The Unfinished Land Read online

  “But the drakes still kill,” Kaiholo said.

  “That they do,” said the left Queen. “But not for long. This, I have been told, will be their last season.” She raised her cane. “Now is the time to introduce our guests to th’other players. One not of the west hath sent a figure ahead, made of sticks and perhaps bones—a bone-wife, we hear it is called, incapable of being driven insane. It might be able to kill these monsters. Dost ye know of the King of Troy and his toys?”

  “He did not serve Hel,” the right Queen said. “Perhaps his toys will serve the island.”

  The one-armed Spanish soldier approached a guard and tugged her down to whisper in her ear. At this, with no further ceremony, the Queens were guided from their throne room. They walked with surprising grace side by side, though the right-hand Queen rested her arm on a guard’s outstretched hand.

  Widsith and Kaiholo and Reynard were roughly shoved and hurried out of the tent chambers, one of the giants wielding a sword without much care, out of the tent itself, and across the ground between the wounded on cots and the dead in their shrouds. The great tent was now surrounded by a frightened, exhausted mob of eastern soldiers, and scattered through this roil, a handful of Spaniards, though Reynard could not see Cardoza anywhere.

  “Where are we going?” Kaiholo asked as they were nudged on by pikes and spears.

  “Where you will not get us killed,” said the one-armed soldier when they were a hundred yards from the tent. He seemed high in rank, and his wound did little more than slow him down. He carried a long sword and his aide carried a Spanish crossbow, and they kept glancing at the sky.

  Reynard looked at Widsith, then at Kaiholo. Where would they be able to summon their drakes? Reynard did not know how that relationship worked, or what summoned whom—or even how drakes and their masters communicated! He had hoped to have instruction from Anutha, but now his mind was empty both of hope and knowledge.

  The soldiers in their guard urged them one direction, then merged with another group that poked and prodded them another, until they all had cuts and bruises from spear points or sword blades, and no one seemed to have any plan—except to get the captives away from the tent and to a place where they could be unable to interact, perhaps, with any drakes.

  Came a flurry of confusion among those surrounding them, a roar of anger followed by shouts of pain—and several great glinting streaks of shadow over the mass of men and women, along with the pound of hooves and screams of horses—

  “They are here!” Kaiholo called, and was struck by a shield, which knocked him flat. The one who struck him, a broad, bald, young eastern man, knelt down beside him, as if he regretted striking such a blow, but knew not what to do, and almost gently, he lifted the island Traveler as if he would revive him.

  Reynard saw this with wonder just before he was himself struck down by the flat of a sword, and three men and a very tall, angry woman stood over him, watching the sky, watching the moving mass of soldiers, trying to find a way to carry out whatever orders they might have been given, but all was tumult, and many were fleeing, trampling, even cutting their way through their fellows—

  Reynard saw why through the weaving bodies of panicking troops. The drakes’ broad wings reflected light from the camp fires. Beneath the swooping drakes, several horses were being guided by fighters in black with red ribbons tied to their arms, along with others wearing armor he was not familiar with, and still others on black horses swift and vague as smoke—Eaters!

  Widsith pushed between his captors and threw himself over Reynard, just as a spear bounced from the hard ground and two swords plunged and stabbed nearby. Reynard was astonished to find he was not hurt, nor was Widsith, but he could not see Kaiholo.

  He did, however, see rising over this mass of frightened, desperately fighting men—Andalo! On a horse, and not far from him, visible only at brief moments, other young guards from the wagon, fighting fiercely, killing many, causing even more rage and fear among the easterners . . .

  Yuchil was wrong about their not being true warriors!

  And then, a great flame rose to Reynard’s right, to the west, and he saw the Sister Queens’ tent was ablaze.

  Now he felt a strange prickle in his thoughts, a hard sort of request—a kind of question, as if an insect would ask questions or set up a strange conversation!

  And Reynard knew for the first time what it was to summon his drake, and set it to work to protect him.

