by Greg Bear
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.
“See the teeth?” MacClain asked. The edges of the upright brown leaves were lined on both sides with small, bluish teeth, like the teeth of a small shark. “Got bit once. Never again.”
Reynard swallowed a groan and wondered if the wreck of the hoy had ever passed through such a loose and wandering forest.
The dory entered the wall of mist. From the shore, the sound of waves faded, and they were enveloped by a knotted, twisted arras of more gloom, as if the fog itself questioned their wisdom in being here. Against the swish of the oars and the grunts of the oarsmen, he heard muffled sounds from something larger, deeper, under the water—and from the far, subdued shore. A change in the very air around them made the fog churn and swirl in strange ways.
“Is that the weed?” Reynard asked.
“Nay,” Gareth said. “Weed is silent, mostly.”
“You have heard the breathing, no? The island is alive,” Manuel said to him in a low voice.
“How alive?” Reynard asked, in an equally low voice.
Manuel lifted a hand and waggled it slowly, with a press of his lips and a side glance to the water beyond the breakers. “Quaking land, volcanoes, the greatest named Agni Most Foul, seldom seen or visited—and farther inland, beyond mountain ridges, and through many passes, a pale waste, the chafing waste, so-called, surrounded by a ring of great shallow bowls called hereabouts kraters—and into these kraters few dare go. Not even Eaters.”
“Oh,” Reynard said.
So far, he and Manuel had not been asked to row, although Reynard would have been perfectly willing, just to feel useful, to be useful to these people on whom likely his life depended.
A wide grayness rose in the mist ahead, and Gareth, who seemed to have the sharpest eyes, pointed it out to Dana, who instructed the oarsmen to move in that direction. The cause of the shadow was slowly unveiled—the half-submerged hulk of the galleon. Water sloshed through the hole open once more in its side—patch missing—and there was much new damage besides. Decks had been ripped to splinters, as if clawed up by hungry cats in search of mice, and half-eaten bodies draped the side rails, limbs loose in the waves. Soon the once-great ship would sink and never again be a danger to England.
Reynard wondered what had happened to el maestro.
“The soldiers are now alone, with no means of escape,” Manuel said. “And mayhaps lost in the wily forest.”
Dana looked over the wreck with something like sorrow. “Anutha’ll track them and report to the town,” she said. “None of that is our concern, not yet.”
The rowers resumed their course.
“Just two drakes can do that,” Sondheim said to Reynard, assuming Manuel already understood. “Twenty could make of this coast a dead waste. Queen Hel once set them to keep men under control . . . but then thought better, and gave us means.”
Gareth held up ten fingers, signifying the paired sea drakes available on this coast. “Great power, but not enough,” he said.
“What can you do about the wild ones?” Reynard asked.
“Nothing,” Dana said. “Some just beneath the sky, Vanir, can hunt them, but not the children of men. We can only hope any wild drakes we miss will fight and kill each other. To find a new crop of nymphs near this shore, we have to visit islands they have favored in times before. There are two here. Likely you passed one such as you came up on the first beach, but we will take that one last, because it is a difficult landing, and we will need do the most we can before we put ourselves, and our work, in danger.”
The boat creaked in the swell. Reynard asked, “Do we get weapons?”
“No blunter hath more than a knife, but for our chisel,” Nem said. Reynard glumly surveyed their prospects at that news—heading south to find monsters that had just wrecked a great Spanish ship, or at least finished the job begun by the English, perhaps by Drake himself—named after a drake!
The human Drake, Reynard added in his thoughts, would have carried a sword along with a pistol . . . And doubtless a fearful cohort of harquebuses.
“If you cannot hurt them, and cannot kill them, what do you do if they attack?” he asked.
“Our best,” Sondheim replied. “ ’Tis all we have ever done.”
“And if you be paired, do your drakes defend from other drakes—from wild ones?”
Dana said, “They will not kill. But drakes fight all the time, for females, for territory.”
“We have seen drakes eat another, when it be weak and silly,” Gareth said.
“That we have,” Dana said. “We can be paired, yet never know their hearts.”
“If they have hearts!” Nem said.
