Silver Skin Read online

  Healers dealt with burns all the time. There was an open hearth in every home. Babies learned the hard way that fire hurts; toddlers tumbled no matter how carefully their mothers watched them; cooking led to scalds; dried seaweed and dung fuel spat sparks unexpectedly. Everyone in the village carried scars.

  But this burn was different. Instead of ugly, lumpy ridges on the flesh, his wound looked almost beautiful, as if it had been carved with the finest tool in the Stone Maker’s possession. Cait shook her head. No, not like that. Stone Makers created circles and swirls, but this was all thin straight lines and hard angles, intersecting squares and rectangles.

  The nearest she’d ever seen to anything like this were the few scratched marks in the long passageway between the houses, that everyone touched for luck as they went by, even though no one knew what they meant any more or who had put them there. And there were the other ones, hacked into the edge of the Old Woman’s bed and in the Chert’s house. But they were clumsy things in comparison.

  The pattern on his arm was strange. Like the selkie.

  He didn’t belong here.

  Pity welled up in her throat.

  She leaned close, taking the selkie’s good hand in her own, trying to put comfort into the sound of her voice. ‘Gently now, rest now. And as soon as you’re well again, you can go back to the sea. Back to being a seal. Back to the cold and the waves …’

  The sound of hissing laughter made the words die in her mouth. She bent her head and tilted it just enough to look across to the head of the hearth, through the smoke to where Voy squatted like a malignant toad.

  The Old Woman was holding the selkie’s skin, stroking it, running its silver sleekness through her twisted fingers. There was a look on her face that Cait couldn’t read. But her eyes sparked and flickered strangely in the dim light, as if furious activity were going on behind them.

  Never underestimate her, Cait. Never…

  The selkie was shivering now. As she covered him with more fleeces, the thought came to her, I’m sorry, seal boy and then, Maybe dying would be the kindest thing for you after all …

  ‘He can’t die.’

  Cait had fallen asleep leaning against the stone side of the bed, but Voy’s voice jerked her awake. She rubbed her eyes, wondering how much time had passed. Voy was still crouched on her stone at the head of the hearth. Cait caught a glint of silver as the Old Woman finished stuffing the selkie’s skin into a leather bag, tying it awkwardly to her belt.

  ‘He can’t die,’ the Old Woman muttered again, staring into the embers. ‘It is likely the power of the skin is tied to the human form. If that dies, it may be useless.’

  Is she talking to me? thought Cait blearily.

  Sometimes, lately, Cait would come in from gathering limpets or puffball fungus or the last of the shrivelled crowberries and Voy would be sitting, empty-faced, by the hearth. She’d let the fire go out, or the medicine she was distilling boil dry, and she’d be whispering to … no one. And even before, when the Old Woman spoke her thoughts aloud and it was just the two of them in the house, sometimes she would punish Cait for answering, and sometimes she would punish her for not answering. It was impossible to tell what to do, from one time to the next.

  Cait stole a quick glance at the selkie. Still breathing, but his eyes were beginning to sink into his strange brown face as the fever ate at him from within. She had to speak. Speak for him. It was her fault he was here.

  ‘If you don’t want him to die, give him back his skin,’ she said. Her voice sounded thin. She leaned forward and added fuel to the fire. ‘Maybe his skin can heal him. He might be grateful and help us. If you keep it from him, and he dies, we might be haunted by his spirit. Who can say what damage that might do?’ She held still, waiting to see if the Old Woman would respond.

  Nothing. The smoke swirled up towards the roof, like a curtain of cloud between them. The selkie moaned softly. Cait took a breath.

  ‘You have to give it back,’ she persisted. ‘You know the stories. You know no good comes of stealing a selkie’s skin. Not in the end. It always goes wrong in the end.’

  She saw Voy shift a little and show her teeth. They were still strong in spite of her age. ‘That’s because the people in the stories are always fools. I’m not a fool.’

