Грег Бир - The Unfinished Land

“ ¡No hay viento! ” cried a voice forward.

“No wind,” the old man translated. “No wind anywhere.”

A man of great dignity and fine clothes came down to the middle deck to inspect their catch. He knelt beside Reynard and regarded him sadly. The old man, in oft-patched rags, with a rope for a belt, was a sorry contrast to this splendid fellow, whose gray-specked beard had been neatly trimmed, and whose enameled scabbard depended from a belt on a silver chain. His eyes were like emeralds, and his hands were pale and smooth—a young woman’s hands, untouched by the wear of rope or oar.

The old man bowed low. “This is el capitán del mar y de la guerra Jorge Cardoza de Vincennes, very powerful. Say something. Name anything—an isle thou know’st, a spit, a reef.”

“Where the sea doth strangle the wind,” Reynard rasped, sensing he would be tossed back into the water unless he said something, however stupid.

“ Donde duerme el viento, ” the old man said to the gentleman.

“Ah,” the gentleman said. “ ¡Él sí conoce el nombre! ”

“Know’st thou this place?” the old man asked Reynard, with a sparkle of suspicion. “Or make cruel jest?”

Reynard tried to remember where he had heard the phrase, where the notion had come from. It might have been from his father before he died… but that would have been when Reynard was little, no more than three or four years of age. “My father told it to me,” he said, then put fingers to his mouth for more water and for food.

Sadly, deliberately, the gentleman in the fine clothes came off his knee and stood his full height over them—about five feet six inches, shorter than Reynard’s uncle and slighter, more delicate.

“ ¡Norte-noroeste! ” cried the voice forward.

“How doth he know?” the old man muttered. “For days, the compass guideth not.”

And so it was. The Spanish were lost, too. The fog obscured the tops of sails and masts like a billowing blanket, dividing and reshaping into worms and wisps—but also hiding some of the damage the galleon had suffered in the great battle off Gravelines. Ragged sails hung, ripped and holed, rigging cut as if by shears, the ends tied and lifted for fidding and rejoining later, spars hanging but also tied away, bumping in dejection against the great masts.

The old man followed Cardoza, el capitán del mar y de la guerra, forward and up onto the forecastle. Two other boys, also younger than Reynard and curious about the prisoner, brought him more water. The oldest smiled, not in the least afraid. They were not unkind, he saw, not cruel—and he had heard many times that the Spanish tortured their own children when they were bad, that they flensed and ate fishermen and merchants for breakfast after breaking their necks in the noose. More grog tales, no doubt, but effective at keeping an air of menace about those who threatened the Queen.

“The Queen’s a fair tease when it cometh to Philip,” his uncle had said. “But now the old king’s dander is up and we are all put to it. If only the dander flaked from a worthier head. Philip will be their bloody ruin!”

The sailors knew a little English, and as they led him to a cage under the overhang of the stern castle, followed by the youngest boy, they tried out their few words, as if seeking his approval of their pronunciation. “Bastard, asshole, thou donkey—thou monkey dick!”

Reynard nodded and smiled.

After the sailors locked the cage, the old man brought him a bowl of lentils and vegetables soaked in oil, not butter. He ate with his fingers. The old man went away again, and now sailors crowded around.

“I know thou is good lad,” one sailor attempted.

“ Él es rubio, ” said another, with a cackle. “ Él prefiere los pelirrojos. ” His puzzlement set them back and forth with each other until the old man returned. Despite his rags, the old man seemed to be respected.

The sailors, bored, left them to talk alone.

“They remark thou hast red hair,” the old man said.

“My hair is black,” Reynard said.

The old man shook his head. “Sea-bleached, then. No doubt from terror. Mayhaps it will grow out black. I have told el capitán thou’rt son of a fisherman and know’st the waters north to Iceland. Make me not a liar!”

“I know some of the coasts and waters off France and Flanders, and some of Ireland,” Reynard said as he ate. His stomach was giving him pains.

“Hast thou fished with Basques? With Dutch?”

“My uncle fished with Basques off Flanders and Portugal,” Reynard said. “No Dutch.”

“Thou speak’st Basque?”

Reynard made a face.

“French?”

“No.”

“Gypsy? Roma?” the old man asked, doubtful.

Reynard shook his head, unsure—his grandmother had never liked the name or judgment of “Gypsy,” assuming as it did an origin in Egypt and a clannish, outlaw nature—but was not Tinker’s Cant touched by Roma?

“English!” the old man concluded, with a wry twist of his lips. “Well, el maestro is afraid, and el capitán saith little but frowneth much. We have wandered at sea ten days without wind. And even before the battle, we were stuck in this wallowing tub of shit for over two months! Thou seest plain our galleon is sad. The soldiers never chanced to get ashore. The battle, the storms, the currents…”

“Your guns sank my boat,” Reynard said. “You killed my uncle and our crew. They knew the sea better than I.”

“Many ships and sailors now grace the Lord’s deep,” the old man said. “I think maybe the planning not so good. But say nothing of this to el maestro or el capitán. ”

Reynard’s strength was slowly returning, and with it things he had tried to forget—wild winds and pounding waves, shots and fire, screams as his uncle and the crew tried to keep the hoy behind the galleons and away from the guns of the swift Spanish pinnaces. The hoy had been built for cargo, not war, and her four old guns had been mounted in all the wrong places, while a galleass, fierce in the dark gray light of that horrible noon, as the tide reversed and all the Spanish ships seemed to flee in their direction, came abreast and let loose with the scattered shot that put an end to everyone but Reynard…

He lay back, shoulders against the rough bars, caged like a bear. It was said that the Queen liked to watch stags baited by dogs, and bears as well. There were dogs on this ship—big dogs. Reynard could hear them barking and growling. Mastiffs, he thought. Perhaps they belonged to the gentleman, el capitán.

But what kept his eyes from closing was fear of the living fog that had dropped no water into his sail and now followed all these sailors and soldiers northwest—to where?

Slowly he pieced together fragments of those long-ago tales his father had told him, of haunted seas and strange lands, and of the ring of seven islands at the top of the world. “Your grandmither, bless her and all she knows, tells me they are called Tir Na Nog, and they are places where mortals can live forever, and where gods, goddesses, and monsters roam according to their own laws. I have never been there, thanks be to God, but old fishermen who have, and told tales in mine youth, as I tell you now, spake of a slow, relentless storm that pulls and pulls, like a snake of wind and water, sweeping them north and west until there is no escape—all the way to where the wind goeth to die, and sailors with it. Some would say the nearest isle is a great land hidden beyond that storm, that none but demons should visit! So they say, and your grandmither as well… But we are sailors, and know teat from twaddle, do we not, boy?”