Tender Morsels (38 page)

She took up the trowel. Its edge gleamed fine as a fresh-honed cleaver’s.
Pat, pat
, went the kitten-cat’s dark paw on the ground. Branza knelt and began to dig while the shadow frolicked and purred around her hands.

Liga was crouched by the garden when she was overtaken. Whatever it was, it lifted every hair on her body, goosefleshing her almost to painfulness. She half stood. What is happening; am I turning into a bear? she wondered.

And she was poised there, bent all unnaturally, when she saw the gleam of Branza’s hair in a shaft of morning sun among the trees. She is a witch! Liga thought, because the fear, because the goosefleshing, seemed to flow from her daughter’s figure, rendering her movement sinister. What will she do to me? She will question me, and force it all out—she will ruin everything, undo all I have worked for.

Liga found herself in the warm, bready air inside the cottage, the door gaping dangerous behind her. Her hand was on the chimneypiece, as if she would climb up inside it as she had done the other time.

But that was impossible now: the fire was strong in the hearth, and the bread was baking there in the oven. And her skin was crawling, rippling—it would lift right off her bones! She must not entrap herself again. She had time—
just
enough, she thought—to slip out the door and run for the trees behind the house, before Branza arrived, and whoever,
whatever
, was with her.

She hurried out of the house again. Branza was not yet in full sight, but under the arbour a beast waited—a big dark cat, was it?—its shoulders eager and its head low, a fire-stink flowing from its fur.

Liga slipped along the front of the house and ran across the grass. The cat would thud into her back, with its claws and its fur; it would only need to take one leap, the great vicious thing.

She reached the trees, but they would not have her. There were more springy branches than first appeared, and gently they threw her back into the house-clearing. She staggered, but did not cry out. She glanced back, and could see neither arbour nor cat, but only the slim candle flame of Branza emerging from the forest’s edge, carrying some awful, shining thing, bending to put it down, to conceal its shine and its awfulness behind a tree there.

‘Mam?’ Her tall, fair daughter came sunlit towards her. Beyond Branza, at the house-corner, the cat-thing loomed and lurked, its head there, its shoulder, its hideous looping tail.

‘What has it done to you? You are in its pay, daughter, under its beguilement.’

‘Mam, Mam, hush!’ Branza came to her, carrying nothing; reached for her and drew her from among the branchlets; held her against her familiar frame.

Through wisps of her daughter’s white-gold hair, Liga watched the cat approach, and nothing was reliable—neither her skin’s sensations nor her sight’s impressions, nor even the movements of her mind. Her thoughts would not travel in a line, but flashed terror, reassurance, the threat of Da, the chimney-smoke, the sun in the last leaves, the crawling crawling of her flesh, of her stomach, the animal crossing the grass like a black flame, the awful object Branza had hidden like a wound throbbing unpleasantness out into the forest-scape.

‘Make it go, Branza!’ She hid her face in Branza’s shoulder, feeling the animal flow past into the trees.

‘Look, Mam—it wants us to follow!’

Now, behind Branza, Wolf moved doubtfully towards them in the grass. Ahead, the cat—for a moment it was only a cat, and Liga saw what her daughter saw: the intelligent glance, the fine white teeth as it summoned them with a meow, the alluring tail. Then it bulked larger, though, and the meow turned to a baying in its throat, and it must crouch and force its way along the path under the trees.

Branza took Liga’s hand and followed the cat, and Liga could feel her daughter’s excitement and determination through her fingers. ‘Only because an animal is leading you,’ she said, glancing behind. The wolf was trailing them; she met his mild gaze. ‘Make her see sense,’ she commanded him, not knowing any more what could be commanded and what must be yielded to.

They reached the stream. The vast-cat, swelling and shrinking, sometimes as solid as a horse or cow, sometimes as faint as mist or zephyr, led them along the path, down past the rapids to the flatter ground. There it bounded away and back again, and now the awful thing was momentarily in its jaws—a highly polished pail full of dirty
bones, and the two jewels—
her
jewels, Liga’s! The monster must have uprooted the bushes at her door! Then the cat was on the stream-bank, beaming out danger. Liga backed away from it, crying out to Branza. Water swirled around her ankles. A rushing blotted out all other sounds; a burning stink obscured the forest smells, the water smells. The cat curled its tail—which was part of the rushing stream now, part of the smell—around its tree-trunk legs, across its tree-root paws. It nodded, satisfied, and Branza’s wolf was tiny in its branches, between its ears; he was no longer a wolf but a tiny, brittle bird, blue, white, and unlikely, piping on the cat’s head. And then all was darkness, and rushing, and stinging heat, and only Branza’s hand kept Liga from flying to pieces.

I woke to the groaning of a distant cart at the bottom of the town. It was still dark, but the air was all wakeful, and when one of them Strap children ran frantic along the lane—‘Come, Mam! Look a’ this!’—Mill raised his head, and Hamble and I caught each other’s glances, and we were up and out too.

People came out of their houses all over, into the before-dawn dimness, their eyes soft and swollen from sleeping, their hairs pushed this way and that, and stumbled along the lane with us. And when we reached the open street, at the bottom of the hill there laboured a blackness that was the biggest of Marks’s big cart horses, pulling not just a wagon but the festival-wagon of oak, with the carved and painted shafts and wheel-rims of ash. Wolfhunt was sitting beside Marks on the seat, and all those hunters were ranged around the insides.

The load bulked dark. ‘Oh my,’ says I. ‘Can it be?’ My legs felt likely to go from under me; I pushed to the back of the people and leaned against the house-wall there.

