The Unfinished Land

Of Childers and Bone-wives

REYNARD FELT something nuzzle his bare foot and opened his eyes. He had slept soundly, the sleep of fear and pain giving way to healing, as if, all else aside, his simply being on this island soothed him like a balm.

Again, Reynard’s foot was nuzzled. He looked down the length of the cot and saw, in a ray of sunshine falling through a narrow crack in the roof of the fold, the familiar, silly face of a goat, rolling and sliding its lower jaw back and forth, chewing cud.

He had slept through the day and into the next. He looked around for Manuel, but the old man—he would have to stop thinking of him that way!—was nowhere to be seen. Doubtless the Pilgrim had wandered off to attend to other business—perhaps this Maeve, his wife. Or to arrange to trade Reynard for Traveler favors.

But this morning, Reynard was anything but afraid. He rose and discovered that his body had a kind of liquid vibrancy, as if it liked being here, liked waking—despite his fears. But he was thirsty and very hungry. And then he spotted, in one corner of the stall, a small table supplied with a loaf of bread and a pewter flagon. He sniffed the flagon: mead, sweet and pale. He sipped, then took a bite of bread, hearty and dense. In a few minutes, the small breakfast was gone and he was not so very hungry. The goat remained, watching him and chewing philosophically.

But the goat was not alone.

Something moved up into the light beside the goat and stared at Reynard. It was a child, naked… but small, little more than knee-high, all its limbs proportioned to that size, appearing perhaps five or six years of age, with scrubby brown hair and black eyes… neither a boy nor a girl. Just too small.

The goat turned its head, poked at the child with some irritation, and the child vanished.

But there were others in the manger. They walked, moved, flitted like moths—four, five, six. He stopped counting. One paused nearby, held up a hand, and smiled.

“Greetings,” Reynard said. The child danced around him, still smiling, and then popped like a bubble. A tiny musical note followed, and the goat bleated, then moved away into the shadows—bored.

Strangeness everywhere, Reynard decided, and looked around. Beside the table he found an iron chest, opened to reveal worn leather shoes and patched clothes folded neatly. He stripped down, then knocked out the shoes and shook the breeches and shirt and vest. His uncle had taught him that on faraway isles, one had to be careful about creatures dwelling in clothes and footwear. Would the spirit children hide there as well?

He tried the new garments and the shoes. The shoes had holes in their toes, through which his own toes poked, but the breeches and shirt fit reasonably well. The vest was too tight and so he left it off. He then put into the chest the garments that had presumably belonged to a now-dead blunter. Waste not, want not.

A few minutes later, he pushed through the wicker gate of the fold and emerged in watery sunlight. The fold was a few dozen yards from an intact manor house with stone walls and a slate roof. Apparently the fight had not reached this far. Both house and the fold were surrounded by tall trees, all rustling naturally enough in a light breeze. Above the trees the sky was still hazy with smoke, but the sun shone through warmly, and he felt encouraged that he had been left so long to sleep and recover from another awful night.

“Fine morn for childers,” spoke a gravelly voice behind him. He spun around and saw a bald, elderly man with a long, brown-stained beard, sitting on a milking stool beside the gate. “They seem to like thee.”

Coming out, Reynard had not noticed this figure, but now the man surveyed him from a hunched angle, holding a long, flute-like reed with a bowl at one end, from which unwound a steady curl of thin white smoke. Reynard knew of tobacco; it was smoked often by sailors and, he heard, Raleigh and the Queen’s folk, but never among fisherfolk in Southwold. His uncle had shunned it because of the example of Hawkins, whom he had hated with a dark passion.

“Children?” Reynard asked, feeling a moment of such strangeness that his fingers prickled and neck hair stood on end.

“Childers!” the man with the smoking flute almost shouted. “Little ones, come and go—fine weather for ’em around thee, lad.”

“Are they fey—are they fairies?” Reynard asked.

The man drew with a hiss on his reed. “They come, they go. They harm no one.”

“What are they, then?”

“Childers. Get used to them.” He pointed the reed’s bowl around the corner of the manor, away from the fold. “Thou art free to go where thou pleasest—but perhaps not the town for a while. The townsfolk think the Spaniards were led to the island. They might blame Widsith, or thee, but Dana and Maggie work to calm them, and testify thou art no danger and fought hard for Zodiako.” Another long, sucking draw and smoke expelled from mouth and nostrils. “There be no more breakfast here, ’less thou be’st a goat or a sheep.”

