The Unfinished Land

The Next Silence

EAST ALONG THE great blade of rock, evening mist was clearing from the caged seed city.

Andalo and Sany spoke with Nikolias away from the wagon.

Widsith had avoided Reynard through the night, but now stood beside him and listened to the guards. “Half of the Sister Queens’ armies are most likely returning from their conquest of Zodiako and the southwestern shores, by sea and any available paths overland,” the Pilgrim said. “The Travelers will assume that all their ways back will be watched by the Queens’ pickets, ready to summon more troops than we can possibly defeat.”

“The Travelers wish to keep going east?”

“Nikolias’s only choice. Yuchil’s as well, given how many soldiers may surround this half of the island. We know not how many Travelers remain in these lands, if they no longer serve the Crafters. But there might be some.” Widsith studied the boy. “Nikolias may hope he can pass thee to the next group of servants, if they find any—and then, rewarded with food and water, turn about and head south or west.”

“Is there an escape that way?”

“None that I know,” Widsith said.

“The servants would trade me… to whom, for what advantage?”

Widsith shook his head.

Reynard drew himself up. “Calafi says it must be so.”

“That girl… I have not seen her like. I would ask Yuchil where she was found, but I wonder if any of them could answer.”

Nikolias approached and informed them they would try to roll their wagon a few miles along the blade of rock before nightfall. “Beyond, none knoweth what will be found.”

Andalo and Bela came to them next. “We have seen many footprints,” Andalo said. “Heading east—being herded by horsemen.”

“The servants of this city?” Widsith asked.

“Future slaves for the Queens,” Bela said darkly. “But they may not be able to feed or keep them all. We fear…”

He did not finish his fear. There was no need.

Calafi approached Reynard from behind, surprising him, and took his hand in hers. “I’ll be with thee, whatever they decide,” she whispered, looking up into his face.

Sophia brought the horses forward, and all mounted and followed the wagon. Calafi stayed close to Reynard and his horse. She never rode, always walked, but now she had ceased her dances and her spells, and her red tresses were knotted, for she refused the attentions of Yuchil and Sophia.

Seeing the mute swarms of birds had made the Travelers even more gloomy, as if the silent, wheeling flocks presaged their own doom, the end of their own worlds of language and meaning…

Their own silence.

Valdis, as always, seemed to find the comfort of shadow.

The garden lands, beyond the eastern end of the high, sharp ridge, became a jumble of uplifted plates of rock, punctuated by white hexagonal pillars, as if a great coat of varnish had been laid over the ground and broken by bones rising from below.

Yuchil raised her hand, and the wagon stopped. The guards dismounted and passed their horses’ reins to Calafi, then opened doors in the side of the wagon and scooped out hay in great fist-clumps, while the Travelers on foot arranged their blankets and laid out cloth bags of provisions.

“They will feed the horses one fine meal,” Widsith said. “What doth that wagon truly contain?”

“Whatever Yuchil needeth,” Kaiholo said. “And that which her children require. For a while!”

Reynard had wondered if perhaps the wagon’s stores were endless. How much magic did Travelers possess? If they commanded words, could they turn words into goods—into food and water?

The first word is the first mother. It is not her breast or larder. Words only guide and describe. They do not fulfill. Look to the silence of the birds! Their songs have never filled their stomachs.

Somehow, hearing that inner voice that still was not precisely his own, he felt ashamed of his hopes.

They moved higher up the rocky fields and into low clouds that made these places even more ghostly and unreal, not that any of it seemed real to Reynard.

“Where are the drakes?” Andalo asked Widsith. “I would have mine close!”

“That I do not know,” the Pilgrim said.

“Can we sense their wills, their direction?”

“Not yet,” Widsith said.

Kaiholo touched his jaw. “Perhaps they arrive only when we have true need.”

Kern studied the gray skies with a broad scowl. “If the southwestern coast is conquered, many drakes are either dead or without masters. And a drake without a master is a dangerous enemy. Who hath killed its master, it must kill before its season is done.”

Stars lit their way, but not many, and no moon, and still the wagon rolled on through the night, leaving the first krater city behind. And still they had not seen a krater, or crossed the boundary of the chafing whiteness.

But they could clearly see in the dirt and along the crusted rock the prints of many feet and hooves.

“I wonder they gave in without a fight,” Andalo said.

“Maybe they had hope of rescue,” Reynard said.

“From us?” Bela asked. “We were ever the lesser of Travelers. I wonder if perhaps they believed the island could not live on without them.”

