The Salt Grows Heavy, page 3
Carefully, I smooth a hand across Luke’s brow, parting the hair from his features. His expression is gentle, beatific, without the scarring that death sometimes inflicts. I had expected a rictus. Pain. It isn’t until my fingers find the stitching—the finest sutures, so exquisitely delicate that they may as well be illusionary—that I understand why.
“Welcome.”
“Welcome.”
“Welcome.”
“You’re just in time.” The doctors arrange themselves on the right of the body, every motion matched and mirrored, Luke’s bezoar transferred from hand to hand, before it is at last installed in the abdominal cavity, just above the rise of the pelvic bone.
“In time.”
“In time.”
Cogs come next, bronze in the firelight. Toothed discs, spirals of wire. “A new round is to begin. When Luke reawakens, he will play the role of the butcher, and another will be chosen as the pig. Such is the game that we play, the exercise that we must perform to ready the body.”
“Butcher.”
“Pig.”
The last is a whisper, ravenous.
One of the doctors crooks a hand and a boy—I remember him from the taiga, the one with a soaring voice of crystal—rises to provide access to an open jar, the container massive enough that he must clutch it with both arms. Inside, coils of intestine, succulent and redolent of brine. About two feet of the winding organ is meticulously removed. The rest is returned to salt water. The same is done with a glossy slab of liver, a stomach, rinds of muscle still on the bone: everything is measured, mapped to the millimeter, before a segment is taken and joined to Luke’s extant viscera.
Not once do the three surgeons pause or falter, knives and thread and needle flashing, a life cohering beneath their long fingers. At some indeterminable interval between then and tomorrow, Luke swallows a ragged breath. His lungs—pale, smooth pink, wisping steam—expand.
And he screams.
With his eyes rolled back. With his body convulsing in time with every paroxysm of noise. With the terror of the dead coerced back into its carcass, and the choking knowledge that comes after: now it must teach the heart to beat, the blood to run, the body to breathe when before there had only been the dirt, the quiet.
This is nothing clean about this, nothing that merits celebration, nothing willing, no agreement on the part of the resurrected boy. I twitch away from the sight of him spasming against his restraints. His peers do not share my repulsion. They roar up from their obeisances, howling, exulting in the debacle they’ve witnessed. When Samson turns to us, his eyes are fanatic-bright.
“See?” His grin is a knife. “Told you they’d make Luke good as new.”
To their credit, the doctors do not indulge in their edification and focus instead on the completion of their task. As Luke thrashes in agony, one moves to pin him down by the shoulders, while another secures his ankles. The third works rapidly, lacing the boy’s dermis together with filaments that are almost invisible in the firelight.
Through it all, Luke continues to scream and scream; his lungs swollen against his ribs.
“What have they done?” my plague doctor moans. I find their hand and slot my fingers between theirs, find them trembling, their pulse juddering in its veins. “What have they done,” they repeat. “What have they done. What have they done.”
I squeeze their hand as the children’s saints begin to speak.
“You see?”
“You see.”
“You see.”
“I see—” begins my plague doctor, the words hoarse. “—three men who have participated in the torture of a poor child. First, you catalyze his murder and now? After he has at last fled this wretched earth, you drag him back, and bind him to steel and sinew.”
“Every newborn screams when they first emerge into this world.” They sigh together, and there is something petulant about the acoustics of their retort, a churlishness that pricks. “This is no different.”
“You say this”—a baring of teeth as the plague doctor’s voice crescendos—“you say this as men who have never practiced their art on themselves. You say this as men who have never known pain, who cannot know pain. You say this—”
A stillness fits its maw around the crackling of the torches, the wind as it laces cold around the village, a moaning nearly too low to hear. Sensing blood in the wind, the crowd stills, their lambent gaze turned to the surgeons, expectant.
They transmit a look among themselves, heads moving like clockwork sparrows, the barest motions. “We would not do unto others what we have not done to ourselves. This pain—”
“This pain.”