  ‘But—’ Cait began again, when suddenly Voy lunged, grabbing her by the front of her tunic, dragging her forward till she was coughing in the smoke.

  ‘Not all the people in the stories come to grief because of stupidity,’ the Old Woman hissed. ‘Sometimes it’s because of greed – or betrayal. But I’m safe from all that. The people fear me. Even if they knew, they wouldn’t tell the selkie where its skin is.’

  And what about me? The words formed in Cait’s mind against her will. This close, the Old Woman would surely read her thoughts in her eyes.

  Voy did. ‘You would never betray me,’ she whispered. ‘You know what the price would be.’ Then she let go, so suddenly Cait almost fell into the fire.

  Oh, yes, thought Cait bitterly. I know the price. I know it very well.

  Rab: Skara Brae

  He woke and for a long moment he felt nothing but a deep woolly peace. His eyes drifted towards a shaft of sunlight that slanted down from the ceiling. It left everywhere else in darkness. What a strange place … It was like some sort of museum simulation. There was smoke drifting gently upwards. He stared at the slant of brightness. Someone’s made a hole in the ceiling. I wonder how they did that? Won’t the people in the unit upstairs fall through? He frowned. There was something he should be remembering. But it was hard to think – like pushing a rock up a hill and it keeps slipping back again. Not that I’ve ever pushed a …

  He stirred slightly – and the pain returned in a red rush. All the bleary happiness had gone. Only the sharp horror was left.

  I fell out of the sky – my Com was screaming – Mayday, Mayday – this is all wrong – I have to get out of here – this isn’t right –

  Then someone was standing over him, blocking the light.

  It was the young woman. He remembered there’d been a young woman.

  ‘Who are you? I … I shouldn’t be here …’ he croaked. ‘Where am I? I have to leave!’ He tried to sit up but she pushed him down again, carefully but firmly. ‘How long … have I been here?’

  She didn’t answer. She put her hand on his forehead, nodded to herself, and then went over into the darkness. He heard a clinking of pottery, as if things were being mixed in a cup. And then she did speak, and he found her voice was already familiar to him. A comforting sound. ‘We brought you here when you came out of the sea. Can you understand me now? You were talking seal at first – I wasn’t sure you were going to find your way into your human mind. It’s a good thing your people are strong. Here, drink this.’

  She came out of the darkness, supported his head and held the cup to his mouth. It was bitter. It tasted familiar, as if he’d drunk it before. Then she laid him down again and covered him up.

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’ He was ashamed to hear how his voice quivered. His eyes filled up with tears.

  She made shushing sounds. ‘You’ve been ill. It’ll take time to get your strength back. I know you like to bask – I’ll get you into the sun soon – but look, see? Today I opened the roof.’ She pointed up over her shoulder and gave him an encouraging grin.

  She’s got a nice smile, thought Rab blearily. I like her smile.

  Then he was asleep again.

  Cait: Skara Brae

  He can’t die.

  And …

  It’ll be your fault if he dies.

  Voy hadn’t said that, not exactly, but the Old Woman always blamed Cait for everything bad that happened. This would be no different. Besides, it was her fault. She was the one who’d found the selkie. She was the one who’d had him brought back to the village. She was the one who could never leave well enough alone.

  The burn on the selkie’s arm blistered and wept and refused to sc
ab over. And the fever eased and then worsened again … did it have something to do with the tides? … There was so much she didn’t know about the way selkie bodies worked.

  Even knowing what to feed him was difficult. She experimented with bits of raw fish and limpets fresh from the seawater storage tank in the corner, trying to push morsels into his mouth. But he only spat them out, wrinkling his nose and making retching noises. It was better when she made them into soup in a clay pot on the embers, and offered him the broth on a horn spoon. He still pulled a disgusted face, but at least he swallowed.