Reynard was reminded of those inland farmers and lords in England, who did not believe in oceans and far lands, or the peril they might bring.

They paused in the dark and stumbled about to water the horses. Widsith found an old sailor’s rest. Sleep or rest of any sort seemed impossible to Reynard, who felt an inner pain he had never known before—a grief not just for lost family and friends, but for all those who might come after, for all who might arise in times of peace and prosperity—for he saw that such times might never come again, would never come again—and he was to blame!

He rolled over in his blanket, now dusty and itchy and miserable, and saw that Kaiholo and many of the Travelers were already up and about before the muted sunrise, off to brew tea and make thin soup. Reynard closed his eyes and squeezed them tight, as if to see into the greater darkness behind them—and when he looked again, there was Yuchil, holding out a cup of tea. Widsith had not yet stirred. Reynard sat up, took the cup, and sipped slowly, while she carried over a silken pillow and laid it beside him. She sat with a ladylike sigh.

“Thou still knowest not why thou art here,” she said. “Whilst brave enough in battle, it be not thy calling to fight and kill.”

“No,” he said. “That my family hath never required of me.”

“And yet thine uncle took thee out to sea,” she said.

“To carry food to our ships. We are none of us warriors.”

“Nor, except in extremes, are my people,” Yuchil said. She shook her head. “Some carry swords, and will defend us, but they are not true warriors. They cannot be true warriors unless they are willing to begin wars, and they are not. But do not tell our young men I said that.”

Reynard nodded. “I have been told I come from a long line of tinkers and wanderers,” he said, hoping for better or at least clearer judgment than that from the King of Troy. “Can you tell if that is true?”

“Oh, there are many in England descended from the Rom and other Travelers. The Travelers have, after all, spread far and wide, and proven themselves as essential to kings and queens as any warriors. Not only do they bring the languages that tell the stories kings and queens love to hear, of themselves and others like them, greater still… But those languages convey power and strategy. Before the Travelers reached any of the lands we know, any of the lands that Crafters controlled and shaped, there was only base instinct and forgetting. Now… there is change and suffering and war. Which is better, think’st thou?”

He shook his head. “There must be good and various reasons to live, and they cannot all involve animal loss or animal gain.”

Yuchil’s smile was like a light in the early morning gloom. “Wisedom beyond thy years.”

“Misery breedeth change in hearts and minds. Some call it wisedom.”

“Thou hast remembered some things, Widsith doth tell me. Thou remember’st your grandmother speaking to thee in thy mother’s womb… teaching thee some of her words?”

He nodded.

“If that was given to thee, then something else happened as well. Dost thou remember others who sought thee out and conveyed their words?”

Reynard looked into the silver-haired woman’s youthful eyes, and noticed that Calafi had come closer and was listening. None of the others approached, however—they did not appear to notice them at all. “I remember a man with a white shadow, who spake to me whilst I hid in a hedgerow. And another man, who came whilst I was alone at sea. He had a feathered hat.”

“Thy grandmother would have arranged another ceremony. A completion, as it were, of thy charge and task… a loading of the musket, a fletching of thine arrows.”

Reynard frowned at her. “I do not remember any such ceremony,” he said.

“She would have determined thy quality then, and armed thee with the languages she knew thou wouldst need. Inner languages. Inner qualities that stream now through thy flesh and along thy bones. Dost thou feel them, like cold fire… like the white shadow of the strange man, and the feather in the fancy hat of th’other?”

“I sometimes dream such,” Reynard said. “But the dreams are deep in fog, and I do not remember them when I awaken… so perhaps, no.”

“Time to awaken the dream and make it remember thee, young Fox.”

“How can that happen?”

“It is like the beginning. May I speak to thee of that place, those people, that time?”

Reynard nodded, though he almost dreaded hearing such things, because of the responsibility they might bring.

“Once, people who would become like thee and me were deaf. They heard nothing, and only saw, and that not in colors, but merely in grays and blacks. The man with the white shadow is a presence from those times. He will not leave thee alone, ever.

“The people who would become human felt only the pounding of their feet deep in their bodies, as they walked a dark and silent realm, trying to find themselves and all who would come after. Many such passed into oblivion. They also felt the pump of their blood and the drumbeat of their hearts, and once, one looked up at a bird on a bare tree and thought she heard a thin, light sound. So she put her fingers to her lips and blew out her breath, and heard the whoosh—but also a high whistle—and others around her heard it as well, and so they were no longer deaf, and wondered what that would bring to them. It took a long time to hear the wind and the land around them, but it did happen in time, and the more they listened to the sounds they already knew, the more new sounds became apparent. Once, a woman screamed in pain as she was gnawed by some beast. They heard that, and made it into a word to warn and frighten.

