The Girl Who Sold the Wind · novelette
3The Wind's Story
I gave the ticket back.
Do not applaud. I have watched people’s faces at this part of the tale for thirty years and there is always someone who leans forward, pleased with me, thinking ah, now the girl turns good — and I must disappoint you as the Waste disappointed me, which is to say thoroughly and at once. I gave the ticket back because I could not ride while he walked and I could not bear to be looked at, and a thing done to stop yourself being looked at is not goodness. It is only vanity with better manners.
And Rafiq took it. That is the part that put the hook in me. He did not refuse it nobly, he did not press it back into my hands with tears; he lifted the thong over my head with the same two hands that had put it there, and hung it round his own neck where it belonged, and said, “Thank you,” as though I had returned a dropped cup — and then he walked at the tail of the caravan beside me anyway, on his own two feet, with a bonded place and a camel’s shade waiting for him that he did not take. And at the water-halt he split his share of the pot and gave me half.
I would have felt better if he had spat in my eye. I want you to understand that I would have felt enormously better, and that this is a true report of the state of my soul on the second day of the chase.
“You needn’t,” I said, on the third day, with his water in my mouth.
“No,” Rafiq agreed, and went on walking.
That was the whole of our conversation for a hundred miles, and I have had longer arguments that told me less.
Now, a caravan is a village that walks, and every village has three things: a well, a fool, and a woman who knows too much. Ours was called Mother Sufra, and she rode at the head on a white camel and sold nothing to anybody, which at the time I thought was a great waste of a good position.
She was the caravan’s tale-teller. Every night, at the fire, she told them; and every night I sat at the edge of the light with my three warm coins in my fist and did not listen, because I was fourteen and busy and had a wind to catch, and a girl who is busy is the easiest fool in the world to make.
It was Rafiq who noticed. Of course it was.
“They’re getting warmer,” he said, on the ninth night. He was looking at my hand, which was closed, and he was right, and he could not possibly have known it, and I have never got to the bottom of Rafiq. “When you’re near her. Not the wind — her. The one you’re chasing.”
So I opened my hand at the fire and let the light fall on the three coins of the warm strange metal, and the talk around that fire stopped as though somebody had shut a door.
Mother Sufra did not touch them. She leaned across and looked, the way you look into a well, and then she sat back and pulled her shawl up over her mouth, and said, “Wind-metal,” and one of the salt-men got up and went to check the camels who did not need checking.
“It’s coin,” I said. “It’s good coin, it’s the best coin I ever —”
“It is not coin, girl. It is a wind’s own voice, minted out of what it lost.” She looked at me over the shawl with old, unbothered, terrible eyes. “It is the only money a wind has, because it is the only thing a wind owns. Put one on your tongue and it will tell you a piece of the story it is made of, and it will tell you true, and then it will be gone. Spent is spent. There is no getting it back.” She let that sit in the fire a moment. Then, gently, because she was not a cruel woman, only an accurate one: “It is the same rule you sell by, child. It is the only rule there is out here, and everybody learns it, and everybody learns it late.”
Three coins. Three pieces of a story. Even I could do that arithmetic.
I put the first one on my tongue.
The first coin tasted of green, which is a thing I cannot explain to you and will not try.
I was standing in a city.
Not a city like the salt-cities, brown and squat and mean about its water. A city at the mouth of a river where it goes into a sea, all white stone and running fountains and courtyards of little dusty trees, and it was called Halvashir, and it was the last city at the end of the Salt Road and the first city at the beginning of it, depending which way you were going and how much you had left.
And every evening at the turn of the day, off that sea, came a wind.
Oh, they loved it. That is the whole of the first coin and I could have stood in it a year. The wind came in over the harbour wall at the hot end of the afternoon and went up the streets like a cat that lives there, and the awnings lifted, and the fountains blew sideways, and the whole white city let out its breath at once. They set their doorways to catch it. They cut their windows for it. They had a word for the exact hour it came that they used for nothing else, and they gave that word to their daughters as a name, and there were nine hundred girls in Halvashir named for the evening wind and not one of them thought it strange.
The coin was gone off my tongue like a snowflake. I sat down in the sand.
“Well?” said Rafiq.
“They loved her,” I said, and my voice came out wrong, and I did not then know why.
The second coin tasted of smoke, and I knew before it finished melting.
It came in a dry autumn, and the fire started in the low granaries on the eastern shore, and nobody has ever known who started it, and that — Mother Sufra told me afterwards, and she was right — that is always the trouble. A city can bear a great wrong if it can see the face of it. It cannot bear a great wrong with no face at all.
The evening wind came in off the sea at its own hour, as it had every day for a thousand years, doing the one thing it knew how to do, and it took that fire up the streets like a cat that lives there.
Halvashir burned for two days.
