The Stolen Wind

For three weeks, the wind had not blown in Saltgate.

This had never happened before. The grown-ups said so. The mill — which depended on the wind — had stopped. The fishing boats sat at their moorings, sails hanging slack. The harbour was a strange dead-blue colour, like a mirror that had forgotten what it was for.

The grown-ups argued about it. Some said it was the weather. Some said it was a stagnant pressure system. Some said it was a sign.

Pia was eleven. She lived in the small house behind the mill, where the back garden ran up to the slope of the dunes. She had grown up with the wind. She knew its weather. She knew its moods.

This was not the wind being absent. This was something else.

The wind had not, Pia thought, gone away. The wind had been taken.

This was the kind of idea that an eleven-year-old can entertain easily, but that no grown-up will accept. Pia did not bother telling anyone.

Instead, she did what she always did when she had a question: she went and walked.

She walked along the dunes. She walked along the cliff path. She walked round the harbour. She listened.

She had a theory she could not quite explain. The theory was that wind, like everything else, had to come from somewhere and go somewhere. If it was not coming, something was holding it.

On the third afternoon of her walking, she found something odd.

At the far end of the dunes, in a hollowbetween two of the highest mounds, there was a tent.

The tent was old, leather, weathered. Tied across its front was a long string of bells. The bells were not ringing. They should have been — there should have been a constant tinkle, given how exposed the spot was.

Pia stood at the lip of the hollow and listened.

The bells, somehow, were perfectly still. The grass around the tent was perfectly still. There was a tiny ring around the tent — about ten paces wide — where everything was as still as the inside of a sealed jar.

Outside that ring, the air was — not stormy, but air-shaped. The grass moved.

Inside the ring, nothing moved.

Pia sat down on the lip of the hollow. She watched the tent for a long time.

After about an hour, an old man came out of the tent. He had a long grey coat and a blue scarf. He was carrying a small clay pot.

He looked up. He saw her.

He said, "Ah."