Word Count: 3544 | Reading Time: 12 min
Since that first night of time, when the earth cleft from the moon and the waters rushed into the sea, we have known of fire pouring from the earth, we have heard of lightnings that freeze glasslike in the sky, we have even bent close to hear whispers of stars (yes, stars!) that have winked out and disappeared. But in all the many years in all of creation there has never been a time when all four winds have slept at once. You are right to gasp, little ones. Never ever, even for a moment. You see, whenever one of the winds grew tired of holding the sky so far apart from the earth, they can settle into a weary little nap, knowing that the other three can hold it all up for a little while. So no one, no one at all, not a soul from the huts on earth nor the castles of the sky, knows what will happen if all four winds fall asleep. Not even you, not-so-little-ones.
All this is well, but all cannot always be well or there wouldn’t be a tale to tell. Tonight, when the clouds glide slowly, and the birds rest their throats, and the moon lets her hair down to touch the waters, tonight the winds are at their sleepiest, and they do not see the harm in closing their weary eyes for a moment. ‘What would a moment of sleep ruin for the world?’ asks the West wind, who has whistled through many low ravines on this night already. ‘If I were to close my eyes, just for a blink, really, nothing would be harmed,’ says the East wind, who has skimmed over the silvery tops of waves and dried the backs of lazing dolphins. ‘Surely the clouds will not fall to the earth if I don’t bear them on my back for a little while,’ grumbles the South wind, who is parched by the sands it has carried from one dune to another. And the North wind is silent, for the frost has already closed over her eyes and her breath is slow as the breath of the earth.
Do you hear that stillness drawing close around you? Tickling your very eardrums? Look up, even the clouds hang silent and still as clouds in a painted sky. A silence so deep that you could even — yes, do not even blink, do you hear it? The soft falling, soft as dew on leaves, of a princeling.
You are not likely to have seen a prince before, for the princes of the sky are a light and almost insubstantial people formed from the air, and the merest breath of wind can bear them. Just as we plough the earth and build our homes from its stones, the four winds are firm enough for princes to stand on and sleep on and raise their incomparable castles on. And what castles they are, my lovelies, built from the pliant sorts of clouds, rising in grand columns and falling in great arches and almost transparent to the eye. Nestled in their soft architecture, the princes find the delights of the sky so pleasant and toothsome and various and saturating that they spare as little concern to what goes on below the sky as you or I might to what goes on several leagues below our feet.
Have you wondered at the entrails of the earth? Have you considered the Worm? Yes, yes, I have, I see some among you raise your hands to say. Just so, among the princes of the air, there are some who are not content with the delights that surround them, who spend their nights imagining rivers and trees, who worry about things that do not and cannot concern them. They are mocked for this; their tutors cajole them and their parents distract them; they are offered lives of minimal duty and endless ease, but none of it works. In short, the princes of the sky have their dreamers too. Our little princeling, the one who you can still hear falling, is just such a dreamer.
He is a wispy thing by our standards, but for them he is quite solid and crude. He is more smoke than vapour, he is heavy enough to bend a blade of grass, and he even casts a shadow in the moonlight. His tutors are eternally beset by questions; they avoid him as they see him walk through his courtyards with his bouncing lilt of curiosity. All his leisurely hours day and all the sleeping hours of night he spends in contemplation of land far below him.
‘What joys they must feel, those heavy beings below,’ he mutters, lying on the lip of a cliff of curling air, ‘What a solid and secure world they live in! When they go for a walk they need not account for the tugging of the moon. When they see a mountain in the distance when they fall asleep, they know it shall not be blown away before they wake. They can even hold the things they love close to them.’ And this last smites at his heart so grievously that he sighs, and it is a wondrous whooshing sigh because it comes straight from the bottom of him, and it pushes his wispy self off the cliff.
Now ordinarily this is no danger for a prince of the sky, because the winds that hold the sky above the earth are more solid to a prince than the bones of the earth are to us. Every prince knows that winds shall blow him back to the cloud that bore him. Yet tonight, on this incomparable night where the four winds (all four of them!) have forgotten their duties and given themselves over to rest, the princeling falls from the cliff and keeps on falling.
Falling is unknown to a being that lives in the sky. It may even be that the princeling, sighing and fanciful, does not realise he is falling, that all the world he has ever known is dwindling among the stars above him, all its pinnacles, and parapet, and keeps, and wings, and moats that hold the vapours in. When he opens his dreaming eyes he is already a long way down, further from the clouds than any being of the air has any right to be.
The principality from which the prince pitched down hangs over a flat patch of sea, speckled with gravel. As the prince falls the gravel grows into stones, which resolve into boulders, which finally wax into rocky rippling islands whitened at the edges by the tide. To him this is the greatest wonder he has ever known. Away with all the gossamer crowds he’d pestered with his questions, away with all the rumours that he had to take as fact. The earth looms large below him and he spreads his arms to embrace it.
