Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 454 of 619

The two beasts lay skinned on the wet sand. Rowan worked the last teeth loose while Kael rolled the hides into tight bundles. Ajax wiped his father's blade and looked at the dark tree line. The kills had gone clean. Now came the harder part. He had to get the hides back to the ship, and then home, before the meat drew scavengers or the tide turned foul. Chalam knelt over the second carcass. He pressed two fingers into a lump under the jaw. "Glands here," he said, flat. "Same as the pale-fur. Cut and pack them cold, they sell. Leave them, they rot by morning." He drew a short knife and freed one sac, then held it out. It glistened gray. Rowan took it without a word and set it in a fold of hide. "Belly leather makes gloves," he said. "Backs make coats. Teeth go to needles." He named each part as he cut, quick and sure. He had done this work a hundred times in the north woods. Ajax knelt beside him. "How much does the whole beast give us?" "Two coats a hide. Twenty needles a mouth." Rowan did not look up. "No port has seen this fur. Aldric will price it high." That was the point. Ajax needed goods no other coast could sell. His ship carried plum wine and Verath hides north already, but any house could copy those in time. This gray fur was new. It would carry his name to the red quay house and keep the merchants coming back. Every coat sold armed another man behind his walls. They worked fast in the low light. Kael dragged both bundles down to the boat and lashed them under an oiled cloth. Chalam sealed the glands in a jar of cold sand. Rowan strung the teeth on a cord and hung it from his belt. By full dark the carcasses were stripped bare. Ajax pushed the boat off the sand and the four men rowed hard against the swell. Marcus held the ship at anchor, a lamp low at the rail. They came alongside and passed the bundles up hand to hand. Ajax climbed aboard last. He stood at the rail and looked back at the black shore. He had gambled a night on an uncharted coast and come away with two whole hides of a beast no man had traded before. "Home," he told Marcus. "Straight up the coast. No stops." Below deck the hides sat cured in salt, worth more than a season of common cloth. Ajax had found something that fed his house and could not yet be stolen or matched. But the shore was mapped now, and the beasts there were finite. He would need Rowan to find the next kind, and soon, before the merchants tired of gray fur and looked elsewhere for their coin.