The Wind-Master

by Brett Davidson

Meyr learned she had been found by the family of a Wind Master, or what sufficed as such in the Dead Cities. That was how far down she had come: right into the realm of the Dead.

The man was the one who had found her; he was a short, burly figure and his name was Fulgrin. Each day he would go out into the knot of arteries that he had decided were his own and he’d scrape the air-barnacles and bacterial mats off the walls so that the winds could run free and clear through the city. The bacteria and algae and even the barnacles, even though they were animals, however primitive, went into the stew pot tended by his wife, Caaryn.

Fulgrin and Caaryn had daughters of their own, Bredda and Ambri. One was big and the other small and Meyr wondered if they shared the same father, but she never asked. Full-blood sisters or not, the two spent a lot of time out together in the halls and amongst the great still machines where they stole antique artifacts for sale at the markets and Bright City trading posts. Meyr barely saw them and when she did, they teased her and she didn’t like that. They were jealous of her and she was jealous of their freedom to roam. She was told about the Dead Cities and guessed that they were different from the tales that she had read, but she wasn’t allowed out to see for herself until Fulgrin and Caaryn were sure that her leg was fully healed and that the pogrom was ended.

Meyr often woke crying for Nurse and would hobble to the cell of Fulgrin and Caaryn and they’d let her curl up under the covers with them, but it wasn’t good enough. Other times she would scream at them and find cause for complaint everywhere, particularly in what she thought was the squalor and slovenliness of their home. The Voyact domus had never been as dirty and as inelegant as this and they’d had plenty of bright, pretty things and entertainments! Nurse was with her all the time! Why, why didn’t they give her the same!

“We can’t Meyr,” Caaryn explained patiently. “We can barely afford to look after ourselves.”

“I’m bored!”

Caaryn sighed. They gave her old clothes of their own daughters and let her wander at will in their domus, providing that she used a stick and did not put too much weight on her leg. It was an odd place, apparently a converted valve of the artery system with a coiled spiral arrangement of chambers like a shell. The hearth-lamp at the centre was makeshift, but she could tell that parts of it were very old indeed and seeing it, she thought that perhaps this family might be noble in its way after all.

If nobility was what they had, it was a strange nobility. Whereas the Voyact palace had been filled with many heirlooms and artistic creations, the spiral house had been filled up over the years with Fulgrin’s findings of bits of odd junk as he combed his patch. “Dirty things!” she said to herself contemptuously when she was shown the attic, but eventually the contents revealed the shine of novelty and she found herself exploring and examining with her old curiosity. Some of the stuff was plainly litter, but many things were interesting - there were odd, rusted mechanisms with enamel dials, carved objects of wood, the colourful husks of insects and crabs, scraps of fabric. There were plenty of books for her read too, some of them very, very old. There was even, nested in a wrap of torn damask, a little sphere of glass. It was just like the one from which she had hatched Face, only smaller. She grabbed it and hid in her bed cubby where Bredda and Ambri couldn’t find it.
 

The occupying force of Watchmen supporting the Census eventually went to be replaced by the sanctimonious merchants and volunteers who sought to ‘improve’ the lives of the Dead. This improvement seemed to involve taking their money or possessions at unfair rates of exchange and telling them that they should be happy with their lot. Meyr found it surprisingly easy to hate them. Why was that? She asked herself this question a few times. Perhaps, she realised eventually, it was because she had to defend herself against the insinuating knowledge that she was never ever going to go back home again. She curled up in her cubby at night and whispered this to her little memory globe. “Ai, Eyyr,” she heard it whisper back.

“I have to see, don’t I?” she asked it.

“Ai.”

“I have to see, I have to find out.”

“Ai.”

“I live here now, don’t I, ai?”

Face chattered mildly.

“I wonder what’s happened to Nurse? Did they get her? I wonder if Fulgrin and Caaryn will look after me forever? They say they’re not rich.”

“Bajool!”

“I have to see!”
 

The next day she dressed herself and announced to Fulgrin and Caaryn that she was going Out. “What, into the Land itself?” laughed Fulgrin.

“No,” she said calmly and with dignity. “I am going Out into the City.” She shook her leg to show that she was healed. “I am going to find Nurse. See, she can look after me because you’re not rich.”

The couple exchanged glances and Caaryn nodded. “I’ll take you to see the Market,” she said, “but you must stay close to me. It’s not so safe for someone who’s not known.”

“I came here by myself,” Meyr pointed out, not entirely accurately.

“Yes, of course.”