We must leave the prince in his joyful falling for a moment, and introduce our other, heavier hero, who at this same moment is running down a grassy slope on one of these islands. Below that slope is a sudden drop, and below the drop the air is bare. What is more, she intends to jump. She jostles and scrapes as she runs because she has tied to her back a lovely, rickety pair of wings that she has made from leaves she has dried and treated and stitched together finely, and lengths of bamboo held together with dowels. She is picking up speed as she nears the edge. Though she is wise, and clever too, you must not do as she is doing, no matter if you are wise, and clever too, as I am sure you are. It is not a safe business, running off a cliff with the fruits of one’s wisdom and cleverness strapped to one’s back. It is not to be done, especially not if you are a being of humble flesh and blood.
This heavy, heaving hero of ours we shall call Tinker, because it fits her well. You may not understand why Tinker is doing something so reckless as jumping into a span of air so high above the ground. Perhaps you would understand if you have ever worked yourself raw trying to do something deeply wished for, and failed again and again. Tinker wishes to fly, and for this wish she has sweated sourly and cried bitterly. She has dissected and drawn the wings of birds so that she may know their secrets. She has tied fruits to cradles that waft slowly to the ground. She has cut and folded reeds so that spinning them makes them twirl up and away. She has made device after rig after contraption and none of them has done more than slowing the inevitable fall. It is not enough for her. None of this art and artifice has brought her to her goal. Tinker has spent weeks and months of her short life (yes, she has had only a short life, though she won’t admit it) so she can be the first to fly.
Cleverness like Tinker’s always finds a way, and today her hands have made her proud. At noon she had hit upon a new construction, by sunset she had put it all together, and it was dark already by the time she hauled her invention up the hill. I need not tell you, but I shall anyway, that Tinker is a dreamer too. These dreams draw close around her limbs to steady them as she runs, they calm the frantic beating of her heart, they wind around her toes as she springs into the cold night air.
To make this jump Tinker has had to rely on every bit of her skill. The cutting and joinery on the bamboo is perfect, all the stitches hold without complaining, and the wings spread out with a jerk of her shoulders and lock themselves in place. It is only that she has not taken the time for a trickle of dust from her fist that would have told her that the winds she relied on would not come. Her wings really are a lovely piece of work, reliable and beautiful, and one may even imagine that they would have worked, save for the fact that on this one night (and perhaps we are harsh on Tinker for not knowing it, because who could have known this windy hill would have no wind?) on this very night, the four winds (yes, all four of them) had fallen asleep at once. At the zenith of her leap, where Tinker thinks she shall sail into the sky, she tips downward and falls, leaving her stomach somewhere above her.
I apologise to you for doing this, I truly do, and I shan’t do it again, but we shall leave Tinker here, suspended in the air, to check on our fine and fragile friend who is falling from far above her. His fall is graceful and without peril, and his mind has no fear. The mind of a prince of air is as quick and slender as his body, and though he is scorned by his tutors, in his falling he has already learned much. He has divined the nature of the tide and its connection to the moon, he has guessed at the seaborne paths of rain and the scouring paths of rivers. Though he is rapt in his wonder, and though he is already composing in his mind the book of his travels, part of him nudges the rest of him to notice the queer shape that flaps and flails below him. Though our prince has always been mocked for having his head in the ground, he knows a moment of urgency when he sees one. He draws his arms in close so he may fall faster and approach Tinker in her terror. He sees her scrambling arms and legs flailing in the night, and her wings slack with no wind to hold them.
Now that we have taken our two moments and joined them together, quite a lot happens at once. Tinker, who is sure of breaking at least a dozen bones, wails in fright. The princeling, alarmed and quite worried, wraps around her, even past her tied hair and into her eardrums.
‘Are you in danger?’ He asks her, and she stops mid-wail.
If you are sharp, as I know you are, you may have a question here. How on earth could a drifting princeling know Tinker’s tongue, the very one that her parents had cooed to her in the cradle? This is not a very easy thing to explain without going into needless detail, so I shall draw you a picture that would teach you with its simplicity rather than its accuracy. When putting a bedsheet on a mattress, you can just throw the bedsheet into the air and gently guide its fluttering descent. Just so, as the prince begins to speak, the fluttering of his voice is answered by an incomprehension in Tinker’s ear, and he can guide that fluttering until he knows she understands.
Tinker’s answer, which she does not need to speak out loud, is a frantic Yes.
At once the prince summons his strength and gathers himself into a fist of air that bears up into Tinker’s wings. This is a valiant effort, and a well-aimed one, but the strength of a princeling is not in his body. It is not enough to make Tinker fly, but it is enough to save her from slamming into the rocks jutting out below her, and it is certainly enough to save a dozen of her bones. He holds her aloft till they are clear of the rocks, he slows her descent as long as he is able. Tinker and the princeling scrape past some branches and tumble loudly through the canopy to fall into a rolling heap on the stoneless ground. Bamboo cracks and wingspan splits, and it is close enough to her for Tinker to feel it as pain. The twisted ankle and split lip hurts a good deal less. She lies there, tumbled out on the grass, her heart a drumbeat in her chest.
