What the Wind Wanted

By noon, Zerune had discovered that the mysterious book in the fishmonger’s window was a collection of insults for use at weddings. She bought it anyway. Yesterday she had spent an hour copying three of its hooked letters through the glass; today she could read even the cramped addition beneath the price: Let it go cheap. It smells.

The fishmonger spoke to his sister in the language of their childhood. Zerune understood that, too. He told his sister he’d meant the little note for her, and hoped this customer would not ask for a discount.

“I won’t,” Zerune said.

He examined her face. When she tried to explain in his language, the sounds would not come. She knew what he had said, but knowing how to move her mouth was apparently a separate accomplishment. She paid the full price in silence and carried the book into the market.

At the cloth stall, two women were signing a dispute about the length of a sleeve. The quick movements were as clear as speech. One woman glanced at Zerune, caught her following, and tucked her hands under her arms. Zerune hurried on, ashamed. She was thirty-two; she ought to have better manners than a child who had learned to read over shoulders.

Still, every passing cart brought her something. A curse. A direction. A man assuring a tethered hen that they would be home soon. The hen’s answer remained a squawk. A wheel squeaked without meaning anything at all.

She sat on the low wall beside the grain sellers and opened her book. Her afternoon stretched before her, full of available things: the inscriptions above the old playhouse, the letters her grandmother had kept but could not read, the poet with the blue binding whom she had loved for his pictures. All at once she had too little afternoon.

The book’s leaves lifted beneath her fingers.

“Up there,” someone whispered.

Zerune looked toward the windows over the stalls. A woman was shaking out a rug. Beyond her, laundry hung almost motionless in the heat.

“I need to go up there. Which way do the walkers go?”

The whisper moved past Zerune’s cheek. She twisted to look behind the wall. There were broken baskets, a sleeping dog, no crouching child.

“Who said that?”

Her pages flickered from front to back. The sound was paper scraping paper, and within it the voice asked, with a sudden concentration, “Can you hear me?”

She clapped the book shut.

For a moment there was only the market. Then the loose end of her headscarf lifted and stroked her ear.

“That stopped the noise. It didn’t stop me.”

Zerune held very still. The scarf rose again, stirring air against her neck in three small pulses. The words arrived with the touch: You can. You can hear me.

She put the book down carefully. “Do that again.”

The pulses returned, each quite distinct. All morning understanding had opened ordinary things. Here was something she had never thought to try to understand.

“You’re the wind.”

“Some of it.”

A boy sweeping outside the grain stall sent a fan of chaff toward her feet. Part of it continued across the paving. Part rose into a loose ring at knee height, revolved twice, and shed a few flakes.

“This much,” the whisper said through the chaff. “At present.”

Zerune reached toward the ring, stopped, and asked if she could touch it. It moved over her hand. The chaff fell away, leaving a cool pressure that ran around her wrist and returned beneath her palm. She could feel where it passed without feeling its edges. Then it left her for a sunlit stone, where a little dust began turning.

“Do all winds speak?”

“I don’t know all winds.”

“But you understand me.”

“You walkers say things constantly. Down by the boats, all through the night. How long have you been listening?”

“To you? Since you asked the way. To everything else, since breakfast.”

The dust stopped turning. For one dismayed instant she thought she had lost it, but her book opened and shut a finger’s width.

“Then you heard the other one.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Up there. Beyond the white ridge.”

She followed the direction of the page as it lifted toward the hills behind the town. The ridge was high enough to retain a dark fold of snow below its summit, though the orchards on its lower slopes were in leaf.

“Is that where you’re going?”

“It called when the sun came over. I caught the edge of it above the water. A long rising turn, with a hollow in the middle. I want to turn in that hollow.”

The breeze left the book and sifted through a basket of oranges. Their seller waved it away as if it were a fly.

“You’re looking for a lover,” Zerune said.

“I’m looking for that wind.”

She had been about to ask what it remembered of the drowned temples along the shore. “And you want directions.”

“Yes.”

There was nothing disappointed about its yes. It circled her warm wrist again, expecting an answer.

