Tender Morsels

by Margo Lanagan

  ‘Money?’ said Urdda. ‘I’ve heard Mam use that word, for stories.’

  ‘I bet you have, little slutter-tart. I’ll bet you have.’

  ‘Come away, Urdda,’ said Branza, hating his sneering tone. ‘He is free now; we can leave him be.’

  ‘But I want to know, yet. How did you come to be caught so?’ Urdda pointed into the marsh.

  Where does she get such curiosity? Branza wondered. How can she care one way or the other about this worn-out boot of a man and his unpleasantness?

  ‘None of your bee-wax,’ he said.

  ‘What are you?’ said Urdda, fascinated. ‘Are you a bad man, such as fireside stories have? Should we run away from you?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the littlee-man smoothly. ‘I am Saint Collaby himself, and you should always come to my aid when you find me in trouble, on pain of the God-man paddling your bottom.’

  What is he talking about? thought Branza, exasperated.

  ‘Who put you in the marsh, then,’ said Urdda, ‘and tied your beard there, if you are not bad?’

  ‘You’d never understand.’ The dwarf picked up another clump of eggs and watched them shrink and gleam on his palm. ‘Not the permutations nor the torchurous exigencies.’ He clicked the beads into the cloth with the others. Then he fetched out his muddy pocket-string and tied up the cloth. ‘I am done here,’ he said. ‘I am off home to go shopping. You can sit and goggle all you like.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to thank us,’ said Branza icily, ‘for saving you?’

  He turned and she flinched, not knowing what to expect from him. ‘Oh, yes,’ he sneered, offering a smart salute that flicked mud at both the girls. ‘A thousand thanks for chopping off my manhood; pardon me that I do not stoop to kiss your filthy feet, whore-daughters.’

  He hoisted his little sack, walked around a flattish rock, stamped his foot and was gone, seemingly into the ground.

  Urdda laughed! And now she was running after him!

  ‘No!’ Branza followed, terrified her sister would also disappear behind the rock.

  ‘He’s gone into nowhere and nothing.’ Wonderingly, Urdda patted the moss, peering under the rock’s little overhang. Then she lifted her face, finely spattered with mud, to Branza, all alight still. ‘Where can he have gone? Has he changed into the ground, a part of the ground?’

  ‘He’s gone to a place of monsters just like him,’ said Branza tightly. ‘Where he belongs and we most certainly do not.’

  Urdda stood up from the rock. The shore was empty. Only the scrapes and scrabble-marks in the mud showed that anything had happened; only her own wetness and muddiness, and the stubborn set to Branza’s shoulders as she picked up the pie-basket.

  ‘Are there such places?’ Urdda skipped after her sister.

  ‘He had to come from somewhere,’ grumped Branza, ‘and he had to go.’

  ‘And more like him live there?’ Now Urdda was dancing backwards, watching Branza’s mouth. ‘That shout out whatever pops in their heads, and are ugly, and hit out at people?’

  ‘I don’t know. Have I ever been?’

  ‘You might have. You might have, and not told me!’ Urdda laughed at that enchanting thought, and danced on beside Branza. ‘But wouldn’t you love to follow him and see that place?’

  ‘I would not want to be anywhere that horrid littlee is.’

  ‘I would love to go there! Do you think Mam has ever been? Has she ever seen that man, do you suppose?’ Urdda’s blood itched in her veins.

  ‘She has never said so,’ said Branza.

  ‘But then—’ Urdda hopped after her steady sister. ‘There may be a lot of things that Mam has seen and never spoken of, to us. She is tremendously old.’

  Branza cast an alarmed look over her shoulder.

  ‘Well, we ought to ask her,’ Urdda said.

  ‘We ought not,’ said Branza.

  ‘Whyever not?’

  ‘Because if she has not seen him . . . well, I shouldn’t think she would want to know of someone like that.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t she, you daftun?’

  Branza pushed on through the bushes; the twiggy noises against the basket’s weave were like her irritation come alive. ‘She just wouldn’t. I’m sure she wouldn’t.’

  ‘How are you sure?’

  ‘I just am. Because I am seven summers old. When you are seven, you will know some things too.’

  ‘I will?’ Urdda ceased her hopping and conjecturing. She slowed and walked along beside her sister, hoping by her similar gravity and sensibleness to attract the knowledge down upon herself.

