The Unfinished Land Read online

  “Evening comes early today,” Yuchil announced from the wagon. “We camp soon.”

  The girl eagerly ran ahead and again danced a pretty dance on the hardpan, then smiled on them all, sunshine and sweetness and joy at their company.

  “She doth find relief,” Yuchil said from the seat of the wagon. “Visions, like a storm, clear the air.”

  Plain of Jars

  * * *

  WITH THE TRAVELERS VIGILANT—all of them serving watch, including Calafi—and the wagon at the center of their camp, another peculiar dawn arrived, and Reynard was able to see the new terrain by what passed for daylight. He could make little sense of what he saw, but it still seemed gloomy enough to dry his tongue and make it cling to the breakfast of dried fish and porridge seasoned with red pepper powder. Widsith ate as if he had eaten such foods before, or even spicier fare. And likely he had. Reynard had not.

  The girl brought a leather bag with water and they sipped from it, no more. Widsith pulled it down when Reynard tried to quench the heat of the breakfast.

  “There is little water here,” Nikolias explained, taking his quick turn at the bag and handing it to the young warriors. “And none more until we cross the pass.”

  Valdis did not drink from the bag, but squatted by her horse, eyes shut as if asleep—or lost in an Eater’s strange reverie.

  “This is the outskirts of the plain of jars,” Nikolias said, “forbidden to all but Crafter servants, and still they do not arrive.”

  “Yet none doth challenge or forbid!” Widsith said.

  “We must deliver,” Yuchil said grimly.

  Widsith gave Nikolias a look almost of resentment, but mostly of fear, and Reynard knew that none of them had ever been this far into the center of the island, or beyond. Silent, questions neither asked nor answered, they surveyed the prospects ahead.

  “The horses are brave for us,” Widsith said to Reynard as the wagon rolled on. Valdis passed them. Her form was like a wraith of smoke, but where the light struck her, she glinted, she gleamed. And her eyes in particular seemed to change color, more umber than jade.

  Nikolias said, “We have to make way through this place before nightfall. Not even Travelers are free to pass here at all times.”

  A flat, arid paleness stretched many miles to the distant peaks and did indeed contain row after row of great black jars, many hundreds of them stretching off to the flank of the dark ridge of rock, one of the radiant mountain ranges that divided the island’s center and embraced the waste. Each jar was surrounded by a rough wooden scaffold that rose to the rim and seemed to afford access to any who would dare climb. Reynard did not think he would be one such.

  “Beyond lies the first of the krater cities,” Nikolias said. “Right on the edge of the widest part of the chafing waste. Perhaps the servants will be there to greet us.”

  “I doubt it,” Yuchil said, and climbed back into the wagon. Trailed by the warriors, flanked by Kern and Kaiholo, they rolled on toward the next great ridge of rock. Nobody spoke much, and Reynard remounted his horse and watched Valdis do likewise, but with a translucent lack of energy that made her seem more and more like a ghost.

  Calafi approached Nikolias. “Valdis doth not like it here,” she whispered.

  “We were told to bring at least one Eater,” Nikolias said. “I do not think any of us like it here!”

  “Then how rude of them not to meet us!” Calafi said.

  “Are Crafters truly buried out there?” Reynard asked Widsith, also whispering.

  “So I have been told,” Widsith said.

  The road passed through the field of huge jars, on to the ridge beyond. Reynard looked to his right and then his left, trying and failing, mostly, to avert his eyes, not to stare directly at the ancient tombs. The tallest jar, he guessed, rose fifteen yards and spanned the same distance. What would need such a tomb, and why open to the sky? Did they miss the stars? How many were already filled, how many still empty?

  They halted as the pass yawned before them, between two rugged walls of gray stone. Nikolias walked up to Widsith and stroked his horse’s muzzle. “Still no one to greet us.”

  Yuchil leaned out from behind the curtain that covered the entrance to the wagon. “Are any of the innermost servants still alive?” she asked.

  Nikolias made a gruff snort.

