Грег Бир - The Unfinished Land

The soldiers returned the bag and the implements.

“We saw them!” el maestro said. “Under the sea, following our ship—was it one also, hanging from a tree on the little island?”

The woman nodded. “We have no time to waste.”

el maestro took Manuel aside, and they spoke more.

Manuel said, “ el maestro tells me that one of these creatures visited us last night and grabbed up a dog.”

The two men, keeping close to the woman, maintained a watchful silence.

“He would also know about the Eaters of whom you speak. What is their food?” Manuel did not seem to be asking a question to which he, personally, required an answer.

“They eat lives,” she said.

“Are they vampires?” el maestro asked.

“They care nothing for blood. It is thy time on Earth for which they hunger. From those protected by pact, they take only seconds or hours, from the sick conclusion or the strong middle of our days, as exchange for their protection, or as part of ritual. From such as thee”—and she looked sharp points at el maestro— “without protection, thou wilt lose young months and even years, night after night. They come again and again until thou fad’st to dust or leave.”

The sailor who had watched from the boat told el maestro that the white forms had approached Manuel and the boy, the Gitanos, and touched them both, but they were either younger or no different. The sailors and soldiers regarded them with renewed fear and suspicion.

“I, too, see no aging,” el maestro said. “Is it because they are Gitanos ?”

“No,” the woman said, and regarded Reynard with a strange sharpness, as if she feared him as well. She then looked off to the water. “We need to finish our work, and soon.”

“Keep these three here,” el maestro said. “Do not let them leave. el capitán may need guides for his ventures inland.”

Manuel suggested that was not wise. el maestro ignored him, and soldiers bound the trio and made them kneel on the beach. el maestro ordered them to bring two cages off the galleon, and the woman and men were roughly thrust into one. The burly sailor grinned as he locked them in. His gums were bleeding, and he had lost considerable hair and many teeth.

“And these two, hold them in th’other,” el maestro said.

Manuel and Reynard were locked in the second cage, some yards away. The burly sailor handled them roughly, his breath a stinking fume, and the other sailors and skinny boys murmured approval, while the soldiers studied the trees and the sky with apprehension.

“It is not going well,” Manuel observed. “I doubt anyone here understands what is about to happen… Dost thou?”

Reynard shook his head. He could feel odd and frightening tugs in his thoughts, even vague memories, but without shape, like forgotten dreams—and yet not his dreams, and not in the least connected to his short life. Perhaps he was still hearing, at a distance, the words his father and uncle, his mother and grandmother, had spoken, their stories, their legends. But he did not think so. The glassy-skinned woman had stared at him so strangely.

Something new was being awakened, something he had never expected and most surely did not want, any more than he wanted to be lost at sea and stranded with Spaniards on a strange shore.

EL MAESTRO hath made plans to push the galleon from shore and return through the gyre,” Manuel said, his lips close to Reynard’s ear.

The boy had again been dozing, if only to pass the time, and this woke him quickly. The light said it was late afternoon. He sat up blinking, and saw Manuel squatting beside him. They watched four sailors fasten the patch to the galleon’s side with bolts and nails and then caulk it with tar. Ten more sailors, accompanied by a ponderous, grumbling el maestro, surveyed the upper beach, poking sticks between the shingle and into the sand, perhaps to measure the tide from the night before.

“Will the ship stay afloat?” Reynard asked.

Manuel shook his head dubiously. “The wood here is unfaithful,” he said. “They will as like sink out beyond the breakers and become food for the big lobsters.”

“Methinks they are not lobsters,” Reynard said.

“Agreed,” Manuel said with a wink. “Dark doth sweep us soon. el capitán maketh preparation to move inland, away from the beach and the dog-eating dragons—and find places to hide from the glassy skins. The soldiers might kill me and thee before they go. Or they might think death awaiteth us here anyway, and why bother?”

“They want to conquer? But they know nothing about the island… do they?”

Manuel said, “Philip commandeth dominance—that, and the spread of the Inquisition. It is what they are trained to do. el capitán believeth he will never reach England, or even return to Spain, yet still feareth what Philip might think of him… as if the Spanish king learneth his exploits from a crystal ball.”

“Doth he so study?”

Manuel smiled. “Philip never so observed the islands named after him. I was there with Salcedo, in Manila, where the nao de la China load and take their name—Manila galleons. Philip did not learn the foolishness of his generals, and the valiant efforts of many priests, until he heard it from human lips—his own spies and officers. And so… no crystal ball.”

Were the priests monsters, or saviors? Manuel seemed capable of holding both opinions at once. “Dark soon cometh, and the glassy skins will be back,” he said. “I doubt any army, no matter how strong, can twice survive such visitors.”

REYNARD AGAIN passed through numbing fear to a murky darkness where memories and fancies rose like a shoal of fish beneath rain-spattered waves. Was he back on the hoy? He whimpered and drew up his legs until his knees met his chin. He spent empty hours going back through early memories, as if to make sure they were still there—but why? Then he came upon the night his grandmother had died. Her name was Ringbrae, an ancient name, she had told him, from the great grassy meadows east of the rainy marshes but south and east again of Russia. He knew little of any of those places, so he pictured them as his grandmother had described them, filled with great white stone fortresses, and wagon and horse trails across endless seas of grass populated by her people, stone people, who built more when they were stopped, and so were never allowed to stop, but rolled on and on in their great caravans, pulled by small, strong horses with brushy manes and patient eyes.

Ringbrae was in her nineties when she died, tended by her widowed daughter, and took a long while doing it. As her dying dragged on, she received guests from around Southwold, compatriots of many shades of olive and brown, as well as pale villagers and fisher­men who had come to her for words and charms. She had given them all the satisfactions they requested, and so now they honored her as few of her people had ever been honored, and she received their company with a sad, patient smile, remembering the troubles they had given to her husbands—for she had had three, two of whom had fled in fear, fear of her some said, and one of whom, the longest of her marriages, had died in his blacksmithing shop in the unexpected, fiery breath of a forge, leaving her three years in a place of dark visions.