  Next morning, Urdda went to the marsh alone, took off her shift, and waded out into the water, feeling with her toes for that bristly bit of beard-hair she must have left in the hard clay floor. It must have caught when he magicked himself here, she thought yet again. There must be some little door, some tiny opening, some mended place between here and wherever he had come from.

  Urdda looked up into the great careless sky, with mare’s-tails curling in it like peals of laughter made visible. Was there a whole other region down there with its own skies and marshes, a whole other world?

  She searched and searched for some object or dimple or unusual sensation underfoot. She searched until her teeth chattered and she could no more feel her feet, let alone the shapes beneath them. But all she found this time was squish and squash, fish-nibble and eel-whip and the flowering of mud up around her middle. A-dark, said a frog to her; pok! said a fish; and a crane smoothed the air with its passing wing.

  Suddenly impatient, she waded back to shore. Several flat rocks lay there, all very like the one the littlee-man had disappeared behind. She stamped all around them. ‘Pardon me I don’t kiss your feet, hoar-daughters,’ she said several times, in case it was the words that had made him disappear. ‘Hoar-daughters. Hoar-daughters.’ She stamped and stamped behind each stone.

  She tired of stamping. She stared at the ordinariness around her. She could stand here and listen to her own world breathing, with all its catches and coughs, all the many thoughts passing cold and busy under its surface. But she could not pass through to that other one. She could only watch and wait, and hope the littlee-man would come through again, and not disappear as fast this time, so that she could see how he did it, how he came and went, and follow him.

  6

  It is a great honour to be made a Bear. Only the best of young men gets it in this town, the strongest and the handsomest. You may not be Bear if you are already wed, but usually you have had girls interested in you, and you may have shown some interest yourself.

  Which is why I thought some sort of mistake had been made this spring, that I was here. Because I had hardly lifted my eyes from my misery this last year and more, losing our mam just after New-Year, and then our da of grief from losing her. You must get some joy of life, Uncle had been saying. Dance, boy; drink! Steal some kisses! Sow some oats! What do you think you have all that youth and health for? But No, I’d said, and No. And when he wanted to garland me and drink to me for my eighteenth year I would not let him, for I could not see what there was to celebrate in that.

  I would not be surprised if Uncle had prevailed on someone in the council to make me Bear, however much he insisted not. Or perhaps they felt enough pity themselves, seeing my long face about the town, my earnest work in the wool hall and among the shepherds and flocks on the Mount, among the merchants and wool-hags and weavers in the market square.

  That young Davit Ramstrong, he needs taking out of himself, they might have said around their meeting-table.

  Someone would have made a face. I don’t know. These Bears, they is supposed to be everything that is spring. You know: strong, wild, mebbe a little dangerous, fulla juice and roar. Do you think—

  Have you seen the size of the boy?

  But he handles it so clumsy. And he wouldn’t know what to do with a woman, which way up to turn her. He is still moodling after his mother, that one.

  All the more reaso
n. He can learn it on the trot, on Bear Day. I know a few girls as will teach him a thing.

  And a grimace and a shrug, and the thing was done, and now here I was, stuck with it, honoured and shamed both.

  There in the cold room, dressing with me, Fuller, Wolfhunt and Stow made a lot of noise to cover the quiet inside us, the awe, putting on the stiff skins.

  ‘Can we not wear them over our own clothes?’ Stow had said. ‘These trousers scratch like mad, the stitching.’

  ‘You sop,’ Wolfhunt’s dad had said. ‘You will die of heat in there as it is, running. Also, the maids like to know there is nothing but yourself in the skin. The maids and the maids’ mothers. No one wants a glimpse of breeches or smock. Flesh is the thing. Muscle and sweat.’ And he went at Wolf’s face with the oil-and-soot, so energetic that Wolf squawked. ‘Shut your mewing,’ he laughed. ‘How can I be proud of a boy that mews?’

  ‘Hmph,’ said Stow. ‘They have a very particular pong.’ He sniffed the shoulder of the costume. ‘All those stinking dads and granddads, eh?’

  ‘Of Bear!’ cried Wolf’s dad. ‘Of Bear and privilege! Of good usage! This is my happiest day!’ He kissed Wolf smack on the forehead and got a blackened mouth from it.