Zerune knew a path to the ridge. She had gone partway up it once with a party of cousins, before they settled under an almond tree and forgot their destination. She told the breeze about the path, and it brushed upward along her arm, then fluttered uncertainly against the book.

“Show me the beginning.”

She looked at the open page, where someone had written a furious objection to the author’s remarks about bridegrooms and dated it two hundred years earlier. It would keep.

She tucked the book into her shoulder bag and set off for the last houses. A little dust followed her uphill.

At the last house the path passed an open cellar. The breeze, skimming ahead, drifted across the doorway. Its whisper broke into a thin, meaningless rattle. Dust spread on the doorstep.

“Are you there?” Zerune asked.

The dust gathered slowly toward a bright patch of paving. She waited while its circle tightened.

“Cold in there,” it said at last. “Don’t take me under the trees.”

“What happened?”

“I nearly came apart.”

She crouched by the patch of sunlight. The moving air trembled against her knee. “Would you have died?”

“I would have scattered. Come on. The stone’s giving me plenty now.”

It rose in a little spiral and went ahead, leaving her to straighten more slowly.

For a while the path ran beside a low orchard wall. The breeze avoided the shade of the trees, crossed sunny gaps, and waited on pale stones while she caught up. It could turn the youngest leaves, but when Zerune asked it to give her a push up a steep stretch, it did no more than lift the cloth between her shoulders.

“You’re heavy.”

“So I’m discovering.”

Her shoes had been suitable for the market. Gravel entered them at every bend. Below her the harbor diminished into boats and bright spaces between boats; above, the white ridge had resolved into rock, a saddle, and the dark mouth of a tunnel. She asked whether the breeze had ever entered a ruined temple.

“Holes in stone? Yes.”

“And heard anything?”

“Dripping. Wings. Once another wind that wouldn’t let me leave by the way I’d come.” It ran over a clump of thyme and returned smelling of it. “I could bring this.”

“To the wind you’re meeting?”

“Does it cling?”

She inhaled. “Very strongly.”

It took more, combing the thyme against its stems. Her next breath tasted green and bitter.

“Enough,” she said, coughing.

The breeze had already left the path. She found it above a rock, practicing a turn that lifted dry flower heads in a narrowing spiral. It began telling her about the routes it had traveled: between two waves before they struck together, up the hot back of a sleeping bull, through a row of freshly washed shirts. As it spoke, little pressures along her arms indicated turns and dips. She understood the words for those movements. She could no more imagine their pleasure than she could smell a color.

“Will you show me the wave one?” she asked.

“This is the wave one.”

She watched the flower heads swing around the rock. “Oh.”

“There was more room between the waves.”

It swept the flower heads away and went farther up the path.

By the time they reached the tunnel, Zerune had removed her scarf and was carrying it with both hands behind her neck. The afternoon sunlight stood on the ridge’s western face. A cold stream of ordinary air poured over the saddle above the tunnel, dragging tatters of mist off the snow. Nothing whispered in it.

The breeze stayed low against the sunny rock.

“Through there,” it said.

The tunnel cut straight through a narrow spur of rock. Zerune could see daylight at its far end, green within the white glare. The floor was level, worn smooth along the middle. Inside, water gleamed on the walls.

“Why haven’t you gone through?”

“Put your hand in.”

She did. The tunnel air was cold enough to tighten the skin along her arm.

“And over the top?”

The breeze touched her scarf. “That flow would pull me out long and thin. I’d lose the turn that keeps me together.”

“You can’t go around the ridge?”

“I can go down again. Along the shore. Away from here.” Its speech rustled in the scarf, impatiently at first, then more slowly. “The other wind will change when the sun leaves that basin. I don’t know if it will come back the same.”

Zerune eased her bag off and sat on a flat rock. She could feel her pulse in her heels. She had climbed far past the almond tree without recognizing it, and now, at the height to which she had brought it, the creature needed something she could not provide.

She drew breath to say so.

The breeze pressed against her lips.

She flinched, spat, and pulled the scarf across her mouth. “Don’t do that.”

