Then Dicle crested a hill, as the sun climbed as high as it could in the white-hot sky, and when she looked down into the valley, her eyes started to hurt from too much brightness. Ouch! But that was what Wriggler said would happen, so she knew she was in the right place. Below her stretched endless white: the Tuz Gölü, at last. When she shaded her eyes with her hand, she could see the altar at the edge of the pale lake, sitting a bit back from the shore. It was a rectangular box the size of the meeting-cave, with all these poles jutting from the top, holding up a big empty circle. The rectangular part had lots of holes in the side that Wriggler said weren’t caves but little peep-holes covered in clear stuff that kept the wind out better than woven reeds. That was strange, but Dicle fought her urge to explore. Her business was with the sacred stair and what was at the top of it. She’d show the Mother how dedicated she was by staying focused.
So, Dicle ran toward the altar, her bare feet pounding the earth, every cut or scrape on her body smarting from the salty wind, but as she drew closer, she saw something and stopped so quickly she almost stumble-tumbled—something was crawling out of the Tuz Gölü and nothing was supposed to come out of the Tuz Gölü except the Mother!
For the first time, Dicle felt scared, but she also felt curious. The thing—no, she realised, as she peered slit-eyed and scuttled closer sideways, just like a yengeç—things were not happy, not at all. One was screaming and flailing, and seemed to be missing a leg at the knee, and the other one was dragging the first as fast as it could away from the shore of the Tuz Gölü. As the dragger dragged the screamer farther from the edge of the lake, Dicle saw they were leaving a big, brown blood-smear behind them. But Dicle had seen wounds that bad before and knew just what to do. She ran closer to help them, only to feel more scared and curious than she ever had in her whole life when she realised that the things looked just like her, even though they were obviously long past the time when they should have made their pilgrimage and been changed by the Mother in the Salt.
Still, Dicle remembered her manners.
“Merhaba!” she called, approaching them cautiously.
“Get away from the lake!” shouted the dragger and Dicle understood what she was saying, even though she spoke the words in a funny way. “There’s something in there!”
“Of course there is, silly,” said Dicle. “That’s the Mother! Don’t you know?”
The screamer looked up at her and spat up a big bubble of blood, then went limp in the dragger’s arms. The dragger, who wasn’t dragging anymore, fell to her knees and vomited everywhere. Then she looked up at Dicle. Her mouth hung open, making shapes but no sound, and her eyes were glassy, empty, and bulging. She looked just like a balık! Dicle laughed and unsheathed her glinty knife.
The dragger wiped her mouth. “But we just left yesterday,” she said.
When Dicle’s mama died, Stag-Face had comforted Dicle in her distress and helped her perform the rituals after they’d dug out her meat-shell from underneath the rocks. Dicle was happy to do the same for the dragger.
“Don’t worry!” said Dicle and she patted the dragger on the shoulder, to comfort her in her distress. Then, as was proper, Dicle plunged the knife into the right thigh of the (now quiet) screamer, slicing through skin and flesh. Working quickly, she cut a long strip of meat from his shell.
“What are you doing?” whispered the dragger. “Oh God, oh, God, what are you doing?”
This person must be a stranger if she didn’t know the sorts of things even the littlest babies knew! Dicle decided to be Teacher and help her to understand. Leading by example, Dicle dipped her thumb in the (now quiet) screamer’s cooling blood and drew the insignia of the Mother in the Salt on the dragger’s forehead, then adorned herself the same way.
“The Mother knows our hearts and loves us all, her children,” said Dicle, and then began to gobble up the meat.
***
Once Dicle had given the stranger some water to rinse out her mouth—she’d vomited again as Dicle gobbled—she’d told Dicle her name was ‘Yıldız’, and forbidden Dicle from cutting the rest of the (now quiet) screamer’s flesh from his bones, even though that was what was supposed to happen.
“I don’t understand,” she kept saying, over and over and over again. Bo-ring! Dicle didn’t know what there was to understand, so she gave Yıldız a roasted balık to munch on. It looked so good, Dicle ate one herself.