“Oh, of a kind,” Dana said. Strange to think that she was in charge of so many men; his uncle might have thought it stranger still. Bu
t then perhaps he could have been reminded of Reynard’s grandmother, if that uncle, and that grandmother, were still alive. On a few occasions, the young Reynard had seen his father stand hat in hand before his mother-in-law, head bowed. Strong man, stronger mother.
Thoughts of those already lost reminded Reynard that he likely wore the clothes of a man who had died on just such a mission as theirs. Not that Reynard was unused to dead men’s clothing. Poverty spread such gifts from dead to living, and especially to the young, often enough.
They looked up at a thrumming and a musical trill that quickly filled the air, like big drums under shrill fifes. A shadow passed over, and they all flinched.
“Drake?” Reynard asked Nem, who nodded.
“Maybe two,” the boy said, and forced a smile. “But they do not swoop! Not hungry, I guess. Filled with sailors!”
Manuel said, “They are yours, paired, no?”
“Maybe,” Dana said. “But they still have independence. Anyway, think nought of that,” she warned. “Tough enow to find and blunt nymphs with our keenest wits.”
She seemed to know her way in the gloom, and soon, in the middle distance, they saw two dark gray pillars with a forested ridge like a causeway between, raising more sounds of splashing waves. The ridged and rocky island was taller and wider than the lone pillar the galleon had passed on their uncontrolled approach to the beach.
The blunters rowed in slowly, backing water as the waves hissed against more black sand. Reynard’s experience of sand was limited, but sailors he had met in Southwold told him black sand was likely old lava. I saw it many times on the shores of old Atlantis, one grizzled fisherman had said, as they spread their nets and built fires to smoke the afternoon’s catch. In the Mediterranean. Finest sea in the world.
Irish Sea is the finest, another had said, holding up a cudgel.
Manuel poked Reynard out of his memories. “Keep thine eyes open,” he said.
They rowed around the island, looking for a landing. And they found it, though it was already occupied. They pulled onto the deeper beach beside a round vessel, very like a currach, an Irish skin boat, but about ten feet across, with a silvery membrane stretched around the oval wooden frame rather than tarred hide.
Dana was unhappy to see it there. She bent to touch the shimmering skin. “Not one of ours,” she said.
“Made by men,” said Gareth.
“But none just above the mud would use drake wing,” MacClain added.
A man’s voice came out of the woods overhanging the beach, and a large fellow with thick-muscled arms, stripped to the waist, deep brown skin heavily tattooed, leaned out on a red-barked tree limb, smiling like a freebooter. “Plenty of work here for blunters,” he said, then swung down and walked across the beach. The man’s face had been ritually scarred, then patterned in swirls and stars with red and black dyes. He appeared no more than thirty years old, but his eyes were deep, the color of firelit shadow, and his hair was a stiff brush, like close-packed hog bristles.
Dana said, “That boat’s worth more than your life, if it was sold in Zodiako or inland.”
“I never sold such,” the man said. “And that is not my boat.” He held out his hand, not to her, but to Manuel, and then to Reynard, with a half smile. “I am guessing one of you is new, and one just returned. I am Kaiholo.”
“Soundeth like an island name,” Manuel said. “But I do not know it.”
“Your lands have not found mine,” the tattooed man said. “It was my father’s name, and the name of his grandfather.”
Manuel shook the extended hand. Reynard followed. The others refused. The hand was rough-callused—a seaman’s hand.
“I have dishonored none of them,” Kaiholo added, with a moue at their fellows, “and I say again, the boat and its skin are not mine. Though I do on occasion ride it . . .” He shook his head as if at a difficult memory. “Whenever possible, I swim.”
“Whose boat is it, then?” Dana asked, a pale cast to her face.
“Hers,” Kaiholo said.
Manuel turned away and looked down at the black sand, but Reynard caught a glimpse of both old shame and hunger.
“What presence commands thine attendance?” Dana asked. “An Eater?”
“Not an Eater. One just beneath the sky. Last night, before we went to work, she told me two important individuals had arrived and deserved high attention, though not hers, not yet. She also told me that a young female Eater and the Afrique protected them—and that under the old rules, the Afrique restored to an old man some of his lost years. Be you that man?” He directed his question to Manuel.
“I was given time by the Afrique,” Manuel said.
