From ‘The Churned Earth’: Cox
Eleanor HancoxIt was obvious that he did not belong. His alabaster bones among so many gilt and silver figures, Cox drew attention wherever he went in the workshop. The alloy bodies which occupied it were burnished by sandstorms that would have scoured him to the marrow. He was grey with decay and stark white with life.
Though young, still growing over the bones his brothers had planted him in, the sun had already bleached him and his spores as powder pale as the sand that shifted beneath the dozens of delicate bones in his feet. A gauze of spores grew over his ribcage like a sheer pall draped over a corpse; curved bone bulged through. Translucent spores pulled taut between the crest of his cheekbone and his jaw, translucent so his teeth in their fixed grin showed through in their fixed grin. Only his eye sockets were not hollow; they were cataract white where the culture clotted thick. All over, spores strung the empty skeleton together, so Cox seemed to be something spider-spun, worked in silk or lace or gossamer, something that would disentangle and drift away if the winds picked up.
Roe sat beside Cox, working on his broken bones. As she reached for the splintered end of his forearm, just below the bulbous left elbow, she felt for a moment that when she touched him, Cox might slip through her fingers like flowing sand, like seconds in an hourglass.
“Is that all right?” she asked. “Does it hurt?”
Cox shook his head. No, the fracture had stripped the bone of live spores. He could feel nothing where the wound looked most painful.
Roe cradled his elbow in her palm to steady the forearm as she held the two pieces together, her silver thumb in the crook of the joint. Not long ago, a wild storm had snapped a young branch from the weeping tree that grew beside the lake near the dunes to the east. It was still so tender and green that it bent in Roe’s hands as she picked it up from the sand. The ragged shards of bone at either end of Cox’s broken arm reminded Roe of the dismembered willow wood. Where the young branch had sprouted its own delicate stems, its fresh green leaves had lost the lustre of their wax and begun to curl into fists. It was the image of this tree that Roe had carved into her arm like a tattoo, sat beside the lake for hours until desert dusk blurred its shape grey and then ink blue, etching its slender silhouette into her metal epidermis. The outer layer of alloy had flaked away and left shallow, silver channels running from Roe’s elbow to her hinged wrist, like rough bark peeled back to show the yellow tenderness of the tree beneath.
At the other end of his dismembered limb, ashen with dead spores, Cox’s hand slumped limp from the wrist. Sand-scrawled, all his bones were chipped from the trauma of falling from the sky, covered with the shallow scars of hairline fractures like legends registered in runes. His body was beautiful and strange. The brace for his broken arm would not be difficult to build – a few pins drilled either side of the fracture, welded to a small frame to hold everything together until he healed enough to fuse the bone himself.
Roe knew it was the right thing to have done, bringing Cox to the workshop. He could not have returned to his village with the brace fixed with pins to his arm; his brothers would never have forgiven him for corrupting marrow with metal. Roe only wished he had needed sanctuary sooner, later, at any time but now. Every second Cox’s presence threatened the stranger her sisters harboured behind the nearby dunes, hiding him and his battered vessel from those who wanted his bones.
Though the vessel had torn blazing red through the clouds and cauterised the sky before it crashed, its pilot had survived. Cox and his brothers, by ancient right, owned every corpse, but no matter how bloodied or bruised blue, they could not claim a body still breathing. Yet they were so desperate for skeletons.
It was not much more than murmuring, but Roe had heard that they weren’t performing any Burials at all now. Years ago, they would have interred every body deep beneath the dunes, returning them to the churned earth, only to be exhumed after the shifting sands had rubbed the sharp edges of shattered bones smooth. Now, if what Roe had heard was true, they would not wait for the desert to scrub away the charcoal scorch marks so bones came up from the grave gleaming again like mother of pearl. They seeded new spores in skulls still rusted with blood.
Roe could not imagine an end to the Ceremonies. Her sisters had said that the last Burial on record had been before they had sown Roe in her metal chest – before her first Ceremony, then. She remembered staring up into the eye of the eclipse, its dark pupil dilated wide. The iris – blazing violently – had left Roe temporarily blind, but she could still hear her sisters chant and feel their words thrum through her chest. That was what Roe could not understand. How would Cox and his brothers, without the elegy intoned over an open grave as the sand sifted through empty eye sockets and between stripped ribs, remember the dead? (Their deaths gave us birth.) If they no longer had the patience or reverence to perform a Burial, what was to stop them claiming a body with the heart still beating, stop them flaying the stranger’s skin from his bones like bark peeled from the tender green tree?
Clutching both halves of Cox’s broken arm, Roe tried to focus instead on the mechanism of the brace she would build him. The flint shards of the fracture seemed so brittle. Dead spores around the raw edges crumbled to the touch. Roe did not know how much time it might take him to heal. She hoped it would not be long.