The Unfinished Land

White Shadow

CALAFI FOUND the country lanes fascinating and studied with rapt attention the flowers, for somehow they had skipped a winter and a heavy snow, and were now in glorious spring.

They had little money for inns and transportation, and Calafi came up with no more purses, but neither seemed to mind sleeping out under the stars, though they went hungry often enough, and became beggars of a kind.

“Are you my brother, really?” Calafi asked, studying him as they lounged under a hedge and waited for the summer day to grow a little cooler before they moved along.

“I do not think so,” Reynard said.

“But if we have no father or mother, perhaps we can be brother and sister?”

“I suppose,” he said.

They heard the rumble of a wagon along the lane and peered out to see a tinker’s cart, jangling with every bump, pulled by two horses and trailed by a rider on a hefty roan—a rider wearing a long black coat, very like someone they both remembered—in part.

The rider, a tall elderly man, stopped where they were hiding and said, “Is it safe to pass here? No roving gangs or mean spirits?”

Calafi came out, smiling and happy, and the back flap of the wagon opened, and a thin white-haired woman looked out.

“Be ye hungry?” she asked them.

Days later, the wagon rolled on with Calafi, who had decided this was where she belonged.

Reynard and she parted with some tears, but determined they both had to find their ways, for where they had come from no longer existed.

Reynard never found Southwold, nor any village quite like it, nor any who knew his family—though Aldeburgh was still there, and prospering as more and more ships were made. There had been more Spanish invasions, but England had survived and now seemed on the edge of prosperity as her ships sailed the world and brought news of riches and goods.

Reynard worked on farms and in towns, shoeing horses and tending flocks, and one day, herding sheep through a village near York, saw a man with a thick, grizzled beard—a handsome man, though blind and with a kind of lightning-strike scar from forehead to chin. The man was begging on a side street, and Reynard dropped a coin into his filthy hand, and said only one thing:

“Cardoza?”

“Aye, the very same, a poor vagabond master, late of the sea, and who art thou?”

Reynard backed away and pushed his sheep on, and wondered if sometime soon he might find another man of some acquaintance—a man he knew only as Pilgrim.

When Reynard took a coach to London, he had saved enough coin to pay for a small room in the garret of an old, leaning house, and here he ate bread and water and hoped to find more work.

But on the street, one middle-bright day, as the summer was coming to an end, he saw entering an alley a figure he recognized instantly: a man in reverse. A man with a white shadow. He waited for Reynard in the narrow lane, in a stray beam of sun bounced from a high, angled window.

This man summoned him to come close.

“Time to begin sharing thy gifts,” said the man with a white shadow. “Hast thou found th’one named Bacon? Francis Bacon?”

Reynard said, “I have seen him remarked in passing. I think he lives nearby. And more like him!”

“Then go to them. Many crave the touch of stars that thou dost carry.”

Reynard held out his hands, beseeching the strange man. “There are so many in London alone!”

“You were given much time.”

“But I cannot visit them all!”

“There were six other islands. All sent forth chalices like thyself, backwards and forwards, across many years. After London, go south to Italy, to Padua, where more await. Wherever thou goest, find those who speak the new languages that giveth humans mastery, and share thy stars with them all.”

“And what will they do?”

“They will see, and describe, and measure, and faster than light or spirit, the world and beyond will fill out, and the new will take charge. Give them a touch of the glory of the Seven Isles. Give them a touch of what once was.

“Call it Genius.”