The Unfinished Land

Maggie Strong

THE STREETS OF Zodiako were in an uproar. Even while planning proceeded for two weddings and the funerals of three elderly townsfolk, with all the necessary rituals and precautions that both entailed, people skulked from their houses and now, as night drew near, took refuge inside the old stone parliament or in the long halls of the temple, hiding from moon and stars like mice between bins of grain.

Maggie made her grim walk through the gray dusk, past the graveyard and three fresh-dug pits decked with ribbons, hoping to encourage those recent and doubtless surprised spirits to depart quick and clean from their isle. She took a stone path north toward the stables, on a most unexpected and unwelcome mission. As the town’s only physician with experience in Eater magic, she had to hurry and tend to a victim of the kick of a horse…

An Eater’s mount.

A clan of Eaters from the Ravine two miles inland had been through Zodiako the night before, and though they were not rogue, and had not broken their ancient pact, and showed no signs of doing so, their presence, even in passing, was not welcome. Children did not sleep when Eaters were near—nor for that matter did their parents. But children had the most to lose.

Furthermore, the Eaters had left four of their horses in the care of the local stable. Eater horses were in themselves unsettling, with their restless ways and strange eyes that seemed to have witnessed paths and trails unknown to humans—and probably had, since Eaters were known to venture near the island’s heart to, so it was said, commune with gods and beasts that no longer existed anywhere else.

The kick from such a horse could embed a wound with strange dirt indeed, dirt that sparkled and burned and left the wretch—a stable boy of tender years—writhing in agony. At least he would not die of an infection. Such wounds, in her experience, always cleansed themselves. But left untended, they could also cleanse the world of the boy so afflicted.

Still, the true rub of the matter was that Eaters on foot, without their mounts, were going about deadly serious business down at the shore, and did not trust even their horses while so engaged. And that meant there might be new arrivals from the outer world—people not subject to the pact, and thus attractive to all Eaters, and more so the outliers of their kind.

For Maggie Strong, that was both an alarming possibility—that unaware peoples might find their lives cut short!—and a welcome, even exciting one. She had lived her entire life here, but had often, since childhood, felt a rude, undisciplined need for words from the outside, words on history and how the human races had changed, and what the world’s, and the island’s, fate might be, as Crafters molded their stories, their plots—their long plans.

She entered the stable slowly, cautiously, not to make any loud sound. The stable master, an old friend named Kule, nodded toward the rear stalls where the Eater mounts were being kept for the time being.

“They just appeared,” he said. “Januk came on them by surprise. The stall gates were barred by a silver rope, and he was curious—had never seen such before.”

“So he pulled on it,” Maggie said.

“That he did. The animal reared and struck him.”

“Where is he?”

“In the tack room.”

She went with Kule to a long extension from the middle of the stable, with haylofts above and stone grain bins below, and the tack arrayed on one wall of the closest bin.

The boy, Januk, was familiar to her, though she did not go to the stable often. She did not ride willingly, having been thrown from a supposedly tame and child-friendly horse at the age of six, giving her the limp she still demonstrated when weather was gray—which was much of the time in Zodiako.

The boy lay on his back, grimacing at the rafters and hayloft, one thigh bare, bruised, and clearly marked by the down-striking hoof. She bent beside him, with a wince, then knelt and said, “I am Maggie. Thou art Januk, son of Senilil and Mark, in truth?”

The boy’s face was a mask of pain, which he was trying his best to conceal, and failing. “I am,” he said through gritted teeth. “Why doth it burn?”

“Thou hast strange land in thy leg, boy. It will help the wound stay clean, but give thee odd dreams tonight. We will clean out the dirt and give it back in a small bottle, to light thy way in the dark.”

The boy was in too much pain to find this appealing, but she knew it would make his reputation with the other youngsters. She asked Kule to bring her a clean wrap. The wound’s blood clumped black and clotted, as if cauterized, but a couple of inches of flesh lay loose and exposed silverskin and a beefy nubbin of muscle, and there along the rip it was—a sparkle like embedded stars. The Eater horses had been to the chafing waste not long ago.

Kule handed her a half-clean rag, the best to be had out here. She asked him for some of his famous uisquebaugh, which he kept hidden in the back of the tack room for purposes other than treating wounds, and, grumbling, he went to fetch a jug.

“This will hurt thee worse than the kick,” she said to the boy, and took a curled edge of the cloth to rub away the glitter she could see. The boy shrieked, and Kule returned just in time to help her hold him down. He sat on the boy’s midsection, light enough and gentle.

She had removed all of the glitter by the time the boy passed out, and now she spread the rag and scraped the shining dirt into a small glass jar. The boy’s dreams had already begun, she saw, for his eyes weaved fast under their lids and he moaned not in pain, but at what his dream-self was seeing. Maggie wondered what those visions might be.

