Tender Morsels Read online

She could almost count the trees behind her and the gaps between them. Without looking back, she knew the moment when there were enough trees to close her from his sight if he stayed where he had stood. She risked a glance around and he was not there, was not following. Still she hurried on. She went well out of her way, to a thicket she knew where she could entirely hide herself. She lay there until nightfall, when they would have gone, the woodcutters. Then she returned to her father’s house.

  She checked the snare, next day. The stone was kicked aside, the cord pulled down, the overhanging branch snapped and dragging in the path the many coneys had beaten since last spring. Coney droppings lay across the wreckage. Had he fetched them from elsewhere and put them there, that boy? Was he as subtle, as nasty, as that?

  She did not quite know what to make of it all. Would he tell his father that he’d met her, and would they talk about it, and would they go to the mayor? And did her father have dispensations, and were they hers now? Ought she to go to Jans’s mother and ask? But if she had nothing and no rights, might not Jans’s mother join the woodmen in moving the beadle or the constable or someone to cast her out, to put her on the road?

  So little was different from yesterday morning—the sunlight and birds moved secretive among the branches; the wind wagged the last yellow leaves very soothingly. But Liga was not soothed; she stood, struck still with anxiety there, her hand on the bab—which was like live coals inside her, heavy and hot—and she felt her ignorance sorely.

  Nothing came of the encounter with the woodman’s son, though: not through the remainder of autumn; not into winter, either. Liga kept herself secret, and sometimes, without aid of any village life, she had a thin time, but always at her thinnest, some skinny fish took her bait under the stream’s ice, or she chose the right snow to dig at and found some bit of growth that would boil up flavoursome, or some small hibernating thing sent up a curl of sleep-breath against the sunlight. She all but hibernated herself, eking out her firewood and her squirrel-store of nuts, harbouring her small warmth in the truckle, dragged close to the tiny fire.

  Her baby came steaming into the world one deep-winter night. Straight away, Liga saw what had been wrong with the other one—its head too big for its body, its pointed chin. This one had cheeks; it had limbs like baby-limbs, not like an old man’s, all shrunken and delicate. And this, look: it was a girl, like her. He is outnumbered now, she thought deliriously. We will combine against him! We will get what we want!

  When she had dealt with the mess of the birthing, she laid the wrapped baby on the table. All stiff and light-bodied and leaky, she sat on bunched rags on the bench and examined it by the candle.

  All the expressions that are possible crossed its face, as if its thoughts were wise and limitless one moment, daft and animal the next. And Liga too was pulled towards awe, that this little girl-thing gave off such an air of being entitled, and then towards pity at its abjectness and its frailty and—how soft it was, the surface of it, and so warm! She could not believe the tiny makings of its mouth, or its perfected eyelashes, its ears like uncrumpling buds, all down and tenderness. She was full of the joy of her father being gone—that she could sit like this all night if she wanted, not bothered or harangued, without a remark from any other person, and watch this creature busy with its morsel of life, its scrap of sleep, its breaths light as moth-wings lifting its narrow red chest.

  Sleep nudged at her eyelids before she had looked her fill, and she took up the baby and brought it into the truckle bed with her, for still she did not like to go to the marriage bed. She never would; she had thought several times to break that bed up for fuel, except that her mother had died in it too, hadn’t she? It was all she had of her mam, however loud sounded the snores and creaks of her father’s memory.

  The baby squeaked some time in the night, and Liga woke from the darkest, softest sleep, wondering muzzily as she surfaced what kind of rat or vermin had got in and how soon Da would wake too, and crash about, chasing and killing it. And then she realised—oh, he was gone, gone forever! And this, this being tucked against her that clawed the dimness, with its thin throat learning to push out that miniature voice, this was—

  She brought out a breast, pleased to employ it for the first time in its proper usage, instead of endure its being fumbled from behind as he muttered her mam’s name in her ear. The baby mouthed and nodded bemused against it awhile, and then its instinct fastened it to the nipple, and after some noises so much like relish and surprise that Liga could not help but laugh—a soundless laugh, through her nose, such as would not frighten a bab—it more or less settled to what it must do.

