Tender Morsels

by Margo Lanagan

  ‘Yes,’ said Liga when they reached home next morning and told her their adventure. ‘I have seen that light.’

  ‘You have?’ said Urdda. ‘And you never told us?’ What kind of mother kept such a thing to herself?

  ‘I have been to that precipice and spoken with that moon-babby.’

  ‘Babby?’ said Urdda. ‘That was no bab, unless it was the babby of a monster. It was huge, Mam! Big as this cottage.’

  ‘Oh, Urdda, it was not!’ laughed Branza. ‘It was the size of Bear himself, maybe a tadge bigger.’

  ‘Well, whatever size,’ said Liga, ‘you do not need to be frightened of it, Branza; it means you nothing but good. See how it stopped you falling?’

  ‘It did not stop Bear,’ Branza pointed out.

  ‘Yes, it did,’ said Urdda. ‘It was Bear, magicked so that he floated and was safe.’ She nodded, and nodded some more at her mam, hoping to reassure herself by convincing someone else.

  ‘You have not seen Bear this morning?’ said Liga.

  ‘We looked, didn’t we, Branza? To see if he had fallen, you know. Certainly we could not see him from above. And no, we didn’t meet him, all that long way home. We could have ridden him if we had, couldn’t we? We would have been home so much sooner. Truly, you have not been worried about us, Mam?’

  ‘I did wonder. But I knew you were out there with Bear. I knew you would come to no harm. And neither did you.’ She picked a scrap of moss from Branza’s golden hair. ‘Tell me again, Urdda, how he ran off the cliff.’

  Urdda described it again, and Liga listened, so attentively that Urdda did not have to enlarge or embroider the story to keep her from picking up needle or broom.

  ‘And you did not . . . Did you think to reach out and touch the moon-bear?’

  ‘Touch him?’ Branza made a face. ‘He would have burnt our fingers off! Or froze them, maybe. Or . . . it might have hurt.’

  ‘Or it might not. It might have brought him back to his usual self, just to . . .’ Liga made the gesture herself, her face hopeful and thoughtful: ‘Just to take his paw, you know, and pull him to you, as when you make him dance with you.’

  ‘Well, we did not,’ said Urdda bluntly to her mother’s faraway face. ‘Branza was too frighted.’

  ‘Oh, I did not see you grabbing him when he reached for us.’

  ‘Reached for you?’ said Liga sharply. ‘He did not reach.

  He did this.’ Urdda swiped the air nonchalantly. ‘Near us. As if just to play or something. Or to wave a fly away.’

  ‘Or to knock us off the cliff-top,’ said Branza dryly. ‘Which is when you said, “Let us go in the trees.” ’

  ‘And you agreed quick-smart, and ran straight off.’

  ‘Oh, do not quarrel about it.’ Liga gathered their two damp, tired bodies to her. ‘We are all upset to have lost Bear.’

  ‘Yes, we are.’ Branza laid her head gratefully on her mother’s shoulder.

  ‘Where do you think he has gone to, Mam?’ said Urdda.

  Liga thought on it, holding them, swinging them a little. ‘I do not know,’ she said. ‘I cannot tell you. I cannot imagine.’ And gradually she stilled, and gazed at the floor as if standing on a precipice herself, searching the forest below for the tiniest glimpse of tiny, tiny Bear. Urdda had been on the point of asking, Have you also seen that littlee-man, down by the marsh? But that look of her mother’s, as if the surfaces of things hardly mattered against what she saw in her mind, against what she regretted that she saw, kept the daughter silent.

  Midafternoons or evenings were when he would arrive. As the year warmed, they had left the cottage door open to breezes, and he would be an event, nearly filling the doorway, all muddy fur and fishy or clovery breath. If the girls were there, they would run to him and make a great fuss, remarking on his state and delighting in putting him to rights. And there was always a point, when they had groomed and arranged him, at which he would make his way to Liga, and nudge her with his head if she was busy, with her back to him; or lower his head and tickle her bare feet with breath, seeming to ask her blessing for being there among them.

  It took Liga a long time to stop expecting him. She would hear the girls’ voices coming through the wood, and she had to school her feelings not to lift into amusement and anticipation, but only to be happy to see her two daughters squabbling or laughing—slender, smooth-limbed, unshadowed by Bear.

