Knitbone

by Fritz Leiber, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The thumb was made of a mutton bone, a little beeswax, a smear of walnut stain for the yellow of an old man's nail, and three weeks of Ysolde Fenk's undivided attention, and it was the best thing she had ever made. She had given it a whorl on the pad, a white scar across the second knuckle, and a nail split down the middle and grown back crooked, as a nail does on a man who has spent forty years scraping hides. She had boiled it, dried it, smoked it over a pot of chimney soot and black tea, and laid it on a square of velvet in a cedar box no longer than a spoon.

"It's beautiful," said her sister Mag, who sold things.

"It's a thumb," said Ysolde, who made them. "Don't call it beautiful in the temple. Call it holy. Beautiful costs less."

---

Haskarel is a city of nine hundred and some gods, a figure the census-priests revise each spring, generally downward, because gods in Haskarel die the way shops die: quietly, of empty rooms, with the shutters up and a notice in the window that nobody reads. The ones that last are the ones with something to show. The Temple of the Seven Stairs had a thumb.

It was the left thumb of Brother Comfry, the hermit of the tannery ditch, who had lost it to a hide-shears in the year of the great hail and had given it, the story went, to a beggar child who asked him for alms when he had nothing else to give. The child had sold it to the Seven Stairs. The Seven Stairs had set it in a crystal egg on a gilded stand at the top of their seventh stair, and pilgrims climbed to it on their knees, and some of them got up again cured of the palsy, the flux, the falling sickness and the debt-fever, and the rest got up with sore knees, which they agreed was a kind of blessing too. Brother Comfry, who was still alive and lived in a lean-to of tannery board on the ditch bank, was said to call it "my absent friend" and to send it his regards on feast days.

Our Lady Cark had nothing. She was the goddess of worry, an old and respectable deity in a merchant city, and for two hundred years her temple on Tallow Street had been full of shipowners lighting candles for overdue cargoes. But the shipowners had discovered the Seven Stairs, where a man could pray for his cargo and his gout in a single climb, and Our Lady's candles had dwindled from a forest to a thicket to a few dozen sorry stubs, and her Prelate had begun quietly selling the brass.

So it was to Tallow Street that Mag Fenk carried the cedar box, on a wet afternoon in the month of Rooks, in her good grey cloak and with the face of a woman who has been entrusted with something by the dying.

---

Prelate Oswy Dunnage received her in the vestry, among candlesticks wrapped in sacking for the brass-dealer. He was a large soft man with a voice like a cello played in a cellar and small wet clever eyes, and he looked at the box before he looked at her, which Mag counted a point in his favour as a buyer and against him as a man.

She opened the lid. She said nothing at all. Mag had a voice that could sell fish to a fishwife across a market in a gale, and she had learned long ago that its greatest effects were made by not using it.

Dunnage bent over the velvet for a long time. He did not touch. He breathed through his nose, and the candle he held made the walnut-stained nail shine like old horn.

"The right," he said at last.

"The right."

"Brother Comfry," said the Prelate gently, "has his right thumb. I saw him bless the tanners' children with it on Lamp Night. I counted, madam, because I am a priest of worry and counting is most of what we do. Ten digits, less one, and the one that is missing is up seven stairs in a crystal egg."

Mag had prepared four answers to this, each more elevating than the last. She opened her mouth to give him the first, and Dunnage lifted one soft finger and she closed it again, because she knew a man about to make a speech when she saw one, and it is bad business to interrupt a customer who is selling himself.

"Do you know what worry is, madam? It is faith turned inside out. The faithful man believes that what he hopes for will come. The worrier believes that what he fears will come, and he is right far more often, which is why my goddess was rich for two hundred years and will be rich again. I worry that the Seven Stairs will have my last candle by midsummer. I worry that Brother Comfry is seventy-four years old and sleeps in a ditch in the month of Rooks. I worry, therefore I know, that he will not keep his right thumb, or anything else, very much longer. And when he is gone, who is to say his right thumb did not come to Our Lady first? Not he." The Prelate closed the cedar lid with one finger, tenderly, as if tucking in a child. "We shall exhibit it in anticipation. Holy Cark has always been a goddess of things that have not happened yet. Forty crowns."

"Sixty," said Mag, a little faintly, because she had not expected to win the argument and did not like the way she had.

