The Stiff Sinew

Salt crust had glued my eyelashes together by the time I dragged my knees back to the forty-second hide. The wind off the gray swells did not blow in gusts; it pressed flat and steady against the curved gunwale, tasting of dead kelp and glacial slush.

Behind me, Flintwick had not moved away from the mast. He leaned against the spruce spar with three of his spearmen, their shoulders touching for heat, hollow faces angled toward the White Stag. None of them had lowered their ash shafts. They watched the animal breathe. The beast's ribs rose and sank under dirty white wool, each exhalation sending that thin, sorrowful drone through the timbers beneath our feet.

It was a sound like wind through a hollow marrow bone. It kept the black eels from chewing the stitches, Knotrow always said. But right now, the seam three hides forward of the mast did not care about songs. It cared about tension.

Black water oozed over my knuckles when I jammed my palms against the overlap.

"Two pairs of hands," I called over my shoulder, not shouting, because shouting wasted warm breath and the spray drank every syllable anyway. "Flintwick. Bring a lever-pole and three fathoms of walrus cord."

Nobody stirred.

I wiped a crust of frozen spray from my mouth and looked back. Flintwick stayed glued to the spruce spar. The frost had turned his coarse black fringe into needles above his yellow brow. His fingers remained locked around his ash spear, knuckles swollen purple from chilblains.

"You heard me, Spear-boss," I said. "The overlap is curling. If the outer margin lifts another thumb's width, the brine will peel the skin from the ash lath. Then we can all test how well our fur coats float."

Flintwick spat onto the spruce planking between his boots. The spit froze into a gray marble before it reached the bilge.

"Let the lath groan, Aunt," he said. His voice was thin and dry, like dry moss crushed in an apron. "My boys haven't had a shred of seal-flesh since the third moon-quarter. Burl's knees tremble when he squats. If we haul on your wet walrus cords, our bellies will tie themselves in knots we cannot untie."

"Your bellies won't matter when twenty cubits of arctic water fill your gullets," I told him.

"You talk about the hull," he said, taking half a step toward me, the spear tip drooping just an inch toward the sodden deck. "You always talk about the hull. The hull doesn't weep when you cut it. Look at the people huddled under the skins aft. Girth-widow's girl hasn't opened her eyes since sunrise. We need hot grease in their throats before the night freeze takes them. One hindquarter. Just the left flank. That beast has four legs. He can stand on three and sing his little hymn."

The stag shuddered at the word hindquarter. Its throat hitched. The drone in the deck boards broke for a fraction of a heartbeat, skipping like a flat pebble on ice, and beneath my boots the spruce ribs groaned in sympathy.

"He isn't a mountain sheep, you fool," I said. I pulled my coiled sinew from the grease-pouch at my waist. The gut was stiff as dried willow twig. To make it bite into mammoth leather, it needed warmth. I shoved a span of the twisted gut between my molars, working the foul, tallow-starved cord with my tongue and gums, using my own saliva and body heat to soften the fibers. It tasted of old tallow, urine-tan, and stale salt. My cracked gums stung where the brine dug in.

Flintwick watched me chew the string. His face pulled tight with disgust.

"You're an old dog chewing a dead harness," he muttered. "You'd rather drown us all with an awl in your hand than let us eat."

"If you don't haul this hide," I spoke around the wad of sinew in my cheek, "you won't need to worry about starvation. You'll be feed for the blind worms that crawl the sea floor."

He didn't move. None of the three hunters behind him moved either. They stood in the sleet, shivering in their ragged reindeer coats, their eyes dead and fixed on the stag's white flank. From their rigid stances, they were hoarding every drop of blood in their muscles for the butchery waiting once the light failed.

I spat the softened sinew into my palm. Arguing with an empty belly is like hammering copper cold; you only break your tool.

"Useless meat-eaters," I muttered under my breath.

I crawled to the port gunwale on hands and knees, my knees leaving wet black ovals in the slush covering the mammoth hides. The hull here was constructed of bull skins from the great tundra herds, tanned in smoke and whale oil seven summers ago. But the salt was relentless. It leached the oil from the grain, leaving the skin pale, brittle, and tight as a drumhead. The forty-second hide had shrunk by two fingers. The single remaining strand of gut-thread along the lower seam was drawn taut as a bowstring, humming with a high, wet whine.

If I tried to punch through both hides without mechanical purchase, the awl would slip or the margin would split along the needle holes.

I reached into my side bag and hauled out my toggles. Three walrus-ivory pins, thick as a man's thumb, tapered at both ends and notched in the belly. They were older than Flintwick, carved by my grandmother when our tribe still hunted the frozen river mouths.

I found a gap between the spruce framing and the outer hide. Bracing my left boot against a curved rib, I wedged my shoulder under the cross-brace. The cold timber bit through my sheepskin vest, bruising the bone. I took the ivory toggle in my teeth, gripped the edge of the shrinking forty-second hide with an iron-tipped jaw-tweezer, and hauled backward with the full weight of my spine.

My breath tore through my teeth in white puffs. The leather fought back. It was stiff, stubborn, cured in old smoke, resisting my weight with all the malice of an unyielding beast. My bad thumb throbbed where the nail had blackened from last moon's pinch.

"Come on, you dead sow," I grunted through my clenched jaw.

The hide stretched half an inch. The gap between the margins narrowed. With my free right hand, I whipped the ivory toggle into the notch behind the rib, jamming it flat against the spruce frame. I threw my hip hard against the wood to lock the wedge in place.

The toggle held.

The tension transferred from the failing gut-thread to the walrus ivory. The high-pitched whine of the snapping seam dropped to a dull, wooden creak. The black brine stopped gushing; now it only wept in thin, greasy drops down the curvature of the belly hide.

I wiped sweat and salt spray from my forehead with the back of my raw wrist. One toggle wouldn't save us in a gale, but it bought an hour. It gave me a margin to sew.

I picked up the curved awl, its bone grip slick with cold grease, and knelt over the overlap.

Before I could drive the point into the first puncture, the wind died.

The sudden quiet was worse than the gale. The canvas stays slackened. The Mor-Kahn rolled slowly onto its port beam, wallowing in the gray trough of a swell. From the center of the coracle, the White Stag's song didn't rise; it thinned, dropping to a breathless whistle that sounded horribly like an infant gasping for air.

Then the water beneath us darkened.

The bottom of the Mor-Kahn was translucent in the gray noon light—three layers of shaved mammoth skin, scraped thin enough that shadows below the boat showed through as pale, watery silhouettes.

Directly beneath my knees, where the forty-second hide met the spruce rib, the pale light vanished.

A black bulk rose from the trench. It was wider than three mammoth carcasses lashed flank to flank, slick and featureless, gliding with sickening smoothness against the outer skin. Something rubbery and cold scraped along the exterior leather, right across the newly toggled seam.

The leather buckled inward beneath my palms. The pressure lifted my shins two inches off the deck boards.

Flintwick let out a choked cry, his boots slipping on the frozen slime as he stumbled toward the center of the boat, his ash spear forgotten in his white fist.

"Aunt," he whispered, all the arrogance scrubbed from his raw throat. "What is under the skin?"

I didn't answer him. I pressed my palm against the weeping hide and felt the massive, freezing pulse of something that had not heard the stag's song in far too long.