Tender Morsels Read online

  The wall of the cave was rock, and one version of Urdda’s hands found it resistant, but another version pressed through, into an altogether spongier substance, the smell searing her nostrils.

  She was up to her elbows in the wall. So this was possible; so it was possible for her! She stood still a moment, accommodating the relief, trying to control her excitement. She had her four arms out, two of the hands exploring cracks and chinks, the other two reaching, reaching—she could see them, could she not? She could imagine them in sunlight. There was no doubt in her mind—she had not paused in doubt. She was only gathering her breath to move, to move forward, to move through to whatever other place would have her.

  The membrane between the worlds was not wet and not dry, not cold and not warm; it was thick as a castle wall, and all give to the touch, and all blur to her eyes. She pushed her knee, her toe and shin through it; she pushed it aside with her hands; she grasped it and pulled herself through.

  Sunlight burst on her. She glimpsed a sunny wall. Then something roared in her ear, and snatched her up, and kissed her scratchingly on the cheek, and rubbed her face with roughness. And she was pushed against the wall, coughing through her scorched throat, and he was running away down the narrow lane—a man clothed all in furs, with a tall fur bonnet on his head, his bare hairy legs and arms all roughly covered with black slime.

  9

  ‘Iam alarmed now,’ said Branza when evening came.

  ‘Alarmed?’ Liga looked up from her finework with a smile. ‘This is our little wild adventuress you speak of.’

  The bear bulked at Branza’s side in the doorway. Did you eat her while I slept? she wanted to ask him. Did you have her for your breakfast? But he had been with Branza all day and had never stopped browsing. He had even caught himself three fish in the stream while she rested from her searchings on the bank, her throat sore from calling her sister’s name. And if he had devoured Urdda, he had left no piece behind of her, as he had of the littlee, for Branza to bury.

  ‘How long should I wait, then, to worry?’ Branza asked.

  ‘Oh, a little longer. Are you hungry, of your wanderings?’

  ‘Very.’ Branza shook off her shoes and stepped inside. The bear huffed and followed.

  ‘No! Not you! Outside!’ Liga cried, and flew at him, and flapped her hands.

  ‘Mam! That’s not kind.’

  ‘He smells bad, this one.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense. He smells of bear, and perhaps a little of fish.’

  ‘Well, that is bad enough. Yes, sit there on that step. Very well, you may lay your head in the door, but no more of you.’

  Branza laughed. ‘Oh, look how low you have brought him!’ For the bear had rolled his eyes at her mother, very crestfallen.

  ‘Well, he may sulk all he wishes,’ said Liga. ‘Spread a cloth, Branza, and we will have our supper.’

  When the bread and cheese and the salad were laid out, Branza recounted, with building anxiety, her day’s searching. She had been to the old house-in-the-tree where she and Urdda used to play, on the off-chance that Urdda, unable to sleep, had gone there in the night and dozed off. She had scoured Hallow Top, behind every fallen stone and in every clump of furze. She had asked about the town, but no marketwoman, and none of the pig-people outside the gates, had set eyes on Urdda.

  ‘I will go up that cliff-top tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I know sometimes she haunts up there.’

  ‘Oh, you think?’ Liga’s voice was full of doubt. ‘That’s a long way.’

  ‘And perhaps below it. Perhaps she has fallen. She might have tried to fly again.’

  Liga laughed. ‘Oh, Branza, she has fourteen summers now; she would not be so foolish!’

  Branza sighed. ‘Well, I must do something. To sit here and stitch while she does not come—I don’t know how you can do it. I am so cross with her one moment, and so frightened the next!’

  Liga swallowed a mouthful of cheese and bread and patted Branza’s hand across the table. ‘All will be well,’ she said comfortably. ‘You will see.’

  But all was not well. Or at least, all continued well except that Urdda did not return. Branza went out in the mornings with Bear at her side and a place in mind that Urdda might have taken it into her head to visit, or to build a hidey-hole in and pretend to live in for a few days. It had been something they used to do together, she and Branza; Branza was offended not to be told, although both girls had had solitary games all their lives, as well as games they played together.

