The Unfinished Land Read online

  “Oh, but being born is another way of dying. Thou didst die before thou camest here, didst thou not?”

  He stared at her, irritated, even angry—but they were interrupted. Sophia brought the girl a blanket, wrapped her shoulders, and looked his way, but her expression told him nothing.

  Reynard leaned over to Calafi and insisted, as if claiming some firm ground, “I have yet to die!”

  “Oh, good!” the girl said, curling up to sleep. “Then it will be an adventure.”

  “Look,” Kern said, standing on the other side of the second fire. “They leave!”

  The birds had stopped wheeling and now rose high in the last of the sun, like sparks or bits of molten gold, and flew away from the city and the great blade of stone—south, as if fleeing a looming storm. The upper works of the basket city were again deserted and lifeless.

  Yuchil called for tea to be made, and soon all but the girl drank of the warm liquid from flat steel kettles, and others arranged pots for boiling more gruel. The night seemed to surround them like a fog.

  They ate and drank, and some wandered to the edge of the firelight to relieve themselves, women squatting and hiding their efforts with long skirts, men turning away as if this were the height of modesty, but none daring find cover in the fields in the dark.

  Reynard took his turn, as did Widsith. “I piss less often now, and that is a blessing,” the Pilgrim said to Reynard. “I would die another death before age creeps on me again.”

  An Echo in the Glooming

  * * *

  IN THE NIGHT, the strange mud-gray night, Reynard opened his eyes and saw Calafi standing over him.

  “The scout is hurt worse than any thought,” the girl said. He felt he had known this already, but could not remember. “She is dead soon. The Eater can save her for a while longer, by sharing her time.”

  “As Calybo did with Widsith. Where is Widsith?”

  Then he saw that Calafi had no real substance.

  “But the Eater will not save her, cannot save her. Valdis needs must borrow from another, because her time is trothed and may not be shared.” The girl wavered in the last light of the flickering fire, and then, behind her came Valdis to stand where Calafi had been, and his heart leaped. He could not see the redheaded girl anywhere, nor even much of the camp, and he wondered if he was still asleep.

  “Will you save Anutha?” he asked Valdis. “She hath been brave! Take time from me if you cannot find Widsith or anyone else!”

  “You have no time to share,” Valdis said. “You are too near your beginning. No Eater can borrow from you, only give. And giving will spell the end for us all.”

  “I do not understand!” Reynard said.

  “Hel has returned, and given her orders to th’one who made me what I am today.”

  Reynard rolled over in his blanket and found that he had not yet opened his eyes. And when he did, the night was still thick about them, and he saw Widsith lying not far away.

  The Pilgrim was snoring.

  * * *

  With day, the fires were down, not even smoking, and the fields and ruins near which they had camped were cast half in deep shadow, the line of the shadow made murky by passing layers of cloud.

  Reynard could not remember what he had seen in his deep sleep.

  The Travelers brought them tepid gruel and chunks of a hard, mostly stale bread, like ship’s biscuit. Lifting a spoon of the gruel, Widsith remarked how rice was far more common in the lands of his travels than in Europe, where wheat and rye and other grains supplied their usual needs.

  Nikolias emerged from the wagon and cracked his joints with a rich variety of grimaces, then looked to Reynard and Widsith.

  “Still no one,” Yuchil said, peering from the back of the wagon. “We should be on our way.”

  “There is nowhere left to return to!” Widsith said, his voice breaking with both anger and sorrow.

  “And no farther path here,” Nikolias said. “Move we must, even so, to deliver the boy. Pack it away.” The guards rolled up their sleeping blankets, kicked the fire marks around the dirt, and prepared horses and wagon to move on—though, as Widsith had said, there was no place for them to go.

  “I would have saved Anutha,” Reynard said to Widsith. He felt the muscles on his back and neck twitch and looked up at the sky and the rolling gray clouds, searching for shadows, for of course anything could happen here. They were near a dead city, on the outskirts of a dead land.

