The Language of Cold Stones

Learning to walk anew upon the shingle beaches of Sandwick was an exercise in pure inanimate mechanics.

Her weight no longer shifted with the lithe ease of her nineteen years as an island daughter; each stride demanded conscious calculation, an exacting adjustment of the thigh sinews to balance the waxy, unyielding tension of the hemp-stitched abdomen.

The Firstborn walked ten paces ahead. He never turned to offer an arm. He never glanced back to see if she tripped among the stunted heather creeping through peat fissures. His detachment was not scorn; it was the absolute reverence of one who understands intimately the profound humiliation of existing as an assemblage of borrowed parts.

They reached the headland where the North Sea breakers smashed against sheer basalt ramparts in geysers of bitter brine. Upon a flat slab used by nesting puffins, the giant sat cross-legged.

—He promised —the Firstborn rumbled, his voice thick and labored as stone dragged across a riverbed—. Upon the slopes of Chamonix, beside the glacier of Montanvert, he swore by sun and stars that he would fashion a creature like unto myself. A companion with whom to share exile and cold.

Grizel seated herself upon a boulder three paces off. The gale whipped her coarse homespun shift against her ribs, yet beneath the skin she registered no frostbite. Her circulation was an unhurried, sluggish tide that barely acknowledged winter.

—And what did he accomplish here in the isles? —she asked.

The giant raised a massive hand, gesturing toward a barren islet—barely a fang of rock gnawed by tides—looming two miles offshore through the slate mist.

—He rented an abandoned shepherd's shieling. For two months he hauled crates of acid carboys, galvanic troughs, and wicker hampers delivered under cover of darkness by island fishermen. I watched him from the gorse thickets. I beheld how he arranged the vertebrae, how he threaded the vessels, and how he assembled the machine of a woman.

The man paused for long seconds, letting the hollow boom of the surf fill the void between his words.

—One night beneath a full moon —the Firstborn continued—, I drew near the casement of his laboratory. He raised his eyes from the dissecting board and beheld me in the gloom. He saw my countenance... and beheld in thee the terrifying prospect of a lineage. The horror that two beings such as we should multiply upon the earth turned his blood to ice. He took up the heavy scalpel, undid the stays, and tore to shreds with blind fury that which had cost him weeks of labor. He cast the remains into a stone-weighted wicker basket and sank it in the firth.

Grizel looked down into her lap. The hemp suture throbbed beneath the rough cloth—not with agony, but with an obscure memory alien to her waking mind.

—He did not butcher a monster —Grizel whispered—. He butchered me so he would never have to meet his own reflection.

The Firstborn nodded heavily, bowing his brow toward the surf.

—He fled south in a herring lugger at daybreak. Yet the tides of Orkney are ancient and stubborn: they returned the basket to Mariota's drift nets before the crabs could hollow out the heart.

Grizel rose with a single fluid, unbroken motion. The gale no longer swayed her balance. Her bare feet gripped the living rock of the islands with a tenacity she had never commanded in her former life.

—Then we shall hunt no creator —she declared, turning her face toward the northern horizon—. We shall hunt the debtor.