Young ladies in the Dead Cities didn’t wear veils, Meyr discovered, but she wasn’t going to have people stare at her so she took an old Watchman’s helmet that she had found in the attic and put that on. This provoked more laughter from Fulgrin and indulgent smiles from Caaryn, but she was as stubborn as ever and wouldn’t take it off outdoors. “Ah well,” Caaryn said resignedly, “the best way to be inconspicuous might be to look like one fool among many!”

The corridor outside leading to the Market was a shock to Meyr after the close confines and quiet of the house. People went by like a torrent of water, like the water and the mists that she had seen in the great arteries. Although she knew that the helmet was silly, she was glad that she wore it to keep all the noise of their thoughts out of her head. She only regretted that its filtering software was corrupted and it didn’t fit well, causing it to wobble as she moved her head. She tightened her fist around the marble in her pocket and felt it warm up.

The Market was, like the manifolds of the arteries, a coming together of many ways where people swirled about like the mists and the clouds. She could smell something very strong and very strange. It was a mixture of sweat, spices, rust, moisture, oil and other things that she couldn’t name. Burning herbs perhaps? People were smoking funny pipes and she caught a whiff of the cloud exhaled by one man and it made her dizzy. Someone tapped on her helmet and laughed.

It was all so much that it might have driven her mad. “I know what,” she told herself, “I’ll pretend that I am mad!” Face would agree with that. She wouldn’t need to tell anyone that she was mad of course, just so long as she knew it herself. It was rather fun in fact, having this little secret for herself instead of telling everyone. Immediately she felt much better. She straightened her back and marched confidently alongside Caaryn.

Caaryn spent most of the day at a stall where she laid out from a pack some of the choice gleanings from Fulgrin and her daughters’ expeditions into the arteries and byways of the City. Meyr pretended that she was a real Watchman and stood guard, sometimes marching back and forth in front, though still with a limp, which provoked a lot of interest and amusement. She liked pretending, she decided. She liked it very much and people liked her too. Caaryn did quite well with her trade as a result of the attention that Meyr attracted and they went out together again the next day, and they day after that. When people asked her where she’d come from, she made up stories for them, a different one every time. After a few such trips, Meyr the Liar was a fixture in the Market and “What’s it today little one?” became a standard greeting. Every time she told a story she’d point out the goods on sale.

“Look at this,” she’d say. “I went Out into the Land and stole this from the House of Silence! That’s where I hurt my leg!”

“Did you really?”

“Oh yes, I did!” she’d insist and then describe with great earnestness and pride her adventure, acting out parts of it for illustration. The shopper would laugh, but they’d buy because they had laughed.

The Market was a great place to find books, Meyr discovered, which delighted her. One thing she insisted on now and again was that Caaryn accept an interesting book in trade rather than coinage. Sometimes she acceded to this, but in any case the more regular customers came to know Meyr and sometimes presented her with small volumes as gifts. She would then read them aloud, often elaborating on the text to make tales of her own. Even if the book in question was a strictly descriptive manual on chemistry, she would still read from it aloud because the names and the colours and the strange processes and transformations were so enchanting.

Once Caaryn fell ill and Ambri took her place at the Market stall, much to Meyr’s chagrin, but it turned out that she was willing to look after her in the wider world just as much as Caaryn did and the two began to accept each other as step-siblings of a sort. Ambri had a boy friend, which actually impressed Meyr, and she made up stories about his heroic deeds to amuse the customers and make Ambri blush with embarrassment.

Sometimes there were others in the Market stranger than Meyr, people in motley that she saw passing by. She knew who they were: Masquers. Some of them began to linger to watch her, impassive in their masks as she was in her helmet. She watched them back. She remembered them from her old home and how they’d come out of the walls at night and she remembered that Nurse had had something to do with them. She missed Nurse.

Face said strange things to her at night, his nonsense twisting away at her mind, suggesting things that felt like her own admissions. Maybe she really was mad and Face was just a part of herself, but it was impossible to avoid the fact that he was directing her towards things that she knew were irrefutable. When she returned to the market, she was not sure if she was hiding from these things or seeking them. The stories that she heard and told seemed to have aspects of both, though only the Masquers seemed to understand this well.

Some Masquers, when they stopped by, played along with her lies by treating them as lies. First she was offended by their overt scepticism, but she quickly saw that there was a competitive aspect to lying. They didn’t expect her to be shamed by her stories - they expected her to do better. “So say you went to the House of Silence, eh?” asked one, and she might have blushed or persisted stubbornly in her simple claim. Instead she cocked her head and waited for his objections to see if she might embroider them herself. “So you might have seen the Eye of the Winds too, or looked into the face of a Watcher too, eh?”

