The Salt Grows Heavy, page 7
I don’t lie to them nor do I portend inevitabilities, and instead cup the drooping viscera in my palm. Tenderly, with a girl’s reverence, as though the coils were expensive ribbons that I might thread through my hair. What surprises us both is the cry that escapes, the tiniest of whining gasps, and my plague doctor’s eyes becomes effulgent. Something like love flits between us.
I press my head to the chapel of their chest, that nameless corpse displaced. Carefully, I fit myself into their arms, body curled into a question, their intestines in the bowl of my hands, and I hold them there, hold us there, my breathing metered by the diminuendo of their pulse. Slower, slower, until each inhalation is elevated to an event, unique in its infrequency.
“We had a good run.” They laugh at the phrasing. Blood spasms between my fingers, scalding. It couldn’t have been more than an hour, surely, but already I’ve forgotten what it is like to be warm, what it is like to be anything but numb.
“Don’t speak.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the plague doctor ripostes, their languor infuriating. For a wild moment, I’m subsumed by hypotheticals: what if I were to devour them? Bone and brain and bezoar, the last swallowed whole and unbroken. Would their cells, once edited into nutrients, then parasitize mine? Colonize and civilize the crenellations of my brain, develop into a ghost, a disparate consciousness. If I could answer this with any certainty, I’d consume them in a heartbeat, preserve them in every chapter of my body. I’d do anything but watch them die. Even if payment for their longevity isn’t shared tenancy of this body, but complete monopoly. Better I be reduced to miscreant daydreams of the ocean than be alive without them. Whatever it takes. Anything. Anything, so long as they stay with me. “There’s no point.”
“The bezoar—”
“Too much damage.” Their kindness is traumatic to endure. “It is alright. There are worse ways to die. I promise. I’ve seen them, lived them. I—”
The exposition is interrupted by labored coughing. I look up. My plague doctor bleeds from every cavity: ears, mouth, nostrils, tear ducts. Estuaries of wine that taste on my tongue of the taiga and the sea, salt and soil grown rich on the dead. Of trout excessively seasoned, of my palm on the plague doctor’s cheek, of futures foreshortened, of a kiss that never was, and all at once, I am drowning in loss, and I need them to stay, no matter the price. I’d slice my larynx clean, make soup of the ribbons. I’d peel every word from my vocabulary. Anything, everything, so long as I can keep them anchored to this life.
“Please don’t talk,” I whisper, my impotence a knife through my gut. So many years spent an exile from my own voice, and this is all I can muster: platitudes, weakly murmured into cold and turgid flesh. “Please don’t talk. Please don’t talk. Please don’t talk. Please don’t. Don’t—don’t die.”
The entreaty is an embarrassment. I cringe at its infantile architectonics, at how maudlin it all sounds, but my plague doctor only chuckles, their fingers wefted into my hair. A thumb finds the parabola of my lower lip, nail stroking against needle-teeth. “You should go.”
“No.”
“There’s no point in dying here.”
“There’s no point in being alive either,” I counter, vicious, relentless. “Where am I to go? If you die, I can’t—”
My plague doctor does not hear me. I don’t think they can. Their caress becomes rhythmic, restless, broad strokes that chart the road between cheek and chin. “That wasn’t the case when we first decided to travel. I remember precisely how you looked. Standing in the square in your ragged finery, radiant in your newfound freedom. You looked”—another paroxysm, another dribble of claret—“like you’d seen the world unroll like a map and there were no borders, no boundaries, nowhere you couldn’t go. You were so beautiful.”
They kiss me then. Through the hair matted to my brow, their mouth wet with warmth. They kiss me and my heart seizes with grief. “Bury me, my love, and take a lock of my hair with you. Carry me through the centuries. I think I’d like to share, just a little, in what immortality is like.”
I begin to keen.
“You don’t have to. I can be a romantic fool.”
“It’s not that. It’s not. It’s—”
“It is alright.” They sigh. “This is not my first death.”
