“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. But 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.