Meat and Myth

The black shape slid back into the deep trench, but the hull remembered the weight. Mammoth hides do not forget being bent inward against the spruce ribs; they groan like sick cows when the water lets them spring back.

All around the center deck, eighty people lay tangled beneath frost-stiffened caribou pelts, listening to the brine splash in the bilge. Children whimpered into their mothers' collars. Nobody stood up. To stand up in an eighty-pace leather coracle after a beast brushes the keel is to admit you have nowhere to jump.

I wiped greasy sea-silt from my palms onto my wool leggings and stood over seam forty-two. My grandmother's ivory toggle stayed wedged behind the spruce brace, dripping slow, oily black drops, but the leather had settled. It was holding. For a little while, at least.

Then Elder Knotrow crawled out from his nest near the mast foot.

His reindeer robe was shedding bald patches, trailing frozen fringe across the slimy deck boards. In his left hand he gripped his carved birch prayer-staff, hung with dried mammoth molars that clicked like pebbles in a dry brook. He smelled of old urine, stale smoke, and the sour curd of empty guts.

"To the mast," Knotrow rasped, his cracked lips smearing blood on his gray beard. "All of you, lift your faces to the White One. The deep waters test our humility. When our fathers fled the burning mountain spruce, the Stag ran before us. He parted the gray ice. He gave us his breath."

He raised the birch stick and began the old chant of the Sun-Hoof, rattling the ivory teeth against the wood. His voice was thin as alder shavings. It fluttered against the low clouds and died two paces out over the freezing sea.

Beside the mast, lashed with four turns of greased walrus cord, the White Stag dropped its head. The beast's knees shook. Its coat had gone the color of dirty snow where sea-spray had crusted its wool, and its dark eyes were milky around the rims. When Knotrow rattled the teeth, the stag did not lift its horns; it let out a wet, rattling sigh that shook its ribs.

"Shut your teeth, Knotrow," I called out, wading through two inches of icy bilge toward the mast. My boots were soaked through, every toe numb and hard as gravel. "You rattle those dead bones in his face again and his knees will buckle. If he falls on his side, his lung will press flat, and the song dies entirely."

"He is the soul of the clan, Hidecombe," Knotrow wheezed, turning watery eyes toward me. "The ancestors listen when the staff sings."

"The ancestors are two moons behind us, buried under volcanic ash," I said. "And unless they plan to climb down from the gray sky with bailers in their hands, they won't pump forty buckets of black water out of our bilge."

A snort answered me from the shadows by the gunwale.

Flintwick stepped into the clearing around the mast. The terror that had turned his knees to water when the sea-beast scraped our hides was gone, burned away by the raw fever in his cheeks. Behind him came five hunters—Burl, Cornet, and three of the younger spearmen from the eastern ridge. Each carried his fire-hardened ash spear, the stone points freshly lashed with dry sinew.

Flintwick held a stiff sealskin pouch in his left hand. He didn't look at Knotrow's prayer-staff. He didn't look at me. He walked straight to the ring of stones where we had once burned spruce twigs before the wood gave out, and he turned the pouch upside down.

White splinters clattered against the wet timber.

They were rib bones, shin fragments, and knuckle joints from the last three seals we had dragged aboard twenty days back. Every single bone was scraped clean to the yellow pith. Not a scrap of gristle clung to the edges. Several of the larger shins were split lengthwise, hammered open with river cobbles so desperate tongues could lick the frozen marrow out of the core.

"That is what we have left, Elder," Flintwick said. His voice was flat, carrying easily over the slap of the gray waves against the coracle. "Forty-two scraped bones. Three handfuls of black bladder wrack drying on the forward thwarts. And eighty bellies chewing on their own spit."

