Tender Morsels (15 page)

Not as far as his grasping fist, though. Besides, I had seen the pearls, and there is nothing like a gem or precious metal to give a man strength. So up I got, and against all his force and no longer
caring should I lose my beard and all my chin-skin with it, I leaped and strove and raged back towards the bank. He were terrible strong, though—Pinchman’s boys were all big, on top of which, all men are bigger than me, and stronger. I were cursing my size and being trapped in a situation where my wiles were bugger-all use to me, and calling out for someone to come: Where are folk ever when you want them? When you don’t, they are always in your face with their prating and whinnying! And my pocket were dropped and all the pearls were rolling out of it, beyond my reach and sinking. I were desperate, I can tell you. I flung myself about like a dying trout on a streambank, only a degree more noisier.

The sisters were walking home from the town. They had been baking that morning with Wife Wilegoose, and Branza carried in her basket three of the pies they had made, the three very finest and most perfect, still warm and covered with a cloth. Down the hill they went, and along the path that skirted the highest floodmark of the marsh-edge.

They were about halfway along it when a roar, at once enraged and pleading, chopped through the forest peace. ‘What is that?’ said Branza. ‘Someone’s bull escaped and is trapped somehow?’

They walked on more slowly. The roar came again. ‘I think it is a
person
,’ said Urdda, veering off the path towards the sound.

Branza stopped dead and held her basket to her chest. ‘Urdda, come back!’

‘Who can it be?’ Urdda darted off through the trees to find out, then ran out onto bushier, more open ground. Branza made a small, anguished sound. She did not know who it might be; she did not
want
to know; she was afraid of the sound.

‘Come!’ Urdda’s voice was tiny with distance. ‘Branza, look! Come and look!’

Branza hurried down towards the marsh. She worked her way around the marsh-edge, muttering and stumbling over roots and dead branches to the place where there was a break in the bushes.
She looked out across the tussocky waters. Urdda had run far out on the bank, quite unafraid. ‘Come back, you silly girl!’ Branza cried.

The roaring thing—it was not a bull—was trapped, certainly. The mound of it was so mired, it barely moved when it struggled. It seemed bound to the water with many fine threads, as if the water surface itself were a net and the creature were trying fruitlessly to push up through it.

With horror, Branza saw the eyes. They seemed the size of ladle bowls, they were so wide with rage and terror, and they were fixed on Urdda through the whitish webbing that held the creature to the marsh-water. The noise came again, bubbling the water under the net, and there was an edge of begging desperation in its horrors, so that Branza, however great her fear, could not quite turn and run from it.

She stood, panting, and gradually the creature seemed not so large, was not so new and frightening. It had a large head, but it was not far out in the marsh, and judging from the ripples, the body was quite small.

‘Come, Branza! We must rescue it!’ Urdda knotted up her shift and stepped out into the marsh.

‘No, wait!’ cried Branza weakly.

But Urdda forged on. Whimpering, Branza found a place to put the pies where they would not be found too soon by ants, and tied up her skirt and waded after her sister. The thing lay quiet under its bindings, its eyes glowing between lids that were like worn leather. It had a short, wide nose hovering just above the water. It was the sort of face Branza did not want to see the mouth of.

Oh, how hideous: that was its
hair
, that white web, from its own wide, round head, slicked out across its floating wet shirt.

‘It
is
a person, Branza!’ said Urdda, very pleased. The person muttered as she investigated. ‘His hands are pushing in the mud,’ she said, ‘holding him up to breathe.’

His great eyes rolled at them, and he bubbled and growled as Urdda felt all down him.

‘Oh, it is his chin-hair!’ she cried. ‘A piece of it is caught in the
mud!’ And she knelt, shift and all, and took a breath and submerged herself, groping about in the brown water.

‘Urdda, come up, come up!’ Branza patted at the water, at the floating cloth of Urdda’s shift, not liking to be left alone with this person’s glaring eyes.

