Tender Morsels

by Margo Lanagan

Now Liga reddened, and Annie was no longer so amused. And it all thunderclapped together in my mind: the word ‘hurt’ and what it could mean, coming from Branza’s mouth; the sudden seriousness; the extent of what had been done to the five townsmen. Then, with a littler concussion, the black figure Ousel was making to walk along the table: of the five, that must be Hogback Younger. No one but Branza and Anders would meet my eye.

  ‘How long have you been witching, Urdda-girl?’ I said, to move myself off such thoughts.

  ‘A single night,’ she said with a bitter laugh. She looked up, and clear as a clanging bell Hogback’s lineaments marked her face. I felt as if I were seeing her for the first time as her mam must see her. They hurt Mam. That would be Hogback’s way; he would never do anything without assistance, without an audience.

  ‘And even then, I did not know I was doing it,’ Urdda went on. ‘I did not know I could!’

  ‘She have just come into it,’ said Annie with quiet pride. ‘She have just reached the right age, for her, and the right pitch of feeling.’

  ‘That must be quite some feeling,’ I said. ‘Widow Fox, it’s said, has lost her senses, seeing its effects upon her son.’ Urdda hung her head. ‘Hogback has sent for his physician at High Millet.’ I spoke gentler, seeing how she sank under my words. ‘And there are fears for Joseph Woodman’s life, he is bleeding so badly.’

  Urdda’s nose was no more than a finger-width from the tabletop. Ousel walked the black cloth-figure and a white one up to her head. ‘This is a big rock, fallen in the road,’ he made the white one say, and then he laid the black one down and had the white man scratch his head. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘What are we going to do, Ousel?’ I said.

  ‘We are going to have some breddamolk,’ he said decisively. ‘Because we are too hungry to lift it now.’

  ‘I think we have done enough,’ said Liga; she had sat forward so that her face were hidden from me by little Annie. ‘Are you saying we should go and tell, Davit? Admit what Urdda has done, and have the constable up here again? Explain to him? Go through the whole . . . Go over all the reasons, past and present?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Annie. ‘’Tis too late for that. Urdda have took matters quite into her own hands and accomplished them. I say we should keep our heads well down.’

  I thought of Constable Whinney’s laborious face, the embarrassment it would show as he was being explained to. Crimes against women he had no sense at all of; powers other than fists and blades he did not want to acknowledge. ‘I think you are probably right, Annie, for your own peace’s sake. But what are we to do with our new sorceress here, to keep her feelings running off from her again?’

  ‘I think there is nothing else in the world,’ said Urdda to the tabletop, ‘that would make me as angry as what Mam told me yesterday.’

  ‘Ah, but you will not always require that degree of feeling,’ Annie said, ‘now that you are woken. Much slighter annoyances will set you off. I had to move out of town to that mudhole of mine, I had tripped up so many people here or made them fall in fires, just for being born luckier than I was, or speaking harsh to their wife or child. You will call down who knows what for some fleeting irritation—unless!’ Here Annie slapped the table, making us all jump, making Urdda lift her head and look hopefully across, making Liga sit up and lose some of her worried look.

  ‘Unless what, Annie?’ said Branza, for Annie would only sit there with her eyes flicking back and forth, watching her own thoughts, a smile showing more and more of her fine teeth.

  ‘Why, unless she is proper instructed, of course,’ she said, beaming. ‘And there is no need for her to manage on gypsy scraps and dares-and-do’s as I did, and made such trouble. We know exactly where to send the girl for teaching—and very gladly she’ll be taken on, to keep her away from my dangerous urgings and influence!’

  And she rocked and cackled there in her seat, like a little black hen so pleased with itself for having at last, and after much struggle, squozen out its first egg.

  The carriage stood in the road outside St Olafred’s gate, dark and glossy and stern as the woman who owned it; the horses, the black and the dapple-grey, tossed their heads and stamped and made rich sounds with their harnesses; the coachman waited, dapper and solemn in his seat; the footman stood neat at the door. Miss Dance’s house-woman, Goodwife Marchpane, who would companion Urdda on her journey to Rockerly, strolled in the roadway, somewhat apart from everyone so as not to intrude on the goodbyes.

