A Flask of Deep Marrow

How much pumice could an empty stomach plow before the knees turned to tallow? Gijsbert van der Meulen planted his heels into the black shale of Braam-Duin, sank his hips eight inches, and reached out to catch eighty tons of charging mutton. He did not want the beast dead on the flat rock. A carcass dropped in the dust bruised the prime shoulder clod, cracked the ribs, and ruined the subterranean fat cap before a single kettle could be stoked. He wanted the animal whole, hot, and hoisted.

The alpha ram struck him like an iron warehouse falling off a crane.

A shockwave of powdered sulfur puffed outward from their contact point, scouring the lichen off the surrounding boulders. Gijsbert caught the twin horn bases in the crooks of his elbows. The bone there was thicker than beer casks, ridged like frozen cordage and pulsing with volcanic heat that blistered the calluses on his forearms. The monster’s skull drove straight into the center of his chest.

Stone screamed. Gijsbert’s ox-hide boots sheared through the top layer of basalt, carving two smoking trenches thirty yards long across the shelf. The ram’s cloven hooves hammered the terrace, each strike kicking up clods of fused slag the size of bread loaves. It lowered its neck, grunted a wet column of yellow gas, and shoved.

Gijsbert braced his jaw against the coarse wool of its brow. \"Lean into it,\" he muttered through his teeth, his spit spattering against the horn ridges. \"Plenty of clover in that rump. Solid feed. A touch stringy around the flank, but nothing five hours of steam won't soften.\"

Then his stomach made a sound like an empty copper boiler tumbling down a well.

A hollow ache ripped through his gut, spreading toward his ribs. Three days of fasting had stripped the marrow reserves out of his thighs. The mass-expansion qi that kept his ribs from turning to gravel flickered like a candle in a gale. His left knee dipped three inches. The tendon behind his ankle gave a dry, splintering pop.

Without broth in the boiler, wrestling logic was merely arithmetic waiting to kill him.

\"Up, you fat bastard!\" Femke's shout carried over the roar of the fumaroles.

In the upper corner of his vision, forty yards above, Gijsbert caught the blurred shape of Femke leaning over the terrace rim beside the boiling cauldron. Reinier’s panicked shouting cut through the roar of the steam, followed by the metallic clang of a copper vessel being yanked from the oxen's supply basket.

\"Catch, ox-head!\" Femke screamed.

A glint of metal arced down through the sulfur smoke, spinning end over end across the open gorge.

Gijsbert could not raise his chin to track it. If he released either horn, the alpha ram would spear its crown through his belly and toss his carcass into the liquid fire below. As a tremor ran through Gijsbert's shoulders, the beast dug its rear hooves into a volcanic crack, dropped its massive snout, and surged forward to crush him against the terrace wall.

Gijsbert shifted his right heel into an ancient split in the basalt floor. Instead of resisting the ram’s horizontal drive, he pivoted his hips two inches to the left, taking the beast's momentum onto his latissimus and twisting the crown downward. The creature’s left horn scraped across the stone with a sound like sharpening sickles, the sudden redirection throwing its eighty-ton flank off balance and buying Gijsbert half a second of slack.

He whipped his left arm free from the horn crook.

The copper flask dropped out of the haze. Gijsbert snatched it cleanly out of the air by the neck, brought the mouth of the vessel to his teeth, and bit the tallow-sealed cork clean off.

The steam that vented from the rim carried the concentrated essence of six-year-old oxtails, dried star-anise, and roasted mountain leeks.

He tipped his head back and drained the vessel in four violent gulps.

The broth hit his stomach like liquid bronze poured into a furnace.

It was thick, salty, and dense with collagen, reduced until it clung to the roof of his mouth. The moment the gelatin dissolved across his belly lining, the caloric debt snapped shut. Heat exploded through his core, rushing down the major channels of his thighs and up the broad muscles of his spine. The gray pallor vanished from his skin. The hollow sunken lines beneath his cheekbones filled out with crimson vitality. His mass-expansion qi flared to life, not as a whisper, but as a roaring backdraft of pure combustion.

His boots stopped sliding.

The alpha ram threw its head back to toss him, but Gijsbert’s left hand was already back on the horn. His fingers sank into the bronze-veined ridges, crushing through the outer keratin until bone dust leaked between his knuckles.

\"Better,\" Gijsbert breathed, the steam venting from his nose now smelling distinctly of pepper and bay. \"Much better.\"

The beast grunted, realizing its forward charge had encountered an unyielding cliff. It strained its hind legs, muscles bunching under thick hide, trying to shake the man from its neck.

Gijsbert did not let it pull away. He dropped his weight directly onto the monster's cervical vertebrae, threading both forearms beneath the chin and behind the massive horn curls in an ironclad underhook. His latissimus dorsi flared, broad as cellar doors, locking the beast's snout against his collarbone. The alpha ram thrashed, but every ounce of its eighty-ton mass was anchored to Gijsbert's grounded stance.

A high whistle cut through the cloud bank overhead.

Out of the milky fog, a barrage of alchemical ordnance descended. Deprived of their optical flare-box on the lower ridges, the catapult crews aboard the hovering imperial scow were blind-firing into the ravine, flinging heavy sulfur-naphtha barrels to blanket the terrace in liquid fire.

An iron-banded barrel smashed into the terrace ten paces away, bursting into a geyser of sticky green flame and charred staves. Another struck the rim of the upper shelf, scorching the basalt lip and showering Femke's kettle with greasy soot.

\"Fools!\" Femke's voice echoed from above, followed by the metallic clang of her skewer batting away a burning hoop. \"Mind the seasoning! If you drip one drop of pitch into that stock, I will skin every gunner on that scow with a paring knife!\"

Down on the lower shelf, Gijsbert didn't flinch. A glowing splash of burning sulfur caught his shoulder blade and sputtered out against his dense skin, leaving only a streak of gray ash.

The alpha ram bucked violently beneath him, panicked by the raining fire and the iron clamp around its skull.

Gijsbert tightened his grip, digging his chin into the crown of the beast's head until the horns groaned under the leverage. He felt the animal's balance tipping toward its right foreleg. The line was open. The trajectory toward the drop was set. All he needed was one clean pivot.

Gijsbert turned his eyes toward the upper terrace, where the steam from the six-ton pot rose like an inviting hearth fire.

\"Keep that fire roaring, Femke!\" Gijsbert roared back, his voice booming across the canyon louder than the exploding barrels. \"The meat is tenderized, and I am bringing it home!\"