Snodgrass and Other Illusions - By Ian R. MacLeod Page 0,106
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 marvelled at how she’d changed and grown to become something quite unlike the person he’d imagined, yet was still recognisably 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 out 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 travelled, 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 which different types of grain placed upon a mill. How the millstone had to geared and levelled 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.