Black Brine

A mammoth hide tells you it wants to rot three days before the water comes through. It starts with the stench of curdled tallow, turning sour and sharp under the lashings, and then the grease goes gray. I smelled it through my sleep, cutting clean through the musk of eighty unwashed clanfolk huddled beneath sodden caribou blankets, and knew my morning was gone. All I wanted was an hour on my patch of dry reindeer moss to work rendered suet into the cracks of my thumbs. Instead, the deck under my knees was already sweating cold grease.

I crawled forward on hands and knees, dragging my willow-bark kit bag through the dark. Around me, the Sun-Hoof tribe lay tangled in wet heaps between the spruce deck-timbers, shivering in their sleep, coughing out the gray phlegm of starving people. The boat was eighty paces from bow to steering oar, fifty prime mammoth skins sewn together over curved birch stringers and whale ribs, but right now it felt no bigger than a trench grave. Every wave that slapped our flank set the leather groaning like an old woman’s hip.

Three hides forward of the mast, where the seam of the forty-second bull skin met the belly hide of the forty-third, the pitch was lifting.

A blister of black water bubbled along the joint. It didn't spray. Spray would mean a clean puncture, an easy fix with an ivory peg and a mallet. This was a slow, sickening weep. The hide had pulled tight against the cross-stitch, taut as a snare, and out from the gut-holes oozed a greasy sludge the color of bruised meat.

I leaned down and touched the puddle with the calloused side of my index finger, bringing the moisture to my tongue.

Bitter. Salt, dead winter moss, and the stink of rotten marrow. The gut-thread hadn't snapped yet, which was a mercy, but the leather itself had shrunk from three weeks of freezing brine. It had stiffened into stone, shrinking away from the pitch and dragging the seam open like a split lip. If the skin pulled another thumb's width, the thread would saw right through the punch-holes, and forty barrels of deep ocean would drop into our sleeping blankets before the watch could scream.

"You're leaking, you old hog," I muttered to the skin. It did not answer back, though the deck shivered beneath my shins.

I turned back toward the center of the coracle, where the spruce mast rose into the low fog.

Lashed to the timber with braided walrus ropes, the White Stag stood braced on his cloven hooves. His silver-white coat was matted with salt spray and soot, his great crown of velvet antlers scraping the hide rafters whenever the hull pitched. He did not thrash. Spirits of the great inland forests didn't thrash; they simply endured, their milky, weeping eyes staring at the damp flooring. From deep inside his chest came a steady, vibrating hum—a sound like a stone rolling inside a clay pot.

Whenever that sound rolled through the timbers, the mammoth skins stayed whole, and the vast, blind things swimming three fathoms down kept their teeth to themselves. But this morning, the hum had a hitch in it. A dry catch, like an elder trying to clear winter gravel from his throat.

Elder Knotrow sat huddled against the stag’s front hooves, his skinny shanks wrapped in shedding red-fox furs. The old man was rocking in place, holding a dried mammoth-tail whisker and muttering prayers to mountain peaks we had left behind two moons ago.

"Knotrow," I barked, hauling myself upright by a guy-rope. "Drop the prayers and open the fat-jars."

The old man blinked up through crusty gray lashes, trembling so hard his jaw rattled. "Hidecombe... we must pray. If we disturb the sacred silence, the ancestors will turn their faces..."

"The ancestors aren't the ones taking on water," I snapped, stepping over two sleeping children wrapped in ragged seal coats. "Listen to the beast's chest, Knotrow. Hear that gravel? His hum is catching. His song is faltering, and the forty-second seam is already weeping black brine because of it. Admit it, old man—the god is flagging, and if I don't caulk the leather, we drown before noon. Open the fat-jars. Half a bladder of rendered seal grease and three handfuls of tallow. Now."

Knotrow bowed his head, his frail shoulders caving in as the truth left him. "You have the right of it, stitcher," he croaked. "His breath grows thin. The sea feels it."

Knotrow pulled his furs tighter around his collar, looking everywhere except my face. He reached behind his rump and brought out a dried pig-bladder. It was flat as a birch leaf, brittle and wrinkled. He turned it upside down and shook it.

Nothing came out but two dried bone buttons and a pinch of yellow dirt.

"That's the last one," Knotrow whispered. "The boys scraped the tallow jars four nights ago. They boiled the scrapings with dried kelp for the weeping babes."

My stomach gave a sharp, hollow cramp. "You boiled my caulking tallow? Who gave that order?"

"I did," a voice rasped from the gloom behind the mast.

Flintwick stepped around the stag's rump. My nephew was twenty winters old, but hunger had carved his cheeks until his jawbones looked like split river stones. He carried his six-foot ash spear in his left hand, and his right held an oily river flint. He wore no furs on his chest—just a vest of boiled rawhide that hung loose over his sharp ribs. His eyes were wide, glassy, and fixed entirely on the stag’s throat.

"The children were chewing their own sleeves, Aunt," Flintwick said. His voice was thin and dry as rustling grass. "You can't caulk a boat with dead men. We need our blood warm."

"You can't sail a dead skin, you stupid whelp," I said, stepping toward him until my chin was level with his breastbone. "If that seam tears, your blood will be freezing at the bottom of the trench before your empty belly has time to ache. Fetch me whatever whale fat is left in the stern lockers."

"There is no fat in the stern," Flintwick said. He took a slow breath, his chest heaving under the rawhide vest. "There is no fat anywhere on the Mor-Kahn. Just eighty skeletons waiting for you to sew them into a floating shroud."

He raised the flint. Slowly, with deliberate spite, he drew the sharp stone along the fire-hardened tip of his spear. The scrape was loud, harsh, and grating.

The White Stag flinched. The great white ears pinned back against his skull, and the humming in his chest broke into a wet, rattling gasp. The wood under our feet went dead and cold, losing that subtle, living buzz that kept the hull supple. Ten feet forward, I heard the faint, terrifying snip of a single strand of gut-thread snapping under tension.

"Put that flint down," I whispered, the hair on my forearms standing stiff. "You don't sharpen bone or stone near the spirit. You know the taboo, boy."

Flintwick didn't lower his hands. He took one step closer to the mast, his gaze locked onto the stag’s jugular, where the pale skin pulsed with warm, red life.

"He's not a spirit," Flintwick murmured, his knuckles white around the ash shaft. "He's three hundred pounds of venison on the hoof."

The young hunters huddled in the dark behind him stirred. Eyes gleamed in the gloom—starving, yellowed eyes, watching the spear tip, watching the stag, watching to see if the old woman with the awl would step aside.

I gripped the bone handle of my curved awl in my palm, feeling the cold ivory bite into my split skin. "You touch that throat, Flintwick, and you won't live long enough to choke on the meat."