"Fifty, and a candle lit for your sister's hands. They are very fine hands."

She took the fifty. She did not take the candle.

---

"In Anticipation," said Ysolde, that evening, at her bench under the eaves of the house on Glue Lane, with the rain finding its usual three ways through the slates and dropping into its usual three pans. "He said that. In those words."

"He's having it painted on a banner. Gold on purple."

"And you took his money."

"You made the thumb," said Mag. "I don't know why you get to be the one with the clean hands. You've a split in your own thumb you've had since Midwinter, you won't let anyone look at it, and you're cross because the work went for less than it was worth."

This was true, and like most true things said between sisters it ended the conversation and settled nothing.

The banner went up on Tallow Street a week later. Under it, in a reliquary of beaten silver that had once been a soup tureen, lay the Right Thumb of the Living Saint, In Anticipation, and on the third day of the exhibition a cripple who had been carried there on a door threw his crutch into the air and danced a jig on the temple steps, and the shipowners came back to Our Lady Cark like pigeons to a dropped loaf.

Mag went to see the cripple dance. She came home laughing so hard she had to sit on the stairs.

"It's Ted the Leg," she said. "It's Teodric Ballow. I paid him to fall off a cart on Fishgate twice last summer, when we were selling the tincture. He's got two good legs and a bad memory, and he's taken Dunnage's money and not even changed his hat."

Ysolde did not laugh. She was looking at her hands, which she did not usually do, the way a fiddler does not usually look at the fiddle.

"What does Mother Spune say?" she asked.

Mother Ilbreth Spune of the Seven Stairs said a great deal. She said it from the top of her seventh stair, beside the crystal egg, on the next three holy days in succession, in a voice like a bell that had been dropped once and rehung: that the Living Saint was living, that any child in the tannery quarter could go down to the ditch and see his right thumb on his right hand, that Tallow Street was showing mutton to the faithful and calling it grace. The faithful went down to the ditch to look. They saw an old man with two hands and one thumb, scraping hides, who waved at them, and they came back up and told the city, and the city, being Haskarel, opened a book on it.

By the end of the month the bookmakers in the Exchange Arcade were offering seven to two that Brother Comfry would not see the spring, and fifteen to one, a longer and more interesting price, that when he was laid out for burial he would be found to have no right thumb.

"Somebody," said Ysolde, "is going to take that bet."

"Somebody already has," said Mag. "Several somebodies. It's the shortening of the price that's the news. It was twenty-five to one on Tuesday."

Ysolde put down her graver and stood up and took her coat off the nail, and Mag, who had argued with her sister every day for thirty years and knew which days were worth it, took hers.

---

The tannery ditch runs along the eastern wall where the river is let in to wash away what the city would prefer not to smell, and does not succeed. It smells of lime and urine, of oak bark rotting in the vats, of the dog dung the tanners buy by the bucket from the children of the quarter and call pure, which is the oldest joke in Haskarel and has never been funny. Brother Comfry's lean-to stood on the bank between a vat and a pile of horns, and Comfry himself stood in front of it with a hide over a beam, working it with a two-handled knife, and the knife moved just as well for having only one thumb to guide it.

He was a small man, bald, brown and creased as a harness strap, with a white beard trimmed close because, he said later, a beard on a tanner is merely a place for the work to hide. He did not stop scraping when the two women came down the bank.

"You'll be the thumb-makers," he said. "Let me see your hands."

Mag showed hers, which were big and red and had nothing to hide. Ysolde did not show hers. Comfry put the knife down, wiped his own hand on his apron, and simply took hers, as a doctor might, or a mother, and turned it over.

"There's the craftsman's crack," he said, and put his thumb against the split in the pad of hers, the one she had had since Midwinter, that opened when the bench was cold and bled into the wax. "Every carver gets it. You've been sealing it with your own beeswax, haven't you, and it's been coming open again by noon."

"Who told you we made it?" said Ysolde.

"Nobody needed to. Half the quarter has been down here this month to count me, and the other half to see whether the first half could count." He let go of her hand. "They tell me it's a very good likeness. They tell me it has my scar. There's one carver in Haskarel could do that, and she'd have a crack in her thumb from the doing of it." He held up his right hand and showed it to them, front and back, a showman's flourish: the scar across the second knuckle, the nail split down the middle and grown back crooked. "I'd have liked to see it. I've never seen my thumb from the outside, you understand. One doesn't."

