Silver Skin

by Joan Lennon

  The grin widened and she mimicked his attempted growl. ‘You’re warning me? Of what? Just what do you imagine yourself doing to me, seal boy?’

  He wished she wasn’t so horribly good at making him shrivel in on himself. He wished he could be facing her when he had the hot wild blood pounding round his body like some ancient warrior. But he was just ordinary, just himself. He’d barely even experienced pain before he came here and the only violence he knew was the no-consequences violence of the vid and of sim games. Nobody ever got hurt. Nobody ever died. How she would sneer at them, if she knew.

  ‘You want it back?’

  ‘What? Yes!’

  ‘Then earn it.’

  He had no idea what she wanted. Maybe she meant information. About the future. But what about the Non-Intervention Contract? His Com had been adamant about that. But his Com wasn’t here, and he didn’t care any more. If there was a bargain to be struck, he would strike it. Anything to get back home. ‘What do you want from me?’

  The grin widened. ‘You’re lucky. Selkies are lucky. Share your luck with us.’

  His mouth dropped open stupidly. ‘I don’t know anything about that! I can’t make you lucky.’

  The Old Woman shrugged. ‘If you can’t make us lucky, maybe you’re not a selkie. And if you’re not a selkie, it can’t be your skin. Maybe you’re just another castaway, like the girl, a foundling that Skara Brae has taken in. That I have taken in. Living off us. What are you good for? Luck is all you have to contribute, and you say you have none of that.’ She lifted one shoulder and eyed him speculatively. ‘Why should we keep you, I wonder. Go away, why don’t you? Unless the skin is yours. Unless you are a selkie. A shape changer. Maybe even a future changer.’

  She began to circle round him, slowly, dripping horror and derision into his mind in equal measures.

  ‘Make me believe you. Make me give you back the silver skin. Or maybe you could just take it. Why don’t you smash my head in with that stone there? Mash my face into the grey pulp inside my skull, splinter the bones, let the blood spurt up. Strapping lad like you, old woman like me, should be no problem. You could slit my throat with a knife. There’s one on the shelf. Gairstay, our Old Chert, made it. It has a fine sharp edge. Do you know where to cut? I could show you. Just here, where the life beats in the neck – that’s where you must aim.’ She bent her head to the side, displaying her scrawny throat. He could see the pulse throbbing just under her wizened skin. ‘And then stand back and wait for all the red blood to drain away. Or a belly stab might suit you better – it is sure and needs no special accuracy. Rip open a body anywhere in the soft parts and it will suppurate and stink, you can count on infection setting in, only a little patience is required before death and the rest of the body can follow suit, stinking and putrefying – we turn to liquid more quickly than you might think. All that solid flesh sloughing off my bones till they’re clean and white …’

  He put his hands over his ears, tried to block her out, but somehow he could still hear her. She went on whispering, suggesting and describing more and more horrible ways Rab could take her life. Her words dripped like poison – they smelled of damp earth and fear and sweat, until he couldn’t stand it. It was making him sick. He had to stop that awful voice – he had to shut her up. With a strangled shriek he turned and flung himself at her but suddenly she wasn’t there and before he could turn again she had slammed her stick into the backs of his knees so that he crashed hard onto his back. All the air was knocked out of his lungs and before he could draw breath again she stood over him, blocking out the sky while the end of her staff bored agonizingly into his gut.

  ‘You want back your skin, seal boy? Prove it’s yours. We can’t go on with the world the way it is. We need things to change. Make them change. Share your luck. Start with good weather and a clear Road at the Ring of Stones. Keep the clouds away this cycle, so we can release the spirits of our dead from the stones and send them back to the Source. That shouldn’t be a problem for a powerful creature like you. Go on. Impress me. Impress us all.’ With a sneer on her face, she eased the pressure on the staff, then removed it altogether. Rab curled in on himself, retching and wretched. By the time he could finally make himself stand again, the Old Woman was nowhere to be seen.

  He limped back to the village because there was nothing else to do. Nowhere else to go.