The cart crept up the cobbled hill. Huge, dark, wild, dead, the
she-bear hulked upon it like rubbished cloth, like furs thrown off a full council-room of lords. One of her forepaws hung off the back edge of the cart, the claws shaking almost alive when the cart bumped over the cobbles. The big blind head gaped, as if she were luxuriously asleep. They had bound her eyes with a rag—as you must, to keep the beast from seeing and magicking you—and blood was issuing from her mouth, as dark and slow as treacle. As the hill steepened, the horse’s slow heavings and the cobble-tremors set the blood-puddle moving, and a long drip of it dropped off the back of the cart-floor, heavy as honey, leaving a string on the air behind it as sticky and wandering as the first thrown thread of a spider’s web.

I snatched my hat from my head. I stood straight now, and steady as rock. Noer, where was Noer? Had they killed him too, like they did Filip?
This
might kill him, if the hunters had not. This was like to his
wife
being shot and carried up the street in public view.

My mam were coming through the people. ‘Bullock!’ she says, and her face was bright as if she hadn’t just seen me the night before.

‘Run up to them,’ I say. ‘Ask whether Noer—’

But she was weeping, throwing herself on me. ‘My own boy!’ She stood back; she slapped my cheeks. ‘Look at you! Oh, throw away this filthy thing!’ She took the bear-bonnet from me—from my hands!—and flung it out in the road, where it skidded in the bear-blood.

‘Mam!’

‘Quickly!’ She pushed at me. ‘Let me at the lacings. Take all of these off, Bullock, before the wind changes or whatever, and you are stuck again.’

‘I have my own hands back!’

‘Bullock, my boy!’ Here came Da now, Hamble at his shoulder.

‘Mam, you can’t unclothe me out here in everyone’s view!’

‘I can and I will. Oh, the
stink
of it!’ And she threw the shirt after the hat.

‘The stink of
him
,’ said Hamble, falling back from me. ‘You smell like a rotten cheese, you do, Bullock. I’ll wait’ll you bathe before I embrace you!’ He held his nose with one hand and clapped my arm—my man-skin arm, with only the man-amount of hairs on it—with the other.

‘Ma-am!’

‘Take them off! Take them off!’ She was laughing a bit mad now. ‘Get them off him, Oxman! Our grandparenthood depends on it!’

‘Run for his trewsers, Hamble. Tek them bear ones off, Bull, and hold ’em up front for your modesty.’

‘But not touching, not touching!’ hooted Mam. ‘For if they stick again—Oh!’ And
she
didn’t care about the cheese-smell of me—she was all over me, checking no bear-bits were left and kissing me. ‘Thank the Leddy, the curse is lifted! It must have been the killing of that bear!’ she says. ‘Just like that oul witch said. You make the sacrifice and everything’s set right, no?’

‘Well, I dinnit . . .’ The cart was near out of sight now, a ripple of Strap children running along beside, the hunters standing tall with spear and bow around the lump of the she-bear. ‘I dinnit eat the heart of her like the widow wanted. Dinnit boil the bones,’ I said, ‘or nothing.’ It wasn’t even properly light; we were all milling and laughing in a dimness like underwater, with no colour yet except that streak of rose-and-lemon cloud in the eastern sky.

‘’Tweren’t required!’ Mam danced all glee around me. ‘Look at him!’ she said to the grinning neighbours, to the round-mouthed just-woke children brought out for the hunters’ spectacle. ‘The bear have let him go!’

I did not think she had it right. We’d not done half of what the widder reckoned we ought; nothing could have been appeased by our poor effort. Some other’s work were in this, and I were willing to put good coin on its being that fierce Miss Dance.

Daylight returned to Liga’s eyes, as after a slow blink, and here was the forest again, but flushed green with leaf-buds and the nip gone from the air. The cat-creature was gone; as for the pail with the bones—why, that woman held it, the stranger in the dark, well-cut gown, and it was awful no longer, though it still had the same shine, and held the same remains, the same jewels.

Liga’s flesh was her own now, and firmly wedded to her bones.
Whatever had been happening was ended, and birdsong and stream-rush gentled her ears, and in the space vacated by her fear and unbalancement, she had time to examine the figures on the bank, all mysterious to her except for that little woman, whom she knew from somewhere.

‘Bless my arse and whiskers!’ the little woman said, and held her hands out from herself as if she were startled that she had them.

Liga would have exclaimed too, had she the courage, for all the many-coloured stones of the rings that weighed down the small woman’s fingers now squirmed in their settings, and their polished surfaces brightened to quite different kinds of iridescences. They crowded and bristled, and next she knew they had lifted off the woman’s hands, and flown as a flock out over the bank, chirp-and-twittering, clearly small birds, until they vanished, faded to nothing in the air between Liga and another person, fine-dressed, aghast, ruining her shoes in the shallows.

Examining this face—older than she recalled, but younger by far than it ought to be—Liga felt to the deeps of her body the untapping of ten years’ sorrows, untouched heretofore and unacknowledged, like the breaching of a dam wall, the bursting of a water-barrel or wine-keg. What kind of a mother am I, she thought, appalled, that I never felt the loss of this child? What kind, that I should not
want
to feel it, should not want to
feel
at all? What kind of a person? And she waded towards Urdda, stretching out her arms to the girl, who faltered there; who ought to have been brave and laughing, but instead swayed weakly; who had always been full to bursting with chatter but now could hardly bring the single word to her lips: ‘Mam!’

‘Mam!’ Urdda staggered forward and let Liga take her—Branza, too, that tall Branza grown to womanhood in little more than a year. For quite a time, the three did not see beyond each other, but only wept and laughed, and stabbed at what had happened with half-sentences and exclamations.