by Greg Bear
Kaiholo smiled slyly, turned, and walked toward the eastern headland. He threw his arm out to point up into the trees along the ridge. “Dead drake that way. Mistress harvested the wings. Beyond, on the northern headland, hang four sacks. Now sleep I must. Fare ye well.”
“How doth she share?” Nem asked his back. “Doth she kiss . . . or more?”
Dana reached out and cuffed him. He did not take it amiss. But the tattooed man looked back and grinned in pure jovial menace.
“Maybe thou wilt ask her thyself. She would like thee.”
Nem shook his head, crown of black hair swishing. “No, sir!”
Reynard could not agree more. He was as far from Southwold as he had ever been, physically, emotionally, and spiritually . . .
And apparently these people showed respect to, if they did not outright worship, a queen who came from Hell.
Blunting, and Things Thereof
* * *
AS THEY PUSHED through the brush and trees below the ridge, Dana muttered that she had long suspected there was a high one wandering around the southwestern shore.
“What sort of devil is that?” Reynard asked.
“Not far from angel,” Manuel said. “Vanir, just beneath the sky.”
“How do you know this?” Reynard asked. “Are there books or teachers for such things?”
“No books,” said Dana.
Said Sondheim, who until now had stayed quiet, with a glance at Manuel, “Let us find the nymphs. We blunt them, mark them, and after that, they are of no use to Queen Hel.” He was a thin, rope-muscled fellow with skin roughened by years of wind and waves, and almost certainly a sailor. But then, to get here, how many of these must be sailors? How many had been here a long time, and how many were still due to arrive?
“Hel is dead and gone,” said Gareth.
“Hel can never die,” Sondheim said.
“I keep no company with those who worship Hell and its demons,” Reynard said between clenched teeth.
“Not that Hell, mooncalf!” Sondheim said, scoffing. “Queen Hel.”
“Hell hath no queen!” Reynard said indignantly.
The others chuckled, or simply smiled. “You will catch on, if you live,” Sondheim said.
“Then tell me, what is the difference?” Reynard asked. “What doth your queen rule?”
“She is not our queen,” MacClain said, and Gareth agreed.
“She be far older than your Satan or your Hell, and deadly beautiful,” said Sondheim. “Queen Hel birthed all peoples, and most monsters.”
“Not me,” Gareth said. “I am no heathen.”
“Nor I,” MacClain added. They were near the crest of the suspected headland, Dana foremost in the climbing line.
“She made this island,” Sondheim added, warming to the subject. “Made the Eaters, raised up the drakes . . . Made the entire world, some say.”
“And so I say, not me,” MacClain insisted.
“And yet here you are, consorting with those who serve the high ones and blunting drakes!” Sondheim said. “Hel made all in which we believe.”
Angry, MacClain reached out as if to strike him, but Dana blocked his fist.
“Hel did not make me, neither,” Nem said under his breath. “And she is not coming back.”
“Shut it below, now,” Dana said, and leaned over between branches to pull up MacClain, who did the same for Gareth. Sondheim was rough with Nem, yanking him after by one arm.
“Leave the boy be!” Dana said. “He is no pagan, and he knoweth his craft, which is more than I can say for some of ye.” To Manuel and Reynard, she added, “Without parents, he is not responsible.”
“At least I know who my parents were!” Nem said.
“I’ll treat him right when he hath a drake at his beck,” Sondheim grumbled.
“One sip!” Nem said. “I am ready.”
One by one, they clambered onto the headland, just beyond the natural causeway.
“You are exceeding quiet,” Gareth said to Manuel, as if blaming him for their disagreements.
Manuel showed his stronger, more numerous teeth in what passed for an ingratiating smile. More teeth—but not a complete set by any means. Getting younger might improve that aspect, but only a little more than it erased lashing-stripes—too many years of long, hard voyages, bad captains, bad food, and scurvy. Reynard’s uncle’s teeth had not been much better; he had blamed that rough voyage with Hawkins to Africa and then to Jamaica, and had never gone to sea again with Hawkins or his ilk. Instead, he had settled in Southwold, married, and fished with his brother, Reynard’s father.
