Tender Morsels (13 page)

Branza held out the leaf of row-cabbage. At last the hare, very slowly, approached her with its rocking stride, almost like limping. It paused and breathed before her, its yellow eyes looking at everything, its velvety lips nibbling the air. It reached across very delicately, not at all jaunty as a hare should be but quite humble, and nibbled the edge
of the leaf, and in the quietness its teeth broke the flesh of the leaf, and crushed and crushed it with a sound like panting.

Branza tried to stay as still as a cabbage. Her body swayed very slightly and her insides rushed and thumped with excitement, her breath gusting, her eyelashes swishing as she blinked. Her body was like a storm gathered into itself over the hare, putting out a very narrow, silent finger of lightning. She crouched huge and dangerous, brimful of her five human years and growing all the time, and the hare had seemingly forgotten what a thunderous presence she was, had come and put its delicate furred self, its veiny ears that would tear like rags, its jittery bones, at her mercy.

Urdda could not do this sort of thing so well; she was too restless a person. Branza sat in her patience like a rock lodged in a stream-bed, and the frail animals came to her. It was gratifying that there were creatures smaller and frailer and quieter than herself, the quietest and most timid of her family. She had tried all her years to understand them, to listen as they listened, and now she sat and felt around her the forest and all its dangers for hares, all its possibilities for being leaped on and swooped on and devoured.

There went the hare, into cover with a bound, at that step, at those steps: Urdda’s little runnings behind Branza, and a heavier tread on the path skirting the clearing. Branza was startled up herself, her heart thumping on the hare’s behalf.

She only had to glimpse the man on the path—hardly bigger than herself, but very old and wrinkled and fierce, with much too much silvering hair and beard—and she knew to run, silently, to Urdda, to crouch behind the holly-bush there, her finger on her sister’s lips.

Urdda thought it was a game—her eyes brightened and rolled with the fun of it. ‘What is it?’ she murmured around Branza’s finger.

But Branza touched her own lips, stilled by unaccountable dread as, over Urdda’s innocent shoulder, she watched the littlee-man go by.

Before long I came to a road, and there beside it was a spring and cup exceeding like the one near to St Olafred’s. I drank, and very sweet it was, and then I set off towards what I hoped would be the town, but all brought down to a useful size, so that I would have no need to make a joke of myself, hoisting myself like a toddler into giant chairs, poking my nose above market tables and ahoying to be served.

The road took all the turns and had all the boggy and broken bits that I remembered from walking so glumly into St Olafred’s a few days ago. Were it not for the weight of gold in my belt and pockets, I would have thought I was in the same old world. And then I came around the last bend and there was the pig farm, same size, and the giant-sized huts all clustered against the same towering town wall, and as I came up I saw the pig-farmer out by his house, not the same twisty-faced misery as before, but just as big a lummock, it looked.

The town guard, also, were beanstalks as usual. They looked at me, though, with more than curiousness this time, and they walked forward into my way. Maybe they smelt the gold on me.

‘What may I do for you today, youngfellers?’ I says, a bit testy at having to look up to them still, and a bit uncertain because I could see, behind them, people coming and going, and none of them short-stumps.

‘You don’t belong here, Mister Collaby Dought,’ says one.

This nettled me. ‘Mebbe not,’ I says. ‘Where is all the little people at, that I was promised?’

The other spoke, but his voice and manner were exactly the same as the first’s; they must be twinned. ‘You ought go back where you came from.’

I looked upon them close; something were not right about them, about their identicality. They met my eye quite without enmity or any other active feeling.

‘I will look about somewhat first, if it please you,’ I said.

‘You shouldn’t dally here,’ one said.

But they did not stop me walking around them, and they did not come after me as I sauntered up the street.

Half the houses seemed to be missing, and the street were a lot less busy than the true town’s. The people were all, to a man and woman, your standard tallness, with no one my height bar the children ten years or under. They did not stare, though, as the real townspeople had done; instead, some of them walked out of their way, to mutter at me as I passed, ‘Mister Dought, go to your home now,’ or, ‘You’re not welcome in this place, sir.’ But no one shouted and no one impeded me. No one even gave me a dark look.

