"Ian R. MacLeod - The Master Miller's Tale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

The Master MillerтАЩs Tale
by Ian R. MacLeod


Ian MacLeod contributed a number of memorable stories to our magazine in the
1990s, including тАЬVerglas,тАЭ тАЬThe Noonsday Pool,тАЭ and тАЬTirkiluk,тАЭ but nearly a
decade has passed since his last appearance in F&SF. Which is not to suggest he
has been idle; as detailed at www.ianrmacleod.com, he has published The Great
Wheel, The Summer Isles, The Light Ages, and The House of Storms over the last
ten years. (And a new story collection entitled Past Magic has just been published
this year.)
This new story, which marks his welcome return to our pages, is set in the
same alternate world as that of The Light Ages, but it takes a different approach
and you need not be familiar with the novel to enjoy the story.
****
There are only ruins left now on Burlish Hill, a rough circle of stones. The
track that once curved up from the village of Stagsby in the valley below is little
more than an indentation in the grass, and the sails of the mill that once turned there
are forgotten. Time has moved on, and lives have moved with it. Only the wind
remains.
Once, the Westovers were millers. They belonged to their mill as much as it
belonged to them, and Burlish Hill was so strongly associated with their trade that
the words mill and hill grew blurred in the local dialect until the two became the
same. Hill was mill and mill was hill, and one or other of the Westovers, either father
or son, was in charge of those turning sails, and that was all the people of Stagsby,
and all the workers in the surrounding farms and smallholdings, cared to know. The
mill itself, with its four sides of sloped, slatted wood, weather-bleached and limed
until they were almost paler than its sails, was of the type known as a post mill. Its
upper body, shoulders, middle and skirts, turned about a central pivot from a squat,
stone lower floor to meet whichever wind prevailed. There was a tower mill at
Alford, and there were overshot water mills at Lough and Screamby, but Burlish Mill
on Burlish Hill had long served its purpose. You might get better rates farther afield,
but balanced against that had to be the extra journey time, and the tolls on the roads,
and the fact that this was Stagsby, and the Westovers had been the millers here for
as long as anyone could remember. Generation on generation, the Westovers
recemented this relationship by marrying the daughters of the farmers who drove
their carts up Burlish Hill, whilst any spare Westovers took to laboring some of the
many thousands of acres that the mill surveyed. The Westovers were pale-faced men
with sandy hair, plump arms and close-set eyes which, in their near-translucence,
seemed to have absorbed something of the sky of their hilltop home. They went bald
earlyтАФpeople joked that the winds had blown away their hairтАФand worked hard,
and characteristically saved their breath and said little, and saved their energies for
their work.
 ****
Although it took him most of his life to know it, Nathan Westover was the last
of the master millers on Burlish Hill. Growing up, he never imagined that anything
could change. The endless grinding, mumbling sound of the mill in motion was
always there, deep within his bones.
He was set to watch a pulley that was threatening to slip.
тАЬSee how it sits, and that band of metal helps keep it in place...тАЭ his mother,