  It is just that he was so large, she thought, so that he leaves a large emptiness behind him. But it was not his largeness she missed—or not only that. Every way that he had disposed that size around them, or at the centre of them—accepting his role as toy or bed or amiable furnishings; snoring on the hearth or across the cottage step in the springtime; friendly and foolish one moment, gentlemanly the next, solemn and vastly noble the next—had improved and enlarged their lives. Liga found—as she laundered at the stream and glanced up at shadows that were not Bear; as she tidied after the evening meal and Branza and Urdda ran out into the last light, just the two of them, speeding around until they dizzied themselves, with no Bear to clamber on or instruct or reduce to rumbling contentment with scratchings of his head and back—how easily she had accustomed herself to him: to his size, to his maleness, to his easy acceptance of all their embraces. She could lie across her own bed, but it did not have the shape and warmth of Bear; she could be prone on a sunlit knoll of fine grass that almost, almost gave the feeling of Bear’s fur if she closed her eyes and imagined hard, yet it did not sigh and shift beneath her, or make Bear’s digestive mumbles and squeaks. He was with them no longer, she must always at some point admit, and once she had admitted it she would go out and gather up a daughter, all bones and flying hair, and tumble her Bear-like on the grass and growl, or sit by the fire on one of the wooden stools and wrap her arms around her own self as she gazed into the flames.

  Urdda stamped back and forth along the cliff-top, beating at the edge with a long, stout stick.

  ‘Show yourself to me!’ she muttered. ‘Whatever you were, magic Bear or star fallen out the sky. Come and glow at me.’ Thud, thump, she went with her stick.

  The world below was all dark billows of hill and tree, and sunlit birds’ backs as they flew. The breeze teased everything. Urdda’s dark curls stroked her cheeks and forehead. All was movement, yet nothing was happening.

  ‘It was not a dream,’ she insisted to the sky. ‘We followed Bear! He jumped off here and flew away, and then there you were. Both of us saw you—even Branza, who didn’t want to. And Mam, she knew—she never once said we must be making up stories, or touched by the sun, or what.’

  Thump. A spray of dirt flew out from the cliff-edge and fell away. Why would nothing do as she told it? The drifty clouds followed their own breeze; the sky dreamed; in the great hard world, sticks stuck out and scraped you, stones tripped you, trees stood silent and required you to find your way among them. Everything ignored Urdda, no matter how angry she grew.

  ‘I have not brought Branza today!’ she called into the emptiness. ‘I believe in you! You can show yourself and I will not be frightened. Come on, bright thing, whoever you were!’

  The silence streamed at her in its disguise of hissing leaves and bird-cry. ‘Blast and bother you,’ she whispered. ‘Where in the name of that hairy bad-man are you?’

  She stood very close to the edge, shut her eyes, and imagined the space before her: the maw of it, the yawn. It had been nearly dark when Bear disappeared—not the red-dark of sunlit eyelids like this, but proper thickening dusk, full of evening creatures, the thrill of their fleeing paws. She had run up that path with Branza’s whimpers in her ears and Bear’s mass ahead, and she had seen him lope off into the stars just as if the ground continued. And she would have, would have followed, had not that bear-thing, that moon-thing, come beaming at them and said—What had it said? No, there had been no voice, no words. Only it had made her think how tired she was, and how she ought to look to Branza’s safety, and to her own. If it had not got
in the way, she would have run right off after Bear into . . . wherever. Into that place of light. Into the place that caught you if you fell from a cliff-top, and stopped you dashing to pieces on those rocks down there.

  Still she swayed on the cliff, trying to pull the magic up from her memory, to infuse this afternoon with whatever had obtained that other evening to make impossible things possible. She thought about the moon-bear; she pretended, with all her heart and imagination, that the hot light on her eyelids was of the bright thing, that all around this blob of heat that was moonbear-lit Urdda, the evening was breezing, full of owls and owl-prey, bats and bat-beetles on the wing. So strongly did she want this, she convinced herself she had made it so; that the moon-thing had heard her plea and come to fetch her, just as it had fetched Bear. Slowly she walked, backward down the slope, eyes closed, feet feeling, holding the real gravel and hot ground entwined with the moonish thoughts, the cool-night-air imaginings.

