Tender Morsels (52 page)

‘I have done nothing but walk off my feelings,’ said Urdda, and went to the scullery to wash her hands and face.

‘Don’t you think there is something of an air around that girl?’ she heard Lady Annie say behind her.

‘An air?’ Liga said. ‘I am very tired too—perhaps too tired to distinguish airs.’

Then Branza bustled into the kitchen, relieved and anxious. Supper happened—a fine supper, but a subdued one. Urdda heard Branza attempt several bright beginnings of conversation, but nobody else could sustain them very long, and she herself was torn between pitying Branza and envying her her ignorance of the truths, of the histories, that seemed to hang above the table in a leaden cloud, threatening storms and tears. Did Annie feel that cloud? Urdda was almost certain she did, and as they ate, she examined various times when in Annie’s presence, Annie’s and Mam’s, certain people had passed, or certain names been uttered, and some small silence had occurred, or some change of subject or other evasive manoeuvre had been performed, unimportant to Urdda until now. And now—oh, it was intolerable to be trapped in the now and to see all this! How was Urdda ever going to forgive herself for having had Mam and Branza dragged back to this world, for making Mam remember all the details she had related today—every word and bruise; every button and torn dress-seam; every drop of spittle; every flutter and leap and throe of terror and revulsion? How would she ever make things right?

When a girl of fifteen, hovering on the point of entering womanhood, wants a thing, there is only so much she can do, and for most,
most
such girls, the wanting itself—even with all the hope and will and power they can muster—will not be sufficient to gain them that thing.

But Urdda was not most girls, and there lurked within her—pressed tight and in-crinkled as a closed flower bud, mysterious as a seed or egg, invisible as an unborn in the mound of its mother—abilities most girls do not have. Whether they came direct from some powerful great-granddam of Liga’s or less straightly down a sire-line, from home blood or from foreign—well, such matters are never clear. But there they were, and until that afternoon they had been all-but-formless potential, unable to be wielded in any directed or specific way.

Strong feelings were required to arouse them, and many varied and well-honed skills to manipulate them. Few stronger feelings exist than those Urdda had undergone that day on behalf of her mother, and these emotions had brought the potentialities to a state of alertness as she wept in Liga’s lap. Whatever filament had kept the bud closed, it was now released, and though still tight-folded, the flower held among the sprung-apart tips of its outermost petals the ‘air’ that Annie had sensed and spoken of. This air was responsive and interested, and engaged itself immediately in considering Urdda’s distress and rage, insofar as it had intelligence.

There is power everywhere in the true world, and Lady Annie’s house was no exception. The mudwife herself, for one, had considerable ability, though it had never been more than partially and poorly employed. Liga’s energy existed mainly in her bitterness and anger, so deep in her bones now that she thought she did not feel them any more. The strength with which she had forced them below, to protect herself from their derangements, was a positive force on its own. As well, there was the miraculous stuff that runs like sheet-opal through the matter of all people—Branza had it, and Mister Deeth, and every passerby. Unaware of anything more than her own distress and anger, Urdda had that afternoon drawn these stuffs from the people near around her and those beyond Lady Annie’s walls, so that the core of her rage and sadness had been surrounded by appropriated abilities, as a bonfire is surrounded by
the wavering air of its own heat, or an emerging flower by the first waftings of its soon-to-be-irresistible scent.

And as she had walked that evening, Urdda had passed many powerful people: children touched with charm, clueless that it was within them; maids whose frivolous fortune-telling always held a germ of truth; mothers and wives whose soups were as good as medicines in times of illness; and men who simply attracted luck, or women who sped healing, with a touch or a word. And those inner scales or sheets of power in us all, so slight and fine that we deny them or never notice; the wisp-flames of happy-chance that touch us, sting, and then flicker away before we can calculate how they were conjured, how they might be kept—Urdda had all unknowingly drawn these out of every person, every house, every plant and creature she passed. Through the town she had moved like a boatlet being poled across a mirror lake. Powers had pleated and arrowed and rippled behind her like melting glass—but gathered in
towards
her, not spread out in her wake. The town had dulled and lost energy as she passed; people had become somewhat aimless, needing to remind themselves what they had just been doing; people had shaken themselves and blinked and propelled themselves with newly necessary effort about their duties and businesses.

