the river of flame which steamed westwards from Burlish Hill, there were worst things still. At least, he told himself as he walked on, he hadn’t left his mill, for there was nothing left to leave.

  Following no particular direction, he kept walking until morning, and came across a railway station which he dimly recognised from his journeys as a Man of the Future. He sat and waited there, and took the first train, which bore him all the way to the coast. It was a bright day. Even this early in the summer season, families were camped out on the beach behind coloured windbreaks. Laughing children were bathing in the ocean’s freezing shallows, or holding the tethers of snapping kites. Nathan watched and felt the bite of the salt against his face, happy to see that the world still turned and the winds still blew, whether or not there was a mill on Burlish Hill.

  The rails went everywhere now. They took you places it was hard to imagine had ever existed before the parallels of iron had found them. Even when the timetables ran out and he discovered himself sitting on an empty platform at a time when he knew that no train would be coming, their shining river still seemed ready to bear him on. He travelled. He journeyed. He leaned out of carriage windows, and looked ahead into the fiery, smoking, sunset, and licked the salt smuts from his lips. Had he the breath left within him, he might have sang to the teeming air.

  Another summer was coming, and the fields were ripening across the wide and heavy land. He sat on the steps beside the bridge of a riverside town where a mother and her daughter were feeding the crusts of their sandwiches to the geese and swans. They were both red-haired. Nathan’s fingers bunched the knotted lock he still kept in his pocket. He often longed to release it, and to feel the special giving of a final wind-spell. But he remembered the look in the last embers of Fiona’s eyes, and he wondered what he truly had trapped there; what, if released, he might be letting go.

  North and south, he travelled on through the many nights, and the landscapes which lay around him in the darkness were stitched in flame. Dawn brought rooftops, chimneys, on every horizon. Swallowed in giant buildings, spat out with the litter and the pigeons onto surging streets, he gawped and wandered. He was cursed, bumped into. Leering offers were made in return for money he no longer had. The sky was solidly grey here, and the airs which rushed up to greet him from the chasms of streets were disgustingly scented. This was a place without seasons, or with seasons which were entirely its own. Nathan had grown accustomed to the tides or delays of departures at stations, but here he was lost.

  He wandered the darkening city, taking odd turns as he sought out some direction which was neither north nor south, east nor west. Far behind him, the girders of some vast structure were being erected, their black lines gridding the sky, but there were less people here, and those who were became furtive in their glances, or ran away at the sight of him with screams and clatters of clogs. Not a place to be, he thought, for anyone who doesn’t have business here. But, more and more, he felt that he did. He almost ran, and the bricks rushed by him, whispering with the echo of his dried-out lungs. Whispered, as well, with the glow of all the spells and talismans which were scrawled across them. Some, he was almost sure, belonged to his own guild. Others, he thought, had the taint of the sea about them. And here were the symbols of men who tended the tallest roofs, and of other guilds of those who worked in high places, and breathed the changing airs as they looked down on a different world.

  Wheezing, exhausted, light-headed, he stumbled on. There were gates and walkways. The hidden thrumming of vast machineries ground up through the earth. Dawn, though, brought a different kind of landscape. He was tired beyond exhaustion, and it amazed him that his feet dragged on, that his heart still stuttered, that his lungs raked in some sustenance, but the city had cast itself far behind him—so far that the shifting horizons had smeared it entirely out of memory and existence. Here, puddled and rutted lanes unwound and divided to the lean of empty signposts, bounded by endless hedgerows: fences, gates, railings, snags of string and wire and thorn. And the wind blew everywhere, and from all directions—and the world fluttered with the litter of what seemed like the aftermath of some archetypal storm. Hats and scarves, stray shoes, newspapers, the pages of books, umbrellas, whole lines of washing, the weathered flags of guilds, even the torn sails of ships, fluttered everywhere, or were snatched to tumble in the sky like wild kites.

  Nathan’s fingers bunched once more around the knot of Fiona’s Smith’s hair. Here, if anywhere, was the secret of how she might be released. He understood now what all his wanderings had been about, which was to get here, wherever here was, and find the spell, the secret, which might unlock that last knot. But he was tired. He was tired beyond believing. Walking, he decided as he leaned against another blank signpost, was an activity he might still just about be able to manage, but he wasn’t so sure about breathing, nor sustaining the incre
asingly weary thud of his heart. But still he pushed on, and the winds, as they came from every and no direction, pushed with him, tearing as his clothing, afflicting him with hot and cold tremors, spiralling around him in moans and whoops. Then he heard another sound—it was a kind of screaming. Although he now had no idea what it was, it drew him on.

