Tender Morsels Read online

  His skin was warm; the scratch of stubble along his jawline matched the sparkle of it in the sunlight on his chin and around his mouth.

  He moved the bowl fractionally so that it was not against the lathe; he removed his foot from the wooden pedal under the workbench and the spinning lathe slowed. Liga took back her hand, frightened.

  Joseph sat unperturbed, the bowl in his hands, his wrists resting against the workbench. And then he would have returned to the work—Liga saw his thigh tense to replace his foot on the pedal—had she not said, ‘Joseph?’

  His thigh relaxed, but still he looked down at the lathe—he was not impatient to start again, but . . .

  She glanced up and down the empty laneway. She took hold of Joseph’s elbow in one hand and the bowl in the other, and she lifted his arm from the bench and unbent it, and laid hand and bowl in her own lap. She took the bowl from him and placed it back on the workbench. The unresisting hand lay in her lap—a man’s hand, a strange animal. She fitted her own hand into the palm, lifted it, and slid her other hand underneath. Joseph’s was warm; it was furred here and there with wood-dust that fell onto her skirt; the back was covered with strong, short hairs, bowed like eyelashes, springy. Did the hand grip her in return, or had she pushed the fingers into place herself, around her wrist?

  ‘Sometimes I find myself lonely,’ she said towards the hand. ‘I thought you might also feel this, if you are grown now, if there is no girl.’

  She lifted her face, and there was Joseph’s. But his eyes did not hold the thoughts, the troubles, or the desires Liga had hoped to see. Instead, the young man’s customary kindness had unfixed itself somehow, was interrupted with a flickering in the pupils, so that instead of black depths there ran a glimpse of sky, a glimpse of frost, grainy grey streaks blowing across a pale blankness.

  ‘Joseph!’ she whispered in fright. ‘Master Lathe!’

  And his eyes were all kindness again. ‘Miss?’ he said.

  ‘My name is Liga,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ His hand lay warm in hers. It seemed to Liga that he looked upon her much as he had been looking at the bowl as it came into being against the lathe.

  ‘What was that?’ She was hot with fear. ‘What happened to you just now? To your eyes?’

  ‘You asked too much of me, Liga.’ He lowered his eyes, but she had seen the sky rushing in them again. ‘I was not made for it.’

  ‘For what?’ She hardly wanted to ask.

  ‘To . . . to feel anything for myself. Lonely or no.’

  Liga was stiff with terror. The wind, the frost, and worst of all, the vast emptiness she had seen behind his eyes translated itself into his voice. If she could see them now, they would be blank as the moon. But he had used her name, Liga. He had known her better than Joseph the Lathe ought to, better than Ada Keller or Wife Taylor or anyone in this town or country did, better maybe even than she knew herself. To her very depths, with all her secrets, she was known by everyone here, by everything.

  Joseph kept his gaze on their hands, but the light from his eyes stuttered in her lap. The world was flimsy around her; it rippled like embroidery on a curtain, and beyond the curtain was chaos, and a light that might blind her.

  Trembling in the trembling world, she took up the wooden bowl and thrust it into his hand. His fingers closed on it, firm and limber, and he smiled at Liga. His pupils were dark again, but he did not seem relieved, or even properly aware of what had just passed; he was only his kind self, the same as ever. He turned back to the lathe and set it spinning again.

  Rain was falling quite hard outside the woodshop door, where the sun had beamed down from a clear sky moments before. Two men passed and hailed Joseph, and he nodded and kept on working. They walked by without a glance at Liga.

  She jumped up, knocking the stool over. Joseph did not even start. She could snatch the bowl from him, she suspected, and fling it out onto the wet cobbles, take up that mallet there and smash his creation to pieces, and he would only take up the next block of rough wood and begin again.

  She hurried out of the shop, into the gasping-cold rain. The two men were walking away, their soaked backs to her. The sky was black and churning; wives exclaimed at upstairs windows, pulling in curtains, slamming shutters.

  Liga ran, taking the beating of the rain as her punishment, icy arrows in her stupid head, cold lashes across her shoulders. None of it is real, she thought, not this rain, not these slippery streets, not these houses, that wife hurrying, that carter leading his soaking horse. She boiled with embarrassment and with fear; she must push him out of her memory, Joseph the Lathe, with his warm hand and his white eyes. She must run away from him hard, through the lashing rain, and find as soon as possible her Branza, her Urdda—her little daughters, the only true people in this world besides herself.