Kaiholo scowled. “I do not like the air when Calybo is near.”
Manuel asked, “Your mistress sought no protection for the others from the galleon?”
Kaiholo looked away. “None,” he said, “but for you and the boy. Is that how you know Guldreth?”
“I will speak of that in town, when I am there,” Manuel said.
The blunters drew back from Manuel and Reynard.
Kaiholo said, “Like you, I am just above the mud. My mistress told me to keep lookout—but she confideth little.” He turned to Dana and her blunters. “As for ye, she hath already downed one of the wild ones, her limit for this season, whoever doth measure. She let two tame ones pass, and they did damage to the great ship out there. Was it ye did direct them?”
“Not as such,” Dana said. “But they caught the scent of our enemies.”
“Do you object to Guldreth taking a wild one?”
“As she is just below the sky,” Dana said, “it is not for me to object. Her harvest leaveth one fewer wild drake to worry us this season.”
Kaiholo rested a leather-shod foot on the frame of the skin boat and explained, for Reynard’s benefit, as if he had already judged their levels of knowledge and thought he had the most to learn, “Nymphs refuse to attack a boat stretched with drake’s wing. For the high ancients under Hel’s skies, there are elder advantages, elder protections—including defense against drakes. But my mistress is at her limit. So be wary out there.” Again to Reynard he added, or more like confided, “Hel made the drakes to keep watch on the children of men, and protect these shores from invaders.”
“But the invaders are here anyway,” Dana observed.
“We shall see how they fare.”
Did this strange tattooed man—more woodcarving than human—work for someone like the glassy-skinned visitor Reynard had seen during their first night on the beach? He had thought she might be a dream, until, after the second night, he had witnessed Manuel’s rejuvenation.
And what was this talk of Hell?
“Not all of the Spaniards were killed,” Dana said. “Soldiers still move inland.”
“Give them a few days,” Kaiholo said. “Eaters rarely miss a chance to add to their years. All children of men are here on their sufferance.”
“And on the sufferance of Travelers and Crafters,” Manuel said, in a chiding tone.
“Them, too,” Kaiholo said. “When Hel returneth, she may or may not decide to keep us, whether we interest the Crafters or no.” He studied Reynard more closely. “Where from, lad? Eastern Albion?”
Manuel moved between them and held up his hand. “Enough. These have work. When they are done, I would return to speak to thy mistress.”
Kaiholo shrugged this off. “Full of questions, I wis. I cannot guarantee she will be here, but may I make compense for her unpredictable nature, and guide ye to a prime location?”
“We know where to go,” Dana said. “And what to do when we get there.”
Kaiholo seemed much given to shrugging. “By dark, I have to be strong and alert. There is at least one wild drake out there . . . By tonight, there could be four or five. If I were you, I would get your blunting done before dark.”
More than ever, Reynard wanted to wake up, to get away from the war at sea, the wreck of the hoy, his dead uncle and th
e other fishermen . . . the galleon, el maestro, el capitán, and this unknown island.
“Where doth your mistress sleep?” Nem asked nervously.
“I do not know that she sleepeth, as we sleep, or where she is—other than that she is up there.” Kaiholo gestured at the topknots of woods that crested the island’s two headlands, with a lightly timbered causeway between. He looked to Dana. “Under a drake wing tent.”
“How do we keep safe and away from her?” Nem asked, but Dana hushed him.
Kaiholo turned his attention again to Manuel. “Can you, would you, tell me why Calybo treateth you so well?”
Manuel did not meet his eyes.
“Or how many years he hath banked and delivered to you?”
Dana intervened. “Thou and thy mistress—whatever clan or status, she tradeth years for her favor, true? How old art thou, really?”
Kaiholo drew his brows together. To Manuel, he said, “If my mistress asketh—and you have a name known to Calybo—even below the stars —”
“Not thine to know,” Dana said. “Not until he reporteth to Maggie and Maeve.”
Kaiholo was not easily assuaged. “I feel my mistress’s time clean and sweet, like silver. What is in this old sailor’s added years, I wonder? What borrowed or traded memories? Some of mine own, mayhap?”
Manuel stared him down but did not answer. Did the tattooed man pose a danger?
