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At first I worried that I would be discovered—but after a few weeks in greasy mud and fog colder than the ice scrim on a pail of milk in the morning, one soldier looks much like another. I was never questioned. I was set a watch, and given a wooden sword. The men laughed like a treeful of crows and said that I would have to earn a real one. In fact, I wore more or less my own clothes, and kept my recruiter’s helmet, though many tried to barter for it. The King, it seemed, felt iron and leather could be best used elsewhere. I was told to guard twelve barrels bounded in iron, and not to look inside them. Simple—yet all I remember now when I think on it is his skin, wet and loose, sloughing off between my fingers.
We were encamped in the wide steppes which through the ministrations of hundreds of soldiers had grown thick with their autumn crop: mud. It clung everywhere: hair, eyes, fingernails, knees, throat, nose. It smelled of leaves and mushrooms and dung and us, for we could no longer tell our own smells amid the mud. The barrels were stuck in slime, green climbing the wood. With my ridiculous toy sword I stood before them, muscles corded with the care of cows and horses that had once been brothers, and peered into the night. A terrible tea was concocted from wheat seeds, caterpillars, and mud, and I drank it down at the end of every watch before feebly asking if I had not, through faithful duty, earned a real sword. One by one soldiers, bearded and bare, bald and hairy, chuckled and told me that I could not have a real sword until I had killed someone—what was guard duty when no one threatened my guard?
Yet we fought no battles, and I killed no one. Mold began to grow between the pommel and the grip of my plank sword. I waited; we all waited. My recruiter rethreaded his tassels in gold and went on to the next village. I asked after my brothers—but who could recall two boys now dead? I waited; we all waited. Once, only once, did I ask the only officer whose cloak still showed color, what was in the barrels. He paled and his mouth twitched as though he might vomit on my barely shod feet.
“It came from the King’s man, before you got here. Suffice it that I know and you do not—be happy, and do not pray to trade lots.”
I was a good soldier; I guarded my barrels. It was half a year before anyone came looking for them. Before his skin came off in my hands and I sucked in my last breath of clean air.
It was very black at night, like the inside of a great dark heart. Snuffles and snores and the occasional weeping rattled through the mist and the mud, the endless clammy damp. He came crawling like a centipede, this way and that, his helmet cracked wide across the crown, his cheeks hollow under coarse stubble. He must have been hiding among us for days, waiting for my watch, the skinny soldier with the wooden sword. He lunged at my barrels—I caught him full on the chest, hacking at him with my stupid, useless stick. I slammed it into his eye a few times and he grunted, groaned, our breathing fast and heavy as we grappled in the mud, our weight pressing us knee-deep into the sodden earth. He punched me hard in the stomach but I did not let go, though the breath went out of me like a soul ripped free. We fell together into the barrels. I collapsed on top of him, and his sweating bulk cracked one of the vessels beneath him, grinding its shattered planks into the sludge. I scrambled up—and his skin came off in my hands.
My father used to tell stories about people who lost their skins: selkies and leucrotta and suchlike. Underneath, they are always something different, even beautiful. A girl in a seal suit is wet and pale and shimmering under her gray, rubbery skin. But this was not like that—there was just blood and fat and sagging skin, and he melted in my arms, slipping away like a coat shrugged off in the summer. The smell was thick and acrid as burnt cat meat.
A greenish white paste oozed from the broken barrel—pale steam already rose from it, curling and wafting, as though deciding which way to drift. It clawed the air before me and before I knew it I had breathed it in, long green trails of smoke filling up my chest, rubbing at my skin. Blisters rose before I could blink, fat and rippling on my arms. My eyes burned, something seemed to burst in me like a tiny sun, and I stumbled away from the man without skin, away from the ruined barrels.
My superior came running across the field of sleeping men, lugging water in two wooden buckets. He threw them onto the wreckage of bubbling flesh and pale, pasty sludge; hissing and spitting, the slime vanished into the earth, leaving a ghost smoke floating over all those dreaming heads, smoke that would leave them scratching and weeping, but well enough in a day or two.