After Yıldız ate, she said, again, “We just left yesterday.”
“How can that be?” Dicle was getting impatient. The sun was hot and she wanted to clamber up the sacred stair to summon the Mother in the Salt, so she could pray and change and then start home again. “You could not have left yesterday. You are all grown up, but you don’t know about the Mother and you haven’t changed. Did you fail on your pilgrimage?”
Yıldız laughed, but it wasn’t a happy-sounding laugh. “Maybe so,” she said. Then she pulled her knees into her chest and put her forehead on them. “This looks like the Tuz Gölü Research Station, so maybe....” Yıldız looked up at Dicle. “Where are you from?”
“I am on pilgrimage from K’pah-doh-K’yah,” said Dicle. “Where are you from? There’s not another village for a million billion klickers.”
“Cappadocia?” Yıldız looked upset. “Where in Cappadocia?”
Dicle frowned. She must be from far away.
“K’pah-doh-K’yah is how you say it,” she said, Miss Matter-of-Fact. “I live in the caves, of course, and Stag-Face is our boss. Everybody lives in the caves unless they’re like Wriggler, who has to live in the lake, so he can breathe.”
“No one’s lived in those caves for centuries,” said Yıldız, as if she knew anything! “There were too many earthquakes; they were unsafe to live in. The Turkish government forced everyone to evacuate.”
“Turkish?”
“Yes, Turkish. Turkey. That’s where we are.” Yıldız got all glassy-eyed again and went quiet. Dicle wondered if she’d have to slap Yıldız to get her to wake up, until Yıldız started talking again, but it was like she was a tiny baby. “Tuz Gölü is an endoheric basin, so if there was any runoff from the Hypersaline Resonator, it wouldn’t get into the rivers—”
“The Music brought the Mother, who came here, but was always here, and she gave us our true shapes. The Mother knows our hearts and loves us all, her children,” recited Dicle.
“The music what? The Mother?” Yıldız bit her lip. “I saw something down there...too big, it was too big, though. The lake should be less than a metre deep in the summer, and yet....”
“Come with me!” Dicle grabbed Yıldız’s arm and yanked her to her feet. “Space and time are the same thing. The Mother has always been there, forever and ever through time, so it’s deep and big enough for her! Don’t you know anything?”
Dicle took off running toward the altar, dragging Yıldız behind her. She was jitter-jumpy and restless, and anyways, the Mother would explain better, once she was summoned.
“Where are we—”
“Just come on!”
“What the hell is that?!”
Even though Dicle had reached the bottom of the sacred stair, which was made of hard rusty-crusty iron and ran zig-zag up the side of the altar, she turned around to see where Yıldız was pointing. There, at the top of the hill, terrible and looming against the bright afternoon sun, was Stag-Face. Dicle could see his antlers. He’d spotted her, and was running pell-mell down the salty sand to get to her. She began to tremble.
“Stag-Face,” she whispered. “Oh, no!”
“That man has a deer’s head!”
“Come on!” Dicle would not be thwarted. She yanked Yıldız up up up the sacred stair, until they reached the flat top of the altar. She heard clomping on the stairs behind them as Stag-Face’s hooves rang on the iron. Mean old Stag-Foot! He wouldn’t stop her, not now!
Dicle rummaged in her bag and, under the roasted balık, found the sack of her mama’s bones. She placed those at the base of th
e big circle and found the thing that Wriggler said was called a lever—it was just where he said it would be, on the left-hand side.
“No!” cried Stag-Face. He had reached the top and was pointing. “Dicle! Whee! told me you’d be here! Such a bad girlie! You don’t know enough, yet! You haven’t purified your heart; you haven’t learned the right songs! The Mother will not accept you for changing! She will punish us all!”
“The Mother knows our hearts and loves us all, her children,” shouted Dicle, as she wrapped her hands round the lever.
“Stop!” cried Stag-Face and Dicle heard his hooves pounding on the roof.