  Another fence, it slats torn, flapping and rotting, and another gate, which turned itself closed and then open in the wind, although that wasn’t where the screaming came from. Nathan had to smile. It was simply an old weathercock, fixed to a fencepost, and turning madly, happily, this way and that in the wind. So familiar, although he’d never stood this close. The one odd thing about it, he realised, as it screamed and turned on its ancient bearings, was that the four angles of the compass which usually projected beneath such devices were entirely absent, even as rusty stubs. Then gate reopened, and the weathercock screamed and shifted in directions which lay beyond any compass, and the wind also turned, pushing him along the path which lay beyond.

  There was a house, although its windows flapped and its slates and chimneys were in disorder, and there was also a garden of sorts. That blurry sense which he’d felt all morning was even stronger here. There were trees which in one moment seemed to be in blossom, but the next were green, then brown, then gold, then torn to the black bones of their branches in sudden flurries of storm. Roses untwined their red lips and then withered. This was a place of many seasons, Nathan reflected as he gasped his way on, although it belonged more to winter than it did to summer, and more to autumn than to spring.

  As much as anything, the hunched figure which lay ahead seemed to be shaped out of the ever-changing territories of the air. Not just windy days, or the sudden bluster of summer thunderstorms, but also the hot stillness of afternoons which seemed to be without prospect of any wind at all, at least until you saw something separate itself from the grey shimmer of the world below. The wind seller had his sack laid open beside him. He was gathering the tumbled sticks of a nearby willow which shivered and danced its wild arms. Somewhere inside Nathan’s head, that weathercock was still screaming, and with it came a sobbing agony in his lungs. He knew he didn’t have the strength left to tell the wind-seller what he wanted, and it was a release and a relief to him when the man simply held out his pale fingers, which looked like stripped willow themselves, and took from him that glorious red tress. As Nathan Westover stumbled and fell into the puddled mud, he saw the wind-seller’s hands working not to release Fiona Smith’s last breath, but looping her hair again to draw another, final, knot.

  Afterword

  I’ve long been a great admirer of Thomas Hardy’s work. The workings of fate. The sense of place. The breadth of life written upon a small, local canvas. And above all, Hardy’s women. Wilful, often put-upon and misunderstood, but always powerful and memorable.

  Another thread which was bound in with this story was my desire to write an “aether story” to go with my two “aether novels”, The Light Ages and The House of Storms. Mainly, I think, and as is often the way with me, just to prove that I could. Both novels have the premise of an industrial revolution based on magic. Which rendered them “steam punk” in some people’s eyes, although, to be honest, I don’t think the term had been invented when I first started working on this concept, and had become old hat by the time I’d finished with it. I’m not a quick writer, but I do generally get there.

  Isabel of the Fall

  ONCE, IN THE TIME WHICH was always long ago, there lived a girl. She was called Isabel and—in some versions of this tale, you will hear of the beauty of her eyes, the sigh of her hair, the falling of her gaze which was like the dark glitter of a thousand wells, but Isabel wasn’t like that. In other tellings, you will learn that her mouth stuck out like a seapug’s, that she had a voice like the dawn-shriek of a geelie. But that wasn’t Isabel, either. Isabel was plain. Her hair was brown, and so, probably, were her eyes, although that fact remains forever unrecorded. She was of medium height for the women who then lived. She walked without stoop or any obvious deformity, and she was of less than average wisdom. Isabel was un-beautiful and unintelligent, but she was also un-stupid and un-ugly. Amid all the many faces of the races and species which populate these many universes, hers was one of the last you would ever notice.

  Isabel was born and died in Ghezirah, the great City of Islands which lies at the meeting of all the Ten Thousand and One Worlds. Ghezirah was different then, and in the time which was always long ago, it is often said that the animals routinely conversed, gods walked the night and fountains filled with ghosts. But, for Isabel, this was the time of the end of the War of the Lilies.

  Her origins are obscure. She may have been a child of one of the beggars who, then as now, seek alms amid the great crystal concourses. She may have been daughter of one of the priestess soldiers who fought for their Church. She may even have been the lost daughter of some great matriarch, as is often the way in these tales. All that is certain is that, when Isabel was born in Ghezirah, the many uneasy alliances which always bind the Churches had boiled into war. There were also more men then, and many of them were warriors, so it is it even possible that Isabel was born as a result of rape rather than conscious decision. Isabel never knew. All that she ever remembered, in the earliest of the fragmentary records which are attributed to her, is the swarming of a vast crowd, things broken underfoot, and the swoop and blast overhead of what might have been some kind of military aircraft. In this atmosphere of panic and danger, she was one moment holding onto a hand. Next, the sky seemed to ignite, and the hand slipped from hers.