  All day Branza would search cave and cottage, marsh and heath and town lane. As the days, as the weeks, went on, she sometimes paused, to rest and to weep discouragement and grief into Bear’s fur; she would not burden Mam with it and threaten her eternal hopefulness, but she must release it somehow: Urdda might never come back, she feared. The forest was vast; no one in all their lifetime could explore every nook and crevice of it. And the stream was long, and in places pooled very deep. And the marsh—who knew what lay under that sheet of silver lumped with reedy islets, arrowed with the wakes of ducks? And Urdda might be in none of these places, for Branza remembered well that littlee-man stamping his foot and being gone behind the rock when there was nowhere for him to go. She remembered Bear—that first Bear—running off into nothing, into moonlight and enchantment. She remembered—the memory was like a red-hot iron against her heart—Urdda saying she had tried to fly after him; Urdda diving and diving at the marsh-edge, hunting for the beard-tuft. Wouldn’t you love to go there? Urdda exclaimed in Branza’s memory, wounding her sister again and again. She might not be in all the vastness here, in wood or water or town; she might be stepped through, stamped through, flown through finally to that place she had always wanted to go to—to the land of littlees, to the land of magicked Bears who consorted with children and mams.

  As the weeks passed, as the months passed, Liga’s greeting changed in tone, so subtly that only Branza could have noticed it. She always asked the same bright question: ‘And where have you been today?’ But with time, the note that expected good news of Urdda, and then the note that even associated Branza and Bear’s wanderings with her younger daughter—both those notes faded.

  ‘And I saw no sign of Urdda,’ Branza would sometimes say dully at the end of her account of her travels, unable to believe that her mam could so forget, could care so little about, the reason Branza exhausted herself each day.

  ‘Oh? Oh. No,’ Liga might say, remembering, then straight away dismissing it. ‘These are fine cresses you found. You say the bear led you to them? I almost like him for that.’ And she cast a fond look at the beast’s head in the doorway.

  But Liga could not entirely forgive this bear for not being the other, that first one. He seemed stupid by comparison, and ordinary in his looks—not splendid at all.

  ‘Scat! Scat with your eyes!’ she said, shooing him away while Branza dressed.

  ‘He is but a bear, mother,’ laughed her daughter, dropping her shift over her head. It fell to conceal that troubling body of hers, with the hips now, and the breasts beginning, and the fuzz of golden hair between the thighs.

  ‘I don’t like his look,’ said Liga. ‘There is something altogether unbeastly about him.’

  As the year passed and the weight of grief lessened somewhat on Branza and allowed in some playfulness, Liga was less and less inclined to let the girl out of her sight with the bear. She was so innocent! Liga was glad when the weather chilled and Branza ceased to swim with him, for she had been as good as naked in her soaked shift, laughing as he plunged about her, his excitement so evident that Liga was compelled to call Branza in.

  ‘You should not let him nuzzle you so,’ Liga said, watching the two of them on the matting before the hearth that autumn, and she could neither bring herself to talk about men and their lusts and their ways (he was a bear, for goodness’ sake, not a man!), and thus let Branza take charge of her own modesty, nor quite ignore the play of them, their positions and alignments and points of contact. She
seemed condemned to sit worried, and purse her lips at the beast, and invent errands for her daughter so that she would not rest too long in the bear’s embrace or grow too accustomed to it, or too fond of the sensations.

  Finally winter came. The beast began to spend almost all his days upon the hearthrug. One afternoon he came in muddy, though, and when Liga and Branza returned to find him filling the cottage with muddy-bear stink, and the walls and ceiling spattered with the mud he had shaken off, Liga decided they were done with him.

  ‘Out! Out with you!’ she cried, and flicked him about the face with her cleaning rag to move him up off the mat. ‘Look at the pig-mess you have made here! Go and find a cave and hibernate there, like a respectable bear!’

