Tender Morsels (24 page)

‘But he came with us willingly,’ said Urdda. ‘He seemed to know us and to want to come with us.’

The bear sniffed at Liga, her face and shoulders. Was he larger than the other? How long ago that was—why, it must be seven summers! Or was it eight?

She took his head in her hands to still him. She looked into his fine eyes, which were dark as the other’s, deep as the other’s, but not the other’s. ‘Do you know that other bear?’ she said.

He shook his head, but it seemed he was only shaking off Liga’s hands.

She knelt before him. ‘Does he still live?’ she said.

He looked back into her eyes. Was he trying to answer? Was he answering yes or no? She could not tell, she could not tell.

‘Will he come again? Do you know him?’

The tawny bear made a small strangled noise in his throat.

Branza threw her arm across the bear’s neck, the white limb almost disappearing into his fur. ‘What does it matter, Mam? How we have missed having visits from a bear, any bear! Surely this one knows how to play, just as well as the other did?’

The bear made a shy movement with his great head; he swung away from Liga and lay on his side at Urdda’s feet. Branza fell too, into his stomach fur, laughing. ‘See?’

A piece of other-world knowledge rose from Liga’s bones: they were too old for such games, her girls now. Branza was of marriageable age and Urdda was nearing it, too old to tumble about with animals, especially this stranger, who seemed to Liga to luxuriate too
much in the game. Improper, it was. She remembered women scolding, and talking about girls in scolding voices. If it had not been that she and her daughters were alone here, with no one to fill them with shame or to have any opinion of them at all, she would have scolded them herself. She could feel the inclination for it. She could hear other women’s words readying themselves in her mouth.

Instead, with a forced smile, she took the fish inside, and desolately she laid their now less satisfying weight across the green leaf-patterned platter on the table. The laughter of her daughters sounded in the little house; the fishes gleamed. She eyed their silver skins, the blush of their clean flesh. What had she hoped for? What did she want? Only to be seen and known and some way understood, as she had been by that first bear. Well, it seemed she would not be, now, though minutes ago it had been as likely as not.

Could she even remember that other bear? Had he really come to her at the laundry-rock that day, and touched her face so lightly, and tried to speak to her? She was sure he had tried to speak! Seven summers ago, it had been—was she recalling it right, or had she dreamt it?

Branza’s golden head bobbed laughing at the window; then bear-fur flowed past; then Urdda ran after the other two, laughing also. Then only the boughs of the green forest filled the window-square, dimming with evening around the little house.

Urdda set out early. She took nothing with her, only her own sharp eyes; only her thoughts, busy as a beehive. Through the cool of the morning, she hurried to the stained place in the grass; to the grave, still with Branza’s hand- and footprints on it; to the crushed place where the bear had sat; to the forest from which the bear had approached unseen as she and Branza argued with the littlee-man.

She retraced the beast’s path easily; he was big, and had brushed and broken things; he had been hungry and had torn this bush and grubbed up this plant and that. The light grew, and Urdda’s confidence and happiness grew with it—and her own hunger, because she
had brought no food. A few mushrooms she found, and she drank from the stream where she crossed it, and that must keep her going; she would not stop and return—she was too curious.

At last she came to a cave-mouth, and a single set of bear-prints leaving it. For a moment, she stood in satisfaction; then she bent low and walked in.

She had thought she could see all of the cave from the mouth, but, stepping in carefully so as not to mess the tracks, she found a passageway leading off into darkness to one side; the paw-prints emerged from there. She had to bend her knees to move along it without scraping herself on the rock overhead. She felt her way forward until she could no longer see her hands, the darkness was so complete.

More and more slowly she moved, feeling all around. The smell of bear—of all his vegetable foods become animal inside him over the winter, become meat and fur—was strong, and she breathed it in hard.

At the end of the passage, she put out her hands. A rough rock-wall stopped them. She established the shape of the tunnel-end; she could stand straight here. It was so dark that she could not see her splayed fingers on the wall; already she was halfway to invisible in this world. She pressed her hands to the rock, full of hope.

When a girl of fourteen wants a thing—when she has wanted it all her conscious life; when she senses it near and bends all her hope, and all her will, and all her power to it—sometimes,
sometimes
, her self and her desires will be of such material that worlds will move for her. Or parts of worlds, their skins particularly, will soften to her pressure, and break in a thousand small and undramatic ways, so that she may reach through, so that what seemed a wall reveals itself to be only the thought of a wall, or a wall constructed of bricks of smoke, mortared with mist. There is a smell to such workings, and Urdda smelled it here and now at the rim of the bear-scent, as if someone had held a flaming brand near that bear-fur so that it began to singe and smoke and reek.

The wall of the cave was rock, and one version of Urdda’s hands found it resistant, but another version pressed through, into an
altogether spongier substance, the smell searing her nostrils.

She was up to her elbows in the wall. So this was possible; so it was possible for
her
! She stood still a moment, accommodating the relief, trying to control her excitement. She had her four arms out, two of the hands exploring cracks and chinks, the other two reaching, reaching—she could see them, could she not? She could imagine them in sunlight. There was no doubt in her mind—she had not paused in doubt. She was only gathering her breath to move, to move forward, to move through to whatever other place would have her.

