Bone Soup

by

Shaun Tennant

Smashwords Edition

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Bone Soup

Copyright © 2012 by Shaun Tennant

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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* * * * *

It was just a small bone. An animal equivalent of a finger bone, most likely. I had heard

of creatures on the islands to the south that have hands like men. I thought it might have been

from one of them. When I held it against my own forefinger, it was the same basic shape as the

middle bone, between the first and second knuckles. So it was probably a finger bone.

It had come to me after the death of my mother. She had worn the bone around her neck,

by looping a piece of leather string though a natural teardrop-shaped opening in the middle of the

bone. At least, I think the hole is natural, but I suppose someone could have carved it. It’s just

that there are no tool marks or scratches. The bone is flawless and smooth.

It was white, but my mother once told me it used to darker. I supposed it had faded over

time and exposure. The bone was quite light and rounded on all the edges, which made it easy to

wear. It was always slightly cold when it rested against my chest, as if it always tore a hole

through the front of my tunic and let the breeze onto my bare skin.

I didn’t like the bone, but I wore it every day from the day she died. Over my heart.

I accepted the bone when the elders took it off my mother’s body and held it out for me. I

wanted something of hers, something she believed was important. I couldn’t let them bury it. I

continued to keep it, and wear it, for entirely different reasons. I wore it because it was the only

thing in the world that I could say truly belonged to me. I still have my reasons for keeping it

today, but those reasons have changed. I’ve since learned that the bone belongs to nobody; I’m

just carrying it for a while.

I was banished from the village at fifteen years old. I had always been the maid’s boy,

sleeping on the floor of her room in the High Elder’s house. I was not important enough to be

trained as a smith or a mason, and the farms had enough mouths to feed. It was a simple matter

to the Elders- I was an orphan and I needed to go. My mother had only been a servant, and as a

boy I could not replace her as the elders’ maid. Without her, I had no place in their world.

It was winter, and I was very cold.

In the Northern Pass, the snow covered the ground completely. The jagged, rocky terrain

was transformed into a flat white blanket, and when the wind howled, the bone sent chills

through my flesh. I had been out there for almost three weeks, digging into the ground to tear

apart shrubs for firewood, eating melted snow, and always hiking. The nights were longer there,

and colder, than any I had known in the village. It might have been the harsh weather of the

north, but looking back I think the bone was carrying the cold, like a torch carries the light.

There was no food. All that I had packed was long gone, and I hadn’t seen any tracks for

days. As the sun was setting, I found cover in the shade of a boulder. I opened my pack to fetch

the sticks I was carrying, and my flint, and the small iron pot I used for boiling. The small fire

was crackling soon enough, with handfuls of snow melting in the pot. I was so hungry, so

desperately hungry, but if I went foraging in the darkness I would only get lost and freeze. I was

so direly in need of food; of anything that didn’t taste like snow or rust.

That was when I decided to boil it. I had boiled soup bones many times back in the

village. Why couldn’t I boil the one I wore? It was small, and had no marrow, but it might have

been enough to change the taste of the hot water and at least help me get to sleep. So I removed

the bone from around my neck and dropped it into the pot, leather string and all.

The water soon boiled, and even though the bone was small and old and dried, the boiling

broth smelled like stew. I could swear there were beef and carrots, and even spices in that little

pot of melted snow. I was so eager to drink it that I didn’t wait for it to cool. The first sip was too

hot, and scalded the roof of my mouth, but it didn’t matter. It was soup. Glorious, nourishing

soup.

I took a second look at the pot. It was just clear water, steaming a little, with a little bone

on a string at the bottom. I took another drink. It wasn’t beef stew, nor chicken soup. It didn’t

taste like any rabbit or deer or any other forest game I had ever tasted. It was almost like pork,

but not quite. I think there were onions in the broth, but there was no way to tell. It just felt like

water in my mouth and looked like water in the pot. But there was so much more than water in

the flavour. I drank until the pot was empty, then refilled it with snow and boiled it again. I had

soup three times that night. And every night, for the next week.

I didn’t need to forage wild edibles after that, or to catch rabbits. I didn’t need them. The

bone was enough. It kept me full and happy and energized. I could walk farther each day, and

after a few days I realized I wasn’t turning my ankle on the rocky slopes, wasn’t favouring my

hip when I walked uphill. It was the greatest elixir I ever tasted.

