Silver Skin

by Joan Lennon

  Cait: South of Skara Brae

  Wailing woke them.

  Seals, wailing. It was always an unsettling sound, even in bright sunshine like today. The cries faded and rose, drifting to them on the wind – eerie, alien, infinitely sad.

  ‘Is it for you?’ she asked Rab in a whisper. ‘Are they calling for you?’

  ‘What?’

  She knew where they would be. They liked to haul out, fifty, sixty at a time. The tide was low now, and the skerry of flat rocks would be nicely out of the water. Perfect for basking.

  ‘Come on.’

  She lead the way out between the rocks and down to the shoreline. They couldn’t see the skerry from here, but she knew how to draw the seals’ attention. She pulled a whistle bone out of her bag and put it to her lips. The sound was shrill and high-pitched, and almost at once, wet grey heads began to pop up in the waves. Long-nosed faces ending in splendid white whiskers, stiff with curiosity. The tune wailed and wavered. The seals seemed to find it mesmerizing. When she walked along the shore towards the skerry, they followed her, keeping pace like inquisitive, though nervous, aquatic dogs.

  On the rocks, other heads lifted and dozens of dark, slightly bulging eyes turned towards them, watching them intently. The wailing stopped, but grunts and sneezes were exchanged. The ones in the water bobbed up higher to get a better view, sank under the waves, then reappeared further along the shore.

  Rab smiled. He seemed delighted at the sight, but he made no move to speak to them.

  Cait stopped playing. She found she was holding her breath.

  Tell them you’re all right here on land. Happy and safe.

  The words formed in her mind.

  Tell them you’ve decided to stay.

  She closed her lips tightly, refusing to say the words out loud, but they pushed at her control so that she wasn’t paying attention to anything else. To whatever it was that suddenly caused the seals to lollop into the water in a white, splashing panic.

  Rab raised his arms in dismay. ‘Oh NO! What—?’

  Abruptly she put her hand over his mouth, peering intently along the shore. She heard now what had spooked the seals.

  Someone was coming. Fast.

  Rab: Beyond the Near Hill

  It was Mot, pounding along the narrow trail through the heather as if his life depended on his speed.

  Deer, Rab thought. They were going after deer. What could have gone wrong?

  Mot was white as wool, and sweat and tears mixed and dripped down his face. He was so focused on running that he almost raced past without seeing them.

  Cait grabbed him. Made him stop.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  The boy could barely speak. ‘—oar … boar … father …’

  Rab saw a look of fear blossom on her face.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘S-scrubland … beyond the near hill … he’s cornered …’

  ‘Not dead?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Terror and misery competed in his eyes. ‘I only ran … away … to get help …’

  Cait shook him fiercely and then let go again. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Now keep running. Bring the men from the village. Tell the Old Woman.’ And when he still just stood, trembling, his thin chest heaving, she gave him a shove that nearly knocked him over. ‘GO!’

  Rab stared after the boy as he rushed away in the direction of the village.

  When he turned to speak to Cait she was gone too, already running in the opposite direction.

  *

  They hid downwind in the scrubby gorse bushes at the side of the clearing and tried to control their panting. They could see Sketh. One leg was a bloody mess. He had his spear butt dug into the ground, the flint point angled outwards. He had backed himself against a jumble of rocks – he’d probably been trying to climb them to get out of reach when he ran out of time. He was trapped.

  Between them, and him, was the boar.

  Rab struggled to believe what his eyes were telling him.

  The boar was huge. As it paced back and forth, he could see spittle and blood splashed over the coarse bristles on its great chest. Grotesque tusks curved out from its jaws, stained and dripping red.

  It must be two hundred kilos … and then he peered over his shoulder suddenly, fearfully …

  ‘Is it alone?’ he whispered.

  Cait stared straight ahead. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. It’s mating season – he’ll have been out looking for females. Other males to fight with. You can see he’s all sexed up.’

  ‘Oh.’ Rab tried to whisper the word, but nothing came out.

