Robin McKinley

by Deerskin

  Lissar lay the glove-finger down, picked up a straw, stared at it, sighed. She thrust the tip in the bowl of milk, sucked it full, thrust the straw down the pup's throat, and let the milk loose. The pup gasped, coughed, choked-and kicked; the milk all came out again. But the pup was startled; she made a little mewling noise, her blind head trembled, her tiny paws twitched.

  Lissar refilled the straw hastily, stuck it not quite as far down the puppy's throat, and released the milk. This time the puppy gasped, choked, kicked-and swallowed.

  Very little milk reappeared. The puppy swallowed several more strawsful without further complaint; her little belly had a faint new convexity of outline. Lissar laid her down very tenderly.

  As predicted deprecatingly by Jobe and Hela, the puppies all developed diarrhea.

  The first night was the last real sleep Lissar had for ten days. Hela helped sometimes, but it was obvious her heart was not in it, and she avoided handling the puppies herself. She said it was because as few people as possible should handle puppies so young; but Lissar did not think that was the real reason. She was grateful for Hela's help in fetching milk and clean cloths, and cleaning up; but she knew that she and the puppies were still ostracized-and the puppies at least, condemned.

  Ossin himself was a more valuable assistant. He had looked in and seen them all sleeping, that first night, and gone quietly away again; but after that he came every day. He had no qualms about touching the pups, although at first the little bodies were so dwarfed by his big hands that she wondered how he could cope with handling anything so small. But he fed them more easily than she did-and praised her ingenuity with straws and glove-fingers, although she knew that these ideas were not new, that her ingenuity was only that she was willing to think about how to keep the pups alive and then put her ideas into practice.

  He never spoke a sharp or angry word himself, however sharp Lissar's exhaustion made her, and how much she forgot to whom she spoke, or rather, did not speak, for she was too tired for courtesy. He insisted instead that she not forget herself entirely; he brought her her meals occasionally, when those in the commonroom suspected she had missed eating; he sent her off for a nap in the bathhouse ("just don't drown") saying that an hour there would do her more good than an entire night of unbroken sleep.

  And once she woke with the horrid awareness that she had slept too long, and saw him with a puppy in one hand and a damp, distended glove-finger in the other; and straw in his hair. He had been there all night; she remembered him bringing her her supper, and how she had sunk down, her head on her arm, to rest for just a few minutes. And now there was early morning creeping through the window.

  "All still alive?" she said. It was a reflex. She said these words more often than any others, even when her first words should have been, Your greatness, I am so sorry, why did you not awaken me?

  He turned his face toward her, and there was no reproach in it; instead a tired smile curled the corners of his mouth. "Yes," he said, with evident satisfaction, as if her question were the correct response to his presence.

  But she was not unaware, and she began to make her belated excuses, whereupon his face closed down and he turned away from her again. "I wish to make your impossible task as nearly possible as-as mortal flesh and blood can. It is I who wished it tried at all, and I who know, none better, that no one will help you but me. I am glad to do it. Here, you"-and he directed his attention to the puppy in his hand, who was attempting to play with the glove-finger instead of nurse from it.

  Lissar pushed the hair out of her face, and crawled toward the puppies. Two or three of them now had narrow slits of eye showing between the lids, and most of them were swimming, belly to the floor, fairly actively; occasionally they took a few staggering almost-steps, their little legs crooked out at painfullooking angles, moving like turtles, as if they bore great unwieldy weights on their backs. But there were still two who moved very little, who moved only when they were lifted up for milk, whose heads hung over the palms of the hands that held them if they were not picked up carefully, as if their necks were nothing but bits of string; who would not nurse but needed straws thrust down their throats, who needed the most belly-rubbing and yet simultaneously had the most persistent diarrhea.

