The Brine Seam

The taste of cod liver oil arrived before the sight: thick, yellow, and clinging to the gums like a sticky film that refused to dissolve with warm saliva. Then came the crunch. The dry, brittle friction of dehydrated oar-weed beneath the weight of her shoulder blades.

Grizel opened her eyes to a ceiling of sandstone slabs so low that the smoke from the damp peat found no escape; it hung midway, a grayish, dense stripe dividing the room into two thermal halves: below, the saline cold rising from the stones; above, a sour heat stinging her tear ducts.

She tried to sit up. The body—or what remained of the muscular machine that used to obey her will—flatly refused with a sharp tug in her lower belly.

It didn't hurt right away.

That was the first anatomical irregularity. True pain has temperature and pulse; this was a dull tightness, a dead weight, as if they had sewn a piece of wet leather over her pelvis while she slept. Grizel lowered her right hand. Her fingertips, still dirty with the black sand of the breakers, felt the rough fabric of a burlap shirt she did not recognize. Beneath the cloth, the surface did not yield with the warm elasticity of her own body. The skin was cold, stretched to the limit of its tensile resistance, furrowed by a row of hard knots viscous to the touch.

Hemp thread soaked in pine pitch.

The thread pulled at edges oozing a serous fluid, warm but lifeless, staining the burlap with yellowish circles that smelled of brine vinegar and ox tallow. Whoever had closed the incision had done so with the methodical haste of a dockside butcher rushed by the high tide.

This was what lay in the gloom at the foot of the cot:

A three-legged pine stool with a dented pewter bowl; a row of fisherman's boots set out to dry upside down on stakes; and, in the corner where the dry-stone wall curved to bear the weight of the hillside, a figure sitting on a bundle of old ropes.

The figure did not breathe with the rhythm of the living. There was an excessive pause between each descent of his chest, an interval of five or six seconds that Grizel counted mentally—one, two, three, four, five—before that man's lungs swelled again with a wet, metallic whistle, akin to the friction of pack ice when it fractures far off in the currents of the strait.

The Firstborn did not raise his head. His hands, disproportionately wide relative to his wrists, rested on knees covered by coarse cloth trousers. The knuckles had the slate-gray color of the Yesnaby cliffs after three days of uninterrupted rain.

"Don't touch the ropes," said a voice from the gloom of the doorway.

Mariota Linklater entered carrying a larch-wood bucket with corroded iron hoops. Her gray hair was gathered in a linen cap that smelled of old smoke and ash lye. She stopped beside the low hearth, set the bucket on the floor with a muffled thud, and pulled a dark rag from her apron with which she wiped her hands, finger by finger, with a slowness that had nothing to do with compassion.

"If you touch them with dirty fingers, the flesh rots before it takes," the old woman continued, without looking her in the face. "And it already took enough work to keep the crabs from feasting on what was left on the shore."

"Where... is the master?" Grizel asked. Her own voice sounded strange to her, as if her windpipe had been scraped with seashell sand.

Mariota leaned over the fire, pushed aside a lump of dead peat with the tip of an oxidized iron shovel, and blew until an orange spark revived in the ash.

"In Kirkwall. Or on the road to Leith. Men in a hurry don't wait for the flesh to heal."

"The wind shifted at dawn," said the Firstborn from the corner.

It was the first time he spoke. His voice lacked the cadence of the isles; it sounded flat, devoid of the nasal lilt of the Stromness folk, as if he had learned the words by reading them on paper rather than hearing them from a mother.

"Shifted, yes," Mariota replied, concentrated on placing three pieces of dry peat over the embers. "It brings sleet from the north. We'll have to bar the shed shutter before the high tide rises."

"The bottom latch is loose," he added.

"I'll wedge a piece of wood into it later."

Grizel closed her eyes for an instant. The mundane, flat, almost domestic dialogue between the old woman and that patched-up hulk was more terrifying than any scream. They spoke of the wind and a broken shutter while a foreign seam throbbed in her lower belly.

Mariota approached the cot with a slightly steaming earthenware bowl. It was a murky infusion of wild mint and willow bark that barely managed to mask the pungent background of the cod that still varnished her palate.

"Drink."

Grizel tried to lean on her elbows, but the effort caused the lower edge of the wound to tug with a dull violence. A warm trickle slid toward her right groin. With her free hand, she mechanically scratched the corner of her jaw, where the dried salt pulled at her skin, and then took the bowl. The clay was rough, unglazed, and retained the warmth of the hearth.

She took two bitter sips. The liquid burned her esophagus, but it settled the tremor shaking her shoulders.

"He said he would save me if the ship capsized," Grizel whispered, staring fixedly at the dark surface of the infusion. "He said he had the instruments. That in Edinburgh he had learned to retain the vital principle before the blood cooled completely."

Mariota let out a dry laugh, a brief click that died in her throat without moving her cheeks.

"The young gentleman learns what suits him in the anatomists' books. And then he comes to these islands because here the drowned have no relatives with lawyers in Londres to claim the remains."

The old woman crouched with a cracking of knees that echoed against the flags. With fingers deformed by rheumatism and hard as birch bark, she lifted the edge of the burlap shirt.

Grizel looked.

The skin of her belly was not hers. It would have been a monstrous relief to think it was an hallucination caused by saltwater fever, but the evidence was there, illuminated by the orange glow of the peat: the skin of her original torso was pale, speckled with the reddish freckles she had always had since childhood in Sandwick; but the lower strip, the one covering from the navel to the pubis, was sallow, thicker, with dilated pores and a waxy texture reminiscent of whale meat washed by weeks of brine in the flensing vats.

The hemp stitches joined two distinct worlds with the relentless precision of someone closing a sack of grain.

But it was not the seam that stopped the air in her lungs.

Grizel pressed the palm of her hand onto the exact center of the suture and pressed inward. She found no soft, elastic, familiar resistance of her own organs. Beneath the foreign muscular wall there was a concave void, a hollow space that her lower ribs bordered like the desolate arch of an abandoned pier.

The cavity was deserted.

The incisions had not been traced to restore her breath on the sand, nor to suture viscera torn by the crash against the reefs. They had been made with the fine ebony-handled scalpel, the one he kept in the green velvet box alongside the phials of pure alcohol.

He had torn out her belly out of cowardice.

The phrase did not arise as a cry, but as a marginal note in a dissection notebook, cold and definitive. It formed in her throat with the mathematical certainty of a missing weight on a scale. He had taken the only thing of hers that served his experiments in the north before letting the tide drag her toward the breakers, certain that the Orkney sea would swallow the mutilation beneath ten fathoms of blackened kelp.

Mariota left the rag on the stool and stood up slowly, shaking blades of dry seaweed from her skirt.

"Tomorrow the spring tide rolls in," the old woman said as she walked toward the door. "If you're going to get on your feet, you'd better learn to steady yourself before the floor starts to roll."

The poorly joined plank door closed behind her with a sharp bang. In the gloom, the Firstborn continued breathing with his dilated rhythm, a mechanical tide of five seconds filling the room with the smell of rust and preserved meat.

Grizel sank her fingers a little deeper into the cold hollow beneath her ribs.

What creature did he intend to nourish with what he had ripped from her body before leaving her to die?