Ss the master millers ta.., p.1
SS The Master Miller's Tale, page 1
The Master Miller’s Tale
by Ian R. MacLeod
Ian MacLeod contributed a number of memorable stories to our magazine in the 1990s, including “Verglas,” “The Noonsday Pool,” and “Tirkiluk,” but nearly a decade has passed since his last appearance in F&SF. Which is not to suggest he has been idle; as detailed at www.ianrmacleod.com , he has published The Great Wheel, The Summer Isles, The Light Ages, and The House of Storms over the last ten years. (And a new story collection entitled Past Magic has just been published this year.)
This new story, which marks his welcome return to our pages, is set in the same alternate world as that of The Light Ages, but it takes a different approach and you need not be familiar with the novel to enjoy the story.
* * * *
There are only ruins left now on Burlish Hill, a rough circle of stones. The track that once curved up from the village of Stagsby in the valley below is little more than an indentation in the grass, and the sails of the mill that once turned there are forgotten. Time has moved on, and lives have moved with it. Only the wind remains.
Once, the Westovers were millers. They belonged to their mill as much as it belonged to them, and Burlish Hill was so strongly associated with their trade that the words mill and hill grew blurred in the local dialect until the two became the same. Hill was mill and mill was hill, and one or other of the Westovers, either father or son, was in charge of those turning sails, and that was all the people of Stagsby, and all the workers in the surrounding farms and smallholdings, cared to know. The mill itself, with its four sides of sloped, slatted wood, weather-bleached and limed until they were almost paler than its sails, was of the type known as a post mill. Its upper body, shoulders, middle and skirts, turned about a central pivot from a squat, stone lower floor to meet whichever wind prevailed. There was a tower mill at Alford, and there were overshot water mills at Lough and Screamby, but Burlish Mill on Burlish Hill had long served its purpose. You might get better rates farther afield, but balanced against that had to be the extra journey time, and the tolls on the roads, and the fact that this was Stagsby, and the Westovers had been the millers here for as long as anyone could remember. Generation on generation, the Westovers recemented this relationship by marrying the daughters of the farmers who drove their carts up Burlish Hill, whilst any spare Westovers took to laboring some of the many thousands of acres that the mill surveyed. The Westovers were pale-faced men with sandy hair, plump arms and close-set eyes which, in their near-translucence, seemed to have absorbed something of the sky of their hilltop home. They went bald early—people joked that the winds had blown away their hair—and worked hard, and characteristically saved their breath and said little, and saved their energies for their work.
* * * *
Although it took him most of his life to know it, Nathan Westover was the last of the master millers on Burlish Hill. Growing up, he never imagined that anything could change. The endless grinding, mumbling sound of the mill in motion was always there, deep within his bones.
He was set to watch a pulley that was threatening to slip.
“See how it sits, and that band of metal helps keep it in place...” his mother, who often saw to the lesser workings of the mill, explained. “It’s been doing that for longer than I and your father can remember. Now it’s getting near the end of its life...” The pulley turned, the flour hissed, the windmill rumbled, and this small roller spun on in a slightly stuttering way. “...and we can’t stop the mill from working when we’re this busy just to get it fixed. So we need someone to keep watch—well, more than simply watch—over it. I want you to sing to that roller to help keep this pulley turning and in place. Do you understand?”
Nathan nodded, for the windmill was always chanting its spells from somewhere down in its deep-throated, many-rumbling voice, and now his mother took up a small part of the song in her own soft voice, her lips shaping the phrases of a machine vocabulary, and he joined in, and the roller and the pulley’s entire mechanism revolved more easily.
Soon, Nathan was performing more and more of these duties. He even learned how to sing some of the larger spells that kept the mill turning, and then grew strong enough to lift a full sack of grain. He worked the winches, damped the grist, swept the chutes, oiled the workings. He loved the elegant way in which the mill always rebalanced itself through weights, lengths, numbers, quantities. Fifteen men to dig a pit thus wide down at school in the village meant nothing to him, but he solved problems that had anything to do with grain, flour, or especially the wind, in his dreams.
Sometimes there were visits from the rotund men who represented the county branch of the Millers’ Guild. On these occasions, everything about the mill had to be just so—the books up to date, the upper floors brushed and the lower ones waxed and the sails washed and all the ironwork shiny black as new boots—but Nathan soon learned that these men liked the mill to be chocked, braked and disengaged, brought to a total stop. To them, it was a dead thing within a frozen sky, and he began to feel the same contempt for his so-called guild-masters that any self-respecting miller felt.
On the mill’s third floor, above the account books with their pots of green and red ink, and set back in a barred recess, leaned a three-volume Thesaurus of spells.
One quiet day at the end of the spring rush when sails ticked and turned themselves in slow, easy sweeps, his father lifted the heavy boots down, and blew off a coating of the same pale dust which, no matter how often things were swept and aired, soon settled on everything within the mill.
“This, son....” He cleared his throat. “Well, you already know what these are.
