“It’s an orerry—a model of the universe itself. These are the planets, this is the sun. These tiny beads are the major stars. See…” As she leaned forward, their blaze was reddened and brightened by the fall of her hair. “This is where we are, Nathan. You and I and everyone else, even the Hottentot heathens. This is our planet and it’s called Earth.…”
Nathan watched as her hands, her hair, fluttered from light to dark amid all this frail and beautiful machinery, and his thoughts, and his lungs and his heart and his stomach, fluttered with them. Although he had no great care for matters of philosophy, he couldn’t help feeling that he was witnessing something exotic and forbidden in this strangely Godlike view of the universe that Fiona Smith was describing. But it was thrilling as well.
“Now watch.”
Leaning down close to the table, afloat in sunlight, she puffed her cheeks and blew just as she had blown at her birthday cake. But now, smoothly, silently, the planets began to turn.
“You try.”
She made a space and Nathan shuffled close. Then, as conscious of the warmth of Fiona’s presence beside him as he was of the blaze of the sun, he bent down and he blew.
“Is that how it really works?”
She laughed. “You of all people, Nathan, up on that hill, should understand.”
Silently, seemingly with a will of its own, in gleam and flash of planets and their wide-flung shadows, the orerry continued to spin. Nathan watched, willing the moment to continue, willing it never to stop. But, slowly, finally, it did. It felt as if some part of his head was still spinning as, dazed, he helped Fiona close the shutter and followed her back down the stairways and along the corridors of her huge house. Everything, the sheeted furniture, the hot air, seemed changed. Outside, even the sun was lower, and redder, and it threw strange, long shadows as it blazed across the lawn. The world, Nathan thought for one giddy moment, really has turned.
A space of desk near the back of the class at the village school lay empty when Nathan and his classmates returned to school, although there was nothing particularly remarkable in that. Soon, they all were leaving, drawn into the lives, trades, and responsibilities for which they had always been destined, and Fiona Smith’s birthday party, if it was remembered at all, was remembered mostly for the drink and the food.
The windmill up on Burlish Hill turned, and the seasons turned with it. More and more, Nathan was in charge, and he sang to the mill the complex spells that his father’s voice could no longer carry. The only recreation he consciously took was in the choir at church. Opening his lungs to release the sweet, husky tenor that had developed with the stubble on his cheeks, looking up at the peeling saints and stars, it seemed to him that singing to God the Elder and singing to the mill were much the same thing. Instead of calling in at the pub afterward, or lingering on the green to play football, he hurried straight back up Burlish Hill, scanning the horizon as he did so.
He could always tell exactly how well the mill was grinding, and the type of grain that was being worked, merely from the turn of its sails, but there was a day as he climbed up the hill when something seemed inexplicably wrong. Certainly nothing as serious as a major gear slipping, but the sweep of the sails didn’t quite match the sweet feel of the air. He broke into a run, calling to his mother as he climbed up through the stairs and ladders inside the mill. The main sacking floor was engulfed in a gray storm, with flour everywhere, and more and more of it sifting down the chutes. Hunched within these clouds, gasping in wracking breaths, Nathan’s father was a weary ghost.
Feeble though he was, the miller resisted Nathan’s and his mother’s attempts to bear him out into the clear air. He kept muttering that a miller never leaves his mill, and struggled to see to the rest of the sacks before the wind gave, even though the batch was already ruined. Finally, though, they persuaded him to take to his bed, which lay on a higher floor of the mill, and he lay there for several days, half-conscious and half-delirious, calling out spells to his machine, which still creaked and turned between periodic, agonizing bouts of coughing.