"You should leave the city," said Ysolde. "Tonight. We have money."

"You have Oswy Dunnage's money," said Comfry, "which I'd as soon you kept, it'll do less harm in a carver's purse than in his. And go where? Every town on the coast has a temple. Every temple has a box. I'm safer here than anywhere, for the moment, with the whole quarter watching to see I keep my hands on." He picked up his knife again and looked at it. "Shall I tell you about the other one? The absent friend?"

They waited. The rain had stopped. Somewhere up the ditch a tanner was singing in a language neither of them knew, the same three notes over and over, the way men sing who have been at one task for thirty years.

"There was no beggar child," said Brother Comfry. "That's the Seven Stairs' story, and it's a good one, and I'd not take it from them. It was the year of the hail, and the shears slipped, and I bound up the stump and picked up the thumb, and I was hungry. There's a thing you learn on a ditch bank. The holy do not starve; they are merely holy by the time anyone looks. So I took it up the hill in a twist of cloth, and the old warden of the Seven Stairs, Spune's predecessor, a fat man called Abery, gave me four pennies for it, and I bought bread and onions and a jug of something I shouldn't have. It was the first honest money I ever made out of religion," he said, "and I made sure it was the last."

He bent and pulled up a weed from the bank by his foot, a coarse hairy-leafed thing with a drooping purple flower gone over. "Knitbone," he said. "It grows all down the ditch, wherever the bank stays wet. Bruise it, boil it, wrap it on a sprain, and in a week the sprain is a little better, as sprains generally are in a week. That's my miracle. That's all of it. Every tanner on this ditch knows it, and they come to me because I'm cheaper than a physician and pleasanter than a god." He pressed the leaves into Ysolde's palm and closed her fingers on them. "Put that on your thumb. Nights. Don't seal it with wax. Wax is for things that are finished."

Mag saw her sister's face do a thing she had not seen it do since their father's burial, which was to come apart for a moment and go back together a little crooked, like a nail. Ysolde said nothing at all. On the way back up the bank she carried the knitbone the whole way in her shut hand, as though it might get away.

---

It was the Feast of Lamps again, the turning of the year, and the faithful of nine hundred and some gods were out in the streets of Haskarel with lanterns on poles, so that from the high town the city looked like a ditch of wine with fire floating in it. It was also, Mag learned in the Exchange Arcade at noon, the night the price had shortened to four to one.

She found Ysolde at the bench, with the knitbone on her thumb under a strip of linen and nothing in front of her: no wax, no bone, no work.

"Both of them," Mag said. She was out of breath, which was rare. "That's what I can't — I thought it was Dunnage. Of course it's Dunnage. But Spune's put money on four to one against, through a cousin, a great deal of it, and you don't bet like that unless you've decided to make yourself a winner. Don't you see? If he dies with his thumb on, the Stairs win and Cark's a liar. If he dies with it off, Cark's a prophet. Nobody needs him alive, Sol. Nobody in this whole city needs him alive except tanners with sprains."

---

They ran. Afterwards Mag remembered the running chiefly as a set of stage pictures, each lit a little differently, as if somebody up in the dark were changing the coloured glass in front of the lamps: Glue Lane under its one red lamp; the Bridge of Coopers solid with a procession of white-robed votaries of a minor god of keys; the long slope down to the eastern wall, where the lanterns thinned out and then stopped, because nobody carries a lantern to a tannery.

Except that tonight two parties had.

They came along the ditch bank from opposite ends, as if the thing had been blocked by a director with a taste for symmetry: from the north, under purple, a dozen young men of Our Lady Cark with Prelate Dunnage puffing in their midst; from the south, under the white and gold of the Stairs, a dozen more, with Mother Spune at their head, upright as a candle. Between them, in front of his lean-to, in the light of both, stood Brother Comfry with his two-handled knife hanging loose in his hand, and his face, Mag thought, was the face of a man who has been sent for by two creditors at once and finds the situation, on the whole, very funny.

"Mother," he said. "Prelate. You'll forgive me if I don't kneel. The bank's slippery and I'm out of practice."

Both of them made speeches. It is what they were for. Mother Spune said the Saint must come up the hill tonight, under the protection of the Stairs, where his holy body could be kept safe from the impious; and the Prelate said that Our Lady Cark, too, was eager to offer her protection, in anticipation; and the young men behind each of them shifted their feet, and under the white robes and the purple Mag could see, now that she knew to look for it, the shapes of the knives.

