Tender Morsels (12 page)

Now she looked, though—all put out, too. I were going in the right direction.

‘Why can I not be in the nature of an experiment?’ I said.

‘And you would be, too, it has been so long since I done anything proper, and never have I gone so big as that.’

‘And you don’t reckon you could?’

‘I don’t—Well, I . . . You see, Collaby, experiments is not what is done, this field of endeavour. The misadventures might end up too serious.’

‘More serious than being sought by murderers that a man owes money to?’

She looked at me sidelong. ‘To be sure,’ she says. ‘The worst could come of that is your murder, is it not? Which would all happen in this world, no? Whereas
twixting
worlds, sending someone
across
to his own heaven, well . . .’

I waited on her. ‘Well, what?’

‘Well, it’s not as if you’re askin for a poultice made up, or a love potion. I don’t even have all the preparations I would need. We are talking about a visit to High Oaks Cross when the market is on.’

‘It needn’t be done today. Sooner is better, but I can wait if I know you are putting something together for me.’

‘That is big of you. Right gen’rous. How ’bout if I am still out of pocket, though? Some of the items I would need is quite expensive.’

‘Point me at them, Annie, and I will obtain them for you. Or the pocket to pay for them. Such lesser amounts is no bother to me.’

‘Oh, so your fingers is light
and
little, is it?’ All eyebrows, she peered around her cup at them.

‘And the next man, you can charge
him
a fine price, and get all your costs back and some over.’

She mouthed out her lips awhile, like a girt catfish’s, right down to some of the moustachios.

‘I will leave it with ye, shall I?’ I said soberly. ‘I know you have the power; it is just the will you must summon.’

‘Oh, must I?’ She mumbled her mouth and moved her ragged dress on her knees. ‘Must I just.’

‘You worked it so close in your youth, Annie,’ I said. ‘Are you not itching to use the fullness of what you hold inside of you?’

‘I don’t know.’ She looks down into the forest. ‘I have itched, I suppose.’

‘You see?’

‘But there was no living in it. There is a living in the herbs, you see, and in reading hands.’

‘Is it in my hand?’ I laughed, holding it out. ‘Look there and see if you’re going to do it.’

She eyed my palm, but did not touch it. She read it quick as a kestrel reads a hillside, and looked away. ‘Dought,’ she said, and her voice had lost all its front and bravery, ‘it looks good for you. Right up to the end, it looks good.’

‘Right up to anyone’s end is good!’ I laughed. ‘Nobody wants to end, whether their life were good or ill.’

‘I’ve seen plenty that wanted to go before time took ’em. They come to me for the wherewithal.’

‘Well, anyway.’ I swigged the last of the tea and jumped off the bench. ‘You think, Annie, how the thing might be accomplished, and I will be your white rabbit. I will come back tomorrow.’

She looked down at me. Everyone had grown into giants around me, all the orphans I used to be equal with. Here she was, sitting, and me standing, and she must still lower her eyes, when I used to poke her looking almost straight into them.

‘There might be many you can promise this to,’ I said. ‘You might make your fortune sending people to the place of their dreams. Come, Annie’—I stepped towards her, pulling out my last card, which with women is always His Majesty of Hearts—‘for the sake of times at St Onion’s. Poor-house rubbish together, we were. ’Tis a binding that never unravels.’

‘There are dangers, Dought. You cannot imagine. I am not sure of them all myself.’

‘Mebbe not. Get it wrong with me, that you may right it with others, and become a rich woman in a house on the hill.’

Still she regarded me, all uncertainty. If I’d looked more pleading, my eyes would have fell right out my head onto the dirt there.

‘Leave me think,’ she said. ‘You nuisance, coming here with your Onion’s-talk. Why should I want to recall all that?’

‘It’s what we’re made on, Annie. We cannot deny.’

‘Go on.’

‘I’ll go on.’ I patted her grey-clothed knee. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow.’

‘Next day. I’ve a batch to mix tomorrow and don’t want disturbing.’ She said this to the forest wall over my head.

‘Very well,’ I said, and I was gone, leaving her thoughts, I was sure, bubbling like broth over a cookfire.

‘There was a woman said I ought never to do this,’ Annie said. ‘I met her at High Oaks Cross when I were deeper in the telling game. Come all the way from Rockerly, she did. Miss Fancy-pants.’

We were by a stream, because running water was required. The air was ripe with the things she had laid out, which were all grey and dusty, except the fresh mother-in-law ear, which were
green-grey and hairy. She were not done yet. She were busy with the bits as she went on.

‘I said to her,
Why is it guv me, then, if I’m not to use it?
But she says,
Ooh, not all as has wombs is good for mothering
. And coming from Onion’s, I took her point; some o’ those old besoms, you wouldn’t wish ’em on the Devil as an enemy, leave alone a mam. A little fire, Collaby, is what we’re needing now.’ She tossed me a tinderbox. ‘When it is going, await my word to put these on.’ And she prodded at a bundle of sticks with dried buds falling off and through them.

Well, the magic-making went on such a long time, I were on the point of complaining. Remember, she is doing you a favour, Collaby, I told myself any number of times. I’d had to flit away in the night when the men of my main creditor, Ashbert, caught me up at Osgood’s inn, so I was all twitchy. The whole world seemed in pursuit of me, and all I wanted was an end to the fleeing.

‘And now,’ Annie would say. She would glance at the sky as if she were wishing away rain. ‘Everything that is bitter.’ And this plant and that powder would go up in an awful stink, and I would have to breathe the smoke of that. Or, ‘A spot o’ signage is in order now,’ and she would sit me down and draw her mysteries on my brow, which I was hopeful would bring on glimpses such as I had enjoyed at haying that time, but no, it was just
rasp, rasp, rasp
, and her hand this time smelt of that distinct repulsiveness women have when they are past childering, overlaid with this herb and that mineral dust. ‘And now for the mershon,’ she would say, and then make me go down and dunk myself three times in the freezing stream while she stood and muttered her stuff on the bank.