Annie had sensed these accumulations on Urdda’s return, but because of her own diminished powers, she could not properly see, or bring herself to care very greatly, what had happened. Had she pursued her first questioning of the girl, she might well have detected what was emerging, undisciplined, and been able to confine its effects to some degree; but she did not. She only supped as the rest did, and when Branza, frustrated by the women’s moodiness, dismissed them from the table, she only climbed the stairs, with Urdda plodding ahead of her and Liga trailing behind. While Branza clashed and scrubbed and sang in the kitchen below, the three women bade each other good-night and retired to their rooms.

When Branza, too, had gone to bed; when the whole house slept; when the whole town, unaccountably tired, had gone early to its rest and lay drained and dreamless on its pallets and pillows and piles of straw, the accumulated forces and feelings of that day tendrilled
from Urdda’s body and memory down through the house like curling, inquisitive rootlets. Through the floorboards and the laths and plaster and the ceiling beams they sank—soundless, sightless, odourless, persistent—and into the workroom, where events—or the
telling
of events—had first evoked them.

The man-figures Urdda had snipped from the black cloth and the white—at first they stayed cloth, and moved only slightly, as if a draft had caught them. The pins that held them to the table glowed dully—only as much as you would expect from moon- and starlight gathered from the uncovered window—but the first real sign of Urdda’s coming into her powers was the pins’ brightening to red, and further, in time, to orange. One by one, the cloth-men ceased their now energetic rippling and noticed their shining pins, and pushed themselves with their blunt cloth hands up to sitting, and tried with those hands to quench the pins’ heat. They spoke to each other, at first in sounds that would have been inaudible to normal ears; and then in dry whispering like the rubbings of cloth throats; and then more slipperily, like scissor-blades snipping—
slish-slish
.

They plumped out, flat cloth no longer, and stretched up, growing from doll-sized to the size of the men they matched in true life. Their feet met the floor.

‘Oh, cold!’ said one under his breath.

‘Do not worry,’ said another. ‘We will hot things up.’ He stroked his swollen pin, which stood out from him, orange-hot, with yellow sparks winking and hissing on the pinhead.

Clothes appeared on the men, though vaguely—maybe only chalked, or tattooed, or embroidered on the white skins and the black. Their faces came into being, as uncertain in their features as the clothes were, fading and sharpening on their heads as their different hairs glimmered around. Younger versions, they were, of their matching men, twelve-years-ago versions of the boy Woodman, and Thurrow Cleaver, and Ivo Strap, and Fox, and Hogback Younger, son of the foreigner Blackman.

‘Where will we start?’ said the littlest one.

‘Fox was the first to sin upon her,’ muttered another. ‘We should follow history.’

‘But young Hogback’s shaming will be the greater. He is closest to a gentleman.’ The black figure’s hands hissed on his white-hot pinhead, which stood out like a constable’s cudgel from his velvet-seeming trousers.

‘Let us save him till the last, then. Let us work upward, from lowest to highest standing in the town.’

‘Yes, and for each we will follow the original order, with Fox first, then Woodman, then me, and so on.’

‘A grand plan!’ The Fox figure clapped his hands. Flashes as of lightning lit the room.

Murmurous and flickering, the five cloth-men moved beyond the walls.

Thurrow Cleaver they found in the Thatchlanes, in the arms of his favourite laundress. At the touch of their clothy hands, she leaped from the bed. She snatched up her kirtle to cover her nakedness and stood against the wall, screaming loud the full time, bringing the household down. Each visitor had his way with Thurrow: the Fox-man, the Woodman, the Cleaver, the Strap and the Hogback-man. The laundresses crowded in the doorway, exclaiming or staring or laughing helplessly, each according to her nature and past relations with Thurrow.

