Tender Morsels (33 page)

‘And why is none of the girls stuck in their dresses, then—unless they are, and are just keeping very quiet about it?’ Noer looked his most withering, but at his elbow Filip was frowning, thinking. I was sure he almost remembered.

‘I think . . . because they were not dressed up as bears.’

Now Noer were uncertain. And Filip squinted at me hopefully. I was not trying any tricks on; I was just letting the knowledge bubble out as I thought it, with no calculation of its effect. They could hear that in my voice, my own surprise in the face of it. Their eyes searched around me, fast and flickery as if a cloud of flies were circling me.

There was a rattle outside and in came the pretty again, with a tray of flower-tea makings so fragile and fine, I almost said,
We’re bears, remember
.

‘Please, will you sit and take some teas,’ she says, and we girt fools folded ourselves again into the girl-furniture. With much grace and amusement, she juggled the infusing and giving. The weak sun shone on the cups and pots and strainers and the pouring, so it was as if she were arranging the very light and the shine. She nestled two morsel-cakes on every little salver against the cup before she handed it across. Was she in mourning? Certainly she were dressed very dark. Dark and shapely. A fine figure, as I said.

‘Thank you, Urdda,’ says the widder.

Miss Foreign—Urdda—had brought a cup for herself too, and she poured it and drank from it, her eyes laughing at us over the rim, or so I thought. Well, we made a picture, did we not? We were cleaned of soot, at least, but we were still three growed lumps of men in bear-hats and filthy bear-furs, Filip in his boots, too, for the warmth. But it were not Bear Day, so the sense of the costume was somehow lost, and we were not rampaging about the streets but visiting a lady in a parlour. In our big hands, the silver cups-and-salvers were like dollware, with the tiniest ornamentations engraved upon them—was there ever an incising tool so small? Had she given us teas to make us more ridiculous? I would not put it past her, the bold miss.

‘In the twitten, you say,’ said the widder to her teacup. ‘Which twitten would that be?’

‘The one that cuts behind Hogback’s,’ said Filip. ‘From Murther Lane down to the laundresses.’

She pussed her mouth and blinked at that. ‘Hmm. And were you doing owt improper at the time, or lawless?’

‘Well, mum, the whole of Bear Day is for lawlessness,’ said Filip. ‘We had been being improper on girls and women many hours by then; it were expected.’

‘Netherless,’ she says, ‘there must have been some type of infraction occurred.’ She looked around beadily at us. ‘And where there is infractions, there must also be appeasements, I am thinking.’

‘We were only doing what was arksed of us,’ sulked Noer. ‘What every other Bear have ever done.’

‘Appeasements?’ said Filip. ‘Appeasements is things we can do, isn’t they?’

‘That’s right,’ said the leddy. ‘They make right what is done wrong toords the powers that be. I am thinking some kind of sacrifice is in order here. And as this is all bear-related, it stands to reason a bear be slain, and the right words said, and the right parts consumed and offered up.’

And that is how we came to find ourselves, early next day, high in the forest on Olafred’s Mount. Noer had his bow, and with us also walked Sollem Archer and his son Jem; Filip and I, poor marksmen both, brought only knives for the skinning and removing of the pieces. The widder had told us we were to eat this and burn that, and boil the bones up so, and bury them white with the skull uppermost by Olafred’s Tree—that pine, lightninged into a claw, where the story said the saint had sat in amity with all the animals, chief among them that famous bear, what is on all our pennants and insignias through the town.

Girt fools we looked, and I was glad we had left Wolfhunt and the other men in that lower camp, where the boiling would happen, and only had the Archers, for they were taciturn as we could wish, and seemed to find none of this amusing—even the thought of the bear-bounty this would earn them of the town. They had such eyes and ears, such noses—they were more limbs or extensions of the mountain, stepping silent upon it, than stumpers and grumblers like us townsmen, out of our place and longing for comfort and civilisation.