After two weeks of walking I reached the northern lands. Here, the people were shorter

and thinner than those in my village. They saw much more of winter, and their crops grew

smaller. They survived on very little, and you could it see it when you looked at them. It was as

if every month that was shortened from their growing seasons removed an inch from their height

and a year from their lifespan.

It was still the dead of winter here. I had no place to stay, and no food in my pack, yet

they still would not take me in. I was an outsider, and outsiders weren’t welcome to share in the

tiny supplies of food they relied on to survive the winter. A fine gentleman wearing a many-

colored scarf and with an axe resting on his shoulder told me to keep walking.

I settled inside a straw-roofed barn at the edge of their village. I built a fire and started the

bone boiling, hoping that nobody would see my tracks leading into the building. It was the first

time in weeks I had been under a roof, and just escaping the wind was enough to make me smile.

I was just bringing the soup to a boil when someone saw the firelight. I heard the crunch

of a footstep in the snow and knew I was caught. Instinctively, I pulled the string and jerked the

bone out of the boiling water. I pulled it over my head and tucked the bone beneath my tunic just

as she opened the door. Even though the bone had just come from a boiling pot of water, it still

felt cool against my chest.

“Who are you?” asked the girl.

She was about my own age, dressed in ragged clothes beneath a coat made from various

skins. Her cheeks were red from the cold and her hair was long and brown. She looked quite

angry.

“I’m nobody, ma’am,” I said, lowering my head.

“What are you doing here?”

“I only wanted shelter from the night and a place to warm some water.”

“Water,” she said, “you mean stew made from whatever you’ve stolen.”

“No! It is only water. Come and see for yourself.” I stood up, taking several steps away

from the fire and the pot that hung above it. I waved her over to look. The girl grunted, and

walked over, careful never to turn her back to me. She looked into the pot and saw the clear

water with nothing in it.

“Funny,” she said. “I could have sworn I smelled soup.”

“Please,” I implored her, “do not tell your master about me. I only seek shelter. I will be

gone at sunrise.”

She looked at me like I was something to be pitied, but she wasn’t sure whether or not to

actually let that pity affect her judgment. “Alright. You can sleep here tonight.”

She left me alone. I hungrily picked up the pot and sipped from it. It was warm and

soothing, but tasteless. It was just hot water. I realized that I needed to leave the bone inside the

water while I drank, or that wonderful flavour was lost.

The next morning I was packing to leave when the girl returned. She wore the same coat,

and carried a shovel.

“Hold on, boy,” she said. “Before you go you must pay for the night.” She handed me the

shovel and told me that the roof of the house was in dire need of snow removal or else it would

cave in.

“Won’t the master of the house see me then?” I asked.

“I suppose so,” was her answer.

After an hour throwing the snow from the roof, I climbed down to see the girl was still

waiting. I handed her the shovel and she replaced it with a hammer. “Some of the fences have

broken. Fix them.”

I did I was told, and reattached the broken wood to the old fences in a half a dozen spots

where the boards had fallen off. It seemed odd to fence the field, however, since there were no

cows. There had been no animals in the barn the previous night, either.

When I asked the girl about this, she snorted and told me to mind my own business. She

then gave me enough jobs to last the day and told me I could stay another night in the barn if I

worked hard. I agreed.

She offered no food, and when night came she went back to the house and pointed me to

the barn. I had bone soup again that night, and woke refreshed the following morning. The girl

wore the same clothes again, and she had dark circles under her eyes. I noticed for the first time

that she was missing most of her back teeth, although the front ones were still intact.

“Ain’t you hungry?” she asked me around lunchtime.

“I’m fine enough,” I told her. I didn’t want to beg food from someone who had so little of

it, not when the bone provided for my dinner.

After another day of work I was sent back to the barn, and this time the girl was able to

sneak up on me without my hearing her. She threw open the door just as I was sipping from the

second pot of meaty-tasting soup.

“A-ha!” she screamed. “I knew you been stealing food. Give that to me.”

I pulled the bone from the pot. “It’s mine. I didn’t steal it.”

“Is that all you’re boiling?” She ran to the pot, pulling it from my hand. She raised the pot

to her lips and took a sip.

“It’s just hot water,” she said.

“I know.”

“But I smelled it. I sat out there all the time you boiled it. It was meat and spices. I

smelled it the whole time.” She eyed the string sticking from my hand, and the bone buried deep

in my palm.

“Gimme that.”

“I told you it’s mine.”