And that sigh becomes the sound of muscles slackening beneath skin and sinew, of a body unmaking itself from the rote and routine of living, one stitch at every stage of exhale, liver and lungs and lymph slumping into obsoletion. I clutch at my plague doctor, palsied by my weeping, and I am deserted by every thought save these:
That I want to die here, mired in the cold. That I want to race them to Death’s carriage, exceeding their pace but only just, never going so far as to be unable to turn and corset their fingers in mine. That eternity is a worthless bauble without their conversation. That I would follow them into the demise of the universe where every heaven and each hell is shuttered, and there is nothing of us but motings of wan light, and there is no bodily apparatus with which to express affection, no recourse save to glow weakly in worship until at last, such things are swallowed too by the dark.
That I would love them even then.
As long as a moiety of conscious thought persists, I will love them.
I will love them to the death of days.
Succumbed to fatalism, I do not stir when a hand clinches my shoulder and another, papered in leather, explores the anachronism of teeth and temple, my thalassic nature more apparent now. A thumb caresses the gills fronding my jaws; frosted over, they crack painlessly where pressure is gratuitously applied. I do not pay attention to any of these things, though, not until knuckles impact my face, hard enough that the nasal bone fenestrates. Thin slivers of calcium and cartilage embed beneath my orbital sockets, spackle the adjacent skin. One works through the curtain of flesh that is my cheek. Another spears an eyeball.
The second blow comes before I can orient: a slap this time, imperious.
“Wake up, little fish.”
“Wake.”
“Wake.”
I stare into the blizzard through a rinse of scarlet.
Silhouettes in the writhing snow, ominously spectral: the children, like a jury of deaths, standing witness to my sentencing. In the foreground, in sharper focus, the triptych of charnel saints, those dread surgeons, gazing solemnly down upon my prone frame. They are without masks or perceivable injury, features rendered handsome anew. I think I can see something of Luke’s mordance in the spokes of their expressions, overlaid by Samson’s ferality, his grin unutterably obscene through the window of those three’s mouths.
“I should have made you scream longer.” I laugh shakily. Each time I blink, the needle of bone works itself deeper, tearing at the corneal layer. Soon enough, my vision is halved, the ruin of that eye marked by a gout of warm fluids, trickling tear-like down my frozen cheek. “But you tasted foul and it would have taken too much time. Still, I regret it.”
The one I had ingurgitated, stripped of sinew and sheets of muscle, whose ribs I had fractured so I could better worm into the abdominal cavity and undo the heart from where it latches to the diaphragm. Who I ate alive, vellicating organs with my nails, scraping tunica from the vulnerable entrail, while he twitched like a fish on the line: these chunks like condiments for bigger swathes of meat, and also a way to expedite his consumption. That one, he glares at me with leadlight eyes, teeth gritted.
“I won’t make that mistake,” he says.
A sudden fractious movement beneath me: the plague doctor, lurching into startled awareness.
“I told you to run.” Agony in that hoarse verbalization, their hand fumbling for mine. “Why didn’t you run?”
I slant a bleak smile at them. “You’re here.”
Their grip tightens.
“Idiot.”
* * *
They leash us to two wizened birches, the trees dead long before this winter, ossified by some meteorological alchemy. I’d thought initially they would leave us staked there, let the cold take us. But the surgeons had different plans.
The children, skin bruised by exposure to the bitter weather, extremities hypothermic, fingertips black from the gelid condition of their blood, rush through the taiga, seeking what wood they can, any kindling they can salvage, no matter how esoteric its former nature. Our funerary pyre becomes a study in boreal archaeology: a drift of dead branches, ancient pine cones, desiccated moss, and corpses hacked loose from icy integuments. Fat burns gorgeously, after all, and with such succulent fragrance. My husband’s kingdom taught me this.
“Tell me about your sisters,” comes a ragged entreaty.
