It was horrible, feeding the fire, heating water in our cauldron while the speckled doe moaned. Sida touched her nose to the crease between the doe’s neck and chin. The doe nipped at her, exhausted and scared.
When the water was hot, Torun shrugged off his vest and untied the belt around his waist. He lifted the shirt over his shoulders and tossed it onto the rest of his discarded clothes. He soaped his hands and forearms and washed in the hot water.
“You had better wash, too,” he said. This was not a time for squeamishness, his tone told me. I rolled up my sleeves.
By the weak light of the lantern, Torun announced that the doe’s body was ready, but that nothing was coming out. “Go and see if you can comfort her. Talk to her.” He went down by the doe’s tail. I went to her head.
I had no idea what to do.
But then the doe gave a shrill cry and thrashed. I looked over at her hindquarters.
“Yimma naisik,” Torun crooned, but he stood up and stepped back. “Lizbet, please come here.” We squatted down together and he pointed without touching. “See that? It’s the rump and tail. The uksarv voon has turned around. Its legs are tucked in and we need to shift them around,” he said. “But she doesn’t want my help. She doesn’t trust me. I need you. You’ll have to reach in with your arm. You need to find the back feet and pull them out. The contractions are going to be strong, but unless the feet come out first, the uksarv voon will be stuck. Are you ready?”
“No.” But I leaned over by her tail anyway. I put my hand into the tight, damp, muscular cave before the contraction came and squeezed down on my arm. I gave a stifled moan of my own, a faint echo of the doe’s pain, until it eased, and then I reached further.
“Got it,” I said, my fingers closing on two tiny hooves. There was something wrong, though, an angle that did not fit. I grunted along with the doe this time. “I think there’s something wrong with the fawn’s leg. It’s bent,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Straighten it,” Torun said. “Bring it towards the outside.”
It was hard work. The fawn, inside, recoiled at first from my attempt to pull its legs straight, but I was stronger. Slowly, the angle unbent itself and I eased out two bloody, cloven hooves. I grunted with the effort.
“Don’t let go,” Torun said behind me. “When she pushes, you pull the baby uksarv out. Ready?” he said. “Pull. NOW.” I pulled, and then Torun put his arms around mine, gripped and pulled with me as the doe pushed her best. Pull, pause. Pull, pause.
It seemed like eternity had passed before the long legs emerged, then the rump and ribcage. I adjusted my grip as the doe kicked in the effort to pass the fawn’s shoulders through, inch by inch. The shoulders were the biggest and the rest slithered out onto Torun and me.
I had a glimpse of the nose and closed eyes before Torun pushed me aside and took the membrane off the fawn’s face, cleared its nostrils and mouth of mucus. It had kicked and pulled away from me in the womb, but had it survived its passage into the world?
Next to us, the doe, panting and exhausted, struggled to deliver the afterbirth.
The fawn lay there, limp, as Torun breathed into its mouth. He pushed on its chest. Another breath. He sat back on his heels and wiped his face in the crook of his elbow.
We looked at the small, still thing. It coughed.
The doe lay with her head on the ground, so we dried the fawn off as best we could with my shirt and set it next to her teats. Sida nuzzled the doe, and I went to stroke her neck. The doe stood up slowly, gingerly and looked back and down at her fawn.
Below her, the fawn struggled to its feet and stretched out its neck to suckle. It sat down quickly, as if its tender bones had been bruised. I stepped forward to help the fawn up, but another doe from the herd nudged me aside. She also had no horn and her own sturdy fawn trotted close by her heels. This doe placed her nose expertly under the new fawn’s frail forelegs and supported it while it drank.
Torun brushed the outside of my hand with one finger, a reminder that we had other work to do. We tipped the cauldron over the fire and stamped out the embers. Only after the hiss of hot wood had faded did I realize that we should have washed our hands again in the warm water. Instead, we gathered our things and stumbled down to the riverside, dirty and exhausted. I went first, stripping off my clothing as I stood knee deep in the water.
It was dark. It didn’t matter if he saw me or not. My shirt was full of blood and mucous and feces and I didn’t want it on me anymore. I squatted down in the cold, running stream and then lay down.
“They will see your hair is wet,” he said.
“Don’t care.” I scrubbed my clothes but knew they would still be mucky. I tossed them onto the stones.
“You should take my shirt,” he said.
There wasn’t any reason to say anything else. I sloshed out to him, and he held the shirt out in front of him like a flag of surrender.
I climbed into it while, a few safe paces away, he peeled off his trousers.
“Stay,” he said.
I watched him, a dim glowing slip of white in the river. He had a long walk back to the high pasture. I hoped nothing had happened to the sheep.
“I wasn’t scared,” I said. My voice was sudden and loud in the night.
He splashed water onto himself. “I did not say you were.” He was scrubbing at his arms with handfuls of rocky sand. “But I was. It was close.”
And now I felt foolish.
But he passed over my bravado. “You were strong. You did well.” He walked out of the river, wet and shivering and weary.
I went over to embrace him. Because I saw that he needed comfort, and I did too. His wet back was stippled with goosebumps. I rubbed my cheek against his chest.