  Lissar looked at the six of them-all still alive, against the odds-and her heart quailed; there were still long weeks ahead of her before her task could be declared accomplished, success or failure; and if it was over before then it was only because she had absolutely failed. She picked up one of the two smallest puppies, rolling its unprotesting body in her hand; feeling the butterfly heartbeat, and picked up a hollow straw.

  Without speaking a word about it, Ossin fell into the habit of spending every other night in the puppy pen; and Lissar got a little more sleep that way, although never again did she embarrass herself by sleeping through the night. The prince stayed sitting up, snoring faintly sometimes as his head dropped to his chest; Lissar lay down, near the wall, with Ash stretched out behind her. Ossin never acknowledged his own regular presence by pressing Lissar to leave the puppies to him and go to her own room, the bed she had never yet slept in; and so Lissar never quite dared protest what he was doing. And at some dim distance she also knew that she appreciated his company, not only for the practical help and human reassurance he provided.

  Over the course of every night, wherever the puppy-heap had begun, it rearranged itself to spill over Lissar's hands and feet, or to press against her belly. Ash mellowed to the point where she would not instantly leap to her feet on a puppy's coming in contact with her; but she never offered to let Lissar lie next to the wall either. Lissar woke up sometimes by the sensation of a puppy being gently lifted off her; which meant that the prince had already warmed the milk on the tiny fire-pot, rust-free and freshly blacked, that stood always in the corner of the stall. After this had happened two or three times Lissar woke once to a large shadowy figure reaching down to her, stooped over her, and she sat up with a gasp, throwing herself backwards, against Ash, who yelped.

  Ossin straightened up and took a step backwards. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's only me, not a night-monster. We turn them away at the city gates, you know. You can sleep quietly here." He was standing perfectly still, his hands hanging loosely at his sides. She recognized the tone of voice even as it worked on her: he wished to soothe her as he might a frightened dog.

  "I-forgive me. I-I must have been having a bad dream, although I ... don't remember it."

  The first three weeks were the worst. Not only was there the persistent fear of one of the weaker ones giving up entirely-and the need therefore to feed them oftener because they would swallow or keep down less, and used it less efficiently than the stronger ones-but as soon as they all seemed more or less thriving for half a day, that was a sure sign that one whose health she had begun to take for granted would suddenly reject its food, or cry and cry and refuse to defecate or to settle down to sleep. Lissar worried also that they would strangle on a broken straw, or a shred of blanket; that one of the bigger puppies would smother one of the weaker ones and she would not notice till too late; that she herself would crush one in her sleep, for none of them had any sense about where they disposed themselves around her.

  Every time one of the pups coughed she knew it was about to die: that due to her carelessness in thrusting straws down their throats, some milk had gone down the wrong way and produced pneumonia.

  But none of them died.

  By the end of the first fortnight she had grown accustomed to the sense of trying to climb an avalanche. She still had nightmare fragments during her fragments of sleep; but these nightmares were different from the ones she had had when she and Ash were still alone. These were not about her; and when she woke from them, she had something to do: check the puppies. When she found them all still breathing the sense of release and of peace was so extraordinary that sometimes she sat or lay for several minutes or a quarter hour, thinking of nothing but that her charges were well, and that
she was ... happy. She noticed, but did not pursue the thought, that she felt most content with her world on the nights that Ossin was snoring gently in his corner.

  She remembered, as if she would remember a dream, that the first days of the Lady's peace had been much like this; but it was different as well, more complicated; this was a peace of wind or running water rather than a peace of solid rock or quiet ground. It was a contentment of motion, of occupation, instead of stillness: it was a contentment more like the Lady herself.

  Sometimes it seemed her contentment was not that at all but a mere physical reaction to the numbness of exhaustion. She awakened when the puppies stirred, and her hands began their work while her brain was too tired to recognize what was going on. The little muffled squeaking noises they made, slowly evolving into recognizable canine yips, reassured her even as they woke her up. Sometimes puppy-noises were part of the nightmares, and then her sleeping self laughed and said, It's only the puppies, and she woke up calmly and sweetly.

