The Salt Grows Heavy

They were always men, those itinerant storytellers, for the bitter winding roads—bandit-swollen, lord-haunted—were and, for all that I might wish otherwise, will likely always be unkind to women. I remember the first of them to arrive in the court. He was lithe, circumspect in conduct. His coat was wrinkled. He wore a cravat around an untidy collar and had untidy curls that fluffed along his ears. The maidservants called him unhandsome, but he was kind to me and for that, I adored him.

“You remind me of me,” he told me once, sadly and quietly. Dusk had glazed the chamber in glowing indigo, gilded the chairs, the hulking cinnabar armoire, its surface engraved with vignettes of primordial birth. I could smell my evening’s repast: something choking with cream, fresh vanilla pods, a hint of citrus. “Trapped.”

In response, I shrugged and wrote him another koan to decrypt, this one pertinent to the rites of ceremonial fratricide. Later, I’d learn of the palimpsest he’d made from my stories, how he told the world that a mermaid, should she prove virtuous enough, may hope to transform into a daughter of air. Of all the
men who have mistold my history, I resent him least. Like me, he stood anchored in gilded chains, throat and wrists collared by another’s presumptions, breath beaten to gasps by a world that permits only a single direction: forward and away from our heart’s desire.

He was not quite wrong, but he certainly was not right

Instead, I say nothing.

“Do your people believe in an afterlife?” They pluck tufts of straw from beneath them, grimacing.

I shake my head. What need is there for such platitudes when you are born to yourself time and again? Like a story, we are the summation of our incarnations, a spirit refracted through a billion lives. We are our pasts, our futures, tethered by the flavor of our sisters’ flesh.

“Ours do.” A smile, or something like a smile, invents itself upon their lips. “Even though no one has ever discovered any proof that we are more than meat and bone, humans continue to hold on to the belief that some part of us will persist after our deaths. The unscrupulous have built an entire industry on this.”

I glide towards the plague doctor, shrugging free of my furs as
I do, and stop inches from their knees, my hands outstretched. They nuzzle their jaw into my hands, allow my fingers to cinch about their skull. I could snap their neck, dislocate the vertebrae stacked upon each other, sever the blood flow. They know this. I do too. Nonetheless, they place their faith and their breakable flesh in my fingers, eyes closed.

“But they are not all charlatans.” The plague doctor does not kiss my skin, does not move to restrain me, does not do anything but rest their cheek in my grasp, its stitching rough against my palm. “There were three—surgeons, I suppose you could call them. They were better than the rest of them. They understood how one might lengthen the life of another, might prolong the function of a failing body by exchanging old parts for new. Eventually, they grew more curious. Could you assemble a new life from nothing but debris?”

Their smile erodes. Their voice fades.

“You would be amazed by what you can do when you have faith, when you know how to commoditize someone else’s faith, when you know the trick of words like hold on and tomorrow. I—”

The door opens, admitting the winter and a stranger’s flickering silhouette. The figure outside our doorway is small-boned and long-haired, clad in the barest of wools, a fox’s carcass around their throat. They shiver, bones chattering.

“They’re asking for you.” A high, piping voice. What I imagine my sister-daughters might have wielded had they been born human, rosy-cheeked and plump. The sounds of the village swell to a fever, drumbeats metered by youthful voices.

“Was this yours?” says the plague doctor, and they gesture
with a hand, the graceful parabola of the motion encompassing the room at large.

The girl says nothing, only clenches her jaw.

“So very like them. To take and redistribute what never belonged to them,” the plague doctor murmurs bitterly, untangling themself from my fingers to rise in a murmur of onyx fabric. I follow behind, wordless, watchful.

They sit themselves on the bed, their hat anchored against their heart. I stare at them, wordless, expectant. But the plague doctor reveals nothing, only sheds their mask so I might regard the pensiveness that has possessed them. If I had the voice for such a thing, I might have whispered then that they were beautiful, deified in the firelight, with their cheekbones carved for killing, their hair a halo of curling inks.

Certain stories are recounted so many times that they become parched of meaning, stories like those concerning the girl and her wolf in the woods, the cinder-smudged princess, the monstrous beauty who vomits pearls with every sob.

Others, however, are kept from taverns and wine-warmed conversations, catalogued but rarely recited. Complicated stories with no easy ending, stories that remind us karmic debt is a
contrivance of despair, that there is nothing fair or sweet about this world.

The tale of how some children played slaughtering together is one of them.

The story of the three army surgeons is another.

“What’s this?” The plague doctor pads up behind me, their chin on my shoulder.

A bible, I would have said had I a tongue to shape the words, not a brief wag of muscle. A scripture. A palimpsest improvised from a religion older, crueler, bloodier than even what was venerated in my husband’s kingdom. An ancient story retold as a game to waste the winter with, a wager as antiquated and cold
as the ocean’s deep. I turn the page. Drawings populate the margins, more sophisticated than the calligraphy. Images of the three men, captured from every angle, always with their masks, their dense fur cloaks.

“You know,” remarks my plague doctor. “I’d expected them to set themselves up as kings. But as gods? That seems a bit arrogant even for them. Oh, well.” A taut, ugly laugh.

“Welcome back, children.”

Beside me, the plague doctor stiffens.

It is a male voice that speaks, wine-dark, thick as syrup, drunk on its own percussions.

“Welcome.”

The men—physicians like my plague doctor, I imagine, what with the dry floral reek of them, their monochrome uniform, these saints of the children, these hallowed butchers—move closer still, no sound at all to their motions.

But whatever secrets it has accreted, the organ will not share. We continue on until at last the pine and the aspen give way to cottages and flickering candlelight, silhouettes behind grubby windows, dirt roads and anemic gardens, a salty fragrance of woodsmoke and baking bread. Serviceable but spare, unremarkable as villages go. At least, it would have been were it not for one peculiarity.

Bodies, some already rotted to gristle, most mummified in frost, dangle from carelessly erected gallows. Fifteen in total
and none with their lower halves intact. One—the oldest, I think—is nothing but chest and wilted spine.

“We’re here,” declares Samson, full of yearning.

I glance over as he unwraps whatever he’d excised from the dead boy’s viscera: a bolus of broken-off teeth and snarled hairs, fingernails, caked dirt, curds of mummified grey, colored glass. Over it all, a lettering of fine blue veins, like an alphabet that only muscle can decode. It throbs in his grip, alive. He smiles at the bezoar before bellowing.

“Pig is back! Tell the saints!”

An answering chorus: “Dinner’s ready! The saints are told!”

Teenagers flit from the doorways, girls and boys both, gaunt as jackals, their hair twined with bones and dried ixora, their cheeks finger-dotted with indigo. Whooping, they rush us, surround us. The horse rears, kicks hard at one, and his sternum folds in half. He tumbles to the accompaniment of his companions’ laughter. Two pause to gather his concave-chested body away, red foam dribbling from a pouting lip, and as they turn a corner, I catch them kissing him, each to a cheek.

“Stay close.” The plague doctor bares their knife and I bare my teeth, but no one takes notice, devouring Samson with their eyes, their panting attention. Even the dead ignore us, sockets black with accusation.