  Cait: Skara Brae

  The selkie had changed. Cait didn’t know what had happened when he’d gone chasing after the Old Woman that day. She couldn’t guess what Voy had said to him. But she could see the results. As the unseasonably warm days passed, Rab grew stronger and more healthy in body, but there was something far from well going on inside. The smile still came when he turned to her but it had become brittle and stretched. He asked a lot of questions in an odd way. Fast, as if he were trying to cram as many in as possible before … before what?

  She’d felt close to him during the long, hard illness, closer still when they’d lain together in the hollow in the heather and he’d cried out his heartache, but now, though he spoke to her constantly, he seemed somehow to be someplace else. Every question seemed to be saying I’m not like you. You’re different. Let’s make a list of all the ways you’re different …

  He jiggled his knee unconsciously whenever he sat down.

  He had bad dreams.

  Rab: Skara Brae

  I should be taking notes! If only I could take notes!

  The data for a dozen reports, untold credits, square centimetres of floor space, were all around him and he had no recording system of any kind. No Com, no vid, no voice rec. Only his own precarious memory.

  It drove him crazy.

  He gathered information anyway. He constantly asked questions. Not because he needed to know how this world worked in order to survive in it. Oh no. He wasn’t going to be here long enough to need to do that. It was so, when he got home, he could capitalise on the things he was seeing, hearing, smelling. His friends were going to be so jealous. His mum was going to be so impressed.

  This is a dream opportunity. This is going to change my life, when I get home.

  When I get home.

  Sometimes the urge to grab Cait by the arm and tell her the truth about himself – about the world he really belonged in – would build up to a terrible pressure. He fought the impulse with more questions. He pestered her like a toddler.

  What’s in that field? Why is the Stone Maker’s house separate from the rest? What’s that big pile of rubbish behind the village? What do the other houses in the village look like?

  She’d stared at him when he asked that. ‘All the houses are the same – that’s how you know they’re houses!’

  Not so different from home, then, he thought and then pushed the feelings that rose in his chest away.

  Data. I’m after data.

  He watched Cait in the hut, keeping the fire going, grinding grain on the flat stone quern, cooking food and foul-smelling medicines, boiling seawater to produce salt, hanging strips of meat from the whale bone rafters to cure in the smoke. Outside, he watched the villagers, grubbing in the field, bringing limpets and fish from the shore, dried berries and heather from the moors. He watched them in the paved place, talking, hands busy. Some of them laboured in pairs, twisting rope out of crowberry stems and roots. Others were working pieces of leather, rubbing them with lumps of rock. No one was idle, except him.

  He watched, and watched, and tried to remember what he saw.

  For when he got home.

  At first he had trouble telling the villagers apart – everybody had the same leathery skin and scars and marks – or how old they were. Even the few children were so … battered. Burn marks and old wounds, all puckered and ugly. They all wore the same clothes – trousers and tunics of some sort of felted wool material, cloaks made of animal skins with the fur left on, leather boots laced to their legs. Necklaces of shells and stones, feathers and bones, strung on leather cords. But gradually he became able to
see the difference in quality and grandeur in all these things – the skins of Sketh’s cloak, for example, were far finer than the ones Rath’s was made from, and Mewie’s necklace had a special piece of green jadeite and what Cait called an eye stone. The men wore jewellery as well. When Rab first saw the thing in pride of place on Sketh’s necklace he had a moment of horror – it looked just like a wizened human hand – the hand of a skeletal child – he had visions of screaming mothers and baby sacrifice … In fact, it was the talon of a golden eagle that the hunter had killed – when Sketh saw him staring at it, he proudly told him the whole story, in detail.

  The people of Skara Brae did look a lot like each other, but no one in Skara Brae looked like him. For one thing, everybody was smaller than him. Even as weather-beaten and browned as they were, their skin was several shades lighter than his own. And no one had his short black curls. At home, human colouring and characteristics had been jumbled together for so long that any couple could produce a child of any appearance. Nobody stuck out because everybody looked different.