  Time passed, and Liga was a score and ten years old, Branza fifteen summers beautiful, and Urdda fourteen years lively. Life was good for the women in the cottage; Liga toiled every day to make it so, to keep it so, to deserve it. Since she had sat in the woodshop and seen how fragile was their safety, she had been unable to rest; she might have been broidering the very forest, the very weather, into existence; she might have been stitching the seam where earth meets sky, so assiduously did she apply herself, and so constantly. The anxiety she had stirred that sunny-rainy day was now bound into her bones the way blood is, the way muscles are tethered in; in order to feel any joy, she must always be paying, always be showing how seriously she took this place she had been given, how willing she was to pretend it was all true.

  Branza, with her soft heart, must have intuited something of the strain of this, for she had been visited many times in those years by nightmares. Liga would wake to Branza’s shouts of rage and fear in the darkness, or to the sounds of the girl kicking and muttering in her bed. Liga learned not to touch or shake her, for then Branza dreamed she was under attack, and woke thrashing and screaming in panic. ‘Branza, Branza, wake yourself! It is only a dream!’ Liga would exclaim, wringing her hands by the girls’ bed over the two daughters, one fast asleep and the other fighting the covers, fighting the invisible enemy.

  And when she was roused and the lamp lit to chase away her terror, Branza would lie and stare at her mother, her eyes fixed open so that she would not fall back into the dream. Liga would have to talk about daylight things, or bring the basket of rabbit-kits or the lately born kid from the fireside for Branza to cradle, to distract the girl, to soften her face out of its fearful expression.

  ‘Who is he? What is he like? And where does he come from?’ Liga would ask Branza in daylight, for all she could manage to gather on the subject of the nightmares was that they were always about a man, always the same man.

  But Branza would not be drawn to describe him. However brightly the sun shone, however charming the animal in her arms, however delicious the honeyed fig her mother had just divided among the three of them, Liga’s questions only reduced her to silence, to head-shaking, to shudders at the memory of her assailant. And Liga feared—for she did not know how magic worked, only that it was powerful, and fragile, and unpredictable—that her own undeservingness had visited the nightmares on Branza, that her daughter was being attacked in the night by a version of the man who had made Liga’s nights a misery as she grew from girl to woman.

  8

  ‘Take these baskets,’ said Liga, ‘and the mats we made—the prettier ones—and the whitest of the cheeses, maybe three of those. Go into town, to Wife Gruen.’

  ‘Wife Gruen?’ Branza was crouched in the sunlit doorway, watching the birds come to the breakfast crumbs she had scattered on the path.

  ‘Yes, ask her to take the cheeses for two dress-lengths of that fine lawn, in the blue I admired the other day. I have made up my mind. And give Wife Wilegoose the matting for some of her beans, and whatever she gives you of her herb-garden.’

  ‘Come, Urdda, while the morning is still cool,’ Branza said.

  Urdda laughed. ‘Hark
at you. Branza has a sweet spot for Rollo Gruen, Mam, can you tell?’

  ‘I do not.’ Branza bridled—or pretended to.

  ‘Indeed she has,’ said Urdda. ‘I have seen her smiling and swinging her basket while he passed time of day with her under the Square Ash.’

  ‘You know nothing! I’ve a sweet spot for no one!’ Branza came into the cottage and snatched up her comb, then stood to the full willowy height of her fifteen years, haughtily combing.

  Urdda snorted. ‘No one but every bunny and babcock that hops out of the wood. Oh, and Rollo Gruen. Look at her, preening herself for him.’

  ‘Hush, you, snippet,’ said Liga. ‘You are only jealous you don’t have such a way with wild creatures.’

  ‘As long as I can catch one for our dinner, that’s as close as I need be.’

  Branza’s tamed pigeon that she had rescued from the foxes suddenly resettled its wings on the chair-back where it was perched, and all three women laughed. ‘That’s telling you!’ said Liga. ‘What an outrage, to talk of dinner.’

