Грег Бир - The Unfinished Land

Shadows overhead! The air filled with a buzzing roar. A great black drake, the largest Reynard had yet seen, dropped from the sky and thrummed over one of the invaders, bit off his head, and tossed it across the lane, where it bowled through the door of another house. That done, the drake hopped onto an attacker madly swinging a long knife, having flung aside his musket. This Spaniard swung himself off balance and staggered, too worn to make any sound but a rough, husking grunt. The drake shook out its wings and appraised him, as if looking over a puzzle, then rotated its wide, glittering head, pinched the man’s waist in its mandibles, and bit through. The drake’s rear arms pivoted forward to seize the pieces and, still clutching them on both sides of its thick body, the wings beat briskly, and it rose and carried the halves out of the village.

Reynard found himself flat on his back, coughing at the enveloping smoke, his vision narrowed to foggy circles. Manuel was obscured or missing. Dana and Sondheim lifted him, and they all stood in another narrow alley between broken rows of houses. He slumped and leaned against a wall, unable to lift his scythe, shook his head, and rubbed his eyes.

Dana whistled, and another drake swooped over the town’s tree line, fanning the flames of a thatched roof, then, lifting and landing, hopped and grabbed a lone Spaniard trying to flee. The beast flew this poor old Spaniard high into the air, then dropped him onto another burning roof, where he crashed through to the floor beneath.

Reynard closed his eyes and covered his face with an arm, wondering if the drakes would mistake him for an enemy. This new concern, mixed with the horror of the battle, was both paralyzing and intoxicating, somehow very different from the terror of the galleons at Gravelines, yet necessary and even sensible—between the harrying drakes and more village defenders with and without weapons, men and women and several youngsters, Nem among them, his face pinked with heat and anger, plunging a pitchfork over and over again, making sure the fallen Spanish were dead, if on the ground, and if alive, poking and herding them into the meadow for more drakes to take their pick—at least six drakes now busy on that hunt. At long last, the Spaniards, already depleted by Eaters, were meeting their match, their betters, and facing unexpected weapons—monsters beyond their understanding.

And then…

It was over. The cries of the combatants subsided and were covered by the crackle of flames, billows of choking smoke, and then—wailing grief. Manuel tied a kerchief around a red-dripping slash on his arm, his eyes distant and sad.

Villagers by the hundreds came from other parts of the town and formed lines, passing water in buckets from several wells and a stream, working with scant success to douse the fires.

“Where is Cardoza?” Manuel asked. “We must save a few. We must learn their plans!”

The moonless night was dark and deep and long.

The fires dying down or extinguished, grim-faced villagers led teams of horses and wagons and began to load and carry Spanish dead to a meadow just outside the town, where they left them unburied for now. The village dead were covered with blankets and sheets and, when those ran out, with cloaks and capes and coats, before they were taken to the temple, which looked to Reynard like an English church, with a steeple.

Manuel had returned from looking at as many of the Spanish corpses as he could, as many as he could find. “He is not here,” the old sailor said.

“There are fifty or more gone and as many hurt bad,” Dana told Sondheim and Gareth.

“We saw Maggie and Anutha. They are still alive.”

“I know. But we lost three blunters. And there is a drake out on the meadow, badly wounded. Likely will die.”

“Whose?” Nem asked.

“Asquith’s, I think.”

“Asquith’s among the dead,” Sondheim said.

Dana called forward Gareth and Nem and asked them to take Reynard to a place where he could get food and drink, and sleep for the rest of the night.

“The houses are in bad shape here, folks are being sent to other homes, and many of the barns have burned,” Gareth said, flexing his broad shoulders and sharing the exhausted Reynard’s weight with Nem.

“There is a sheepfold out on South Road, near the stables. The old shepherd’s place. Take him there. It is beyond this mayhem, and will serve until morning.”

Dana and the blunters, led by Anutha, were met by a candlelit procession of ten men and boys and four women, in deep twilight at the edge of the destruction. This procession was guided by the older, gray-haired woman who, Reynard now saw, bore a resemblance to Dana, perhaps mother to daughter. He wondered if this was Maggie.

In the middle of the grieving and preparations for funerals, news of their success with the nymphs on this part of the coast was met with the gray-haired woman’s sad approval, as if they had done all that could be expected—and perhaps all that was necessary.

The paired defenders were brought forward and treated with respect, but no congratulations, and the whereabouts of their drakes were inquired after, but few knew much. Drakes that had killed and likely fed on humans were not responsive for days, Nem told Reynard in hushed tones. “And they did eat, I saw them!” he added.

“How many more Spanish still out there?” Maggie asked Manuel.

“Maybe fifty,” Manuel said. “Dependeth on how many died in the forest.”

“We stabled Eater horses the last three nights,” Maggie said. “Let us hope the Spanish have had enough.”

Manuel and Reynard were now studied without being touched or questioned. Nem spoke to the other youngsters, some also injured and bandaged, in a language Reynard could not understand—not the Basque that Manuel had used, that he had heard from other fishermen, nor the Tinker’s Cant of his grandmother, but something else mellifluously round and complicated.

The assembly split in three, and Nem, Gareth, Manuel, Maggie, and Dana continued on, Manuel a few steps to one side. Reynard wobbled along between Gareth and Nem, barely able to keep his feet under him as they took him to the edge of a tree-ringed clearing, between several magnificent, spreading oaks, onto a trail covered with ancient cut stones and bordered by woven fences made, Reynard thought, of willow or perhaps hawthorn. The candles provided little light, and the group seemed to want to keep them at least partly ignorant.

Dana and Maggie were conversing in quiet tones.

Manuel murmured to Reynard, “They talk about me. And about thee.”

“Will they kill us?”

Manuel made a face. “Not likely,” he said “We have fought beside them, and we have both been touched and recognized.”

“By Eaters?”

“By Travelers. Those who connect,” Manuel said.

“I do not remember them,” Reynard said.

“They will be more obvious, in time,” Manuel said.

“Who are these from the town?”

“The older woman is Maggie,” he confirmed. “She is in charge of the blunters who work this coast. She reporteth to Maeve. Both rely on Anutha.”

“Quiet,” Gareth warned.

They passed these lanes and continued on in a tight group, lit by shaded lanterns. After a walk of a mile or more, they saw candle­lit windows in the distance and came upon a wide, cleared common, with another sheep-dotted meadow behind split-rail fences, and more people emerging from rounded stone houses with smoking chimneys, men and women and a few children commenting in several tongues about the fight, as they had heard it from this side of town, and of the return of the lost blunters, and how many more could now be placed on the rolls of paired defenders. They seemed more interested in those facts than in the facts of the battle.