  ‘When they charge, they lower their heads and then slash upwards. That’s what it’s done to Sketh’s thigh. See? It’s ripped through to the bone. He’ll bleed to death.’

  How can she sound so calm? But then she looked at him and there was desperation in her eyes and her pupils were huge and black.

  Sketh was bleeding hard. His face was pasty and Rab could see a sheen of sweat on his skin. As long as he keeps the spear up the boar can’t get close enough to finish him off. As long as …

  Sketh’s eyes started to roll back in his head and the spear dipped. The boar snorted and stamped a foot forward eagerly, but at the sound Sketh struggled with himself, clawing back consciousness by raw force of will. He re-focused his gaze and steadied his weapon.

  It was a heroic effort but it came at a price. The blood oozed out of his wound faster and redder. Rab couldn’t believe how much of it there was. It was pooling on the ground and still it came.

  ‘Where are the others? Why aren’t they here yet?’

  Cait shook her head. ‘Too soon. Too far.’

  Sketh’s life was draining away – he was dying in front of their eyes. This can’t be happening … This can’t be real …

  He was deeply conscious of her, close to him. His mind started to race while everything around him slowed.

  He didn’t have a spear. He didn’t even have a knife. All he had was what was inside his head.

  The zoo …

  Out of nowhere, he remembered going with his friends to a zoo – of course all the species were miniaturized to save space, nothing like the size of the thing in the clearing, but otherwise … He’d only been a kid but he’d learned stuff.

  Rab closed his eyes, squeezed them tight to block out the terror, focusing on remembering.

  Boars are just big pigs. And pigs are smart. That means they have expectations. That means they can be surprised. Distracted. Confused.

  The element of surprise. That was what he had. And there was a plan, sitting in his brain, waiting to see what he would do with it. Not a great plan – not even a good plan – but …

  Rab opened his eyes and stood up.

  He heard Cait gasp. He felt her hand on his sleeve. He ignored it and stepped out of the bushes and into the clearing.

  ‘Hey. Pig.’

  The boar swung round with terrifying speed. It squinted its short-sighted little eyes. Its nostrils flared red, but the wind was still blowing towards Rab, carrying his scent away. He got a powerful blast of the boar though, a hot, acrid stench that made him want to gag. But there was no time. He had just a split second before the boar made up its piggy mind about what to do with this unexpected, half-sensed new arrival.

  ‘Want to see a dance?’

  And Rab began to do his wild, gangly, ungainly victory dance, even though he had no guarantee of victory of any sort. There was no sound track, no music in his head – just the pounding of his heart as he hopped up and down and side to side, arms flailing.

  ‘Look at me. Look at me. Don’t look at him. Look at me,’ he chanted. His voice was high and squeaky and didn’t sound like it belonged to him at all.

  The boar snorted and shifted uneasily on its sharp feet. It lowered its head –

  Bad sign! Bad sign! Rab added great awkward leaps from one side of the clearing to the other.

  The boar gave a bewildered grunt and swung its head back and forth, trying to k
eep track of Rab’s apparently random motion. But confusion was fast turning into irritation. The dance had won the wounded hunter moments, but no more. Rab was already starting to gasp, his muscles beginning to cramp up. The boar seemed to sense weakness. Spittle drooled down from its jaws – again the great head began to lower, preparing to charge, the blood-stained tusks glinting …

  ‘Look at me, you big bully – this is what I think of you!’

  Rab was so shocked he almost stopped moving – but there was Cait, leaping out of the bushes, wagging her bottom and thrashing her arms about and pulling grotesque faces.

  Rab could practically see the boar thinking, NOW what?

  Which is the moment the wind shifted.

  Instead of blowing towards them, masking them from the boar, the wind was now sending all the information it needed about these bewildering shapes directly to its sensitive snout. Is that all? Another deep sniff. Is that ALL?!

  With a snort of utter disdain, the boar turned its back on Rab and Cait and prepared to finish its original kill. It took one step.

  It never took another.