A long, hard, dreary climb it had been behind the hunters, half in the dark and then less stumblingly in the dawn. As we neared the place of the caves, the air tightened with the Archers’ attention, and I began to worry, and see shadows looming among the trees, and push thoughts out of my head about the size of grown bears and their ferocity in the early spring.

Cave-mouth to cave-mouth we went, and Noer and Sollem and Jem performed their examinations, and for a long, tedious while it seemed there were no bears to be had.

Midafternoon, because we were so chafed and tired and complaining, Sollem put us next a spring and took Jem off to search some higher caves that we could not reach comfortably. We sat and took bread and cheese, and drank of the spring, and did not talk much to each other in our disheartenment.

‘We will be Bears for ever,’ says Filip gloomily, stretching out on the needly ground.

‘Sometimes it is days, when the real hunt is on,’ Noer pointed out. ‘They go back at night to camp and cauldron, then out next
day to stalk again, and next day and next, living on rabbits and brought provisions.’

‘That is no kind of life,’ said Filip.

Miserably we lay, in the bits of late sunshine we could find, and one by one fell asleep.

I woke, and the light slanted differently. A scent filled my head, filled my body, filled the clearing, that was all the green and brown of the world—all the blood, all the bone, all the wild water. I sat up. ‘Filip! Noer!’ I whispered, for there was the creature we were after, a full-grown she-bear drinking at the spring. The scent rushed off her, poured from her fur and her lungs and richly from her hindparts, billowed out.

‘Noer!’ I whispered again. ‘You must shoot her!’ How would he do that, close as she were, huge as she were, a moving mountain herself? I took another noseful of her, fresh as the first cider of autumn, clean as the first good snow untrod by man or beast.

‘Craw Mighty.’ Filip had woken, and sat staring. ‘What a creature.’

She swung her head to look at us, her muzzle all diamonded from the spring, drops in her eyebrows and frosting the edges of her ears. Her face was big as a hanch-platter. I tried to remember there was teeth in it, and a brain behind, and behind that who knew how hungry a stomach this early in the spring, after her long time in the underworld with only hell-moss and hell-fungus to eat? But I could not care. All I wanted was to see her closer, to bury my face and fingers in her fur, to have her enfold me.

Noer woke and saw her and shrieked up the slope there. Though I could not take my eyes from the jewelled face, from the breathing muzzle, from the amber eyes, at my sight’s very edge I registered the foolish boy swarming up a tree. She can climb, you know, I thought, hoping all the while she would stay near me, seeing all the while how his shout had attracted her, and her face was turning toords him and I was losing her. ‘Stay,’ I think I even said.

‘No,’ I heard Filip breathe.

But she was moving now, the bulk of her, the darkness. New suggestions and flourishments of her scent flowed over me as her limbs and folds opened and closed passing near. I put out my hand,
and the brush of her passing flank was coarse fur only, but it left on my fingertips some oil or paint of enchantment, and I did not know—Should I put it to my mouth? Or rub it on my skin? Which would be the more delicious?

Noer clutched his tree-trunk as if it were a lady-love. He made very similar sounds to a lady-love himself.

‘It’s all right,’ Filip called out to him, all dazed. ‘’Tis a magic bear, Noer, and no risk to us.’ Which I was not at all sure of, for she had took some of the smell with her, and now I could see her grey feet, and remember her teeth and likely appetite.

Filip went after her, but I walked slower in my uncertainty. The three of them assembled themselves like holy statues in a grotto: the masked bear-boy crouched in the tree-fork; the hatted man and the bear in their furs below.

‘Come down, Noer. She’ll not harm you,’ says Filip happily.

But the cloud of her had already risen. Noer lay along the tree-limb and hung his arm down; his fingertips almost reached the nosing nose below. The bear upheaved herself against the tree-trunk, and he cooed and stroked her as if he were huntmaster and she his best hound. And Filip’s hand was a pale star in the fur of her back.

