The Unfinished Land Read online

  Reynard was fascinated by the fragility underlying Maeve’s apparent graceful strength. Was this what aging was like when Eaters borrowed from your later years? And how did that affect them?

  “Persuade which? Calybo?” Maeve asked. “He is assigned only to thee and cares nought for me. Valdis, then? She seemed a young one in their ranks.”

  “I did not see her, only Calybo.”

  A young-seeming female Eater? Was that the one who had visited Reynard on the beach?

  “Well, she came that first night I returned to mortality,” Maeve said. “She held me so briefly, as if in sorrow, as if I might be a kind of friend or mother to her, and shared with me memories of northern islands and long ships, and of strong men and women she had not seen since she was a child, badly hurt in a storm. A yard and sail fell on her and broke her back. Her parents brought her here through the gyre, and donated her to the Eaters, that she might live. From me, that night, she sipped mere seconds. But she sealed in my time. I will no longer take.”

  “I will convince Calybo she needs to return and reverse that course.”

  “Impossible,” Maeve said. “Once sealed, I approach a point that ends a line.” Her smile was that of a woman already dead, Reynard thought—teeth prominent behind thin, pale lips. She seemed almost as translucent as an Eater herself. “Anutha hath told me more than thou, husband! That when the Spanish ship arrived, and the Eater Ravine was made aware, Calybo called upon Valdis and gave her a separate mission. She was instructed to take no time from this boy, but to pass along some memories—and not to belabor the Spanish, so that the other Eaters could take their due. What could be Valdis’s purpose, her mission? Did Calybo order it, or Guldreth?”

  Widsith shook his head.

  “Once, I was informed of these things,” Maeve said, “if only to support the stock of lives from which Eaters drew. Now, as I near mine end, other than Valdis, few of our marvels reveal to me anything important. This maketh me innocent again, giveth a new sort of youth. And so having capped my years, I am eternally reborn.”

  Widsith paled at that thought. “Thou hast lived a good and decent life here—I choose not to believe it will end soon.”

  “Then why was I left behind? I wished to go with thee, this last time, suspecting by thy words, thy demeanor, thou wouldst be gone for many, many years.”

  “I wanted to take thee, but thou wouldst have died long since. Times are hard on the sea and out there, in the far isles.”

  “Thou couldst not have left me as a serving maid with the Virgin Queen, or in the court of Philip’s daughter?”

  This amused and moved both of them. Widsith softly stroked the back of her hand. “Thou know’st what would have happened.”

  “I do! I would have left the side of the Queen or the girl, chased thy departing sloop or galleon, and gone with thee. When we reached those distant shores, I would have seen thee laugh and dally with brown maids, and I would have lost my purest love in anger at thy brutal needs. And then I would have stolen a great ship to return to our isle.”

  Widsith nodded. “Thou wouldst have done all that.”

  “My life is here,” Maeve said. “I understand this island, but little of the greater world thou hast visited, that one they say Crafters do shape and refine.”

  Maeve stepped forward, but this time with little certainty, and Widsith supported her by the arm. They walked slowly back down the aisle to the door, and Reynard followed. On the steps, Widsith lifted her—she seemed light as straw—and carried her through the great oaks to her home, a small cabin on the edge of the village, its fences burned and walls scorched. Maggie and Anutha were waiting, and as he lowered her to her feet, Maggie grasped Maeve’s outstretched hand. Anutha took the Pilgrim aside and whispered to him. Reynard heard little but the name Valdis. Anutha and Maggie then escorted Maeve into her home and closed the door, with a stern parting look from Anutha.

  The Ravine

  * * *

  WIDSITH AND REYNARD stood on the porch while the trees rustled and leaves and sticks rolled and skittered by. The old woman, to Reynard, still seemed to be speaking—but the voice was not hers. It belonged to the wind in the forest.

  “Let us take two horses from the stable,” Widsith said. “We must be swift.”

