The First Cut

A split seam never announces itself with a shout; it begins with the sound of fat parting from gristle, quiet enough to hide under a sleeping child’s breath. I heard that sound three hours after dusk, while I sat wedged between the spruce framing ribs, scraping dried salt off the eye of my spare bone needle. I wanted three hours of dry sleep on the willow thwarts before Flintwick’s dawn came due, but the Mor-Kahn was already answering a shift in the sea that the hunters were too hungry to notice.

The coracle lifted on a black swell, hung in the freezing sleet for a breath, and slammed down into the trough with a jar that loosened teeth.

Then came the tear. It was not a pop of cordage, but the dull, wet rip of mammoth hide giving up its grip on the wood.

Ten paces forward of the spruce mast, the lower margin of the forty-second hide pulled away from the framing rib. My grandmother’s ivory toggle held firm in the upper seam, but the frozen salt crust had turned the leather beside it brittle as dry slate. The surge caught the loosened lip and peeled it back three fingers wide. Black brine, heavy with grease-scum and slush, punched through the gap, spilling across the floorboards in an icy torrent.

In the dark belly of the hull, seventy-nine people woke at once.

A child shrieked near the middle thwarts. Mothers scrambled backward into the pile of reindeer pelts, clawing at each other in the dark to get their boots out of the rising slush. Two spearmen scrambled toward the gunwale, shouting that the bottom had dropped out, their big ash shafts banging uselessly against the spruce ribs. They were mighty men when a caribou stood trapped in a snowdrift, but six inches of freezing brine around their moccasins turned them into squawking gulls.

"Sit down, you brainless calves!" I roared, throwing my scrapings aside. "Sit down or you'll tilt the thwarts and put the gunwales under!"

They didn't listen. Panic on an eighty-pace hide boat moves like tallow on hot slate. People lunged toward the center deck, crowding the mast where the White Stag stood tethered. The beast took one look at the rush of wild eyes and flailing spears, threw its head against the walrus cords, and let out a shrill, whistling cry.

The low, humming drone that kept the sea quiet broke into three jagged gasps.

Beneath the deck boards, the ocean responded instantly. A heavy shudder ran through the keel laths, like a whale rubbing its barnacled back against a sunken ledge. The water in the bilge surged white at the edges.

If the forward flap peeled three fingers wider, the whole forty-second hide would unzip from the bow timber. The sea would hollow us out in the space of twenty heartbeats.

I didn't wait for a spearman to find his courage. I dropped flat into the freezing bilge, my knees smacking hard against the spruce floor ribs, and threw my body across the tear.

The shock of the water knocked the air straight out of my chest. It felt like someone had driven an iron blade across my ribs. The salt burned through my grease-stiffened wool trousers, biting into the raw cracks on my shins with a pure, blinding ache. Outside the hide, forty fathoms of black water pressed inward, pushing against the torn flap with the weight of an overturned mountain. The leather bucked upward, slick with old seal slime, trying to peel past my hip.

I jammed my left knee into the framing angle, wedged my shoulder against the spruce stringer, and bore down with every stone of weight I had.

The flap caught under my ribs. The rush of incoming water choked down from a torrent to a heavy, spurting froth that hissed around my collarbone. But my body alone could not hold it. The mammoth skin was cold, stiff, and violently alive under the ocean’s heave, sliding an inch with every trough the boat plunged into.

"Cornet! Burl!" I spat salt from my teeth, screaming over the wind and the crying infants. "Bring the coil of three-ply walrus line! Move your lazy shanks or drown where you sit!"

Flintwick came first. He didn't have a coil. He slid through the icy slush on his heels, clutching an empty wooden bailer in both hands. His eyes were wide in the gray dark, his lean jaw slack with terror. He stared down at me—an old woman pinned belly-down in black bilge, grunting like a sow in a ditch.

"The hide's torn," he gasped, water dripping from his matted bangs. "Aunt, the sea’s coming through the floor."

"I have two eyes and a wet belly, Flintwick, I noticed," I snarled, my teeth chattering so violently I nearly bit my tongue. "Drop that bucket and put your boots on this lower lip. If it slips past my knee, we're fish bait before your dawn comes."

Flintwick tossed the bailer aside. He fell to his knees in the sloshing bilge, planting his calloused heels against the bottom seam, throwing his weight beside mine. The frame groaned under the doubled strain, but the leather stopped sliding.

My right hand was already numb, but the fingers still remembered the tool. I reached into my coat lining, pulled out my thick walrus-bone awl—the four-inch spike carved from a bull's jaw—and found the raw overlap where the mammoth skin crossed the spruce rib.

With frozen leather, you do not punch; you drive.

I set the point against the double margin, raised my fist with the palm heel locked, and slammed the tool downward. The bone struck the dense, oiled hide with a hard thud. It bit through the outer layer, caught the spruce rib beneath, and sank two inches into the green wood.

The torn flap locked against the frame. The spray stopped. The bilge water swirled around my chest, thick with soot and reindeer hair, but the sea stayed on the other side of the skin.

"Burl!" Flintwick bellowed over his shoulder, his voice shaking with the cold that was already creeping into his blood. "Bring the bailers! Get twenty men on the buckets!"

The hunters scrambled into motion, spurred by the sharp crack of Flintwick's order. Wooden scoops began scraping the spruce bottom, splashing dark water over the leather gunwales into the dark.

I stayed where I was, cheek pressed against the freezing mammoth hide, unable to unclench my fingers from the awl's hilt. The cold was a thick grease inside my joints, creeping past the skin and gnawing on the bone. Every breath felt like chewing river gravel.

Ten paces away, beside the cracked mast ring, the White Stag stood shuddering in its tethers. Its sides heaved in violent, shallow jerks, its white coat plastered with freezing sea-spray. Knotrow was clinging to its forelegs like a weeping child, mumbling broken words of a mountain tongue that had died with the inland spruce groves.

The stag tried to hum. It opened its dark lips, but what came out was a dry, rattling wheeze—a song so frayed and thin that it could barely carry past the center thwarts.

Through the translucent mammoth hide beneath my face, the sea glowed with a faint, curdled milkiness.

It was not the light of the moon, which remained buried behind the snow clouds. It was the cold phosphorescence of the trench. Three fathoms down, floating directly beneath our stitched keel, long pale ribbons of motion drifted into the gray water. I saw the slow sweep of a tail as wide as six thwarts, followed by the pale, ridged back of an abyssal serpent, its white scales ghosting against the translucent floor.

It was not hunting yet. It was coasting, gliding on the boat's wake like a dog following the smell of fat in an open yard, waiting for the stag's wheeze to fail completely.

Flintwick looked down at the pale light gleaming beneath our boots. He saw the white spine turn in the dark water. The arrogance that had stiffened his neck when he dropped his seal bones at the mast was entirely gone, replaced by the sick, hollow stare of a boy who has looked into an open grave.

"Get the walrus line through the rib loops," I whispered, my lips stiff and bloodless. "We have to lace this margin before the gale turns. Dawn is still five hours away, nephew. And the water is very cold."