The Girl Who Sold the Wind · novelette
5The Homesick Wind
Now. You have been very patient, and you have paid, and this is the true telling, the one that cost me, so I will not be clever with you at the end. That would be a poor joke after everything.
We came down onto the gate road of Halvashir at the turn of the evening, and the fast wind set us on our feet and went straight up out of the world like a bird let go, having been paid and being done with us, which is a wind all over. And there was the white city with the sea going gold behind it, and the gate open the way a gate is open at supper time, and one bored old man in the gatehouse eating with his fingers.
And there was the stranger. Twenty paces off, in her grey, with her veil going, holding my bottle against her the way you hold a child you have carried too far to put down.
I want to tell you that I ran at her. It makes a better tale. What I did was stand in the road with my knees going soft and my mouth full of a plan.
Because I had one. Of course I had one; I am Zari, I had a plan before I had shoes. All the way west, three days and three nights up in the high air with Rafiq’s shoulder against mine, I had been building it, and it was, I will say it plainly, beautiful. I had found the one place where she was thin. It went like this. I would let her get to the wall. I would let her raise the bottle over Halvashir. And then I would say, in my carrying voice, the one I use to turn a crowd:
They named nine hundred daughters for you. Do it, and by morning you are the thing they said you were. Forty years too late, you make them right.
That was it. That was the whole trick, and it was true, and it would have worked. I knew it would work the way I know a stopper is loose. It takes her love — the one soft place in a hard grey woman, the nine hundred daughters, the fact that she has not stopped for one hour in forty years loving the city that murdered her name — and it makes a leash of it, and it walks her backward off that wall with her own tenderness around her throat.
It was the cleverest thing I have ever thought of. I have never told anybody it before tonight.
Do not be clever, said Mother Sufra in my ear, from a fire a thousand miles behind me. You have been clever your whole life and it has brought you here.
I stood in the road and I felt the shape of what I was about to do, and it was the shape of every trade I had ever made: find the thing they cannot bear to lose, and put your hand on it, and let them buy it back off you at your price. That is all cleverness has ever been. I had done it to caravans and merchants and pilgrims and one boy with a water-skin, and I had called it a gift, and it was a gift, and it was also the reason I was standing at the gate of a city with a hundred thousand people in it about to save them by wringing a widow’s heart.
So I shut my mouth, which I would like recorded, because it may be the hardest thing I have ever done, and I walked up the road to her instead with nothing in my hands.
She heard me coming. She did not turn.
“The wind-seller,” she said. Her voice was the sound of a door on a cold night. “Nine days on foot is three days on the high air. You paid for a wind.”
“I did.”
“With what?”
“With everything I’ve got,” I said. “Nearly.”
And then — because I still had one foot in my old life, because a fish out of water still swims — I did the thing I had come to do. I held up my hand and I minted it, right there in the gate road, and it came up hard and warm and terrible: the whole coin, the never-again, the wall and the store and the full jar and the hungry orphan and the fourteen years of it, pressed down small and round in my palm, the ugliest, dearest money on the Salt Road.
“Wind-metal,” I said. “Real, and mine, and minted out of what I would not spend. You know it’s good; you’re a wind, you can weigh it. So: a trade. The Road’s own rule. I’ll buy the homesick wind back off you at your own price, and I’ll pay in this, and there isn’t a wind between here and the Ninth Waystation that’s been offered a coin like it.”
And she turned around, at last, and looked at what was in my hand for a long time.
I would like to tell you she was tempted. I think she was. I think a wind has never in the history of the world been offered a coin like that one, and I think for a moment the grey of her went thin as morning. But she did not reach for it. She only looked from the coin to my face, and back, patient, the way a teacher waits.
And the coin went soft in my hand.
I felt it go — the same slither, the same wet-salt run of it through my fingers as the stall on the night I tried to mint a thing I would have handed over gladly — and I made a noise I am not proud of and I grabbed at it, and it was nothing, it weighed nothing, it was worth nothing at all.
“Why,” I said. “Why — that was true, that hurt, I felt it —”
“Count,” said the stranger.
And I stood there in the dust and I counted, and I found the bottom of my own trick, and it was the oldest and stupidest and most Zari thing in the whole tale.