Tears came to Reynard’s eyes.
“There will be a meeting. Maggie and Maeve will decide,” Dana said. “If these two pass, they rise just above the mud and get village names—if they want them. If they are not eager to leave!”
“Nobody leaves once they are in the pact,” Sondheim said darkly.
Manuel balanced on a line of broken lava, thick with ropy creepers and what looked like overlarge ivy. They were at the western end of the ridge, rock topped with soil and thick with trees that had withstood years of wind and high waves, trees of paper-flake bark with blood-red wood beneath, but not lively; quiet, stolid, with nought but treelike opinions.
Reynard took hold of a branch and tugged to make sure he could rely on it, and one by one, they swung out to stand under a hanging sack very like the ones seen by the watchmen on the galleon a few days before. It was a strange and beautiful growth, to be sure, over five yards long, and hung motionless from the thickest branch of the reddish trunk, over the pounding waves. Reynard thought he saw through a greenish, hard-looking section, near the thick, twisted cord from which the sack hung, an inner quiver of something soon to break out, soon to fly free.
“Is that a drake?” he asked.
“Soon,” Nem said. “And a fine big one, too. Colored like turquoise and opals, I think.”
Gareth reached out to brush the sack. It did not move.
They arranged themselves beneath the shrouded nymph in a U, the open part of their U facing the ocean, and Nem began a high, sweet chant, which they all took up in order, according to rank—a noisy chorus, Reynard thought, but strangely beautiful.
Manuel contributed a few words, then shook his head, as if he could not presently recall more. Dana seemed to think that this confirmed all her suspicions—and Reynard wondered, had Manuel done this before? It seemed he had! Reynard felt a tug of meaning as well, and he did not like that, for he could have no connection to these people . . .
To any who would sing lullabies to unborn monsters!
Dana gathered up her satchel, opened the flap, and drew out what looked like a chisel, bright as moonlight, with an ebony handle. She expertly climbed the tree’s red trunk, slung herself along the sturdy branch, and there hung by legs alone, like a squirrel, and lowered her torso, chisel gleaming in one hand. Reynard was afraid she would fall, but no one else seemed worried and they continued to sing.
The sack swayed as she drew one hand along the cord, and within, the nymph shivered violently, as if to toss her free. Grim-faced, Dana brought the chisel down on a part of the upper casing that Reynard could not see, and the chisel’s tip steadied, seeming to find a groove. From her hanging satchel, she drew out a small crystal container, its neck wrapped in a loop of rope. Pushing the satchel aside to view the top of the sack, she wrapped the vial’s rope around her other hand, near the chisel, then let the loop expand and fall around the uppermost bump. The vial now hung a few inches below the bump. With the container thus positioned, she reached back to her belt for the hammer, raised it, and tapped twice the chisel’s ebony handle.
The chisel sank deep.
The sack flexed violently, as if in pain, and Reynard tried to stand aside, but could not break free of the grip of the others. The violent swaying and shivering continued for long minutes, and Dana, steady despite the struggle, smoothed the bump with her hands, as if reassuring the casing’s occupan
t. A brownish liquor flowed from around the chisel, and she filled the vial, capped, and withdrew it. She then backed off along the swaying branch to straddle the trunk and waited. The sack’s contortions subsided into shivers, and it hung still.
“Fresh, it is brown,” Nem said reverently. “In time, it becomes clear.”
Dana crawled backwards along the trunk, joined the rest of her blunters, and held up the bottle, murmuring an oath that echoed their song. Then she slipped the vial into her satchel.
“For town and ally,” she said. “This drake will not attack, and serveth humans now, if they drink or dab her liquor. Three remain on this isle, and maybe three on the other rocks. If we row quickly, there may yet be time.”
“What of the sleeping high one?” MacClain asked.
“If she be merely a high one, and not Vanir!” Sondheim said.
