The Unfinished Land

The Chafing Waste

THEY WALKED for an hour through the dead and again crossed the border of the chafing waste, mouths dry, noses clogged with the dust raised by battle. That dust seemed everywhere, stinging, blinding—as it must have blinded the soldiers and Spaniards and Traveler servants…

The distant city finally appeared through a veil. Unlike the great circle of cathedral towers, the dust revealed low buildings arranged—he could see through the eyes of his drake, high above—in four quarters or neighborhoods, cut through by a cross of broad boulevards. At their intersection was a krater, covered by vaulted walls and bridges, with at its own center a circular theater. The drake could not see through the shimmer that hid the interior of the theater, and neither then could Reynard.

“Does anybody know where we are going?” Calafi asked, suddenly waking from her murmuring trance. Andalo echoed the girl’s question, louder, that more could hear—

Which Reynard realized were now many, dozens of Travelers and, he saw, Kern, and Gareth, and Dana in their leather uniforms, who had gone around the battlefield, intent on only one thing, ready to sacrifice all to this last part of their journey, with no clear conclusion, only a destination they would not reach, did not wish to reach, for their duty was to deliver Reynard.

Nothing more.

After that, he had no idea what would happen to any of them. Nobody knew, not Valdis, not even Calybo, and certainly not Widsith, covered in white dust, more and more like the ghost he would have become had he not returned to the western shore and Zodiako.

“Move on,” Reynard heard from a passing darkness and chill breeze. “Move on!”

Then Valdis rose up before him like a blue flame from an icy fire, but the voice was not hers. Behind her lifted an even darker mass, the Afrique. None of the Eaters were mounted now—only the Travelers and Calafi, who appeared comfortable enough on the saddle before Andalo. Andalo gripped a great sword with one hand and Calafi’s arm with the other, but both looked haunted, seeing a little through their own eyes and much through other eyes, trying to make out what might be their end, their fate, or their triumph.

Widsith stayed close to Reynard, as did Kern with his sword almost too long even for him to swing. They stood in a half-circle on a low hump in the salty waste.

“I have something to tell thee, fox-boy,” Widsith said. Reynard pulled back from his high perspective, for there was something in the Pilgrim’s tone that commanded attention—even a change in his voice, as if he were going back to being an old man, for the moment… reviving a memory he was not completely sure he could have had.

“What?” Reynard asked, puzzled and irritated at this distraction.

Kern moved away from them, but not so far he could not protect. This talk seemed personal, and he was not sure he wanted or needed to hear it.

“Dost remember I plucked thee from the ocean, not so many weeks ago?”

“I remember an old man who saved me,” Reynard said. “An old man who looked twice and then lifted me onto a galleon!”

“Sí,” Widsith said. “An old Spanish man being returned to his beloved isle on a ship that did not belong to him, and who had no power but persuasion, and very little of that.”

“What of it? I am grateful,” Reynard said.

“I had rarely seen such a thing before,” Widsith said. “When first I saw what was thumping against the hull of the galleon, there was only a broken boat, empty.”

“Then you looked again, and saw me!”

“No,” Widsith said. “Not even the second time.”

“How could that be? I was there, and saw you!”

“I saw nobody the first time, nobody the second time, but then I felt I must look again, and thou tookest shape on the wreckage, like a form drawn by a master on paper—roughly sketched at first, then filled in, features clear, pain and distress obvious—and I recognized here was something new, something that had not been there before… but was with us now, and most importantly, a sign, for rarely do Crafters thus reveal themselves.”

“What do you mean? I was there all along.”

Widsith nodded, as if not disagreeing, and both were for a time distracted again by the high vision of their drakes, and stepped apart, separated by Andalo’s horse, until Kern reached out to draw Reynard away from the nervous animal.

Both he and the giant fell back, and Widsith joined up with them again. Kern still seemed to be deliberately not listening to their conversation, as if embarrassed by its intimacy—but he glanced at Reynard, then looked off to the dust clouds around the last city.

“I was there, and have been all my life!” Reynard said in a resentful undertone.

“And what was thy name, in this previous life?”

“Reynard.”

“And who named thee?” Widsith asked.

“My grandmother, I have been told.”

“The color of thy hair did remind me of a fox I once fed in the Philippines… or perhaps it was in the Japans.”

“My hair is black!”

“The sea, I suppose, had turned it red, though to ponder that puzzle is madness… But at that moment, I called thee Reynard. Before this sighting, fox-boy, thou hadst no part in this world, and that I’ll swear on all mine ancestors, and all I love, and on thee, whom I have come to love like a son. Before I looked that third time, the wreck was empty.”