I jump at my plague doctor’s voice, though not very far, not with my wrists bayoneted to the tree. I had thought them dead and been grateful for such. They had hung there for long minutes, slack, gore spewing from their belly, intestines like spoiled goldwork, its color bleached by the cold. In the tenebrous light, it is almost beautiful: the frost become diamantine paillettes, and I think of weddings. Not in vaulted halls where the air is insipid with sandalwood and spun sugar, a stink of powders. But in the taiga in spring, when the world has thawed, and there is green everywhere, green beneath my feet and green in the trees, wreathing the boughs like a bride’s crown, green like the lambence of their eyes.
“Tell me about the deep. Tell me of your fathers, of your bathyal mothers. Tell me what it is like there in the dark water. Tell me if the stories are true. Do you sing men to their deaths? Do you drown maidens? Are the rusalka kin? Tell me,” their voice falters. “Tell me your stories until the fire comes.”
I do.
I tell them everything. I recite the chthonic scriptures, the migratory cycles of the kelpies; my misgivings about how Scylla had been poorly represented, no more monster than Charybdis, who has become sweet in their dotage, too old to do more than faintly worry passing ships. I tell them of what happens when a sealwife renounces domesticity and decants herself into the water, how some husbands follow and why others do not, and what happens when a man gives himself wholly to the sea and its children. I recount each birth I’ve had, how we are haunted by our sisters. I tell them of the abyss, of the colors there, those hues mankind will never add to their tomes because they will never find their way to our homes, and we will drown them if they think to try.
“And your names?” asks my plague doctor, my beloved. “What power is there in your names that you can offer them while tongueless, mutilated by husbands?”
I try to answer, but suddenly, it’s too late.
“So you know what we intend,” says the surgeon with the bass voice. “You will both burn. Had you been less difficult, we might have made a harvest of you. We might have taken your skin and reaped your bones. We might have studied every inch of your sinew and vein. Paraded you through the museums, and placed you in the circuses of the world. They would have loved you. They would have known you. But now, you will be ash instead.”
“Nothing but.”
“Ash.”
The children begin to howl their praises.
“I read somewhere,” says my plague doctor, “that there is power to your kind’s names, isn’t there? Or was it in your voices? I can’t remember. Not right now. But there was a reason your husband sliced out your tongue, was there not? He was afraid, one way or another, of the voice that beats in your lungs, your hurricane scream. You frightened him. How men fear things that can’t be quieted.”
Their laughter shears through the ice, through the crackle of the kindling as the embers burst and leap, and that rapacious inferno bulges beneath my plague doctor’s feet. How carnivorous that sullen light, building in gusts, until not even the onslaught of snow might delay it. I watch as it clambers towards them, so eager to swallow them.
I begin to scream.
Yet my plague doctor remains insouciant, even smiling.
“You don’t remember me, do you? The things that you did.”
The surgeons stand silent for a time. Then:
“We don’t remember meat.”
“Meat.”
“Meat.”
At this, my plague doctor erupts again into lunatic laughter, louder this time, baying their mirth as though this tableau is as innocent as a drink in a warm tavern. Their viscera heaves, descends by another three inches, torn by the violence of their guffawing. I am mute again countenancing this horror, transfixed by a nihilistic certainty that this is better, that this is quicker, that them dying in this fashion is superior to an excruciating death by the fire.
“Well,” says my plague doctor. “At least you won’t forget her.”
And they speak my name into the fire as the crash of their heart goes quiet and the loss is too much but the act somehow is enough, becomes fatwood for what follows.
What happens after feels as natural as falling, as grief, as flight: an effervescence which begins first as needlepoints of light within my breast before it becomes torrential, a devouring effulgence spreading as I imagine feathers might, downing my skin, the walls of my organs, my throat, the nadir of my being abruptly incandescent. I swallow a breath, exhale flame and it is not dissimilar from what seethes across my plague doctor’s pyre, but it is cleaner, far cleaner: a celestial thing, bereft of fuel from unwilling flesh.
The surgeons retreat. The children shrink from what I have become.
But it is too late for all of us.
