Грег Бир - The Unfinished Land

“They were not here to take,” said a swarthy man with wide, nervous eyes.

“We work for them as well,” Dana said. “Thou’rt looking well, Pilgrim,” she said to Manuel. He stared off into the bushes.

Dana and the young men made a fire of castaway twigs. The trees did not seem to object. Dana heated water from a small stream and brewed a brothy tea. Reynard found it salty but restorative.

Anutha came through the woods and told them she could see three nymphs on rocky islands near the shore. Dana said, “The boat is hidden south. Let us hope it is still there.”

The party pulled leaf-wrapped breakfasts, bread, and a small loaf of soft cheese from their satchels and ate as they moved after Anutha. Dana offered Reynard a share of hers, and Anutha shared with Manuel. Both took it with gratitude. They had not eaten since being put in the cage.

Minutes later, they emerged in a clearing on a headland overlooking the ocean and gazed out across a rosy-gray mist that hid the horizon. The ocean in the harbor was calm, with long, low swells sliding gently up a narrow beach of pebbles, black sand, and fallen dark brown boulders. They saw no sign of the Spanish soldiers.

Dana curled aside a gate woven from dried fishweed, a kind of carnivorous seaweed, toothy edges still visible on the leaves, and led them down a roughly sculpted stairway to the beach below. As they approached the water, they saw two bodies—mangled, partly eaten. Sailors. They did not pause to bury them. But Anutha took resolve. She had to return to the village. “There are a great many Spaniards and not so many drakes or Eaters,” she said. “You know well these beaches and islands. I have to track and tell the town where the Spanish are.”

And so she left.

“We have little time,” Dana told the rest. “Our work is just as important.”

“We know,” said the shortest and stockiest of the group. “But I would like to get home and defend.”

“And summon our drakes!” said the beardless boy.

“If we move fast, perhaps we shall,” Dana said.

Manuel’s movements had smoothed and quickened, and Reynard watched him with more respect and perhaps more fear—as did the others. But Manuel clearly enjoyed the change, and sometimes would pause and just look at his hands, feel his face, and murmur something Reynard could not hear—a word, a name, a prayer.

In the shadow of the headland, they came upon the mouth of a deep black cave, its upper lip hung with dry moss, like a green and gray mustache. Two of the team cleared another woven gate, and four more entered and soon dragged out a wooden boat, flat-bottomed, smaller than those that had flocked around the Spanish and English ships—about twenty feet from stem to stern, with three pairs of oars neatly tied along four thwarts, not much different from the dories Reynard had fished from as a young boy. The carvings along the gunwales were much fancier, however, like those on peasant boats in Flanders, and still carried color, showing stumpy, stylized versions of the winged creatures he had seen the night before—the creatures this crew was meant to manage. With some awe, Reynard studied the carvings. He had once examined a dead bat and had concluded its wings were little different from his own hands, the skin stretched between longer, skinnier, more fragile fingers, and a flap extending from the little finger to the feet. But based on the carvings here, and what he had managed to see in the near dark, sea dragons—drakes—had at least four wings, one larger pair before the smaller, each wing made of translucent membrane stretched along three long, slender struts, with panes arranged inside the struts, like pieces in a stained-glass window. The carvings showed four spiked black legs tipped with crab-like claws, and emerging from the body behind the neck, two gripping arms, also with claws, but smaller. The long slender tails behind the wings were patterned in a mosaic of brown and silvery blue. The heads featured four jeweled eyes, two on each side of a black bump of a nose. Below the nose opened jaws like the mandibles of a crab—or the mouth of a dragonfly. He wondered why he had not seen it sooner—perhaps because, unlike darting dragonflies back home, harmless and common, these creatures had scared him so badly from the first. Still, what was carved on the gunwale seemed most similar to those buzzing insects that populated English marshes and rivers… though of course much larger. He wondered at the connection.

The beardless boy observed Reynard’s interest. “ ’Ware that nose,” he advised, pointing a callused middle finger at one carving. “Cook you through, it will—if the drake dothn’t know you, or dothn’t like you!”

“What is your name?” Reynard asked.

“Nem,” the boy said. “Short for Nehemiah. Yours?”

Reynard told him.

“Fox. That is rich!”

The others introduced themselves while Dana finished her inspection. She pronounced the boat sound and big enough to carry them all. “We can only hope we aren’t interrupted,” she said. “Where be t’others’ clothes?”

Sondheim, tall, quiet, flat-nosed, with shaggy flaxen hair, and MacClain, the swarthy one, with nervous hazel eyes and muddy brown hair, delved deep into the cave and brought out two dirt-stained, leaf-speckled sacks. Dana reached in and withdrew two buckskin shirts, tied at the front, and two pairs of canvas pants, wrinkled and dank but wearable. “Put these on. The water’s colder out there.”

“Whose are they?” Manuel asked. Reynard was not sure he wanted to know.

“Spares,” Sondheim said, with an accent that reminded Reynard of Norwegians or Swedes.

“Given to the poor by ill luck,” Gareth said. He was a small, bushy-haired man with outsized chest and shoulders that seemed to be wearing through his shirt, revealing pale skin through holes and loosened patches.

“Their previous owners no longer need them.” Dana finished the topic with a scowl, as though both lightness of tone, and concealing their coming peril, were equally improper.

Manuel put on the breeches and shirt handed to him. Long, pale scars from years of cat lashings spread across his back and buttocks. Apparently the restoration of his years could not erase such markings. Reynard stripped off his rags more shyly and dressed quickly, but his foot caught in a pants leg. He was not used to skins as clothing, and his toenails were still ragged from salt and shingle. Dressed, he and Manuel looked less like sailors and more like hunters—which they now were, apparently.

They carried the flat-bottomed boat to the water, where it bobbed at leisure in the slow swells. Then all waded out around the boat and hoisted themselves aboard. Three teams took turns rowing steadily out to sea—out to where the galleon had gone, Reynard thought. Where the galleon had vanished and all aboard had perished, most likely.

Sitting between the two current oarsmen, Gareth and Nem, Reynard studied the bluing mist as the headland and beach fell behind. This weather was not so different from Southwold’s the past few springs and winters.

Manuel kept watching the sky.

“ ’Ware of fishweed,” Gareth said. “Lies just beneath the surface, doth put out nets and eat more than fish. There!”

He pointed to a wide tangle of brown and green kelp, or what looked at first like kelp, rising and topping between the crests of the waves. Broad brown leaves seemed to stick up like hands pointing to the boat. Then a stalk with several bulbs on its length churned and twisted, clearly moving toward them. Gareth prepared an oar and gave the stalk a good strike, which made it thrash and curl back.

“Nymphs eat the weed, or the fish the weed doth snare. We do not bother. Awful stuff,” Gareth said.