“He’s got a knife!” shrieked Yıldız. She was fumbling with something hanging on her belt. “Wait! Wait!”
But Dicle wouldn’t wait, even if Stag-Face had a knife. She yanked on the lever and big, crackling shafts of lightning began to curl around the circle, writhing and touching each other, just like Wriggler’s arms, and they were even the same purple-blue colour. Dicle felt a burst of heat behind her; she heard the angry sound of Stag-Face in pain, and then the salt began to sing. It was so beautiful, it made Dicle’s heart shudder and her skin crawl all over, and she felt a sudden gush of sticky hot wet over her face as she pressed her hands to the sides of her head in agony. It was blood, flowing from her eyes and ears and nose—ugh! But that was the sign of the Mother and, as the Mother emerged, Dicle began to pray, harder than anyone had ever prayed before.
***
Yıldız, who was now Spots, came back to K’pah-doh-K’yah with Dicle, who was now Jackrabbit. Spots took over bossing everyone because she had teeth and claws like a leopard, and she’d also killed Stag-Face with what she told Jackrabbit was called a “laser pistol”. And that was okay, because the Mother had made her understand, and afterwards Spots was the smartest of them all.
“Ahmet and I went through the Hypersaline Resonator, thinking we could visit this other place, a place up there in the sky that the star-watchers had said was okay for us to breathe and see,” Spots had explained. “The Resonator was supposed to help with the problem of too much time passing here while we were gone. But when we got there, we saw a Mother—a different Mother, or maybe the same one, I dunno—and we were afraid it would come back here through the Resonator, because we didn’t understand that the Mother loves us all, her children, and that would be a good thing! Silly us! But now everything is better.”
Jackrabbit, who had been Dicle, was sure that Mother loved everyone, but she wasn’t sure everything was better, even though she had finally changed. It was true that the Mother had granted her prayers to be the fastest of everybody, but she was now also the scaredest and rarely wanted to come out of her hidey-hole in the caves. All the sounds were so loud in her big ears! She’d almost gotten gobbled by the ghouls on the journey back home because, every time she heard something or saw something, it terrified her and she couldn’t always control her urge to run away and get deep underground.
But, she reminded herself every day, at least she could dance in the revels and she could jump higher than anyone. Not that she felt like jumping or reveling much, even for the sake of the Mother. She was very sad, all the time. Wriggler hadn’t lived more than a few months after snuggling with her. When he’d seen her true self, he’d said she was so pretty and they’d done the huff-and-puff a lot, but only for a few weeks. All of a sudden, he’d gotten sick and pale and told her to go away, so she’d gone away. When she next worked up the courage to bolt down to the lake, she’d found his corpse washed up and rotten on the bank. No one had eaten his meat and that was sad. All Jackrabbit could do for him was clean his bones and put them with the rest, for the time when the next little babies grew up and made their pilgrimage to the Mother in the Salt. And nobody else wanted to be her snuggler, not even Whee!, because Wriggler had put a baby inside her, but when it had come out, she’d gotten so scared when everyone had crowded around to see it that she’d gobbled it right up!
Being changed was sure not like she’d thought it would be. Jackrabbit was always frightened and always alone. Nothing was wonderful. Not at all.
SKIN
By Helen Marshall
Helen Marshall is pursuing a PhD in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, for which she spends the majority of her time in the libraries of London, Oxford, and Cambridge, examining 14th-century manuscripts. Her poetry has been published in ChiZine, NFG and the long-running Tesseracts anthology. “Mist and Shadows”, published originally in Star*Line, appeared in The 2006 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Poetry of 2005 and her poem, “Waiting for the Harrowing”, has been nominated for a 2011 Aurora Award. Her poetry chapbook, Skeleton Leaves, was released by Kelp Queen Press in 2011 and her collection of short stories, Hair Side, Flesh Side, is forthcoming from ChiZine Publications in 2012.