  The time it took to walk to the stable was short, but the twilight was already dense. Reynard looked upon the place where he had seen the childers, but they were not present, nor was the keeper.

  As they led two horses from their stalls, Reynard asked, “Is Guldreth an Eater?”

  “She hath not their habits. But she is almost as old as Queen Hel, if Hel were still alive.”

  “And we are just above the mud?”

  “We are.”

  “And you loved her? How is that done?”

  Widsith crossed himself just like a Spaniard, then excused the gesture with a swift pass of one flattened hand. “Mount,” he said. The horses received them with flicks of their withers, and they nudged them into a run. They were going to the beach where the blunters stored their boat, Reynard thought, but Widsith took a turn in the deep and twisted woods, and instead they pushed along a well-traveled trail for a couple of hours in darkness and dappled moonlight, the horses seeming to magically feel their way to where Reynard smelled ice . . . a strange, sour kind of ice.

  And then they came upon the southern end of a great cleft cut or split in the land, sunk by several dozen yards below the trees and the broken tops of stone walls. Chill air poured from the cleft, air that seemed to nip and tug at Reynard’s hair and skin. He felt something strange and dangerous in the cold that lapped and surged before them.

  “This is the Ravine,” Widsith said. “Pacted Eaters dwell here much of their time, near enough to partake of Zodiako and the surrounding towns and farms. It is their due.”

  Reynard stared into the Ravine, his face crooked by a curious sensation—that he knew this place, that he had been here before. The Ravine curled like a serpent between two crenellated ridges, once carved by an old river and now edged by clumps and ribbons of forest and filled with a long, strange, broken glacier. “Are you here to beseech Eaters, to demand that they save your wife?” he asked.

  Widsith shook his head sadly. “After what she hath asked of Valdis, the sealing of all her years, such a request is bootless. They have not the power now.”

  “But the Eaters have been tasked to serve us, if what you say be true. How can she seal herself from them?”

  “That, too, is part of the pact. None can force beyond a point the will of a woman, or any human.”

  “I thought Eaters were all-powerful!”

  “Powerful, but they serve. They did not make the pact. ’Twas made for them.”

  “By the Queen of Hell?”

  Widsith grinned sadly at him. “I think thou hast not yet got the right of that.”

  The horses did not like the air from the Ravine any more than Reynard did. Widsith did not urge them on. “We await here,” he said. “Our appointments arrive on no human schedule.”

  Reynard peered into the shadows. “I see nobody.”

  “Nobody is here, at the moment. What is it that thou dost see?”

  They dismounted. “A scarp covered with sharp stones.”

  “Aye, and what else?”

  The horses anticipated no profit in chewing the rank grass and bushes that grew around the Ravine, so they scuffed their hooves and hung their heads.

  “Ice in strange forms,” Reynard said. “Perhaps last year’s snows.”

  “This ice cometh not from snow. It is shaped by the peculiar talents of the Eaters within. What else?”

  Reynard suddenly clutched his chest, as if his heart pained him. “I know the ice cometh not from snow. I know about the talents of Eaters. I do know this place!” His tongue numbed with the stupid audacity he felt. “How is that possible?”

  “Thou’rt sharing something, methinks.” Widsith said. “Likely thy muse hath supplied thee with impressions—a
thing many of us have felt at times, if it suits the Eaters.” His own face took on a crooked look. “Canst thou journey through the memories?”

  Reynard closed his eyes and stretched out his arms, as if to avoid bumping into obstacles. “I see it deep,” he said.

  “Tell me what thou seest.”

  Reynard tried to explain, but his words tripped him up.

  “Just remember,” Widsith said. “Words will arrive.”

  “I am walking, but not walking.”

  “Of course. Thy mind moveth, not thy body.”

  Reynard kept swinging his arms like a loose-limbed puppet, but did not move his feet. Sights and narratives arrived in broken continuity, but assembled and formed histories, rides, walks, whose details were more than elusive. Not finding the right words, he seemed to stumble onto other words—Nordic-sounding words. “Is this from the girl, the young Eater?” he asked. “From Valdis?”