  Branza would have protested against Liga’s sending Bear away, but the mud-spattered room, and the hours that would be required to clean it, outweighed the sympathy she felt for him. She watched her tiny mother banish him—it was like a kitten terrorising a wolfhound: the spitting fierceness of the one, the cringing mass of the other—and she knew that he had brought this banishment on himself, and that she would have no success if she tried to defend him.

  He visited once or twice more, and then she did not see him again until the spring. When she met him then, out in the woods alone, he manifested great excitement, and she was so happy to see him that she allowed him to lick and whiffle as he pleased a while, until he combined a lick and a pawing of her shift in such a way that he got out one of her breasts. Despite her laughing protests and her pushings, he held her body to the tree he had herded her against, and he licked and licked at the rosy nipple as if it were honey leaking from a cracked pot, until Branza hardly knew what to think, with the heat and strength of the sensations, and the horror of their newness. Other parts of her responded that were quite far from the nipple itself and yet were connected by some cord of sensation like a string through a wooden puppet.

  Before long, though, her fright became too strong and her laughter turned to shouts and her pushings to slaps upon the bear’s nose. She saw what it took him to wrench himself away—it was against every instinct in his body. His teeth showed for a moment, and the danger of him.

  Branza hurried away, hurried home to her mam, pausing at the stream to wash the bear-lick from her chest, the bear-smell from her hands. She was torn. Should she tell Mam and wonder with her what Bear might have been about, or should she not say a word? By the time she reached the cottage, the latter intention had become the stronger.

  When she next saw Bear he was calmer, and careful with her, but as the summer swelled, he grew more confident, and there was a game that he began, which was of chasings, just as first-Bear had played with Branza and Urdda when they were little, so that Branza played her part with a will, with nostalgia and a certain amount of poignant enjoyment on Urdda’s behalf.

  But the game changed, with only the two of them playing. Bear would run into a thicket, say, and Branza, giving chase, would plunge in after him, but the thorn-branches would catch her, or spring back into a screen behind her, and then it would be up to Bear to rescue her. At first she thought him very attentive and even gentlemanly, with his anxiety that she be scratched as little as possible; but the third time he led her into such a trap, she knew it was no longer accident, and there was something in his enfolding of her that was not solicitous, that was not gentlemanly at all. And after he engulfed her in a cave once, when she had followed him in without thinking, she had quite a time fighting herself free of the grunting bulk of him, of his terrifying strength, of the urges that had him in their grip quite as tightly and irrationally as he had her in his.

  ‘Where is the bear?’ Liga stood from her work in the garden when Branza came home, and Branza wished she had straightened her hair and clothing better before walking out of the forest.

  ‘I have smacked him and sent him away,’ said Branza. ‘He was annoying me.’

  ‘He will come back.’ Liga bent again to the glossy beginnings of her chard crop. ‘Tomorrow, you will see. He will skulk up that path and give you that moon-eye look, and you will forgive him, as you always do.’

  Which was so. That year progressed more uncomfortably than the last, with Liga more eagle-eyed and Bear more calculating about his behaviour, and Branza between them only wanting peace, but compelled to apologise one for the other, excitement and repulsion pushing her towards and away from Bear; love, loyalty, and rebellion fighting each other in her mam’s direction.

  Winter descended again, and Bear knew not even to try entering the cottage now, though he lingered in the cottage clearing, particularly in fine weather. And then he went away entirely, to sleep out the winter somewhere. And so there were some peaceful months, with Liga happier and Branza less confused, as the snow lay thick over the cottage with the two of them as harmonious inside it as twins inside a womb.

  Branza more or less forgot him, and when she walked out in the early spring, she was not even thinking of bears. But then she happened on one—a new, smaller bear than the ones she had known, standing in the stream, waiting for the salmon to jump. Did this bear come from the same place as the others? was her first thought. And her second, more wistful, was: Did Urdda step through from the Bear-world, from the littlee-world, with this one? Is she somewhere nearby?