I kept my courage all the way to the market square. There I found a mam selling plums, and these smelt so good I asked her for three of them.

‘And what do you have in trade for them?’ she says.

‘Ho-ho! What do I have? I will show you what I have.’ I took out a gold coin and waved it at her.

She took it from me, and on the instant it turned to dandlin-head again. ‘I can give you nothing for a weed-head, I think.’

‘Then I shall just take what I like, shall I?’ And I picked up a plum in each hand, looking for her surprise and ire.

But there was none. I might of been some misbehaving boy that she never expected better from, she was so serene.

I were about to eat one of the plums, but they lost their texture as I lifted them, and there I was, holding two plum-sized rubies instead. ‘What is this?’ I said. ‘What is a man to eat in this place?’

She shrugged and turned away from me.

I put one ruby back to become a plum again. Taking the other, I went to the bread-stall next to the plums, and took hold of one of the floured baps there, which immediately heavied into a little loaf of gold, dusted with gold dust. ‘Shaish!’

‘Put that back, sir,’ says the bakewife kindly. ‘It will do you no good.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I have a small fortune here in my hand.’

‘As you please. But off you go, now.’

I walked about the market some more, but now I had one hand full of gold and the other of jewel and no more free to fondle things, and I could not see how I was to eat anything without it turning to metal or stone in my mouth and choking me. And these people kept muttering to me—all of them in the same sort of voice, very civil and low:

‘Come along, now, don’t linger.’

‘Go back to your true world, sir; this is no place for you.’

‘You ought shift yourself, Mister Dought.’

I left the market and walked down through the town, hoping for an alehouse, or hoping to find the place that I had seen, when I first walked up St Olafred’s looking for Annie, that had had the woman at the door with the right sharp look about her for a bawd. Well, I found those places, but someone in their joy-killing had razed both buildings, and cleared all the rubble away and grassed the ground over, so a fellow might drink nothing but dew there—if it did not turn to diamonds on his tongue—and play with nothing but himself.

‘Well, that’s a fine spoiling of my sport,’ I said there in the sun. ‘I know, I know,’ I added to the goodwife who was veering towards me from the lane beyond, ‘“Get thee home, Mister Dought; there’s nothing for your sort here.” I shall go, I shall go, in my own good time.’

‘There is no good time for you here, sir. You are injuring this place every moment you tarry.’ And the smug cow passes me onto the road.

I went after her, and I tucked my ruby against myself with one elbow, and I caught hold of the woman’s bum through her skirt, right there in the street, with who knew how many to witness!

She went very still.

‘I was just seeing were there real flesh in there,’ I says, ‘or only a wooden frame.’ I let her go, and she walked on as if I had not touched her. No one shouted at me; no one looked askance. I ran after her again. ‘I’m reckoning I could have you here in the street and no one would stop me. Am I right?’ And I grasped her bum-cheek again.

She turned on me such a face! If I had managed up a fist, it would have withered on me right then and there. It was not that she were cold, or angry, or scornful; it was that she were
not a woman
. She were not even a
person
. Her eyes were white as skylit windows; the wind whistled through her earholes, through her hollow head. I let her go. To be sure, where is the fun of outraging someone if they are
not
a someone, if they do not feel the outrage; if there is no rule to break, no punishment to risk? You might as well fondle a tree, or poke yourself into a hole in the wall.

Well, I was hungry now, ragingly so, and all this muttery and mistaking were depressing my spirits, so I hied me out of the town and back down the road and to the waterside where I had come to this horrible place. I found the torn and trampled place where I had jubilated before, and walked upstream of that to where I thought was the place where Annie had magicked me.

‘Now, did you think to mark it, the place where you came up, Collaby Dolt? I think you did not! Well, serve you right, then, to be laden down with valuable coin, and stuck in a place where you cannot use it.’ My arm ached from carrying the golden bap, and my head thudded with all the newness of things. I stamped out into the water near to where I thought I had come up, squitching and squertching about among the eel-weed and the unidentifieds in the mud. But of course, I had been out of my depth when I emerged, and the deeper I got, the stronger the stream’s pull was on me.