I no longer felt the cold. Instead, I was filled with excitement and dread shot through with exhaustion. I needed to do something or say something, or I would burst.
“Thank you for coming with me.” I said at the very same time as he said, “Your nose is freezing.” We lapsed into silence. It was such an odd, everyday thing for him to say, but I was grateful for it. I pressed my cold nose into his shoulder and he laughed.
A splish-splash and whinny announced Sida’s arrival. Holding one another, we watched her approach. But then there was a strange cry, like some night bird. Instead of drawing closer together, we stepped apart.
When she reached us, Sida nudged at me and I scratched her neck. Torun turned to struggle into his trousers and vest, slinging his belt around his neck like a scarf. “I have a long walk.” He drew his fingers through her mane.
Sida stood quite still for a moment, took two steps to the left and vanished with Torun. I blinked. When I had first told him about the unicorns’ ability to disappear, he hadn’t believed. But now, I ran forward to the spot I had last seen them and couldn’t find anything. I was too tired to think it through.
I picked up my wet clothes with my fingertips and started walking back in Torun’s shirt. I had planned to hang the clothing up on the portico, but I simply walked through the house and dropped them on the floor before I collapsed into the big bed. I dreamt of nothing, of the darkness.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Bettina
“Pfft.”
I opened my eyes reluctantly. Sarai had drawn the curtain and beyond her, the open windows let in the bright sunshine. Out of sight, the clackety-clack told me that Melina was weaving at the big loom. Telka was humming and spinning.
“So, you’re alive.”
Sarai picked up my damp breeches and then my equally damp shirt. She frowned, seeing a third heap on the floor. She picked it up. She rubbed the cloth between her thumb and forefinger, noting the rougher weave. Frowning, she held it at arm’s length, to confirm what she already knew. Sarai knew her own handiwork, the difference between cloth made for men’s work in the field and women’s work in
doors. She knew that it wasn’t my shirt, that it was Torun’s shirt.
Sarai looked over at me. Her forehead wrinkled.
I didn’t say anything. How could I? I didn’t have the words to explain what had happened.
She looked over her shoulder in the direction of her mother and sister and tossed the shirt at me. I caught it in one hand.
“Take that out of here,” she hissed and she turned out of the nook, letting the curtain drop.
I dressed in a clean shift and skirt and bundled Torun’s shirt into a ball. Where was my pack? I must have left it with the herd last night. What else had we left there? I was going to have to go back for it.
Sarai was on the portico, laying out my breeches to dry. She opened my damp shirt and made a sound of disgust.
“What have you been doing?” Despite my efforts, the shirt was stained with rusty smears. It was going to have to be washed.
“Hurt animal. Torun helped me.”
“Hmm. Sure.” And then Sarai gave me that same worried look, which was so unlike her. “Just don’t…Lizbet, be gentle.”
What did that mean? I stared at her and she rolled her eyes. “And don’t be stupid.”
The summer morning was warm on the high pasture and the sheep grazed or huddled against each other. Torun was wearing his spare shirt and training his dogs, teaching them to lie down in the grass and crawl forward on their bellies while his arm was outstretched and his hand was flat. With a turn up of his hand, the dogs leapt up and raced towards him.
“Torun!”
The dogs flew towards me, eager to say hello, but with a whistle, Torun called them to his side.
“What happened?” I threw him his shirt and he spread it out on the grass.
“Nothing.”
“You disappeared. With Sida.”
He shook his head. “It was like I blinked and…and it was early in the afternoon. She was with me and we walked back to the high pasture and the flock.”
“So?”
“So, I got there just in time to see us leave.”
We stared at each other.
Sida had not just disappeared. She had also moved back through the day. She had moved through time. With Torun.
“Then there is magic,” I said.
“I said there’s no human magic,” Torun said, trying to limit the impossible. “This is the nature of the uksarv.”
I thought of Pa, of my lost years, of Bettina from years past. Perhaps there was some key to all this. “If we watch them, maybe we can understand.”
“Maybe,” he said, but he did not seem particularly interested in following the herd. He leaned forward to kiss me, beginning light and teasing, on my eyelids, the tip of my nose, then my mouth. I searched for places to impress my memory onto his skin, the dip of his collarbone, the soft skin inside his upper arm, behind his sunburned ears.
I might have bitten him on the shoulder and soon we were engaged in a sort of cooperative wrestling with our clothes mostly on. Though a shift and a skirt, I thought, were not much.
He put his hand tentatively on the inside of my leg, just above my knee where my shift had ridden up. I put my hand over his, unsure whether I wanted to slide it up, or to place it somewhere safer, like my waist, his waist, the grass. Or perhaps his hand was where it belonged right now.
We kissed and our fingers twined. For a moment, I almost forgot everything around us. But Torun’s refusal to know, to recognize the strangeness of the uksarv and the world pressed in on my mind.
“You could come with me,” I said. “I have to fetch your cauldron back for you. Come with me. You went into the forest and you came out safely.”
“I was with you because we had work to do,” he said simply. “And now you are here and I am not in the forest. I do not have to be there to be with you.”
