The Salt Grows Heavy, page 5
“Food is an indulgence, not a necessity. The bezoar requires no tending.” They walk fingers to the nadir of a pelvic bone, press in. A sigh seeps. “It is the only part of me that is left, you know?”
I advance, a darting half step forward, so I am close enough that I can feel the heat from their skin. The plague doctor tips their chin and grips my hand, guides my fingers down to where their bezoar is fitted into their hip. There, I find a rounded tumescence the size of a hare’s skull. It yields to pressure, although not far. Beneath, the pith feels like mouse bones chewed and compacted, baby teeth compressed into a calcium gnarl.
“I was their first or near enough to their first, at least. They found me almost a century ago, half buried in the corpses of a town whose name I have now forgotten, nearly dead myself. I remember blinking at the smoke-scrimmed sky. I remember the flies on my lips. It was warm and the sky was blue, and their army—” The plague doctor flinches away, malachite gaze hollow, haunted. Their hands shut into fists. “I suppose I would have died if they had not taken me. If they had not used me as their experiment. Their lord—our countries were at war, theirs and mine. They told me later there were orders to ensure there wouldn’t be survivors. So. I was lucky. I suppose.”
A snap of laughter, like a spine crisply bisected.
“They gave me a choice. They told me that I could come with them. I-in retrospect, I suppose it wasn’t a choice at all. What child agrees to die? I said yes and they claimed me as theirs.”
I can hear the village murmuring to itself, a drowsing soliloquy, like an old drunk repeating the name of the stars. Somewhere behind us, a hawk screams, a thing dies choking, and there’s the soft sound of wingbeats lofting a meal to the nest.
“I became a—a test environment for them. Every new idea, every concoction, every configuration of viscera, they would measure its effectiveness against my body’s responses. Together, we learned how much belladonna a small child might stomach, how a pig’s heart may adequately substitute for its human counterpart, how tumors may grow from week to week. Slowly, there was less and less of me, and one day—”
They palm the seat of the bezoar, almost affectionate.
“Eventually, this was all that remained. A membranous sac of cells and nerves, a sampling of brain, enough raw material with which to grow new organs, new limbs. I wonder sometimes if this consciousness is the same, if I am the same, or if I am a mere fabrication, strung together by circumstances.”
“There is nothing wrong with being a monster.”
Their mouth bends. “You always know the right things to say.”
Questions circle: how come, why. An entire history to vivisect and catalogue, weigh in the cup of a story, every anecdote no doubt more fascinating than the last. And then a thought: is this what humanity feels like? Selfish? These experiences are not mine to flense and frame, not mine to own, reuse in future conversations. Yet, I crave the answers, regardless.
“Were there others like you?”
“No. Not then. I was the only one. It makes sense that they’ve diversified since. Insurance against another runaway. More importantly, if their objective is to standardize a cure of mortality, it would make sense to use as many—”
A breath, a pause, and I can almost see the eddies of fate arrange themselves around us, fortune and history settling like a powdering of ice. I could walk away. I should, I should. I still could. “I don’t care.”
“I understand.”
“But you do. Which, unfortunately, makes all the difference.” I smile, slightly jagged. “Shall we return to the village? We’ve things to do.”
* * *
“Your eyes were green before.” And they’d tasted of lime and sweat and ice, had dissolved on my tongue like crème. I had eaten those like I’d eaten the heart, the hand.
“I’m certain,” says the surgeon, fingers threading together. His new eyes are silver, like starlight strained and sieved, stainless save for the pinholes of his pupils. “That you believed they were green. Green is a very beautiful color.”
No longer do the surgeons speak in echoes, the madrigal of their voices finally split. For their evening meal, they wear no masks, only skin and burlap robes, and they laugh like they’re proletariat-raised, full of brashness. The children adore them. The youngest attach to their knees, their arms, tugging them every which way. The older children weaponize stories: accounts of their fastidiousness; descriptions of a fox they’d sighted in the woods, its tail a tongue of blood; philosophies newly improvised from the wisdom they’d culled from the guts of a stag. Anything that might elicit attention; a glance, the curve of a smile, or best of all: a word of approval, more precious than any opal.
