Tender Morsels (34 page)

‘
Hit
her? With a
stick
?’

‘I know it sounds outrageous, but the outrage is not real, Filip! It is enchantment, I tell you. Just pick up a good stick and let us have at the both of them. You
do
want to save Noer, don’t you? Or shall we let her take him?’

He upped and helped me then, and we found the requisites.

‘Now, take a good breath of the clean air,’ I says, ‘and we will run in. You poke him; I will beat the bear, for I do not love her as much.’

‘Very well,’ he answers me, all unwilling.

‘Are you with me?’ I say. ‘Because we must get on and have Noer shoot her, and pull these skins off ourselves, and everything that goes with them, such as the love of bears.’

‘I don’t know.’ Filip looked at her, half in horror and half in longing. ‘It sounds so daft when you say it, but the love of
this
bear, and only this one, to whom I would gladly . . . wed myself?’

I pushed him and pounded him. ‘You wet-shirt!’ I screamed in his face. ‘Hear what you said! You are mad with this! Believe me, do just as I say! Take that stick there and save your friend with it, your friend who has been your friend since you was babs together, not just these last few instincts! Poke him down and drag him out of there, away from her. Do you hear? Do you hear? Will you do that?’ All this I shouted over the sounds of her and Noer charming each other, which was like rats gnawing on my liver.

Then there came a thud, and Filip
oh’d
as if someone had punched him, someone stronger than me. He gave out at the knees, and his eyes shone disbelieving at me and then empty, and he fell at my feet, dead as a stone, with a crossbow bolt in his back buried up to the fletching.

‘Sollem!’ I screamed at the man-shadows running the slope.

‘Nice work, boy!’ I heard from Sollem as the two hunters broke from the trees.

‘What are you at?’ I shouted. ‘You have killed Filip dead!’

Jem stopped short of us, and gasped, and threw away his bow as if it were afire and burning him. Sollem ran right down, though—he had to see the deed close; he had to feel Filip’s face, Filip’s neck where the blood should beat, to believe it.

‘Oh my gracious!’ wept Jem. ‘Oh my lords and ladies. I thought he was a bear. Leddy help me, I have killed a man! I thought he were a bear going you, Bullock; I thought I were saving your life. Oh, but he looked just like a bear!’

Rage from the old unmagicked Bullock welled up in me. ‘How could he,’ I shouted, ‘with that girt bonnet sticking up off his head? There is the bear,
there!
’

But the she-bear was gone—and Noer with her.

‘Noer! Noer!’ And I ran after them. But I only had the one glimpse,
far off in the forest, as they passed through the last freckles of sunlight before dusk. She carried Noer as a mam does her child, and he were wound around her tight as paint-stripes on a Maypole. They were gone in a moment, and only me left, with Jem wailing behind me and his da too distracted by the murdering to give the bear chase.

We brought Filip back to St Olafred’s that night, the Archers and the rest of the party not having the heart to continue the hunt, and I did not like to say, now that there was only the one of me, that weren’t the unspelling of me still important? For indeed it hardly seemed so with one man dead and another abducted.

‘We have probly lost the two of them; let us not fool ourselves,’ Wolfhunt says along the way.

I did not think so myself, having heard Noer and his lady crooning at each other, but I could hardly say, could I?—
No, he have eloped with her. It is love
. For no one who had not breathed the stars and the dew of that woman-bear would believe me, and I had had enough of people’s scorn by then.

So I went to my home. Wolfhunt came with me to see me safe and spread the word about Filip, but I could not stand to hear him tell my mam and da. I went straight to my bed and there sought peace unconscious.

Mam woke me late next day with a bowl of bread-milk. ‘Here, Bullock, it’s time to rise—you must go to the constable and give him your account of the events. And Filip’s mam and da too. They are eager to speak to you—Oh!’

The bowl thudded to the mat and she stepped back, wide-eyed.

‘What is it?’ Dozily I took in the spillage, and her face.

‘You have gone . . .
furred
in the night, my son.’

And it were true. My arms were much thicker-haired than yesterday, my fingers shorter, and my fingernails a little longer. And my face—such as I could feel it with these coarser fingertips—more than bearded, it was coated—cheeks and chin, forehead and all—with short, soft hair.

While I felt it, shakingly Mam darted forward and gathered up the bowl. The milk were all gone, but the sodden bread lay there. I saw her look at it; I
heard
her think, as clear as if she said it,
Well, that’s good enough for a bear
. But then she caught my horrified eye.

‘I will make it afresh,’ she said, and hurried away.

I lay down again; I turned to the wall; I did not want to face this day.

Mam brought me more breakfast, and took the soiled mat, and cleaned the floor and laid a fresh mat down. ‘There,’ she said. ‘All’s nice now. You sit up and eat, Bullock.’ But I would not turn my face and appall her further.

When she had gone, I ate, but I resolved to stay hidden, and so all the day I lay abed. But my misadventures got out all over town, of course, and the house filled up with the mutterings of people talking about my plight, and I must indeed face the constable and also Filip’s da, who came to collect my story, though his mam was too grief-struck and frightened to look upon me.

‘Ah,’ said the da, peering at me and patting my furry cheek. ‘You are in the same state as our boy. And we still cannot get the costume off him, to wash and funeral him properly. He will have to be buried a Bear.’

I hung my misshaped head. It would be easier to have taken the quarrel myself, I thought, than to sit here onlooking Filip’s da’s suffering.

Teasel Wurledge came, and my, that were a disturbing visit. At first I did not want to see him, but then he sent in with Mam a message that something similar had happened to him when he were Bear last year, and in my hopefulness of knowing he were no longer furry-faced I allowed her to admit him.

