Tender Morsels Read online

  The cool air turned cold and flapped my skins, turned icy, with a smack of snow. I did not go high as the clouds, but nearly, and then I tipped and slid and wheeled, and there was the town again, complete upon its hill. I could see quite sharply that there was not a person in its streets: the whole place was shuttered up, indeed as if against a bear that had wandered down from the hills all hungry from its winter sleep. This seemed all part of the pattern, though I can hardly explain why. I was not alarmed, though I had plenty reason to be, you would think. But I was not thinking. Being a Bear had done with my thinking, just this while.

  Now a different season was spread all around the town; the green bloom had gone off everything, the green air, and all was snow and wet black branches, and evening of a different day, closing blue and fast. I flew lower, but it was snow-cold there and began straight away to numb me. Rise, rise to where it’s warmer, thought my frozen mind.

  But already I had reached the treetops and was falling. I snapped and tangled through the shocked branches. And then thump! I was sunk over my spinning head in the soft snow, breathless, and with snow aching against my teeth.

  I sat up and spat. I seemed to be able to breathe again, to move my arms, my legs. I could not find anything broken. Even my fur bonnet seemed to be straight on my head.

  I should take this skin off, I thought mazily. I should turn it around so the fur warms me on the inside.

  But when I stood to begin doing that—how I would of, I do not know, seeing it were all tied behind—I saw through the trees a red-gold light, so instead I made towards that, my bare feet turning to numb lumps in the snow. This was dangerous cold—it bit me in the throat, and ran its fingers all about under my costume, stealing the heat out of me fast.

  ’Twas a little house that the light shone from, sweet under a cap of snow, with shuttered windows so snug they showed only a few seams of light between their wattles. I did not try to peep in; I went straight to the round-topped door to beg those inside to admit me and save my life.

  Knock, knock, knock. My hands surprised me, they felt so clawed and furred, so lumpish with the cold, but only my own man-fists came up to knock. The sweat had frozen the soot to them.

  The door opened to nothing—no, to a little one, a dark girl only a third my height. She screamed and was gone.

  I put my head in and she screamed again—had I thought, I would have taken off my bonnet first.

  ‘It will surely eat us!’ the dark girl cried.

  It was a mother and two daughters. Both little girls had shrunk to the mother; she was freeing her arms first from one and then from the other.

  ‘Calm yourselves, you sillies!’ she said, and laughed towards me, a little embarrassed. ‘It is only a bear. Why would a bear eat you?’

  ‘In the story, he does,’ said the other girl, a touch taller than the first, and golden-haired. ‘He eats the bad hunter.’

  ‘I will not hurt you,’ I said, but my voice came out growls into the room, though it were words in my head and on my lips, wherever they were. Frightened, I tried again. ‘I am only half perished from cold, and would warm myself.’

  The girls hid more behind their mother, but she walked forward away from them. Straight to me, she came, and I towered over her, but she looked up into my eyes, clear-faced and audacious. What relief that was after all the girls today, their sly glances or their terror or that strange excitement Bear Day gives them.

  ‘Are you a heaven bear?’ this woman said.

  That made no sense. Maybe she spoke a different language. Nothing seemed to be as it ought.

  I lowered myself to all fours, to a sensible height before her. My costume had changed and thickened; my bonnet had extended as a mask down my face. ‘What have happened to me?’ I said in confusion, trying to look at myself—but my eyes had changed too, and the mind that translated what they saw.

  I felt the mam’s tiny touch on the top of my head. From her and around her were all the smells of warmth, of home, of women. Fire and food, cloth and cleanliness. In my own house—my father’s house, but only me and Aran in it—no matter how I swept and scrubbed, all it smelt of was grief yet. I did not know what to do with it to make it a home again.

  ‘Come in from the night cold, Bear,’ said this woman. ‘Sit by our fire here, but not close; don’t singe that lovely coat.’

  I went to the fire, and clumsily I crouched there. The two little ones watched me fearfully. The mother smiled on them, and then on me again.

  ‘Your husband,’ I said. ‘Is he out hunting, then?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘It’s better in here than out in the snow.’

  ‘He must be hungry,’ said the paler child. ‘Hunger must have woke him. You should be sleeping, Bear.’

  ‘He is deciding which one of us is best to eat,’ hissed the darker girl—with some relish, I thought.

  ‘Bring him the littler of those tar-midgins, Urdda,’ said the mother to her.

  The girl went to a basket and lifted the cloth off two snowy feathered mounds. One of these she brought out and laid on the floor in front of me. She was so fearful and yet so excited in her demeanour—and so small!—that all of a sudden I remembered my own grumma from when I was little, laughing and catching me in her arms and saying, Ooh, I will eat you up, I will! and growling and mouthing the side of my neck.

  But the bird distracted me. I was not hungry, yet when I saw it there, I could not stand the sight of the plush breast intact when I knew what goodness lay inside; I tore it in half and crunched it in my teeth and, feathers and splintered bones and all, both halves went down and were delicious. I licked the blood from every crease of my hands.

  And then I sat and sighed, the fire’s warmth now deep in the fur of my back.