  These uneasy dreams and these awakenings were so very different from ones that she remembered ... remembered ... from before.

  And none of the puppies died.

  By the end of the third week several of them were almost plump, and walked on their feet instead of paddling on their bellies; and they all had their eyes open, and the grand sweep of breastbone and tucked-up stomach characteristic of all the sighthounds began to be apparent. Some of them were growing coordinated enough to begin knocking their brothers and sisters around. They were developing unmistakable personalities, and with their personalities inevitably came names.

  Pur was the biggest, but Ob the most active. Fen and Meadowsweet were still the smallest and weakest. She had not meant to name them, but she could not help herself; and having done so she thought, Let their names be symbols that their lives are worth the keeping. Let them struggle a little the harder, to keep their names.

  Ferntongue yawned the most ecstatically, and Harefoot, to Lissar's eye, already had longer legs and a deeper girth than any of the rest. She named them, spoke to them using their names, as if the names were charms to keep them safe; she knew it wasn't over, they could still catch some wandering illness that would kill all six of them in a day or a sennight. But she began to have some real hope, irrational and stupid with sleeplessness as it was, that Ossin might have some reward for his stubbornness.

  She did not think in terms of rewarding her own.

  As the weeks passed, and the puppies grew and thrived, the look of wistful awe in the faces of the rest of the kennel staff when they looked over the half-door into Lissar's little domain grew so clear and plain that Lissar stopped going into the common-room at all, except to fetch her meals, milk and mush for the puppies, or to ask questions, which were gravely answered. She thought: I have asked questions so ignorant they should shock you; why do you look at me as if I were setting you a trial that you are not sure you will master?

  Her heart still hurt her when she looked at her puppies, and yet looking at them was a pleasure unlike any pleasure she could remember; raising Ash had been different, she thought, not only because Ash was a big strong puppy when they met, but because she and Ash had, it seemed to her, grown up together. But those memories were still vague, still hemmed round with walls she could not breach, as solid, it seemed, as real brick and stone.

  When she grew very tired, and hallucinations crept round the edges of her vision, she remembered that she was accustomed to hallucinations too. She did not remember why she had spent the last winter on the mountain, but she remembered what it had been like.

  She also remembered that the most brutal dream she had had ended with the Lady, the Moonwoman, and that when she had awoken, the supple white dress that now lay folded away on a shelf in a bare little room over the kennels, had remained, as real as she was, as real as Ash's long coat was.

  And Ossin was real; realer somehow than Hela or Jobe or Berry or Tig, perhaps because they had given up on the puppies when Ilgi died, and Ossin had not. Or because of the way they looked at her, and Ossin looked at her only as if she were another human being. But when he walked into the pen, it was as if the sunlight came with him.

  She remembered him as if he dressed in bright colors: red and green and yellow and blue. And yet his clothing was usually the drab, practical sort one would want to wear in a kennel, when a puppy might vomit over your lap at any moment; although it was true that he often wore bright shirts under his tunics, or that the tunics themselves had bright cuffs or collars or hems. She also thought of his face and hair and eyes as bright, when in fact he was as drab as his clothing, and his hair and eyes were a dull brown. But his smile lit his dull square features as fire lightens darkness; and so when her memory of him startled her when she set her eyes again on the reality, his smile reminded her of what she chose to remember.

  Sometimes they kept watch together in the small hours, too tired even to sleep; for while he did sleep in a bed every other night, he was still expected to keep up his other duties as the king's only son and his heir, and he was no less tired than she.

  "Fortunately I'm already known as less than a splendid conversationalist," he told her ruefully; "I'm now gaining a reputation as a total blockhead." They talked softly, the puppies clean and fed and asleep, and Lissar's long hairy head- or foot-rest snoring gently.