Well, straight away he started to laughing at me, quietly but most cruel, I thought. He tugged at my bonnet and laughed the more; he tweaked the fur of my forehead and cheek and went to swaying and soundless mirth.

‘So how did you begone of this, Teasel?’ says I, desperate enough to overlook the cruelty. ‘What did you do, to be back to a man?’

‘Oh, I were much further along with it,’ he says. ‘I had fur all over me, and claws and teeth and extra size and—Big! I overtopped the head of a standing cart horse, I would say.’

‘I heard nothing of this,’ I said.

‘I were magicked away,’ he says. ‘And in Magic Land I was this bear, three year and more, so no one saw me here; I had no such embarrassment as you. And when I magicked back, I were myself again, not stuck in my skins like you lads.’

‘Magic Land,’ I said. I was not inclined to believe him, but why would he come and spin me such a tale?

‘Aye, and Davit Ramstrong have been there too, if you think I am pulling your leg-end. Ask him next time you see him. Aah,’ he says, grinning and shaking his head over me, taking in my sorry state like some old codger under the Square Ash who thought he knew so much better than me. ‘I had me such a grand time there. King o’ the Forest, I were. And there was queens for me! Yes, ’tis true! As well as all the other, I were accoutred with a good big bear-pole, I tell you.’ He measures it out from himself with his hand, an improbable length as all such measurements are. ‘Which I put to good use, yes I did. I have to warn you, Bullock; bury yourself to your bull-sack in leddy-bear, you will never be satisfied with what you can get back here.’

He were looking off dreamy, but now he checked to see how impressed I was—which was, to blankness, more or less. He had run away with all my sense, and I did not know what to think. I were trying very hard not to think of Noer and his lady-bear up there on St Olafred’s Mount.

‘With their narrow arses, you know, and only that scrap o’ fur, ha-ha-ha. ’Tis nothing like the real thing.’

‘So you cannot give me methods, then,’ I says, ‘to save me from this bearness? There is no trick to it?’ For I did not want him to continue in that line of talk.

‘No, I am surprised it is so partial. I were tekkin right away and made fully a bear. Then I come back, all man again, and here I have been since,’ he says with his hands out presenting himself, as if to say,
And what a man I am, don’t you think?

‘Well,’ I said with difficulty through the jealousy—for the man-ness of him, not for his adventures up the queen-bears—‘I am glad to see it is undoable, Teasel, so I thank you for coming and showing me that, at least.’

He looked me up and down, pitying. ‘Were I you, I would rather go the other way, and be the full bear awhile.’ And he makes two fists and shows his teeth.

There was a knocking then at the front door. I stopped him speaking more, signing that I wanted to hear who it was, though truth to tell I were deep fed up with peerers and gossips at me, and only wanted him to stop that smut-talk.

‘I heared of some misadventure,’ croaks a voice, and a stick clacks on the doorstep.

‘’Tis Leddy Bywell!’ I murmured, and it was a mark of how bad Teasel Wurledge had soiled the air that I found the thought of the woman kind and wholesome by comparison. ‘I must send you away, Teasel, and discuss the night’s events with the leddy.’

‘For what?’ he says. ‘Is there a tea she makes, melts the hairs offer you?’ He bent around so as he could see up to the door, then shuddered at me. ‘She’s a-tappin her way down here, and that Urdda-girl with her, the foreign one that thinks so much of herself. I’ll be moving on.’ And he clapped my bear-sleeve, spared me a last snort at my costume, and were gone. ‘Mileddy,’ I heard him say, and ‘Miss Urdda,’ and the maid said ‘Mister Wurledge’ most dutifully, but I could hear the leddy’s wordless stare at him, and that made me chuckle deep inside myself. She knows a thing or two, that oul mudwife, what’s worth a greeting and what’s not.

I was so glad to see her and be rid of that discomfiting Wurledge that in spite of my embarrassment of having her pretty maid see me, I sat up and suffered the oul witch to examine me, the state of my coat, and I told her as best I could how we had been so strong enchanted, me and my friends, that we would fall enamoured of bears if they approached us.

‘To kill one,’ I said, ‘I don’t see how that is possible, the glamour they cast upon our minds. I know I could not have done what you bid us, had we caught her: eat the parts of her, boil the bones. You
might as well ask me to eat my own mother. Or my wife, if I had one, would be closer.’ And I pushed away the thought of Noer in the she-bear’s arms, for still I did not know how to regard that.

The widder stood thoughtful and unhappy-looking, the foreign miss attentive beside her. ‘I am loath to meddle any further in this,’ the old woman said, ‘and make things possibly worser still.’

‘Oh, please,’ I begged, ‘if you can help me in any way at all—’ And pitifully I groped for her hand and held it in my awful paw-likes.

‘I do not mean to say I will abandon you, Mister Oxman.’ She squeezed my paws and patted them. ‘I only mean, let me consider what has happened now. Give me time. Let me think what we might resort to.’

‘You
know
what to resort to,’ said Urdda to Lady Annie as they walked up the town.

‘I do?’ The widow arranged her teeth belligerently.

‘You must summon that Miss Prancy, the sorceress from Rockerly.’

‘And why must I do that, Little Miss Know-all?’

‘Because this is all to do with that hole in the lane behind Eelsisters’ that Dought made through to my old world.’

‘Is it, now.’

‘And for which you are responsible, having put him through to that other place the first time.’

The widow walked on, making great play with placing her walking stick at the precise centres of the cobbles. ‘Nobody has gone anywhere, in this instance,’ she eventually said. ‘Nobody has come from anywhere, as you did. I do not see that it has to be similar.’