Deerskin

by Robin McKinley

  But Ash merely ran round the toro, keeping him occupied, giving him no chance to retreat among the trees. She swept in once more, bit him on the flank; the hoof lashed out, but missed; a thin trickle of blood made its way through the thick hair.

  This was not a proper hunt. A pack of fleethounds ran down their prey; at speed they made their killing leaps, and the prey’s speed was used against it. A cornered beast was always dangerous, and in such situations the hunting-party or -master was expected to put an arrow or a spear where it would do the most good—and save the dogs.

  Ash made her third leap, flashing past the antlers’ guard and seizing the toro’s nose. It was beautifully done; but the toro was standing still, braced, his feet spread against just such an eventuality; and he was very strong.

  He roared with the pain in his nose, but he also snapped his neck up and back, barely staggering under the weight of the big dog. Ash hung on; but while she managed to twist aside as he tried to fling her up and over onto his sharp horns, as the force of his swing and her writhe aside brought her through the arc and back toward the earth again, he shifted his weight and struck out with one front foot.

  It raked her down one side and across her belly; and the bright blood flowed. This was no mere trickle, as on the toro’s flank, but a great hot gush.

  “Ash!” Lissar said again, but this time it was a groan. It had still been bare moments since Lissar had opened the door of the hut and Ash had bolted out; Lissar had not quite crossed the clearing, though she could smell the heavy rank odor of the toro—and now the sharp tang of fresh blood. Ash’s blood.

  “Help her, damn you!” Lissar screamed, and Ob charged by her, made his leap, and tore a ragged chunk out of the creature’s neck; its blood now stained the snow as well, from its nose and flank and now running down its shoulder, and Ash’s weight made the deadly antlers less of a threat; but Ash’s blood ran the faster. The toro bellowed again and made to throw its head a second time; and Ash was built for running, not for gripping with her jaws, and her hold was slackening as her heart’s blood pumped out through the gash in her belly.…

  Lissar, scarcely thinking what she did, ducked under the high-flung head, and the body of her dog; and as one foreleg lifted free of the snow as the creature swung its weight to its other side, Lissar took the ashwood cudgel in her hands and gave as violent a blow as she could, just below the knee of the weight-bearing leg. Vaguely she was aware that the thing had stumbled as the other dogs made their leaps; the toro kicked violently with a rear leg, and there was a yelp; Ash, silent, still hung on.

  The leg Lissar struck broke with a loud crack, and the creature fell, full-length, in the snow. In a moment it was up again on three legs, bellowing now with rage as well as pain; but Ash lay in the snow. The toro turned on her as nearest, and would have savaged her with its antlers, but Lissar got there first, in spite of the snow, in spite of having to flee being crushed when the toro fell, in spite of how the snow held her as one’s limbs are held in a nightmare; weeping, she brought her cudgel down across the creature’s wounded nose, careless of the antlers, shielding her dog; and the toro shrieked, and fell to its knees as its broken leg failed to hold it. At that moment Ferntongue and then Harefoot, with two slashing strokes, hamstrung it, and it rolled, groaning, across the bloody snow, the knife-sharp hoofs still dangerous; Lissar leaped over, and buried her small hunting knife in the soft spot at the base of the jaw, where the head joins the neck; heedless, she grasped the base of one antler, to give herself purchase, and ripped; and the toro’s blood fountained out, and it died.

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE BLOOD’S RUSH WAS STILL MEASURED BY THE RHYTHM OF A beating heart as Lissar turned to Ash. She sank down beside her, shivering uncontrollably with cold and shock. Ash’s eye was half open, and her tongue trailed in the snow. But the eye opened a little farther as Lissar knelt beside her, and her ear tried to flatten in greeting.

  She had fallen on her wounded side, so Lissar could see only the ugly end of it, curving under her belly. “Ash,” she said. “Oh, Ash, I cannot bear it …” She thought she might kneel there in the snow till the end of time, but there was a questioning look in Ash’s one visible eye, and so, still shuddering, Lissar reached out to stroke the sleek, shining fur on her throat, and down across her shoulder; and then she staggered to her own feet.

  She went back to the hut, seized a blanket off the bed, and returned to the battlefield. As delicately as she could she rolled Ash onto the blanket; the dog made no sound, but she was limp in Lissar’s hands, and Lissar was clumsy, for her eyes were blinded by tears.

