Tender Morsels (27 page)

She did the sensible thing: she set off for her home. Down the town she went, and the sound of her own footfalls emerged from the ebbing rousty noises behind her, and the hot glare of the alehouse faded to the cool of moonlight. The main street, with all its extra houses, channelled her down to the gate like a tunnel—a tunnel with a starry ceiling—and the town gate stood open at the bottom, giving onto the passing road. Two guards lounged there: strangers to her, one with a pipe lit, both of them with eyes.

‘Who is us?’ said one, approaching her from the gate-shadow. ‘A bitty maid trotting out on her own i’ the night?’

‘Where might you be headed, missy?’ said the other from within his cloud of smoke.

‘To my home, sir. I live out beyond the Font.’

‘Ah, is a gypsy lass,’ said the closer man. ‘I am surprised you is alone.’

‘We ought escort the maid, mebbe,’ said the other, shifting and waving smoke away. ‘She look to be quite pretty under the Bear-black.’

‘No, thank you,’ said Urdda. ‘I know the way very well.’

‘You hear that, Lorrit?’ There was a note in the closer man’s voice that Urdda could not interpret. ‘Your services are not required.’

‘Good night,’ Urdda said. Without slowing her step, she walked under the arch of the gate and out to the road.

‘
My
services?’ said the pipe-smoker disbelievingly. The other guard chuckled.

Outside the town, everything was more or less as she expected, in its shadows and cool night-forest smells and night-bird noises. Urdda made a good pace, pausing for a drink at Marta’s Font. I hope Branza has left some bread for me, she thought, and not fed it all to the birds.

At first she walked right past the path that led down to the cottage. When she realised her mistake at the next bend and retraced her steps, she found that the tunnel into the forest was not nearly as easy to distinguish as it ought to be, although the rough stone steps down the slope were much the same.

Down she went. Twigs caught at her clothing, vines at her hair, and spiderwebs—not an anchor-rope here and there, but whole curtains and entrapments of webs, speckled with black-wrapped remnants of insects—masked and gripped her face, or required to be torn apart for her to make her way. But she was Urdda, not Branza; she plucked the webs from her face and hands and persisted.

She pushed the last overgrowings aside, stumbled into the clearing, and stopped. A little scream escaped her, very like something Branza might have uttered from one of her bad dreams. And then, in disbelief, in the strange noonish-moonish light, she walked forward through the wild grasses, dead and dried and risen into waves now that their burden of winter snow had melted from them. She bent to the wreckage of Liga’s rose-arbour—the climbing rose uprooted, black and leafless, its knuckles in the lattice as if it were still in the act of tearing the arbour down. There was no sign of the garden’s neat rows; it was a wilderness of bare ground with scraps of gone-to-seed herbs, with caved-in gourd-shells scattered about and rabbit-scrapes dug where once turnip-tops had swelled.

Urdda sidled along the path, turned to left and right, gasped shocked breaths and exclaimed them softly out again. At last she fetched up against the cottage step. It was the same step, without a doubt; she crouched and examined with desperate hands its pits and
cracks, the hollow worn in the middle. But the ground to either side was bare of white-blooming bush and of red, and the doorway had no door, nor even a lintel, but gave straight onto the stars above, and below onto a mound of rotting thatch lumped with roof-beams that must have fallen years ago. The walls had melted under the rains and snows to stumps of things, with wattle sticking out, bleached and uneven, at the top.

‘Where is Mam?’ whispered Urdda. ‘Branza! Where have they got to?’

All appearances gave them to be dead and gone, but that could not be true. Urdda had left them alive and breathing in their beds that very morning. She had stepped over the paw of the snoring bear on just this step! She lowered herself to sit on the stone—she was cold, now that she had stopped walking and struggling through the forest—and stared at the ruin around her, the wasteland. And when that had exhausted her by not assembling into any kind of sense, she raised her gaze to the familiar stars, and to the cheese-round moon, rough-faced and impersonal, coasting along the cloud-streaks above the black trees.

‘I tell you, they is not the same standard of Bears any more,’ I said to Todda, pulling our door to and taking little Anders’ hand.

‘Says you, Bear of Bears.’ She smiled at me, organising her shawl around the bundle that was Ousel.

‘Says me. Even four year ago, we had better lads. Bigger and of better mettle. All the high posts and offices of this town, Bears occupy now, and is respectable. Not one o’ those four last night was respectable. They puked and bellowed and sauced Ada Keller so, her da had to put her away and do all the bringing himself. The whole day is supposed to be about civilising men, not freeing them to paw and offend the women. It has all got bent out of its purpose.’

‘’Tis the lure of the boats. It is that Outman boy that turned a sailor, and brought back his coin, and strutted in his uniform. That glamorised them all, and off the good lads went.’

‘I know,’ I said gloomily. Anders were toddling too slow, so I picked him up and put him on my shoulders.

We walked across town to my brother Aran’s house, where his wife’s mam, Sella, had yet to see our new Ousel. We had a fine breakfast and morning there, most of the town still slumbering around us after the night’s and yesterday’s excesses. I was a touch faded myself, but I had taken care not to get in such a state as some so as I could be some use to Todda in the night, should Ousel cry and Anders forsake his bed at the same time. Which, of course, he had done.
Come, little lad
. I had peeled him off his mam so she could nurse the new one.
I’ve a story for you
. And I told it him in that voice, halfway between song and murmur, that settled the boy’s eyelashes upon his cheeks again.
I cannot do that near so fast as you
, says Todda.
There is something about your rumblingness casts the spell, no?

