Born of the Winds is a Cthulhu Mythos novella by Brian Lumley. It first appeared in the December 1975 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (#295). The story was nominated for a World Fantasy Award; Lumley calls it "one of my personal favourites."[1]
The story relates the efforts of a meteorologist, recuperating in a remote area of Canada, to help a woman find her son, whom she believes has fled into the Manitoba wilderness. It develops that the son's father is the air elemental Ithaqua; their attempt to retrieve the son brings them into conflict, first with the entity's cult, and then with the Wind-Walker himself.
The story is a sequel to August Derleth's "The Thing That Walked on the Wind," and prefigures later Lumley stories that detail the action-adventure struggles of heroic humans against Ithaqua. The concept of Ithaqua having offspring was developed in Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game as the creatures known as the Spawn of the Winds.
Ithaqua[]
The entity that drives the stories plot is Ithaqua, the Wind-Walker, "perhaps the very greatest of the mythical air-elementals." According to the the eccentric scholar Samuel Bridgeman, Ithaqua "made war against the Elder Gods in the Beginning; for which ultimate treason He was banished to frozen Arctic and interplanetary heavens to ‘Walk the Winds Forever.’" He appears as "a dark outline against the sky, anthropomorphic, a manlike yet bestial silhouette...with carmine stars for eyes”--but "the very sight of Him means a freezing and inescapable death for the unfortunate observer."
Bridgeman links Ithaqua to the legend of the Wendigo, and to Native American deities like the Iroquois wind spirit Gaoh,[2] and Negafok,[3] the "Eskimo cold-weather spirit," as well as to mythological figures like the Norse god of thunder Thor,[4] and Enlil, the Babylonian storm god.[5] (Tha-thka, the "Hittite god-of-the-storm," appears to be Lumley's invention.)
Characters[]
David Lawton: An American meteorologist, on extended holiday in Manitoba to recuperate from a "debilitating chest ailment." He describes himself as "addicted to mysteries, as curious as a cat."
Judge Jason Andrews: A "retired New Yorker of independent means," a somewhat reclusive widower, and "something of a professional anthropologist all his life." An old friend of David's father, he offers to let David stay at his home in Navissa, Manitoba, while he recovers from his ailment. The judge is also a longtime friend of Lucille Bridgeman, and was close to her late husband as well. Andrews is described as "a man who liked his facts straight on the line, undistorted by whim or fancy"--but he says that "near the end of a lifetime, I’m no closer now than I was fifty years ago to being able to say what is and what isn’t."
Lucille Bridgeman: A widow who is searching for her missing son. An encounter with Ithaqua 20 years earlier gave her a virtual immunity to cold, and the peculiarity that "her body temperature never rises above a level which would be death to anyone else." She is described by David: "Despite the trimness of her figure and the comparative youthfulness of her skin, her hair was quite gray. She had plainly been very attractive, perhaps even beautiful, in youth."
Samuel R. Bridgeman: A professor of anthropology from England, he married Lucille around 1924, and died mysteriously in 1930 "a few dozen miles or so north of Navissa." He wrote three books that dealt with Ithaqua and his connection to various mythological traditions. Bridgeman’s "theories had made him something of an outcast among others of his profession"; many colleagues viewed him as "a naïve clown who based his crazed arguments in Blavatsky,[6] in the absurd theories of Scott-Elliot,[7] in the insane epistles of Eibon and the warped translations of Harold Hadley Copeland."
Kirby Bridgeman: Lucille's son, born eight months after her husband's death--but fathered not by Samuel, but by Ithaqua. He was born "a weedy, strange little thing," his parentage marked by oddly webbed toes. From an early age, he "could hear the wind, and he used to talk to it"; he was "in no way slow or backward...but he constantly lived in a kind of dreamworld." He was brought up in Mérida, in Mexico's Yucatán peninsula; at the age of seven, he is able to calm a ferocious storm, "a north wind off the Gulf of Mexico," by shouting at it. When he was ten, he built a model glider on a "rippled-air principle" of his own invention; it "seemingly defied gravity," but he destroyed it because members of the local gliding club had laughed at it. He was also fascinated by kites, and later by hawks. Shortly after his fourteenth birthday, he fell from the Temple of the Warriors at Chichén Itzá and miraculously escaped injury. At nineteen, he took money he had secretly saved and headed north, to Manitoba, following "the trail of his destiny."
Publication History[]
Written in late 1972/early 1973, Born of the Winds had to be cut from some 25,000 to 20,000 words for its initial appearance in Fantasy & Science Fiction.[1] It was included in Lumley's collections The Horror at Oakdeene and Others (Arkham House, 1977), Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi (Tor/Rok UK, 1993), The Taint and Other Novellas (Subterranean Press, 2007), and Earth, Air, Fire & Water: Four Tales of Elemental Mythos Horror! (Fedogan & Bremer, 2017). The novella was also reprinted in the July 1977 issue of Fiction (#280) and in The Ithaqua Cycle: The Wind-Walker of the Icy Wastes (Chaosium, 1998).