Deerskin

by Robin McKinley

  There were also further shapes and smells in the bins where she had first found apples and onions and potatoes that were undoubtedly other vegetables, and while she and Ash ate them, she never did know what most of them were. Some grew recognizable upon scrubbing clean, like carrots, even old wrinkly rusty-orange ones. But there was a carrot-shaped thing that, when cut, was creamy-colored inside, and which disintegrated in the soup-bucket much more quickly than carrots, which she did not know, although the taste seemed vaguely familiar. Some things, like a long round brown root that had to stew most of a day before it was soft enough to eat, she had never met before. There were also a few bags of astonishingly dry and rot-free grains of various sizes and shapes, round or oval or folded, tiny or not so tiny, all of which she and Ash ate, although the husks of some of them caught unpleasantly in the teeth and the throat. And, best of all, there was a big rough sack of salt: salt for bread and salt for soup, salt for any and everything, lots of it, more than she could imagine using. The salt-sack made her feel rich.

  They had been in their cabin for several days or perhaps several weeks when Lissar woke up one morning and thought, What is that smell? There must be something rotting in the vegetable bin after all. She would attend to it later—she wasn’t going to get up yet. She curled up more snugly on her side, drawing her knees up and tucking her chin down over her crossed hands; and a breath of warm air slipped up from beneath the blankets, beneath her flannel petticoat and addressed her nose.… Oh, she thought. It isn’t the vegetable bin. It’s me.

  Taking a bath was an arduous process. There was only the one bucket and a few bowls of varying sizes and depths to hold water. She tore another strip from the blanket that had already yielded floor-scrubbing and dish-washing and hot-bucket-of-soup-holding cloths, to wash herself with. Her clothing had … adhered to her skin in several places where the … wounds were the worst; and here her mind began blanking out on her again. But by then she had begun to remember what it was like to feel clean; even though that required a clearer memory of what it was like to live in her body than she usually permitted herself. She found that she wanted to feel clean again.

  Grimly she soaked the crusted flannel free; sometimes she wept with pain suddenly awoken from uneasy quiescence; sometimes she gasped from the reek. She heated the water over the fire; but she no longer let the fire burn as high and hot as she had at first, as she realized how quickly they might use up their wood-pile, and going back outdoors for more snow to melt made her shiver the worse from her ablutions with luke-warm water. Furthermore she was impatient. She had learnt to put their supper on early in the day that it might be cooked by evening; but she wanted to be clean now.

  Finally she could peel her shirt off; bent over, her filthy hair tied back to keep it out of her way till its turn came, she saw her breasts for the first time in … she did not remember, but a howling darkness sprang up from nowhere and struck her down. When she climbed to her feet again, grabbing for the table edge to support herself, she twisted her body, and one soft breast brushed against her upper arm. And with that gentle touch she fell again, and retched with great force. There was little in her stomach to lose, but it felt as if her body were turning inside out to get away from itself; as if her flesh, her inner organs, could not bear the neighborhood of the demon that ate at her, that by exposing her body the demon became visible too.

  She came to herself again slowly, taking great heaving breaths. She lay on her side, the arm beneath her stretched out in front of her; she could feel the weight of that breast against that arm, and she dared not move. Slowly, slowly, slowly, she made her other hand approach her body and … touch it, touch her own body, stroke her own skin, as if it were some wild beast she hoped to tame, or some once-domesticated beast whom she could no longer trust. She touched her side; even after a good deal of soup and bread, each rib stood up individually from its sister, stabbing up through her skin. And I have not even a coat of fur for disguise, she thought, caressing the thin, shivering side. I have less charity for you, my own poor flesh, than I do for Ash.

  Her fingers crawled upward and touched the outer curve of her breast, and the fingers paused, quaking in fear; but after a moment, despite the panic trying to break out of its shadows and seize her mind, she told her fingers, Go on. This is my body. I reclaim my own body for myself: for my use, for my understanding, for my kindness and care. Go on. And the fingers walked cautiously on, over the curiously muscleless, faintly ridged flesh, cooler than the rest of the body, across the tender nipple, into the deep cleft between, and out onto the breast that lay limp and helpless and hardly recognizable as round, lying like a hunting trophy over her other arm. Mine, she thought. My body. It lives on the breaths I breathe and the food I eat; the blood my heart pumps reaches all of me, into all my hidden crevices, from my scalp to my heels.