“Gimme!” she screamed, throwing herself at me. The water spilled between us, and I

stepped aside, pushing her to the ground. I couldn’t believe how light she was. Then I realized

why there were no animals here. This girl was alone. There was no master of the house, no

parents, no livestock. She was another outcast of the northerners, left to live out the winter on her

own. Or more likely die. She was mad with hunger. She’d kept me around to do the tasks she had

no strength to do on her own, and out of a suspicion that I was hiding food.

“Here,” I said. “I’ll show you something wonderful.”

I took her through my routine. Boiling the snow. Dropping in the bone. Drinking while

the bone was still in the pot. I passed the soup to her after taking the initial sip to show that it

wasn’t poison.

“It’s delicious,” she said. She greedily sucked back the entire pot until the dry bone

bumped against her lips, and then she started to refill the pot with snow.

We made soup for the next hour, taking turns drinking the delicious, mysterious flavour.

She became so full of life again, right before my eyes. Her hair shined, her eyes sparkled. Was

that the way I looked? Was the drink so wonderful that it could restore life to one who was

nearly dead?

“We could put it in a cauldron,” she said sometime after we had moved to the house. “We

could feed the entire town.”

We spent the next day working, both of us, around the house. I was outside patching up

spots where the drafts got in, and inside she was making a place for me in the bedroom that had

been hers years before. She lived in the bigger room now, the one where he parents had slept

before their death. That night, we made soup and sat by the fire, talking about our lives and how

much we had in common.

“Have you only ever boiled it?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“If that bone in a pot of water makes soup, perhaps placing it in a pan would make steaks.

Or putting the bone in the oven would make bread.”

“I don’t think so. It won’t work like that.”

She fished the bone out of the empty pot and held it.

“It’s cold,” she said. “I wonder what kind of bone it is?”

“I don’t know. No animal I have ever seen, anyway. I thought for a while it was

someone’s finger, but now I don’t like the idea of it being from a person.”

As she held it, and stared into it, I saw a change in her. She started to rub the bone with

her thumb, and to hold it closer to herself. She turned her shoulders away from me, ever so

slightly. She tried to untie the knot in the old leather string, but that had been knotted for longer

than my lifetime, and it relieved me to see that it wouldn’t budge.

“Imagine,” she said. “If boiling it gives you food for one day, then eating it would mean

you never go hungry again.”

“No.” I told her. That’s not how it works.”

“Have you ever tried?” She raised the bone to her lips.

I tried to stop her, but she popped the bone inside her mouth and sucked it back. The long

string dangled from her lips as she puckered around it. She made a gurgling sound, and started to

choke. The colour went out of her face, and the dark circles reappeared beneath her eyes. She

started to pull on the string, but couldn’t open her mouth. Her eyes were wide and pleading. I

grabbed the string and pulled, but it was like trying to pull roots from frozen ground. It wouldn’t

budge.

I watched in horror as the gentle glow she had acquired faded to nothing. She became the

same sick, frail girl I had met, and then even worse. Her hair started to fall out in matted clumps.

Her fingers, still pulling on the string, started to wither down to skin and bone. I grabbed her lips

and forced her mouth open. I could see the bone in there, but it was trapped within her. Her

tongue and cheeks had swelled so much that her mouth was full of puffy flesh, with the bone at

the centre. I tried to wedge the bone away, but it simply wouldn’t move.

Finally, she collapsed. The bone slipped from her mouth, unblocking her airway so that a

long wheezing sound could seep out of her, and the pale skeleton of a girl was dead. Her eyes

were still open, now completely drained of colour. Her body was frail and thin and colourless, as

if she had been dried up and drained of all her blood.

I looked at the bone, dangling from the string I held. It was dark brown now, almost

purple. It looked like raw meat.

I left the northern lands, alone. I wanted so badly to bury the bone and leave it forever,

but I worried that it would suck life from the Earth as it had done to that pretty young girl. So

now I always wear it. Cold and dark and hard, I wear it all it the time. I may not have a home in

this world, but I have a role in it. I’m the one who carries the bone.

I never made the soup again. No matter how hungry I become, I will never make the

soup. I can’t. Not after I learned what kind of meat I’d been tasting.

* * * * *

About the Author

I’m a young Canadian author just starting out in the writing world. I like to experiment in

genre fiction. I feel that a lot of popular genres are like well-worn trails through a scenic forest.

Sometimes I’ll start and end on a particular genre’s path, but along the way I’ll take shortcuts,

wander along the shore, and discover a few intersections.

Also by Shaun Tennant:

Blood Cell- A Novel.

And check for updates at my author page.