  ‘Anyway, I think she has intentions on that Gruen boy, Mam. With what you have told us of weddings, I think she is wanting that fine dress and the feast, and then snuggerling off to bed with that Rollo, with their matching hair. Oh, such golden-head children they will have!’

  Branza flicked Urdda with a hair-ribbon like a little shining whip. ‘Drink up your breakfast and let us go and get our dress-lengths. We can walk up by the heath, if you want, to make it an adventure.’

  And this they did, taking the hillier way, through the dark furze. In one or two places, great stones had been set, some balanced on others, but in time they had been tumbled, either by people who no longer knew their use or by strong weathers or movements of the ground, and now they lay long and sodden asleep, half buried in the bushes.

  The wind goaded and worried the girls, and blew up their excitement so that they ran, Urdda ahead with the baskets and mats, Branza following more carefully with the cheeses. They were so noisy that they thought they were the only ones shouting, but then Branza called, ‘Urdda, wait!’ and Urdda paused, and then they heard another voice, farther and with quite a different tone.

  Urdda spun to face the sound. Branza turned more slowly in the path.

  Beyond one of the fallen stones beat the tips of two huge wings. The noise came to the sisters on a snatch of wind, with another dire exclamation from the invisible person below, the invisible man.

  Urdda set off fast through the bushes. Grumbling fearfully, Branza went back down the path. She stood by the rushwork Urdda had dropped onto a bush, eyeing the cleft her sister was making through the spiny branches. She took a few steps after her, holding the cheeses close, as if they were eggs in a fragile nest or the young of some furred thing.

  When Branza next looked up, Urdda was prancing on top of a slab, the wind lifting her hair and flapping her skirts, snatching away her voice as she shouted back to Branza. She looks so happy there, thought Branza uncomfortably. I must make sure she is more modest when we reach Gruens’ or Rollo will certainly like her better, for her courage and liveliness.

  She put up her cheeses-basket and clambered onto the stone. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘how magnificent!’

  An enormous eagle strove on the slope below—a bird bigger than any Branza had ever seen, a giant of a bird, red-brown above and splendid bright white below.

  ‘Look who he has, though!’ cried Urdda, and Branza, frowning, saw that the powerful claws, the colour of storm clouds but with an added cruel sheen, held not a large hare or lesser bird, but a person, a person whose size looked unequal to resisting the bird’s force, but whose jerking and shouting brought the bird again and again to the ground, where it would reaffirm its grip on him, that small man seemingly made of torn leather and long white hair.

  ‘Curse him!’ said Branza. ‘I suppose we must help if we can.’

  ‘I should think so!’ Urdda leaped like a freed rabbit from the stone and ran, heedless of furze-needles, towards the struggling bird, the shouting man.

  With a soft moan, Branza sat down and dropped from the slab to follow her. Flap harder! she said to the bird in her mind. Carry him off where we cannot reach him, where we cannot follow! Come on, you great strong thing!

  They ran underneath the burdened bird. Neither had been so close to such an eagle before—so near its relentless eye, the purposeful work of its wings, and the noise of its effort, that angry whipping of the air.

  The littlee-man was like a dragging, blowing snaggle of hair from a thornbush or a fence-post, but with more weight in it, weight of flesh and feeling. ‘Help me, for the sake of all that’s living! Its claws are in my back! It is tearing the very vitals out of me!’

  ‘Struggle!’ cried Urdda, demonstrating. ‘Wriggle! Wrest yourself out of its grasp.’

  ‘I cannot! It is disembowelling me!’

  As Urdda ran on after the bird, Branza stooped for a stone. She straightened and threw it, hitting the man himself. The stone dropped onto Urdda’s shoulder, so that both of them shouted in surprise.

  ‘Not me, you gulping gosling!’ screeched the man. His arms punched at nothing, and his legs kicked under his straggling cloak of hair. ‘Throw at the bird!’

  Branza’s second stone hit the bird hard in the breast, and if a beast can stagger on air, it staggered. It dropped somewhat. Now Urdda could jump and brush with her very fingertips the wispiest ends of the littlee-man’s trailing hair.

  ‘Higher! Higher!’ His arms and legs now reached straight down for her. ‘And you!’ he cried to Branza. ‘Keep with your stones! Knock the damned thing out of the sky!’