Because what was I buying? The homesick wind. The heaviest and costliest wind on the Salt Road, the one that goes home whether it is welcome or not, worth ten stalls, worth twenty, worth the whole Ninth Waystation and the striped cloth and the shelves and every brass scale in the Bright Waste. I was proposing to spend my never-again — and get back, in the same breath, in my own two hands, a bottle that would buy me never-again forever, with change.
There was no losing in it. I had built, out of the truest coin I had, one more clever trade. I had come a thousand miles and paid in my own chest and I had still, at the very last step, found the way to end up holding something.
Spent is spent, said the rule. Nothing had been spent. I had only moved my wall to the other side of the gate.
I put my empty hands down and I began, for the first time in my life, to have nothing at all.
“Why won’t you use it?” I said.
She went very still.
“You’ve had it nine days,” I said. “You had it the night you bought it. You could have gone up over that wall an hour ago; the old man in the gatehouse is eating. And you’re standing in the road. Why are you standing in the road?”
And here is where I stopped trading, and here is where the tale turns, and it did not turn on a trick, it turned on the first honest question I ever asked anybody in my life. I did not ask it to work her. I asked it because I wanted to know.
She said, “Because it will not lift me.”
She said it flat, the way you say a thing you have said only to yourself.
“It carries you home,” she said. “Once. That is what it is for; that is what it is made of. I have carried it a thousand miles against my heart and I have taken the stopper half out twice, and it does not stir for me, because there is no place to carry me to. Home was an evening. Home was that hour” — and she did not point; she did not need to; the whole gold sky was doing it — “and the boats coming in, and eight hundred windows opening at once because I had come up the street, and nine hundred small girls being called in to supper by my name. That is where I long for. It is not anywhere. You cannot be carried to a Tuesday.” She looked at the bottle. “A wind that cannot go home has one thing left it can do with a wind that goes home.”
“Make them feel it,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Every one of them. Forever.”
“Yes.” And then, because she was not a monster, and I would rather have had a monster: “I would like somebody to know what it is like. That is all it is, girl. It was never revenge. I have been alone in it for forty years and I would like, for one hour, to have company.”
And I stood in the gate road of Halvashir with my hands empty and my wall gone and the cold coming straight in through the open door of me, and I understood the whole thing at once, the way you understand a stopper.
She was me. She was me at the fire, counting. She was me at fourteen with the full jar. She was every frightened creature that ever built a hard grey thing around a soft place and then could not find its own way out, and the only difference between us was forty years and a city, and I had been sent a thousand miles to look at it.
Rafiq was behind me. He had come up quiet, the way he does. He did not say anything. He did not put his hand on my arm. Mother Sufra had told me there would be no Rafiq to pull me out, and here he was, not pulling me out, standing there letting me pay — which is the hardest kind of love there is, and the boy had it at thirteen, and had had it since the night I cheated him out of his bonded place and he picked up his water-skin and walked beside me anyway and split it with me at noon.
I had walked a thousand miles next to the answer. I had cheated him and he had come anyway. Nobody paid him. Nobody could. He simply wanted me along, and I had been so busy pricing the world that I had never once wondered what that was worth.
So I knew what to do, and it was not clever, and it cost everything.
“Come home with me,” I said.
She looked at me.
“I’ve nothing,” I said. “I want to be exact, since you’ll weigh it anyway. No stall. No pitch. No striped cloth, no shelves, no brass scale, no jar, no ticket, no roof, no coin, and no prospect of one, and I am fourteen and a thief and a fool and I sold you the weather. There’s nothing at the Ninth Waystation with my name on it any more. There’s a pitch of sand and a girl with two hands.” I made myself say the rest. “And there’s room. That’s all I’m offering. That’s the whole of it. There’s room in me now where the wall was, and it’s cold in there, and it’s going to stay cold, and it’s yours, and I’m not selling it, and you can’t pay me, and if you say no I still don’t get it back.”
And I minted it again — and this time it came up in my hand hard as a stone and heavy as a city and it did not go soft, because there was nothing coming back the other way. Not a bottle. Not a stall. Not one copper. I had finally found the only trade on the Salt Road with real losing in it, which is the one that is not a trade.
I put it on the shelf. I spent it. I felt the never-again go out of me like a lamp, and I have never had it back, and you would not believe what a fourteen-year-old thief will grieve for.
Then I asked her the last thing.
“What’s your name?”
And the grey woman in the road went so still that the dust stopped.
“Nine hundred daughters,” I said. “They named them all for you. And you’ve been standing outside that gate for forty years and I’ve been talking to you for nine days and not one living soul has said it, have they. Not once. That’s the thing they took. That’s the thing that’s gone.”