“But…”
“I will bring the sheep down for shearing soon,” he said. “But I cannot leave them. They must be washed and shaved. I will have to teach Maro and Dan.”
The sheep were his work. The unicorns were mine. My work had once tied me to Ma, and I had been cut loose. But Torun was still tied to his home.
I ached to run back to him as I walked down. At the river, I paused to smooth my shift, to retie my belt around my skirt. Except for the belt, these were not my clothes. They were not mine. Was he? Had she kissed him behind his ear, or did that place belong exclusively to me? Had he admired the curve of her ankles in the palms of his hands? How did a person ask those questions without being consumed with possessive hunger? And there were other questions. What had happened to her?
Torun’s dislike of the forest and Melina’s curse on the hekunaisik suggested something strange. Did it have to do with magic or something else? I sang as I climbed. Blow away the dust, good wind, blow away the dust. With my heart’s old sorrow… Was the song about someone free to walk away from sorrow? Or did they carry it everywhere they went?
In Fenlen, I found the cauldron and my pack where we had left them. Last night, I had stamped out the fireplace, poured water over the embers and kicked some dirt over it, but this morning there was already a bunch of new fern heads unfurling in the spot.
The herd was nearby—it had drifted further west to a soft, grassy patch. I saw the speckled doe and the fawn sleeping between its mother’s legs. It looked frail, but alive. When I tried to draw close, the matriarch met me and stood firmly in my way. I had done my part, but the herd was not welcoming visitors.
Sida emerged from the group of does and trotted along behind me. Her companionship was a consolation for being sent away. She came down the escarpment with me. We were near the fork in the paths, near the place I had met Torun.
I turned to pat her, hold her, to scratch her in the places she liked.
“My baby,” I said. “What mischief you’ve been up to! How did you vanish yesterday, just like that?”
She stepped back and stood perfectly still, except for her ears, which twitched back and forth. She seemed to be thinking. Suddenly, around her, the leaves shrank into buds, the grass withdrew into the ground, which became cold and hard underfoot. With a rustle of wind, the fallen leaves lifted back onto the trees, turning from brown to red to gold.
Autumn.
I remembered that first day I had explored with Torun, the girl’s scream. Had it been mine? Or someone else’s? I ran forward towards Sida and she remained where she was, as if she were concentrating very hard. When I stood beside her and looked around, I saw the leaves and grass turning from life to death all around me.
And now I heard the sobbing. It was hushed, bitten back.
Stepping cautiously, I approached the sound. Sida followed me, kicking up the leaves.
There, where I had first met Torun, a girl stood with her head pressed on the boulder. Her elbows were propped on the rock above and she seemed to be pulling at her own hair.
“Bettina,” I said.
She lifted her face fast. She was silent, suspicious of having her feelings seen.
She had a bit more of her mother in her, a slight fineness to her features. Her chin was more pointed, her throat slimmer. Perhaps she was just hungrier. She was not quite a mirror image: a refraction, not a reflection of who I might be.
“Are you…are you all right?”
Her eyes went big. I put my hand out to her.
She screamed. Not with fright alone, but with rage. She stooped down and picked up a rock.
Now I pivoted on my heel and ran. The rock went wide, flickering through the bushes and falling on my right.
I saw Sida standing, watching me with her head cocked to the right. She turned as I neared her. I put my hand on her shoulder, and around us, the days blurred as the world cooled and warmed and then settled as we found the heat of summer.
Despite the heat, I was shivering. Sida nibbled on a patch of b
ilberries, but I sat down among the low-lying shrubs that grew in carpets around the boulders between the river and the escarpment.
I had seen her. She had seen me. And between us there was a year in which she disappeared.
What had happened to her? I had found her, if just for a few moments. If I had done it once, could I do it again? And if I could find her again, could I save her? If I saved her, what would happen to me?
I should not panic, I told myself. I would give myself time to think. I had time. If Sida had shown me anything, I thought, I had time.
But I was wrong, because Pa was back and trouble came at his heels.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Business and Family
There was a covered cart outside the family hedge. After the first jolt of recognition, I realized it was different from the one Ma had at home, with its cunning wooden house perched on top of the wagon bed. This one had a frame covered by tanned leather and had bells bolted to the corners.
A muscular dun mare grazed in front of it, her forelegs hobbled to keep her from straying. Maro and Dan perched in a tree a few steps away, watching her with delight.
A horse?
I hadn’t seen a horse in months. I had assumed that these people did not have horses. Now I knew that everyone around us was simply too poor to have them.
“What is it like, Lizbet?” Dan asked. He was the shyer of the two boys, so his words spoke to a special determination.
“What?”
Maro pointed “How do we…”
I realized that if there were seldom any horses around, my brush with Sida would be one of their only sightings of such animals. And Sida was much smaller than this work animal.
The mare looked up at us, her ears twitching. She knew she could not run and was made nervous by her vulnerability.
I put out my hand, palm down so she could smell it. “Yimma naisik,” I murmured, using the same crooning tone Torun had used with Sida. I scratched her under the chin, stroked her cheek and her neck. She was so docile, so used to being touched.
The Changeling of Fenlen Forest Page 16