Once upon a time, a man wrote a parable about a mermaid who fell in love with a prince, and when she failed to kill him in his wedding bed, she evaporated to foam. I am melting, sluicing away to cinders and calcium first, to snarling bone. The body I’d held for long, that I’d held despite man’s predations, that I’d held in captivity, held like a vow, a curse, a blasphemy, a wish for better things, combusts. I recall once there was an astronomer in my husband’s court, who extolled the poetry of the universe, how numinous we were, despite the mucus and the blood we shed. Stardust, he’d said, inebriated with his own doctrine. We are made of stardust.
Or maybe, of primordial elements such as the ocean and the dark and the killing flame and love. Perhaps, my kind are conduits, our shape defined not by parentage but the things to which we’d yoked our beliefs. Perhaps, we are as any myths are: protean, impossible, exactly what we need to be.
Whatever the case, I burn them all for what they’ve done.
* * *
Morning comes, ashen through the gristle of the bare branches. I wake, aching, as its light sleets across my prone body, limbs coiled foetally atop a bed of charred figures, warped beyond identification. If anyone had survived last night’s conflagration, I do not know as they are nowhere to be seen, and there are no tracks leading away from this place. Unseen, a songbird trills obeisances to the dawn, voice sweet, and I think immediately of my plague doctor, what they might say of its melody.
Except they are gone.
I look to where they had hung several feet away from me, the birch to which they were bound reduced to brushwork. Of my plague doctor, there is no trace. No. A lie, that. They are still here: a stubble of calcined fragments jutting from the cinders: teeth, a curve of bare skull, their mask, improbably intact. I can see their remains, limned by the dawn-light. Emboldened, I stagger to where they’d burned to nothing, crumbling onto my knees, hope banging a wild refrain through my pulse. I sift through the ash, still warm from the blaze. I search until I find it:
Their bezoar.
It is whole, without wound or seeming blemish: a glistening bolus the pigment and complexion of fresh liver, florid from whatever cardiac activity drives blood through its thin arteries. I stroke a finger over the organ, and it frissons under the contact.
“You’re safe,” I tell the remnants of the slaughter, the indifferent taiga.
I do not yet know what to do with the organ, if metempsychosis is plausible, what with my dearth of medical knowledge, particularly in the vein of reconstruction. But my kind do not die until we are killed or until we relent to be consumed.
I have forever.
I will make this right again.
IV
Epilogue
It is done.
I place the bezoar into its aureate habitat, a wire-frame sphere with a gilded door, its insides cushioned with velvet and altricial down and sigils I’d labored for ten years to write, stooped over a magnifying glass thieved from a crypt, pricking my finger each time the ink thinks to clot. I gave them muscles stitched from the fibers of my gut, intestinal membrane first dried then bathed in chromium salts, so that their chimera body won’t think to digest them. In this light, they seem beautiful, exposed as they are to the air. I will gown them with skin when we are ready. I will ask if they covet dermis or diamonds, some nacreous interstitiality. Whatever they want, I will place it at their feet.
Even their death.
My plague doctor draws a rattling breath, rouses in acts: each inhalation staccato, performed like a clockwork ballet. I pin my breath to the roof of my mouth. The tics and the spasms ease. For ballast, I made them bones of black onyx through which I’d laced steel; I needed them porous for the marrow.
“What—”
Copper fingers dart to a throat bridged by sutures, like the markings on the medical apparatus spread around us. The basement is dust and the debris of decades of research, the totality of human knowledge cannibalized for this single ambition. I’d autopsied practices, sacrosanct and putrid. I’d hunted the saints of medicine, astronomy, mortuary work. I’ve apprenticed with society’s best dressmakers, for who better to educate me on stitching than that elite breed. I devoured all of their knowledge and I brought them here, into the dark where I’ve worked for four hundred years.
“I brought you back,” I say, clearing my throat.
Though never vain before, I avoid mirrors these days. Not because they predicate a certainty that I am unattractive, but because my visage has become too much like theirs. My eyes, once prismatic, are merely green now. My hair is ink, calligraphic in architecture but ultimately banal, bereft of the iridescence that once ran venous through each follicle. And the planes of my countenance, the telemetry of their angles, even the crook of my lips, all these now suggest familial connections that I cannot yet observe without grief.
