Tender Morsels

by Margo Lanagan

  ‘All that way,’ I said, looking out at the streets of St Olafred’s, which shone with drizzle and lamplight in the dusk, ‘for how long a conversation? And now the woman is right here anyway. We might have just summoned her with a message on paper.’

  ‘Oh, that would not have compared with the sight of you in your predicament.’

  ‘’Tis true,’ I glummed, ‘I am an inspiring object.’

  ‘You are.’ She laughed kindly.

  The goodwife came with me to my father’s house, and saw me in, and told my mam and da the gist of what had happened, the good woman. When she were gone, though, there was no disguising the looks of my family as they inspected my beastishness.

  ‘I thought she would magic it all off of you,’ says my brother Millwheel.

  ‘I am hoping indeed that she will,’ I says, testy in my own disappointment, which I had not really felt until then, so strong had been my faith in Miss Dance from the effect of her personality. ‘But it is not a simple thing.’

  ‘Why, what’s she up to, that witch? Did she want money off you? Is that it?’

  ‘Hush, Mill,’ says Mam, but Mill went on expecting an answer.

  ‘She is finding out the story in its entirety,’ I told him. ‘Ramstrong is in it, and Teasel Wurledge, and the widder, and she have to speak to each to get the fixings.’

  ‘Just like a woman—all gab and no go.’ Mill yawned noisily. He’s enjoyed my being gone, I realised, and now he is cross with me for returning. He might be rather glad were I never released from this fur and these skins, leaving him the eldest able son, lording it over Hamble and the others.

  ‘Are you hungry, Bullock?’ says Mam, covering her own feelings with kindness.

  ‘No,’ says I. ‘I will only wash and sleep, I think. I et well these two days courtesy the widow, Mam, don’t you worry. And that Wife Ramstrong, she looked after me near as good as you would of.’

  I would have gone and kissed her had I not been worried she’d shrink from me, from my furry face. It was good to see her littleness, and my da’s blustery look, and my lounging brothers. Home is home, no?—whatever layabouts you live with, whatever tempers and timidities. I was glad to glimpse them, and glad to go to my own bed among them, with the right smell and the right hollows holding me, and no more carriage-noise rumbling through my head. I tried not to think beyond that, but only to rest and be hopeful.

  ‘Well, this is as close as we can be without drowning,’ said Lady Annie beside the swift-running stream. ‘But it were summer then, and the water were just idling down the middle there. That messiest willow there, the one most hung about with offerings and wish-cloths—we were in the stones below that.’

  Miss Dance, clearer-eyed from her night’s sleep, stood, hands on hips, and surveyed the wide stream. ‘Very well,’ she said, and examined the bank around her as if hunting out a good flat stone to skim. ‘It would be best if you all stood quite well back from the bank,’ she said absently.

  ‘You have no herbage?’ said the widow. ‘Shouldn’t we build a fire?’

  Miss Dance returned from a distant place in her mind to raise her eyebrows and then—wonders!—to laugh. ‘Oh, you are a wicked woman, mudwife,’ she said.

  ‘Why is she wicked?’ said Urdda.

  Miss Dance shook her head. ‘Using matter for such matters. No wonder the key-joint cracked. No wonder the times have slid out of place.’

  ‘Well, I weren’t to know,’ said the widow.

  ‘Had you asked, I would have been pleased to tell you,’ said Miss Dance, ‘rather than have you cause such damages. Back,’ she said, and pushed her strong slender hands at the little group around her.

  They stood back in a row: Todda and Ramstrong, each with a son in their arms; and the widow beside Urdda, her expression a strange cross between alert and offended.

  ‘How will she do it, then,’ Urdda whispered to her, ‘without all your preparations?’

  ‘The way it ought be done, I persoom. I’ve no idea.’

  Miss Dance stood very still and straight, facing the water, seeming deep in thought. After a time, Anders whispered to Ramstrong and was reassured that soon something would happen, but the rest of them watched motionless, trying to listen through waking-forest sounds and the stream’s rushing, and to see through the predawn dimness to that other place, to that sunny place or that snowy.