  “Listen to Valdis. Thou hast value, but no power, not yet,” Widsith said. “And none here knoweth why. Anutha died from a poison in her blood. She died honorably, and she delivered the boon of drakes. As Maeve and Maggie would have wished.” Widsith looked along the ridge, over the fallow fields. “Dost thou understand why the Eaters did not share?”

  The Pilgrim’s question cut deep. “What do you know about me?” Reynard asked sharply, as if his words might shake loose something hidden between them.

  “In time, maybe.”

  Suddenly furious, Reynard turned away to hide the redness of his face. He had been told his visit had importance, but had never trusted such judgments, because he knew himself to be ignorant. The Spaniards, worst in his imagination, most skilled at war, had thrived neither in their sea battle nor on this island. And if this land had left its own people to rot under the shadows of a pair of unknown queens, after endless times under the rule of a Hellish goddess—what chance would he have?

  The Next Silence

  * * *

  EAST ALONG THE great blade of rock, evening mist was clearing from the caged seed city.

  Andalo and Sany spoke with Nikolias away from the wagon.

  Widsith had avoided Reynard through the night, but now stood beside him and listened to the guards. “Half of the Sister Queens’ armies are most likely returning from their conquest of Zodiako and the southwestern shores, by sea and any available paths overland,” the Pilgrim said. “The Travelers will assume that all their ways back will be watched by the Queens’ pickets, ready to summon more troops than we can possibly defeat.”

  “The Travelers wish to keep going east?”

  “Nikolias’s only choice. Yuchil’s as well, given how many soldiers may surround this half of the island. We know not how many Travelers remain in these lands, if they no longer serve the Crafters. But there might be some.” Widsith studied the boy. “Nikolias may hope he can pass thee to the next group of servants, if they find any—and then, rewarded with food and water, turn about and head south or west.”

  “Is there an escape that way?”

  “None that I know,” Widsith said.

  “The servants would trade me . . . to whom, for what advantage?”

  Widsith shook his head.

  Reynard drew himself up. “Calafi says it must be so.”

  “That girl . . . I have not seen her like. I would ask Yuchil where she was found, but I wonder if any of them could answer.”

  Nikolias approached and informed them they would try to roll their wagon a few miles along the blade of rock before nightfall. “Beyond, none knoweth what will be found.”

  Andalo and Bela came to them next. “We have seen many footprints,” Andalo said. “Heading east—being herded by horsemen.”

  “The servants of this city?” Widsith asked.

  “Future slaves for the Queens,” Bela said darkly. “But they may not be able to feed or keep them all. We fear . . .”

  He did not finish his fear. There was no need.

  Calafi approached Reynard from behind, surprising him, and took his hand in hers. “I’ll be with thee, whatever they decide,” she whispered, looking up into his face.

  Sophia brought the horses forward, and all mounted and followed the wagon. Calafi stayed close to Reynard and his horse. She never rode, always walked, but now she had ceased her dances and her spells, and her red tresses were knotted, for she refused the attentions of Yuchil and Sophia.

  Seeing the mute swarms of birds had made the Traveler
s even more gloomy, as if the silent, wheeling flocks presaged their own doom, the end of their own worlds of language and meaning . . .

  Their own silence.

  Valdis, as always, seemed to find the comfort of shadow.

  The garden lands, beyond the eastern end of the high, sharp ridge, became a jumble of uplifted plates of rock, punctuated by white hexagonal pillars, as if a great coat of varnish had been laid over the ground and broken by bones rising from below.

  Yuchil raised her hand, and the wagon stopped. The guards dismounted and passed their horses’ reins to Calafi, then opened doors in the side of the wagon and scooped out hay in great fist-clumps, while the Travelers on foot arranged their blankets and laid out cloth bags of provisions.

  “They will feed the horses one fine meal,” Widsith said. “What doth that wagon truly contain?”