  ‘Here he comes at last!’ said Liga, and there indeed was Ramstrong, carrying little Bedella down from the town gate. Anders and Ousel ran ahead.

  ‘Oh, is this your coach, Urdda?’ Anders marvelled.

  ‘It’s splendid, isn’t it?’ Urdda was glad to be distracted from the thought of bidding everyone goodbye.

  ‘Horse!’ Ousel skidded up behind. ‘One horse, two horse!’

  Urdda caught him up and kissed his soft face. ‘Oh, I shall miss you!’ she said, and she could not help it; the tears started to come. ‘Who shall do my counting for me?’

  ‘Bedella were in the middle of her breakfast,’ Ramstrong explained to those waiting. And as if to prove it, the baby hiccupped a posset of milk onto her chest and looked aggrieved.

  ‘Now I must go,’ said Urdda fiercely, putting Ousel down. ‘Goodbye, Anders; come and hug me. Look after your family for me, won’t you?’

  Ramstrong twinkled, standing by Branza and Liga. Urdda kissed the baby, and tears for Todda were all mixed in with goodbye tears, and she could not tell one pain in her chest from the other. ‘Bear!’ she said to Ramstrong, and they embraced as well as they could, with the bab held to one side. Urdda could not speak to Ramstrong’s kind face beaming down on her.

  ‘You are off to such adventures, Urdda!’ he said. ‘Just as you always wished! Don’t worry, I will watch your mam and sister.’

  ‘Please do!’

  ‘They will not come to harm.’

  Before her whole frame should start to dissolve with misery, Urdda turned to Lady Annie.

  ‘Ah, you big sop-wet,’ Annie said unsteadily, and reached up out of her tininess to hang on Urdda’s neck. ‘Do me proud, Urdda. Mebbe you can make up somehow for the poor kind of witch I was.’

  ‘You were a wonderful witch, a wonderful witch!’ Urdda wept into the mudwife’s silk-and-lace collar. ‘’Tweren’t for you, I would never have known this true world existed!’

  ‘You ask Miss Dance how wonderful I am,’ laughed Annie, tears creeping back and forth down her wrinkles. ‘I am sure she will tell you exackly.’ And she kissed Urdda on both cheeks, very wet and firmly. ‘Goorn, now, before your mam goes to pieces.’

  But Liga had already gone; she and Urdda could neither of them speak, but held to each other tightly. ‘My little . . . wild girl,’ Mam managed to get out into Urdda’s ear, through sobbing. ‘Of the forest.’ And Urdda could not release her.

  ‘Come, Urdda, come,’ said Branza, but all Urdda did was reach out and enfold her with them.

  ‘Oh!’ Urdda wailed into the middle of them. ‘I cannot go! How could I think—’

  ‘Of course you can,’ said Liga brokenly. ‘You must,’ said Branza.

  ‘You must make proper use of this gift of yours.’

  ‘She’s right, you must.’ Lady Annie patted Urdda’s back. ‘Else whenever you take a temper, all St Olafred’s must watch its arse, ha-ha!’

  ‘Annie!’ said Liga, and now Urdda had laughter to contend with as well as tears and sobbing.

  ‘We ought to make our start, Miss Cotting,’ said Wife Marchpane quietly, to one side.

  Urdda released Liga and turned upon Branza the full force of her emotions. ‘I shall miss you so!’

  ‘And I you, daft sister. You must send word when you can, whenever anyone is coming this way from Rockerly.’

  Urdda stood back. ‘Take care of Annie,’ she said earnestly. Both their faces were warped with the crying. ‘And of our mam.’

&n
bsp; ‘You know I will,’ said Branza.

  It was terrible, holding Mam for the last time, and then pulling away, feeling as if, yes, she were truly tearing her own heart into two pieces, with all the pain and mess you would expect. Up into the carriage people organised her, almost by force, she was so disabled by her grief. She tried to dry her eyes and look seemly out the carriage window, but the faces out there, some distraught and all beloved, undid her again. Then the coachman’s tongue clicked and his whip flicked, and Urdda leaned out and clung to the sill, and wept her family and her friends out of sight.