One day, these books will be yours. In a way, I suppose they already are....”
The yellowed pages rippled and snickered. Just like the mill itself, they didn’t seem capable of remaining entirely still, and were inscribed with the same phonetic code that Nathan saw stamped, carved or engraved on its beams, spars and mechanisms. There were diagrams. Hand-written annotations. Darker smudges and creases lay where a particularly useful spell had been thumbed many times. Through the mill’s hazy light, Nathan breathed it all in. Here were those first phrases his mother had taught him when he tended that pulley, and the longer and more complex melodies that would keep back those four apocalyptic demons of the milling industry, which were: weevils, woodworm, fire, and rats. As always with things pertaining to the mill, Nathan felt that he was rediscovering something he already knew.
* * * *
There were slack times and there were busy times. Late August, when the farmers were anxious to get their summer wheat ground and bagged, and when the weather was often cloudless and still, was one of the worst. It was on such late, hot, airless days, with the land spread trembling and brown to every cloudless horizon, and the mill whispering and creaking in dry gasps, that the wind-seller sometimes came to Burlish Hill.
Nathan’s father would already be standing and waiting, his arms folded and his fists bunched as he watched a solitary figure emerge from the faded shimmer of the valley. The wind-seller was small and dark, and gauntly pale. He wore creaking boots, and was wrapped in a cloak of a shade of gray almost as thunderous as that of the sack he carried over his thin shoulders, within which he bore his collection of winds.
“So this’ll be the next one, eh?” He peered forward to study Nathan with eyes that didn’t seem to blink, and Nathan found himself frozen and speechless until his father’s hand drew him away.
“Just stick to business, wind-seller, shall we?”
It was plain that his father didn’t particularly like this man. After all, every miller worth his salt prided himself on making the best of every kind of weather, come storm or calm, glut or shortage. Still, as the wind-seller unshouldered his sack and tipped out a spill of frayed knots, and especially on such a hot and hopeless day as this, it was impossible not to want to lean forward, not to want to breathe and feel and touch.
“Here, try this one....” Spidery fingers rummaged with a hissing, whispering pile to extract the gray strands of what looked, Nathan thought, exactly like the kind of dirty sheep’s wool you saw snagged and fluttering on a bare hedge on the darkest of winter days. “...That’s a new, fresh wind from the east. Cut through this summer fug clean as a whistle. Sharp as a lemon, and twice as sweet. Delicate, yes, but good and strong as well. Turn these sails easy as ninepence.”
Already, Nathan could taste the wind, feel it writhing and alive. Slowly, reluctantly, his father took the strand in his own hands, and the wind-seller’s mouth twitched into something that was neither a smile nor a grin. “And this one.... Now this will really get things going. Tail end of a storm, tail end of night, tail end of winter. Can really feel a bite of frost in there, can’t you? ‘Course, she’s a bit capricious, but she’s strong as well, and cool and fresh....”
It was nothing but some bits of old willow bark, torn loose in a storm and dampened by trembling puddles, but already the windmill’s sails gave a yearning creak. Nathan’s father might grumble and shake his head, but the haggling that followed all of this conspicuous advertisement was always disappointingly brief.
They all knew, had known since before the wind-seller’s shape had first untwisted itself from the haze of the valley, that—strange things though they were, the knotted breath of forgotten days—he would have to buy his share of these winds.
* * * *
Although no one else believed them, master millers swore they could taste the flavor of the part
The things looked as ragged now as they had when they fell from the wind-seller’s sack—nothing more than dangling bits of old sea-rope, the tangled vines of some dried-up autumn, the tattered remains of long-forgotten washing—but each was knotted using complex magics, and what else were they to do, on such a day as this? Already writhing and snapping around them—a gray presence, half felt, half seen, and straining to be released—was the longed-for presence of some kind of wind. Up in the creaking stillness of the main millstone floor, and with a shine in his eyes that spoke somehow both of expectation and defeat, his father would break apart the knot with his big miller’s hands, and, in a shouting rush, the wind that it contained would be released. Instantly, like the opening of an invisible door, the atmosphere within the mill was transformed. Beams creaked in the changed air and the sails swayed, inching at first as the main axle bit the breakwheel and the breakwheel bore down against the wallower that transported the wind’s gathering breath down through all the levels of the mill. The farther sky, the whole spreading world, might remain trapped in the same airless day. But the dry grass on Burlish Hill shifted and silvered, and the mill signaled to every other hilltop that at least here, here on this of all days, there was enough wind to turn its sails.
The winds themselves were often awkward and capricous things; unseasonably hot and dry, awkwardly damp and gray. They seemed to come, in that they came from anywhere at all, from points of the compass that lay beyond north and south, east or west. Even as Nathan and his father began gladly heaving the contents of all the waiting sacks into the chutes, the atmosphere within the mill on those days remained strange. Looking out though the turning sails, Nathan half expected to see changed horizons; to find the world retilted in some odd and awkward way. Lying in his bunk in the still nights afterward when the winds had blown themselves out, he pictured the wind-seller wandering the gray countrysides of some land of perpetual autumn, furtively gathering and knotting the lost pickings of a storm with those strange agile fingers, muttering as he did so his spells over rags and twigs.