  Here, nobody looked like him. And nobody looked like Cait, either, with her height and her pale hair.

  In his tower stack and all the other stacks of his world, people were hugely crowded together – of course they were – but Rab had never worried about illness in his life. Whereas here …

  Disease could rip through a place like this like a fire. He could just imagine the villagers in the middle of some epidemic, bustling about helping each other, going in and out of each other’s homes with food and fuel, making absolutely sure the germs were carried to everyone.

  It was terrifying. He looked down at his hands, wondering what microbes were breeding in the grime on his skin and under his nails. All at once his throat felt scratchy and snot began to well up in his nose. He felt cold, and the smoky fire and smelly sleeping rugs couldn’t warm him. Only sitting in the sun could do that.

  Earn your skin, the Old Woman had said. And, bizarrely, Rab seemed to doing so. Day after day, the sun shone and the sky was blue and benign. Nothing could stop the wind, though. It was a new experience for him. At home, it was possible to go up to the roof of the tower stack, but at that height it would be crazy not to have protective shielding. The force fields let in the light but kept the wind at bay, so that it was always still, up there. But here, it was different. He could always hear the wind, whether in the hut or the passageway or in the open. It was present, and it had bugs in it.

  In the paved place, though, he could lean against the outer wall of the village and bask in a little protected sun trap. Just what the selkie ordered. The villagers’ initial caution lessened as time passed and he showed no signs of wanting to suck anyone’s soul or dribble blood. Eyes shut, half-dozing, he listened to their whispered conversations.

  ‘Have you noticed – there hasn’t been a storm since our selkie arrived?’

  ‘There’s a real warmth to the Sun – I can feel it in my bones, and you know my bones never lie.’

  ‘Did you see Benth? She went right over to him and petted his hair!’

  ‘She never! What did he do? Did he realise she’s no idea what she does any more?’

  ‘I’m no expert – he’s got such an odd face – but he just let her do it, and then she wandered off again …’

  ‘Maybe he hexed her and she just didn’t notice …’

  He tried to learn some of the things they did, much to the hilarity of all. The children especially liked to sit near him and follow him about, in case he was about to do something funny.

  Then, when they got tired of teaching him how to make rope or work hides or play complicated games with whale bone dice, Benth would tell stories. She was incredibly old and sometimes couldn’t remember her own name or which house was hers, but she remembered all the stories without effort. She told about the trows who lured the unwary piper inside their green hill and took years of his life away – about the stoor worm whose breath was so foul it killed any who came downwind of it – or about the stones that walked to the shores of lochs once a year to bend down their heads and drink. And Rab would get Cait to explain afterwards about the bits he didn’t understand.

  But not everybody was happy with Rab’s presence.

  Ailth, the Young Chert, always seemed to be squatting in the doorway of the Stone Maker’s house, banging bits of rock together – and watching him. One afternoon, Rab suddenly decided he’d had enough. He pushed off from the wall and walked over to the young man and stared back.

  ‘I’m Rab.’ He knew he was looming. He wanted to loom.

  ‘Our good luck charm,’ Ailth sneered.

  ‘Not really. What are you making?’

  The Young Chert was holding a hunk of rock in his hand and striking grey flakes off it.

  ‘Cait found it,’ he said. He held it up. ‘For me.’

  It looked like a lumpy rock, no different from all the other lumpy rocks, but Ailth was acting like the proud father of a chunk of solid gold. But there was something else going on too. There was an edge to his voice, as if he were making some kind of point.

  Rab didn’t know what the point was. To cover his ignorance, he picked up one of the flakes and drew it thoughtlessly across his thumb –

  ‘Ow!’

  A thread of red welled up. Ailth laughed. ‘Sharp as a seal’s tooth,’ he murmured complacently.

  ‘You could have warned me!’

  Ailth shrugged. ‘I could have,’ he replied. ‘If I’d known you were going to be stupid enough to slice your own thumb.’ And then there was a sudden, subtle shift in his focus.