  Slowly she sledded her sad burden back across the snow to the hut, ignoring both the toro’s corpse and the six other dogs, who, their heads and tails hanging, crept after her. She eased Ash up over the step and the threshold, and skated her across the floor to settle her, still on the now blood-sodden blanket, in front of the fire. It seemed an age since they had left the hut together, and that the fire was still burning high and the hut was warm surprised her. The puppies followed her in and lay down, anxiously, as soon as they were across the threshold, unhappily, submissively, and tightly together, no sprawling, no ease. Lissar had just the presence of mind to count that all six had been able to return without assistance, and then she shut the door.

  And returned to Ash. The cut across her ribs was nasty, but not immediately dangerous, and the ribs appeared unbroken. But where the hoof had sunk into the soft belly.… Lissar, feeling sick, bent her head till her face nearly touched Ash’s flank, and sniffed; there was no odor but blood, and a lingering rankness from the toro. Could such a blow have missed all the organs? For the first time Lissar felt the faintest stirring of hope.… Then she looked again at Ash’s outflung head and the eye, glazing over with agony, and at all the blood … at least she must stop the bleeding.

  “Ash, I shall have to use needle and thread,” Lissar said aloud; she barely recognized her own voice, for it sounded calm and reasonable, as if it belonged to someone who knew what to do and could do it. She took out the little roll of leather where she kept her few bits of sewing gear, which she had last used to make harnesses for the dogs for the trek up the mountain; and she threaded her needle with steady hands. Like her voice, they seemed to have no connection with the rest of her, for she was still having trouble remembering to breathe, and her knees were rubbery, and her thighs painful with cramp.

  The bleeding, she thought, had slowed, which she feared might be a bad sign rather than a good one, but she knelt so that the fire might give her as much light as possible, said, “Ash, I am sorry,” and set the needle into the flesh, a little below the last rib, where the wound went deep.

  Ash’s head came up off the blanket with the speed of a striking snake’s, and there was white visible all the way around her dark eye; but her jaws clashed on empty air, for she had not aimed for Lissar, who was easily in her reach. Lissar clamped her own jaws together, drew the thread quickly through the first stitch, tied it and bit it off; and then repeated the procedure. Ash twitched and her sigh was a moan; six stitches Lissar made, and knew the wound needed more, but knew also that Ash was already at the end of her strength.

  She poured a little water down Ash’s throat, and believed that not all of it ran out again. Then she wiped her as clean as she could, and put more blankets over her, and sat at her head, her hand just behind Ash’s ear, listening to her breathing, willing her to go on breathing.…

  Dark came, which she might not have cared for, except that the fire was dying, and Ash must be kept warm. The puppies followed her outdoors to relieve themselves while she carried wood; and she had regained enough of her awareness of the world to notice that two of them were limping, Harefoot badly, hopping on three legs. When they went indoors again, she finally remembered that she had a lamp to light, and by its glow she examined the puppies. Pur merely had a long shallow slash across one flank and upper thigh; Harefoot’s leg was broken. She panted, anxious and in pain, while Lissar felt
the break as delicately as she could, and tried to engage some emotion beyond numbness at the discovery that it was a simple break and that it should not be beyond her small knowledge, gained by assisting Jobe and Hela, to set it effectively.

  She did so, her hands as little a part of the rest of her as they had been when she held the needle at Ash’s belly; and at the end she said, “Harefoot, you’re a good dog,” and a little unexpected warmth crept out of its hiding place and moved into her voice. Harefoot looked pleased, and dared to put her head on Lissar’s knee and look up at her adoringly; and all the other dogs were a little reassured and crept forward, away from the door, toward the fire. Ash still breathed; and Lissar, and six other dogs, lay down around her, to keep her warm, and to remind her of their presence, and of how much they needed her; Lissar blew out the lamp, to save her small store of fuel, and all but she fell asleep as dusk darkened to night.

  The next few days were a nightmare version of the first days with the puppies, almost nine months ago. Lissar did not sleep; she dozed, sometimes, curled around her charge, achingly sensitive to any signal Ash might make. For while nine months before she had worked as hard as she knew how, and feared, every time she woke from an unscheduled nap, to find one of her small charges fallen into the sleep no one wakes from, it was not the same. If Ash died, a part of Lissar would die with her; a part she knew she could not spare.