  “Likely,” Widsith said. “Though neither young nor much like a girl anymore. Hath she taken a fancy to thee, young fisherboy?” He smirked like the old sailor he had just been.

  “I do see it . . .”

  His mind journeyed deeper into the Ravine.

  “There is much at the northern end,” he added. “Have you been there?”

  “I have, but not directly, and not on a horse,” Widsith said.

  Reynard closed his eyes tight to see the high cliffs, and between them, heaves of pale, broken ice surrounding a winding path, connected by great arches draped with icicles the size of trees, in some places holding up scaly roofs. At least seven ancient castles clustered at the northern end, all in serious disrepair, remnants of past wars between opponents he could neither see, remember, nor understand. Most of those castles had been empty for a very long time—perhaps a thousand years, if that meant anything here. No Eater seemed compelled to do the work necessary to restore or repair them—since none wished to live there.

  And none of their original inhabitants were still alive.

  Along the entire Ravine stretched many arches, bridges to nowhere, carrying no traffic but hiding, under their parapets, little cubbies, small caves, compartments and apartments—some still filled, others having stood empty for long centuries. And some holes were filled by things neither living nor properly dead!

  “The monsters Maeve talked about,” he said. “Have they come here?”

  “Likely,” Widsith said.

  “Many?”

  The Pilgrim shrugged.

  “This is an awful place,” Reynard said, eyes tight shut.

  “Continue,” Widsith urged.

  “I sleep! I dream!”

  “But thou wilt go on.”

  Valdis, young by the standards of other Eaters, had watched this place for centuries, but many mysteries remained. Some things had never been clearly explained to her.

  “Eaters share!” Reynard said, dismayed. “They convene and spread their own lives!”

  “Ofttimes Guldreth hath hinted at such, but seldom let me see. Thou art truly favored!”

  “I see not how this be favor. How can such a being favor a mortal?” Reynard shook his head and stopped speaking. The pictures and stories came too fast. He squatted before the Pilgrim like a lost child, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  The horses watched both with glazed eyes, as if about to fall asleep.

  “That is a mystery I have no answer to,” Widsith said.

  “You should not have brought me here!” Reynard moaned. “My soul is fretted! I have no protection, no purpose!”

  Widsith sat beside him with a sigh of both impatience and sympathy. “I have faith thy thoughts and worries shall resolve.”

  Reynard looked left, eyes still closed, and saw a corridor of memories, all dark, as if shrouded in night and despair. There was a permeating sense of loss all around the Ravine. So many still figures here and there, covered in ice or leaves, hiding in cubbies, frozen in sadness! They frightened him. Eaters, though in a way immortal, could sometimes simply lose interest in their necessary routines. And if they did that, within a few months or years, their sea-foam bodies, called by some meerschaum, along with their glassy skins, crumpled and fell in like old mummies. For an Eater, this was only a partial sort of death. A disembodied wisp remained for another few years and, sometimes, would pause people on the island’s roads and ask difficult, puzzling questions, frightening without means or intent—for such wisps were no threat, and in time, paradoxes and puzzles unsolved, themselves faded to night air and moonlight.

  He shivered at the thought of meeting such a wisp. Widsith gripped his shoulder to stop the shivers from becoming convulsions.

  In a way less marvelous than their lives and purpose, though no less explicable, Eaters did with water what insects do with silk. Over thousands of years, they had filled the Ravine with their homes, like sculptures in an age of ice, showing sometimes creativity, sometimes necessity, depending on their origins and natures.

  “Are we invited in?” Widsith asked, caution foremost. “ ’Twould not do to trespass.”

  Reynard opened his eyes. “I do not know,” he said. “But I feel her presence.”

  Widsith patted Reynard’s shoulder. “This is but a small part of thy purpose. Lead on,” the Pilgrim said.