  Rab didn’t notice at first, concentrating instead on a mouth full of sucked thumb. Then he saw that Cait had emerged from the main passageway into the paved place. She put her hands into the small of her back and stretched, as if she’d been cramped into one position for too long. Rab guessed she’d been grinding grain.

  Ailth was looking at her. There was something proprietorial in his gaze. Something ever so slightly smug. Cait didn’t turn her head, but somehow Rab knew that she knew that she was being looked at.

  Rab felt red rush up his face. Ailth and Cait – they were – they must have –

  ‘Want some beer?’ Before Rab could answer, Ailth had gone into the Chert’s house and returned with a jug. ‘It’s the good stuff. Gairstay taught me how to brew.’

  Rab looked around, but Cait had disappeared again and no one else was paying any attention. ‘Um, well, sure, why not? Scut! Is it supposed to smell like that?’

  Apparently that was, indeed, how it was supposed to smell. Ailth took a huge slurp and smacked his lips appreciatively. He passed the jug to Rab, who tried not to breathe, took a sip and started to cough. The second sip was not quite as bad. The third sip was almost bearable.

  ‘So,’ said Ailth suddenly. ‘What do you know about the Tears of the Sun?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Tears of the Sun. Bronze. The new material. Some people think it comes from the Fey – your kind. But I think it’s an Offlander invention.’

  ‘Bronze doesn’t come from the sea, I know that much.’ Rab desperately tried to remember from his lectures the order that metals were discovered – bronze then copper? Gold? No, iron, wasn’t it? An Iron Age? He’d known all that for an exam years ago, but as soon as he’d sat the test he’d let it dribble out his ears, to make room for the next set of facts he needed to learn.

  ‘It comes from stone – special stone.’ Ailth paused his explanation to drink deeply again, and passed the jug back. ‘It takes two kinds – you don’t even find them in the same place. There’s the ones with bits of green – you grind those up, like grain to make flour, you know? And then you put in the other one and heat it up till it’s runny and pour it into a hollow shape – though—’ here he prodded Rab’s shoulder to make sure he was listening properly ‘– though I’ve been doing some experiments.’ He nodded sagely and put his finger to his lips. ‘Follow me.’

  He got up and ducke
d back into the Maker’s house. For some reason, when Rab tried to do the same, he banged into the side of the entrance, hitting his funny bone unpleasantly hard. Rubbing it, he straightened up and peered about. The square central hearth was much bigger than Voy’s. And the smells were different too. The Young Chert was obviously following in his elder’s footsteps in many ways, including brewing something noxious in a collection of jars in the corner. There were more shelves, stacked with antler tools and stone slivers and lumps of rock. There was a sort of oven with some clay lamps sitting on top.

  Ailth evidently could turn his hand to most things.

  It made Rab want to tell him all the things in his own time that he was good at and Ailth would be rubbish at.

  That’d shut him up, he thought.

  At the moment, though, Ailth was still talking about bronze, and the more he talked and showed Rab lumps of half-melted ore and stones with flecks of something shiny in them and then talked some more, the more incomprehensible it all became.

  Which is strange, thought Rab, as he took another gulp of beer. How hard can it be?

  And then something else wandered into his mind.

  ‘Ailth, listen. You know the Stone Maker who died – he was called the Old Chert, right? And you were his apprentice. But even though he’s not here any more, they still call you Young Chert. So what happens when you take on an apprentice? What will they call him?’

  Ailth took a deep draught from the jug. ‘That would have to be, ah, Baby Chert.’

  ‘B-Baby Chert?’ Rab squawked.

  Ailth got up and started to hobble about the room, hand on his bent back, his voice high and squeaky like an old man’s. ‘I’ve seen more cycles than you’ve got curly hairs on your curly head, I have, and knapped the finest flint in all the islands with these two … where’d it go? … I used to have two … oh, there it is – with these two hands – what was I saying? I’m Baby Chert, I am, and what are you sniggering at, young fellow – beware the wrath of Baby Chert!’