The Split Skin

Kazuma had forty paces of ladder between his embalming bench and the open air, and beneath every rung the hull was vibrating like a saw blade biting into green timber. How long could five inches of seasoned cedar hold against jaws that cracked river turtles for marrow? He had left Prince Sukenari cold upon the bier with his ribs pried open, the salt-wash tub rocking as the whole bottom of the barge began to hum.

\"Move, old man!\" Teruo shouted from the rungs above. The sentry climbed with his spear clenched between his teeth, bronze butt-cap clattering against the cedar uprights. Dried silt rained down through the floorboards of the commoners' hold, powdering Kazuma's hair and stinging his eyes.

The middle deck was thick with smoke from the stagnant smothers, but topside the heat struck them like a wet cloth over the face. The sun was drowning behind the gray reed-beds, turning the dry mud flats into a crust of scorched violet. In the center of the upper deck stood the ward-drum, its squat bronze belly mounted on iron trestles.

The split ran four feet across the oxhide drumhead, clean and jagged, like lightning cut into yellow parchment. The bronze hoop had cracked down one side, snapping the tension so the oxhide tore back into two curled flaps of dead skin. Without the drum's continuous pound to shake the marsh silt, the hull had ceased to sing.

Beside the mast-stump, Botan sat cross-legged on a coiled mooring cable. He held his eleven-string harp across his lap, plucking a sluggish, off-key sequence with an ivory plectrum. His silk tunic was stained with brine around the armpits, but his long fingernails remained scrubbed and white.

\"The skin surrendered,\" Botan said, not looking up from his pegs. He gave the lowest string a vicious twist. \"Ox didn't like the desert air. Can't blame the beast. I don't care for it either.\"

\"Get up!\" Teruo lunged onto the deck, kicking the harp case aside. He jabbed a soot-crusted finger toward the deck seams. \"Listen to them! They're past the copper sheath! They're in the wood!\"

From below decks came a continuous, wet chewing, muffled by fifty paces of dead air but rising in pitch until the soles of Kazuma's sandals tingled with friction. It sounded like a thousand sickles reaping dry rice at harvest.

Sayano emerged from the awning of the royal pavilion. Her trailing robes of imperial mourning were shredded at the hem, pinned to her waist with split willow twigs to keep the silk out of the grime. In her hands she carried a brass censer that smoked with rank pine gum.

\"The prince must have his quiet,\" she said, her voice dry as salt. \"The rasping reaches all the way to the third cabin. His soul will stray if the silence stays broken.\"

\"His soul has no ears, lady, and neither do the things under the keel,\" Kazuma said. He limped across the hot planks to the base of the mast, dropping his tool basket with an iron clang. \"We need hide. Tough hide, cured in lye. Where are the spare water-skins?\"

\"Empty,\" Teruo spat. \"Slit down the bellies three days ago to scrape out the tallow. You ate the mush yourself, old man.\"

Kazuma's gaze cut across the awning. Behind Sayano hung the great funerary tapestries: four broad banners of double-woven silk, boiled in linseed and stiffened with lacquer to repel rain during the dead court's voyage downriver. The central banner bore the coiled gold-thread form of the Water Dragon, its whiskers braided with silver wire.

\"Take down the dragon,\" Kazuma said, pointing a pitch-stained awl at the pavilion.

Sayano stepped in front of the hanging ropes, the brass censer swinging like an iron fist. \"That is the fourth nephew's imperial standard. The crest belongs to the Ministry of Rites. Touch a strand of that weave and I will have Teruo take your fingers.\"

\"Teruo's spear won't float when the bilge splits,\" Kazuma replied. He did not raise his voice. He took three paces toward the pavilion and drew his hooked skiving knife from his leather sleeve. \"The lacquered weave is six plies thick. It does not stretch under water, and it will not split under an iron mallet.\"

\"It is consecrated,\" she hissed. Her face was smudged with lampblack, her knuckles white around the censer's chains. \"It guided the court through twelve river bends. It belongs to the dynasty.\"

\"The dynasty is salted in the dark below your feet,\" Botan murmured from the mooring coil. He plucked a shrill, sour dissonance that made Teruo wince. \"Take the dragon, Kazuma. The beast has four claws and none of them ever walked through dried mud. He might as well earn his keep on a drum.\"

Sayano turned her glare on the musician, her lips peeling back over yellowing teeth, but Teruo was already moving. The sentry did not look at her. He set his spear against the pavilion rail, stepped past her shoulder, and severed the hemp halliards with one slash of a belt-blade.