“Not our concern, I hope,” Dana said, looking at Manuel. “Stay close. I might use thee to bargain. And the boy, too.”
Gareth had been surveying the beach below the ridge, and said they should get on with their work. “This be a longer day, for so the island moveth beneath the sun,” he said. “Not long enough, maybe.”
“What season?” Reynard asked as the group clambered across the ridge, grappling from tree to tree to the opposite headland.
“Small matter,” MacClain said. “Time here is what it wants.”
“But how do you know when to fish or farm?” Reynard asked.
Manuel touched his finger to his lips.
The next pair of nymphs had climbed up from the waves together, as if friends, though Dana assured Reynard that nymphs in the sea rarely did other than fight and try to eat each other. Still, these nymphs had capsuled and hung themselves from two thick limbs on a single red-bark tree. The headlands were thick with these quiet trees, and Dana hoped their final drake of this day—if the tattooed man had spoken truly—would hang from one on the last pillar-like island, the island too dangerous to risk earlier.
MacClain and Sondheim forgot their prior disagreements and blunted these two, then handed their vials to Dana.
“No more nymphs here,” Gareth confirmed, after returning from a prickly saunter. “And none on th’other side. Sun’s a-lowering.”
“Did you see her?” Sondheim asked, with a catch in his voice.
“No!” Gareth said, and chuckled like a young raven.
Very strange, gloomy, difficult to absorb . . . And yet here Reynard was, leaping from the boat through the rough waters, tugging a rope to make it easier for Dana to transfer, for she was clearly exhausted.
Manuel and Reynard were told to climb out on the wave-splashed, boulder-strewn base of the final rock to wait. The lone nymph they had seen days before from the galleon had not yet split. MacClain and Gareth, clinging to the pillar high above Manuel, kept watch for swimming nymphs, for not all came up in one season, and not all came from the same batches of eggs at the same time—and of course, the same time could be different in this strange clime for every year, even every month!
It was Nem’s turn for the last nymph. He climbed out on the tree and performed the blunting quickly, drawing and capping another vial of brown fluid before they all returned to the boat and launched through darkening waters.
Reynard had fallen into a deep gloom, but he rowed beside Manuel, whose strength was a match for the others. If they were favored by the Eaters, as Dana and Kaiholo seemed to share the opinion they were, then Manuel was the superior in favor, for unless Reynard was more naïve than he thought he was, and less observant, there had seemed to be some resentment by Kaiholo of Manuel, some feeling that one of the high ones—a powerful and very old one, perhaps equal to this Afrique, Calybo—had shared her time with the old man, as well as himself.
Had that been the one named Guldreth? A high one, just beneath the sky—could such a one be a Vanir, whatever they were?
The waves were more intense now, and the boat moved off from the sharp rocks. The sun burned somber orange above the far mists, and then descended, and twilight took hold of the last of their day.
An hour later, Dana ordered the boat back in, and they began the journey back to the coast. Dana’s satchel was full. She seemed satisfied, but Manuel still had questions.
“How do ye know all nymphs are found?” Manuel asked. “Kaiholo saith there could be five or more.”
Gareth scoffed. “Eaters often tell us in their visits.”
“How? When they come and take their due?”
Gareth looked aside.
“It was not an Eater that told ye, but a man,” Manuel reminded them.
“And was he wrong?” Dana asked. Her head lolled as if she were half asleep.
“And what happened to the first people who arrived, when they found the drakes?” Reynard asked. “How did you all learn —”
“Enough,” Dana murmured.
Sondheim looked toward the distant sound of breakers on the beach. They did not see the galleon again; it had probably sunk, and with it, all hope Reynard had of building another boat to get away from the island. Unless he could purloin one of those currachs, or a boat like this one . . .
“Be not sad,” Nem said with a youthful brightness Reynard could neither understand nor share. “Life is good here. Challenging, but good. And never boring!”
Reynard could make out the glowing of the waves on the beach, and the others pulled the oars with great, grunting strokes, as if the island might try to resist, to slough them off, unless they used their full effort.
