3The First Try

You set a stand for a wind the way you set a snare for a hare: for the animal, and never for yourself. Forty years I had made of myself the most interesting shut thing in whatever street the quarry was crossing — a corked man beside an open bottle, all door, the one closed thing a curious weather cannot pass without stopping to try. It is the whole of the craft I taught in guild-halls, and it had never once failed me, and standing on the salt-pans that spring with the Unbottled running west ahead of us, I understood at last that it was going to fail me now, because for the first time in my life the quarry did not want the shut thing. It wanted it open. To bait a wind that opens shut things with a shut man is to offer a fox a fox. I had built a lifetime’s cunning on being the most closed thing in the road, and the one wind I needed had made a career of opening exactly that.

So I did what a master does when his craft turns in his hand: I out-thought it, or believed I had. If the stand would not serve, the name would. A name is the whole of the catch — everything else is stools and patter, I had told the child, and I meant to prove it. I had spent the season doing the listening no showman is ever seen doing: sitting in the wake of the wind’s circuit, in the opened towns, reading what it did the way you read a hand by the calluses. It opened. It opened doors and letters and the poor-box and the grave-blame of a dead girl; it opened the kept and the sealed and the sworn; and from all of that opening I built it a name, the grandest and truest my forty years could raise. Opener. Opener of the shut, unlatcher of the world, the wind before which no keeping keeps. I said it over to myself in the old tongue until it rang like a struck bottle, and I was proud of it, and pride, I have since learned, is only fear that has combed its hair.

Noor watched me build it and said nothing for two days, which from her was a shout. On the third she said, at the fire, “I cannot hear that one.”

“You have not met it yet.”

“No.” She turned her two fingers over — the ones the doorway wind had touched, the tell she had carried since the caravanserai. “I know the ninety-nine because they knock. They were put in glass and they want out, so they knock, all of them, all the time, and I learned them by it in the dark. This one was never in glass. It has never once wanted out.” She looked at me across the flames with that grey flat gravity that eleven years had no business owning. “Your name is a good name. It is not a true one.”

“And you know the difference how?”

“The same way you do,” she said. “You go quiet where the true one would be.” And she put her fingers back at her throat and let the fire have the rest of the evening, and I told myself a child raised by bottles hears knocking in everything, and did not sleep especially well.

A wiser man would have heard the warning in his own unease and set it down. I heard it and rode harder. That is the vanity of a craftsman at the top of his craft: he mistakes the thing he is afraid of for the thing he has not yet solved, and reaches for more of what he is good at, because being good at it is the only comfort he trusts. I had never in forty years failed to name a wind I had bothered to listen for. I had listened for this one all season. And there was a thing I had noticed and would not look at square, which was that the wind’s bright indifferent circuit — the same three towns, comet- regular, a hundred years — bent, if you laid it on a map and let your eye run west, toward the low salt country where the road climbs out of the pans; toward, if you followed it far enough, the towns where I had come up young into the trade, in the years I have kept the tidiest and told the least. I told myself a circuit is a circuit and means nothing by where it goes. I have spent a good part of my life telling myself that a thing means nothing by where it goes.

We caught it at a nothing town called Sarab, where the well is sweet and the market small, because I had ridden two nights hard to get ahead of its circuit and set my stand in the one street it had to cross. And I will say this for the last good hour of my old life: it was beautiful work. The glass was my finest — blue Talibar ware, the cork waxed, the proving-string coiled ready — and I sat in the white noon on a borrowed stool with my hat off, doing nothing in the most public manner the trade has devised, and the wind came down the street to see who was drawing a house in a town too poor to pay one. It circled me twice. It read me over, the way it reads everything, tasting the awnings, turning the flags; it put its eye, as it were, to the mouth of the bottle — all door, the one thing it cannot leave alone — and the little market held its breath, and Noor stood at the wall with her chin up and her fingers pressed white to her throat, listening to a wind she could not hear.

I leaned to the glass. I spoke the name I had built into the mouth of it, full voice, the grandest and the truest of forty years. Opener.

The wind considered me. I felt it consider me the way you feel a buyer decide. Then it did not go into the glass at all.

It opened my coat.

Not roughly. That is the thing I cannot make the Road understand, on the rare nights I try: there was no violence in it, no snatch, no gust. It came in against my breast the way a hand goes into a coat it has every right to, one it has hung up a thousand evenings — and it went through my keeping, past the purse and the guild-seal and the folded contract worth an estate, none of which it wanted, and it took the one thing. From the breast pocket sewn under my shirt, older than my fame, it lifted the cracked horn stopper that has lived there forty years, and it took it up into the noon light for one turning instant where the whole poor market could see a great man’s secret was a bit of broken horn — and then it was gone west with it, laughing, that sound you feel in the teeth.

I went after it. Understand what I am telling you: Basri Yel, ninety-nine winds and a name the Road carried like a good horse, went scrambling down a nothing street in Sarab on his hands after a wind, hat rolling, dignity blowing off him like chaff, clawing at the dust where a thing had been and was not. I will not tell you yet what the stopper was. I have not told the Road in forty years; I am not going to blurt it into a market at the bottom of the worst afternoon of my trade. I will only tell you that when my hand went to the pocket and found the pocket empty, something went out of me that had never gone out before, not at any catch, not at any fame — and that a catcher’s hand, which is a liar of long standing and goes to the true thing while the mouth is busy elsewhere, had nothing left to go to, and did not know what to do with itself, and I have hated the sight of my own hands a little ever since.

Noor did not laugh. She came off the wall and stood over me in the dust and did the child a kindness no guild-master ever did me: she looked away, at the west, at the wind. “It has your scent now,” she said. “Listen.” I listened, being on the ground already and past pride. And she was right, the way she was always right about weather — the wind was not turning back to its circuit. It had run that circuit a hundred years, robbed the same three towns of their secrets season on season, comet-regular; and now it broke the circuit clean and went on west, straight and purposeful and interested, toward the low country where the road climbs to the towns of my own young years, carrying a piece of me in its teeth and following the rest.

“It is going ahead of you,” Noor said. “To where you came from.”

“Winds don’t hold grudges,” I told her, and picked up my hat, and did not tell her that grudge was not the fear. The fear was that it had not taken the glass, or the gold, or the grand true useless name. It had reached past all my mastery, unerring, and taken the one thing in my keeping that my mastery had been built for forty years to keep shut — and it had done it in front of a child and a market, in the plain noon, the way it does everything: without choosing, without malice, only opening. It doesn’t choose, she had told me in the last town, and I had agreed like a man agreeing to a proverb. Now it had chosen the one door in all the Road I had sworn would stay shut over my grave, and I stood in Sarab with an empty pocket and a full bottle and understood that the name was not out there in the weather to be listened for and built.

The name was in the pocket. It had always been in the pocket. And the wind had just gone west to open the country where I had left it, and I was going to have to follow it home.