  Wolf looked bashful. ‘Do my hands, you great softun. Good and heavy, so I can mark many and well.’

  Uncle tied my skin shirt at the back. Except for the bonnet, I couldn’t take these clothes off myself. I was supposed to be a man, but I felt like a bab again, having its bib tied.

  Uncle was the only quiet man here. I am thinking of Whin, he had said to me this morning, standing there as I woke, the milk-bowl steaming in his hands.

  I know, I said. I had my da in mind, too. My da in the deep winter, declined to bedriddenness, a terrible sight, so thin and so pale and old, it would make you weep to see—it made me. I shall never see light again, he told us when the winter storms drew in. No, Davit, Aran, protest all you like. I am going down the long tunnel now, the one that don’t surface again.

  Well, turn around, you donkey! I had thought at him, but did I say it? No, I was too struck at the heart of. And now of course I wished I had, or Aran had; I wished we had nagged and begged and shamed him into staying.

  The wind whistled in at the window. ‘Smells of snow,’ I said. Spring was undecided this year about coming; all the trees were nubby with leaf buds and still the weather flurried and near froze.

  ‘’Twill be a light dusting, if it falls at all,’ said Uncle, ‘and you’ll be warm enough with your exertions.’

  ‘Even if all your skins fall off, you’ll be warm,’ said Stow. ‘Piled there under all them women. Even if it snows a blizzard.’

  Ah, Gawd. Even since the council had told the names of the chosen, without a whiff of bearskin or a touch of soot, I had seen the girls seeing me. It was uncomfortable; I could not meet their eyes and read that question there; that wondering, that measuring of me and of theirselves against me. Before this, no one had noticed my growing, I had been so quiet and then had been singled out for such ill-luck. With the weight and colour of my miseries, no one had noticed me bulking out, lengthening, it went so gradual. I was become a man under everyone’s noses, even to my own surprise, a little. And now everyone was looking; I saw the flicker of it at the edge of everything. The girl-groups fell silent as I passed, and whispered behind me. You can have your pick! Norse had hissed to me, who would never be Bear, he was such a bean-stick and a whiner.

  Have my pick? It bewildered me, the very idea. Da had not picked Mam, nor Uncle picked Aunt Nica, as from an array of pears on a tree. Although both women widowed them and left them almost limbless from the loss, so perhaps their method of wife-choosing would not bring me happiness either.

  ‘So here we are,’ said Wolf’s dad. He scrubbed at one eye with the heel of his hand and stepped back and took us in, Stow and Wolf now with their tall bear-bonnets on, Fuller watching his dad colour his bear-feet with soot. ‘The finest of our town.’

  ‘Oh, we are,’ said Stow. He would always be sure. He never had thought he would not be here this day. There was a man would pick his wife from a row of them, all lined up and giggling.

  Uncle swallowed and blinked away dew to see me here, among these. He clapped my furry arm and his touch was a dead thump, thick with feeling. I smiled at him, glad he were there, glad he were glad.

  ‘Oh, the teeth on you,’ he said, his voice gone all partial, and clapped me again.

  Out we went through the room of the old Bears, who were cheering and weeping and some of them drinking already to warm their stiff bones against the oncoming weather.

  Hogback Elder blessed us in his foreign speech from his throne-ish armchair; and then the God-man in his disapproving way, tall and starven-looking and dressed black as a moon-shadow; and finally the mayor spoke something we could understand, how we were fine young men and would remember this day all our lives and such. We stood quiet for it, and the olds behind us restlessly quiet too.

  Then the words were done.

  ‘Go on up, boys,’ said Stow’s dad softly.

  Fuller whooped, and then it was on, then everyone knew, and like a hit of brawn-liquor it came alive in my stomach: Bear Day. It was ours and no one else’s—not these olds’, not our friends’ or brothers’, but we four only’s. I was not myself any more; I was one of the four Bears. I cannot tell you the relief.

  Up the tower steps we ran, out into the sunshine and across to the wall. As soon as they saw us, men shouted below, and women screamed, and the rest of the crowd turned up their faces. It were the women screaming that gave us our power: the sound hit my ears painful as knife-edges, but in my stomach it was like fat meat and clean ale, filling me for my day’s wild work.