It withdrew so quickly that her hair fell across her eyes.

“You’re wet inside,” it said. “Warm. When you let air out, I can feel it.”

Zerune lowered the scarf a little. “You want to get in my mouth?”

“Farther. Where you keep your breath.”

She looked from the patch of turning grit beside her shoe to the tunnel. “And then?”

“You walk. You let me out on the warm side.”

“Can you even fit?”

The grit spread. A narrow current entered the loose curl of her hand and went around inside it, brushing one knuckle after another.

“I leave most of the air. I keep moving. Feel?”

She felt. The small circuit tickled her skin. When she closed her hand a little, it moved within the smaller space, quicker and less regular.

“Too small,” it said, and slid free.

She went to the tunnel mouth again. It didn’t look very long. She counted the visible seams in the floor, then gave up trying to judge the distance from here.

“Wait here.”

“I am waiting.”

She crossed without it, counting her steps. Twenty-six. The floor held no loose stones, and the damp stayed against the walls. She emerged onto a grassy shelf overlooking a shallow basin. Sun lay on its far slope and on the tall grasses surrounding a pond. Warm air brushed her forehead. Far below, from among the grasses, came a rising sound that meant here, this way through me, although it wasn’t addressed to her.

She stood listening. A second phrase moved through the reeds at the pond’s edge. She understood it perfectly and could not have followed its instruction without becoming wide and lifting at three separate points.

On the return she walked at an easy pace, watching the bright entrance grow. She had room to swing her arms. No step required a climb.

“I heard it,” she told the breeze.

It came up off the stone so abruptly that grit struck her stockings. “What did it say?”

She tried to reproduce the rising sound. The breeze waited.

“Something about a way through it. I can’t make the sound.”

“But it’s there.”

“Yes.”

It pushed gently against the inside of her wrist. She had wanted its whole attention for an hour. Now she had it, and found herself trying to describe the three separate lifts before she remembered what they were discussing.

“Listen. I can walk that far holding my breath. But if I need to breathe, I will. Even if we’re still inside.”

The pressure left her wrist.

“Could you get back to this end?” she asked.

“Maybe. Close to it.”

“And in the middle?”

The breeze passed once across the tunnel mouth, no farther than her outstretched arm. It returned with a falter she could hear.

“I don’t think so.”

Zerune sat down again. She drank from her flask, wiped the water from her chin, and let her breathing settle. She could take her book down to the almond tree. She could lie there and read until the stones cooled. Instead she listened to the little wind circling beside her, rehearsing and abandoning the beginning of its wave turn.

“Will I hurt you?” she asked.

“If you keep me too long. I can’t stay folded like that.”

“I won’t want you to.”

She pushed the scarf and flask into her bag, lifted it, and loosened the strap so it didn’t press her chest. The breeze rose with her.

“I’ll breathe you in at the entrance,” she said. “Slowly. I’ll say when.”

It waited against her lower lip while she took two ordinary breaths. “Now,” she said, and breathed in. It entered with a faint taste of salt underneath the thyme. Her throat wanted to reject it. She stopped, let it wait, then finished the breath.

Something turned behind her breastbone.

It was no larger a sensation than the flutter that sometimes came when she drank too much strong tea. It was also entirely wrong. She shut her mouth and stepped into the tunnel.

Her bag brushed her hip. First one foot, then the other; the familiar work of walking, with her body trying to draw her attention elsewhere. Coolness gathered under her sleeves. She looked at the far opening. From here she could see the top of a grass stem beyond it, bending in the sun.

The movement in her chest tightened. A delicate vibration reached her throat, and meaning came through it, as plain as the signs at the cloth stall.

Too close. All around.

She could not reassure it. She kept her pace even, resisting the desire to run and use up everything at once. Water clicked somewhere to her left. Her soles crossed a seam in the rock, one she had already stepped over twice. The far opening widened; light touched the floor ahead.

Now her chest wanted to open. The wind was still turning, cramped into her, and she wanted it out with an urgency that briefly displaced all her fascination. She reached the seam where the ceiling ended. One more step put her face in warmth.

She exhaled.