Part of me felt great alarm, and part said to myself, Of course! This is the way it
should
be between man and beast. Certainly between man and bear, for we are twins in being separate from the general run of creation, she in her size and magnificence and us in the power of our intelligence to apprehend and to tame them. ‘Come now, Noer,’ says I weakly.

‘Come now
what
?’ He gazed into the huffing hanch-platter that was her face below him. And Filip, too, looked at me as if he were two year old and I were calling him from play to wash himself and sit through prayers.

The fear croaked in my voice. ‘Come away, the both of ye. There is magic at work here, and I don’t like the feel of it.’

‘Well,
I
like its feel,’ Noer chuckled. ‘I like its feel
very
much.’ And Filip had both hands in the bear’s fur now and was kneading, as if he could not fill himself full enough of the feel of it.

‘Come along,’ I said, stepping back, frightened. I wanted to run at
them and free them as I were free, but at the same time I longed to be trapped like them. But two are enchanted already, I managed to think, and the third must keep his head. ‘We have a
task
,’ I said, to myself as much as them. ‘We have an
object
. I tell you, if we did not have these skins on, we would be filling our trews at the sight o’ this bear. You would be climbing out the top o’ that tree and into the clouds in your terror.’

Noer’s face filled with the sweetest amusement I had ever seen on him. ‘Ah, but we
do
, we do have these skins. We are bear like her. We are the same creature now.’

And Filip looked out too, blindly and dumbly at me, his fingers working in the fur.

I turned from them to catch me a big breath of plain forest air untainted by this enchantment. Then I ran towards them and caught Filip by the arm, and I pulled on him. I am bigger than him, but he stood like one of the stones on Hallow Top, fast in the bear’s spell. The air of the she-bear were stars and pepper and exploding dew on my skin; the little breath of her that I gasped as I dodged past Filip dizzied me like a wine, clarified me like a slap to my face.

I ran at Filip bodily, at the height of his hip so that he would be knocked away from her but not necessarily to the ground and requiring lifting. He gave a shout of disappointed rage, staggered, and fought me all the way, but I had surprised him, and once he were disengaged from her she had not quite such power, and I managed to force him well away from her and hold him down until he wept like a babby. I stood over him and gasped in the flat air—the tedious normal breath of the world, with no magic in it, no taste and no sensation but boring ongoing life, in-out like a water pump. I kept my back to the bear, knowing that if I saw her I would run to her in the longing for those other sensations, those greater.

‘We must get Noer away,’ I says frightenedly to Filip.

‘Yes,’ said he. ‘He should not have her while I cannot.’ So he were still under her power. I gave him a bit of a kick there, rolled him farther away from her. He squirmed and wailed.

‘Let me c’llect myself,’ I said. ‘How can I knock him out that tree?’

‘Ah,’ says Filip into the dirt. ‘I see it. I see it. She had magicked us. What were I thinking? Oh—’ And he gave her a fixed look. ‘I can feel them both at once. Bullock, I am in love with her! In love with a bear! And yet not in love, yet I can see, at the same instant—’ He put his hands to his face and tried to shake the thoughts out of his head.

‘A branch.’ I cast about for one. ‘Big enough to poke him down. Whereupon the two of us might—’ But Filip was looking very mazed and useless there. I might have to do this all myself.

I found a branch long enough, but it was too heavy, even for me and Filip both, even supposing he came to his senses. ‘Curse it,’ I said. ‘With that one we might of stood right outside the magic and dislodged him.’

Filip was sitting up now, smearing dirty tears off his cheeks, taking deep breaths.

‘Are you nearly back to me?’ I said to him. ‘Because I am going to need you.’

The she-bear’s voice tingled the back of my skull and twangled my loins. Noer murmured back. Oh, it was horrible; worms of envy were crawling all over my skin. But the anger of that, I thought, might help me propel him out of this, propel all of us. Oh, where was the right stick? I was mad among the bushes, stomping and flinging about.

‘I think . . . I think . . .’

‘I don’t care what you think, Filip! Find us a branch. Two branches: one to prod him out the tree, the other to whack the bear should she come after us.’