  The Last Krater City

  * * *

  ANDALO GRABBED UP Calafi and placed her on the saddle before him, then rode toward the Sister Queens’ tent, under the direction of Nikolias. Nikolias had supplied him with his own great sword, with a double-edged blade at the slightly curved tip—a saber ending in a scimitar. The girl kept murmuring what sounded like spells or chants, and her eyes had rolled back in her head, showing only whites. As he rode toward and then into the confusion, he did his best to keep her steady and swing his sword at the same time, cutting away easterners who were already in a panic.

  And then he felt what Calafi must be experiencing. His eyes seemed to leap up and away from the horse, and to change their very nature—to change color and range, almost to see behind him, and it mattered not which way he turned his head—for these eyes were not in his head.

  But like his own eyes, they were looking for enemies—and to clear a path away from the great flaming tent and head them northeast, toward what he saw from the sky, in a different sort of memory and with a different sort of judgment, was another great city beyond the horizon—perhaps twelve or thirteen miles off.

  That city meant nothing to this insect judgment. It was important only that it might matter to the partner, the one who now rode behind its eyes and might make demands, which it would be the duty for the animal to anticipate and carry out.

  The insect, even without Widsith’s judgment, seemed remarkably intelligent, even prescient, and together . . .

  As Andalo’s horse stamped and reared through the fleeing crowd, a drake dropped among them, wings barely missing him and the horse’s head. Then the drake rose again, clutching a screaming soldier.

  Another did the same. And another.

  Andalo tried to remember all who had been given vials by Anutha. He had been. And Calafi. He felt the young girl squirm and try to flail—and knew that they were both guiding drakes. This distraction barely allowed him to hold on to the reins, and he wondered, with what little thought he had left to afford wonder, whether they might all be better off dismounted.

  But he did not dismount. Somehow his drake enjoyed the thought of riding a horse—a novelty it had never known before: an animal that could not fly, ridden by another animal that could not fly!

  * * *

  Widsith had already seen what happened to men in the clutches of drakes, and turned away from the harried easterners to a distracted Reynard, who seemed barely aware of what was happening around him. The boy kept looking through the frantic soldiers, as if seeing with other eyes—and indeed perhaps he was. Widsith wondered why he was not being similarly distracted, aided—afflicted . . .

  And then the Pilgrim saw his own drake hover and rise and swing around the great flames, and felt his own eyes exchanged for another’s, faster and higher, dropping, plowing with many limbs, pushing aside, clearing the way . . .

  For Calybo!

  Who wished them to go to the distant city, now visible through the eyes of their highest drakes—a city surrounded by the untended dead, for the Sister Queens had spent most of their army on trying to destroy the men and women devoted to their final Crafter, the final arbiter and creator of the world’s history until now.

  Widsith stayed close to Reynard, as did Andalo and Calafi. Reynard could not see Calybo or Valdis, or any of the other Eaters he knew were here—could feel just yards away, shadows smoothed into other shadows, moving from corpse to corpse, but to what purpose, the boy had no idea, no insight from the memories that Valdis had willed to him in their b
rief exchange on that beach on the western shore.

  They crossed a field of recent battle, hundreds of dead. Reynard saw the bodies from high, and smelled them as he stepped over them, feet catching all too often on tangled limbs.

  Widsith focused away from his high, wheeling drake, and saw not just the Queens’ armor, but Spanish plate and crested helms—worn by old or middle-aged men, the last from the galleon, the last of the Spanish to die, perhaps, on this far side of the isle.

  But no sign of Cardoza. Or any sign of the bone-wives of the King of Troy.

  Reynard thought of the burning candles on their path to this place, and the bag of such candles carried by Gareth. His mind was filled with darting images, suppositions, possibilities—pieces of story not concluded, mixed with so many stories that had reached an end, and he knew not how or why.