As poor luck would have it, the winds then fell away. It grew hot as well. The skies seemed to slam themselves shut. Much more now for the sake of his father than for the mill itself, Nathan longed for a breeze. He searched for the hidden key to the lean-to, and he found it easily in a tin of nails; just the sort of place he’d never before have thought to look. The few knots left inside the small, close space hung like dried-up bats on their iron hooks, and part of Nathan felt that he had never seen anything so weathered and useless, and part of him already felt the strange, joyous surge of the winds that each clever knot contained. There were no spells in the miller’s Thesaurus to tell him how to unbind a trapped wind, nor the sounds that he should make as he did it, but doing so came to him easily as laughing and crying as he stood on the millstone floor. The air changed in a clamor of groans. The mill’s sails creaked and bit and turned. At last, there was work to be done, and Nathan got on with doing it with a happier heart. He knew without climbing the ladders that his father’s breathing would be easier, now that the mill was working properly all around him once again.
Although he was too exhausted to make use of it, Nathan released another wind at twilight purely for the glory of feeling the pull and draft of it through all the mill’s leaky slats and floors. More than usually, this one lived up to the wind-seller’s tales of bright spring mornings and the shift of grass over cloud-chased hills. When Nathan finally climbed the ladders to see his father, his mother—who had sat all day beside him—was smiling through her tears. He took the old man’s hand and felt its hot lightness, and the calluses that years of handling sacks and winches had formed, and the smooth soft gritting of flour that coated every miller’s flesh, and he smiled and he cried as well. They sat through the old man’s last night together, breathing the moods of the mill, watching the turn of the stars through the hissing swoop of its sails.
Nathan’s mother went to live in an old warehouse beside the dunes at Donna Nook, which had once stored southern hops before the channels had silted up. He visited her there on saints’ days, taking the early milk wagon and walking the last miles across the salt flats. Although she was wheezy herself now, and easily grew tired, she seemed happy enough there spending her days talking of brighter, breezier hours, and better harvests, to the widows of other millers. In those days, the Guild of Millers still took care of its own, but of course there were no master millers there. Nathan knew, had long known, that a miller never left his mill.
But he was a master miller now—even if the ceremony of his induction that he’d envisaged taking place beneath the golden roof of some great guild chapel had dwindled to a form signed in triplicate—and he gloried in that fact. Heading back from Donna Nook toward Burlish Hill in darkness, he would find his mill waiting for him, ticking, creaking, sighing in its impatience to take hold of the breeze. Often, he sang to it out loud even when no spells were needed. It was only when he was with other people, he sometimes reflected, that he ever felt alone.
The mill was Nathan’s now, and that made up for most things, even though there was less and less time for the choir. The spells in those whispering books, and every creak and mood and scent and flavor, every seed of corn and every grain of flour it produced, shaped his life. When he rested at all, it was merely to taste the breeze as he stood on top of Burlish Hill. From there, on the clearest of days, you really could see all of Lincolnshire, and gaze down at the huddled roofs of Stagsby, and the rippling windflash of the lake that lay beside the closed and shuttered windows of Stagsby Hall.
Everyone remarked on Nathan Westover’s energy in the seasons that followed. Millers were never known to take an easy bargain, but few drove them as hard as he did. Farmers and grain dealers might have gone elsewhere, but here was a miller who worked to whatever deadline you set him, and never let any of the sacks spoil. On nights of full moon, you could look up and see the sails still turning. It seemed as if he never sle
pt, and then he was to be seen early next morning at the grain markets at Alford and Louth, making deals to buy and sell flour on his own account, driving more and more those notoriously hard bargains, clapping backs and shaking hands in ways that earned money, but also respect.
These were good times across the rich farmlands of Lincolnshire. The big cities of the Midlands were spreading, sucking in labor under their blanket of smoke, and that labor—along with the growing middle classes who drew their profit from it, and the higher guildsmen who speculated in shares, bonds and leases—needed to be fed. Borne in on endless carts, and then increasingly drawn along rails by machines powered by that same heat and steam that drove those burgeoning industries, came supplies of every kind, not least of which was flour for cakes, biscuits, and bread.