  She ran forward now, up the same slope, ignoring the memory of Branza’s voice—Oh, Urdda, do stop! Stop and he will come back to us, all by himself—running into the red darkness. Bear lumbered there, hot with light, red with heat. ‘I’m coming too!’ Urdda cried. ‘Wait for me!’ Squeezing her eyes tighter shut, she ran out into the air after him.

  There, you see? It had worked. See how dark it really was, and the stars! And here—she was in Bear’s claws, or teeth; he had picked her up in some awkward way. Oh, but—curse and cross it—there was the moon-bear, away off there so far, hovering out of Urdda’s reach like a glowing cheese-round in the sky, blotting out so many stars with its busy light.

  But this time it thought nothing at her; it only shrank and steadied and became the ordinary moon, pouring down its flat silver light, coating Urdda in the disappointing stuff. This was a tree she had been caught in, not bear-claws; she had not flown, but only fallen, like the lump she was, down a slope that had not been there when she had peered down over the cliff-edge, into a tree that most definitely had not been here—she would have noted it in the bright afternoon; she would have been careful to avoid it. She had knocked her head on something and slept for a time, to wake now with her skin all hot and sunstruck inside the chill shell of the night breeze, her flesh bruised and stiff, and the moon above her not come to fetch her at all, not even looking at Urdda with its big blind eye, but lighting, as it lit up everything without discrimination or favour, the sloping path she must follow back up to the dreary world.

  ‘Daft girl,’ said Liga fondly. She ran fingers light as a drift of pollen over the bruise on Urdda’s brow. ‘Girls were not meant to fly. Where are your feathers? Where are your wings?’

  ‘Bear didn’t have feathers, nor wings, and yet he flew.’ Urdda sat quiet and good in the washpool in the moony dark, and Liga rinsed the dust and sweat off her slowly, carefully, and with some curiosity. This washing made Urdda feel she ought to be a little ill, or just soft, as Branza was, who loved all touches and kindness and was never impatient with them.

  ‘I don’t think Bear flew at all,’ said Liga, squeezing a clothful of water over Urdda’s dusty hair.

  ‘No, nor do I,’ said Branza. ‘Bear changed into a moon-bear and magicked us to sleep.’

  ‘And then what?’ said Urdda. ‘Where did he go then? And why can we not go there too?’

  ‘Why would you want to?’ said Branza.

  ‘Because Bear is there, that is why! And other people and things, surely.’ Urdda caught Branza’s warning glance and shrugged. ‘All the wonderful things Mam tells of in her bed-stories.’

  ‘But all the dreadful things too,’ said Branza darkly. ‘Evil warlocks and greedies and those horrid horses with the eyes like carriage-lamps. Why would you want to go to a place like that?’

  ‘Because it is there! Because you can—or you must be able to somehow, if Bear went, and—’ She twitched at another meaningful stare from her sister. ‘I would want to see it, anyway. You don’t have to come. I think a person should see everything there is to see.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Liga. ‘Perhaps an older person. I think you belong here with me, the both of you, for a good while yet. And by the growing of mysterious trees and the plumping-out of pieces of cliff-faces to catch you, I would say some powerful person agrees with me.’

  Liga chose a market day, when there would be more people about. She took the girls to the Whistle to visit Keller’s daughter Ada so that she would be alone. Slowly she walked up the town. Everything was reassuringly the same as usual—goodwives going about their business, greeting her here and there—and around and among them the mysterious affairs of men went on, which seemed to involve standing in confident attitudes together and talking earnestly when they were not driving carts or toiling in smithies and workshops. If she drew near any talkers, she knew, they would gently recoil, and glance at her and nod without greeting her, not interrupting their talk.

