He rolled over in his blanket, now dusty and itchy and miserable, and saw that Kaiholo and many of the Travelers were already up and about before the muted sunrise, off to brew tea and make thin soup. Reynard closed his eyes and squeezed them tight, as if to see into the greater darkness behind them—and when he looked again, there was Yuchil, holding out a cup of tea. Widsith had not yet stirred. Reynard sat up, took the cup, and sipped slowly, while she carried over a silken pillow and laid it beside him. She sat with a ladylike sigh.
“Thou still knowest not why thou art here,” she said. “Whilst brave enough in battle, it be not thy calling to fight and kill.”
“No,” he said. “That my family hath never required of me.”
“And yet thine uncle took thee out to sea,” she said.
“To carry food to our ships. We are none of us warriors.”
“Nor, except in extremes, are my people,” Yuchil said. She shook her head. “Some carry swords, and will defend us, but they are not true warriors. They cannot be true warriors unless they are willing to begin wars, and they are not. But do not tell our young men I said that.”
Reynard nodded. “I have been told I come from a long line of tinkers and wanderers,” he said, hoping for better or at least clearer judgment than that from the King of Troy. “Can you tell if that is true?”
“Oh, there are many in England descended from the Rom and other Travelers. The Travelers have, after all, spread far and wide, and proven themselves as essential to kings and queens as any warriors. Not only do they bring the languages that tell the stories kings and queens love to hear, of themselves and others like them, greater still… But those languages convey power and strategy. Before the Travelers reached any of the lands we know, any of the lands that Crafters controlled and shaped, there was only base instinct and forgetting. Now… there is change and suffering and war. Which is better, think’st thou?”
He shook his head. “There must be good and various reasons to live, and they cannot all involve animal loss or animal gain.”
Yuchil’s smile was like a light in the early morning gloom. “Wisedom beyond thy years.”
“Misery breedeth change in hearts and minds. Some call it wisedom.”
“Thou hast remembered some things, Widsith doth tell me. Thou remember’st your grandmother speaking to thee in thy mother’s womb… teaching thee some of her words?”
He nodded.
“If that was given to thee, then something else happened as well. Dost thou remember others who sought thee out and conveyed their words?”
Reynard looked into the silver-haired woman’s youthful eyes, and noticed that Calafi had come closer and was listening. None of the others approached, however—they did not appear to notice them at all. “I remember a man with a white shadow, who spake to me whilst I hid in a hedgerow. And another man, who came whilst I was alone at sea. He had a feathered hat.”
“Thy grandmother would have arranged another ceremony. A completion, as it were, of thy charge and task… a loading of the musket, a fletching of thine arrows.”
Reynard frowned at her. “I do not remember any such ceremony,” he said.
“She would have determined thy quality then, and armed thee with the languages she knew thou wouldst need. Inner languages. Inner qualities that stream now through thy flesh and along thy bones. Dost thou feel them, like cold fire… like the white shadow of the strange man, and the feather in the fancy hat of th’other?”
“I sometimes dream such,” Reynard said. “But the dreams are deep in fog, and I do not remember them when I awaken… so perhaps, no.”
“Time to awaken the dream and make it remember thee, young Fox.”
“How can that happen?”
“It is like the beginning. May I speak to thee of that place, those people, that time?”
Reynard nodded, though he almost dreaded hearing such things, because of the responsibility they might bring.
“Once, people who would become like thee and me were deaf. They heard nothing, and only saw, and that not in colors, but merely in grays and blacks. The man with the white shadow is a presence from those times. He will not leave thee alone, ever.
“The people who would become human felt only the pounding of their feet deep in their bodies, as they walked a dark and silent realm, trying to find themselves and all who would come after. Many such passed into oblivion. They also felt the pump of their blood and the drumbeat of their hearts, and once, one looked up at a bird on a bare tree and thought she heard a thin, light sound. So she put her fingers to her lips and blew out her breath, and heard the whoosh—but also a high whistle—and others around her heard it as well, and so they were no longer deaf, and wondered what that would bring to them. It took a long time to hear the wind and the land around them, but it did happen in time, and the more they listened to the sounds they already knew, the more new sounds became apparent. Once, a woman screamed in pain as she was gnawed by some beast. They heard that, and made it into a word to warn and frighten.
“Another moaned in sickness, and that became another word, and with these new words came new fears and new ideas. It took thousands of years for these peoples to realize they lived on plains of rustling grass, and to know what grass was, and what ate the grass, and what ate the animals and insects that ate the grass, and the more they listened to these animals, and to the birds, the more words they acquired, and went to other groups of people, other tribes, and traded them words. The birds had song, and something like words, and the animals had their sounds, but only these people could grow and trade their languages.”
“I have heard other versions of this before,” Reynard said.
“As is proper, for all histories are personal. The first words became mothers to new tongues, and stories grew. This is when Queen Hel realized these peoples might be important, for they could teach her words, and she might move out of her own silence. And so she was grateful, and elevated them, and set them a long task: to carry languages around the world, but most especially, to build boats and cross the sea, and visit the Tir Na Nog, and provide instruction to the strange beings that had arrived on her creation, and that she herself feared and knew not. For they were shapeless beings, angry in their boredom, and had no tasks, and knew nothing of what they might be or become. And so their power would be a danger to her, she thought, unless she found them a place and things to do… And she felt the first Travelers might help in that way.
“And so it was. Carrying their trade and their words on boats, and on wagons, and on horseback, and on foot, the first Travelers crossed the krater lands where these beings had arrived, and were still arriving, and in fear, met them… trembled at the nightmares they seemed to be… and spake to them.
“And the Crafters—for that was what they would be called—heard the human words, and saw how those who spoke moved and conveyed, their voices carrying meaning as well as story…
“And it was here that they conceived of a string of stories that would move and compel, and help shape form as well as motion. Humans came to call this ‘destiny,’ but also ‘history.’
“Queen Hel watched the Crafters as they took apart some of these visitors and stared deep into their flesh, and there found other languages that defined lives and shapes, and which history would then change. And they saw the potential in that flesh, in those bodies.
“For in the beginning was the word both of sound and flesh. And Hel was pleased, for she saw creation was underway at last, and change upon change would be our greatest story and worthy of many songs.”
Calafi had listened to this with restless fidgets, but now she crawled over to Reynard and grasped his arm, the arm holding the cup, and sloshed it into the dirt. Then she ran her fingers along that arm, in bunches of two, then three, then one, then four.