  Branza threw and threw, and Urdda cast up a number of stones too, and dodged the falling ones.

  ‘Aim for its head, sister!’ Urdda called, but Branza had not a good enough eye to do so, and had best luck with the stones she pitched at the bird’s body. Also she managed to bruise the leading edge of one wing, and with her next hit she made the bird plunge to a point where Urdda, well positioned, caught good hold of the littlee-man’s beard and some head-hair.

  ‘Aagh! You are pulling it out at the roots! Aagh!’ For Branza had run up and taken handfuls of hair, too, and the two girls were trying to pull him down so as to catch his higher hair, and eventually the body of him.

  ‘Stop flailing!’ Urdda commanded. ‘How are we to get a grip on you?’

  ‘You’re hurting me, you vicious, common monsters! Gather more so you are not pulling only on three hairs apiece! Have you no sense?’

  ‘We are pulling on what we can reach,’ said Urdda. ‘But it’s too strong.’ She gasped as the bird tried to surge up and away, and managed indeed, momentarily, to lift her and her sister’s feet clear of the heath.

  ‘You are not heavy enough!’ he said despairingly. ‘Oh, who would have thought, two such thumping great lumps! Anchor yourselves with these fallen stones, why don’t you? Wedge your great flat feet under them!’ The girls’ toes were dragging through the furze—three of their four shoes were dropped or caught in the bushes. ‘Do something!’

  ‘Do something yourself!’ Urdda swung herself up higher on the littlee-man’s hair. ‘Reach up behind you and pummel the thing. Dig in with your fingers so it thinks you are gutting it as it flies!’

  ‘What, while I’m gutted myself? Shall I pluck it and stuff it with sage and onions and cook it on a spit while I’m up here, you stupid? I can barely move while it takes out my bowels!’

  All the while, the bird’s wing tips flicked and stung the girls’ faces, and the wing-wind beat around them.

  Urdda clambered up over the man’s screaming form—and collected a panicked kick for her troubles that nearly knocked her away. She caught hold of the scaly bird-leg, which was like bone and iron bar both, and forced her fingers hard into the thing’s hot feathered belly.

  The bird squawked, and dropped the littlee-man with Branza still attached to him, and at the shock of the space below her and the sight of the rushing heath, Urdd
a let go the leg and dropped too. The loosed bird leaped away, suddenly small. Urdda rolled to a stop in harsh grasses and gravel.

  Up she jumped straight away to see whether her sister too had fallen on soft ground, or was she brained on one of the big stones. But there she was, red-faced and fighting tooth and nail with the nasty little man, the pair of them floundering and falling in the furze like downed birds themselves.

  ‘Get off her!’ Urdda ran at them and tore the littlee-man from where he clawed and bit at Branza, whose arms were tight across her chest and face, protecting herself.

  ‘She has ruined my good jacket with her haulings, the careless witch!’ All the man’s fear seemed to have transformed into violent rage. ‘Do you know how much this cost me? Do you know how many times I’ve had to come to your benighted nowhere of a land to fetch the necessary?’ Thump, thump! He went at Urdda with his fists, tiny and strong.

  Branza stood back, stunned. ‘I never touched his coat!’ she said, outraged, to Urdda, not daring to put her arms down yet.

  ‘Get away off me!’ Urdda pushed at the man. ‘We have saved your life, and more than once, and if this is all the gratitude you can show—’

  ‘Gratitude? For having half my fine manhood torn out, and my face with it? For having my jacket rent and ruined? Look at it! It is all holes!’

  ‘That’s bird-claws that did that. Go and bring that bird to account, if you dare. Go on, shoo!’ And Urdda went after him so angrily and loudly, and so big now—nearly twice as tall as he—that he stumbled back and some of the rage went out of him, and became fear again. He fell harmlessly on his bottom. He more swam than ran away, his shouts turned to mutterings: ‘Blue-fannied broom-pushers! What use are they to a man? You could never get past their claws and beaks to give them the what’s-tuppence!’

  Urdda finished shaking her fists and shouting after him, and turned back to her sister. ‘Has he cut you at all?’

  ‘Only these hurt the worst.’ Branza showed her some welts risen under her ear where the dwarf had clawed her. ‘Is there blood?’