We have already said that Tinker is wise and clever, despite her foolish action, and we must also add that Tinker is unaccountably lucky. It is only for this that I tell you not to go running off cliffs, no matter how fine your wings are. I may be sure that you are all wise and clever, but one can never be sure of being lucky.
‘Apologies for the roughness of your landing,’ says the princeling, ‘I’m unused to such burdens.’
For all her gratitude, Tinker can do nothing but laugh, a breathless, lilting laugh that charms the princeling so much so that he too laughs in his exhaustion. They laugh together, prince and person, in the windless night.
When two dreamers meet it is very hard to keep them apart. Tinker and the prince speak in a speech that is faster than speech, and they share their dreams with each other, and they see how their dreams fit into each other. The prince tells her of the feeling of flight, of the colour of the column of light at the foot of the moon, of the endless palaces the princes make from the clouds. Tinker tells him of the feeling of plunging into water, and of shovels and sailboats and the snugness of blankets. The jutting bamboo pokes her in the back, but she doesn’t mind, and the enormous column of air above him weighs him down, but he doesn’t mind either. Even before Tinker’s breathing has slowed, they have rifled through each other’s dreams.
They would gladly do this forever, and I would be glad to tell you that is what they did, but this does not happen. In this, the quietest night the world has ever known, the first leaves begin to rustle again. There is not enough wind to smell it, to tell which of the four winds it is, but surely they are starting to wake up again.
At this the princeling feels a panic grip him. The hole in the sky through which he fell is beginning to close. It has been all very well to fall from his home, to see his world of dreams firsthand, to meet a dreamer like him. But if he searches his heart, which is a large heart that one can look right into, he does not wish to spend his days in this slow and lumbering world and he certainly does not want the weight of the winds on his delicate shoulders. If the winds rise again, ashamed at their dereliction, they shall blow so vigilant and fierce that a puny princeling could never scale the sky again. He tells this to Tinker, and as he tells it he weeps.
The form that Tinker’s wisdom takes is in refusing to dwell on unhappiness. There are other forms wisdom can take, but this one is hers. To her mind, unhappiness can come only from a problem, and a problem always has a way across or past or through. As she lies among her crumpled wings, she considers the problem, turns it around in her head, and hits upon the solution. She wriggles out of the tangled straps, wincing as one scrapes her skin, and emerges from her wings.
Her right wing is mangled but the left is almost whole, and she bends and draws a knife from her belt and the intact leaf from the wing. The princeling stammers in her ear about the wakening winds around them and the narrowing sky above them, but she does not let this slow her. Tinker pulls bamboo apart, she shreds leaf into kindling, and though she aches at the ruin of her craft, she delights at having an entirely new problem to solve. She folds and creases the leaf just right, reinforces it with twine, and ties to it a small cradle made from a hollow end of bamboo. Then she addresses the morose princeling and explains to him fire.
The princeling has only known the element of fire in its fugitive form — it comes only when clouds quarrel and crack the sky, and send burning bolts coursing through them. He has never known a steady flame. So too is he ignorant of birds — he knows only they are nuisances and menaces that carelessly zip through palaces, and the gusts from their wings send them scattering. He has never known, for instance, what they know to do when they find hot columns of air. He listens to Tinker’s explanation and looks at the work of her hands and mind, and understanding smiles upon him.
She draws from her belt a little pouch of wax and a sparking stone. Into the cradle she pours wax and mixes it with the kindling. She stands up, uncaring of the twist in her ankle, and holds up her work with both hands. It is a simple device, so simple she could make it in her sleep, but she is proud of it all the same.
The princeling knows that time is short, he even sees a strand of hair blown across her temple, and there is no more time to speak. He pirouettes around her in thanks, and he even condenses himself enough to brush her fingers, then climbs into the lantern she has made him. She sparks the stone and lights the flame below him. At once the craft bulges up, slips from her fingers, and rises into the air. The princeling, warmed by the fire, bounces around the inside of the lantern. Past the flames he sees Tinker dwindle below him, surrounded by scraps of her wings. Then he is past the treetops, he is a speck of orange light reflected in her eye. The speck wavers, and she blinks the tear away.
Tinker goes on to do quite a lot else, and her meeting with the prince presents her with all sorts of new problems to chew over, and her cleverness and wisdom shall both grow large indeed, but all of that is a tale for another time.
Don’t be shy, little ones; it is all right to have a moist eye. It is not everyday that something happens that has never before happened, not since the first flower burst from the first bud. I shall quiet down when I am done, just so we can savour this windless light. It is still just quiet enough that if you prick up your ears you might hear the crackling of that little fire, but not for long. Because the West wind is emerging red-faced from a ravine, and he shames the East wind, who startles awake in the salty air above the sea, and who in turn berates the South wind, who has been dreaming a dream of cold sand. It is only the North wind, who is last to wake, who has not even realised anything was amiss at all.