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

by Ian R. MacLeod

  Fiona crossed the room’s considerable space towards the largest of all the sheeted objects which, as she tugged at its dusty coverings, revealed itself to be an enormous bed. Enamelled birds fluttered up from its silken turrets as if struggling to join the room’s starry sky. Nathan had seen smaller houses.

  “This used to be mother’s bedroom. I’d come and just talk to her in here when she was ill from trying to have a son. Of course, it didn’t work, so now my father’s stuck with a girl for an heir unless he goes and gets married again, which he says will be when Hell freezes.”

  “All of this will end up as yours?”

  Fiona gazed around, hands on hips. “I know what you’re thinking, but my father says we’re in debt up to eyeballs. I’m sure that you Westovers have far money than we Smiths, with that mill of yours. My grandfather, now, he was the clever one. Had a real business mind. He was a proper master smithy. He was high up in the guild, but he still knew how to work a forge. He used to show me things. How to stoke a furnace, the best spells for the strongest iron…”

  “And that trick with the flame?”

  Fiona looked at Nathan and smiled. Her eyes were a cool blue-green. He’d never felt such a giddy sense of sharing, not even when he was working hard at the mill. “I’ll show you his old room,” she murmured.

  Up wide, white marble stairways, past more sheeted furniture and shuttered windows, the spaces narrowed. Nathan caught glimpses through windows of the lake, the lawns, Burlish Hill and then the lake again as they climbed a corkscrew of stairs. Cramped and stuffed with books, papers, cabinets, the attic they finally reached was quite unlike the great rooms below. Fiona struggled with a shutter, flinging sunlight in a narrow blaze. Nathan squinted, blinked, and gave a volcanic sneeze.

  She laughed. “You’re even dustier than this room!”

  Standing in this pillar of light, Nathan saw that he was, indeed, surrounded by a nebulous, floating haze. “It’s not dust,” he muttered. It was a sore point; the children at school often joked about his powdery aura. “It’s flour.”

  “I know.” Something fluttered inside his chest as she reached forward to ruffle his hair, and more the haze blurred around him. “But you’re a master miller—or you will be. It’s part of what you are. Now look.”

  After swiping a space clear on a sunlit table, Fiona creaked open the spines of books which were far bigger and stranger in their language than the mill’s Thesaurus of spells. The same warm fingers which he could still feel tingling across his scalp now travelled amid the symbols and diagrams. Guilds kept their secrets, and he knew she shouldn’t be showing him these things, but nevertheless he was drawn.

  “This is how you temper iron…This is an annealing spell, of which there are many…” A whisper of pages. “And here, these are the names for fire and flames. Some of them, anyway. For there’s always something different every time you charge a furnace, put a spark to a fire, light a candle, even.”

  Nathan nodded. All of this was strange to him, but he understood enough to realise that flames were like the wind to Fiona Smith, and never stayed the same.

  “Not that my father’s interested. He likes to joke about how he got through his grandmaster exams just because of the family name. And I’m a woman, so there’s no way I can become a smithy…” She grew quiet for a moment, the sunlight steaming in copper glints across her hair as she gazed down at the vortex of flame which filled the page.

  “What’ll you do instead?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked up at him, fists balled on the table, her face ablaze. “That’s the frustrating thing, Nathan. These of all times. All the old spells, you know, the stupid traditions, the mumbling and the superstitions and the charms and the antique ways of working, all of that’s on the way out. Modern spells aren’t about traditional craftsmen—not when you can mine the magic right out of the ground. That’s what they’re doing now, in places up north like Redhouse and Bracebridge, they’re drawing it out of the solid earth almost like they extract coal of salt or tar or saltpetre.”

  Nathan nodded. He knew such things as mere facts, but he’d never heard anyone speak about them—or, indeed many other things—with such passion.

  “I’m lucky. That’s what my grandfather used to say. I’m lucky, to be living in this time.” She shook her head and chuckled. “The future’s all around us, just like the world you must be able to see from up on your hill. And this, now this…” She pushed aside the book, and took down a large and complex-looking mechanism from a shelf. “He made this himself as his apprentice piece.”

  It took up most of the table, and consisted of a variety of ceramic marbles set upon a complex-looking arrangement of arms and gears, all widely spaced around a larger and even brighter central orb which might have been made of silver, gold or some yet more dazzling metal.

  “It’s an orrery—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 God-like view of the universe which 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 at 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.

  “It 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 orrery 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 more complex spells which 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 which 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 afterwards, 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 which 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. Certainl
y 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 a grey 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 rest of the sacks before the wind gave, even though the batch was already ruined. Finally 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, agonising 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 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 which 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 clamour 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 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 of and draught 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 which years of handling sacks and winches had formed, and the smooth soft gritting of flour which 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 it 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 which he’d envisaged 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 towards 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, for all the spells in those whispering books, and every creak and mood and scent and flavour, 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 which lay beside the closed and shuttered windows of Stagsby Hall.

  Everyone remarked in 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 slept, 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 which 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 labour under their blanket of smoke, and that labour—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 which 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 travelled, 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 which 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 which 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 which 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 which 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 which 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 re-using, re-investing, 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 lay 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 rumour was that Grandmistress Fiona Smith would soon be back at her home in Stagsby Hall. Nathan waited. After all, London and all those other far-away 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 af
ter the tailor’s fitting, although he often took out to admire its cut and shake off its grey 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 which 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.