  She lay there in the grainy dark with the little animal at her, its fist on her breast as if holding it steady for the sucking, as if it had organised the world this way and were only taking its due. How charming it was, and how lucky was Liga, to be thus organised by a being so harmless, and so clear in its needs, and those needs calculated so exactly to what she could give!

  Spring blew in, not quite expected. Fistfuls of pale leaves spurted from the oak branches; buds like candle-flames glowed along other tree-limbs; snow sagged away, leaving wet black ground; and bulb-fingers probed up there, all hopeful curiosity. The earth’s lungs, coated in green ooze and thaw, breathed out blossom-scent and sour rot and fungus-must, wet and warm and aware, where before the air had been cold and blind, remote as the moon.

  Liga went out and stood in the first surprising morning of that breeze, all milky and with her baby in her arms. Her hair blew out long, hardly tied up any more, she had so neglected it; its dull yellow strands smelled of smoke and bed across her face.

  The baby blinked and wondered against her chest, waved its aimless arms, frowned in the sun-dapples. Liga could almost imagine this was her own first time outside too, her first spring, the world was so quiet and light without her father, and there was nothing in it that she was obliged to fear.

  The first she heard of the lads was their voices up at the road. There was a burst of rough laughter as they rounded the hill—three of them, maybe more. Then they quietened, suddenly, as if hushed by someone.

  She knew that laughter. It was the noise of boys showing off for each other, boys with heavy voices and eyes that didn’t properly look at you. She’d a distant memory of that noise, in the market in town, as she walked with her mother. Come, said Mam. We’ll walk through the cloth hall while they pass.

  ‘Come,’ said Liga now, and picked the baby up out of the truckle, and stood listening.

  They were coming down the path to the house. They could not keep silent; there were too many of them, and some wanted to show the others that they didn’t care to be hushed; they slapped their feet down and grunted. One of them hawked and spat. Another hissed a remonstration, and was snarled at.

  Liga crept to the chimneypiece, fast, silent. She took out the loose stone and the key from behind it, and crossed to the wooden store-chest. She opened it, laid the baby on the cloths inside, closed it, locked it. She hid the key and there they were, clear of the trees—five of them, all large except for that runtish boy cockily leading. The woodchopper’s son was there. That foreigner’s boy was there. She remembered asking Mam, of his even darker father, Why has he all sooted up his face? And Mam had shushed her.

  This she saw as she dragged the door closed. On seeing her, they started to run. That little one shot towards her, but she got it done, she dropped the latch just as he banged into the door from the other side. She gasped and jumped back. Coldly she thought, You should have run for the trees.

  They threw themselves at the door. Terrible things they were shouting. They were not sensible; they were in a kind of frenzy. Nothing would stop them, not door, not latch, not wall. She understood not to shout back or to cry out in fear—they would enjoy her shouting; it would whip them up worse. She sat silent beside the chest in the corner, trying to disappear.

  Their heads came to the window, and shouted there and joked and crooned; their laughter bounde
d about in what was once her home, which had been cosy and safe until just a little while ago but now was spindly as a birdcage, fragile as a fey-lamp on its dried stalk under a bush. She had never felt the house to be fragile before, not even in the wildest storm, but now it seemed made of leaf-matter or smoke, and the boys’ arms waved in the window like May-ribbons loose from their pole.

  They pulled out the windowframe. They started to break pieces off around the window. Liga put her hand on the wooden chest. ‘I will come back for you,’ she said to the child inside, and she climbed up into the chimney. She thought of herself going nimbly up and out the top—she had done it before—dropping off the edge of the soft thatch, running, losing them in the forest, listening to them disperse, disappointed; instead, she found her shoulders wedged, and no way to turn them so as to fit through. She looked up and saw the chimney-cover and a wink of sky.

  The boys thudded into her house. Their voices funnelled up to her. She reset a slipping toe and a stone came loose and carried soot down to the dead hearth.

  ‘She’s up the chimney!’

