The Unfinished Land

Separation

“HE IS HERE!”

“Where is the Pilgrim?”

“I do not see the Eater!”

These voices sprang up around him, muffled by water in his ears. He tried to open his eyes, but the lids were stuck together by mud. Someone helped him roll onto his back, and he coughed up sour water and what few things he had eaten in the last twelve hours. When he tried to sit up, Kern was there to help him, calling out to Kaiholo. More water splashed on his face, but this felt different, fresh and cool, unlike the melted ice from the Ravine. Soon he had wiped his eyes and pried them open. The day was blurry and overcast but still bright.

“Where are the horses?” Reynard asked, and managed to get to his feet. Surprisingly, he was not terribly bruised, though he had bumps on his cheek and brow. He was covered in sticky mud, as were the tattooed man and the giant.

“Two are over there,” Kaiholo said, pointing to a gap between two large boulders. “Maybe they were lifted and dropped by the flood.”

“I see not Widsith nor Valdis nor th’other horses,” Kern said. He was worse off than Reynard, face covered in dirty blood and both eyes nearly swollen shut. But he walked bravely and called out for Widsith and for Valdis.

“Is the Ravine empty?” Kaiholo asked him.

He nodded. “It must be. It sloped this way, down to the caverns. Everything flowed to this end.”

Reynard walked toward the gap between the boulders, to see how wide it was, but Kern stopped him. “The horses are afraid,” he said. “They will not let me get near them.”

“Are they injured?”

“Likely.”

He thought of the furred snakes biting and hanging on. “We have to see to their wounds! Horses are delicate, tossed like that, and where are we if they die?”

Kern agreed. “But do not go near them. Let them come to us!”

Reynard picked his way around the boulders and through the debris, pausing only once to examine a dead thing he found wrapped up in a deadfall of logs and broken branches—a thing with a bony crescent for a head, a long gray body, and many, many legs. He made a disgusted, frightened sound and pulled back to take a different path.

Up a brushy slope, away from the tangles of sticks and dead things, Reynard looked for another way between the boulders and found a roundabout path over a clump of solidly nested rocks of all shapes, some of them curious indeed—as if the exit from the Ravine had hosted tribes of sculptors or Medusas. He worked to the crest of the conglomeration and peered into a gap in which the two Eater horses were stamping and making their strange night sounds, though subdued and weary. He clucked and called to them. They alerted but did not stop pacing. They seemed stuck and unable to find their way out of the hollow, which worried him. Had they been lifted and deposited, as Kern guessed? If so, they might be badly hurt and beyond his means to save. But still, he slowly descended the suggestive rocks and finally stood on one edge of the gap, arms at his side, keeping still and quiet. He glanced over his shoulder. The closest space between the big boulders took a lock-and-key curve, which made it difficult to see any exit. It was just wide enough to squeeze a horse through—but no horse would willingly make that journey without guidance, he thought.

Finally, one of the horses—it was Kaiholo’s mount, and the other was his own, with its curious patterns—sidled up to within a few paces, shivering and desperately unhappy. Reynard had nothing to offer and kept his hands by his sides, head bowed, the picture of quiet calm and he hoped familiarity, though they had not been together long.

Kern perched near the top of the pile, also quiet.

“Can they get through?” Kaiholo called from the other side. Kern hushed him.

“That must have been frightening,” Reynard said to the pair. “It scared me, but I am a lot smaller.”

The horses watched him, cross-wove in their pacing, and showed the whites of their eyes—more a golden yellow, actually—as if they were considering stamping him.

He wished Valdis were here to advise him—or warn him not to try!

“We can get ye out of here, but it will take some squeezing,” he told them, and walked slowly around them, then stepped into the gap as the horses watched, without ever meeting their eyes—as Valdis had advised. “See? I can do it. I think thou canst get through as well, and there is more room on the other side—and maybe food.”

Kern squatted atop the rocks, still silent.

“We all need to eat,” Reynard said. “And I would like to see to thine injuries. Thou hast blood on thy hock. And thou hast a gash on thy withers. Pretty deep, I think. Come here and let me look, and then let us go through.”

His calm speech and steady demeanor seemed to be wearing down their resistance. His own horse came up within a stride and lowered its muzzle, then shoved it into his cupped hand.

“Good,” Reynard said, and turned to the other animal. “And what about thee? Kaiholo, come down and join us.”

“There is another horse out here!” Kaiholo called. “I think it is Valdis’s.”

“Your friend doth await thee,” Reynard murmured, stroking the muzzle and underjaw.

Kaiholo entered the gap and stood aside when his horse stamped and snapped, not yet ready. “They seem to favor thee, Fox,” he said ruefully. In time, paired with their riders, the horses calmed and finally seemed almost placid as Reynard pulled and cajoled them through the gap, one at a time. The fit was tight for Kaiholo’s animal, but he seemed ready to leave, and made it through quickly, maneuvering the double bend as if it were a common thing, then stood shivering, nostrils flaring at all the strange smells—and at more debris and strange bodies caught in the lower scrub trees beyond. Now Kern brought up Valdis’s mount. The horses greeted each other with whickers and tail flicks and laying their heads close, like all horses Reynard had ever known. They had been Eater horses for all their lives, Reynard guessed, and might be used to strange sights, but seldom anything like this. Reynard himself couldn’t even put a name to most of the dead creatures.

Kern left the group and walked to the left into the shady woods, then returned. “There is a notch or break over that way. Let us see what is on the other side. The horses will warn us if it is not to their liking.”

“What if it is not to our liking?” Kaiholo asked. “What if it is dead wood all the way?”

“It is not,” Kern said.

“You have been here?”

“And beyond. I told you, giants have privileges. I need to find my horse.”