Reynard’s discomfort had grown to a peak. “I have eaten and thank you. What know you about the old Spaniard?”

“I am old, lad. Widsith is no Spaniard, and hath not that luxury in which I wallow—to grow old.” He waved his smoking flute. “Widsith hath said I should send thee on his trail. But I saith back, thou art free. Git. Whither thou goest, no matter to me. Thou art a chain, boy, and I am the anchor. Cut loose.” He fluttered one hand and drew on the tobacco again with the other. The smoke that filled the air was at once sweet and acrid.

“Which way?”

Reynard wondered if he should simply avoid Widsith and find his way to the beach. But his inner pleasure was strangely compelling, and gave him courage despite the words he had heard two nights before.

He wanted to explore but not to flee.

The elderly man shrugged, then consented to point along a path through the margin of trees. Reynard started to walk, and then to run, away from the fold and the manor house, his shoes making soft scraping sounds along a well-trodden path rutted by wagon wheels and dotted profusely with evidence of sheep, horses, and kine.

Very familiar. Just shite, some fresh.

After a while, deep in leafy shadow, he stopped to catch his breath. The holed toes of his borrowed shoes provided little protection against roots and stones. He removed them and stuffed in thick leaves and grass. Then, for a few long moments, he sat under a white-flowering tree, taking stock. He had made a kind of pact, a strange sort of friendship, with a man who changed his age as he changed his name. He had seen many things in the last few days: sea monsters and at least one tattoed islander or freebooter. And of course, he had seen vampires who dealt in time, years taken or given… And beyond that, perhaps most formidable and frightening of all, drakes that killed at the behest of those who drank their birth liquor. He had just seen as well the strange, airy souls of lost children, perhaps waiting to be born. He neither needed nor wanted any more marvels. He had to find his way to a place that was not wrapped in dream, or nightmare, or perhaps the gloom that comes after death. Should he continue along this path or strike out?

“Surely I am not the greatest mystery here,” he murmured. “And not so valuable as a town!”

Perhaps not even worth his food and shelter. And as for food…

His earlier sense of balm and health was seeming illusory, the more he considered. He wondered about his meager breakfast. Could he eat in this land without partaking of something unholy? Was there food to be found on this island that would not threaten his very soul?

Thou art wiser than that, lad. Thou pray’st the prayers of others. Find thine own strength, and thine own way.

Reynard turned to see whoever had spoken, fearing it might be the dark man with the white shadow, but the words, the strong and stern advice, came from inside his head. Still, he thought the voice sounded familiar—raspy, smoky, deep and deeply female, like his grandmother. Did the dead come here to haunt… perhaps to become child-ghosts and be reborn in the east, where, he had heard, such things were believed?

He looked down, closed his eyes, wished for a sign. Nothing. And so he looked up. The high branches obscured most of that twisted sky, but daylight still filtered down, as if through a stamped pane of window glass. That light said, however soon he might face doom, for the moment there would be warmth, familiar trees, solid ground beneath his worn shoes.

Ahead, he heard high laughter and female voices. Were they women, humans from local farms—or the Eaters he had seen on the beach? He hid behind thick brush and listened. Several, perhaps four, were walking lightly and quickly along the path he had just abandoned. He pushed aside a branch and saw the first of them, dressed in long, filmy robes, her shoulders draped with a dark leather jerkin. Over the jerkin, swirling waves of brown hair fell to her waist—and then came into his sight three others, similar in appearance, like sisters. One had reddish hair, two brown, and one black. They were speaking a kind of ancient English, mixed with something that could have been Icelandic. Old, accented oddly, some words half familiar… but definitely neither Spanish nor Dutch.

And then, he thought, Greek.

The four paused just yards away on the pathway and turned slowly, like weathervanes, until they faced where he was hiding.

“What is this?” one of the brown-haired women asked.

“Widsith!” the black-haired woman exclaimed, and laughed. “He speaketh o’ a new boy who hideth thoughts and memories—a poor and pure son o’ the sea. This is his lad!”

“Come out, English boy. We mean no harm. We are gentlefolk thou shouldst ken.”