  The wagon and party soon were lost on the other side of the dusk, right up against night. Reynard wondered how long they had before death or dawn, or worse than one, and never the other.

  The Pass

  * * *

  WARRIORS, RIDERS, AND CALAFI followed the wagon down a road paved with wide flat stones, grooved by the passage of other wheels over long centuries, much like Roman roads in England. These grooves, however, came in several gauges, or widths between, showing that even larger wagons had passed many times before. The Traveler wagon rumbled smoothly along in its accepted gauge. And so they proceeded with very little water and no more food up a long rise to the narrow pass, and as it swiftly turned dark, clouds driven and chewed by high, cold winds flowed to wrap the peaks.

  They paused again. Reynard’s gaze climbed the walls on both sides, and he saw odd little formations, irregular houses sporting rough entrances, like eyries or extrusions for the benefit of climbers—though not for humans.

  Calafi also surveyed these high, empty dwellings. “Others come here to rest, and prepare,” she said, and her wrinkled nose told Reynard she was guessing.

  Clearly unhappy, the warriors pulled their coat collars up to avoid the chill wind that now seemed to want to drive them back.

  Dark filled the gap.

  “We are tired,” Calafi said to Nikolias. “Can we make a fire?”

  “I think a fire is needed, if this wind will let it burn,” Nikolias said. And so they gathered shrubs and sticks from between the rocks, which here were banded red and black, while the girl came forward with a thin stone she had found that had markings on it.

  “Can somebody read this?” she asked, then held it up. The markings were spirals and wedges, and all who gathered around the wagon and the fire shook their heads but Valdis, who crooked her finger for the girl to approach and bent over to take the stone from her. She held it up as if she could see straight through it. “A spell to bind dreams,” the Eater said.

  “What language?” Nikolias asked, but Valdis merely slipped down gracefully from her horse and replaced the stone in the dirt, where Calafi had found it, then walked up to the rocks, where she studied a crevice no one else had seen until now. With a long, studying glance at the others, she ventured into the side passage, leading the shadowy horse after her.

  “I did not see that,” Widsith said, standing beside Nikolias.

  “None here did,” Nikolias said, touching the rock face with outstretched hands. “And I neither see nor feel it now!”

  Calafi made as if to follow Valdis, but also could not find any opening in the banded rock. She patted and danced a little, as if that would open the crevice again, but Yuchil spoke to her sharply and, dejected, she returned to the beginnings of the new camp.

  For a time, nobody spoke, but all warmed themselves.

  The wind was getting colder, whipping the flames.

  “Perhaps she doth flee us, sensing our fate,” Nikolias said.

  “Pfaah!” Yuchil exclaimed, then brought up more flat rocks to shield the flames. “I have known many an Eater more honorable than most men.”

  “And women?” Nikolias asked, smiling, pitching in with Kaiholo to help.

  Yuchil blew out her breath again. “If our way is blocked ahead—and who can say it is not?—then perhaps she seeketh another way.”

  Kaiholo was skeptical. “No way out and no way in, I trow,” he muttered. Kern agreed.

  “And we all were alert to such,” said Andalo as he nervously fingered the hilt of one sword.

  Reynard nodded to him, and he responded merely by staring, then turned away. Bela and Sany seemed even more imperious. This irri
tated Reynard.

  “We should have looked into a pot,” he said.

  “Why so?” Widsith asked.

  “To see a Crafter. If it is dead, what can it do to us?”

  The warriors did not respond, but Nikolias blew his nose into a clean rag. “Push not nightmares, and save thy sleeping soul.”

  “But have you ever looked?” Reynard asked.

  “No, as I say, I have never been this far. But I heard once from a man who did climb a scaffold. He was ever after laughing mad, and could barely find his supper.”

  The First City

  * * *

  THE CLOUDS SLIDING along the heights of the pass were so dense they could not tell the difference between night and morning.