“Oh yes!” Meyr said brightly in response to this. The man in motley had laid a trap for her, but he’d also given her the key that would allow her escape, and she seized it. “I didn’t see either, exactly…” she began, and saw him purse his lips in disappointment, but that too was a positive sign, because now she knew that she could lead people along complicated emotional trails that were as interesting as their aims. “I didn’t see them, not at first… I was running away from home, you see, and there was this wind, this wind that howled, and it was raining too, a hot wet rain, like blowing in your face.” She blew on him to demonstrate and was immediately embarrassed for having violated his personal space, but she covered her embarrassment by continuing. “It was dark too, very dark, and there was lightning and thunder that growled with the howling.” She pulled a face and growled to dramatise this. “Howling and growling,” she said. “Grrr!”

The man seemed impressed. “I’ll bet that you were very frightened - and even more frightened when…”

He was prompting her, she realised. “When, yes, you see there was this monster in the storm, that was making the growling and the howling!”

“Oh, and what did the monster look like? Was it the splinter of a Watcher that had gotten in? Did you fight it off? Did you send it away and make us all safe?”

Meyr frowned. No, she thought, that’s not what happened, not quite. “It had five heads, I know,” she said carefully and then picked up momentum again. “It was like a great spider, a great black spider, and it prowled the halls, hunting for people, hunting for me. I knew that I couldn’t let it see me, because it had strange eyes, eyes that would eat me up whole-“

“Oh yes, so people say they do, Watcher’s eyes,” the man interjected.

“Yes, yes! I ran and I hid and it couldn’t find me!”

“And where did you hide? The other eye, the Eye of the Winds, eh?”

“Something like that,” she said, trying to sound sly.

“And what did that look like?”

Meyr frowned again, concentrating. Her imagination couldn’t furnish that detail. She thought of her dolls’ house and guessed that it might be a little like the lamp that sat in its middle. “It’s like a lamp,” she told him then. “A great big green lamp, or a flower, or a rose - and it’s at the very deep, hidden centre of the Redoubt!”

“Ah, and why has no-one but you seen it?”

“Because it’s hidden by storms, growling howling storms, and nobody dares go!”

“Ah yes, but so you say, you went there…”

She gave him a careful look. She was sure that she had exactly told him that she’d been there… still, she wasn’t going to let him win so easily. Suddenly she had an inspiration. “Come back again and I’ll tell you the next time!” she blurted.

The faceless man laughed out loud, but he wasn’t laughing at her. It was a deep, appreciative laugh. “Oh yes,” he decided. “Oh yes indeed, that is the mark of a true storyteller: come again later, later there will be more…” He bowed to her as a gentleman might. “Liar Meyr, as they call you, I may not come back, because I have business that takes me everywhere always… but if ever I do, have that tale for me - and have a hook at the end just like that one.”

She was a little confused, because his appreciation seemed far less in its form and far grander in its import than she might have expected, but it was clear that she had been given truly high praise, so she returned to him a bow with flourishes that she invented as she made them and they parted happy.

That night, she asked Fulgrin all about the Eye of the Winds. He being a Windmaster, surely he would know all about it. He did know a little, in a fashion, but his ignorance was even more significant than his knowledge.

“People talk about it,” he admitted, “and it must surely be, because there are storms.”

“Why are there storms?”

He smiled indulgently, happy to feel that he was being a good father to his adoptive daughter and being a proper teacher to her. “Why does your heart beat, Meyr?”

“To drive blood through me to keep me warm?”

“Yes, and the air and everything it carries is the blood of our Mother Redoubt, so as your heart beats, then there is a greater beat - a storm - at the centre of the Redoubt.”

“There’s no eye in my heart,” she pointed out.

Fulgrin laid a finger on her forehead. “There’s an eye in your pneuma, Meyr. An eye of the soul and the memory and the feelings.”

She didn’t quite understand what he meant, that she knew that to tell stories well, she’d have to repeat what he said, so she listened and nodded. “Have you ever been near the great eye of Mother Redoubt’s soul then?” she asked.

He shook his head, rather sadly, she thought. “No. Every time I turn near where it might be, the storm turns me back. Only certain people are let through to the actual place.”

“Certain people? What certain people?”

He shrugged, his smile now self-deprecating. “Ghosts, heroes and liars - but I’m only a father.”

“I’m a liar!” she said brightly.

“No you’re not,” he told her, taking her in his arms. “You tell the truth every time.”