Tender Morsels (20 page)

‘You have not seen Bear this morning?’ said Liga.

‘We looked, didn’t we, Branza? To see if he
had
fallen, you know. Certainly we could not see him from above. And no, we didn’t meet him, all that long way home. We could have ridden him if we had, couldn’t we? We would have been home so much sooner. Truly, you have not been worried about us, Mam?’

‘I did wonder. But I knew you were out there with Bear. I knew you would come to no harm. And neither
did
you.’ She picked a scrap of moss from Branza’s golden hair. ‘Tell me again, Urdda, how he ran off the cliff.’

Urdda described it again, and Liga listened, so attentively that Urdda did not have to enlarge or embroider the story to keep her from picking up needle or broom.

‘And you did not . . . Did you think to reach out and touch the moon-bear?’

‘Touch him?’ Branza made a face. ‘He would have burnt our fingers off! Or froze them, maybe. Or . . . it might have hurt.’

‘Or it might not. It might have brought him back to his usual self, just to . . .’ Liga made the gesture herself, her face hopeful and thoughtful: ‘Just to take his paw, you know, and pull him to you, as when you make him dance with you.’

‘Well, we did not,’ said Urdda bluntly to her mother’s faraway face. ‘Branza was too frighted.’

‘Oh, I did not see
you
grabbing him when he reached for us.’

‘Reached for you?’ said Liga sharply. ‘He did not reach.

He did this.’ Urdda swiped the air nonchalantly. ‘Near us. As if just to play or something. Or to wave a fly away.’

‘Or to knock us off the cliff-top,’ said Branza dryly. ‘Which is when you said, “Let us go in the trees.” ’

‘And
you
agreed quick-smart, and ran straight off.’

‘Oh, do not quarrel about it.’ Liga gathered their two damp, tired bodies to her. ‘We are all upset to have lost Bear.’

‘Yes, we are.’ Branza laid her head gratefully on her mother’s shoulder.

‘Where do you think he has gone to, Mam?’ said Urdda.

Liga thought on it, holding them, swinging them a little. ‘I do not know,’ she said. ‘I cannot tell you. I cannot imagine.’ And gradually she stilled, and gazed at the floor as if standing on a precipice herself, searching the forest below for the tiniest glimpse of tiny, tiny Bear. Urdda had been on the point of asking,
Have you also seen that littlee-man, down by the marsh?
But that look of her mother’s, as if the surfaces of things hardly mattered against what she saw in her mind, against what she regretted that she saw, kept the daughter silent.

Midafternoons or evenings were when he would arrive. As the year warmed, they had left the cottage door open to breezes, and he would be an event, nearly filling the doorway, all muddy fur and fishy or clovery breath. If the girls were there, they would run to him and make a great fuss, remarking on his state and delighting in putting him to rights. And there was always a point, when they had groomed and arranged him, at which he would make his way to Liga, and nudge her with his head if she was busy, with her back to him; or lower his head and tickle her bare feet with breath, seeming to ask her blessing for being there among them.

It took Liga a long time to stop expecting him. She would hear the girls’ voices coming through the wood, and she had to school her feelings not to lift into amusement and anticipation, but only to be happy to see her two daughters squabbling or laughing—slender, smooth-limbed, unshadowed by Bear.

It is just that he was so large, she thought, so that he leaves a large
emptiness behind him. But it was not his largeness she missed—or not only that. Every way that he had disposed that size around them, or at the centre of them—accepting his role as toy or bed or amiable furnishings; snoring on the hearth or across the cottage step in the springtime; friendly and foolish one moment, gentlemanly the next, solemn and vastly noble the next—had improved and enlarged their lives. Liga found—as she laundered at the stream and glanced up at shadows that were not Bear; as she tidied after the evening meal and Branza and Urdda ran out into the last light, just the two of them, speeding around until they dizzied themselves, with no Bear to clamber on or instruct or reduce to rumbling contentment with scratchings of his head and back—how easily she had accustomed herself to him: to his size, to his maleness, to his easy acceptance of all their embraces. She could lie across her own bed, but it did not have the shape and warmth of Bear; she could be prone on a sunlit knoll of fine grass that almost, almost gave the feeling of Bear’s fur if she closed her eyes and imagined hard, yet it did not sigh and shift beneath her, or make Bear’s digestive mumbles and squeaks. He was with them no longer, she must always at some point admit, and once she had admitted it she would go out and gather up a daughter, all bones and flying hair, and tumble her Bear-like on the grass and growl, or sit by the fire on one of the wooden stools and wrap her arms around her own self as she gazed into the flames.

Urdda stamped back and forth along the cliff-top, beating at the edge with a long, stout stick.