  Who would have thought it? She couldn’t imagine how his people managed to make soup underwater, but then she couldn’t imagine how his people lived at all. She’d seen seals hauled out on the rocks or bobbing curiously close to shore to watch whatever the villagers might be doing, but what they did when they were under the waves was a mystery. Sketh and the other village hunters speared them when they could. Seal skins made excellent clothing, and because of Voy’s status as Old Woman, they always got the best pelts and the tastiest cuts of meat …

  She felt suddenly queasy. Had she inadvertently eaten someone like him?! But she pushed the thought away. Not every seal was one of the Fey, just as not every green hump in the ground housed a trow. Besides, no selkie would let an idiot like Sketh skewer him.

  Her selkie had pushed aside the covers again, and she looked at him curiously. He was … odd. She stroked the skin on his chest lightly. It was quite hairless, even though the selkie was the height and build of a grown man. It was remarkably soft as well and unmarked by scars. And he was the same warm brown colour all over, including the parts that would normally be covered by clothes. But of course seals didn’t wear clothes. When they basked in the sun they obviously took care to bake evenly.

  Brown like deep, rich earth, except for the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet.

  Cait tried to picture how the selkie’s human form could be packed inside its seal form – was it like a baby inside its mother? All curled up into a bundle? She shook her head. A man this size, folded up inside the body of a seal? Impossible!

  ‘It would explain why your people wail like that, though!’ she whispered to the unconscious selkie.

  If that’s what he was …

  She sat back on her heels and chewed her lip. The fire that broke out on his arm, and wounded him so deeply – she’d never heard of that before, in any of the stories. And then there was the fact that before she saw him sprawling in the shallows, she’d heard something falling. Or she thought she had.

  She’d told no one about the plunge into the sea. She’d pushed it to the back of her mind. It was more likely some sea creature breaching in the bay, and the sound being made greater, stranger, by the fog.

  If the young man in her bed was a selkie, what could he possibly have been doing in the sky? If not a selkie, then what? What fell from the sky must first fly in the sky, and what, other than birds, could …

  Her throat went tight and cold.

  A lost soul.

  There had been whispers about them, more and more as the years went by and the times showed no sign of getting better. They were spirits of humans who, for whatever reason, were not secured before they could be sent on the Road to the Sun. Or, somehow, got lost on that path once started. They were drawn back to places where there was warmth, or where there had been warmth at some time in their past. They haunted villages. They took the breath from babies. They blighted crops. If a burial cairn wasn’t properly sealed by stone and fire and water and air, they found their way in, disturbing the bones of the dead. Some people said you could hear them shrieking and moaning in the wind.

  For years, the warmth of the Sun had been getting less. Were the souls the Old Women sent from the Ring of Stones not finding their way to Her? Was She giving life and not getting life back again? Was She bleeding to death?

  Cait looked in horror at the young man.

  Is that what he is? A lost soul?

  He sighed. His breath smelled of fish broth. Cait felt something unknot inside her. She was pretty certain that wasn’t the smell of the afterlife.

  No, he was her selkie, sure enough. Could seals fly then? Would that be any stranger than turning into a man? Did they unfurl wings when no one was looking and transform themselves into great sea birds?

  If I could do that – if I could fly – I wouldn’t be trapped here – water would make no obstacle, or mountains or savage strangers. I would fly to my real home and rouse my people to return here and free what is theirs. I could even fly to the Sun and find out what ails Her. Save the world! They’d sing songs and tell stories about that!

  She only realised she’d been smiling when the sharp smell of the selkie wetting himself made her wrinkle up her nose. Nobody sings songs about piss, she told herself with a shrug, and began cleaning him up again.

  Rab: Skara Brae

  He wandered in dreams, searching for something, always searching – Where are you? Don’t leave me here! Don’t leave me alone! – but each time, when he woke, the young woman was there. Her name was Cait. He knew there was someone else – an old woman – living in the hut, but she came and went. It was better when she wasn’t there. He hated the way she smelled. He had trouble finding words to describe it, but why should he have lots of words for somebody’s stink? At home, people didn’t smell at all.

  This isn’t home, and it isn’t a vid, and I haven’t had a chance to sanitize in so long, and …

  And then he would start to cry again.