A wind, once sold, cannot be recalled. It is the oldest rule on the Salt Road, and I had been repeating it since I was six, and I had never once heard what was standing in the middle of it, and I heard it then, at the gate, in the gold, with my hands empty.
Recalled. Called back.
They could not call her back. Not the city, not the harbour wall, not the elders who struck her off the calendar — that is true, and it is iron, and no apology and no sorrow and no thousand years will ever move it one inch. Halvashir cannot recall her.
Nobody had said anything about calling.
“Shir,” she said. Barely a sound.
And I heard it, and I turned my head, and I looked up at the whitewashed arch over the gate of the white city at the river-mouth, at the letters cut into it eight hundred years ago, that every soul in that town had walked under twice a day for forty years without hearing a single thing.
Halva-shir.
They had struck her name off the calendar. They had kept it in their own mouths. They said it every time they said where they lived. They had said it that morning, and at noon, and they would say it at supper, and not one of them, not in forty years, had meant her by it.
So I said it. That is all. That is the whole of what I did, and you may have it for your copper.
I stood in the road, poor as the day I was born, and I said, “Shir.”
I meant her by it.
The bottle went out of her hands.
She did not throw it. I do not think she knew she had let go. It fell on the gate-stones and it broke, and the homesick wind — the heaviest and costliest wind on the Salt Road, the one I sold, the one that was to sit a hundred thousand people down in their own streets and never let them up — came out all at once at the gate of Halvashir with nothing over it and nobody’s hand on it.
I had one heartbeat to be more frightened than I have ever been.
And then it did what it is for. It has no malice in it and no plan; it is only a wind that goes home. It went over the gate-road looking for the loudest longing within a mile, and the city did not answer it, because a city standing in its own streets at supper is not homesick for anything and never was — that was the entire trick of her plan, that she would have had to put it on them, high, deliberate, by her own hand, and her hand was empty now.
And there was one thing in that road aching loud enough to hear from the sea.
It found her. It got under her the way a wind gets under a bird. And it lifted her, and it carried her home — once, whether welcome or not, exactly as it says on the bottle — and home was three feet away, and it was a fourteen-year-old thief with nothing in her hands and a cold open doorway where her wall used to be, standing in the dust with her mouth still round from saying a name.
It is not a place. I had sold that wind for eleven years and I thought I knew what it did. It is not a place. It never was. It is whoever is calling you and means it, and that is why it is the heaviest wind there is, and I hope you did not pay for this telling expecting a merrier moral, because that is the one I have got and it took a city to teach it to me.
The old man in the gatehouse came out and shouted at us about the broken glass, and Rafiq apologised beautifully, and we walked east.
That is the end, and I will not decorate it. Halvashir never knew. Nobody up on that white wall has any notion that they were, for one heartbeat at the turn of an evening, three feet from sitting down in their streets for good; they had their supper and they went to bed and in the morning nine hundred women answered to a name none of them has ever once heard. There was no thanks. There is never any thanks. A fable that ends in thanks is a fable someone is selling you.
You want to know if I got the stall back. Everyone does; you have all got a jar of your own and you want to hear that the jar comes back. Yes. Eventually. Years. It is a good pitch and the cloth is striped and Rafiq keeps the accounts because I cannot be trusted with them, and I want you to hear me say this next part very carefully, because it is the whole of what I have to sell and it is free:
It did not matter. That is the sting. I got it all back and it was never the thing. Enough was never a number. It was a wall I built against being that hungry child, and I stood at a gate a thousand miles from home and took it down brick by brick to make room for somebody worse off than me, and I have been poor and warm ever since, and I would not have the wall back if you brought it to me on a plate.
Now. You have heard the striped cloth over your head moving this whole hour, and you have been too polite to ask, and you have been wondering why there is an evening sea-wind at the Ninth Waystation, nine hundred miles from any sea.
She lives with me. She does not go in a bottle. I have sold every wind that ever came into my hands — dawn and grief and cat’s-paw and the long hot liar out of the south — and there is exactly one on this Road that has never had a price on it and never will, and she is why my lamp is the only one in the Waystation that will not blow out, and she takes her name from me most evenings, at that hour, at the turn of the day.
That is the true telling. That will be one copper.
And no. She is not for sale. Ask me again and I’ll charge you for it.