“This pain.”
“—is transitory, a signal of a body that is learning to change, to better itself. When you have become like us, when you have transcended, there will be nothing but beauty. But we understand your lack of trust. For you, we will prove ourselves again.” An inflection of the hand, repeated in triplicate. “You will see.”
* * *
This is the spectacle we witness:
For the first act, the first doctor severs his hand at the wrist: a smooth descent of a bone saw, a tensing and uncurling of muscles in the dominant grip. No blood seeps from the resultant stump, only a paste-like substance: dark, sweet-smelling.
For the second, the next doctor uses spoons of polished ivory, their stems traced with brass, to commit self-enucleation. The optic nerves he crops with pearl-handled scissors, and the assembly claps at his sightless efficiency.
For the coda of this performance, the last doctor excises his own heart. A complicated exercise requiring the foreshortening of the ribs and a movement of the lungs, the trachea, the digestive tract at its nascence. Arteries are pinioned, veins clipped, their contents rerouted. Where to, I couldn’t begin to tell you, but the art of the doctor is such that he continues to breathe, continues to work without regard for the vanished organ.
When he is done, the trifecta of body parts is set on a tray of obsidian and lofted by a girl with hair like a spill of oil.
“Do you see now?” the three cry in unison, voices bolstered by the paeans of their disciples, messianic in their mutilation. In that moment, they are nothing if not mythic, nothing if not gods of this small place, this snow-swallowed taiga. “Do you not see?”
My plague doctor, of course, says nothing at all.
II
The Second Night
In the minutes before dawn arrives, when the indigo horizon has only just begun to bleed, a reddish-gold seeping between the cracks in the mountain line, I slip from the hovel and pad towards a hut alcoved by the trees.
I can smell them. The eyes, the heart, the amputated hand. A sour-sweetness, faintly chemical, as though of roses beginning to ferment, underscored by a wash of roasted marrow, rich fat. And magic too. Fecund, familiar.
I push the door and a slant of light baptizes the dark, limns the rosewood shelves and their occupants in cobalt, the bottles thick with offal. But they are not what I am here for. I find what I’m looking for on an oval of black stone. Though unprotected, no frost has touched them. The heart, in particular, is unusually warm.
The three surgeons had described these parts as vestigial, no more important than a twist of hair, or the skin scraped from the back of a knee. This, they said, was an example of the providence that they’ve vowed to share, the benediction that awaits those who would persevere, would permit themselves to suffer. Heaven can only be bridged by agony, they cried.
One day soon, there wouldn’t even be need for that. One day, the surgeons whispered, there would be no reason to fear mortality. If only the faithful endure. After all, look: have they not detached the very hand from one, removed the eyes from another, exhumed the heart from the third? Do they not stand among their acolytes, not only alive but vigorous? Was this not proof enough of numinosity?
So I eat them, the detritus they’ve left behind.
I pop the eyes into my mouth first. They are almost ephemeral, tasting of ice and salted limes. The hand is a more complicated flavor: gingery, unctuous, the phalanges crunching like pork crackling beneath my teeth. And the heart—no pang of metal or rotting tissue here, but something exponentially more divine, its potent sapidity recalling my first memory of being conscious, and aware of my bathyal womb.
As I lick the surface clean of its juices, I wonder if my plague doctor would object to what I’ve done, or if they’d laugh. Either way, the surgeons had said they have no use for these.
* * *
“We should leave.”
I lave my tongue across my teeth, savoring their calcium flavor, the few strings of tissue caught between. How I’d missed this, longed for this: taste in its orchestral complexity, every flavor note relayed without exception. My voice—I do not recognize the chords, its abraded cadence, but the shape of it? Still enough of mine that I ache at its echoes. The flesh of the surgeons is more restorative even than the ambitions of my hope. Whatever else they are, whatever else they might represent, they are good meat, nonetheless.