* * * *
The other children at the school down in the village—the sons and daughters of farmers, carpenters, laborers, shopkeepers, who would soon take up or marry into the same trade—had always been an ordinary lot. Perhaps Fiona Smith should have stood out more, as Nathan often reflected afterward, but she was mostly just one of the girls who happened to sit near the back of class, and seemed, in her languorous demeanor, to be on the verge of some unspecified act of bad behavior that she could never quite summon the energy to perform. Nevertheless, she could hold her own in a fight and throw an accurate enough stone, at least for a girl. If he’d bothered to think about it, Nathan would have also known that Fiona Smith lived at Stagsby Hall, a structure far bigger and more set-apart than any other in the village, which had a lake beside it that flashed with the changing sky when you looked down at it from Burlish Hill, but he envied no one the size of their homes; not when he had all of Lincolnshire spread beneath him, and lived in a creaking, turning, breathing mill.
He was surprised at the fuss his parents made when an invitation came for the Westovers and seemingly every other person in Stagsby to attend a party to celebrate Fiona Smith’s fourteenth birthday, and at the fussy clothes they found to wear. As they walked on the appointed afternoon toward the open gates of Stagsby Hall, he resented the chafe of his own new collar, the pinch of the boots, and the waste of a decent southerly wind.
It was somewhat interesting, Nathan might have grudgingly admitted, to see such an impressive residence at close hand instead of looking at it from above.
Lawns spread green and huge from its many golden windows toward a dark spread of woods, and that lake, which, even down here, reflected the near-cloudless sky in its blue gaze. There were indecently underdressed statues, and there were pathways that meandered amongst them with a will of their own. Of greater importance, though, to Nathan and most of the other villagers, was the food. There was so much of it! There were jellies and sausages. Cheeses and trifles. Cakes and roast meats.
There were lurid cordials, sweet wines and varieties of ale. Sticky fingered, crusty faced, the younger children took quarreling turns to pin the tail on a blackboard donkey, and those of Nathan’s age soon lost their superiority and joined in, whilst the adults clustered in equal excitement around the beer tent. There was also a real donkey, saddled and be-ribboned and ready to be ridden. But the donkey whinnied and galloped as people attempted to catch it, kicking over a food-laden table and sending a mass of trifles, jellies, and cakes sliding to the grass in a glistening heap.
The adults laughed and the children whooped as the donkey careered off toward the trees, watched by the stiff-faced men and women in tight black suits, whom, Nathan had divined by now, were the servants of Stagsby Hall.
The afternoon—for the villagers, at least—passed in a timeless, happy whirl.
Much beer and wine was drunk, and the children’s livid cordials seemed equally intoxicating. Trees were climbed; many by those old enough to know better. Stones, and a few of the silver trays, were skimmed across the lake. Then, yet more food was borne out from the house in the shape of an almost impossibly large and many-tiered cake. The huge creation was set down in the shade of one of the largest of the oaks that circled the lawns. Nodding, nudging, murmuring, the villagers clustered around it. The thing was ornamented with scrolls and flowers, pillared like a cathedral, then spired with fourteen candles, each of which the servants now solemnly lit.
An even deeper sigh than that which had signaled the lighting of the cake passed through the crowd as Fiona Smith emerged into the space that had formed around it. Nathan hadn’t consciously noticed her presence before that moment. Now that he had, though, he was immensely struck by it. He and many of his classmates were already taller and stronger than the parents whose guilds they would soon be joining. Some were already pairing off and walking the lane together, as the local phrase went, and even Nathan had noticed that some of the girls were no longer merely girls. But none of them had ever looked anything remotely like Fiona Smith did today.
Although the dress she wore was similar in style to those many of the other women were wearing, it was cut from a substance that made it hard to divine its exact color, such was its shimmer and blaze. Her thick red hair, which Nathan previously dimly remembered as tied back in a ponytail, fell loose around her shoulders, and also possessed a fiery glow. It was as if an entirely different Fiona Smith had suddenly emerged before this cake, and the candle flames seemed to flare as though drawn by an invisible wind even before she had puffed out her cheeks.
Then she blew, and all but one of them flattened and died, and their embers sent up thirteen trails of smoke. Smiling, she reached forward as if to pinch out the last remaining flame. But as she raised her hand from it, the flame still flickered there, held like a blazing needle between her finger and thumb. Then, with a click of her fingers, it was gone. The entire oak tree gave a shudder in the spell’s aftermath and a few dry leaves and flakes of bark drifted down, some settling on the cake. The villagers were already wandering back across the lawn, muttering and shaking their heads, as the servants began to slice the object up into spongy yellow slices. They were unimpressed by such unwanted displays of guild magic, and by then, no one was feeling particularly hungry.