  The bear caught a fine salmon, and lumbered across the stream to Branza, and settled to consuming the fish almost at her feet. There was nothing in the bear’s actions bespeaking any desire but to feed itself. And when it lifted its head from the part-eaten fish, there was nothing in its eyes but eye-colour, and Branza saw that this was a much simpler animal, much more the kind of creature she was used to tending and observing, like the birds and fawns and kid-goats.

  ‘Good morning,’ she murmured, and she fondled the bear’s ears, and it continued with its meal.

  But when it had cleaned one side of the salmon’s flesh from its bones, and just as it was pawing it over to begin on the other side, noises from behind Branza made the bear lift its great head. There in the trees stood Bear, second-Bear, whom Branza had not seen since the dozy days of late autumn. There was still something slow about him now, something clumsy, but what struck her more—and with a shiver like the one she had felt on first sight of the littleeman all those years ago—was his difference from this new bear, his air of intention, the smell of the unknown about him and the unexpected, when every other creature she knew besides Liga and Urdda was entirely predictable. And she knew on the instant of seeing him that the new bear was a she-bear, and that second-Bear would want her as his mate.

  He blundered out of the forest towards them. With a huff, the she-bear was gone; Branza heard her splash across the stream, but did not watch her go. For Bear was running at Branza through the mazement from his winter sleep, and his dulled, complicated eyes were on her, and his black lip was lifted. His teeth were weapons; he had torn the littlee apart with them. Could he possibly mean to do the same to her?

  She sat in disbelief, watching death bowl towards her; she had never felt such hostility from any wild thing. She had never felt so soft and fragile, so much like meat, the person inside so negligible.

  Right upon the moment he might have damaged her, the realisation, the recognition, brightened his eyes, and he propped, and slid a little with his own speed, and sat bewildered, enclouding her in his dreadful breath, months stale from hibernation.

  ‘Bear!’ she said softly, her heartbeat shaking her voice. ‘What are you about?’

  He swung his head, searching the air for a scent. He found it, high up, and he stood. He followed it so certainly that she almost saw the braided spangles of it in the air, leading him to splash thoughtlessly, clumsily across the stream. Halfway, he issued a roar, a cry, a question; then suddenly he was climbing the far bank, and with a wriggle of his massy dark bottom he was gone after the she-bear, and nothing was left of the two encounters but the half-eaten fish, and the blood pounding in Branza’s chest and head, and out into all her extremities.
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br />   Branza hurried back to the cottage after meeting the two bears, too shocked at the danger she had been in to ponder it very clearly, and wanting only the comfort of home, the murmur and industry of her mam, the requirements of the garden and house, and the straightforwardness of familiar creatures.

  There she calmed herself for the rest of the day, but in the night she heard again Bear’s cry, and there was something in the announcement of it, in the plaintiveness, that made her lie awake awhile and wonder.

  In the morning, she said to Liga, ‘I saw Bear yesterday. Did you hear him in the night?’

  ‘Not at all. Was he prowling around here?’

  ‘No, off in the hills somewhere. I thought I might go out and find him again today.’

  ‘Oh?’ Liga had been easy in the sunshine, but now she reached for her finework and examined it closely, deciding where to begin. ‘Perhaps it would be best to wait. Till he is in the mood to be civilised.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  But Branza went anyway. She went many times in the following days, in search of the two bears, but they had travelled quite a distance, and she found that only by beginning just before dawn could she reach, with any hope of arriving home again by nightfall, the hill where Bear had herded the she-bear and was keeping her.

  And the day that she did this, as soon as she sighted him she wished she had not. For Bear, out in the hilltop meadow, was engaged in mounting the she-bear. Branza, having journeyed so far, felt she must stay; such a mixture of revulsion and hilarity filled her, along with her customary clear-eyed curiosity about the ways of animals, that she felt she must watch.