  She was bitterly lonely in the long watches of the night, listening to Ash’s faint, rough, tumultuous breathing; for not only was Ash not there to comfort her, but she had lost Ossin as well, Ossin, who was so much of the reason why she had saved the puppies; so much of the reason why she had believed she would save the puppies. And now she found she could not stop herself holding a little aloof from them, because of the ghost of Ossin that lay between them. She was lonelier than she had ever been, because she now understood what loneliness was.

  Lost him. Run away from him; fled him; threw him away.

  Once she woke, not knowing she had slept, with Ash’s head in her lap; it was her own voice that woke her, murmuring, “Not Ash too. Please—not Ash too.”

  She left the fireside only long enough to fetch more wood; six dogs followed her, two limping, which reminded her that her body had the same functions. Her body seemed an odd and distant stranger, a machine she rested in, and pushed levers and pulled handles or wires to make function, lost as she was in a haze of pain and fear and love and loss, where the promptings of her own bladder and bowels seemed like the voices of strangers. For the first time since she had awakened on the mountaintop, this mountaintop, after meeting the Lady, she did not greet her Moon-blood with gladness, did not welcome the red dreams the first night brought. Her dreams were of blood already, and blood now to her was only about dying.

  She hauled snow for water, which took more time than bringing in wood, since so much produced so little; and one morning, perhaps the second after Ash was wounded, she suddenly remembered the corpse of the toro, which they had killed at such cost. And at that she abruptly noticed she was hungry; that she had been hungry for a long time. The puppies had to be ravenous, and yet none of them had made any move toward the end of the rabbit-broth still simmering on the fire, which she poured drops of down Ash’s throat as she could; nor had any of them made any move to investigate the dead toro when they followed her outdoors.

  Suddenly, as she pried Ash’s stiff jaws apart, the smell of the broth registered: food. There was little enough of it anyway; but it was as if it caught in her eyes and throat now, like smoke. She looked up, blinking, and found six pairs of eyes looking at her hopefully. Tenderly she laid Ash down and covered her closely with blankets. Then she checked that her small knife was in its strap at her hip. She stared at the bigger kitchen knife and, after a moment’s thought, picked up both the small hatchet and the bigger axe she used for wood, and went to the door. The puppies piled after her, the four sound ones giving space to Harefoot and Pur, although the latter’s flank was almost healed already, thanks to the remains of the poultice Lissar had made for Ash.

  The weather had remained unrelentingly cold; the carcass had not spoiled, although she suspected that, since she had not gutted it, she would find some spoilage inside—if she could get inside, for it was now frozen solid. Perhaps it had frozen quickly enough to leave little odor; for no scavengers had been attracted to it, and the snow around it bore only their own footprints. Lissar recognized immediately the blood-stained hollow where Ash had lain.

  The puppies were all looking at her. She looked at the huge crumpled body, chose what might or might not be the likeliest spot, and raised her axe.

  The resulting stew was not her best; it was, to her human taste, almost inedibly gamy, but the puppies ate it with alacrity and enthusiasm. So much enthusiasm that she had to tackle the gruesome carcass again almost immediately, although her wrists and shoulders still ached with hacking the first chunk free.

  After eyeing the thing with loathing she spent some time chopping it free of its icy foundation; it was in a shaded spot till late afternoon where it lay, and the sun, as the season swung back toward spring, had some heat to it by midday. It might make the thing stink without making it any easier to cut; but it was worth the trial, or so her sore bones told her. Meanwhile it also gave her something besides Ash to think about.

  Ash did not die, but Lissar could not convince herself that she grew any better either. Lissar tipped as much of the reeking broth down Ash’s throat as she could, till Ash gave up even the pretense of swallowing; even at that Lissar wasn’t sure, looking at the puddle on the floor, how much had gone down her at all. Ash’s pulse was still thready and erratic, and she was hot to the touch, hotter than a dog’s normally hotter-than-human body heat. She never slept nor awakened completely, although Lissar took some comfort in the fact that her eyes did open all the way occasionally, and when they rested on Lissar, they came into focus, if only briefly.