COLLEAGUES, AS MANY of you know, I have been at some pains over the last months to complete the research which your very kind donations have made possible. If it has taken a toll on me—if you can detect something of a dreary languor in my demeanour—I beg your indulgence. The archives can be an unkind place and History, herself, the cruelest of mistresses.
But I must tell you that it is more than the simple rigours of study that send a wild light to my eyes; it is far more than that. As you know, I have been engaged for some time in a study of a certain manuscript come to light recently in Biblioteca Estense in Modena, a small volume written on a fine vellum, much-damaged by fire, but still clearly one of the earliest copies of a Latin work thought to be attributed to Aristotle. Recent research has indicated—and my colleagues in Harvard have verified the results, checked transcription after transcription and traced both dialectal and paleographical evidence—that the book can be reliably placed near Heliopolis in origin, and may once have been housed in the lost Library of Alexandria.
The ramifications of such a find are far-reaching and will require far more study than I myself in a lifetime could ever hope to achieve, even with such generous donations as you may wish to give toward the endeavour. Nevertheless, it is not the contents themselves that disturb my composure. No, it is the parchment—the stretched and tattered skin, barely readable, discoloured by fire, yet still beautifully resilient after all these years.
In May, I departed for Cairo at the request of this esteemed governing board. My passport was stamped, my visa checked in triplicate, and the manuscript eyed hairily by authorities who neither understood its value nor my own purpose. “Where is the usstaz? The professor?” they would ask, ignorant of my protestations that I was the professor.
Finally, a small, svelte man with immaculate English arrived to take me to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. ‘Khaled Nassar’, he said his name was and he was a godsend, though, no doubt, he’d dispute the term bitterly.
It was at the university that my true work began, and an intoxicating blend of excitement and curiosity drove me forward, even as exhaustion threatened to drag my mind from those soaring pinnacles of knowledge that we have glimpsed in the gelid mists of our studies. I was alone, utterly alone, but for my rescuer who—it appeared—was to be my liaison. He helped me negotiate the streets of that wretched city, sweat crawling down my spine, and taught me the few words of Arabic that helped me survive. In the evening, he would bring a strong, sweet coffee, which we drank to the dregs together, discussing the struggles of research, the petty bureaucracies that exist in all universities. Between us, there was that flash of friendship that comes when two minds strike against each other, flint on steel; it was a friendship that would bring many rewards.
Mister Nassar, you see, had a brother in Giza who worked as a phylogeneticist with a team of French scientists. He had agreed to sample the manuscript and perform the necessary tests to verify its authenticity.
It took five days for the results to arrive from Giza, five days of the breath of Hades on my neck as I tried to fill my time reviewing my students’ Michaelmas papers in a hotel infected by fleas and Americ
ans, five days of cryptic responses from my liaison: “Soon, usstaz, it will be soon.” The paper, when it came, was heavily worn and bore many official stamps. I opened it carefully, reverently, and it is that which I found inside—the words Mister Nassar translated for me from Arabic—that I present to you today. For indeed, I learned that this book had been housed in the Alexandrina Bybliothece—and there must have been many others like it—but even this, colleagues, members of the governing board, is not why I come before you.
The fateful words of dear Mr. Nassar are burned into my mind forever: “The skin,” he said, “the skin, sahib. It is not sheep.” And then he touched my hand. “Human.”
A chill still runs up my spine when I think on it. I have been a scholar for some years, and I have given all of my career and most of my eyesight to the study of books. When I sleep, I smell the musty scent of their pages; when I wake, my fingers explore them, probe their bindings, the threads that stitch them together. I know the soft velvet of the flesh side and the smooth, oiled surface of the hair side. I have studied the pattern of follicles, traced the network of veins that undergirds our most precious documents, the records of Western civilisation, the rise and fall of human knowledge. I have devoted my life to recovering the irrecoverable and rebuilding what was lost, searching out its ghosts and giving them flesh within monographs and articles.
But to learn that the skin I touched was human skin, the network of veins cousin to mine, and that the knowledge I had sought to reinscribe in the hearts of my students was written on the fleshly fabric of their would-be ancestors....
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