“Another moaned in sickness, and that became another word, and with these new words came new fears and new ideas. It took thousands of years for these peoples to realize they lived on plains of rustling grass, and to know what grass was, and what ate the grass, and what ate the animals and insects that ate the grass, and the more they listened to these animals, and to the birds, the more words they acquired, and went to other groups of people, other tribes, and traded them words. The birds had song, and something like words, and the animals had their sounds, but only these people could grow and trade their languages.”

“I have heard other versions of this before,” Reynard said.

“As is proper, for all histories are personal. The first words became mothers to new tongues, and stories grew. This is when Queen Hel realized these peoples might be important, for they could teach her words, and she might move out of her own silence. And so she was grateful, and elevated them, and set them a long task: to carry languages around the world, but most especially, to build boats and cross the sea, and visit the Tir Na Nog, and provide instruction to the strange beings that had arrived on her creation, and that she herself feared and knew not. For they were shapeless beings, angry in their boredom, and had no tasks, and knew nothing of what they might be or become. And so their power would be a danger to her, she thought, unless she found them a place and things to do… And she felt the first Travelers might help in that way.

“And so it was. Carrying their trade and their words on boats, and on wagons, and on horseback, and on foot, the first Travelers crossed the krater lands where these beings had arrived, and were still arriving, and in fear, met them… trembled at the nightmares they seemed to be… and spake to them.

“And the Crafters—for that was what they would be called—heard the human words, and saw how those who spoke moved and conveyed, their voices carrying meaning as well as story…

“And it was here that they conceived of a string of stories that would move and compel, and help shape form as well as motion. Humans came to call this ‘destiny,’ but also ‘history.’

“Queen Hel watched the Crafters as they took apart some of these visitors and stared deep into their flesh, and there found other languages that defined lives and shapes, and which history would then change. And they saw the potential in that flesh, in those bodies.

“For in the beginning was the word both of sound and flesh. And Hel was pleased, for she saw creation was underway at last, and change upon change would be our greatest story and worthy of many songs.”

Calafi had listened to this with restless fidgets, but now she crawled over to Reynard and grasped his arm, the arm holding the cup, and sloshed it into the dirt. Then she ran her fingers along that arm, in bunches of two, then three, then one, then four.

“Ogmios speaks through those who taught you when you were a child,” Yuchil said. “Calafi has felt the same fingers and many of the same messages.”

The young girl looked upon him with wide and somber eyes. “Valdis felt them when she was mine age, I think,” she said. “And that is why she is here, even though she is an Eater, and not a high one, either. In this she knows more than Calybo or Guldreth or any of those just beneath the sky.”

Then she got up and ran away. Yuchil watched her sadly.

“I would wish both of ye child time,” she said. “But I fear neither will ever know such.”

Nikolias followed the girl to a mossy gray rock-thrust wall along one side of the rough road and spoke to her in low tones. She in turn rolled her eyes up into her head and began to tremble, and Nikolias held her shoulders to steady her. After she collapsed in his arms and appeared to sleep, he brought her back to the wagon and put her in the charge of Sany and Bela. “For a time, she must be apart from Yuchil and Sophia,” he said, but did not explain.

Nikolias came to Widsith and nodded at him, then at Reynard. “A message sings in this krater air that our girl hears and interprets. We are at some disadvantage here, but not yet defeated. Before we cross this boundary, we must stay and adjust… as we did before.”

Reynard could sense no difference in the air they were breathing and wondered why they had to linger so long—hours extending into two days.

After two nights, as he tried to sleep, he looked deep into his memories and thought he detected a kind of change in coloration, as if the tinting varnish of an old painting were being removed. Was that the effect they desired, taking these airs? But when morning came, all seemed much the same—as uncertain, strange, and of ill prospect as before.

The young warriors entered the wagon with grim smiles and brought forth what they needed: a clutch of fine swords and three long yew bows very like those Reynard had seen in England, but also a composite horn bow Widsith said was found more often on the great plains of Asia. To Reynard’s wonder and a smile from Kern, they handed the giant a sword as long as he was tall.

These new weapons were all blessed by Yuchil and Nikolias, then by Kaiholo—and Calafi ran through their ranks, making a sort of inspection and drawing smiles, to which she responded with a serious glower. Reynard thought of Yuchil’s judgment. Perhaps she was wrong.

Kaiholo blew out his breath and settled into a far island prayer.