Reynard stepped from behind the bushes. The ladies—for clearly they were used to a kind of deference, looking at him, addressing him as if he were a wayward hunting dog—surrounded him and stroked his hair, his face, his clothes, intent, until they drew breath and sighed as one.

“Not ours to ply,” the first brown-haired woman said, and asked her companions, “Do we fetch him back?”

Another, with locks longer and hair darker brown and straight, falling like a third garment almost to her calves, said, “Knowing his blood, he’ll find a way.”

They all sighed again, like a soft breeze in the woods, then continued forward on the path, away from the town, speaking to each other with sharply sibilant words that seemed to penetrate his ears, like the flash of bird wings fleeing a snake—and yet, words he almost knew, had once heard spoken, but had never bothered to memorize. Words of travel, questions buried in each—questions he could not answer!

“I do not belong here!” he cried out, tears coming to his eyes.

The black-haired woman suddenly stood before him. He had not seen her move! “Why hast thou no memory of place and line? Here, on this blessed isle, no memory for a boy maketh him like a knight without armor. Remember, or another will find and use thee—less gentle than we who are conjured by the King of Troy.”

They each touched three fingers to their rosy lips and laughed again. “Or not. Is Widsith young and favored once more?”

“Such fickle charms!”

“Follow us, then,” the last lady said, smiling over her shoulder. “Our time is short, our candles dim, and we are going.”

And so he followed. The way through this wide, shadowy glade seemed to wind back past trees he had already seen, and yet the women, in a loose grouping, laughing and singing alternately, waving their hands as if in pure enjoyment, seemed always to be walking straight ahead, always away from the village, the town—

But here was the bush he had hidden behind when the women first passed—he remembered the broken branches from his emergence and saw an impression of his foot.

It was on the fourth loop of this game that he saw the four women walking through a wedge of sunlight. The sun, angling under the clouds, was late and golden, almost orange, and as Reynard struggled to keep up, he realized that the slanting light passed through the women, as if they were made of gauzy silk. Their clothes, their hair, and a kind of stick outline of their bodies shadowed within.

He stopped and bit his lip—

And from the corner of his glance saw Manuel, Widsith, perched on a rock beside the path, whittling a stick with a small knife. The formerly old man smiled in sympathy. He looked thirty, at most forty years of age. He still had a bandage on his arm, but he moved the arm freely, and it appeared strong.

Reynard squatted before him, elbows on his knees and chin in his hands, and studied the man’s clothes, his demeanor.

“Now dost thou learn,” Widsith said, highly amused.

“Learn what?” Reynard asked.

“Not to follow the toys of the King of Troy.”

“And who might he be? A true king?”

“No king, ’struth,” Widsith said. “An old mage, powers weakened by time and foolishness. Still, he hath a certain skill.”

“He maketh women to walk in the woods?”

“A favorite subject, I think. They last the length of a candle, and then fade to the sticks and old bones he keepeth in piles near his hut. He deviseth clever names for his illusions. These he calleth bone-wives.”

“How long doth the candle last?” Reynard asked, surprised by his calm.

“A few hours, no more than a day,” Widsith said. “The King of Troy is benign, mostly—and so some in Zodiako, used to wandering magicians and childers, and sometimes hallows, like to think they tolerate his toys, even ask him to provide entertainment for village parties—though he can be unpredictable. Oft his hallows look saintly, but approach too close—and they bite! But now thou’rt here, and all on thine own instinct, while the town maketh grieving and mending, let us visit the old mountebank.” His look was at once crafty and guilty, and Reynard dug deep to find any trust. Yet Widsith had yet to do him wrong, and had shown courage throughout, whatever his deal with the island might be.

Reynard got to his feet. “Why go to this king who is no king?”

“I want his judgment o’ thee, to confirm or deny mine own. Other than that, he can inform us of where we need to go.”

“He is human?” Reynard asked.

“He may not know anymore.”

“And you are human?”

“Aye, as I have told thee already,” Widsith said. “By the grace of history, and the will of this island, I am still human. Ready?”

Reynard allowed he was still more hungry than ready to go witness illusions. “I have eaten, but not enough!”

“On occasions, Troy feedeth his visitors, though the hunger is assuaged only for the length of a candle—like his bone-wives. But our visit will not take long, methinks. And we must return to Zodiako soon.”