  She had considered these men. She hardly knew any by name; most had been replaced by the light-brown-haired folk, and somehow she could not approach those ones; they existed to be strangers, to make the town amiable and bustling with their numbers. She thought, but vaguely and glancingly, about her own purposes—they were to look into someone’s eyes as she had looked into Bear’s and see thoughts shifting there; to reach out and touch the skin of someone who had lived a little, as she herself had—skin that was not the pearls and peaches of her daughters’ faces; that was roughened somewhat, maybe flecked with a scar, and under which she might sense, as she had sensed perhaps with Bear, something of her own uncertainty, her own hopefulness. This was what she thought she wanted.

  She had settled—so lightly and timidly that it could hardly be called settling—on Joseph the Lathe, who worked behind his father Tomas in the woodshop in the eastern lanes. Joseph was diligent, kind-faced; he was golden-haired like herself. She walked across the market square, her head thudding with nervous blood. Nobody seemed to notice that she carried this emotion among them, so inappropriate to the place, though her face felt rigid with it. The feeling tottered and tangled inside her, and she had to rest on a bench against the pot-man’s shop wall. Fear, it was—the relief of recognising it made her sag. She had not felt real fear in a long time—the pulsing of it, the discomfort of her innards. And why was she afraid? Da was gone, dead forever. All the young men who might harm her were gone. She was here, in this place that had never done her any damage and never would. It had given her everything she wanted, these seven years; why should it not deliver her this, a loving connection with some kind man?

  Up she got, still frightened but more determined now, and she went into the lanes and found the woodshop. Tomas was not at his lathe by the door. Oh, good, she thought, they are gone out and there is nothing I can do. But there was Joseph, working deeper in the shop, as always. Well, see how it is all arranged for you? she told herself anxiously. The lane was quiet, though people passed at both ends of it.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said, standing in the doorway. How could a person be clumsy, just standing? And yet she felt she was, as clumsy as one of those blocks of boxwood being seasoned there, unshaped, indelicate.

  Joseph lifted his kind face. ‘Good morning, miss,’ he said in his quiet way.

  ‘May I watch awhile?’

  ‘Of course you may.’ And he went to his work again.

  She brought forward one of the stools with the turned legs, that stood against the wall. She had plainer ones at home. Were she married to a woodworker, she might have him make any number of fancy things for her house.

  But where would that house be? She settled quietly on the stool, watching Joseph’s profile. Would he join her in the forest, or would she move to the town, into the house with his parents and his brothers and sisters? Either place was outlandish; a marriage, a wedding with herself as bride, was outlandish. How did girls move such concentrated beings, bent over their work, towards marriage? How was the thing done?

  ‘Where is your father today?’ she asked him.
r />   ‘Out at the woodmen’s camp, selecting,’ he said.

  There, see? No one would return and thwart her if this was what she wanted. Liga watched the work, the wood-dust flying and the shavings spiralling off; a bowl refining itself in his hands; the hands themselves. How was a girl to distract them from such usefulness; to attract them to herself, to her own hands, to her face? And she felt the scratchy-wood pads of Bear’s paw against her cheek, and she saw his eyes full of wonder and puzzlement, and she heard the breath in his big bear-lungs.

  ‘Tell me, Joseph,’ she said. ‘Do you have a . . . sweetheart? Do you have a girl?’

  ‘I do not,’ he said to the bowl, in a manner that neither rebuffed her nor drew her on, so that she gained nothing from the question beyond the information. Well, that was something, was it not?

  ‘Do you wish for one?’ Oh, how bald that sounded. ‘Sometimes?’ she added, to soften it; and then, ‘Ever?’ quite at a loss.

  He gave her a look. There was something of a smile in it—was he laughing at her, at her clumsiness, at the effort this took? There was—oh, she did not know any more how to read anyone’s face but her daughters’! She was not fit to be outside her home, she was such a poor judge of people.

  ‘You don’t?’ I sound pitiful, she thought. And so sad!

  He gave her a second look, as unreadable as the first. He had heard her, then. Did he perhaps have no opinion yet? But look at those hands; they were a man’s hands. And look at that face, the jaw fully squared and glittering with stubble. Was he too shy to answer, then? She had chosen him for his shyness, she reminded herself; she had known he would not be sure enough of himself to harm her. Perhaps she had known she would have to put the thought into his head, that he was too timid to think it himself.

  So, holding her breath, she reached out and rested the backs of her fingers against Joseph’s cheek.