The Unfinished Land

The Road Before the Pass

THE NEXT MORNING, with wagons underway, escorted by their retinue, Calybo rode alongside Reynard for a few miles. The Travelers did not like riding with Eaters, and kept away from both Valdis and Calybo. The boy furtively watched the high Eater’s night-like features and saw behind his face an even older shade—the ashen light of ancient lands and ancient times under a bright and baking sun.

And now, some of what Valdis had infused in him rose up, and he knew some things he could not possibly know.

There, Calybo wandered through the streets of Timbuktu and served kings and caliphs, and knew the men and women who made books. He carried words and memories between them, and shared time between many, and from them rose empires.

And now he is here.

What can he share with you, young Fox?

For how long, and to what ultimate purpose?

In turn, Calybo met one of his glances and openly studied Reynard. His eyes were as distant as stars reflected in a lake. “What didst thou think on the wide ocean waves, when death looked upon thee?” the high Eater asked.

Reynard was surprised by the high Eater’s tone. “I grieved for my uncle,” he said. “And for my shipmates. I thought I would never see their like again.”

“And hast thou seen their like since?”

Reynard was about to say no but felt a double-edged guilt, and looked around at Widsith and the giant, at the Sea Traveler, and then back to Valdis. “I have found new friends, but not new family,” Reynard said.

“I have long had no family but Eaters,” Calybo said. “We are full of histories we share like water in the breast feathers of desert birds. But the pasts we carry are rarely our own. Hel’s pact made most Eaters—including me—into slaves of those we are ordered to serve.”

“You mean, the pact you sealed with the Queen of Hell?” Reynard asked.

“He hath not yet the right of that,” Widsith said from behind them.

Calybo leaned his head forward, as if infinitely weary. “She doth not rule the netherworld, if that is what thou mean’st. But she created much we see around us, and some say invited the Crafters to our isles, and she even now commandeth from afar, though I have not seen her for ages.”

“We are all slaves to some order,” Reynard said. “Our priest in Southwold spake on it. We are slaves to the freedom of God’s duty.”

Calybo raised his head slowly. “My duty hath been to protect the island, and in that course, I have diminished the time of many and carry their lives within me. I would be free of all of that, and all of them! What if we were free of our histories, free of those who demand we serve their will, when we have contrary wills of our own?”

Reynard’s cheeks heated at the mere thought of such defiance. “Surely you, like our defenders in England, guard us against worse fates,” he said, thinking of the English sea captains and Elizabeth—and Walsyngham. “You have held back the Spanish!”

“It is all of a rope. Five centuries ago, reckoning by time beyond the gyre, a Danish family carried their dying daughter to this far northern isle. They had heard of a way of saving her from awful injuries, and being pagans, had no fear of the dark designs into which they were going to weave her. Anything was preferable to endless death, which was all they could imagine for her, for a young girl had no entry to Valhalla. Their guilt at having put her on their boat, at watching the mast fall and cut her almost in half—that haunted their nights and days until they arrived here and were met by the blunters of Zodiako. The blunters saw the girl, listened to her father, and summoned me from the Ravine.”

Reynard watched the high Eater closely, as if he might sprout wings and fly, so unlikely was this act of confession.

“I met them and explained it would be better for her to die among her people. The girl had but ten seasons and was barely aware of things about her—but her father said, ‘We give her to thee, that she may find new tales, new stories, and new fates, for I have delivered her only to Death, and there is no love there.’ ”

Calybo rode quietly for a time. “Dost feel her fate when thou look’st upon her—the fate she might have had, had she not been injured so long ago and put in my care?”

Reynard could only nod and be embarrassed by the paralysis of his tongue, for he had indeed felt something like that—and had no idea what it meant.

He startled himself by saying, “Do you think of her as a daughter?”

Calybo said, “In all the time she hath been with our people, I have sensed her quality and mourned her circumstance.”

“An Eater can mourn?”

Calybo’s look now was like a thunderous cloud at midnight. Reynard held the horse against a strange pressure that affected them both. “Her father was not a royal king, but a master of storms and following seas, of voyages that drew songlines between many an isle and across several continents. She hath that quality as well, young Fox. She is a deep well of many words. First words, some call them. She inherited the songlines, and they bind her to a different fate.”

“Her parents were Sea Travelers?” Reynard asked.

“They were,” Calybo said. “Of the highest order.”

“Like Kaiholo?”

“Even higher.”

“But those in the wagons avoid you both!”

“All have prejudices, even here.”

Reynard drew his brows together.

Calybo said, “Thou art as different in thine own away as Valdis. And I say this as someone who hath measured and traded time with tens of thousands, man, woman, and child. Thinkst not thou art grand or irreplaceable—that hath yet to be seen. But interesting to such as I, to such as Guldreth—and to a Pilgrim like Widsith. And apparently to the trods and those who smooth them, though they do not understand thee or thy purpose.”

Another long silence. Then Calybo asked, “I believe, in England, thou didst encounter a man with a white shadow?”

Reynard flinched, and wondered if he should confirm this meeting—but more to the point, how he could lie to this being? “Did Valdis inform you?”

Calybo said she had.

“That question is why you speak to me at all,” he reasoned, brow furrowed. “Do you know him?”

Calybo shook his head. “Neither human nor just beneath the sky, rare to being singular, in mine experience. Once he visited the Tir Na Nog and spent a season on the seven isles preaching a new language, a language where words equal measures, or numbers, or symbols that can be all. He doth not serve any man, nor any power,” he said. “He is new. I wonder he is not some new sort of Crafter! But he hath human form—he simply cannot cast a true shadow. For such as I, he foretells either an awakening, or an end.”

And with this, the high Eater reined his horse aside and resumed his place to the rear of the line, behind the giant, who did not seem to have noticed any change.