Some claimed Maggie’s outward-facing curiosity was caused by her drinking of the wildness of her drake charges, the fluids tapped when nymphs were blunted. She opened the baked clay jug and poured out a good glassful of whiskey over the wound, then took a line of gut and a needle and began sewing it up.

“Will it suppurate?” Kule asked, eyes bright and proud that he knew that word. He had seen or himself endured often enough that necessary stage of healing—redness, puffiness, and the copious discharge of yellow pus—that signified flesh knitting and returning health. Or, just as often, creeping red lines, stinking blood, and death.

“I think not,” she said. “If we have got all the dirt out, the wound will heal slow but complete. He’ll have a good scar, but he is young, and maybe that, too, will fade.”

“When will the glassy skins return for their horses? ” Kule asked. “I want to be gone when they do.”

“The boy’s parents have been told, have they not?”

“The father’s on grave detail, and his mother is out cleaning the King of Troy’s hut. I am sure they will miss him soon. They know he works here.”

“Then help me carry him to their house,” she said. “Where is thy daughter?”

Kule shrugged.

“Canst thou fetch her from the still in the forest, and ask her to watch till they return?”

Kule nodded reluctantly.

“Thou canst leave soon as his parents take him home,” she said. “Th’other horses seem quiet.”

“Frightened,” Kule said with a tweak of his nose. “They wol not make a sound until these be gone.”

“The Eaters will return in a few hours, I suspect. But if they come again, and they will, I advise thee to tend their mounts personally, and not assign them to an ignorant lad whilst thou dost hide and mewl.”

Kule gave her a resentful glare, but he knew Maggie too well to sass. “Keep the jug,” he said, as if offering up a valuable gift.

And she did. She knew a scout who might enjoy it.

Maggie helped Kule return the boy to his family’s cabin, where the father waited, weary and stained with dirt. Then she made her way down a lane between the temple and the parliament, the last hundred yards covered by a long slate-shingle roof. Beneath the slates, the overhead beams, every twenty feet or so, were painted on both sides with scenes from history and story. Nobody she knew had painted the beams, and nobody confessed that they knew anyone who had painted the beams, but they were painted, and the paintings were changed every few moons, while nobody was watching. She had learned to ignore their enigmatic and sometimes disturbing depictions, but now, heading at a brisk walk for a meeting with her chief scout, she glanced up and saw a fiery red eruption spread destruction across the beam right overhead. She closed her eyes to avoid its details, then looked down at the bricks and stones of the walkway and hunched her shoulders. The unknown, perhaps incorporeal, artist was unhappy, and so was she. Too many things were happening at once, and what worried her at this point was not that things could go wrong for the town, but that people would panic, like horses in a paddock beset by the scent of tigers. If the town lost its cohesion and discipline, she had always thought that was just as like to hasten their end as any twist or twitch of the Crafters in their far kraters.

Besides, she had never seen a Crafter, much less met one. And she had met with Eaters. Maggie remembered when her mother and father had taken her, as a child, to meet a clan of Eaters, to receive their protection… A story and a ritual experienced by most along the western shore. But she had little memory of that time. She had been three years old.

Hel had given birth to so many offspring, most of them more monsters than people. Maggie had been told by her mother that Eaters had once been highest among these, almost Vanir—strong among the island’s elusive dark elves and dwarves and trolls, now serving mostly in the chafing waste, some said… But Hel and her Crafters had taken it upon themselves, for some slight or other, to temper Eater immortality with dark need, followed by a warning—a severe and unwanted pact tying them forever to humans. Maggie had often wondered if the malleability and proliferation of humans had brought Hel’s curse upon Eaters. Who could know? Crafters did not always observe Hel’s ways, even less after Hel had hidden herself away in long sleep. They may have in their own contrary plan decided it was more dramatic, more satisfying, that humans on any of these seven isles should not remember a time before they devoted a portion of their lives to the Eaters, or the truth of how that relationship was forged.

Upon her mother’s death, Maggie had been put in charge of the town’s blunters. She had kept that position for twenty years. Just two days before, three of them had headed southwest through the lively woods, and had not yet returned nor sent message to explain their delay. What now worried Maggie was that what had led the Eaters to the shore had prevented the blunters from finishing their work, and wild drakes might even now be loose over the beaches and headlands, where the lively woods approached the sea. There had not been a drake attack near Zodiako for years, because her blunters were so skilled, so well trained—

And knew better than to stay out after dark, for nobody liked to tempt Eaters, even with the pacts, so it was said, still strong.

So much upheaval, and so many signs.

Maggie opened her leather satchel wide and shoved in Kule’s jug of whiskey. What could her chief scout tell her about all this? More, perhaps, with incentive.