The Mutineers' Approach

How much blood a starving man had left was an easy sum to work out, and looking at Flintwick, I put it at less than two ladles. His cheeks had caved until the shelf of his jaw looked like a cracked wedge of elk horn, and his eyes were too wide, swimming with the milky shine that comes over folks right before their minds wander off into the frost. But his ash spear didn't waver. The fire-hardened point hung three inches from my chest, gray rime crusting the soot at its tip.

Behind him, five hunters from the stern watch stood shoulder to shoulder on the slick spruce decking, their breath rising in gray puffs that smelled of rotten teeth and bilge water. The heavy coil of walrus rope Flintwick had dropped lay between us on the wet planks like a frozen snake. Burl held an antler-headed mallet and a pair of broad flint skinning wedges, his big knuckles split open from the cold. Little Cornet hovered at his elbow, clutching four short lengths of braided tethering cord and shivering so hard his teeth clicked.

"The boys aren't asking, Aunt," Flintwick said. His voice was cracked, thin as split sinew, but it held the stubborn edge of a hunter who thought he was doing the clan a service. "You've been down in the bilge too long. You haven't looked at the rowing benches since yesterday's noon watch."

"I know what's on the benches," I said, keeping my fingers tight around the flint butcher blade by my hip. My thumbs still throbbed with a heavy pulse from the frost, but the stag's heat had left them limber enough to cut. "Eighty fools praying for dry moss, and six clever hunters who think slitting their aunt's throat is easier than pulling an oar. Put the spear down, Flintwick. Take your boys back to the benches before you force me to carve you in front of the clan."

"Four couldn't rise from the crawl-space," Flintwick barked, taking half a pace forward. His hide boots made a squelching suck on the wet spruce ribs. "Old Sura's girl couldn't swallow water before midnight. The two boys by the steering oar haven't opened their eyes since the moon turned. The rest of them are chewing their own mittens to fool their bellies. In two days there won't be enough living hands aboard to man four oars, let alone eighty."

He pointed the butt of his spear toward the mast ring behind me. The White Stag stood slumped against the lashings, its silver-white flank shivering in spasms. Each breath came out of its black nostrils as a wet, ragged hiss. Its coat was dull as ash now, all the warmth it had blown into my hands paid out from its own marrow.

"There's meat on that spine," Flintwick said, and his throat worked as he swallowed thin spit. "There's three kegs of fat in its brisket. We boil the marrow, we salt the strips in sea-wash, and the clan walks again. We can row south. We can reach the whale-beaches."

I looked at him, then past him to Burl and Cornet. The two younger boys wouldn't meet my eyes. They stared at the deck, their shoulders hitched against the wind, their knuckles white on their tool shafts.

"You're a great hunter, Flintwick," I said, letting the words come out slow and sour. "A regular tracker of mice. Tell me, how much does that beast weigh?"

Flintwick frowned, his spear tip dropping half an inch before he caught himself. "He's taller than an elk."

"He's made of pine-smoke and summer grass, you idiot," I said. "Look at his legs. Look at his ribs. He hasn't grazed since we pushed off from the mountain gravel two moons back. You strip that hide and crack those bones, and you'll find eighty pounds of lean string and gristle. Eighty pounds."

I spat onto the timber between his boots. The spit froze into a gray speck before it could run.

"Divide eighty pounds among eighty starving mouths," I said. "Go on, spear-boss. Do the tally. That's a pound of gristle a head. Two swallows of watery broth and a greasy knot to chew on till nightfall. Then the kettle's empty. And then what do you eat tomorrow? You want fat that bad, boil your own shins. There's more grease on a birch broom than there is on that spirit, and at least a broom doesn't keep fifty bull hides from rotting in the salt."

Burl shifted his boots, his gaze flicking nervously toward the mast. "A pound of meat is a pound of meat, Aunt," he muttered, though his grip on the antler mallet had gone slack. "It stops the belly-cramps."

"It stops your belly-cramps until morning, boy," I told him. "And while you're sleeping off your two mouthfuls, the brine takes the seams. You think those mammoth skins hold together by good luck? You think my thread is magic?"

I tapped the heel of my boot against the flooring between two spruce ribs.

Below our soles, the floor was not timber. The Mor-Kahn was eighty paces of frame held in an oval cradle, but the skin that kept the ocean out was fifty bull mammoth hides, stretched taut and scraped thin enough that the gray daylight filtered straight through the belly leather. When you looked down, you didn't see dry wood. You saw the dark, churning grease of the open sea, five fingers of translucent hide separating our soles from three hundred fathoms of freezing black water.