The membrane between the worlds was not wet and not dry, not cold and not warm; it was thick as a castle wall, and all give to the touch, and all blur to her eyes. She pushed her knee, her toe and shin through it; she pushed it aside with her hands; she grasped it and pulled herself through.

Sunlight burst on her. She glimpsed a sunny wall. Then something roared in her ear, and snatched her up, and kissed her scratchingly on the cheek, and rubbed her face with roughness. And she was pushed against the wall, coughing through her scorched throat, and he was running away down the narrow lane—a man clothed all in furs, with a tall fur bonnet on his head, his bare hairy legs and arms all roughly covered with black slime.

‘Iam alarmed now,’ said Branza when evening came.

‘Alarmed?’ Liga looked up from her finework with a smile. ‘This is our little wild adventuress you speak of.’

The bear bulked at Branza’s side in the doorway.
Did you eat her while I slept?
she wanted to ask him.
Did you have her for your breakfast?
But he had been with Branza all day and had never stopped browsing. He had even caught himself three fish in the stream while she rested from her searchings on the bank, her throat sore from calling her sister’s name. And if he had devoured Urdda, he had left no piece behind of her, as he had of the littlee, for Branza to bury.

‘How long should I wait, then, to worry?’ Branza asked.

‘Oh, a little longer. Are you hungry, of your wanderings?’

‘Very.’ Branza shook off her shoes and stepped inside. The bear huffed and followed.

‘No! Not you! Outside!’ Liga cried, and flew at him, and flapped her hands.

‘Mam! That’s not kind.’

‘He smells bad, this one.’

‘Oh, nonsense. He smells of bear, and perhaps a little of fish.’

‘Well, that is bad enough. Yes, sit there on that step. Very well, you may lay your
head
in the door, but no more of you.’

Branza laughed. ‘Oh, look how low you have brought him!’ For the bear had rolled his eyes at her mother, very crestfallen.

‘Well, he may sulk all he wishes,’ said Liga. ‘Spread a cloth, Branza, and we will have our supper.’

When the bread and cheese and the salad were laid out, Branza recounted, with building anxiety, her day’s searching. She had been to the old house-in-the-tree where she and Urdda used to play, on the off-chance that Urdda, unable to sleep, had gone there in the night and dozed off. She had scoured Hallow Top, behind every fallen stone and in every clump of furze. She had asked about the town, but no marketwoman, and none of the pig-people outside the gates, had set eyes on Urdda.

‘I will go up that cliff-top tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I know sometimes she haunts up there.’

‘Oh, you think?’ Liga’s voice was full of doubt. ‘That’s a long way.’

‘And perhaps below it. Perhaps she has fallen. She might have tried to fly again.’

Liga laughed. ‘Oh, Branza, she has fourteen summers now; she would not be so foolish!’

Branza sighed. ‘Well, I must do something. To sit here and stitch while she does not come—I don’t know how you can do it. I am so cross with her one moment, and so frightened the next!’

Liga swallowed a mouthful of cheese and bread and patted Branza’s hand across the table. ‘All will be well,’ she said comfortably. ‘You will see.’

But all was not well. Or at least, all continued well except that Urdda did not return. Branza went out in the mornings with Bear at her side and a place in mind that Urdda might have taken it into her head to visit, or to build a hidey-hole in and pretend to live in for a few days. It had been something they used to do together, she and Branza; Branza was offended not to be told, although both
girls had had solitary games all their lives, as well as games they played together.

All day Branza would search cave and cottage, marsh and heath and town lane. As the days, as the weeks, went on, she sometimes paused, to rest and to weep discouragement and grief into Bear’s fur; she would not burden Mam with it and threaten her eternal hopefulness, but she must release it somehow: Urdda might never come back, she feared. The forest was vast; no one in all their lifetime could explore every nook and crevice of it. And the stream was long, and in places pooled very deep. And the marsh—who knew what lay under that sheet of silver lumped with reedy islets, arrowed with the wakes of ducks? And Urdda might be in none of these places, for Branza remembered well that littlee-man stamping his foot and being gone behind the rock when there was nowhere for him to go. She remembered Bear—that first Bear—running off into nothing, into moonlight and enchantment. She remembered—the memory was like a red-hot iron against her heart—Urdda saying she had tried to fly after him; Urdda diving and diving at the marsh-edge, hunting for the beard-tuft.
Wouldn’t you love to go there?
Urdda exclaimed in Branza’s memory, wounding her sister again and again. She might not be in all the vastness here, in wood or water or town; she might be stepped through, stamped through, flown through finally to that place she had always wanted to go to—to the land of littlees, to the land of magicked Bears who consorted with children and mams.

As the weeks passed, as the months passed, Liga’s greeting changed in tone, so subtly that only Branza could have noticed it. She always asked the same bright question: ‘And where have you been today?’ But with time, the note that expected good news of Urdda, and then the note that even associated Branza and Bear’s wanderings with her younger daughter—both those notes faded.

‘And I saw no sign of Urdda,’ Branza would sometimes say dully at the end of her account of her travels, unable to believe that her mam could so forget, could care so little about, the reason Branza exhausted herself each day.

‘Oh? Oh. No,’ Liga might say, remembering, then straight away dismissing it. ‘These are fine cresses you found. You say the bear led
you to them? I almost like him for that.’ And she cast a fond look at the beast’s head in the doorway.