The breath came out ragged. Her next went in too sharply, and she coughed, bent over with her hands on her thighs. The flutter was gone. She lifted her head before she had quite recovered, searching the grass at her feet.

There: a pair of pale seed husks, circling each other. They climbed, parted, drifted down. A warm touch crossed her cheek.

“It smells of stone here,” the breeze said. Its voice had resumed its ordinary eagerness. “And deep water. Can you smell the water?”

“Give me a moment.”

But it was already moving down the shelf.

Zerune followed far enough to sit in the grass. The basin lay below her, perhaps two hundred paces across. A grove of short trees occupied one side; on the other, the pond reflected a bright slice of ridge. She could hear the larger current in the trees now, a phrase passing from one crown to the next, continuing far beyond what she would have been able to say on one breath.

The little breeze entered it with a shiver of thyme.

“I went between two waves. Both breaking. I turned lengthwise and came out before they touched.”

The trees continued their phrase. Grasses on the far side of the pond bowed toward the bank, then straightened. Zerune waited for an answer, feeling an absurd need to make sure the breeze was heard.

“It came all the way from the shore,” she called.

The little breeze doubled back through the grass below her. “Don’t tell it. I’m telling it.”

“Sorry.”

It went out again, carrying its salt and thyme, and began the wave turn over the pond. Water dimpled. The dimples curved around one another in a fleeting pattern she recognized from the flower heads. This time it was beautiful, though she could not have said whether the wind performed it better or she had learned where to look.

“There’s another way,” the basin current said.

The pond’s surface moved from the far bank toward the near one in three narrow bands. The breeze attempted to cross them. Its turn broke, reformed, and broke again. A sharp little eddy rattled the reeds.

“Those are not waves.”

“They’re what I have.”

The little wind tried again. Zerune took the book out, laid it in her lap, and tucked the softer bag behind her back. Above the pond the water quieted, and the breeze moved into the spaces between the three bands. The reeds bowed. From the trees came a sound so low that she felt it in her teeth.

“Come through again.”

It did, more slowly.

This exchange went on until the shadow of the ridge had crept past the tunnel behind her. The breeze shed its thyme. Zerune could no longer pick out its scent when a current strayed up to her, but she knew its touch: the small, hasty return, the way it gathered around a warm place before leaving. Once it swept along the pond’s edge and lifted a procession of gnats. The basin current turned them back. The breeze left the gnats alone. Returning over the reeds, it began a tight inward movement, broke it off, and stretched itself into a long curve.

Then the larger voice asked, “What’s the turn you keep folding away?”

The little wind faltered over the reeds.

“A tight one.”

“Show me.”

It drew into itself. A handful of grass stems tilted inward beneath it, their tips describing the little cramped space. Zerune sat forward. The movement loosened, almost resumed the wave turn, then contracted again.

“That one,” said the basin current.

The tight circuit shivered. She felt the remembered flutter in her own chest, though she knew she had let all of it go.

“I couldn’t turn out,” the breeze said. “There was warmth on every side. I had to keep coming back.”

The leaves nearest the pond began to move inward. Farther away, tree after tree took up the curve. The big current was making a hollow for the small one, a space held in motion. Zerune could follow the invitation across the whole slope. For once she knew exactly what was being offered, and still the scale of it bewildered her.

The breeze entered.

The two patterns met above the pond. For a while the reeds spoke first, the trees answered, and the little wind’s quick returns passed between them. Then a movement began in both places at once. Zerune heard a new inflection: we, with a precise meaning she had never heard in a human mouth. Both speakers were still there. One hurried; one extended the turning long after Zerune expected it to end. Together they were asking whether to rise.

They tried. The first attempt spilled into the trees. Leaves flashed pale undersides and a few snapped loose. The little voice objected to the widening at the top; the larger one wanted more space underneath. They came down across the water and began again.

Zerune pulled her feet under her to make room as a cool edge of their conversation crossed the grass. They had no need of her answer. She could hear them perfectly, and sat with her book unopened while the turning gathered below her, spread, and carried its two voices up the sunlit slope.