I tried several ways, starting upstream of the place and letting the current take me down to the stream-bottom to feel with my hands or feet, the weight of the bap and coins advantaging me to help me sink, but then, of course, being impediment should I perchance wish to breathe. And of course I could see nothing for my swirling hair, for the swirling eel-tails, for the mud I clawed and toed up from the bottom.

‘Curse and crangle it!’ I bellowed in the end, floundering halfdrowned in the shallows. ‘Where are you? Let me through!’ And I stamped as hard as I could, and I frothed up the water around me with my fists full of gold and jewel, and flung my hair all about in my rage.

Then there came a horrid deep blurt of bubble, up from the bottom, and oh, didn’t underfoot feel uncanny, sagging and pushing my slipping feet together into the sag. I have done something to the geologics, I thought. I have unsettled an earthquake. And then the water slid cold up my chest and my neck and, ‘I am going to dr—argle-argle-aaaah!’

Down I went through the mud swirl, the pond-bottom tightening around my ankles like a monster’s mouth. It lipped and tongued and sucked me in, and the light and the swirling weeds disappeared, and my breath had all gone out of me on that one scream I had given. Then the mouth clamped my neck, and my head were the only cold wet part, and the rest of me were being crushed and munched, and I must not breathe or I’d drown. So I did not. The thing’s lips sucked my face and head. A crowd of golden stars fizzed across my mud-squelched eyes. My skull were gripped hard enough to crack, hard enough to peel my scalp off.

‘Ow! . . . Uff!’

I were sitting in the stream-edge with a bumful of bruise-beginnings from the rock bed, and the pleated thing were wheeling grey in the sky above me, and there were Annie turning all surprised, pipe in one hand and pipe-makings in the other, on the point of sitting on a tree-stump and smoking, after her morning’s labours hoisting me through into Drowningland.

‘Already?’ she says, astonished.

‘What d’you mean, “already”?’ I upped my sodden self and
stamped out the water. ‘
Hours
I have spent in that place.’ I laid the bap and ruby in the mud at my feet and squeezed some water out of my hairs.

‘Hours? You’re nonsense. I have just kissed your toes goodbye, no more than an instant ago.’

‘Well,
hours
, I’m telling you. I’ve come back laden with what took
hours
of gathering.’

She came down the bank, poking the air with her pipe-stem. ‘Time must go different there, then.’

‘I suppose it must.’ I was most uncomfortable, all wet and bumped and weighted by coinage round the middle, and I did not enjoy being contradicted or mused over.

‘That’s not supposed to happen.’ She frowned at me, watched me not-caring awhile, then walked back up to her stump. ‘Well.’ She started arranging her leaf-bits. ‘What can I
possibly
have done wrong, after all that work?’ She sighed and she sucked there, and fiddled with pipery. ‘Well,’ she eventually’d, ‘you are back now, and what is done is done.’

The both of us examined the air where the wheely-thing had been, but all there was was sky, empty but for breezes.

‘So, did you have a time there, with your stumpesses?’ She cackled at me. ‘I’m surprised you still have your pants on.’ She pulled on a mask of sympathy. ‘You must be very tired, Collaby, with your heavening, poor lad.’

‘No such,’ I says. ‘There were not a single one of us, of anyone I saw. It were the same as here, with everyone towering over me, girt lumps the lot of ’em.’

‘That does not match,’ said Annie. ‘That’s not what you seen before, is it? They were all littlees you saw in the hay, you said. A world o’ them. Did you imagine us bigguns your servants, mebbe, or some such downstruck types?’

‘Nobody were downstruck there. They were all with telling
me
what to do. “Get out of here, Mister Dought,” they all said—yes, and every last soul knew who I was, some down to my name!’

‘Oh dear. Oh dear.’ She took the unlit pipe from her mouth. ‘That sounds very bad, Dought. I dislike the sound of that
very
much.’

I picked up the bap and stone and walked my damp self up the bank to her. My pockets jingled, and my belt felt like to fall off me.

‘But I may have good news, Annie.’ I handed her the bap. ‘Just hold this for a little,’ I said, ‘to see if it lasts in this world. I seen gold change back to flowers in that missus’s hand. Maybe I’ve brought back nothing of worth.’