  Many people died or went mad in the War of the Lilies. Ghezirah itself was badly damaged, although the city measures things by its own times and priorities, and soon set about the process of healing its many islands which lace to form the glittering web which circles the star called Sabil. Life, just as it always must, went on, and light still flashed from minaret to minaret each morning with the cries of the cries of Dawn-Singers, even if many of the beauties of which they sang now lay ruined beneath. The Churches, too, had to heal themselves, and seek new acolytes after many deaths and betrayals. Here, tottering amid the smoking rubble, too young to fend for herself, was plain Isabel. It must have been one of the rare times in her life that she was noticed, that day when she was taken away with many others to join the depleted ranks of the Dawn Church.

  The Dawn Church has its own island in Ghezirah, called Jitera, and Isabel may have been trained there in the simpler crafts of bringing light and darkness, although it is more likely that she would have attended a small local academy, and been set to the crude manual tasks of rebuilding one of the many minarets which had been destroyed, perhaps hauling a wheelbarrow or wielding a trowel. Still, amid the destruction which the War of the Lilies had visited on Ghezirah, every Church knew that to destroy the minarets which bore dawn across the skies would have been an act beyond folly. Thus, of all the Churches, that of the Dawn had probably suffered least, and could afford to be generous. Perhaps that was the reason that Isabel, for all her simple looks and lack of gifts, was apprenticed to become a Dawn-Singer as she grew towards womanhood. Or perhaps, as is still sometimes the way, she rose to such heights because no one had thought to notice her.

  Always, first and foremost in the Dawn Church, there is the cleaning of mirrors: the great reflectors which gather Sabil’s light far above Ghezirah’s sheltering skies, and those below; the silver dishes of the great minarets which dwarf all but the highest mountains; the many, many lesser ones which bear light across the entire city each morning with the cries of the Dawn-Singers. But there is much else which the apprentices of the Dawn Church must study. There is the behaviour of the light itself, and the effects of lenses; also the many ways in which Sabil’s light must be filtered before it can safely reach flesh and eyes, either alien of or human. Then there are the mechanisms which govern the turning of all these mirrors, and the hidden engines which drive them. And there is the study of
Sabil herself, who waxes and wanes even though her glare seems unchanging. Ghezirah, even at the recent end of the War of Lilies, was a place of endless summer and tropic warmth, where the flowers never wilted, the trees kept their leaves for a lifetime, and the exact time when day and night would flood over the city with the cries of the Dawn-Bringers was decreed in the chapels of the Dawn Church by the spinning of an atomic clock. But, in the work of the young apprentices who tended the minarets, first and always, there was the cleaning of the mirrors.

  Isabel’s lot was a hard one, but not unpleasant. Although she had already risen far in her Church, there were still many others like her. Each evening, after prayers and night-breakfast, and the study of the photon or the prism, Isabel and her fellow apprentices scattered to ascend the spiral stairs of their designated local minaret. Some would oil the many pistons and flywheels within, or perhaps tend to the needs of the Dawn-Singer herself, but most clambered on until they met the windy space where what probably seemed like the whole of Ghezirah lay spread glittering beneath them, curving upwards into the night. There, all through the dark hours until the giant reflectors far above them inched again towards Sabil, Isabel pulled doeskin pouches over her hands and feet, unfolded rags, wrung out sponges, unwound ropes and harnesses, and saw with all the other apprentices to polishing the mirrors. Isabel must have done well, or at least not badly. Some of her friends fell from her minaret, leaving stripes of blood across the sharp edge of the lower planes which she herself had to clean. Others were banished back to their begging bowls. But, for the few remaining, the path ahead was to become a Dawn-Singer.

  To this day, the ceremonies of induction of this and every other Church remain mostly secret. But now, if she hadn’t done so before, Isabel would have travelled by tunnel or shuttle to the Dawn Church’s island of Jerita, and touched the small heat of the clock which bore the unchanging day and night of eternal summer to all Ghezirah. There would have been songs of praise and sadness as she was presented to the senior acolytes of her Church. Then, after they had heard the whisper of deeper secrets, Isabel’s fellow apprentices were all ritually blinded. Whatever the Eye of Sabil is, it must filter much of the star’s power until just enough rays of a certain type remain to destroy vision, yet leave the eyes seemingly undamaged. The apprentices of the Dawn Church all actively seek this moment as a glimpse into the gaze of the Almighty, and it is hard to imagine how Isabel managed to avoid it. Perhaps she simply closed her eyes. More likely, she was forgotten in the crowd.