And when the burying was done, the city stood in its own ashes and needed, more than it needed bread, a thing to blame. And there it was: the wind. Their wind. The one they had named their daughters for. They called it treachery — they said it had turned on them, they said it had chosen — and the priests bottled the evening wind at the harbour wall on a still grey morning with the whole city watching, and carried it out past the last well into the Bright Waste, and set it down in the sand, and left it, and went home; and they struck its name off the calendar, and forbade the word to be spoken, and the nine hundred girls named for the evening wind were called something else from that day and grew up not knowing why their mothers cried at their names.
Exiled. A thousand years ago, and the sea-wind of Halvashir has been going up and down the Bright Waste ever since with the sand in its teeth, and no name, and no door open to it anywhere in the world.
I sat by the fire with one coin left in my hand and the whole of the Waste black around us, and I said, in a very small voice, “She only wanted to go home.”
“Yes,” said Mother Sufra. “And what did you sell her?”
Here is where I must tell you the worst thing, and I have told this tale three ways in my life, and this part is only in the true one.
I hesitated.
I sat there with the last coin between my finger and my thumb, warm as skin, and I knew — I knew — that whatever was in it was the piece I needed, the piece with the shape of the disaster in it, the piece that would tell me what a wind full of longing does when it is uncorked over a city that would not say its name. And I hesitated. And I will tell you exactly what I was doing while I hesitated, because I have never lied in this telling and I shall not start with the one part that damns me.
I was counting.
Three coins had been a fortune. Two were spent and gone and had bought me nothing I could sell. One coin was what I had left in all the world — one coin, and no stall, and no ticket, and no shelves, and no striped cloth; one warm coin between me and the hungry orphan I had spent my whole life running away from; and a small cold clever voice in me, the same voice that had taken three coins off a veiled stranger at the hot white hour without asking one single question, said: keep it. You know enough. You know she is going to Halvashir. Keep the coin, girl. Keep something.
A city of white stone and nine hundred renamed daughters sat in one pan of the scale, and in the other pan sat one coin, and I stood there in the cold and weighed them.
Rafiq did not say anything. He did not say anything for a long time. He simply sat on the other side of the fire with his water-skin in his lap — half of which was in me — and watched me do my arithmetic, and let me do it, and that is how I learned that there is no punishment on this earth like being watched by somebody who is not going to help you cheat.
I put the coin on my tongue.
The third coin tasted of home, and it was the worst thing I have ever felt, and I have been in a sandstorm and I have been hungry for eleven days.
She will go in at the harbour wall at the turn of the day, at her own hour, in the old way. And she will open my dearest bottle over the city that cast her out — the homesick wind, the heaviest weather there is, the wind that carries you home — and she will give it to them. All of it. Every soul in Halvashir, at once.
And they will not be carried anywhere. That is the hook of it. That is the thing I had not understood, and that any wind understands in its bones, and that a girl who weighed a city against a coin had richly earned the horror of learning: they will already be home. They will be standing in it. They will be in their own doorways in their own street in their own white city with the fountains going, and they will be made to long for it — for their own city, for the exact stones under their own feet — with a longing no distance can explain and no journey can cure and nothing, nothing in the world, can ever, ever feed.
And they will sit down in the streets. And they will not get up.
Just like the little caravan in the sand at dusk, with the old woman holding her arms out to the west and saying a name.
Only it will be a whole city, and it will be forever, and it will be mine.
I do not remember standing up. Mother Sufra says I stood up so fast I went into the fire and Rafiq pulled me out of it, and I have a mark on my ankle that says she is telling the truth.
“Give it back,” I said. “The wind. I’ll — I’ll buy it back, I’ll trade, I’ll —” and I stopped, because even in that state I could hear myself, and because every soul around that fire was looking at me with the pity you give the very young and the very stupid.
A wind, once sold, cannot be recalled. I had said it a thousand times. I had said it that very afternoon to the stranger, brightly, like a girl reciting her letters.
And then the second half of it came down on me, the half I had never once thought about in all my life of saying it, and it was so heavy I had to sit down again.
Halvashir had sold its wind, too.
They could not recall it either. They could not take her back if they wanted to. There was no bargain left anywhere on the Salt Road that could put that wind in through that gate — not their sorrow, not their apology, not a thousand years of it — and she knew that, my grey stranger, she had known it for ten centuries, and that is precisely why she had bought the only thing in the world that goes home whether it is welcome or not.
“Mother Sufra,” I said. “What do I do?”
The old woman pulled her shawl down off her mouth at last, and looked at me across the fire for a long moment, and she was not unkind, and she was not going to spare me one grain of it either.
“You have made two bad bargains, child,” she said. “One when you sold, and one just now, when you sat there and counted.” She reached out and, for the first time, touched my hand — the empty one; the coins were gone, all three, and my fortune with them. “The Road allows a fool a third. It always has. But the third bargain has a hook in it, and the hook is this: it will cost you the very thing you want most in the world.”
“Coin,” I said, at once. Because I was fourteen, and because I was still, God help me, the best wind-seller at the Ninth Waystation. “Money. My stall. Take it. I’ll pay.”
And Mother Sufra laughed — not cruelly, not at all cruelly — and let go of my hand.
“No, you won’t,” she said. “Not yet. You don’t know what it is yet, girl. That’s the hook.”