  He talked more than she did, for she had only half a year's experience available to her, and much of it was about not remembering what went before-about fearing to remember what went before; and the rest was not particularly interesting, about hauling water and chopping wood, and walking down a mountain. She did not mean to tell him this, that she did not remember what her life had been, but at four o'clock in the morning, when the world is full of magic, things may be safely said that may not be uttered at any other time, so long as the person who listens believes in the same kind of magic as the person who speaks. Ossin and Lissar did believe in the same kinds of magic, and she told him more than she knew herself, for she was inside her crippled memory, and he was outside.

  But one thing she always remembered not to tell him was her name. Since she remembered so little else, and since she had a name-Deerskin-this created no suspicion in his mind; but she wondered at it herself, that she should be so sure she dared not tell him this one fact-perhaps the only other fact she was sure of beyond Ash's name.

  He in turn told her of his life in ordinary terms. There were no gaps in his memory, no secrets that he could remember nothing of but the fearful fact of their existence. He was the only son of his parents, who had been married four years before he was born; his sister was eight years younger. He could not remember a time when he had not spent most of his waking hours with dogs-except for the time he spent with horses-or a time in which he had not hated being dressed up in velvets and silk and plonked on a royal chair atop a royal dais, "like a statue on a pedestal, and about as useful, I often think. I think my brain stops as soon as brocade touches my skin."

  "You should replace your throne with a plain chair then," said Lissar. "Or you could take one of the crates in the common-room with you."

  "Yes," said Ossin, "one of the crates. And we could hire an artist to draw running dogs chasing each other all the way around it, as an indication of my state of mind."

  TWENTY-THREE

  SPRING HAD PASSED AND THE WARMTH NOW WAS OF HIGH summer.

  When Lissar paused on the way to the bathhouse and lifted her face to the sky, the heat of the sun struck her like the warmth of the fire in the little hut had struck her last winter, as a lifegiving force, as a bolt of energy that sank through her flesh to her bones. She took a deep breath, as if welcoming her life back; as if the six small furry life-motes in the kennels behind her were ... not of no consequence, but possessed of perfect security.

  It was a pleasant sensation; she stood there some minutes, eyes closed, drinking the sun through her pores; and then Hela's voice at her shoulder, "There, you poor thing, you've fallen asleep on your
feet." Lissar hadn't heard her approach. She opened her eyes and smiled.

  Two days later she and Ossin took the pups outdoors for the first time. He carried the big wooden box that held all six of them, and she had occasion to observe that the bulk of his arms and shoulders, unlike that of his waistline, had nothing to do with how many sweet cakes he ate. She and Ash followed him, Lissar carrying blankets, as anxious as any nursemaid about her charges catching a chill.

  The puppies tumbled out across the blankets. The bolder ones at once teetered out to the woolly edges and fell off, and began attacking blades of grass. They were adorable, they were alive, and she loved them; and she laughed out loud at their antics. Ossin turned to her, smiling. "I have never heard you laugh before." She was silent.

  "It is a nice sound. I like it. Pardon me if I have embarrassed you."

  She shook her head; and at that moment Jobe came up to ask Ossin something, a huge, beautiful, silver-and-white beast pacing solemnly at his side. It and Ash threw measuring looks at each other, but both were too well-behaved to do any more: or simply too much on their dignity to initiate the first move. Lissar still had only the vaguest idea of the work that went on around her every day in the kennels; she heard dogs and people, the slap of leather and the jingle of metal rings, the shouts of gladness, command, correction-and frustration; smelled food cooking, and the aromas from the contents of the wheelbarrows the scrubbers carried out twice a day.

  The scrubbers were not lightly named; they did not merely clean, they scrubbed.

  Lilac came to visit her occasionally, the first time the day after Lissar had gone to meet the king and queen in the receiving-hall. By the mysterious messenger service of a small community, word had reached her that evening of what had become of her foundling, and why Lissar had not returned as she had promised. "I knew you would land on your feet," she said cheerfully in greeting.