“You idiot!” he mumbled, gently leading me to a thin little stream and dousing my head in the clear water. “It has to be diluted, it has to be mixed by someone who knows how—you don’t just drop a person into it, and you sure as sword rust don’t breathe in the raw stuff!”
“His skin came off in my hands,” I moaned, coughing harsh and sharp, trying not to rub at my blistered arms.
He shook his head. “Of course it did. You smothered him in the Five-League Fog. The King’s man sent it, that old horror in his collar and robes. It’s to be used when we go into the mountains, when we take them for the crown. But cut with water, yo
u silly child! Cut, and blown out fine as ash through bellows! You’re lucky to still have skin on your bones and eyes in your skull!”
As the shallow morning light dripped over the hills like white oil, he helped me to wash in the river, and he did not even remark on it when he saw my bandaged breasts, my ruined, reddened hips. That is how I learned what vesicant means: it means a thing which burns, which gets into you and raises up blisters like accusations—his skin came off in my hands, but my skin burned for years after, like a sentry torch.
THE TALE
OF THE
GOLDEN BALL,
CONTINUED
THE SOLDIER’S HANDS SHOOK AROUND THE EDGES of her shield. She extended her arms slowly, letting the bowl rest against her chest. Under the ancient guards, they were covered in the same old blisters, huge and bruise-colored, hardened into burls, snaking over her flesh like a ruby chain.
“I breathed too much of it, whatever it was. It was only meant to make enemies double over weeping, and I had enough to suffocate a leopard. As we climbed higher into the mountain passes, it became plain that I was not going to recover. The blisters did not recede; I could not stop coughing. But as we began to fight real battles, as I finally came to have a sword of metal, it also became plain that I could not, any longer, be wounded. The blisters were good as diamond clothes—nothing could cut me. We took a village on those steppes—ah, the screaming of horses!—we took a village and a woman with her face tattooed like a demon spat three arrows into me without making a dent in my skin. I put my sword through her sister. Somewhere in the distance I saw a helmet with black plumes, and one of the cavalry said it was the King. I didn’t believe him.
“After that, the men were spooked as horses in sight of a snake. Finally it was decided, before the rest descended into the valleys, that I would be left behind. I would guard the pass. I would, should the chance happen by, requisition from the conquered all the ore I could, to send below, to the troops who are ever in need of arms.” She licked her dry lips, her eyes darting between us like a deer’s. “I have been here a long time, years—maybe years. It is hard to tell, in the dark. Sometimes I hear my brothers calling from the shafts. But I am not their sister anymore, and I cannot go down to them. The blisters are all of me, I float in their shell like a fog.”
I frowned. “We own this mountain, but we do not dredge up ore for you or your wars.”
Widow laughed softly, full of regret as a pail of rainwater. She snatched up one of the other hedgehogs quicker than a cave-in, dredged him in his wheelbarrow of gold flake like a piece of meat through flour, flipped her shield over in her lap, and rolled him around the edge, into the shape of a ball. From a spigot in the barrel she drew a few greenish white drops and smeared them into his fur, and kept up her steady rolling around the hard, bronze edge.
Onto the stones of the upper shaft she rolled a perfect golden ball, and then she reached for me.
THE
HULDRA’S TALE,
CONTINUED
CIRIACO STOPPED, HIS LITTLE GOLDEN MOUTH snapping shut like a treasure house door. I sat in the now-long shadows near the well, my mouth dry, my hands clasped in my lap.
“She rolled us all, in the Five-League Fog and in our barrows—she was so much bigger than we, and so much stronger than she seemed. For all I know she wanders still in the passes. Now our skins are hard as hers, and we were used as hard as she. She sent us down the mountain to the valleys, and we served a King we had never heard of. His name was to us as milk to a cattleless land.” The hedgehog glowered and picked at his quills. “Did you know there was a war here, in this very place, a long time ago?”
“Don’t be silly.”