  The darker girl, Urdda, approached me again, and in wonder lifted my hand, then lowered it. ‘So heavy,’ she gasped, and lifted it again, and higher, and put it on the top of her head, and stood around to face her mam and laughed.

  Then the paler girl came and got under the other hand likewise, and there they were, like two gateposts or arm-ends of a throne, laughing at their mother, and she smiling back. ‘A bear and two gooses,’ she said.

  I had never had maids or maids’ mams trust me before. Everyone I knew thought children a great bother, and girl-children the worst because they screamed so high and painful sometimes.

  But these ones did not scream, because they were not unhappy, or frightened any longer. Now the dark one—‘Take care, now, Urdda; do not hurt him,’ says her mam—had put my hand aside and climbed onto my knee. And then they were one on each knee, as on a pair of ponies. Very small they were, with the dandlin-fluff of one’s hair and the smoke of the other’s dancing about at my chin. The darker one, she turned and touched my face, plucking away a white feather, pushing apart my lips to view my teeth.

  ‘He is terrible cold and wet, Mother,’ she said.

  ‘Fetch the brush, why don’t you,’ said the mother, getting up, ‘and brush that wet and mud out of his fur.’

  Which they proceeded to do. The two of them made some careful bargaining as to who was brave enough to do the belly and who the face and who the back, and then they took their turns, busy and attentive around me. The mother spun all the while. ‘Gentle,’ she said now and then, when they grew spirited in their brushing. I was too preoccupied, myself, to mind how rough they got. The feeling of being a man inside a bear inside their brushing had my whole skin and brain busy. They were brushing a bear into existence from my matter—I began to sense and then to see that I had claws, that I had paws, as they did their delicate work upon them.

  ‘His tongue has been very good at getting out the blood,’ said Miss Urdda, very businesslike.

  ‘But there is older dirt,’ said the pale girl at my back, whose name I had not heard yet, ‘and around here is quite matted. Hurry with the brush, sister.’ So imperious she was that I laughed, and they looked at me and I tried to explain. They smiled at the little whinings
that came out of me.

  ‘He sounds very contented,’ said the pale one, and while the other went on brushing, she leaned on me and put her arms forward over my shoulders and hummed into my fur, waiting her turn. ‘Such a lump. Such a girt lump. Such a quantity, and every bit and big of him alive.’

  All and all, it was an evening sweet and strange; there was no other to compare it to, as I had never had another beast combed out of my being before. It was the kind of thing a person might dream, the senselessness of it and yet the realness, although it persisted much longer, and it made more sense moment to moment than a dream often does.

  When the brushing was done and the little ones had climbed into their bed—which was a most ingenious thing, set into the wall behind a curtain of green tapis—the mam came to me and stroked my head and told me, ‘You stay right here at the fire, Bear, and sleep in the warm.’ Before I could see her go to her own bed, I had fallen into sleep, as if into a sack of warm fleeces. I slept warm all night, not waking, not worried, no dream or notion troubling my mind.

  Before dawn I was roused by the mother’s being up, first stirring the fire and then going to punch down bread dough on the table. Her face was settled not into most wives’ dissatisfaction or distant stare, but into a serenity that reminded me very much of my own mam’s before she fell ill. The usual cares did not press on this woman as they did others, so she had plumped up into her own shape the way a perfect apple grows that is unrubbed by a branch, or a perfect carrot that does not encounter a stone in the loam below.

  ‘Go back to sleep, Bear.’ Her voice fitted in with the crackle of the fire, with the creak and rush of the wind in the trees outside. ‘There’ll be your bread soon enough, and some honey, too, I have left.’

  My great stomach growled and a kind of whine, a kind of groan, escaped my bear throat, my long mouth and nose. I stretched myself out in the warmth and my eyes closed upon my view of her, on the winking of the lamp-flame.

  When morning properly came, it was a sunny one. I went to the door, but although I could see my own blackened hands working upon the latch, I could not seem to place them right to unfasten it.

  ‘What are you up to out there, Bear?’ It was the little dark one, Urdda, using her mother’s tones. She drew aside the bed-curtain and ran to me. She pushed my hands away and had the door unlatched before I could see how she did it.

  I would have thanked her, but the cold day rushed in then, and the sunlight on the snow was like the trump and thump of a soldier-band to me. I ran out, and I breathed the cold and rolled in the new-fallen snow and ran about, and by the time I turned to call to the little one, ‘Join me!’ I was not even there any more, in the place where the house was, but in some other part of the forest’s vast palace with its snow-broidered tree-pillars and its ice chandeliers and its little musicians, the very first-most spring birds come back from the winter bird-place, flitting from here to there above me and singing fiercely in their spots of sun.

  All that day I spent in bear-business, which was very simple and very wonderful. Certain soft underbarks I found excellent to eat, and certain types of tree were the exact right roughness to bliss me when rubbed against the itch that bothered me low on my back. I thought of nothing; all I did was look, and heed the tumbling of scents through my sensitive nose, and accustom myself to the new way of hearing, and propel my new body through the forest. I enjoyed myself, no doubt of it, but I hardly realised I was enjoying, it was all so fast and instinctual.