“And we need to find Valdis and Widsith,” Reynard said. They guided the three horses toward the notch, then led them right through a thinning patch. The darkness beyond was slowly revealing a slope, and perhaps fifty yards up the slope, above the flood, dead trees that had not been painted with mud.

But before that point, the crest of the flood had delivered a sad sight—Kern’s mount, the huge draft horse, lay dead in a patch of debris, head almost doubled back and limbs twisted.

Kern spent a few minutes with the corpse, which Reynard found touching. The giant then rose.

“Let us find the others,” he said.

“I wish we could have gone around the coast,” Kaiholo said. “The sea is much friendlier to my people, even with its hungry beasts.”

Reynard looked at the two and saw they were near the end of their wits, beyond exhaustion and demoralized. He remembered his mother and father and their ways of dealing with travail in themselves and others. They would always speak of family, and origins—of the things people were most proud of. “I am told of Land Travelers and Sea Travelers,” Reynard said. “They draw great ropes of words across land and sea. But who travels the sky?”

“Ah—those be the birds!” Kaiholo said, perking up at least a little. “The feathered ones take their songs to both land and sea and carry many secrets, if thou couldst only listen.”

“I’ll listen,” he promised, but there were no bird sounds in the trees—and none of the larger trees were in the least like those he had seen in England. The branches took spirals and spread great leaves and small, or bundles of reddish needles, or bluish thorns.

They climbed the slope above the Ravine’s wash and stood atop a low hill, in the shadow of a ridge that stretched from the inner ring of mountains to the shore.

“The horses must eat. There be no grass or herbs or suitable leaves here,” Kaiholo said, and then raised his head, alerting at a noise. Kern heard it as well.

“Is that Widsith?” Reynard asked.

Kern warned, “We should take deeper cover.” The horses recognized their alarm and kept quiet as they all sought to hide in a thick brake below the crest of the hill.

Kaiholo silently made his way through the brake to examine a hollow in the ridge beyond.

“Someone’s looking for us,” Kern guessed, dropping to a squat. “Not anyone we wish to meet, I trow.”

Kaiholo returned a few minutes later. “There are bodies,” he said. “Men. Not Spaniards. Nine or ten at least. I did not tarry to count. Judging by their kit, I think they are folk from the eastern shore. I do not know why they have come all the way here. But they did not find what they wanted. They are dead.”

“What killed them?”

“I would say a great Eater. They have been sucked down to the last instant.”

Tying the horses, Reynard and Kern took the path Kaiholo had found and came to a shadowed silver waterfall and a trickle of stream from a shelf along the higher ridge. Here, lying half in, half out of the stream, like soft and slumbering stones, lay nine men… or what had once been men. One was having the hair on his careless skull parted by the fall. The others were nothing but bones draped in pallid wet skin.

Kaiholo stepped into the stream and knelt beside the closest. “Scouts or pickets. Too many, I would say. Could point to a greater march. Mayhaps they were deceived and drawn here.”

Reynard thought of the way the King of Troy had deceived the Spanish.

Kaiholo fingered the corpse’s jerkin, cut and stitched from a finely tanned skin—not unlike those worn by the blunters. The rest of their kit consisted of thick trousers and sturdy leather boots, and each still carried a pair of good swords, one short and one long. One—the poor wight enjoying a perpetual shower—had a musket slung on his shoulder. None showed wounds. They had simply been drained of time.

Reynard moved closer to examine the swords of the nearest. “No thievery!” he remarked, but there was more than a touch of fear in him as he sensed a swirl of breeze, here in this hollow that likely shielded them from moving airs. If one was drained of all time, could that possibly leave a ghost? “I thought most of the Eaters had departed,” he said, his tongue almost as dry as it had been on the wreck of the hoy.

“Valdis?” Kaiholo asked Kern.

“I have never so measured her abilities.”

“Then Calybo!”

“Possible. If he hath stayed behind, it is to protect something of great value to those just beneath the sky.”

They pondered this for a moment.

“Maybe they seek the boy,” Kern said. “Maybe they found Widsith and questioned him.”

“He would not speak of me!” Reynard insisted.

“Thou dost not know the ways of Annwyn,” Kaiholo said. “Kings and heroes will all talk under the ministrations of the doctors of the Sister Queens.” He held up his hand at the boy’s further objections.

“We lose ourselves in questions we cannot answer. If these be scouts, and they surely have that look, there are many more soldiers and retainers out there. Perhaps an army, or at least a great war party. Let us keep away from the broader and easier paths this new group will likely follow.”

They moved up the ridge to a shelf that did not look as if it had been traveled recently. Here the forest’s strange corkscrew trees produced thin foliage and thinner branches, the wind making them dry-rustle.

“The trods cross about twelve miles beyond the next wrinkle in the island,” Kern said. “There are great wrinkles and small, and still finer ones. They come and go at the behest of the Travelers.”

“They can do that?” Reynard had seen a trod being laid out back near Zodiako, but still could hardly credit his own eyes.

“Like making a bed,” Kern said, and spread his hand along an imaginary counterpane. With pinching fingers, he appeared to pick and flick a tuft from the unseen blanket.

“Then they know magic?” Reynard asked, lost in a boyish hope for wonder, which suddenly, as he realized how that sounded, drew out a blush.

“They know wrinkles,” Kern said. “Ask the Sea Traveler how he flattens waves.”

Kaiholo blew out his nose, offering neither answer nor argument, and pointed the way. Kern touched Reynard’s shoulder and pointed to the tattooed man’s horse. They were not riding, they were leading, but all three horses were now energized by the presence of something they were first to sense.

“Likely the other horses,” Kern said. “And maybe their riders.”