  Reynard studied this low, coiled deck for a few minutes before rolling out of his covers and standing. He had slept in a quilted round rug from the wagon, stitched with Arabic words, he thought, but comfortable despite the presence of passages likely from the Moors’ sacred and blasphemous book, and now he handed it back to a plump older girl with strong arms and henna-colored hair, one of Yuchil’s assistants or perhaps her daughters, who, it seemed, rarely left the wagon but followed Yuchil’s orders and found whatever was needed inside to supply their needs. She had not appeared before now. Who else was hiding in that wagon?

  Widsith had slept in another rug and did not break a deep silence, as if still waking from a fraught dream, contemplating his doom, and that approaching right soon, in his opinion. Reynard, on the other hand, had reacquired, after the plain of jars, a kind of curiosity for what lay beyond the pass. He tried to get answers from Calafi, asking her what, if anything, she had heard from other Travelers—or had sensed on her own. But she only waggled her head, tossed her red frizzled hair, and danced to music he could not hear; and soon he felt a growing apprehension, that he might see all there was to be seen, and understand none of it! For no one, not even Nikolias, seemed inclined to prepare him in any way. Maybe they were simply as ignorant as he was himself. But surely when they had delivered stories before, they had interacted with those of their people assigned to receive them and carry them farther! Maybe they wished for him to innocently view what they themselves were so seldom allowed to see: whatever lay beyond the pass, down the smooth road. They would not even respond to his questions about how often they had been here before.

  Bela and Sany and a warrior whose name he did not know talked as they doused the fire. Sany seemed to have Moorish roots. Bela, like many of the Travelers, hailed from the mountain countries in the eastern continent. Reynard stood a few yards away, listening to their mix of Rom and a pidgin of Tinker’s Cant that seemed more eastern than Irish. They paid him no attention. “Papa is putting us all in danger, with the Eater here,” said Bela, who sported only two knives and one short sword. Bela called Valdis a Verdulak.

  Sany murmured, under his breath, “An ifrit, a ghroul.”

  Yuchil’s strong-armed assistant, whom they called Sophia, shook her head. “She is no danger to us.”

  “Why say that?”

  “Because she doth serve the paynim,” Sophia said. “She taketh from them, and giveth to them as well. But she dothn’t serve Travelers. We are not of the pact.”

  “ ’Tis not always true,” Yuchil said. “I suspect some of our people have here made deals with Calybo, to live long enough to understand the Crafters.”

  The assistant did not disagree, but her expression was sour.

  Andalo, cleaning and sheathing all his knives and two swords, said, “All is changing. No one is here to take our deliveries! Hel is no longer with us.”

  “Hel hath not been with us for most of time,” Yuchil pointed out. “What matter to mortals?”

  They saw Reynard’s attention and turned away, walking around the wagon.

  “Hath the Eater returned?” Nikolias asked.

  “I watch,” Calafi said. “She hath not.”

  Nikolias walked off with a shrug to urge the men to finish grooming and feeding the horses. Reynard walked over to where Widsith was shaking off the last of his deep sleep. The Pilgrim did his best to ignore all attentions and company, and did not even look his way.

  Last Roundabout

  * * *

  THE LATER MORNING was only a little brighter than the night, but they pushed on through the pass until they came to a wider spot between the walls. Here, the wagon-rutted path circled a single jagged pillar. Widsith and Reynard and two of the warriors went around the pillar and came upon a perfectly smooth causeway through the last of the great rocks, paved evenly with hewn stone.

  “Do we stop here and wait longer?” Kaiholo asked.

  Yuchil and Nikolias again conferred. Nikolias shook his head adamantly, but the woman seemed to win their debate, so he returned to the others and said they had no choice. “We go where we have never gone before,” he explained. “Because we are not met, nor given signs. Next will be the outermost cities of the krater lands, where many Travelers are said to dwell and serve the Crafters. But all now is uncertain.”

  The wagon wheels and the horse hooves were equally unsure on this smoothness, and more than once the wagon slid sideways and had to be corrected with careful management of reins and horses in harness.

  The other Travelers were gloomy, contemplating what they might find ahead, and disliking going where they might not be at all welcome.