  “Whatever Yuchil needeth,” Kaiholo said. “And that which her children require. For a while!”

  Reynard had wondered if perhaps the wagon’s stores were endless. How much magic did Travelers possess? If they commanded words, could they turn words into goods—into food and water?

  The first word is the first mother. It is not her breast or larder. Words only guide and describe. They do not fulfill. Look to the silence of the birds! Their songs have never filled their stomachs.

  Somehow, hearing that inner voice that still was not precisely his own, he felt ashamed of his hopes.

  They moved higher up the rocky fields and into low clouds that made these places even more ghostly and unreal, not that any of it seemed real to Reynard.

  “Where are the drakes?” Andalo asked Widsith. “I would have mine close!”

  “That I do not know,” the Pilgrim said.

  “Can we sense their wills, their direction?”

  “Not yet,” Widsith said.

  Kaiholo touched his jaw. “Perhaps they arrive only when we have true need.”

  Kern studied the gray skies with a broad scowl. “If the southwestern coast is conquered, many drakes are either dead or without masters. And a drake without a master is a dangerous enemy. Who hath killed its master, it must kill before its season is done.”

  * * *

  Stars lit their way, but not many, and no moon, and still the wagon rolled on through the night, leaving the first krater city behind. And still they had not seen a krater, or crossed the boundary of the chafing whiteness.

  But they could clearly see in the dirt and along the crusted rock the prints of many feet and hooves.

  “I wonder they gave in without a fight,” Andalo said.

  “Maybe they had hope of rescue,” Reynard said.

  “From us?” Bela asked. “We were ever the lesser of Travelers. I wonder if perhaps they believed the island could not live on without them.”

  Reynard was reminded of those inland farmers and lords in England, who did not believe in oceans and far lands, or the peril they might bring.

  They paused in the dark and stumbled about to water the horses. Widsith found an old sailor’s rest. Sleep or rest of any sort seemed impossible to Reynard, who felt an inner pain he had never known before—a grief not just for lost family and friends, but for all those who might come after, for all who might arise in times of peace and prosperity—for he saw that such times might never come again, would never come again—and he was to blame!

  He rolled over in his blanket, now dusty and itchy and miserable, and saw that Kaiholo and many of the Travelers were already up and about before the muted sunrise, off to brew tea and make thin soup. Reynard closed his eyes and squeezed them tight, as if to see into the greater darkness behind them—and when he looked again, there was Yuchil, holding out a cup of tea. Widsith had not yet stirred. Reynard sat up, took the cup, and sipped slowly, while she carried over a silken pillow and laid it beside him. She sat with a ladylike sigh.

  “Thou still knowest not why thou art here,” she said. “Whilst brave enough in battle, it be not thy calling to fight and kill.”

  “No,” he said. “That my family hath never required of me.”

  “And yet thine uncle took thee out to sea,” she said.

  “To carry food to our ships. We are none of us warriors.”

  “Nor, except in extremes, are my people,” Yuchil said. She shook her head. “Some carry swords, and will defend us, but they are not true warriors. They cannot be true warriors unless they are willing to begin wars, and they are not. But do not tell our young men I said that.”

  Reynard nodded. “I have been told I come from a long line of tinkers and wanderers,” he said, hoping for better or at least clearer judgment than that from the King of Troy. “Can you tell if that is true?”

  “Oh, there are many in England descended from the Rom and other Travelers. The Travelers have, after all, spread far and wide, and proven themselves as essential to kings and queens as any warriors. Not only do they bring the languages that tell the stories kings and queens love to hear, of themselves and others like them, greater still . . . But those languages convey power and strategy. Before the Travelers reached any of the lands we know, any of the lands that Crafters controlled and shaped, there was only base instinct and forgetting. Now . . . there is change and suffering and war. Which is better, think’st thou?”

  He shook his head. “There must be good and various reasons to live, and they cannot all involve animal loss or animal gain.”

  Yuchil’s smile was like a light in the early morning gloom. “Wisedom beyond thy years.”