Urdda bobbed up. ‘There is no log or stone,’ she said. ‘Nothing weighing down the beardy hair. It is growing from the bottom, and my fingers cannot even dent that. It is hard clay.’

The little man’s eyes danced and rolled, clenched closed and goggled open. His braced arms weakened and shook underneath him.

Urdda tried to uproot the beard, but the marsh-bottom would not give it up. The man’s face was at her elbow, his furious bubbles bursting against her armpit.

Urdda took from her belt the little knife she had made herself, of flint bedded in a stout stick. ‘I will cut him free,’ she announced, ‘before he drowns himself in his floundering.’ And she ducked underwater again.

Both of them exploded up at once. Urdda, though only six, was still a touch taller than this strange man. He was not afraid of her, though. He pushed her hard, back into the water. ‘You great
goose!
’ Branza heard him say—he had a strange way of speaking. ‘What business have you?’

Urdda spluttered and rose, and the man launched himself at her. She pushed him away, but his hard little fists beat at her elbows. ‘Cut off my manhood, would you, that I have groomed and grown since I were a bare sprout?’

‘It was stuck in the mud!’ cried Urdda.

‘She was saving your life, ungrateful man!’ said Branza, hating him, hating him—‘Oh!’ she said suddenly, recognising. ‘It is that littlee-man!’ But of course, Urdda had not seen him that time, from behind the holly-bush.

The man gasped and sank back a moment, as if Branza had stabbed him in the vitals. Then he was scrambling towards her throat, his voice gone to a shriek. ‘Littlee, you call me? Outrageous orphan! Whore-mouth! You shall never speak again!’

The two girls fought and dragged the littlee through the water,
trying to flee him, trying to detach themselves, until all three of them, mud-slopped and dishevelled, reached the shore.

‘Look at the fool you’ve made of me!’ the littlee-man howled. ‘The stunted, chopped thing! I have never met such cruelty, you bold-faced brindle-cow!’

He sat in the mud and wept, his beard-end in his hands. Branza could just see how it should have been, how it should come to a soft point there instead of being crisply sliced off by Urdda’s knife.

‘Surely it will grow again?’ she said gently.

His eyes blazed at her through his tears. ‘This part, that was the first to protrude from my innocent chin? You ought to be shaven clean yourself, you clumsy offal-bag. All that floss scraped off the top of your clunk-empty head!
Then
we would see what would grow again. Fur or fine fuzz, mebbe, or mebbe nothing at all! Bald as a doorknob, you might be. You are certainly about as bright!’ Then the chopped end of his beard caught his eye again. He pressed the hairs to his lips and the tears ran down his leathery face.

‘But we couldn’t let you stay stuck in the water!’ said Urdda.

‘Stupid, stupid . . . ,’ he sobbed.

‘Come along, Urdda,’ said Branza. ‘We will go now, seeing as he is in no danger.’

‘Just you do that, you lump. Stab a man through the heart and then walk off and leave him bleed.’

But something in the marsh-edge caught his eye. He dropped his beard, took out his pocket, and went to scrabble in the mud there, snatching up what looked like frog-eggs and pushing them, gleaming, away into the cloth, dropping some in his haste.

‘What have you got there?’ Urdda squatted cheerfully beside him and picked up one of the white things. ‘My, that’s pretty—oh!’

‘Ha!’ The littlee-man snatched the muddied frog’s egg from her. ‘You ain’t got the magic, have you, you lump? All you get is a bit of jelly. I get
this
!’ He waved the thing in her face so that she must pull her head back to see it. ‘And
these!
’ He plucked up several more eggs from where they were floating on the ripples. He rolled them together in his hand, and when he opened it, a white bead the size of a pea sat there. ‘You got a use for this? I thought not, iggerent.
No one here knows the worth of money. And no one here has this magic—which stays good on a trade where
I
come from, whether I give it to merchant or mudwife, woodman or woman-of-the-night, so there!’

‘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.