“You can talk.” The plague doctor sits up straight. It is strange to see them without their usual regalia, their robes strung on a line outside the open window. Instead of black, they now wear alkaline white, their vestments not unlike what a travelling monk might don: close-fitted with asymmetrical paneling, the collar high enough to kiss their lower lip. Drenched in the morning sunlight, their copper skin almost glows. “I’d always thought—”
“That I was possessed by a drowning hunger for the sun and as such, chose to surrender my voice for a chance to have the sun warm my shoulders? That I loved him, my husband, with such fury, that I laid everything I was at his feet like a dowry? No. Lies, all of them. Myths to make my captivity more palatable. He cut out my tongue and fed the pieces to me.” I touch fingertips to my throat. Something about my repast had been exceptionally curative. “But later, we can sift through the falsehoods. For now, we need to leave.”
“What did—” The question catches between their teeth, a hissed intake of breath. “Oh.”
I smile. “They said these things were extraneous.”
The plague doctor angles a strange look, eyes liquid. As they rake fingers through coal-dark curls, an epiphany articulates itself: all these years and not once have they offered the use of their name. They sigh. “You’re surprisingly eloquent.”
“When you do not have the option for conversation, there arises a wealth of time for personal instruction.” I fold myself into the opposite chair, a smile budding. My voice rasps and scratches, rusted by the silence, but it is mine, still mine. “Let us be gone.”
“We can’t.”
“Why?”
“The children—” Their voice knots itself in old memories, dies before it can be born. That crack in their facade, the one I’d glimpsed in the woods, I see it dilate again and a drop of terror pitches into their expression. In that moment, they are young, haunted, eminently breakable.
I glance at the window. No one else has arisen yet. No one save our missing host, I suppose, ill-fitting as the description might be. After all, the word implicates some measure of consensuality, and I suspect her agreement was never courted. Certainly, her behavior suggested as much. Late into the previous night, after the last torch had burned itself black, the girl who’d first summoned us—fox-haired, scrawny—entered to nest beside the dwindling fire. She wouldn’t speak to us, would only glare from between matted bangs, glowering as the plague doctor ransacked her notes.
“You want to free them.”
“That would be presumptuous.” Wryness winds itself through their voice. The plague doctor rises, paces to the windowsill where their mask rests drying, the monk’s cloth of their garments whispering hoarse secrets. “I want them to free themselves.”
“Why?”
“Did you not see what they did to the poor boy? No child should live through an eternity of that. Trust me. I’ve spent enough time under those curious hands to—”
The plague doctor falls silent.
Ah, I think.
“The surgeons. They’re the ones who made you, weren’t they?”
They say nothing. I read instead the answer in the tension lines of their mouth, their opaque gaze, the blanched knobs of their knuckles as they crumple the fabric of their robes into a trembling hand.
“Whatever the case,” I say, gentle. “I suspect that your makers—”
They tense at the word.
“—will not take kindly to what I have done. Forget what their disciples might do, regardless of whether their saints survive.” I graze their shoulder blade with a touch and say, not unkindly, “We should leave. Now.”
A spill of voices. Too late, then. I turn as the door gapes open, soundless, and a boy slips through, his face unfamiliar. Today, there are no bones wefted in the hair, no paint on soft cheeks; a fresh-scrubbed angelicness is in residence instead. He smiles, a crack between his incisors. “You two hungry? The saints are asking to have breakfast with you.”
The plague doctor dons their mask, lips thinned beneath the sloping dark.
“Show the way.”
The boy grins, effulgent. He prances forward, never once looking behind, already confident that where he marches, others must follow. We exchange another look, the plague doctor and I. With a slanting of their hand, they gesture me closer, close enough to mantle me with furs scavenged from our little quarters: squirrel skins, rabbit hides, delicate as eyelashes. The ritualism of my dressing, the attention they invest in the act, every motion elegiac, elegant; it proposes the presence of an unconsummated tenderness, something more profound than camaraderie.
