Грег Бир - The Unfinished Land

She settled beside him, knees drawn up, and used her stick to draw birds and snakes in the dirt. “I have died four times,” she said. “Yet I am not an Eater. Who are they, and who am I?”

“A child,” Reynard said, having no other answer.

“In this fire, I see Hel plain as day,” she said. “She is not done with us, nor with thee.”

“Good to know,” Reynard said, and cringed as he bit the inside of a cheek. “Maybe that is my reason.”

“Oh, no,” Calafi said. “It be not so simple, methinks.”

He tongued the brief flow of blood, then said, words a little mushy, “Is Hel another name for Mary, mother of God?” His stomach churned even to ask the question.

“Hel is Hel,” the girl said. “When thou diest, thou wilt see. I hope to be there, to watch thy waking.”

Reynard shook his head. “I’ll be honored,” he said sarcastically.

“Yes, that thou wilt.”

He saw the boldness in the dancing girl, but also the fragility. “What visions have you now?” he asked.

“Oh, many. Some more dim than others. Clear enough, armies approach from the other side of the waste, the other kraters. The Queens are greedy. Very dim: they might kill us but save thee, I know not why. Then thou canst ask them who will replace the dead, and who will stare at the rocky walls, and find us in their designs.”

“What doth that mean?” Reynard asked.

“These, mine own Travelers, value life,” the girl said, ignoring his question. “We are brave enough to stay and defend, but none knoweth what is expected of us. Still, I am ready. I have died often enough.”

“You see your past lives?” Reynard asked. His grandmother had spoken of such things, upsetting the churchgoers around her, in her weaving and threshing circles.

“Many, many,” Calafi said. “The old ones in the quarries keep seeing me in their stone and sending me back. It is my eyes, I think.” She blinked and brought parted fingers to her face, framing one eye.

Reynard shook his head, not understanding anything she said. “I, too, value life,” he insisted.

“Oh, but being born is another way of dying. Thou didst die before thou camest here, didst thou not?”

He stared at her, irritated, even angry—but they were interrupted. Sophia brought the girl a blanket, wrapped her shoulders, and looked his way, but her expression told him nothing.

Reynard leaned over to Calafi and insisted, as if claiming some firm ground, “I have yet to die!”

“Oh, good!” the girl said, curling up to sleep. “Then it will be an adventure.”

“Look,” Kern said, standing on the other side of the second fire. “They leave!”

The birds had stopped wheeling and now rose high in the last of the sun, like sparks or bits of molten gold, and flew away from the city and the great blade of stone—south, as if fleeing a looming storm. The upper works of the basket city were again deserted and lifeless.

Yuchil called for tea to be made, and soon all but the girl drank of the warm liquid from flat steel kettles, and others arranged pots for boiling more gruel. The night seemed to surround them like a fog.

They ate and drank, and some wandered to the edge of the firelight to relieve themselves, women squatting and hiding their efforts with long skirts, men turning away as if this were the height of modesty, but none daring find cover in the fields in the dark.

Reynard took his turn, as did Widsith. “I piss less often now, and that is a blessing,” the Pilgrim said to Reynard. “I would die another death before age creeps on me again.”

IN THE NIGHT, the strange mud-gray night, Reynard opened his eyes and saw Calafi standing over him.

“The scout is hurt worse than any thought,” the girl said. He felt he had known this already, but could not remember. “She is dead soon. The Eater can save her for a while longer, by sharing her time.”

“As Calybo did with Widsith. Where is Widsith?”

Then he saw that Calafi had no real substance.

“But the Eater will not save her, cannot save her. Valdis needs must borrow from another, because her time is trothed and may not be shared.” The girl wavered in the last light of the flickering fire, and then, behind her came Valdis to stand where Calafi had been, and his heart leaped. He could not see the redheaded girl anywhere, nor even much of the camp, and he wondered if he was still asleep.

“Will you save Anutha?” he asked Valdis. “She hath been brave! Take time from me if you cannot find Widsith or anyone else!”

“You have no time to share,” Valdis said. “You are too near your beginning. No Eater can borrow from you, only give. And giving will spell the end for us all.”

“I do not understand!” Reynard said.

“Hel has returned, and given her orders to th’one who made me what I am today.”

Reynard rolled over in his blanket and found that he had not yet opened his eyes. And when he did, the night was still thick about them, and he saw Widsith lying not far away.

The Pilgrim was snoring.

With day, the fires were down, not even smoking, and the fields and ruins near which they had camped were cast half in deep shadow, the line of the shadow made murky by passing layers of cloud.

Reynard could not remember what he had seen in his deep sleep.

The Travelers brought them tepid gruel and chunks of a hard, mostly stale bread, like ship’s biscuit. Lifting a spoon of the gruel, Widsith remarked how rice was far more common in the lands of his travels than in Europe, where wheat and rye and other grains supplied their usual needs.

Nikolias emerged from the wagon and cracked his joints with a rich variety of grimaces, then looked to Reynard and Widsith.

“Still no one,” Yuchil said, peering from the back of the wagon. “We should be on our way.”

“There is nowhere left to return to!” Widsith said, his voice breaking with both anger and sorrow.

“And no farther path here,” Nikolias said. “Move we must, even so, to deliver the boy. Pack it away.” The guards rolled up their sleeping blankets, kicked the fire marks around the dirt, and prepared horses and wagon to move on—though, as Widsith had said, there was no place for them to go.

“I would have saved Anutha,” Reynard said to Widsith. He felt the muscles on his back and neck twitch and looked up at the sky and the rolling gray clouds, searching for shadows, for of course anything could happen here. They were near a dead city, on the outskirts of a dead land.

“Listen to Valdis. Thou hast value, but no power, not yet,” Widsith said. “And none here knoweth why. Anutha died from a poison in her blood. She died honorably, and she delivered the boon of drakes. As Maeve and Maggie would have wished.” Widsith looked along the ridge, over the fallow fields. “Dost thou understand why the Eaters did not share?”

The Pilgrim’s question cut deep. “What do you know about me?” Reynard asked sharply, as if his words might shake loose something hidden between them.

“In time, maybe.”

Suddenly furious, Reynard turned away to hide the redness of his face. He had been told his visit had importance, but had never trusted such judgments, because he knew himself to be ignorant. The Spaniards, worst in his imagination, most skilled at war, had thrived neither in their sea battle nor on this island. And if this land had left its own people to rot under the shadows of a pair of unknown queens, after endless times under the rule of a Hellish goddess—what chance would he have?