The Unfinished Land

The First Death

REYNARD AGAIN passed through numbing fear to a murky darkness where memories and fancies rose like a shoal of fish beneath rain-spattered waves. Was he back on the hoy? He whimpered and drew up his legs until his knees met his chin. He spent empty hours going back through early memories, as if to make sure they were still there—but why? Then he came upon the night his grandmother had died. Her name was Ringbrae, an ancient name, she had told him, from the great grassy meadows east of the rainy marshes but south and east again of Russia. He knew little of any of those places, so he pictured them as his grandmother had described them, filled with great white stone fortresses, and wagon and horse trails across endless seas of grass populated by her people, stone people, who built more when they were stopped, and so were never allowed to stop, but rolled on and on in their great caravans, pulled by small, strong horses with brushy manes and patient eyes.

Ringbrae was in her nineties when she died, tended by her widowed daughter, and took a long while doing it. As her dying dragged on, she received guests from around Southwold, compatriots of many shades of olive and brown, as well as pale villagers and fisher­men who had come to her for words and charms. She had given them all the satisfactions they requested, and so now they honored her as few of her people had ever been honored, and she received their company with a sad, patient smile, remembering the troubles they had given to her husbands—for she had had three, two of whom had fled in fear, fear of her some said, and one of whom, the longest of her marriages, had died in his blacksmithing shop in the unexpected, fiery breath of a forge, leaving her three years in a place of dark visions.

Reynard’s father had taken over the smithy, and had taught the young Reynard skills between forays with his uncle on the hoy, fishing and carrying goods up and down the coast.

Reynard remembered her deathbed. Hay and moss under sacks was constantly turned and refreshed, and so the old woman had smelled sweet, like timothy, but also like old buttermilk, and he had wondered why she did not get up and continue her stories. The dark folks and the pale folks came from around Britain to pay their respects. Ringbrae had finally tired of receiving them, and asked seven-year-old Reynard if he had seen her dead husband, and when Reynard said shyly that he had not, she had turned away with that same sad smile and said, “I have told the far, good folk about thee, boy. Eftsoons I will be real, and thou as well.”

He frowned at this nonsense, as if she were insulting his intelligence, but she smiled assurance. Then she had coughed, vomited blood, and died.

Wide-eyed, he had seen those last moments, and his mother’s frantic endeavors to keep Ringbrae with them. But those efforts had been bootless.