  “I am here—and I am there!” Reynard whispered. He paid no attention to noises behind them. Widsith looked away from the Ravine, into the rocks and woods, away from the ice and cold, and saw men and women of their own kind gathering. Many had come from Zodiako, some wounded and on crutches, and others had come from farms deeper in the forests and meadows, all part of the trade that allowed humans to survive on this coast—to survive and support the Eaters.

  “Eaters must eat as well,” the Pilgrim said, then quietly explained to Reynard the process. Mortal farmers and hunters traditionally approached the Ravine, during daylight, once each month, moving silently to refill the troughs and heap plates with the sorts of foods Eaters could tolerate, even desire—organ meats, wild animals that ate nuts and grass, dense black breads, cow’s or woman’s milk mixed with deer’s or pig’s blood. And on occasion, human blood itself—drained from someone recently dead. There was none such on this occasion. Those who died of violence were abhorrent to Eaters.

  Widsith nodded to an old farmer and a hunter, bow slung over his shoulder and arrows in his quiver. Reynard viewed with some intensity small mountain animals, marmots and squirrels and rabbits, carried on a sled. The villagers sang a somber prayer of summoning. The farmers and townsfolk barely glanced at them, so intent were they on laying out their offerings.

  “So few, this time,” Widsith said.

  Exodus

  * * *

  VALDIS ROUSED from a numb dullness. Sleep for an Eater was never simple or easy. Her rest was hardly rest at all, in fact, and sleep very nearly impossible, fired as both were with vivid flashes from the lives of others—key moments of love and violence, disappointment and revenge, betrayal and injury, but also discovery and knowledge—a strange and broken sampling of humanity’s best and worst.

  How long Valdis had been on the isle, she did not know, did not remember—so crowded was her memory with the lives and times of others. But there had once been awful tides and mountainous waves, and a battered longship had been caught in the island’s gyre, and she could still recall, in a dim and childish way, the soaked and agonized faces of a man and a woman. They must have been her mother and father. Their ten-year-old daughter had been injured by a storm-loosed sail and would soon die, and they had convinced a carl to take them north, at risk of being caught in the legendary tides, in hopes of finding this misty shore and leaving her here to die, if need be . . . Or not to die, but to be found. Given freely to be raised by those of the island, for it was said there were people here who never sickened, never died, but benefited from the charms of witches and magicians and devils—or were themselves witches, magicians, and devils.

  And so those Norse voyagers had left their daughter on a mis
ted shore, and she had not died. She had been found. A one-time mother had somehow recovered from centuries past enough kindness to lift up the limp girl, whose time had run dreadfully low, down to minutes or less—and had named her Valdis, which some said meant Dead Girl, and others said, meant Saved from Valiant Death.

  The one-time mother had summoned another, much older than she, who had vast stores of life, to donate time and something resembling health to the girl, in exchange for her fealty.

  * * *

  Her dwelling was no sort of home for a living woman, made as it was of sticks and leaves pressed into banks of crusted ice. But for an Eater, it was enough. Her skin did not require softness nor any sort of luxury. Her hair kept itself clean without attention, as did her clothes, which were woven of threads secreted by the large, jointed, and heavily armored creatures that dined on the trees above the Ravine. She required no warmth, and could in fact wander through snow and ice without freezing her bare feet or blanching arms and fingers that were already pale. Hel had designed Eaters to be free of such concerns, that they might focus on all they saw around them—generally at night, for they seldom went out by day.

  But now she felt a connection. One was near who could all by himself make her travel by day. The feeling caused a diamond light to grow in her deepest thoughts that had until now known only shadow. On the southwestern shore beyond Zodiako she had ministered to him, connected with him . . .

  And now it seemed arrangements were being made for them to meet again. Great change was vibrating up and down the Ravine.

  She pushed up from the litter, slowly and deliberately brushed herself, emerged from her cubby, and climbed steps hand and foot up the rugged icy slope. The walls of the Ravine were lined with doors cut from stone, or shaped from ice and frozen mud . . . and out of these doors crept many Eaters, little more than shadows.