‘Show yourself to me!’ she muttered. ‘Whatever you were, magic Bear or star fallen out the sky. Come and glow at me.’
Thud, thump
, she went with her stick.

The world below was all dark billows of hill and tree, and sunlit birds’ backs as they flew. The breeze teased everything. Urdda’s dark curls stroked her cheeks and forehead. All was movement, yet nothing was happening.

‘It was
not
a dream,’ she insisted to the sky. ‘We followed Bear!
He jumped off here and flew away, and then there you were. Both of us saw you—even Branza, who didn’t want to. And Mam, she knew—she never once said we must be making up stories, or touched by the sun, or what.’

Thump
. A spray of dirt flew out from the cliff-edge and fell away. Why would nothing do as she told it? The drifty clouds followed their own breeze; the sky dreamed; in the great hard world, sticks stuck out and scraped you, stones tripped you, trees stood silent and required you to find your way among them. Everything ignored Urdda, no matter how angry she grew.

‘I have not brought Branza today!’ she called into the emptiness. ‘I believe in you! You can show yourself and I will not be frightened. Come on, bright thing, whoever you were!’

The silence streamed at her in its disguise of hissing leaves and bird-cry. ‘Blast and bother you,’ she whispered. ‘Where in the name of that hairy bad-man are you?’

She stood very close to the edge, shut her eyes, and imagined the space before her: the maw of it, the yawn. It had been nearly dark when Bear disappeared—not the red-dark of sunlit eyelids like this, but proper thickening dusk, full of evening creatures, the thrill of their fleeing paws. She had run up that path with Branza’s whimpers in her ears and Bear’s mass ahead, and she had seen him lope off into the stars just as if the ground continued. And she would have,
would
have followed, had not that bear-thing, that moon-thing, come beaming at them and said—What had it said? No, there had been no voice, no words. Only it had made her think how tired she was, and how she ought to look to Branza’s safety, and to her own. If it had not got in the way, she would have run right off after Bear into . . . wherever. Into that place of light. Into the place that caught you if you fell from a cliff-top, and stopped you dashing to pieces on those rocks down there.

Still she swayed on the cliff, trying to pull the magic up from her memory, to infuse this afternoon with whatever had obtained that other evening to make impossible things possible. She thought about the moon-bear; she pretended, with all her heart and imagination, that the hot light on her eyelids was of the bright thing,
that all around this blob of heat that was moonbear-lit Urdda, the evening was breezing, full of owls and owl-prey, bats and bat-beetles on the wing. So strongly did she want this, she convinced herself she had made it so; that the moon-thing had heard her plea and come to fetch her, just as it had fetched Bear. Slowly she walked, backward down the slope, eyes closed, feet feeling, holding the real gravel and hot ground entwined with the moonish thoughts, the cool-night-air imaginings.

She ran forward now, up the same slope, ignoring the memory of Branza’s voice—
Oh, Urdda, do stop! Stop and he will come back to us, all by himself
—running into the red darkness. Bear lumbered there, hot with light, red with heat. ‘I’m coming too!’ Urdda cried. ‘Wait for me!’ Squeezing her eyes tighter shut, she ran out into the air after him.

There, you see? It had worked. See how dark it really was, and the stars! And here—she was in Bear’s claws, or teeth; he had picked her up in some awkward way. Oh, but—curse and cross it—there was the moon-bear, away off there so far, hovering out of Urdda’s reach like a glowing cheese-round in the sky, blotting out so many stars with its busy light.

But this time it thought nothing at her; it only shrank and steadied and became the ordinary moon, pouring down its flat silver light, coating Urdda in the disappointing stuff. This was a tree she had been caught in, not bear-claws; she had not flown, but only fallen, like the lump she was, down a slope that had not been there when she had peered down over the cliff-edge, into a tree that most definitely had not been here—she would have noted it in the bright afternoon; she would have been careful to avoid it. She had knocked her head on something and slept for a time, to wake now with her skin all hot and sunstruck inside the chill shell of the night breeze, her flesh bruised and stiff, and the moon above her not come to fetch her at all, not even looking at Urdda with its big blind eye, but lighting, as it lit up everything without discrimination or favour, the sloping path she must follow back up to the dreary world.

‘Daft girl,’ said Liga fondly. She ran fingers light as a drift of pollen over the bruise on Urdda’s brow. ‘Girls were not meant to fly. Where are your feathers? Where are your wings?’

‘Bear didn’t have feathers, nor wings, and yet he flew.’ Urdda sat quiet and good in the washpool in the moony dark, and Liga rinsed the dust and sweat off her slowly, carefully, and with some curiosity. This washing made Urdda feel she ought to be a little ill, or just soft, as Branza was, who loved all touches and kindness and was never impatient with them.