I tilt my cheek, feel their breath puff against my flesh, and there is the sense of timelines fractalizing. In some other world, somewhere, perhaps they kiss me: lightly, feverishly, with the emphasis of desperation, with hesitation, with passion requited.
Here, they only chuckle and pull away. The two of us move in simpatico, keeping time with each other, always parallel, dark and light and the smell of plasma from my clandestine repast cooling on my fingertips. We are led to a banquet table, clumsily ornamented. Four figureheads, one to each leg, their arms raised to support the wood. The faces are hideous: gashes for the eyes and mouth, the jaws swollen to tumors.
The three surgeons slouch in their thrones, hats crowned with red poppies and glistening grey thorns, willow-branch braids. Today, the three wear pantalone half-masks, enamel-crusted leather in the pigments of violent death. A gluttonous amount of food—berries, black as bruising; figs; roasted poultry; fried capers; cheeses pungent with salt—lies piled in front of them, untouched. Around them, the children cluster. There are only two little stools opposite where the surgeons sit like idols on their carved wooden thrones.
The plague doctor makes them wait. They smooth down both sleeves, one after another, adjusting the glide of creamy fabric before they straighten, stride forward. I watch as I always have: watch, wait, teeth demurely withheld.
“Discipline by deprivation, then?” A trimming of venom in their smooth contralto, candid.
“Yes,” says one.
“Yes.”
“You seem—” The third surgeon—the one with the tenor, the one who had gouged out his eyes—sighs and leans forward, shoulders scissored back. His mask is a drowned man’s blue, and his gaze, restored somehow, whole again, is the color of medusae washed to shore, all turgid transparence and shuddering villi. I’ve seen eyes like those. Out in the taiga where everything was ice and nothing was as pale as one triumphant glare, steam uncurling beneath bared teeth. “—so very familiar.”
“When you’ve seen one plague doctor, you’ve seen them all. I—” The plague doctor cants a look at the silent children. “Where is Samson?”
“Elsewhere.”
“Indisposed.”
“Away doing great things,” says the third who sighs then, jellyfish eyes drowsy. “You know how children are.”
Something throbs through the plague doctor, minute paroxysms most visible in the fingers. Was that recognition? An invocation of trauma past? By away, I wonder if the surgeons mean dead, his youth cannibalized. I wonder if his remains have been distributed among them, segregated by value, with better jars for better specimens. Is his bezoar somewhere, dreaming of renascence? My plague doctor exhales, slow, and I glide up beside them, shoulder fitted against theirs, a comfort offered.
“You’ll have to teach me that trick,” says my plague doctor, one corner of their mouth raised, their gaze languid as it moves to rest upon the surgeon who had enucleated himself. “Nothing of my research has revealed how to adjust the color of the iris. And do not think to be coy, sir. I am excellent at detail and I know the color of your eyes today is not the same as what it was before.”
A beat.
“They look just like Samson’s,” says the plague doctor, and there is enough venom in their voice to boil the breath from a dynasty.
“Stay.” One steeples his gloved hands, but I see what he’s trying to hide beneath the silk. In the circlet of bare flesh between where the gloves end and his sleeves begin: a subtle patterning under the skin, as though of string cabled through sinew, holding together muscles until fresh nerves can take root. This then is the nature of their immortality: a cruel parasitism, worse than the hunger of the hunt and its teeth. “And we will.”
“Stay.”
“Stay.”
“We would, but we need to feed the horse,” the plague doctor drawls, fingers circling my wrist. I do not resist when they pull me away. The surgeons say nothing, the children say even less.
* * *
“This is your fault,” they say without accusation, only a dry-mouthed, shambolic despair. The plague doctor wrings their hands as they pace along the frozen riverbank. Across the way, a lynx is testing the ice with too-wide paws, ears bent low, its tawny reflection abstracted by the rime.