The normalcy rankles. It reeks of rehearsal. I glance to where my plague doctor sits, spine straight, hands clasped over the table. Their plate is laden with cheeses, frost-bleached grapes, cold cuts thick-rind with fat. Nothing has been touched. As I watch, my plague doctor leans into conversation with the deep-voiced surgeon; their jaw clenching, unclenching, juddering with the effort of restraint.
“What are you?”
I look back to the surgeon-saint to my right. He smiles, only lips, no teeth. He and his cohorts had seemed indifferent to me in the cold morning—the third jabbers with the children, agreeable as a grandfather—but it might have been there were other things to distract them then: the stilted theatre that is every first meeting, the pleasures of such ceremony, the cipher of my plague doctor’s distaste. “You’re clearly not human. An aquatic creature, perhaps? Not a rusalka, no. I know the rusalka intimately. Your eyes—” He raises his hand, fingers splayed. Moves closer, closer, until his nails scratch my lips. “Fascinating.”
I smile, all teeth. “I’m told.”
The surgeon retracts, fingers balling, even as he lays his hand atop the table. Behind him, two girls—one wide-set, with chestnut hair too thick to bind, the other slim as a needle—maneuver a cauldron to the table. Their stew is redolent of carrots, yams, parsnips, all slightly old; onions cooked till the sweetness bled from them; beef and marrow and boiled-down bones. “That was presumptuous of me.”
“Yes.”
“What can I ask you, then? Could we talk about the weighting of the stars above the night-bruised seas, and what happens when one falls into the abyss? Or whether pelicans converse in French when outside of human view? I’d love—” Shoulders slant forward. His expression becomes one of languorous interest, conspiratorial. “—to know what it is like in the deeps. What do you do? How do you interact with one another? Do you have a civilization? Are you feral?”
I allow myself, for the gash of a moment, to remember what I once possessed: the abyssal ocean, the song in those depths like swimming down the black throat of a god; the searing colors moting my sisters’ coils, sapphire and quartz crushed into constellations, patterns and prisms of incandescence spiraling through the dark, our tails in endless, restless motion; our mother’s eyes colossal, phosphorescent; our father’s ribs, still studded with our egg sacs, his heartbeat in our veins. I’d been happy there. I could have been happy there forever.
“I’ll tell you.” I look up at the sky, a faultless blue, cold as the heart of a king. “But only as payment in a fair exchange, only if you agree to a game.”
“And what game is that?” Oh, that hunger in his gaze, sharp as salt.
“Twice more.” I raise two fingers. “I’d see you repeat your miracles; scoop out those grey eyes, return to us in the morning with a gaze of amber, emerald, cobalt—whatever you’d like to pretend it has always been.”
Like a child caught with his fingers spooled around the heart of another boy, he smiles; slyness, not shyness communicated in the lidding of his gaze, his eyes unrepentant beneath long, curling lashes. He jerks his head. “And if we allow you to bear witness twice again, what do you promise us in sacrifice?”
His voice wreathes itself with the lilt of ritual.
“My heart. My past. The six hundred names of the hadal mothers, the bibles of the squids, the colors that you can only see when you are there in the nothing, there in the deep. Anything you ask or require.”
“Anything at all?”
I look again to where my plague doctor sits, their own dialogue concluded.
“Yes.”
* * *
So, they do it again, with us and the children in attendance.
The first surgeon undoes the lock of his wrist and removes his hand without ceremony, no blood or untidy bouquet of nerves, bones glistening white. A single rotation, assisted by the downward swing of a cleaver.
The second surgeon extracts his eyes with equal uneventfulness: a delicate application of forceps, no more than that. Only at the end does he assert strength. A sharp tug; the optic nerves detach, a splattering trail of moist hues.
