“The Devil is master of the winds”

“The Devil is master of the winds” is a village saying that casts the wind as an agent of evil rather than a neutral force of nature. During the boy’s flight across a frozen plain, it becomes more than local folklore: the saying shapes how he interprets the wind’s power, and makes his exhilarating escape feel increasingly like a trial whose meaning he cannot settle.

The Saying and Its Village Context

The boy recalls that local people regarded the wind as an enemy, shut their windows against it, and feared that it might bring plague, paralysis, and death. Their explanation was that the Devil was master of the winds, which carried out his evil orders. The saying therefore joins a familiar physical danger to a supernatural account of its purpose: wind can injure and kill, but it is also imagined as carrying out someone’s will.

The boy’s experience initially runs against this fearful custom. He has prepared homemade skates and a sail, and the wind pushes him over the ice, away from the village. He feels free and alone, likening himself to a starling swept along in flight. What the villagers treat as an enemy becomes, for a time, the force that makes escape possible.

From Escape to Threat

That reversal does not last. When the boy’s burning comet goes out, he cannot return against the wind and does not know whether a farm is near or whether anyone there would shelter him. The weather has changed from means of departure into a trap: it carries him onward while leaving him without warmth, direction, or a secure destination.

In that exposed moment, he hears what sounds like a chuckle in the whistling wind. He wonders whether the Devil is testing him, leading him in circles and waiting for him to accept an offer. The saying gives shape to this fear, but the scene does not confirm that a supernatural being is present. The wind remains materially dangerous, while the boy’s interpretation makes it seem purposeful; the uncertainty sustains the menace.

The Evil Ones and the Meaning of the Wind

The boy then hears whispers, mutterings, and moans and believes that the Evil Ones have taken an interest in him. He connects the frozen journey to earlier losses and harms: separation from his parents, the loss of Marta and Olga the Wise One, delivery into the hands of the carpenter, the loss of his speech, and Ewka’s fate with the he-goat. In his account, these events belong to a continuing effort to train him in hatred, and the wind becomes another means by which hostile powers control his movement and confuse his thoughts.

The expression thus marks a shift in the scene’s emotional logic. The same wind that briefly seemed to promise freedom becomes inseparable from isolation and persecution. Neither the saying nor the boy’s fears prove that the Devil or the Evil Ones are literally directing the weather; instead, the narrative holds open the gap between natural force and supernatural explanation. That unresolved gap makes the wind both an actual danger on the ice and an image of a world the boy experiences as governed by hostile, unseen powers.