Sometimes, although it seemed less often than in the times of Nathan’s childhood, the wind-seller still came to Burlish Hill. In rare hot, windless times, the shimmer of something—at first it could have been nothing more than a mirage twirl of dust—would emerge from the valley, and Nathan wondered as he watched where else this man traveled, and what he did on other, less closed-in days. He always bought a few examples of the wind-seller’s produce, although in truth he barely needed them, for he made sure that he made efficient use of all the winds that the sky carried to him, and had little need for such old-fashioned methods of enchantment. The world was changing, just as Fiona Smith had once said it would. Magic was being pumped out from the ground beneath northern cities. You could buy oils and new bearings that were infused with it, which was commonly called aether, and which spilled dark hues in daylight, and shone spectrally in the dark. Nathan was happy enough to use the stuff—at least, if it was for the good of his trade. He knew, or surmised, that the hill itself had once been the source of the power that drove the mill’s spells, but perhaps that had been wearing thin, and what else could you do but breathe and work through the seasons that time brought to you, and sing, and wait, and smile, and hope for the best?
Few people ever command anything in this world in the way that Nathan Westover then commanded his mill. He even enjoyed the tasks that most millers hated, and loved filling in the reds and greens of profit and loss on the coldest of nights when the sails hung heavy with ice. Numbers had their own climates, their own magics. Even as the inks froze and his fingers burned with the cold, they whispered to him of how far he had come. He was building up savings in a bank account in Louth—which he was then reusing, reinvesting, but still always accumulating, and it sometimes seemed as he stood outside in the bitter air and the night sparkled with motes of frost that the dark shape of the big house twinkled once more with lights.
I’m sure you Westovers have far more money than we Smiths, with that mill of yours.… Even if it hadn’t been true then, it was almost certainly true now, and the rumor was that Grandmistress Fiona Smith would soon be back at her home in Stagsby Hall. Nathan waited. After all, London and all those other faraway cites were merely places, just like Stagsby, and he was too accustomed to the capriciousness of the Lincolnshire weather to be anything other than patient. He even bought himself a suit, which he never wore after the tailor’s fitting, although he often took it out to admire its cut and shake off its gray coating of dust.
There was an even harder edge to the bargains Nathan drove for the following spring’s rye and wheat, an even brisker turn to his mill’s sails. Then came another summer, and the larks twirled and sang over the ripening corn, and the skies cleared to a blue so deep and changeless that it scarcely seemed blue at all. Then the weather flattened, and there was no rain, and the heat shrank the lake beside Stagsby Hall, and the corn dried and the dogs panted and even the turning of the mill on Burlish Hill finally slowed until there came an afternoon when everything in the world seemed to have stopped—including Burlish Mill.
Nathan was looking out from the mill’s top level when he saw a dark shape emerging from the heat-trembling stillness of the valley below. Certainly not a farmer, for the corn was dying and none of them had anything to bring. Skidding down ropes and ladders, he stood squinting and rubbing the sweat from his eyes as he willed the shape to resolve into a dusty silhouette.
The heat was playing tricks. The body wouldn’t stay still, and the movement was too swift. Through the thick, flat air, Nathan caught the brisk rattle of hooves. He waited. A rider on a gleaming, sweating, chestnut horse came up, dismounted, and walked quickly over to him. Female, tall and well-dressed, she took off her riding hat and shook out her red hair.
Smiling at his surprise, Grandmistress Fiona Smith took a step closer, and Nathan saw that, whatever else was different about her, the fiery blue-green gleam in her eyes was unchanged. Then her gaze moved up to the sails above him and her smile widened into a wonder that Nathan had only ever seen on the faces of fellow millers. Still smiling, still looking up, she began to walk around the brown summit of Burlish Hill.
Nathan followed. Fiona Smith was wearing dark riding clothes—boots, a jacket, a long skirt—but they were new and sharply cut and trimmed with shining edges of silk. This was nothing like the same girl who’d once stood before the candles of that many-tiered cake. Not that he hadn’t dreamed, not that he hadn’t dared to wonder—but looking at this woman, watching the way she moved, he marveled at how she’d changed and grown to become something quite unlike the person he’d imagined, yet was still recognizably Fiona Smith.… All those ridiculous thoughts, all those years, and yet here, real beyond any sense of reality, she was.