  She sat up, and began slowly and dizzily to wash her body; then she mopped the floor, and hauled the dirty water outdoors, to spill it over the latrine-corner; it would be frozen by the time she brought the next bucket of dirty water out.

  The private places between her legs were still sore, and some old scab cracked open and began bleeding anew. She knelt by the fire, her arms wrapped over her clean belly, and her hand holding the bloody cloth, and wept for the loss of whatever she had lost, for whatever it was that had brought her here, to a tiny one-room hut with snow lying waist-deep around it, and a too-rapidly diminishing store of wood and food, alone with her dog, and afraid of herself—afraid of the touch of her own flesh, afraid to give herself a bath, afraid to do what she wished to do; afraid to be clean, afraid to relish being clean, which would be a new, more complete reinhabiting of the bruised and humiliated body she feared and tried to ignore.

  She wrapped herself in the cleanest of the blankets when she was through, and Ash came and nuzzled her, and sniffed and licked some of the bits of her that were exposed to view. Lissar stared at the sodden, streaky grey-brown heap of her clothing, and wondered if she could ever get it clean, even if she had proper soap, instead of the soft, crumbly eye-and-nose-burning stuff she had found in a small lidded bowl. There wasn’t much of it, but it burnt her hands as well till it was mixed with a great deal of water, so she did not worry about this, at least, running out; though they could not eat soap. She sacrificed the biggest bowl, the shallow one she used for making bread, to put her clothing in to soak for a while.

  But her bath had cleaned some window or mirror in her mind as it had cleaned her skin, and she began to have visions, sleeping and waking, that came between her and the simple time-consuming tasks that were now her life. She saw the faces of people that were no longer around her, but that she knew had once been a part of her ordinary days; and always, just out of sight, was the monster who haunted her, who still entered her dreams at night and woke her with her own screams.

  Even in daylight its looming, oppressive presence was near her, just out of sight, just out of reach; she found herself looking over her shoulder for it, and not believing that it hadn’t been there the second before she turned her head. She felt more vulnerable to it, whatever it was, now that her skin was clean, as if the dirt and the half-healed wounds, the sores that by some miracle were not infected, had been protection. Now that she could feel the air on her skin, she could feel her oppressor’s presence more clearly too.

  She was also, now, often faintly nauseated. She did not vomit again—because she did not let herself. She set her will to this, and her will responded. She and Ash did not have any food to waste, and so she did not waste it. But what this meant in practice was that her meals often took a very long time, as she had to eat mouthful by slow mouthful and dared swallow again only after the last bit declared its intention to remain quietly in her belly, and her belly declared itself willing to cooperate. Even so, twice or three times, she miscalculated, and found herself on her knees, her mouth clamped shut and her hands tight over both nose and mouth, while her stomach tried to heave its contents out and away from her. I wi
ll not, she thought fiercely, eyes and nose streaming and throat raw. I will not. And she didn’t.

  Ash’s eyes grew bright and her coat again shone. “Rotten meat and moldy onions agree with you,” said Lissar affectionately, and Ash rose gracefully on her hind legs and kissed her on the nose. Ash now spent some time outdoors every day; Lissar loved to watch her.

  Ash would pause at the edge of the porch, looking around her, as if for bears or toro; and then she would bound joyously out into the open ground. She disappeared to her high-held head when she sank into the deepest drifts of snow over hidden concavities, but she emerged again with each astonishing kick of her muscular hind legs, the snow falling off her like stars, and seemed to fly, her legs outstretched in her next bound, much farther than any simple physical effort, however powerful, could be responsible for; till she came gracefully down again, her front feet pointed as perfectly as a dancer’s. And she sank into the snow again, only to leap out.