  Wife Marchpane did not try to console Urdda, but only patted her knee every now and again, and before long—now that the goodbyes were done, the faces gone—Urdda breathed somewhat freer, and her tears slowed, and she could lower her handkerchief more often to let the fresh breeze cool her face.

  It was early autumn, all the light and the forest leaves proclaiming the end of things, even as Urdda’s life, her own life, shaped and impelled solely by her own powers, was just beginning. Outside was a festival of warm colours: the dark branches bore past their lading of brass and rust, of gold and startling red. The sky was clear blue through them, with a white puff here and there of cloud. Past Marta’s Font, with the glint of always falling water and the battered cup on its chain, the carriage rushed, and the coachman slowed the horses only slightly for the narrow place, just above the dell where the ruined cottage continued to crumble away.

  I used to sit in that house, Mam said in Urdda’s memory, her voice fine and chill through the scraping and squeaking of branches against the carriage, through the coachman’s muttering outside. My da would not let me go up and look, but I would listen, when a coach came by. Where was it going? And who was in it, I would wonder, flying by me so fast, rich enough for a coach, and free enough to go where they pleased? And now look at me, in a house in town myself, a reputable sempstress and a mam, a mam of two grown girls!

  It was me, Mam, Urdda said now, in her memory. It was me, Urdda, off to learn my magic properly. There was some accident of time, maybe, and it was this carriage, and me rich and free inside, that passed above you, that you heard.

  She could feel the magic there, in some other level of the world, the wellspring and the whirlwind of it. She had used a little drib of it only, scotching Anders’ fever the other night, under Lady Annie’s instructions. (This I caint get wrong, the mudwife had said. This I’ve been doing correct since I first come to womanhood, no doubt of it.) Now Urdda fairly tingled with all her unused powers. She was going to Rockerly, to live and to work with Miss Dance, the person she most admired in the world! She was apprenticed to a real magic-worker—and she was a sorceress herself! Who knows, she thought, what I might find it in myself to do?

  She wrapped her shawl closer around herself and sat back in her seat. At the coach window, out in the fine autumn day, the trees flung past their sunlit leaves of red and gold, like brightest jewels thrown and thrown again from a treasure-box, which, itself being magic, would never be exhausted, never emptied, never spent.

  17

  Winter came, and Liga was grateful to be kept indoors by the weather so that she need not meet and greet and converse with complicated true-world people so much, who were always unnerving her with unexpected remarks, and requiring her to devise suitable responses. But she was charmed, too, by the pleasantries and efforts people made at Midwinter, to sing and bring light to the town, if only by torches and lanterns; to bring greenery from the pines on the Mount and warm it to sweet-scentedness in firelit rooms; and to enliven the plainer winter fare with this pie and that preserve, this taste of summer and that, brought carefully through to winter’s depths in wax-sealed pots.

  February arrived, and the world lifted slowly to wakefulness again, the streets unmuffling themselves of snow and becoming first grim and treacherous, with ice between the cobbles, then drying, surprised, in the gentler air that came rushing along them, promising nestlings and flower buds and greenery.

  Liga and Branza and Annie spent the Day of the Bear as guests of Widow Tems, whose house was on the market square, where every Bear must pass at least once during the chase. From an upper window they could gain a fine sense of the madness and festivities, and see clearly the wild, roaring Bears in their flapping skin costumes and the maids screaming away ahead of them.

  ‘How can they stand it?’ said Branza, clutching Liga’s arm, shocked to laughter by the sights below. ‘How terrifying! And then to be caught so roughly, and dirtied so! I would think it would feel so shaming, somehow.’

  ‘Shaming? Never! ’Tis grand fun!’ Lady Annie hung over the window railing and shook her little fist. ‘Show me your cheeks, Tossy Strap!’

  And the girl turned up her laughing face, slime-striped by Bear fingers. ‘Come and run with us, Leddy Annie! I’ll bet you could put on a turn of speed if you wanted!’

  The year warmed and flowered and warmed some more. Midsummer came and St Olafred’s bonfire burned high, the sparks spinning off among the stars as the townspeople danced below.

  Liga danced with Ramstrong. You do not dance like a bear, she thought, and remembered his answer: But you and I know, Liga . . .