  Spears thwacked into the huge body from all sides. The clearing was suddenly full of men. The boar heaved its great head back and forth, roaring in pain and fury, desperate to focus on a target, but its tormentors were always somewhere else and it was pierced again and again. Rab felt every blow almost as if they were entering his own body. The smell of blood, of dung, of entrails, was shocking, savage.

  The boar took forever to die. It lay on its side kicking and snarling, slashing at nothing, blood and froth spilling onto the ground. When someone finally finished the job, Rab felt his knees go wobbly under him. He crumpled in a heap at the edge of the clearing and was noisily sick.

  Cait: Beyond the Near Hill

  The second she knew the boar wasn’t getting up again, Cait pushed past the mess to get to Sketh. She slid to her knees in the blood-slicked grass.

  The hunter’s face was a rictus. It wasn’t clear if he knew what had happened. He was still holding the spear, his grip so tight she couldn’t get it away from him.

  ‘Sketh! Sketh! You’ve got to let me help you!’

  Suddenly someone was beside her.

  ‘Give me the spear, Sketh.’ It was Mewie. There was an authority in her voice that made Cait turn her head and stare.

  Sketh’s hand loosened.

  ‘Now lie down …’ But even as she was saying the words, the hunter had already collapsed in on himself. As if, without his spear, he didn’t remember what his will had been telling him to do any more.

  Cait eased him onto his back. When she straightened his wounded leg he whimpered but didn’t resist.

  White bone showed through the torn muscles and skin. Cait felt sweat break out on her hands.

  ‘Where’s Voy?’ she called over her shoulder.

  ‘She wasn’t there … in the village …’ It was Mot, his sides heaving hugely in and out. Cait wondered numbly just how far the boy had run that day. ‘But I brought … I went into your place and brought the healing bag … I …’ He swallowed hard and his eyes were afraid. ‘I didn’t look at anything – I didn’t touch anything – please don’t punish me!’

  Cait surprised herself by suddenly hugging the boy fiercely. ‘No one is going to punish you,’ she said to him in a husky voice. ‘You’ve done the right thing from first to last and anyone who says otherwise will … will … live to regret it!’ She held onto the hug too long. Anything to keep from facing the ruined thigh.

  Inside her head the words kept repeating: Where’s Voy? Where’s Voy?

  ‘I brought water,’ said Mewie. Cait reluctantly released the boy and saw the pot of clean water, stoppered with a scrap of leather, tied with crowberry rope. Mewie’s terror and doubt when Mot’s cry roused the village could not have been greater than Cait’s own, now, and yet she’d had the foresight to snatch up the pot. She’d thought through the fear.

  For a long moment Cait looked into the other woman’s eyes as if she didn’t recognise her.

  ‘Tell me what to do,’ Mewie said.

  ‘Yes. Wait – I need to …’

  She needed to look and she needed to see. She tried to clean away the blood but it kept oozing up again, blurring what she could see of the gash. She tried again. How could there be so much blood?

  Voy had had her practising on deer carcasses, cutting the flesh and repairing the wound, again and again. She knew how to work with meat. But without a beating heart to push the blood about there had been nothing like this to deal with. Nothing to get in the way, confusing her.

  While she havered, Sketh’s life was draining away. He was already grey about the lips and as she looked at his face she realised he was no longer conscious.

  ‘Tell me what to do,’ Mewie repeated.

  ‘Yes … yes … put your hands here.’

  She took Mewie’s hands and put them one on top of the other at the place where Sketh’s leg met his body. ‘There … press down. No, harder. That’s better …’

  The blood stayed away for longer now, each time she dabbed it with the puffball. She hoped it wasn’t because Sketh was finally running out of it.

  She took a deep, slow breath. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the damage in the dark place inside her head – she could see more clearly there – the way the muscles and tendons and skin should be, and the way they were after the tusk had ripped them apart from each other. What she needed to do to bring them together again, a layer at a time.

  You’ve done this before. A man’s no different to a deer. Not much different.

  She opened her eyes and reached for the healing bag.

  She could see that the tusk had missed the main road of the blood so there was hope for his life, but she knew Sketh wouldn’t thank her if she saved his life but he lost the best use of his leg.

