THE AIR WAS AS THICK as the midwife’s birthing room: blood and salt sweat in it. Errol pulled Dagmar’s cape around him and burrowed under the hemp sacks. He was safe. Safe in his brother’s warren, deep in the earth. Such fierce dreams he had had, of being pierced, of having his chest splayed open. He put his hands on his ribs. His fingers came away wet.
“Rip?” His voice was ragged.
He tried to get up but fell. He had no feeling in his legs. Something weighed him down, something so vast and immoveable, Errol was sure the earth had caved in on him. Why did it have fur?
He reached for a flint, but his hand came upon the empty sheath. And now he remembered. He had ignored Rip and Dagmar and had taken the spikes from their case. He had left them next to him on a wooden crate and wrapped himself in the cloak and fallen asleep. The lamp had run down. His hand knocked a tin off a crate. The clatter was small but it brought on a frenzy of crashes. Some mammoth force was alive in the room with him, twisting now, kicking and bucking. Errol buried himself under the sacks and covered his head. When the movements stopped, he felt again for the flint and lit an edge of the sack for light.
The great beast lay on its back next to him on the shards of broken glass, with its front legs curled like the handles of an urn, and its enormous back flanks stretched across the room. Its head was turned to Errol, and a curious, fist-sized eye stared at him. Behind the snout and the eye were the low branches of a rack of antlers.
Errol tripped and stumbled over the animal and into the tunnel.
“Rip,” he whispered. He tripped over something the size and shape of a rolled-up carpet and raised the lamp. “Rip. What are you doing?”
Rip took a swig of the whiskey, drizzling liquor down his ears and neck. “Am I lying down or standing up?”
“You’re down.”
“Thank you.” He got unsteadily to his feet.
Errol cleared his throat. “Something happened in the night—”
Rip lifted the flask to his lips but stopped and lowered it. “Yes. For me, too.” He surveyed the floor of the tunnel, which was littered with new, broken things. More lamps, half books, a file. He drank from the flask. “Just so long as you didn’t take the knotting spikes out of their case.”
From within the room came the bellowing of an animal.
Rip narrowed his eyes. “You fool,” he said, pushing Errol aside, running into the room. There, in all its magnificence, was the rump of a beast. At the other end of the room, the antlers spread like two saplings.
“What is it?”
The beast swung its head around at the sound of Rip’s voice and hammered Errol in the jaw with its antler.
“It’s a stag,” said Errol. “I think it’s a large one but I have nothing to compare it with.”
“I know what it is,” murmured Rip. “How the hel—” And then he stiffened. “Who was here last night with you?”
“No one. Not even you, apparently,” said Errol.
“It was Sabine. She is unwieldy like this. Wild-eyed. Skittish. Where is she?”
“What are you talking about? Why would Sabine be here?”
“Why indeed. I’m not a fool,” Rip said. “Because this stag can’t be yours. It’s not possible.”
Errol wanted to say he had no idea what Rip was talking about. But in fact his mind returned to a nightmare, of a quick slice of an edge, and an enormous animal struggling to climb out of his ribs, wrenching open the already-bruised bones to gasp for air. Then an insane knotting, as if the skin of his chest were being torn into strips and knit together.
“Let me see you!” Rip tore Dagmar’s cape from Errol’s shoulders. He stepped back as though he had been hit. “How is that possible?” he cried. A fine wound ran up the center of Errol’s chest. Errol stared at himself in the queasy lamplight.
“It hurts,” he said.
“Well of course it hurts!” Rip yelled. Then quietly, “Of course it hurts. You’re a fool. You had to have those spikes. But this is not your stag. It can’t be. Because that simply is not possible. You would be empty, like me.” Errol could make no sense of whatever Rip was carrying on about. Rip drank from the flask and pressed the cork back into it. “Unless, of course, she was unfaithful.”
“Unfaithful? I’m telling you,” said Errol. “Sabine was not here.”
“No. Not Sabine. Mam.”