  He hated that. By rights he should be furious, not weeping like a pathetic baby. It was somebody’s – something’s – fault that he was trapped in this hole, wherever it was – nobody deserved to be treated like this – it wasn’t fair – not fair –

  But he found that anger took energy he just didn’t have.

  ‘How long have I been ill?’

  Cait shrugged. ‘Since you arrived.’

  ‘But how many days has it been? Weeks?’

  She shrugged again. She did that a lot.

  He’d been asleep again. It was dark, and there was a light now, coming from the back of the hut. He squinted at it and could just make out a bowl, sitting on the stone shelving, with a low flame flickering above it. The young woman must have seen he was stirring. She appeared from the gloom, picked the bowl up and carried it carefully over to the bed box. When she held the light close to his face the whiff of fishy oil caught at the back of his throat and made him cough. He could see the liquid sloshing back and forth, the floating wick drifting about, the light reflecting off the oily sheen.

  What kind of place was he lost in, that was so primitive they didn’t have proper lights?

  He tried to make his brain work. He knew – of course he knew! – that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. This wasn’t his world. And yet the horrible, terrifying thing was that the world he remembered, the one he called his, no longer seemed completely real. It was as if his illness had divided him from it. The things that felt most real to him now were bad things, pain and fever and weakness, but also small, intense pleasures – the taste of cold water, warmth from the coverings on his crude bed, the smell of whatever the soup was she fed him – and her.

  Cait.

  When all the possibilities of the great wide world seemed to have narrowed down to almost nothing, she was still there.

  Cait: Skara Brae

  Cait was keeping the selkie alive by guesswork, but there were things about him that worked in his favour. For example, he’d started out fatter than anyone in the village. Probably than anyone on the islands, especially these last years. Life under the water was clearly much easier than life on land. His flesh was firm and his ribs barely showed. He had all his teeth. His earthy brown human skin was soft to the touch, unmarked except for the one burn. When he opened his eyes, they were a deep, dark brown as well, not blue or green or gray. They were liquid and lovely, like all seal eyes. She tried to picture him when he was in hi
s seal form, with those eyes open and a set of stiff whiskers raying out from his cheeks …

  Suddenly Voy was peering over Cait’s shoulder. ‘Not dead yet, then.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And speaking sense?’

  Cait shrugged. ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘He seems pretty stupid. Still, he’ll be fit for coupling one of these fine days, and no one needs to be smart for that. Don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking of it.’

  Cait didn’t look up. Voy was baiting her. Best act stupid herself.

  Hissing her sneering laugh, the Old Woman left them alone.

  Rab: Skara Brae

  Then a time came when Rab woke – and the pain was less.

  It felt like the middle of the night. Though how would I know? The flaps of hide from the canopy over the bed had been dropped down. Moving with elaborate care, he reached over and pushed one aside. He looked into the room, dimly lit by the embers in the hearth and saw her, Cait, curled up asleep on the hard, cold ground.

  He wondered idly why she slept there. It didn’t occur to him it was because he had taken her bed.

  He heard steady snores coming from the other stone bed box. So the old woman was there too.

  He was immensely tired, but the main thing, the thing he really cared about, was the pain being less. Becoming something he could almost detach himself from.

  He rested his chin on the stone side and stared at the fire. He’d seen simulations of open fires before, in historical reconstructions at museums. One of his lecturers had been particularly keen on stuff like that. ‘Recapturing the feel of the time. The ambience.’ But the simulations had been a million miles off. He knew that now. Too clean. Too odour-less. Two-dimensional. Real fires spat and filled the room with smoke that stung your eyes and throat. Real fires mesmerized.

  You could stare at a fire for ages.

  He stared.

  It had died down now, but then a bit of fuel shifted and a single flame flared up. It illuminated the tall driftwood stick leaning against the old woman’s bed. The light reflected on the polished surface of the wood, the long twisted shaft, the curious shape at the top.