  The Chafing Waste

  * * *

  THEY WALKED for an hour through the dead and again crossed the border of the chafing waste, mouths dry, noses clogged with the dust raised by battle. That dust seemed everywhere, stinging, blinding—as it must have blinded the soldiers and Spaniards and Traveler servants . . .

  The distant city finally appeared through a veil. Unlike the great circle of cathedral towers, the dust revealed low buildings arranged—he could see through the eyes of his drake, high above—in four quarters or neighborhoods, cut through by a cross of broad boulevards. At their intersection was a krater, covered by vaulted walls and bridges, with at its own center a circular theater. The drake could not see through the shimmer that hid the interior of the theater, and neither then could Reynard.

  “Does anybody know where we are going?” Calafi asked, suddenly waking from her murmuring trance. Andalo echoed the girl’s question, louder, that more could hear—

  Which Reynard realized were now many, dozens of Travelers and, he saw, Kern, and Gareth, and Dana in their leather uniforms, who had gone around the battlefield, intent on only one thing, ready to sacrifice all to this last part of their journey, with no clear conclusion, only a destination they would not reach, did not wish to reach, for their duty was to deliver Reynard.

  Nothing more.

  After that, he had no idea what would happen to any of them. Nobody knew, not Valdis, not even Calybo, and certainly not Widsith, covered in white dust, more and more like the ghost he would have become had he not returned to the western shore and Zodiako.

  “Move on,” Reynard heard from a passing darkness and chill breeze. “Move on!”

  Then Valdis rose up before him like a blue flame from an icy fire, but the voice was not hers. Behind her lifted an even darker mass, the Afrique. None of the Eaters were mounted now—only the Travelers and Calafi, who appeared comfortable enough on the saddle before Andalo. Andalo gripped a great sword with one hand and Calafi’s arm with the other, but both looked haunted, seeing a little through their own eyes and much through other eyes, trying to make out what might be their end, their fate, or their triumph.

  Widsith stayed close to Reynard, as did Kern with his sword almost too long even for him to swing. They stood in a half-circle on a low hump in the salty waste.

  “I have something to tell thee, fox-boy,” Widsith said. Reynard pulled back from his high perspective, for there was something in the Pilgrim’s tone that commanded attention—even a change in his voice, as if he were going back to being an old man, for the moment . . . reviving a memory he was not completely sure he could have had.

  “What?” Reynard asked, puzzled and irritated at this distraction.

  Kern moved away from them, but not so far he could not protect. This talk seemed personal, and he was not sure he wanted or needed to hear it.

  “Dost remember I plucked thee from the ocean, not so many weeks ago?”

  “I remember an old man who saved me,” Reynard said. “An old man who looked twice and then lifted me onto a galleon!”

  “Sí,” Widsith said. “An old Spanish man being returned to his beloved isle on a ship that did not belong to him, and who had no power but persuasion, and very little of that.”

  “What of it? I am grateful,” Reynard said.

  “I had rarely seen such a thing before,” Widsith said. “When first I saw what was thumping against the hull of the galleon, there was only a broken boat, empty.”

  “Then you looked again, and saw me!”

  “No,” Widsith said. “Not even the second time.”

  “How could that be? I was there, and saw you!”

  “I saw nobody the first time, nobody the second time, but then I felt I must look again, and thou tookest shape on the wreckage, like a form drawn by a master on paper—roughly sketched at first, then filled in, features clear, pain and distress obvious—and I recognized here was something new, something that had not been there before . . . but was with us now, and most importantly, a sign, for rarely do Crafters thus reveal themselves.”

  “What do you mean? I was there all along.”

  Widsith nodded, as if not disagreeing, and both were for a time distracted again by the high vision of their drakes, and stepped apart, separated by Andalo’s horse, until Kern reached out to draw Reynard away from the nervous animal.

  Both he and the giant fell back, and Widsith joined up with them again. Kern still seemed to be deliberately not listening to their conversation, as if embarrassed by its intimacy—but he glanced at Reynard, then looked off to the dust clouds around the last city.

