Bone Soup
by
Shaun Tennant
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Bone Soup
Copyright © 2012 by Shaun Tennant
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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