Just before the boat’s prow pushed up on sand and shingle, something out in the sea, between the islands, gave a tremendous groan, peaking in an awful shriek, as if a monster had been savaged and left to die.
Reynard cried out. The others leaped over the sides and dragged the boat with Reynard still on a thwart, too terrified to move. Gareth reached around his torso and pulled him out with a single burly arm, then planted him several steps up the beach.
Nem grinned. “Always alive, always a challenge!” the boy said, face flushed. “There are more things here than drakes and Eaters, newcomer,” he said to Reynard. “Many more!”
The Scout’s Tale
* * *
AS EVENING FELL, Maggie carried her lantern under the covered walkway, ignoring the painted beams every twenty feet, as she always did. Still, scalp tingling, she glanced up and saw several with sailing ships, and two illustrating drakes and their offshore breeding rocks. One showed glistening shadows fighting with armored men.
Maggie picked up her pace.
The world outside their isle had been in obvious turmoil for over a thousand years, with pilgrims, refugees, sailors, and wanderers seeking new lands and the hope of new lives, as well as new histories. Zodiako had once been half its present size, with a quarter the population. In the last century, as measured so imperfectly here, many hundreds had arrived on the southwestern shore and found their way into Maggie’s town, and not just fishermen but freebooters—some English, some Portuguese, a few Dutch. Earlier there had been Norse and Danish voyagers—her people—and earlier still, brown, sun-kissed folk from the far Pacific and Asia, who had soon built great canoes and fled to other islands in the ring of Tir Na Nog, islands more friendly to their needs.
But most of those visitors had arrived before Maggie’s time, and according to those who knew and had lived here even then, the migrations had not been nearly so large and frequent. Now, apparently, hundreds of explorers, unsure of whether their motivation was discovery or wealth, were finding ways around the unmapped regions of the greater world, and arriving more and more often on their isle’s shores by the dozens of vessels every year.
The Eaters disposed of most of them, and since these new arrivals were not protected, and were not explicitly part of Hel’s pact, there was nothing the townspeople could do.
At the end of the covered walkway, the parliament building, made of shaped and cut lava, rose ten yards above a green quadrangle dotted with trees brought
from other lands. Trees native to this isle were not much suited to servitude or town life, or any sort of domestication. While trees from the lively woods might not just walk away, as some thought, when early builders had tried to make use of them, before they were cut down, they often died of themselves and took on unpleasant forms, as if they had once been people—and who knew? A thousand years or more before, some of the townspeople might have become trees, and that could happen again, anytime . . . Who could judge? Crafters could imagine anything.
Stepping up to a side entrance, a thick oaken gate mounted in the stone wall, she took a steel key out of the satchel. She inserted it into a great black lock and opened the gate to a hall that ended on steps that led up to the nave of the temple and another locked door that went left to her room in a far basement corner, where drakish matters were discussed. Her chief scout, Anutha, gone for days now, had her own key and had entered a short time earlier—no doubt after rounds at the smallest of the town’s three taverns. Maggie could hear her singing in rugged sweet tones, words she did not quite understand, perhaps in Shelta or Zigrany, languages she knew Anutha was familiar with from her contacts with Travelers.
She opened the door and swung it wide. Anutha sat on a bench behind Maggie’s hewn desk. The scout was thin, in her middle years, but very strong and fit, with short-cut gray hair. Her regular garb was a jerkin and pants of black and brown leather, with shiny gray nymph-shell greaves. She looked up as the door opened, eyes both bleary and weary.
“Good life, Anutha,” Maggie greeted.
“Back to you, doubled,” the scout said.
“What report?” Even three paces away, Maggie could smell the mead on the scout’s breath, like a beehive souring in the rain. Now was not the best time to hand her Kule’s jug. She needed a coherent report. Maggie knew this rugged, dedicated woman had the best eyes of any, but she always looked tired, as if the world’s sights had long since worn down her enthusiasm.
“You have brought something for me, no? Or am I too drunk already? Give it here . . . please.”