Ivo Strap was cosy in his cot with the second Mistress Strap and seven of his twelve children. Nobody saw the cloth-men walk in through the front wall. They pulled Strap from the bed by his ankles, and the children and the wife spilled everywhere with his clawing. They were still complaining of his stealing the blanket when the Hogback bared Strap’s bottom and offered it to the little Fox-man. ‘Here, Fox, and don’t spare him. This one were partic’lar rough, as I recall.’

The others stood round and kept the shouting wife and the screaming sons out of the way, flicking them back like flat-beetles, while Strap was dealt with. Piteously he cried, until he went insensible from the treatment they dealt him.

‘He suffered nicely, that one,’ said a cloth-man, wiping his hands on his coat-ends as they stepped out through Strap’s door into the crowd of woken neighbours.

‘He made good noise, to be sure,’ agreed the Hogback. ‘My oath, but it doesn’t last long, though, the relief. Look, I am orange again already.’

‘How it itches and it burns!’ said the Fox-magic.
Zzzt-zzzt-zzzt
, went his hands upon his pin.

Joseph Woodman was a good way away, out in the forest in the cutters’ camp. All of his brothers were there with him, and two of their wives to keep the woodmen fed.

‘Teller? Jock?’ said Joseph mazily as the cloth-men pulled him from his lean-to. ‘What muckinbout is this? Lemme sleep.’

The Woodman-magic tore off the man’s trousers. ‘Look at him,’ he said. ‘Bright as two moons. This is the one what instigated it, boys. Make sure he remembers.’ And they went at him, each with his great glowing pin. The whole camp woke, and watched or fled, according to their stomachs. A man or two tried to go to Joseph’s aid, but the cloth-men proved difficult to grasp ahold of, and then frightening in their difference from human textures, so that no man held to them for long. Then the deeds were done, and the cloth-men threw him out of the pack like a dog-chewed rag-a-doll, and they muttered and moiled away among the trees, with a flash of shirt there and a gleam of velvet here.

Ah, Lycett Fox, so small and smart. Only his mam was there to see what he underwent, but that proved quite humiliating enough for the both of them.

‘Mmm.’ The Fox-magic smacked his lips as he climbed out the chamber window onto the roof. ‘He were good and tight. He almost quenched me. He almost done the job.’

‘Save yourself,’ growled the Hogback, folding himself after him. ‘The best is yet to come. Enflame your pin for this last one; he will quench you well and truly.’

So finally to Hogback’s they repaired. There they found the gentleman at cards and tobacco with a large party of his closest confreres, frittering away the fortune and reputation his father had spent his life acquiring.

Hogback leaped up at the sight of the motley men stepping into
the drawing room. But then he espied his own self—only strangely clothed, and brightly pinned, and giving off a strong incendiary stink, and his ‘How dare you!’ died on his lips.

‘Ooh, this is a fine, upstanding feller,’ cooed the Fox-man.

‘He is no better than the others,’ said the Hogback-man, striding forward. ‘Only his fine clothing takes more negotiation. Let’s have at him.’

They descended on him, all five, and there before the merchants of the town, and the most respectable, and such of their ladies as ran from the adjoining parlour at the hubbub and did not faint dead away at the sight, they stripped away Hogback’s fine pantaloons and visited on him exactly the measure of degradation and damage he had dealt out to Liga that afternoon in her father’s cottage, those many years ago.

‘Well, we are done,’ said the last cloth-man, withdrawing from Hogback’s bottom and letting him fall limp and bloodied to the fine Turkitch rug. All around them, the gentlemen expostulated and broke candlesticks on the cloth-men’s heads, and the ladies shrieked and malaised and ran about. Unperturbed, the five figures tucked what was left of their dulled pins away into the matter of their clothing, or their flesh, or whatever it was they were made of. They stepped out through wall and window, descended to the street, and strode, too fast to follow, up the town. In the morning, some onlookers would say they had fled downhill; others would swear on the Eelmother’s chastity that they had tripped off all five in different directions; still others would insist that they had flown into the air on bat-wings, or caught fire and burnt themselves up to nothing and nowhere.