  “Misery breedeth change in hearts and minds. Some call it wisedom.”

  “Thou hast remembered some things, Widsith doth tell me. Thou remember’st your grandmother speaking to thee in thy mother’s womb . . . teaching thee some of her words?”

  He nodded.

  “If that was given to thee, then something else happened as well. Dost thou remember others who sought thee out and conveyed their words?”

  Reynard looked into the silver-haired woman’s youthful eyes, and noticed that Calafi had come closer and was listening. None of the others approached, however—they did not appear to notice them at all. “I remember a man with a white shadow, who spake to me whilst I hid in a hedgerow. And another man, who came whilst I was alone at sea. He had a feathered hat.”

  “Thy grandmother would have arranged another ceremony. A completion, as it were, of thy charge and task . . . a loading of the musket, a fletching of thine arrows.”

  Reynard frowned at her. “I do not remember any such ceremony,” he said.

  “She would have determined thy quality then, and armed thee with the languages she knew thou wouldst need. Inner languages. Inner qualities that stream now through thy flesh and along thy bones. Dost thou feel them, like cold fire . . . like the white shadow of the strange man, and the feather in the fancy hat of th’other?”

  “I sometimes dream such,” Reynard said. “But the dreams are deep in fog, and I do not remember them when I awaken . . . so perhaps, no.”

  “Time to awaken the dream and make it remember thee, young Fox.”

  “How can that happen?”

  “It is like the beginning. May I speak to thee of that place, those people, that time?”

  Reynard nodded, though he almost dreaded hearing such things, because of the responsibility they might bring.

  “Once, people who would become like thee and me were deaf. They heard nothing, and only saw, and that not in colors, but merely in grays and blacks. The man with the white shadow is a presence from those times. He will not leave thee alone, ever.

  “The people who would become human felt only the pounding of their feet deep in their bodies, as they walked a dark and silent realm, trying to find themselves and all who would come after. Many such passed into oblivion. They also felt the pump of their blood and the drumbeat of their hearts, and once, one looked up at a bird on a bare tree and thought she heard a thin, light sound. So she put her fingers to her lips and blew out her breath, and heard the whoosh—but also
a high whistle—and others around her heard it as well, and so they were no longer deaf, and wondered what that would bring to them. It took a long time to hear the wind and the land around them, but it did happen in time, and the more they listened to the sounds they already knew, the more new sounds became apparent. Once, a woman screamed in pain as she was gnawed by some beast. They heard that, and made it into a word to warn and frighten.

  “Another moaned in sickness, and that became another word, and with these new words came new fears and new ideas. It took thousands of years for these peoples to realize they lived on plains of rustling grass, and to know what grass was, and what ate the grass, and what ate the animals and insects that ate the grass, and the more they listened to these animals, and to the birds, the more words they acquired, and went to other groups of people, other tribes, and traded them words. The birds had song, and something like words, and the animals had their sounds, but only these people could grow and trade their languages.”

  “I have heard other versions of this before,” Reynard said.

  “As is proper, for all histories are personal. The first words became mothers to new tongues, and stories grew. This is when Queen Hel realized these peoples might be important, for they could teach her words, and she might move out of her own silence. And so she was grateful, and elevated them, and set them a long task: to carry languages around the world, but most especially, to build boats and cross the sea, and visit the Tir Na Nog, and provide instruction to the strange beings that had arrived on her creation, and that she herself feared and knew not. For they were shapeless beings, angry in their boredom, and had no tasks, and knew nothing of what they might be or become. And so their power would be a danger to her, she thought, unless she found them a place and things to do . . . And she felt the first Travelers might help in that way.

  “And so it was. Carrying their trade and their words on boats, and on wagons, and on horseback, and on foot, the first Travelers crossed the krater lands where these beings had arrived, and were still arriving, and in fear, met them . . . trembled at the nightmares they seemed to be . . . and spake to them.