  Todda had been dead a year, and of course Liga had not been responsible for her dying—how could she ever have thought that of herself?—and the whole town was saying, Who is he going to take to him, to look after those three children?

  They were part of each other’s lives now, the Ramstrongs and the Cottings and Annie. And they were balanced out in what they owed each other, with Ramstrong’s and Todda’s kindness to Urdda paid for by all the women’s assistance after Todda’s death. Liga, Branza, and Urdda were like extra aunts to the children, Annie like an extra grumma, so comfortable were the little ones with them.

  And here she was, dancing with him, in the couple-dances and, more bravely, in the round dances this year. Around the circle she went, from hand to hand, and all the men greeted her most politely, and some with that courtly care that made her think, Oh . . . you? And she felt she was beginning to see how matters were organised, how attractions made themselves known, how people sought each other out and entertained the thought of each other as courting couples, as married ones.

  Then she arrived back at Ramstrong and the final part of the dance began, the reunited pairs in procession up the middle. Imagine, always to have this arm at your waist, the arm of a good man and kind, who had been to your heaven and loved it too; who had seen your daughters in their childhoods there and begun wanting daughters himself.

  That hand there—as a paw it had once rested against her cheek. If that was a man-gesture, and a man looked into you the way Bear had looked, or spoke to you and abased himself as Bear had rumbled and bowed, that would be a man who felt some attachment, no? That would be a man who had some hopes towards you.

  The fiddlers played on and the bonfire roared in the midst of the dancing and games, in the midst of the town in its finery and feasting. I do belong here, Liga told herself at the edge of the field, among friends, and with a daughter nearby. It is where I began, after all, before Mam died, before Da spoiled me. I ought to feel I have come home, and that the life of these goodwives, whirling in their husbands’ arms, is mine to claim too. Surely I have worked hard enough to prove myself deserving? Surely I have raised my daughters happy and healthy enough for their origins not to matter? Her eyes sought out Branza, who was with Sella over there, helping Aran into a woolsack for the men’s race. She feels at home, that is clear; she has no need to inquire after how she was begot, but takes her place quite calm and confident now, in this world. Perhaps I should follow her lead and put past pains behind me, scrub away their last traces and look outward from my workroom somewhat more, and try not to resist whatever joyous events await me, that the true world has in store?

  He came to her in the early autumn, almost a year to the day after Urdda left.

  ‘May I speak with you private?’ he said softly at the door, and all seemed
so right and clear that her heart did not even quicken, as it had tended to lately when he was near.

  ‘Come into the workroom,’ she said. ‘Branza and Annie are out visiting.’

  ‘I saw them near the Ash. I thought I would take the opportunity.’

  She went around the table to her work. ‘Look, the town have given me bear-pennants to make; the old ones are going to tatters. Six portraits of Ramstrong, they want, all sewn onto yellow silk.’ She laughed and sat in the engoldening afternoon light.

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said, his eyes on the bear-face that she had embroidered with eye-whites and teeth and a pink pillow of tongue. ‘Bearness is bigger than only me.’

  ‘Bear of Bears, I have heard them call you,’ Liga said. ‘Should we not give the young men of this town something to aspire to?’ She laughed again—she was laughing too much. She should get her chatter out of his way so that he could say what he had come for, and make her life in this true world all right and complete.

  He waited until she had sewn a few stitches. ‘I have come to ask you, Liga.’

  The sunshine was warm on her back and shoulder; the yellow silk shone it out, making all corners of the room glow, making Davit’s face glow. There was much in his eyes, but now he had a man’s mouth to speak it; he need not nudge her with his great furred head, or snuff and grunt and cry out, voicelike but inarticulate. ‘Yes?’ she said, and smiled up at him, his face always so kind and thoughtful, so familiar now—the face that anchored her in the true world, that told her she had returned, and why. Then she looked to her stitching hands again, because he was finding words difficult and she wanted to give him peace and time to phrase it however he wanted, without her looking expectant.

  ‘I have come to ask you for Branza’s hand.’

  Her needle stopped in the cloth. Everything stopped—all sound, all movement, life. Just for a moment it stopped, while her hope, while her illusions, detached themselves from the cliff-face of what was real, what was likely, and collapsed around her. And upon her, crushing her, deafening her, raising a suffocating dust.