And the third, he makes no use of tools. Instead, he pares his shoulder of fabric, baring his chest and its puckered brown nipple, before peeling back cutis and muscle with his nails. Beneath, the ribs are revealed to be grotesquely architectured, the striations of calcium shored up by stucco, so to accommodate the hole hacked into their midst. Inside the man-made cavity, epauletted by amethyst and mica, his heart shudders, as though horrified by the presence of an audience.
He removes the organ without any overtures of agony, and the village howls like dogs in celebration.
* * *
“Are you certain you know what you’re doing?” My plague doctor’s breath blooms white in the dark of the shed.
“Not entirely. But I think—” I smack my lips. The night is frost and sheets of falling snow, like flecks of crystal through which the moon is refracted a thousand times over. It is so quiet without the children and their baying, all of them asleep. I wonder what we would do should one of them discover us here. “I think what we must do is displace their godhood, remind their devotees that these are just men who bleed.”
My plague doctor sighs in counterpoint, expression morose, but they do not hesitate to retrieve what I’d requested: the heart, the hands, the staring eyes … “There are simpler ways.”
“My husband was a foolish man. But he understood one thing well.” I move the new oblations in place, thumb stroking across still-warm ventricles. “For the falling star and the rising ape to meet, the former must first be debased. No myth can remain terrifying when you’ve seen it broken and beaten, rendered as toothless as an old crone.”
No reply save for a subtle retexturing of their breath, the gap between inhalations infinitesimally smaller, the length of their exhalations protracted. Then: fingers gently clasp my shoulder. No words are needed. I smile into the gloom and my teeth glimmer like knives.
And I eat as my plague doctor unravels the lynx’s corpse, removes the souvenirs we intend to leave in our wake.
Hand, heart, unblinking eyes—
I savor them all.
The hand, this time, is flavored with copper, its cartilage fractures like glass; the heart is a mouthful of brine and fermented raspberry; the eyes burst into effervescence, peculiarly tasteless. Beneath every note, however, I find Samson, the stink and salt of him, his fear intaglioed into a bloodied aftertaste. If I focus, I can almost hear the syncopation of his pulse: pained and urgent.
He did not die easy. He did not die quick either. His flesh is pungent with trauma, acidic, nearly mush, textured like rotted shrimp. I swallow every bite, nonetheless. Waste is deplorable, no matter how pitiful or poorly seasoned the victuals.
III
The Third Night
We wake to a commotion.
I uncoil from the bed and tweak aside a curtain flap, look out into the village: one of the surgeons is on his knees, hunched over, like a penitent in the throes of flagellation. Someone’d bound his eyes with a strip of bloodied cloth. He moans. He claws furrows into his cheeks. Around me, a noose of staring children echo his agony.
“I think they noticed.” I turn to my companion.
“So fortunate that they are gods then and not men.” My plague doctor sits up, their hair a cloud of knots, voice husked. “Kings would have us swinging from the gallows by now.”
Their tone is mild despite their words, allayed further by a misalignment of their mouth, a not-quite smile that could have been, in a different light, a grimace instead. I twitch a shoulder upwards. “Perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” they echo, sloughing their cotton robes as they do. In their motions, there is neither seduction nor pretense of decorum, merely efficiency. While they dress, I study the mathematics of scars inlaid into their spine, their shoulders, the sloping of their pelvis. “I suppose it is time for the second act.”
* * *
Appearance is everything.
Remember this when you’ve forgotten all else.
* * *
“I did not know that saints could weep.” The malice is starkly unsubtle, its stridence so anomalous that I blink at its manifestation.
The surgeon labors to his feet, one knee and then the next; breath whining between his teeth. Blood has dried into black tributaries, sectioning his features like a butcher’s chart. His grimace is blotched with ochre. “I see, I see, I see. What a blessing these eyes are. Never have I beheld the truth more clearly.”
“And what is that truth?”
“Even a mutt may gaze upon a god if it is sly enough to wait until the divine sleeps.” The surgeon staggers, loses traction. He slips. A crunching noise: an applause of cartilage and ligament, tearing, snapping beneath the descent of the body’s weight. But the surgeon does not scream; he spits, fresh blood and green-yellow phlegm, bits of bone like half-digested baby teeth.