  But when evening drew in, I found myself to be more like my old self, and felt how very abruptly I had left the woman and little Urdda and her sister that morning, and I realised that I required some kind of cave to return to for the night, and I did not have that cave, had not discovered that cave in the course of my disporting myself this day.

  So, all shamefaced, I found my way back, and I tapped very gently upon the door, and when the little dark girl ran to answer and embrace me, I kept very still and good, and when she allowed me, I entered and prostrated myself before the mother, feeling as if I were too enormous for this pin-neat house; I could not get myself low enough to match what I was endeavouring to say.

  Well, the mother laughed, of course. ‘Get up, you great fur-thing. Get off my feet,’ she said. And the two girls, they were already upon me, climbing on my back and sliding off my rump, hardly heavier than raindrops. And there followed an evening that was equal parts laughter and gentleness, while the two explored and groomed me and used me as their plaything, and the mother, too, felt sure enough of me to lean before the fire into the fur-backed armchair of me, and touch and remark on the length of my claws, the conformation of my face, the sweetness of my ears, given the bulk and wildness of me.

  And I—who had not been touched so curiously since my mam cared for me in my own childhood, who had not been embraced except by my own grieving uncle and aunt since my da went into the ground—I was enchanted. It seemed much preferable, even if I could not speak, to be a bear. There was so much more sensation in being animal. The scents of these three, for instance, were so distinct, though they were clearly a family: the dark girl more savoury and the golden-haired one more honeylike and the woman sweetest of all—I could not place what flower it was she recalled to me, or perhaps what sweetmeat. The three scents together, they busied and dizzied the air around, and I were continually snuffling at it, reading their flashes of mood and interest.

  And their resting against me and clambering on me—I drank up the weight and warmth of it like an ale or a cup of hot wine, it had been so long and I could have it so blamelessly and without embarrassment. I didn’t know what her husband might think, walking in and finding his wife and daughters disposed around a bear, but certainly it would not be the same as if a visiting man were at the centre of things. I were so comfortable, though, I would have been happy for him to walk in and slay me with bow or pike; even that would have been worth this enjoyment.

  Who would not stay in such a place, being bear by day and as good as man by night, with such a beauteous family to welcome him whenever he appeared? And so I stayed, from that midwinter through into spring. It did not occur to me to leave, so I did not seek ways to do so, and none presented themselves to me unbidden, either.

  Such children I had never known, so happy, unbowed, and unbeaten. Free as the forest they were growing, but they were by no means wild. The fair girl, Branza, was as kind and dutiful and diligent a daughter as any man could wish for. Urdda had bite and spark for all of them rolled into one, but when she had tired herself with her running and her outbursts of temper, it was clear how gratefully she rested with the other two, and enjoyed both to command and to amuse them.

  And the mam, well, she worked some kind of slow-growing magic on me. At first I could not admit to its happening, expecting at any time the arrival, in person or even in their conversation, of a da, of a husband. He must be a dusky type—Franitch, maybe—that Urdda took after, while Branza had the fairness of her mother. Perhaps the fear of him was why I avoided people; he might at any time be thrown up out their midst, to show me exactly the man I could never hope to match, and claim these women from me.

  At any rate, he did not come and he did not come, and there was no talk of him either, from girls or mam. I never saw him; neither did I see another man or woman, although there were signs of them: a road that I came to know and avoid, the sounds of a smithy one day as I patrolled my borders. I did not need other people; I did not want them; my days were brimful and overspilling with what I had.

  And alongside the smoke-tendril of hope that then crept up in my heart there grew—I allowed myself to see it—a beauty in the mam that swelled and goldened as the leaves budded and burst upon the trees. She was a fine woman, strong and lean with always moving energetically from task to task, with lifting her lovely daughters to console or converse with them, with striding from cottage to town with cloths and rushwork, and town to cottage with foods and necessities.

  My love of her went under
cover of some muzzier bear-instinct. In my clearer moments, I longed to sit and question her: What life have you come from? What is your name? And:May I stay? May I be bear with you always? May I keep you company, and you me? For I was content to while away my days bear-ing in the forest, if I might always return and rest my eyes on her movements, so sure and steady among the flicker and dance of her daughters, and my nose in the air of her, in the atmosphere, and my ears in her lullabies, in her fey-tales and other stories, in the prayer-whispers she offered up when she had put her daughters to bed, when she were going herself to her night’s rest.

  One sun-dappled spring afternoon, Branza and Urdda had fallen to sleep across each other, like thrown cloths in the grassy shade. I found them at the end of my morning’s explorations and pleasures and duties in the woods, when I was ready again to lounge and play.

  I sat and watched them and tried to remember children, girl- children, of my old home-place—more clothed and fearful girl-children, because so many more dangers beset and surrounded them. But I could not remember clearly—I could not think very clearly of that old place at all.

  But I could hear, and what I could hear was the slapping of laundry down at the stream. Someone was awake and working. And singing, singing a song I thought I knew, from that home-place. Her singing lifted me and called me down through the trees, trying to work out the puzzle of it; there was something about being a bear that took the sense out of words put to song, and at the same time made them bewitching, made me think: At any moment I will recognise this and it will all rush back, the memory, the life before.