“I do not understand!”

“Nor I. But a Crafter madest thee at that very instant, scrawny, sea-logged, and thirsty, and allowed me to see it happen. And that is when I began to understand how hard things would go in Zodiako, and across the Tir Na Nog, and how change was upon us.”

“You speak foolishness! How is it I have my own memories?”

“That is the way of all made by the masters of history and story. There is no man or woman without a navel, some say, though not all are born of woman.”

“But why you, returning and eager to get home to Maeve?”

Widsith shook his head. “I have always served Crafters, and I can only assume they wished to reward me by bringing thee into the tale.”

Reynard stepped away, around Andalo’s horse, and met Calafi’s distracted gaze. Andalo had lowered her to the ground, and she seemed to share a strange pain he was feeling—coming so close to the dwelling of the one who might have made them both.

“Fox-boy,” she said. “Dost feel that?”

He nodded.

“I have felt it coming since I first looked on thee!” She then said, with a pirouette, “Nikolias tells me the same story—that he and Yuchil found me in the woods, at the cross-trod. Or rather—saw me arrive! I remember much before then—being lost, being found. But are we simply staring into our belly buttons? More important, where are we going to complete our task?”

Nikolias was escorted by Valdis, and behind them, Calybo. Both the Eaters were barely visible.

“We are all ready,” Valdis whispered. “The chain will form. We will give all of our stores of time and power, and then be done, and at peace.”

“But only fox-boy and Calafi can go into the krater,” Calybo said.

“Guldreth said as much to me,” Kern said.

This on top of what Widsith had said was more than Reynard could take in. He remembered Calafi saying something about the stores of time he did not contain, that he had not been on this Earth long enough to help save Anutha—and that Valdis would not expend any of her time, nor Calybo’s, nor the time of any Eater to that end…

He remembered also what the man with the plumed hat had said when he appeared like a specter, rising above the waters that nearly covered his uncle’s hoy.

But he also pushed his thoughts back through his life, touching on the memories he had, of his mother and father, of that same uncle, of the towns he had visited, the journeys across the ocean to the best fishing grounds, his uncle’s tales about sailing with Hawkins, and all his uncle had taught him about tasting the waters to know where they were, and about the types of fish they could hope to find in different currents and in different regions at different times of the year—and those times in which it was foolish to go to sea at all.

But also his own curiosity, his own hunger for learning and language, that had driven him to approach people in Aldeburgh who he knew would treat a scrawny fisherboy with contempt.

And among those visitors—

The man with the white shadow, who he thought might have greater secrets than any in the nearby towns… If he were real. If any of them were real.

Those memories must mean he lived and saw and remembered before his uncle drew him out to Gravelines and sacrificed crew, nephew, and boat to resupply the British ships going up against the Armada of Philip and the Duke of Medina Sidonia.

All those memories were vivid and real even after all he had seen on this island, all the monsters and strange beasts…

Even now that he saw from the eyes of a high drake, gliding out on four wings over the next city, which in many ways was not much more than a wide, low town, like Aldeburgh, like his home village… But with the streets arranged in a spiral, cut in four, the spiral ever curling into a covered krater.

He looked from his own eyes now, leaving for the moment the drake to make its own decisions.

Nikolias walked beside Andalo, while Widsith stayed close to Calafi and Reynard, and Kern followed them at a couple of paces, so close he could almost reach out to them. These people, his partners in this story, were taking him to that covered place, and they were more than hinting that they could push him into closeness with a Crafter, perhaps not a god, though capable (Reynard might concede this) of creating out of nothing a creature such as himself—but a creature from the stars, from the places studied (or that would be studied) by the man with the plumed hat, or known somehow through other than human experience to the man who cast a white shadow.

“The Queens have sent their last force,” Widsith said, seeing through his drake’s eyes. Reynard switched his awareness again and saw it as well—a divided force of perhaps two hundred warriors, mostly men, coming at them from both sides as they approached the walls of the city, hoping to cut them off, perhaps kill rather than capture.

Taking vengeance for those who had already died in so many actions around the island.

But the drakes were already sweeping in from above these warriors, braving bolts from more than a dozen crossbows, falling and grabbing with their spiked, razor-sharp legs and scissor-gripping talons, pulling up and carving one after another, while the Queens’ warriors shouted and screamed, and finally stopped trying to reach them or block their way—

And the dregs of the Sister Queens’ armies broke and ran.

This part of the war seemed to be over.