  ‘Can you see? Is she out the top?’

  A voice came suddenly loud up the chimney. ‘I can see. I can see right up her. Right up the crease of her. Come, sweet one, bring down that little purse to me! I shall count every coin you have in it!’

  ‘Light a fire! Smoke her out!’

  ‘She’ll be the stubborn sort; she’ll die up there of smoke rather than tumble down.’

  ‘We’ll have her then, then.’

  ‘You want a roast, go and buy your feck-meat from Sweetbread & Sons.’

  ‘Fox, you go up. You’re littlest.’

  ‘Yes, Fox! You’re perfect for the job!’

  ‘Wi’ this new shirt? My mam would kill me.’

  ‘Take it off, man!’

  ‘May as well be nekkid now as later, eh?’

  ‘Must I?’

  ‘Go on! We’ll let you have first go of her.’

  In the silence, Liga pushed her shoulders up against the obstruction, turned, pushed. Soot went dancing down.

  ‘She have not gotten out the top yet, have she?’

  ‘Shut up and listen!’

  They shut up.

  ‘Look up there, Fox.’

  ‘I can hear her in there,’ said Fox. ‘I can hear her breathing. She is trapped.’

  Liga took the sleeping baby out of the chest, out of the house. She carried her with care and pain to the stream and laid her on the bank there and waded in, and washed and washed her cringing parts, her torn. She took off her dress and washed herself—all of herself—rinsed out her hair, rubbed the smell of them off her, soaked her clothes and squeezed them out and dressed herself in their limpness.

  She carried the baby into the forest. The day was closing, the sun gone from casting its excessive light on everything. But then, eye after eye, the stars came out. The moon’s fat face rose and hung in the treetops, staring.

  Liga only walked, only walked away. Slowly, because to walk was to hurt, she put the distance, step by step, between herself and her father’s house, where all her troubles had happened. No matter now that Mam had died in that bed. At least Da had called on Mam’s memory as he misused it. But that strangers should come, and with no awareness of its sacredness, one by one, have of Liga there, and think that that was the place to do such things—well, Mam must be truly dead and gone, and not watching from anywhere; clearly she was of no help to Liga now.

  Liga came to a part of the night where the path ended and the ground dropped away to rocks far below, and a different level of forest. It seemed like the answer to her; it seemed fated, a kindness. She would throw the little one first, and then there would be nothing left for her in this world, and she would be able to cast her own self off.

  But she found when she tried that she could neither throw the baby nor hold it over the emptiness and let it go.

  I will tuck her in my shawl, she thought, so that we are smashed dead together. And she did tuck the baby in, and tied it tight against her.

  But then she thought, If I die and she doesn’t, think of her, mouthing my dead breast, crying under the weight of me, perhaps broken and in pain. And she could neither step nor leap from the precipice.

  ‘I could kill her against that tree first.’ She said the outlandish words aloud. She had brained many a coney and kid; she would know exactly how. ‘Against this rock right here. To make sure.’

  She untied the baby from herself. She lifted her out of her wrappings, shutting off her own nostrils from the scent—warm; a little sharp, like vinegar. She held her up and the child slept on, her wise mouth expectant of nothing, not caring if she continued or no. The little heart coursed along there, under the heel of Liga’s hand.

  Liga gave a great living sigh, and sat on the ground, and laid the baby on her knees. So soft was its cheek that Liga’s finger-skin could not feel it; she leaned in to breathe of the milky breath, and watch the eyes moving under their dozy lids. So beautiful and unsullied; how had the bab known to lie quiet all that time in the house? Surely it was best to end her before life broke and dirtied her. If Mam had only ended me! she thought. I was well-grown and walking, not a bab like this, but she might have strangled me with a snare-cord, or cut my throat. She might have taken me with her. And if she had—Liga stood up—I would not be holding this sweet, soft thing out here, with the breeze coming up from below and tickling the downy hair on her brow, the last soft movement before I let the rocks have her, let the rocks break her—

  With a sob, she let the baby go. Her hands snapped to fists at her chest, her eyes closed, her face averted itself from what she was doing.