No
, says I,
You make your stories too interesting, that is their problem
.

Anyway, here we were, making our way back home, through the mess and desertion of St Olafred’s after Bear Day. Todda led Anders; I had Ousel in my arms. The pennants on the turret of the castle still snapped their reared, snarling bears in the wind, and hunters’ houses had bear-heads on their steps, or hung on their doors, that protected their women from molestation on the Day, and there was some girl’s ribbon trodden to the cobbles, and some man’s pint-mug sat with drunken precision on a windowsill, that would have to be returned to Osgood’s at some time.

I saw her as we crossed the High Street, standing like a lost lamb in the covered market, watching us but affecting not to. ‘Who is that?’ I says to my Todda, even as I felt, I know that person, from life before my marriage, from life before Todda.

‘I’ve never seen her before. Mebbe she’s been visiting for the Day.’

The way the girl stood, it was like a bee in my brain. Where do I know her? No, I have never seen her before! But—

Most uncharacteristic, I made towards her, away from Todda and Anders. Todda cleared her throat, slight but pointedly, behind me, but even then I must have known the face glowering at me, with the pin-drops of rain flying and falling across it.

Then I were in the market and there was no rain between us, and still she met my eye, in a way that would have been insolent in a town girl, but in this one—

All on a sudden, I knew the reason, and I clutched babby Ousel to me, because the first effect on me was to make me turn limp and nearly drop the boy to the slates.

‘It’s little Urdda!’

Her face cleared of some of its frowning, but still she were puzzled, I could tell.

‘But all growed up. Grown to a young lady now. How old would you be, fifteen? But in the space of four years—how is that? You were but a little sprout then.’

‘I am fourteen summers, sir,’ she said.

‘You do not know me,’ I said. ‘Forgive me. Of course not. My name, sweet child, is Davit Ramstrong. I am a woolman and a citizen of this town of St Olafred’s.’

‘Oh, so it
is
the same town. But I have not met you, sir?’ said Urdda.

‘Indeed you have, my slip,’ I said. ‘But I were in bear form, in the place we met. Often we have sported, you and your sister Branza and your lovely mother and I. You will remember chasing me, I think, when I run off into the sky and never returned? Off that cliff there?’

She searched my whole face carefully. ‘You? You are Bear?’ I could see her in there, the little one I knew inside this taller, less certain girl. Todda and Anders were behind me, watching, listening. I could hear my wife’s calm breathing.

‘I
was
Bear—for one day here and for some months in your place. The time must run different in the two places. Which is why you can be so much older now. But how do you come to be here, Urdda? What brought you?’

‘I brought myself,’ she said unsteadily, glancing at Todda beyond my shoulder, and around me at my boy. ‘I followed the trail of a bear, a different bear; I pushed through the wall of a cave.’

‘Davit?’ said Todda behind me.

‘This is Urdda, wife. Remember I have told you? The day we met, that whole tale.’

‘Urdda is the younger daughter? Of . . . of . . . Liga, was her name?’

The girl’s eyes brightened further. ‘You know my mam?’ she said, and her voice was fraught.

My good wife went straight to her, bless her, and took her hand where it gripped her shawl. ‘I know
of
her, Urdda, that only.’

‘Do you know of where she is? Where I might find her?’

Oh, I had never heard that little sparkling girl so woeful. Todda turned to me and a glance full of doubt and pity passed between us.

‘How long have you been here, girl?’ I said, gentle as I could.

‘I arrived . . . last evening,’ she managed, on either side of a gulped breath.

‘And where have you slept? Have you slept,’ says Todda, ‘or only wandered?’

‘I went out to the cottage.’

‘The cottage? There is no cottage left!’ I said.

She nodded. ‘I made myself a kind of nest,’ she whispered. ‘Of grasses.’

‘And slept in the wildwood?’ said Todda. ‘Girl, you were lucky not to be took by bears or gypsies! Davit, I think we must have this girl to our home with us. I shudder to think what will happen to her, do we not accommodate her. You must be the only man of this town knows her provenance—and no one else will believe her, but they will take any story you give them as to her origins. Who have you spoke to already, girl?’

‘The guards at the gate. That Bear. Laundry-girls. A woman selling cakes outside the alehouse.’

Todda touched her own cheek at the horror of it. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘There’s the nook next the babbies’ room; you shall have that to sleep in. Oh, that dreadful cottage!’

‘You must have had a bad fright, seeing it for the first time,’ I said, following them out the market, ‘were you expecting it to be as you remembered.’

‘Oh, I did,’ she said, her poor mouth trembling between tears and a smile. ‘I did not know what to think—and still I don’t.’

And nor did I, as I followed the three of them, Anders now on Todda’s hip, watching the new acquaintance curiously. ‘I had begun to think I had dreamt you all,’ I said, ‘and my time as Bear among you. And now you have stepped out the dream, all tall and real. This will require some thinking.’

So
that
bear is gone too, Branza finally admitted. First, first-Bear goes, then Urdda, and now this second Bear. Well, was he so much of a loss? Not compared to Urdda, certainly, or to first-Bear, an altogether kinder, nobler beast. She thought, though, of lying against the second one—the bulk and warmth of him, and his willingness to accommodate her there in her doubts and wonderings, his enjoyment of the little amount she allowed him. It was indeed a less worrying world without him, but it was lesser in other ways as well.