The banner came down with a heavy, rustling thud, thick as leather.

Sayano gave a ragged gasp, but she did not strike. Her hand dropped, the censer swinging low until its hot belly scorched a dark ring into the deck cedar.

Kazuma knelt over the banner at once. \"Teruo, bring the pitch pot from the deck brazier. Sayano, take the far hem. Pull until the embroidery groans. If the grain slants, the mallet will tear it on the second strike.\"

For three heartbeats the woman did not move. Then she dropped the censer into a sand bucket, fell to her knees in her ruined robes, and seized the heavy gold-bordered silk with both hands.

Kazuma's thumbs worked with practiced speed across the ruptured drumhead. He sliced away the curled margins of the split oxhide, leaving a rough diamond of taut skin still lashed to the bronze frame. He smeared thick, boiling pine pitch along the raw edges, the pungent reek of resin searing his nostrils and blotting out the rot of the marsh.

He laid the folded silk across the gap. \"Pull, woman!\"

Sayano threw her weight back, her tendons standing out like cords in her neck. The lacquered weave stretched with a dry crackle.

Kazuma did not simply bind the fabric down; he drove four bronze bodkins through the doubled silk and into the lashing holes of the kettle's flange, catching the underlying hemp cordage in a mortuary lock-stitch. It was the same knot he used to secure the jawbones of dead lords when the throat ligaments collapsed. With an iron fid, he levered each loop, twisting the hemp until the fabric pulled rigid as slate across the bronze mouth.

When he struck the center with his palm, the drum barked. It was not the deep, sonorous boom of thick oxhide, but a flat, sharp crack that rang through the iron trestles like an anvil.

\"Mallet,\" Kazuma ordered.

Teruo thrust the lead-weighted wooden mallet into his grip.

Kazuma drew back his arm and drove the mallet into the silk.

Crack-thum.

The vibration traveled up his forearm, rattling his elbow and jarring the loose teeth in his jaw. The bronze kettle hummed, a low, vicious drone that poured over the bulwarks and into the silt below.

Crack-thum. Crack-thum.

Kazuma struck with the steady, unhurried cadence of a carpenter driving pegs. Beside him, Sayano leaned against the bronze rim, chest heaving, her fingers blackened by hot pitch. Topside, the air seemed to contract.

Beneath the deck planks, the frenzied harvesting sound hesitated.

The wet rasping of jaws slowed to an irregular scraping. Then came a series of dull, subterranean thumps as heavy bodies dropped from the bottom timbers back into the cold slime of the marsh trench. Within fifty strokes, the surface gnawing along the hull ceased entirely.

Teruo exhaled, lowering his spear point to the deck. \"They're backing off.\"

\"They don't like the bronze,\" Botan said, though his fingers never stopped testing the harp strings. \"Gives them a headache. Almost as bad as mine.\"

Kazuma handed the mallet to the sentry. \"Keep the count. One strike every three breaths. No faster, or the silk will heat and soften the pitch.\"

\"Where are you going?\" Teruo asked, his grip tightening on the handle.

\"To see what they took before we shut the door.\"

Kazuma gathered his knife and his grease-lamp, leaving the steady thrum of the patched ward behind. He descended the three ladders into the stifling belly of the barge.

The commoners' hold was quiet now, smelling only of damp cedar and stale tallow. On their shelves, the wrapped dead lay undisturbed in their gray cocoons. Further down, in the lowest bilge, the air turned freezing and foul with stagnant marsh water.

Kazuma held the grease-lamp low, stepping along the narrow inspection catwalk above the bilge keel. The lantern light caught a smear of wetness on the third cedar plank up from the garboard strake.

It was not bilge water.

In the center of the five-inch timber was a clean, circular hole, three fingers wide, bored through the wood as neatly as if an iron auger had turned in it. Around the opening, the cedar was soft and pale, stripped of pitch.

Dripping from the rim was a pool of thick, gray slime, bubbling faintly in the lantern light.

From deep within the black darkness of the dry ballast stones beneath the floor, something gave a wet, clicking chirp.