  Two ragged breaths she took and released before she would look. But when she did—‘Ah!’

  For the baby had not dropped. It hung there against the stars, held up by nothing at all, its head sunk to one side, perfectly asleep.

  And it commenced to glow. All around it, needles of light spread out against the night sky.

  Liga stepped back. ‘Go, little one! Die! This is no place for you!’

  But the baby would not drop, and the light spread around it, and from the brightening centre flung out loops and arcs of crinkled light like loosened swaddling.

  At the sight of these, at the thought that they might encircle the baby and take it from her sight, Liga stepped to the edge again, and reached and took the baby out of the air into her shaking arms.

  On the sky, though, where it had hung, there hung another baby, or at least the shape of one drawn in the brightest of the light, as if when she took down the child Liga had peeled a layer off the night’s skin, exposing the stuff behind that the skin protected the world from. She could barely look at it—it had some kind of burn or chill about it—but she glimpsed within the baby-shape other shapes turning, moving, plumping and contracting; the vague attempts at form of whatever force had suspended her bab, had intervened and cut the connection between her act and its consequence. A vast power had had to be channelled—she was awed and hotly ashamed that it must—through this small aperture so as to be tolerable to Liga’s senses, so as to handle the mortal scrap of her child without harming it, so as not to break either of them with its strangeness and strength.

  What are your babbies’ names? it said, direct into her mind.

  Babbies? Babbies more than this one? Should Liga have named that stain in the snow? That little blue personage so quickly handed over to Da? ‘I have not given this one a name, not as yet,’ Liga said. ‘I had not really thought of it.’

  No name? it thought at her, astonished, and perhaps also offended. She had not known that she was accountable to such a thing.

  ‘Because, you see, we never—I have not taken her into the town,’ said Liga. ‘I have not met anyone with her. There has been no need for a name; she is the only other person in the world with me. She is ‘babby’, or ‘my little one’.’

  There will be need, though, the moonish matter thought, flesh or cloth or whatev
er it was. To distinguish the one from the other.

  Part of it burst and laughed, the lightest, shortest bit of delight. From the bursting it thrust a luminous limb, much like a baby’s arm in shape, if not in movement. Whether the hand was tiny or vast Liga could not tell, but on its palm an immense clear jewel lay and glinted.

  Liga was frightened to take it, but she was more afraid that the light, that the flesh, of the child-thing would touch her and burn her, or worse. So she took the stone, neither hot nor cold as it was, neither painful nor pleasurable nor yet entirely inert, into her own ordinary hand.

  A second limb of light, opposite and yet not opposite the first, erupted from the mass, bringing another jewel, but a black one this time, which when Liga took it showed through its heart a gleam of this moon-child’s light, turned red by the gem’s internals.

  ‘But what am I to use these for?’ said Liga. ‘People will ask how I came by them. They will string me up for thieving. They will cut off my hands.’

  Paff, said the moon-baby. This is not for selling. This is for planting. Plant the clear stone by the northern end of your doorstep; then the red by the southern. Then sleep, child. Rest your sore heart and your insulted frame, and begin again tomorrow.

  ‘But how shall I get home? I am quite lost here.’

  A globe of light the size and shape, perhaps, of a ripe plum broke from the moon-child, moved towards the trees, and waited there at their fringe. Liga followed, and the globe went in among them, along the path she had arrived by. The moon-bab emitted something like a laugh, something like a sigh; it hovered there behind her at the cliff-edge, labouring to contain its glory. She glanced back many times as she went, watching the moon-child shrink and reappear among the accumulating trees, until at last they obscured it altogether.

  3

  The moon-plum dipped and skated ahead, lighting every crease and pock and root of the path, sinking to show the muddy places, bobbing higher to point out low-hanging branches. Liga began to recognise some of these branches, some of these knolls. Her spirits should be cast down, she thought, at coming back here when she had vowed to leave the place forever. But her returning seemed hardly related at all to her leaving, so distressed had she been and so calm was she now, and so companioned by the light of this plum-thing so confidently leading her.