The Bone Awl

How long it took for an ash spear to cross three feet of deck depended entirely on whether the man holding it had eaten within the last five days. A well-fed hunter from the river camps could drive a fire-hardened point through two layers of boiled hide before a woman could blink. A starving boy whose ribs rattled under his tunic was another matter. Flintwick had the will to kill, but his shins were trembling, and I wanted his spear in the timber before he could put its soot-crusted tip through my windpipe or the stag's chest.

He lunged with a dry, whistling grunt, throwing his whole scrawny weight behind the thrust.

A hunter always aims where a beast's heart should be. On a woman braced against the mast ring, that meant the hollow right above the collarbone. But the decking under our feet was not frozen river turf. It was mammoth leather slick with whale oil, sea brine, and frost rime. A man who spent his life chasing elk over rock never understood that footing on grease did not care about a spearman's pride.

I did not jump back. Stepping backward on wet hide was the quickest way to end up on your skull with a cracked pelvis.

Instead, I took half a shuffle forward with my left heel, letting my hip brush the spruce mast. As the fire-blackened point shot past my collar, I brought the flat of the four-inch flint butcher blade down across the ash shaft with everything my thawed wrist had left.

The knapped stone rang against the cured ash with a dry crack.

The blow didn't shatter the wood, but it knocked the tip six inches wide. Flintwick's forward momentum carried him past me. His right boot hit the frozen coil of walrus rope I had pinned beneath my sole, his toes catching in the stiff rawhide loops.

He cursed, his balance breaking. His shoulder slammed hard into the mast timber right beside the stag's shivering flank.

The stag flinched, letting out a sharp wheeze that shook the lashings. The mammoth skin beneath our feet hummed with a sick, slack vibration, and out in the gray wash below the translucent floor, the black bulk of the leviathan tilted upward, its dorsal plates rising toward the belly leather.

We had no time for wrestling.

Before Flintwick could wrench his spear free or yank his boot out of the rawhide tangle, I dropped the flint blade into the bilge slush. My right hand went straight to the heavy leather apron at my waist, catching the horn butt of my spare stitching awl—four inches of dense walrus bone, ground to a needle taper and polished smooth with river sand. My left hand dug into the opposite pocket, closing around my palm-stone, the flat quartzite cobble I used to hammer needles through frozen mammoth hide.

Flintwick scrambled to push off the timber, his left palm splaying flat against the spruce trunk to heave himself upright.

"Aunt—" he began, his wild eyes widening as he saw what was in my fists.

I didn't let him finish the word.

I jammed the needle point of the walrus bone directly into the back of his splayed hand, right between the knuckle bones.

Before he could pull the hand back, I brought the quartzite palm-stone down on the butt of the awl with the full downward drive of my shoulder.

The bone punched through his flesh with a wet, sickening pop, crunching cleanly through the palm tendons. The stone struck the butt again, a second brutal hammer stroke that drove the tapered bone two inches deep into the seasoned heartwood of the spruce mast.

Flintwick screamed.

The sound tore out of his throat, raw and shrill as a butchered pig's squeal, echoing across the eighty paces of the open coracle. His body arched backward, heels drumming violently against the decking, but the walrus awl held him fast. His left hand was nailed flat against the tree trunk at shoulder height, thick dark blood welling around the bone shaft and dribbling down the grey bark into the stag's matted flank.

His ash spear clattered from his right fingers, rolling into the scuppers.

"You pinned me!" Flintwick shrieked, vomit and yellow bile dribbling down his chin as his knees folded under him. "You pinned me to the mast, you crazy old sow!"

"Keep your knees up, boy," I told him, blowing cold air through my teeth. My lungs burned from the heave, but my hands stayed steady. "Hang your weight from that palm, and you'll tear the skin clean off the bone. Treat it like a tight stitch and hold your damn feet still."

The entire deck went dead silent.

Along the rowing thwarts, every waking soul aboard sat frozen beneath stiff furs, staring at the mast with mouths hanging open. Burl stood half-risen from his bench, his big hands trembling at his sides, his face pale as lard. Little Cornet had his knuckles jammed into his mouth, his eyes wide and glassy with sheer terror.

Nobody moved toward the mast. Nobody reached for an ash pole.

Even Knotrow stopped muttering about his lost mountain herbs. The old elder sat huddled in his muskox robes, his milky eyes locked onto the black blood dripping from Flintwick's wrist, his jaw slack with disbelief. In five generations of the Sun-Hoof clan, an elder had never spiked a hunter's flesh to the council wood. A needle woman had never spilled hunter blood on the sacred timber.

Behind Flintwick's pinned shoulder, the White Stag lowered its great horned head.

Its black nostrils flared, sniffing the steam rising from the fresh blood on the bark. Then it drew a long, rattling breath into its starved chest.

The hum returned.

It started as a low, deep vibration in the spruce wood, traveling down the trunk into the mast step and out through the fifty stretched mammoth skins of the hull. It was not the sweet summer song of the inland forests, but a harsh, stubborn droning, like a horn sounded through thick fog.

Beneath our soles, the water responded.

Through the translucent amber belly leather, the gigantic shadow of the sea-beast slowed its rise. Its milky dorsal ridges paused three feet below the leather, coasting along the line of our keel. Then, lulled by the renewed hum of the timber, the shape tilted downward, banking into the cold green twilight of the abyss until the dark swallowed it whole.

The hull stopped groaning. The mammoth leather beneath our boots settled, tight and drum-firm once more against the sea.

I picked up the knapped flint butcher blade from the bilge slush, wiped the greasy brine off on my sleeve, and tucked it securely into my belt roll. Then I turned around and looked at the gaunt faces staring at me from the benches.

There was no gratitude in their eyes. There was no relief.

They looked at me the way starving dogs look at a handler who has just broken the lead dog's ribs with an iron rod. They saw an old woman who would butcher her own sister's son before she would let them have a kettle of broth. Every mouth on the Mor-Kahn was still empty, their bellies still swollen with starvation cramps, and now the woman holding the thread had proven she carried stone in her chest.

Flintwick let out a ragged sob, his forehead pressing against the rough spruce bark beside his pinned wrist.

"We're going to starve, Aunt," he wept, the fight entirely drained from his voice, leaving only the small, frightened child who used to bring me broken moccasin thongs to patch. "We're going to starve out here in the dark."

I rested my palm on the quartzite stone in my apron pocket and looked toward the gray horizon where the sea met the fog.

"Then we starve with a dry hull," I said.

The wind picked up from the north, carrying the bitter reek of sea-ice and salt spray across the benches. Flintwick's blood congealed into black jelly around the bone pin, sealing the wound against the wood, and not a single soul aboard moved to pull it free.