  She began to clean the wound with the water Mewie had brought and the inner fibres of the puffball fungus – that would slow the bleeding and discourage infection. She drew the long muscles back to their normal places. To what she thought were their normal places. It would be down to Sketh’s own strength to knit them together again. Then she took another deep breath and brought out a length of deer tendon.

  ‘Mot. I need your hands too.’

  She showed him how to hold the sides of the wound together, and she began to sew. She was sweating and her hands cramped with the effort of pushing the sharp bone needles through skin and flesh. But at last it was done. She packed more puffball down along the length of the closed gash and wrapped Sketh’s leg from groin to below the knee in felted wool, tying it round with gut straps to keep it straight.

  She eased back onto her heels, found she was shaking. She watched as Mewie stroked the hair back from Sketh’s forehead. She saw how Mot clung to his father’s hand. Something shifted, clenching inside her chest.

  Rab: Beyond the Near Hill

  The villagers got on with hacking apart the boar while Cait worked to sew Sketh back together again. Both processes seemed to involve appalling amounts of blood.

  Scut. It worked. Scut. It worked. That was all he could think as a wave of dizziness swept up from the cold ground.

  ‘Put your head between your knees,’ said one of the men, pushing Rab’s head down for him with a blood-sticky hand.

  That helped. He left it there.

  He could hear them whispering. A few words came through – ‘Selkie … dance … dance … entranced …’

  No. No, no, no. They must have seen me – they must have seen me making an arse of myself … they must think I’ve gone like Benth …

  But he didn’t hear anyone snickering. He looked up. He looked over.

  They were clustered at the edge of the clearing, as if to leave a space between themselves and him, but somehow, in a way he couldn’t quite put a finger on, the space was a respectful one. When one of the men caught his eye he even raised a hand to his brow in a kind of half-salute.

  They think
I was doing magic. They think that I knew what I was doing. That it wasn’t just a crazy gamble. That I wasn’t just trying to impress Cait …

  She knew – and it didn’t matter. Suddenly he just wanted to be close to her. He dragged himself upright and skirted the boar butchering. Cait had just stood up too. She turned from the wounded hunter and took a few steps, randomly, as if she didn’t know where to go. Her clothes were blood-soaked and there were red smears right up into her hair and her hands were stained with gore and he didn’t care.

  Voy: Beyond the Near Hill

  The Old Woman came from out of nowhere and stood at the edge of the crowd of villagers. She did not choose that they notice her presence, and so they didn’t. She listened to their murmurs of awe. She watched as Cait struggled with fear, calmed herself, looked, cleaned, stitched. She saw the Young Chert watching as well. She saw Cait sag into the selkie’s embrace. She saw the look on Ailth’s face flicker and twist as he turned away.

  But when Cait looked round, suddenly aware of something, the Old Woman was gone.

  Cait: Skara Brae

  She woke in a sweat, disconcerted to find she was in her own bed – except that she wasn’t. She was in Mewie’s bed. Mewie had insisted. She had insisted on a lot of things, and Cait had been too weary to argue.

  Sketh was snoring unrhythmically in the other bed box, and Mewie and Mot were curled up together by the hearth. The fire had been banked for the night. But which night? She put a hand up to the bruised place on her cheek. It was healing. It didn’t hurt too much when she pressed it. So, a few nights anyway, since they’d brought Sketh back to Skara Brae.

  Getting Sketh home without re-opening his wound hadn’t been easy. The men entrusted with carrying him, stretched out on his cloak, didn’t need Cait’s urging to know how important it was to keep their burden level and unjolted. By the time Skara Brae came into view, their faces were running with sweat. Sketh was sweating too, and his skin was grey, but only a little blood had reddened the dressing.

  Behind the stretcher-bearers came the rest of the village. Everyone was laden down with boar meat and bones wrapped in its skin, pots of entrails, the great head, its dead staring eyes still open, still furious – and everyone was exclaiming and twittering like a flock of over-excited sparrows.