Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 613 of 619

The two beasts lay dead on the shelf. Ajax stood over them in the gray dawn, his father's blade still in his hand. The path up the cliff was clear now. But before they climbed, he wanted to know what the kills were worth. He called Aldric down from the boat. "Look at these," he said. "Tell me what's here." Aldric came with his tools rolled in leather. He was Ajax's scholar, the man who read old bones and told him which parts filled a ship's hold. He knelt by the larger beast and ran his hand along the hide. Grey creeping through his hair, a green tunic stitched with gold. He pressed a thumb into the thick belly skin and studied the four-toed feet. "Older than the gods," he said. "The hide is thicker than anything on the southern coast. Worth more too." Rowan crouched by the head and pulled back the lip. "Teeth," he said. "Long. No wear on them." He tapped one with his knife. It rang. "Bone like this holds an edge. Needles. Hafts." Aldric drew a blade and cut a clean line down the belly. He worked fast and sure, the way a man works who has done it a hundred times. "Take the hide whole," he said. "Don't cut it into strips. A whole pelt this size, no port has seen its like. The teeth, all of them. Roots too." He glanced at the second beast. "Both of them. Nothing here goes to waste." Chalam stood back and watched. "The blood carries no working," he said. "These were beasts, not made things. Safe to load." He said it plain, the way he said everything. Ajax nodded. That was one worry gone. They worked through the morning. Rowan skinned while Aldric pulled teeth and packed them in salt. Kael and Torren hauled the folded hides down to the tide line and rowed them out to the Seraphine in loads. The belly skin of the larger beast came away in one wide sheet. Aldric held it up and turned it in the light. "Council coats," he said. "Boots that no arrow gets through. This one alone pays the voyage." By midday the shelf was clean. Two hides, a sack of teeth, bones for weapons, the glands packed cold in wet cloth. All of it stowed below deck. The beasts were gone but their worth rode in the hold now. Ajax wiped his hands and looked up the cliff. The seal waited at the top, the door his father never touched. He had come for that, not for hides. But the hold was full, and a full hold meant his house held through the season no matter what the door gave him. "It's loaded," Aldric said. "Every part that's worth carrying." Ajax turned to his crew. "Then we climb," he said. "At first light."