“This is where you keep the winds?” Despite the heat of the day, the air around the stone lean-to had a different edge.
“You know about the wind-seller?”
“I’ve made a small study of your trade.” Fiona shivered. Her eyes flashed. “Why don’t you use one now?” Her gaze changed shade as she looked at him. “But that’s the old way, isn’t it?—and no self-respecting miller likes to admit that they can’t manage on nature’s winds alone. And such winds cost money. That’s what I admire about you, Nathan Westover. You’re passionate, but you’re practical as well. You should hear people talk. Everyone.…” She turned beneath the still sails, spreading her arms, encompassing every horizon. “From here to here. They all know exactly who you are.”
“But probably not by name.”
“The miller of Burlish Hill!” She laughed. “But that’s what you are, isn’t it? Strange, for a man of such substance to have his life founded on a mere breath of air.”
Nathan laughed as well, and felt something loosening like a freed cog inside him. He’d never thought of it like that before, but she was right. “I’d always hoped,” he said, “that you’d come here.”
“And here I am.” She gave what he took to be a curtsey. “And I have a proposal to put to you, Nathan. So why don’t you show me inside your mill?”
Nathan would have been speechless, but the mill was the one topic about which he was always capable of talking, and pride soon took over from his shock at Fiona’s presence. He could even push aside the thought of how he must appear, with his arms bare and his dungarees still gritty from the dust of a long morning’s cleaning, and probably reeking of sweat and linseed oil as well. At least all his hard work meant that his mill was in near-perfect condition. Even if Fiona Smith had been one of the guild inspectors who’d used to come in his father’s time, he doubted if she’d have been able to find a single fault. Pristine, perched, as ever, on the edge of turning movement, the mill welcomed them through streams of sunlight into its hot, fragrant floors.
“You and I,” she murmured as she climbed the last ladder and took his arm to help herself over the lip, “I always used to look up at this mill and wonder if I couldn’t become a part of what it does.” She was so close to him now that he could feel the quickness of her breath, see how the changed brownness of her skin consisted of the merging of constellations of freckles.
Then they both hunched deliciously close together beside the topmost window, looking down and o
ut at all the world as it was revealed from the combined height of Burlish Hill and Mill. Nathan could feel the warm tickle of Fiona’s hair. The world was hazed today, but everything was clear in his head as on the sharpest day as he pointed out the directions of the winds. All Lincolnshire lay before them, and he could feel the soft pressures of her body as she leaned closer. Despite these distractions, he found that talking to her was easy as chanting the simplest spell. When most people looked out from Burlish Hill, they strained for the name of this or that town, a glimpse of the sea, or the tower of Lincoln Cathedral. They saw buildings, places, lives, distances to be traveled, but what Nathan saw and felt was the pull of the sky, the ever-changing moods of the air. And Fiona Smith understood. And she even understood—in fact, already knew—about the demands that different types of grain placed upon a mill. How the millstone had to be geared and leveled differently according to the grist and the weather, and all the complex processes of sifting and sieving, and then of proving and damping, about which even the farmers who produced the stuff, and the bakers who baked it, barely cared. She could have been born to be the wife of a master miller.
Then, as they leaned close, she talked to him of her years away from Stagsby. The school she’d been sent to by her father had been just as dreary as she’d feared, but she’d traveled afterward, fleeing England and heading south and south, toward warm and dusty lands. Looking out, Nathan could smell the air, feel the spice heat of the lives of those darker-skinned people who, as she put it, slept when they felt like sleeping, and danced when they wanted to dance. He’d never cared much for the idea of travel, for the winds of the world always came to him, but now he understood. The mill was turned fully south, facing across the brown weave of England toward other, more distant, shores. Then, although he hadn’t spoken a single word of a spell, the whole great machine shook, and its gears moved, and the sails swooped in a single, vast turn. It was a sign.
Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 24