  We roared and clawed the air and ran back and forth along the battlement. We all but threw ourselves off the top, leaning out fierce and threatening. Every child does this, boy or girl, in play. But we were not playing; we were the real Bears that children wanted to be, to terrify the world and bring spring.

  I don’t remember getting down to the streets, I was so ahead of myself, so gone from myself. But I did, and then there were simple rules to follow. The ones that came at me, young and old alike, I picked them up, planted a black kiss on them, put them to the side, and ran on, roaring. The girls that cringed and shrieked and ran, I pursued. I brought them down, smeared them with my face, gave them a good dose of my hand’s soot-and-grease, messed them right up. Children that were offered me, terrified as I were terrified once when held up by my mam—for them I softened my roaring to a growl, and streaked them lightly on their cheeks, thumb and forefinger in a single pinch. I uttered no word to anyone. If any woman broke the rule and fled indoors, I’d licence and permission to follow her in, smudge and disarrange her house, and break one thing—pottery I found to be the most satisfying—unless she offered me her cheek.

  I could feel it in me, the force of spring. I could see the excitement and the fear of the maidens, the fervour of wives wishing for a babby, putting themselves in my way. I could see the men, too, pushing their wives and women forward and their daughters, and laughing a particular laughter, with a jealous note in it—I could hear that. I had never laughed that laugh myself, but now I saw the reason for it: they wanted to be so tall and furred and wild as me, so disguised, and turn the season, and be so free. It had never quite made sense before.

  My path crossed with Stow’s. One of his cheeks was clean, but the soot around that eye kept him monstrous. We ran together for a while, taking courage one from the other, combining to chase down some of the fleeter girls.

  ‘Eeyaagh! Ooraaarrgh!’

  We ran through quarters I had never been, down every alley, kissing old women pressed against their doorposts, laughing; following clumps of girls, their flying skirts, their blue running feet.

  ‘I’ve a rod on me like a pike,’ Stow panted as we cut along the lane by Wellbrook. ‘I hate to think if my skin falls off.’

  Did I want to know
such? I did not. ‘It won’t fall,’ I said. ‘These are cut and sewn and tied for a full day’s worth of rough running. We are prisoners in them.’

  ‘They are hot, though, ain’t they? Might be a relief to lose them. And some of these wives, the look in their eyes, they’d sit theirselves upon you on sight, hunh?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Here, you run along straight. I will go down the twitten and head those washergirls off.’

  ‘Good man! Sharp thinking!’ He was gone, and I was in the twitten, Hogback’s wall at one ear, the Eelsisters’ hedge at the other, their sunny lawn glittering through.

  I was all slime inside my skins; sweat was drabbling from under my bonnet. How long had we run? And we must run, and kiss and roar and paw and smash, until we were stopped—we’d be derided if we fell down for long among the women. We must spread ourselves thin—everyone must be touched and marked. A Bear moved fast so as not to be recognised, so as not to be himself, to stay a stranger and a bear.

  And then either the twitten grew long or my running slowed without my deciding, for it were very difficult on a sudden. The sunny lawn streaked aslant one way and another through the hedge of Eelsisters’, from one step to the next. The flagstones went soft underfoot, like sucking bog; my feet would not spring back as they should. It was all falling away—the narrow hot shadowy air of the twitten, the damp paving, the square of bright grass within the cloister, with a sister there, stitching—and I was running fast and furious into the air. What was I to do? I could not stop; I would fall and shatter. In terror I brought my feet up under me and jumped—against what, I could not tell you; against some solid bit of nothing. I spread my arms and flew, like swimming on cold air, and the town dropped and tilted, and I could see more country than I had knowledge of—I could see how the forest and hills were disposed; how each town snuggled against its glitter of water; how the roads crept about around them, flung from one to the other like a boat-rope or a goat-tether. Oh, I thought, there is a system about all we do and live—look at it. There is a pattern. Everything fits here, even the fact that Stow has his rod about this strange day while I do not; while it is nothing of that kind for me. The pattern is bigger than my own body, certainly bigger than the manhood of me; ’tis seasonal and circular; births and deaths happen, and lives, so many lives, overlap each other, full of lessons and habits and accidents—and those is just our cosy matters, people’s, small and colourful, in the midst of everything we do not know, which goes on around us regardless—