  Lissar had made herself a very rough dress by cutting a hole in the lightest of the blankets, and poking her head through it. Her own clothing had largely disintegrated under the stress of washing; some flannel strips she salvaged, and some bigger swatches of the cloak, but no more. One of the strips she now used as a belt. With the coat, mittens and hat, the latter tied with another flannel strip in such a way that it could not swallow her entire head and blind and smother her, Lissar ventured at last out into the meadow. Her hip was a little better, or perhaps it was that the walls of the little cabin seemed to press in around a shrinking space. The boots were so large that she could not pick her feet up, but had to shuffle, or wade, sliding one foot after the other, even though she padded them somewhat with more of the ubiquitous flannel strips. Awkwardly she dug a path all the way around the hut with the shovel, but left the meadow for Ash.

  The hut was set at one end of the clearing, and the snow was much less under the trees; in places the ground was almost bare, and Lissar could walk, or could have walked if the boots had let her. She followed a curve of ground downhill one day into a cleft and found a stream, not quite frozen; followed the stream a little way till it emerged from the cleft and wandered out into a clear space that Lissar could recognize from the patchy look of the snow-cover as a swamp. Here she found cattails still standing, and another of the lessons she had learnt from Rinnol came back to her. But it had been a long walk—too long—and she was limping badly by the time she got back to the meadow.

  Ash met her on the porch that day, tail high and waving proudly back and forth—and a rabbit in her mouth. As Lissar waded up to her, she laid it at Lissar’s amazed feet.

  She watched hopefully as Lissar wrestled, messily and only somewhat effectively, with disembowelling and then skinning it. Lissar gave her the entrails, which disappeared in one gulp, and then Lissar had to sit down with her head between her knees for a few minutes. The mouse had not prepared her enough.

  The soup that night was almost stew; and while it tasted a little odd, Lissar didn’t know whether this had to do with her lack of hunterly skills or with the fact that she had forgotten what fresh meat tasted like. Ash made no complaints. Ash seemed to have a mysterious preference for cooked meat.

  The next day, Lissar found her way back to the swamp, and came home with not only cattails, but a little borka root, which she had dug up where the boggy ground remained unfrozen, and a few stubborn illi berries that still held to their low pricky bushes. Her hip, and the shoulder and wrist of her weak arm, throbbed so that night that she found sleeping difficult; but it had been worth it.

  Lissar’s spirits began to lift, in spite of the nagging bouts of nausea. Her days and Ash’s fell into almost a schedule. In the mornings, Lissar began the meal that would be their supper, putting bread dough together to rise, cutting up the solid bits that would go into the stew, melting snow for water, deciding if she could spare the bucket to make soup in or whether she needed to use the less reliable method of burying a lidded bowl in the ashes and hoping the contents would cook. Near noon, when the sun was as high and warm as it would get, Lissar would let Ash out, and when she disappeared into the trees Lissar waded, stiffly, around the house to fetch more wood, and to break up some of it, awkwardly and one-handed, for kindling. If the weather was fine and Lissar was feeling strong enough, she went foraging also, sometimes following Ash’s tracks for a little way, sometimes returning to the marsh to see what she could scavenge. When she was feeling slow and sick, or when the sky was overcast and the wind blew, she stayed indoors, trying to piece the rags that had once been a flannel petticoat and shirt into something useful, or sewing the hems of her dress-blanket together that it might keep the wind out more effectively; or sweeping the floor; or, once a week, giving herself a bath. Since her first bath she had been making an effort to pay better, more thoughtful attention to her physical self, although it was still an odd discipline. She often thought of her body as a thing, as something other than herself, whose well-being and good intentions were necessary to her, but still apart from her essential self. But this distance was helpful more than it was alienating, or so she experienced it, for it helped her bear the pains of the lingering wounds she did not remember the origins of.

  It occurred to her after a time that a sling might help her arm, and so she made a rough one, and her arm began to hurt less; at the least the sling reminded her to treat it gently. She did not know what to do for her hip, or for the sudden waves of nausea, or for one or two of the sores that never quite grew dangerously infected, but which went on being a little swollen, a little tender, a little oozy.