"That leather is forty years dead," I said, pitching my voice to carry past Flintwick's shoulder, straight to the spearmen behind him. "The only thing keeping the salt from eating the oil out of the grain is the breath coming out of that stag's throat. Kill him, and the hides go soft as boiled tripe before the next tide. The stitches pull through the needle holes. The seams belly out. And every one of you drowns with a shred of sacred meat stuck between your yellow teeth."

"She's lying to save the beast," Flintwick snarled, though a tremor went through his jaw. He swung the spear butt toward Burl. "Knotrow filled her head with mountain stories. We lived on mammoth meat for ten winters before we ever saw this stag! We know how hide behaves!"

"You know how dead hide behaves when it's dried on a rack by a smoky fire," I said. "You don't know shit about what salt water does to raw belly skin. I've been sewing your breeches since before you had hair on your chin, nephew. You ever see a wet boot left in a brine puddle? It turns into slime."

The stag behind me let out a low, shuddering moan.

The sound wasn't the proud, bell-like hum that used to ring through the coracle when we first fled the glaciers. It was a dying gasp, thin and reedy as wind through split cane. The deck shivered beneath us. The spruce ribs groaned against their rawhide lashings, the tension in the boat slackening by an inch as the beast's knees buckled against the mast.

Then the water beneath the mammoth skin went black.

Not the gray-green gloom of the normal sea. A solid, greasy shadow rose out of the depths, sweeping under the hull like the belly of an overturned mountain. It moved with a slow, heavy glide, thirty paces of ribbed bulk coasting five feet beneath the translucent hide floor. Through the amber leather, we could see the dull, milky gleam of its dorsal ridges—thick plates of gray cartilage crusted with barnacles the size of cooking pots.

The coracle heaved upward. The hide beneath our boots bulged like a drumhead under a hard thumb, the mammoth skin groaning under the displaced water.

Cornet yelled, stumbling backward until his spine hit the gunwale. His hands opened, and his bundle of tethering cords dropped into the bilge slush. Burl froze where he stood, his mouth slack, his antler mallet and flint wedges slipping from his stiff fingers and clattering against the spruce ribs.

I didn't give them room to think. I drove my boot heel down onto the walrus rope Flintwick had left on the deck, pinning the heavy coil against the timber, and kicked Burl's dropped flint wedges behind me until they knocked against the mast base, safely out of their reach.

"It's under the keel," Burl stammered, staring down through the stretched hide at the passing black bulk. "It's smelling us."

"It smells your grease, boy," I said, leaning my weight over the pinned rope. "And it smells the tear in the song. The second that stag stops humming, that thing won't coast beneath us. It'll drive its skull straight through the belly leather and drag your benches into the dark."

"Pick up the rope, Burl!" Flintwick snapped, his voice cracking with fury. "Get the line around the antlers!"

Burl looked from the shadow under the floor to the cold flint blade in my fist, then shook his head. He took two stumbling strides backward, refusing to reach for the walrus cord under my boot.

"I'm not touching it, Spear-boss," Burl said, his face gray. "I'm not tearing the bottom out of the world for two bites of gristle."

He grabbed Cornet by the collar of his parka and hauled the boy backward. The other three spearmen didn't wait for an order; they turned their shoulders and retreated toward the rowing benches, leaving the mast deck clear.

Flintwick stood alone. His mutiny had shrunk to one starving hunter with an ash pole, but his knuckles stayed white around the shaft. His belly rumbled with a hollow, ugly ache, the sound of a man who had already buried his fear under pure hunger.

"We drown anyway," Flintwick whispered. The hunger in his eyes had burned past fear, past reason, past whatever blood ran between us. "If we don't eat today, we don't live to see tomorrow's leak. I'd rather choke on salt with meat in my gut than die dry on a bench while an old woman preaches about thread."

He didn't look at Burl. He didn't look at the shadow sliding beneath the floor.

Flintwick dropped his weight into his back heel, sinking his knees into a hunter's low crouch. He brought his hands together on the ash shaft, turning the point until the fire-blackened tip leveled straight at the hollow of my throat.

I tightened my grip on the knapped flint blade, setting my boots wide on the frosty timber, and waited for the lunge.