Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod

by Ian R. MacLeod

  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 organized, 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 toward 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 that 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 that these men then started to use, the muttering of short phrases, the leaving of scrolls of symbols that caused machines and furnaces to break apart when they were restarted, 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 that 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 toward 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 toward 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 gray 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 an 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 bolt, 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 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 that 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 were 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 realized 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 shoveling coal into the furnace, stoking up its heat, whilst others of their ilk smirkingly tended to the taps and levers that 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 toward the glare of the furnace. The wind that 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 recognized the names she called. When she called them again, and added a few others, along with some hells and goddammits 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 toward 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 the building behind her.

  “What exactly have you done to my—”

  Then the entire engine house exploded.

  Nathan ran, fighting his way through the sea
ring 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 that 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 colors 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 hands still twined. Looking down, he saw that his hands had unconsciously drawn a knot in the last unsinged twine 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 realized 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 that still blazed in the valley, lay dark at every point of the compass, he realized that there wasn’t a single breath of wind—not, at least, apart from whatever was contained within that last knot of hair he’d cut loose with a glowing claw of metal, and that his fingers now held crabbed in his pocket, and was far too precious to be released.

  Nathan coughed. With what 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 that most often prevailed across Burlish Hill, but that 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 all the mechanisms that he’d known and sung to for his entire life became a hot, spinning blur. The sound that the mill made was incredible—as if it were singing every spell in every voice that had ever sung it. He heard his father there within that deep, many-throated rumble, calling to his mill in the strong, clear tones that he had once possessed, and humming as he labored, and sometimes laughing for the sheer joy of his work. And the softer tones of his mother, and all the other mistress millers, were 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 mill’s sails swooped, and the world revolved, and the sky unraveled, and the stars and the planets spun 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 that rumbled across the countryside, when that same hair was twined with smoke trails of gray. 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 held her 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, joints 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.

  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.

  Afterward, there were many rumors. 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 had 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 westward, and the rain dissolved the charred wood and the grass regrew, 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 reestablished and the lake was dredged and gleamingly refilled; 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 that 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 the worst. But, Nathan reflected as, burned and breathless, he looked back up at the river of flame that steamed westward from Burlish Hill, there were worse 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 that he dimly recognized from his journeys as a Man of the Future. He sat and waited there, and took t
he 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 colored 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 a 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 traveled. 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 sung 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.