  After her first rabbit, Ash brought rabbits, or squirrels, or ootag, or other small furry four-footed things Lissar did not have the name for, now and then, just often enough that one of Lissar’s worst fears was assuaged, and she began to believe that they would not run out of food before the winter ended. The cattail flour, and the borka root, which was very filling when stewed, although it tasted rather the way Lissar imagined mud would taste, also helped. And she really didn’t care what it tasted like. What mattered was that she and Ash were going to come through. The pleasure and satisfaction this thought gave surprised her. But pleasure was so rare an event for her that she returned to it often: that they would come through.

  THIRTEEN

  IF THE WINTER EVER ENDED. LISSAR STILL COULD NOT THINK ABOUT the future. She knew in theory that winter came to an end, and was followed by spring, and the snow and ice would melt, and the world would be warm and green again, and she remembered that the green stems of the borka were delicious. But the idea of spring—of warmth, of an end to whiteness and silence—seemed distant to her, as distant as the life she must once have led, in seasons other than winter, that she now recollected so little of. She even feared spring a little, as if the turning of the seasons—her direct experience of the rolling year—would wheel that life back to her somehow, that she would have as little say in it as she had in the weather.

  She wished winter would stay, forever. She brushed aside questions of food for themselves and the fire when she was in this mood. And perhaps it would stay. She had no idea how far Ash and she had come; how many days they had spent travelling, how many leagues they had crossed. Perhaps here in these woods, far from anywhere, perhaps they had wandered into the forest of the farthest north, where winter stayed all the year around but for the brief vast burst of flowers and small stubborn fruits of high summer, before the first blizzard of autumn covered the blinking, sun-dazed earth once again.

  She had found a pair of snow-shoes lying under the blankets at the bottom of the bed-bin. They fitted the too-large boots, but for a long time she did not think of trying them, because she knew her hip would not bear the added strain of splay-legged walking. But as she grew stronger, she thought she would try; by then she had grown fairly clever at wrapping her feet in enough blanket and cloak strips to wedge them firmly into the boots.

  She had never worn snow-shoes before, but they were reasonably self-explanatory, and
after walking out of them a few times from misreading how the straps went, and then falling down a few times by misguessing how to walk in them, she grew adept. She trudged along sometimes in Ash’s wild wake; she, lightly staying on top of the snow like a web-footed bird, yet had nothing of the aerial grace of the long-legged dog. And Ash, particularly once she entered the trees, with their lesser snow-cover, could disappear in a few bounds.

  Lissar worried about bears and dragons, but she had seen signs of neither (didn’t they sleep in the winter? Well then, but what about wolves and iruku and toro?) and tried to leave all such questions to fate, which had brought them to their haven in the first place—or Ash had, which came back to Ash again. But the conclusion then was perhaps the more comforting—that Ash could take care of herself.

  Ash never stayed out so long that Lissar’s will not to worry was tried too hard. Ash—Lissar remembered, in the hazy, fencedoff way that memories of her former life presented themselves to her—had never liked the cold much, even in that gentler weather they had once been used to. She could think about the weather, she found, so long as she was careful not to press out from it too far. So she remembered wearing heavy clothes and shivering, but she thought that the sort of cold that sealed the nose and froze the throat was new to her. Lissar did know snow; knew she knew it. And she had heard rumors of things like snow-shoes, which was how she recognized the great, round, funny-looking platters of woven leather in the first place; for she knew also that she had never seen such things before, nor had any need of them. Cautiously she thought about why she had never had need of them: because she never had cause to go walking in deep snow, or because she was unaccustomed to deep snow?

  The latter, she thought. But—this was troubling—the former kept obtruding. She kept having odd fragments of almost-memory, like her vision of ceremonial robes, of being waited upon; but she was an herbalist’s apprentice, and herbalist’s apprentices are waited on by nothing but ants and spiders and their own imaginations … apparently she had once had a vivid imagination.