Then Brother Comfry did the thing that nobody, Mag was afterwards sure, had rehearsed. He laid his right hand flat on the beam where the hides were scraped, and lifted the two-handled knife in his left, and said, quite pleasantly, "There. Now nobody need be anxious."

And brought it down.

He was a tanner; the knife was sharp; he knew his trade. The thumb came away clean and lay on the dark scraped wood, and for as long as it takes a drop to fall from a beam there was nothing on that whole bank but the sound of the river being let in through the wall.

"For Our Lady," said Brother Comfry, and he was white now, and swaying, but he was still smiling, "in fulfilment. Now Tallow Street's honest, and the Stairs were right all along, and neither of you has any reason left to want me dead. Somebody give me a rag, please. Ysolde Fenk, I can see you up there. Have you any knitbone?"

It might have ended there. It is the kind of ending a theatre would choose. But a man who has been offered a thumb begins, almost at once, to think about the hand; and a man who has been offered a hand begins to think about the rest; and the young men of both temples had come down to the ditch with knives and their courage screwed up, and had been robbed of their scene, and there is nothing in the world so dangerous as a crowd that has been robbed of its scene. Somebody in purple went for the thumb on the beam. Somebody in white went for him. A lantern went into the ditch and hissed out. Then another.

Mag saw her sister go down the bank, with no knife, and nothing in her hand but a strip of linen, shouting the old man's name. She saw her sister struck aside by a forearm in a white sleeve and fall against the vat. She went down after her, roaring, in the great voice that could sell fish in a gale, and for a moment the whole bank stopped and turned, because there is something in a voice like that which every soul in Haskarel has been taught from the cradle to obey.

It lasted a moment. Then the last lantern went out.

Mag got her sister up the bank. She would never afterwards be able to say how. She did not look back, and she did not let Ysolde look back, and what they heard behind them in the dark she has kept to herself ever since, except to say, once, very drunk, at a burial: that it was a wet sound, and a busy one, and that there was singing in it.

---

By the end of that week there were relics of Brother Comfry in thirty-seven temples of Haskarel, which was rather more temples than Brother Comfry had had pieces. The Seven Stairs had his heart, in a casket on their seventh stair beside the absent friend. Our Lady Cark had the right thumb, in fulfilment, and a lock of the beard, and a shinbone she had bought from a tanner at an inflated price. A god of keys had a knee. A goddess of good harvests was said to have something she would not specify. The bookmakers of the Exchange Arcade paid out at four to one on the thumb, and then, as an afterthought, opened a book on which temple would have the skull by spring.

The commissions came to Glue Lane by the dozen. There were not enough pieces to go round, and the city wanted pieces, and everyone in Haskarel who knew about such things knew who had made the best thumb anybody had ever seen. Mag read the letters out in the evenings, the offers rising, while the rain came through the roof by its three ways into its three pans. Ysolde sat at her bench with her hands in her lap and the linen on her thumb, and did not answer.

On the ninth evening she unwrapped the linen. The craftsman's crack had closed. There was a thin new seam of pink skin across the pad, already beginning to callus, the whorl running through it a little crooked, like a nail grown back.

She put the letters in the stove, every one, and the mutton bones after them, and the beeswax, which spat and roared and filled the house with a smell like a chapel.

---

You may still see Mag Fenk on the Tannery Bridge any morning there is no rain, and on most mornings that there is: a big red-handed woman in a grey cloak with a basket on her hip full of coarse, hairy, bruised green leaves, which her sister picks along the ditch bank before it is light, with a strip of old linen still tied round one thumb out of habit. The procession goes past her up toward the Seven Stairs, on its knees by the top, and Mag does not raise her voice to it. She has a voice that could sell fish to a fishwife across a market in a gale, and she does not use it.

"Knitbone," she says to whoever stops. "A penny a bunch. Boil it and wrap it on the sprain, and in a week it'll be a little better, as sprains are." And if they ask, as the pilgrims sometimes ask, whether it is holy, whether it grew where the saint fell, whether there is anything in it of him, she shakes her head.

"It's a weed," she says. "It costs less."

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ā Friderīcō Leiberō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Fritz Leiber, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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