Riverkeep by Martin Stewart Page B

with blows that bounced into his spine—“and forever and still never crack . . . a bloody . . . piece of it!”
    The ice split with a surprisingly gentle sound, parting with a break that was almost perfect. Wull straightened his back and let the rod clatter at his feet. Hands on his knees, he filled his lungs with stabbing air to release a long and bitter laugh.
    Then he saw the face peering back at him from below the ice, and the breath stopped in his throat.
Canna Bay
    Scores of them came in the night, slices of a deeper black on the horizon: strange craft under strange flags, crewed by the salt-cut and the sea-hardened, seeking the bounty of the mormorach’s flesh. The people of Canna Bay watched them anchor, blaze up their lamps, and dot the harbor with light.
    The lamps glowed faintly blue—magic had come with the mormorach, and the air in the village had changed. There was a smell—of burnt things and hot metal—that had begun to inhabit everything: clothes, skin, hair, bread. The people went to their burnt-smelling beds and held each other and whispered prayers of fortune that the harpoons of the morning would find their mark.
    In sleep, the village—fishless now for days—was silent: the night packers’ heat and laughter snared with the fishermen’s empty nets.
    One ship arrived after all the others, once the people of Canna Bay had taken their bed leave. Although wide-hulled and misshapen, the
Hellsong
was faster than the rest, and its prow and flanks were studded with rows of teeth that caught the moonlight and shone. Its bowsprit was the pearlescent spike of a great narwhal; its terrible figurehead the skull of a huge cragolodon. And fixed to its rails were the skulls of game fish: mairlan, shark, and greenfin. Damage to its mast and deck was splinted byenormous bones and trussed with rope, a skeletal patchwork that gave the vessel the look of a wounded and rotting animal. But underneath this projection of decay, the impression was of tenacity.
    In the guts of the
Hellsong
sat its captain, Gilt Murdagh, turning a lump of ivory in hands that were three fingers short and thick with dirt. Five of his crew were cramped beside him, awaiting his word; in the doorway lurked the wide-eyed cabin boy, Samjon, snatching conversation beyond the table’s kicking feet.
    The hatches had been battened somewhere over the Keppul Sound in the face of a storm that dropped the barometer’s quicksilver almost out of sight, and the galley’s air had grown sour in the hours since. A tang of sweat, fish, and false, itch-making heat crawled on the skin of the crew and into their mouths and noses.
    Murdagh was unaware of the stifling atmosphere; decades at sea had chewed him to a strip of teak-strong gristle, and he no longer tasted the well-lived air. He had about his face a thick clod of beard, lumped by tangles and tar and livened by the bright flash of scar tissue. Beneath a curtain of once-injured flesh glowed his bloodstained left eye; his right, deep-set in sunbrowned skin, was gray and hard. From the floor came the scrape of his whalebone leg against the deck’s grain, and he bumped the sharp point of his iron crutch in a distracted rhythm.
    Murdagh lifted his long nose and opened his mouth, tasting the air. He turned the piece of ivory again, knocked it on the table, then smiled at the men and women before him, running his tongue over teeth that were ribbed with grime.
    â€œWe’s here,” he said quietly. “Let’s hunt.”

6
The Boathouse
    When I have done the work o’ day,
    An’ aw the dead are tucked away,
    I sit, bankside, an’ breathe my whiff,
    An’ munch the skin from off the stiff.
    When I have tucked away the dead,
    An’ aw my seula friends have fled,
    I sit bankside, upon my heels,
    An’ out my teeth I pick the eels.
    When fled have aw my seula friends,
    An’ aw Dan-ey-ék’s water scends,
    I