  Finally, a far misty landscape became visible—a wide valley into which the pass debouched. A few miles away, another ridge, central to the valley, as thin and sharp as a knife blade, interrupted the lowering cloud. Reynard could almost make out more shapes this side of the ridge, rounded and tall and huge, but obscured by thick mist.

  Calafi ran ahead a few dozen yards and then returned with her widest gap-toothed grin. “A city in the form of a grand seed!” she called. “Flowers and stalks make caged seeds! This is like those, but great.”

  Yuchil clucked and got down from the wagon. Calafi danced forward, spinning, sashaying, and curtsying, as if introducing them all to unseen hosts. As well, she raised her hands into the air, fingers curling inward as if waiting to hold an apple.

  On one side of the great blade of rock—also banded red and black—were what the girl had described as a great caged seed, and Reynard soon saw her description was apt. The structure hugged the near slope of the blade and rose almost as high as the ridge itself. It most resembled the late summer curled nest of a hedgerow wild carrot or cow parsley, with a protective outer basket of wood or stone, he could not tell which, though how stone could be worked so fine and delicate and yet remain strong, he had no notion. Within the up-curving frame of the basket, houses as big as manor estates were mounted on cross-works of beams, connected by stairs and ladders and held together in part by a thick tackle like the ropes of a great-masted ship. It all looked so absurdly fragile that a typical coastal winter storm might have toppled it and blown out its dwellings like thistledown.

  Nikolias and Andalo guided the wagon across the last of the hewn road, onto another stretch of mud and broken cobbles, covered with puddles and now trackless. Reynard rode alongside Widsith.

  Facing the mud, Calafi had stopped her skipping dance and now walked quietly beside the lead riders, making gestures with arm and fingers, as if trying to find a way to describe in a secret alphabet what they were seeing. She squinted up at Reynard.

  Widsith rode with his eye on the valley, the blade-ridge, the curled structure emerging from the late morning shadow of the opposite side of the ridge.

  In less than an hour, the wagon rolled into the shadow of the great basket, while the murky sun split its light along the ridge, falling on a stone and wood stockade that surrounded the city and the inmost fields.

  “It is deserted,” Nikolias said from behind.

  “Or worse,” Kaiholo added.

  The fields were untended, overgrown, and the outer small hamlets of stone and mud-brick houses, within the stockade and spaced beyond it, were demolished and burned.

/>   “No dead, no living,” Kern said.

  Widsith rode along a dry gravel pathway that seemed to point toward the distant rising cloud.

  “These gardens were once magnificent,” said Yuchil. “But now they are just sticks and dead soil.”

  Reynard could not take his eyes away from the great ribbed and vaulted edifice. The ribs could have been crafted of either wood or stone—or wood made stone! Raised on the flats of Southwold, having known only shingle-stone and driftwood buildings, separated by narrow lanes and fields crossed by mazes of hedgerows, the thought of life in such a topsy-turvy structure was inconceivable. For one thing, the stairways had no rails! Monkeys might ascend and descend, or leap from rope to road, or from strut to beam to strut—but anyone else, it seemed, must live in constant fear.

  Andalo and his warriors could hardly conceive that Travelers who once lived here, and tended these fields, might have given up without a fight. “There must have been a great battle between the Sister Queens’ armies and Travelers who served the Crafters, one side victorious, and th’other . . .”

  “But why leave it empty?” Nikolias asked. “Those who were supposed to meet us claimed this was a rich land, full of rich peoples. How many remain? The Crafters who dwelt here are likely dead, and those who served them carried off in slavery.”

  “How can that be?” Andalo asked, like a little boy told that a favorite legend was not true and never had been. “Are Crafters not immortals, protected and ruled by Queen Hel?”

  “Maybe, like us, they have their age, and pass away,” Yuchil said. “If we could but see what the Pilgrim hath seen!”

  “None of what I saw explaineth this,” Widsith said.

  Yuchil drew up her cloak to ward off the wind that still followed them. “It groweth cold and dank. We must leave now!” She rose and patted down her dress and overrobe. But the men did not move.