  “I was there, and have been all my life!” Reynard said in a resentful undertone.

  “And what was thy name, in this previous life?”

  “Reynard.”

  “And who named thee?” Widsith asked.

  “My grandmother, I have been told.”

  “The color of thy hair did remind me of a fox I once fed in the Philippines . . . or perhaps it was in the Japans.”

  “My hair is black!”

  “The sea, I suppose, had turned it red, though to ponder that puzzle is madness . . . But at that moment, I called thee Reynard. Before this sighting, fox-boy, thou hadst no part in this world, and that I’ll swear on all mine ancestors, and all I love, and on thee, whom I have come to love like a son. Before I looked that third time, the wreck was empty.”

  “I do not understand!”

  “Nor I. But a Crafter madest thee at that very instant, scrawny, sea-logged, and thirsty, and allowed me to see it happen. And that is when I began to understand how hard things would go in Zodiako, and across the Tir Na Nog, and how change was upon us.”

  “You speak foolishness! How is it I have my own memories?”

  “That is the way of all made by the masters of history and story. There is no man or woman without a navel, some say, though not all are born of woman.”

  “But why you, returning and eager to get home to Maeve?”

  Widsith shook his head. “I have always served Crafters, and I can only assume they wished to reward me by bringing thee into the tale.”

  Reynard stepped away, around Andalo’s horse, and met Calafi’s distracted gaze. Andalo had lowered her to the ground, and she seemed to share a strange pain he was feeling—coming so close to the dwelling of the one who might have made them both.

  “Fox-boy,” she said. “Dost feel that?”

  He nodded.

  “I have felt it coming since I first looked on thee!” She then said, with a pirouette, “Nikolias tells me the same story—that he and Yuchil found me in the woods, at the cross-trod. Or rather—saw me arrive! I remember much before then—being lost, being found. But are we simply staring into our belly buttons? More important, where are we going to complete our task?”

  Nikolias was escorted by Valdis, and behind them, Calybo. Both the Eaters were barely visible.

  “We are all ready,” Valdis whispered. “The chain will form. We will give all of our stores of time and power, and then be done, and at peace.”

  “But only fox-boy and Calafi can go into the krater,” Calybo said.

  “
Guldreth said as much to me,” Kern said.

  This on top of what Widsith had said was more than Reynard could take in. He remembered Calafi saying something about the stores of time he did not contain, that he had not been on this Earth long enough to help save Anutha—and that Valdis would not expend any of her time, nor Calybo’s, nor the time of any Eater to that end . . .

  He remembered also what the man with the plumed hat had said when he appeared like a specter, rising above the waters that nearly covered his uncle’s hoy.

  But he also pushed his thoughts back through his life, touching on the memories he had, of his mother and father, of that same uncle, of the towns he had visited, the journeys across the ocean to the best fishing grounds, his uncle’s tales about sailing with Hawkins, and all his uncle had taught him about tasting the waters to know where they were, and about the types of fish they could hope to find in different currents and in different regions at different times of the year—and those times in which it was foolish to go to sea at all.

  But also his own curiosity, his own hunger for learning and language, that had driven him to approach people in Aldeburgh who he knew would treat a scrawny fisherboy with contempt.

  And among those visitors—

  The man with the white shadow, who he thought might have greater secrets than any in the nearby towns . . . If he were real. If any of them were real.

  Those memories must mean he lived and saw and remembered before his uncle drew him out to Gravelines and sacrificed crew, nephew, and boat to resupply the British ships going up against the Armada of Philip and the Duke of Medina Sidonia.

  All those memories were vivid and real even after all he had seen on this island, all the monsters and strange beasts . . .

  Even now that he saw from the eyes of a high drake, gliding out on four wings over the next city, which in many ways was not much more than a wide, low town, like Aldeburgh, like his home village . . . But with the streets arranged in a spiral, cut in four, the spiral ever curling into a covered krater.