Knotrow drew back his staff, trembling. "The sacred herd—"

"Girth-widow's smallest girl died before the noon tide," Flintwick cut in. He stepped on a seal rib, crushing the brittle marrow shell beneath his boot heel. "Her breath simply stopped. Sive cannot feel her feet. Seven men forward are coughing brown foam. You want us to sing mountain hymns to an animal that does nothing but stand there and leak tears onto our feet?"

A murmur rose from the huddles under the pelts. Faces poked out from the damp fur hoods—pinched cheeks, dark hollows under starving eyes, mothers clutching bundles of rags that barely moved.

"He keeps the hull whole!" Knotrow shouted, his voice cracking into a high, childish screech. "The song holds the salt from the stitching! You saw the beast—you felt the belly of the abyss press against the floor!"

"The beast came because your god is failing," Flintwick said, taking another step. The tip of his ash spear hovered six inches from the spruce mast. "Look at him. He's starving faster than we are. When he drops dead on his side from famine, what happens to your song then? We drown with empty bellies. If we bleed him now, eighty people eat hot meat before nightfall. We boil his marrow. We drink the fat. We grease the hides with his lard."

The five young spearmen fanned out behind him, their shoulders hunched, eyes fixed hungrily on the stag's white flank. One of them, Cornet, licked his lips. His tongue was gray from lack of fresh water.

I pushed between them, planting my heels on the wet spruce decking right in front of the stag's shoulder.

"You're a clever boy, Flintwick," I said, letting my bone awl slide into my grip from my belt loop. The point caught the dull gray light off the sea. "You have the mind of a weasel in an empty grain pit. You think mammoth skin is like your mother's apron? You think it stays together because you ask it nicely?"

Flintwick glared at me, his knuckles white around the ash shaft. "Step aside, Aunt."

"You cut that throat," I said, pointing the awl straight at the center of his chest, "and his breath stops. You get three days of meat. You fill your guts with hot tallow and think you're kings of the tundra. And while you're sleeping off your grease-sleep, the salt water gets into the seams. Without his drone humming through the laths, the mammoth skin rots to wet moss in two days' time. The stitches dissolve like spit in a cup."

I tapped the floor with the iron tip of my boot.

"The beast that scraped your ankles just now? It isn't blind, and it isn't stupid. It stays down in the dark trenches because that creature at the mast hurts its ears. You turn him into cold stew, and sixty fathoms of teeth will come up through the floor before your belly even finishes digesting his liver. You want to eat? Fine. Butcher him. Then prepare to chew on the seabed."

Silence fell over the deck, broken only by the slosh of bilge in the belly and the low, whistling rattle of the stag's breath.

Flintwick's chest rose and fell in jagged heaves. He looked at the five hunters behind him. Cornet looked down at the crushed seal bones, his spear point dipping toward the floor. The memory of the black bulk pressing upward through the translucent skin was still too fresh in their muscles.

Flintwick swallowed hard. He knew he didn't have all eighty of them yet. The elders and the mothers were staring at the floor beneath their boots, terrified of the black water beneath the hides.

He turned back to the mast. With a sudden, savage grunt, he brought his ash spear down, striking the stone point hard into the spruce mast deck-ring.

The timber cracked. The spear stood upright, quivering between the stag's hooves.

The White Stag shuddered, its breath catching in its throat before settling back into that fragile, whistling hum.

"Until dawn," Flintwick said, pointing a finger at Knotrow and then at me. "We give your god until first light. If he brings a herd of seals to our gunwales, or if the gray fog parts and shows us shore, we let him stand. But if the sun comes up over empty brine, the spear goes into his throat. We will eat his flesh, Aunt. And you can sew your boat with what is left."

He turned and strode back toward the bow, his hunters following in his wake.

Knotrow collapsed against the mast, sobbing into the frayed sleeves of his coat, clutching his silent birch staff.

I didn't offer the old man a hand. I crouched by the mast, placed my palm against the stag's trembling, bony ribcage, and felt the faint warmth of its slowing heart.

Until dawn. One night to find another way to keep eighty starving fools from sinking to the bottom of the world.