  But she lay, almost motionless; always a clean dog, she now relieved herself as she needed to, with no attempt to raise herself out of the way before or after, as it she had no control, or as if she had given up. Lissar cleaned up after her without any thought of complaint; it was not the cleaning up that she minded, but what Ash’s helplessness told her about Ash’s condition. The only comfort Lissar had was that Ash’s wound did not fester; it was even, slowly, closing over; it was not swollen, and it did not smell bad. Lissar kept it covered with poultices, which she changed frequently; the air of the hut was thick with the smell of illness, spoiled meat, urine, feces, and the cutting sharpness of healing herbs. But Lissar cared nothing about this either. Lissar only cared that Ash should live, and if she died, she did not care what she died of, and for the moment, dying was what she looked to be doing.

  Lissar hauled the vast frozen dead beast into the middle of the snowy meadow with all the savagery of despair.

  One night, having soaked more meat soft enough to skin, she was boiling the noisome stuff. She tried not to breathe at all though the puppies all sniffed the air with the appearance of pleasant anticipation. She sat with Ash’s head in her lap, running her hand down the once-sleek jowl and throat, now harsh with dry, staring hair. Don’t die, she thought. Don’t die. There’s already little enough of me; if you leave me, the piece of me you’ll take with you might be the end of me, too.

  She must have fallen asleep, and the fire begun to smoke, for the room became full of roiling grey, and then the grey began to separate itself into black and white, and the black and white began to shape itself into an outline, although within the outline the black and white continued to chase each other in a mesmerizing, indecipherable pattern, as if light and shadow fell on some swift-moving thing, like water or fire. And the Moonwoman said, “Ash is fighting her way back to you, my dear; I believe she will make it, because she believes it herself. She is an indomitable spirit, your dog, and she will not leave you so long as you hold her as you hold her now, begging her to stay. She will win this battle because s
he can conceive of no other outcome.”

  The Moonwoman’s words seemed to fall, black and white, in Lissar’s ears; she heard them as if they were spoken twice, as if they had two distinct meanings; and she recognized each of the meanings.

  “Do not be too hard on yourself,” said the Moonwoman, reading her mind, or the black and white shadows on her own face. “It is a much more straightforward thing to be a dog, and a dog’s love, once given, is not reconsidered; it just is, like sunlight or mountains. It is for human beings to see the shadows behind the light, and the light behind the shadows. It is, perhaps, why dogs have people, and people have dogs.

  “But, my dear, my poor child, don’t you understand yet that healing carries its own responsibilities? Your battle was from death to life no less than Ash’s is now; would you deny it? But you have not accepted your own gift to yourself, your gift of your own life. Ash is looking forward to running through meadows again; can you not give yourself leave to run through meadows too?”

  Lissar woke, finding herself crying, and finding Ash, rolled up on her belly from her side, where she had lain for so many hopeless days, feebly licking the hands where the tears fell.

  PART THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  SPRING BEGAN TO COME QUICKLY AFTER THAT. SOMETHING—SEVeral somethings—discovered the half-thawed remains of the toro one night; Lissar, who still slept lightly, woke up to hear a growling argument going on outdoors. The puppies were all awake, ears cocked, but none of them showed any desire to go to the door and ask to be let out. The next day, amid the bits of fresh fur and blood, Lissar dismembered what remained of their kill, and hung it from a few branches at the edge of the forest.

  Pur’s flank was healed; Harefoot’s leg Lissar left in its splint perhaps longer than necessary, in fear of further accidents. When Harefoot ran, more so even than usual with fleethounds, it was as if some sixth or seventh sense took over, and she became nothing but the fact of running. Lissar’s belief in her had come true for all to see when the kennel staff had set up an informal match-race between her and Whiplash, considered the fastest fleethound in the prince’s kennels. And Harefoot, only seven months old, had won. Lissar remembered how the blood vessels had stood out in her neck and upon her skull, and how wild her eyes had looked, and how long it had taken her to settle down again—how slow she had been to respond to her own name—after this. She would not take care of herself—could not be trusted to take care of herself—so Lissar would take extra care of her. The leg was setting straight; but Lissar wondered if it would ever be quite as strong as it was before, if Harefoot might have lost that edge of swiftness she had been born with. She remembered Ossin’s comment on racing: a waste of a good hunting dog, and she tried not to mourn; but she wondered how it would look to Harefoot.