  Urdda sensed it begin, just in front of Miss Dance. There was nothing to see, but—just as when Urdda herself had pushed through the cave wall into the twitten—a strong, sharp smell obtruded of something catching fire, fur or moss or rotten wood or feathers. And everything loosened and swarmed. Now Urdda could not see clearly what was stream-shine and what air-shiver, at the forwardest reach of Miss Dance’s arms.

  The sorceress spoke, but Urdda could not hear the words. She went to the waterside, where she could read Miss Dance’s lips without impeding her work.

  ‘Time is racing by in there,’ said the woman. ‘This will take strong intervention. Can I maintain any kind of form, I wonder, as well as realign the times?’

  Miss Dance watched the movement of things Urdda could not see—although she thought she could almost—almost—sense them, in the movement of the air near the woman, in the fine skin near the corners of her eyes and mouth.

  Then Miss Dance pushed her hands into the instability so that they became unstable also, like hands viewed through misted window glass. She commenced whispering, and she continued to whisper, with a fixed look and with tremendous tension accumulating in her frame. The shape of her skull began to show through the flesh of her face, as if a strong wind were pressing on it. The stink of sorcery built steadily; they would all soon catch fire with it, Urdda thought.

  Whispering, whispering, Miss Dance took the slowest forward step imaginable. Her face blurred, and the front of her body smoked darkly.

  The wolf woke Branza, touching his cold nose to hers.

  ‘What is it, my beauty?’

  He whined very slightly.

  She sat up and swung her feet to the cold floor, and he made way for her and stood watching, stepping from paw to paw.

  ‘Ah, the impatience!’

  She went to the door and opened it. The cold autumn air flowed in. The wolf ran out, paused, then looked back for her.

  ‘But the sun is barely up!’ Not even the very tips of the highest trees were yet sparkling. The shadowy wolf loped away a few paces, back a few paces, and whined again.

  ‘Truly? Wait, then, while I make myself seemly.’ She returned to her bedside and there quickly dressed, and combed out her pale hair. Liga slept on behind her curtain, breathing steady and warm.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Branza said to the wolf, closing the door behind her. She followed him under the lightening sky into the forest, replaiting her hair as she went. ‘What have you heard or smelt or sensed in your bones, wild lad?’

  The wolf kept on very intent and steady. He did not come back for her, but sometimes he waited while she caught him up. ‘Where now, beautiful? Around the rise, eh? Very well.’

  Through the forest towards the heath wolf and woman passed, in the first quiet of the morning, while all the birds stirred and questioned in their nests and roosts. The branchwork above and around them was black with the night’s rain, and the remaining unfallen leaves lit the canopy yellow and rust before opening it up to the twig-laced sky. Branza loved all seasons, and each one’s creatures and weathers and actions, whether of blossoming or rot, of flaring or fading colour. She could not be happier than she was now, following her friend—almost her child, she had found him so young, and attended him so long—through the trees on his animal mission.

  He paused again and did not run out onto Hallow Top as he usually did. Branza came up beside him, and stood silently there. Out in the pre-dawn, in the rabbit-nibbled grass there, something shone, and the wolf gazed at and was stilled by it, and did not want to approach.

  ‘What is it?’ Branza stepped out of the forest’s c
over and walked forward slowly.

  A silver pail shone there, like a milk-pail, only there had never been a milk-pail so new and bright, mirroring everything around it. Some tool’s handle, also silver, leaned inside it against its rim, and in the grass nearby—was it an insect-swarm, a cloud’s shadow? No, it moved too sprightly. Something danced there, teasing Branza’s eye.

  She crouched a short distance from the pail, focused hard on the movement. She was almost sure that it was a shadowy cat. But was it a tiny kitten, leaping and darting at its whim, or an older cat, more sinuous and sly?

  She stood again; the cat-thing did not retreat. Inside the silver pail leaned a silver trowel, the most inviting thing. Its handle would exactly fit Branza’s hand. And the shadow-cat pawed the ground, drew the same circle with its undulations, patted the ground again.

  ‘Oh, this is where . . .’ Branza glanced around at the forest frowning over her, at a fallen standing stone slumbering on the hilltop. This was where they had first met second-Bear, she and Urdda. This was where Bear had torn that nasty manlet to pieces and eaten him.

  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.

  13

  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?’