I grew miserable and bored of it, and still she came up with new trials. I began to think a beating of Ashbert’s boys would be preferable. However close to death it brought me, at least it would be quick. Certainly an end to this and a nap in a sunny place where my clothes could dry out were seeming most immediately attractive.

‘Ha!’ She checked the sky again and grinned at me, her face all folds of leather. ‘Look at it, Dought!’

‘At what?’ I grumped.

‘There.’ She pointed up into the flying smoke.

It seemed to me I saw only a smudge such as is often in my eye when I have the leisure to look awhile at the sky. It took a time of squinting to the sides of it that it became a crinkle, a star-ish shape of grey pleats hanging over us, around a puncture mark.

Now Annie was beetling about with this and with that, all excited. She sent up smokes, and some of them obscured the mark and others brought it to more darkness, until I was quite used to and bored by the horrible hovering thing, and unconvinced. I could not see how this had to do with the vision she had showed me as we lay in the hay, which had been of a world where nobody loomed or towered. Many maids there had been, my size, and men of a spirited disposition, my kind, who would join me in whatever prank or party I might devise. It had been all colour and dancing there, not this shadow growing on the air, not the cold water dripping off me and making me sniffle, not one foul smell upon the other until my nose was so dizzy it could only discern the outermost edges of the nastinesses.

‘Here we go, Collaby,’ she finally said, and there was that little gamester I knew, bright and naughty as ever in the stance and glancing of her. ‘I will leg you up to it.’ She linked her hands into a stirrup and bent down to me.

‘What? What am I to do?’ I put my hand on her shoulder and my foot in the stirrup, suddenly all boredom gone and my knees locking with fright.

‘Go on up to it. Your world is waiting, what I drew on you.’

‘Up there?’ She had hoisted me, and the thing was over me like a lowered bum, like a lowered cloud ready to release its storm. Oh, it was no ordinary cloud; I could feel the concentration of it, its compressed lightnings all unable to burst out.

‘Push into it!’ she cried. ‘Dig! Quick, afore my skirt catches in the fire!’

I joined my hands as a God-man prayeth, and pushed the point of them up into the grey. ‘’Tis quite hard, Annie; it does not feel inclined to yield.’

‘It will yield, it will yield. Just you push, just you force it. It is yours, I tell you, on the other side.’

What a substance it was, particularly when my fingertips broke through. Nasty washes of sensation passed down me; Annie felt them too, I could tell by her shaking. ‘Cawn, Dought, my toes are crisping here.’ And she straightened further. Her head was against the edge of the phantasm, all misty there. She had forced my arms through into cold, cold! Cold water had broken out the bottom of the world above and was dropping and soaking me.

‘Blemme, woman, you are putting me through into an ocean, to drown there!’

‘’Tis not salt,’ she said, smacking her lips. ‘It is lake or pond or stream or summut.’

‘Some fish is brushing me, aak!’

But she forced me up with my feet, and I was so stiff with fear that I did not think to bend my knees. My head went through; it felt as if all my hair and beard were tearing out on the way. All the forest sounds turned to the
gloomp
and
glop
of bubbles through water, and the push of it. Light, there was light up there! And a great plant—not a fish, a broad plant with leaves flat as eel-tails—trailed overhead of me in the stream-current, in the frothing mud.

Two strong pushes and Annie had skinned me alive, but I was through. My feet could kick and they kicked upward, with stars swimming all around me in the ribbons of eel-weed.

Up I gasped, through to the glorious air, and there I was, being cradled on the water-top and spun under the trees, the bank empty of Annie back there, but the trees the same, the sky.

Best get out of here, I thought, before I hit that rocky, rushy part downstream, and bang my magical brains out.

So I whumped and galumped my way to the bank. It were all pretty steepish there, but I gripped up handfuls of the grasses and dandlin-daisies and pulled myself out, and some of the daisies out the ground, but there was plenty more, no?

Then, as I sprawled there, wondering how this was any different and where was all my new friends, something happened to the grippage in my hand, and when I opened it, not dandlin-daisies but shining coins new-minted of the king’s currency lay there.

‘What is this marvel?’

I turned the coins, I bit them, I weighed them in my palm. I plucked, all frightened, a dandlin-head off its stalk. It melted to gleaming gold on my wet hand and lay there, valuable.

I quite lost my senses for a little while. I yelped and leaped about, picking flower after flower, watching them change, pocketing them so that they clinked at my belt. I tore off handfuls of the blooms; danced about, raining gold on myself. ‘I am a king!’ I shouted. ‘I am a prince and a wizard! I shall fill my bath with gold and wash my beautiful beard in it! I shall eat gold for dinner and drink golden wine!’

Then I calmed and busied myself. I filled my belt and pockets, I did, until I had to pull the belt in a notch so’s not to lose the heavy thing, and restrain myself so’s not to burst the pocket-stitching. That were well enough to get me out of the hole I’d dug myself with Ashbert, not to mention going back to Middle Millet and maybe even to Rockerly town, and paying back the men I’d borried from there and restoring my good name. Then I would buy myself a house and a horse and carriage and some suits of clothes, and so much else besides! I had never had money to dream beyond that, it had all been scribbling-scrabbling here and there, clawing up coppers like sifting spilled grains from dirt. How I laughed and sang and exclaimed, for there were no one else around here, neither short-stump nor long.

When my belt and pockets were full, I set off along a path uphill, wishing to find the people of my own size that Annie had shown me, and to see what manner of merchant or spank-house or keller-man they had here that I could impress and make use of with my new wealth.