My plague doctor grins beneath their mask. The expression is pure savagery. They stalk forward, and I follow in silhouette, my profile muddled by stratas of warm fur. A stratagem that my companion does not explain, only implements after obtaining consent. I pluck at the collar, tense beneath its captured heat.
“I will keep those words in mind for when and if I meet a god.” The sound of my plague doctor’s voice is poison. They crouch before the surgeon, head cocked, the drape of their robes like a framework of wings. “Let me know if you meet one. I’d love to see if my manners might please them.”
“Mongrel dog—”
“If only words weren’t meaningless.” An upward stroke of steel; the surgeon’s head ricochets back. Blood gouts, blistering heat. My plague doctor carves him open from philtrum to forehead, butterflies the flesh so it weeps into flaps.
Fabric ripples onto the snow, the paleness debauched by gore. The children mill in place, uncertain noises pulsing in their throats like drumbeats.
“Your saints promised you perfection.” No smugness in the pronouncement. No discernible emotion at all. My plague doctor clutches their knife loosely, reverse-grip, its edge now ribbed with vermillion. “But how can they give you that when they themselves are so fallible? So mortal? Everything they’ve shown you was just … lies. Trickery. Sleights of hand.”
With each word, however, their enunciation becomes more staccato. Each syllable is a detonation. “Look at him and tell me if this wretch deserves worship.”
The surgeon bears animal eyes in his sockets. Lynx eyes, I wager, from the shine and the shape of the iris. They are held in place by a web of pink tissue, keloided, beaded with warm pus and dandelion blooms of fresh nerves.
The result of the mischief we wrought in the shed is hideous.
“Ungrateful—” His voice has taken on a stridulatory resonance, an unpleasant buzzing, like a cicada taught to speak. The surgeon staggers upright, one eye making orbits in its hollow. Momentum disgorges the other. It thumps against his cheek, the optic nerve overgrown with extraneous tissue. Eyelids flutter loosely, devoid of corneal support, concaving into the hollow.
“Look at him,” my plague doctor repeats. This time, they do not resist the impulse to sneer.
A scream cuts through the tableau before we learn of the children’s assessment, whether they find the debasement of their saint repugnant or revelatory. As one, they stampede to the loci of the wailing: one of the smaller cottages, a slant of tiling and wood clinging parasitically to its neighbour’s foundation.
We follow, my plague doctor and I, pulled forward by the noise. It is not dissimilar from the sound that Luke made as the surgeons threaded his soul into his carcass: raw-throated, expunged without consideration for air or damage to the esophagus.
The door is slammed open. The children barge in. I join the mass of bodies, craning a look around their shoulders. The antumbra reveals little: broad shapes, crates, shelves stacked close as vertebrae. Movement that segues into snuffling, chewing. A shuffle of footsteps. Crying. Someone invokes a pantheon of names; someone gasps; someone retching onto the flooring. The air, already stinking of musk and mildew, grows acid.
A pane of morning sunlight fractures across the dark, divulging the scene at last. The surgeon with the voice of bass stoops over a body, his mouth wedged in the solar plexus. It is the girl whose abode we’d taken. She lays under the surgeon, whimpering ceaselessly, arms above her head. Still alive, in spite of her disembowelment, and agonizingly so.
The surgeon wraps fingers around exposed ribs, tugs hard. The calcium scaffolding comes apart like slabs of meringue. He plants the heel of his palm against the breastbone and pushes, freeing more space for his chin. The surgeon uses the jut of it like a shovel, nuzzles upwards before he plunges headfirst into the spooled offal, begins to feast again. He savors each gulp, moans into the motion.
“You were right.”
Luke.
“You were right about the saints.” His voice is high and aching, terrified. I hadn’t realized that he’d been part of the watching mass, had been unable to differentiate him from the columns of starved limbs, and the intent faces. “They’re monsters. They’re murderers. We—”
