Tender Morsels (8 page)

But she found when she tried that she could neither throw the baby nor hold it over the emptiness and let it go.

I will tuck her in my shawl, she thought, so that we are smashed dead together. And she did tuck the baby in, and tied it tight against her.

But then she thought, If I die and she doesn’t, think of her, mouthing my dead breast, crying under the weight of me, perhaps broken and in pain. And she could neither step nor leap from the precipice.

‘I could kill her against that tree first.’ She said the outlandish words aloud. She had brained many a coney and kid; she would know exactly how. ‘Against this rock right here. To make sure.’

She untied the baby from herself. She lifted her out of her wrappings, shutting off her own nostrils from the scent—warm; a little sharp, like vinegar. She held her up and the child slept on, her wise mouth expectant of nothing, not caring if she continued or no. The little heart coursed along there, under the heel of Liga’s hand.

Liga gave a great living sigh, and sat on the ground, and laid the baby on her knees. So soft was its cheek that Liga’s finger-skin could not feel it; she leaned in to breathe of the milky breath, and watch
the eyes moving under their dozy lids. So beautiful and unsullied; how had the bab known to lie quiet all that time in the house? Surely it was best to end her before life broke and dirtied her. If Mam had only ended me! she thought. I was well-grown and walking, not a bab like this, but she might have strangled me with a snare-cord, or cut my throat. She might have taken me with her. And if she had—Liga stood up—I would not be holding this sweet, soft thing out here, with the breeze coming up from below and tickling the downy hair on her brow, the last soft movement before I let the rocks have her, let the rocks break her—

With a sob, she let the baby go. Her hands snapped to fists at her chest, her eyes closed, her face averted itself from what she was doing.

Two ragged breaths she took and released before she would look. But when she did—‘Ah!’

For the baby had not dropped. It hung there against the stars, held up by nothing at all, its head sunk to one side, perfectly asleep.

And it commenced to glow. All around it, needles of light spread out against the night sky.

Liga stepped back. ‘Go, little one! Die! This is no place for you!’

But the baby would not drop, and the light spread around it, and from the brightening centre flung out loops and arcs of crinkled light like loosened swaddling.

At the sight of these, at the thought that they might encircle the baby and take it from her sight, Liga stepped to the edge again, and reached and took the baby out of the air into her shaking arms.

On the sky, though, where it had hung, there hung another baby, or at least the shape of one drawn in the brightest of the light, as if when she took down the child Liga had peeled a layer off the night’s skin, exposing the stuff behind that the skin protected the world from. She could barely look at it—it had some kind of burn or chill about it—but she glimpsed within the baby-shape other shapes turning, moving, plumping and contracting; the vague attempts at form of whatever force had suspended her bab, had intervened and cut the connection between her act and its consequence. A vast power had had to be channelled—she was awed and hotly ashamed
that it must—through this small aperture so as to be tolerable to Liga’s senses, so as to handle the mortal scrap of her child without harming it, so as not to break either of them with its strangeness and strength.

What are your babbies’ names?
it said, direct into her mind.

Babbies? Babbies more than this one? Should Liga have named that stain in the snow? That little blue personage so quickly handed over to Da? ‘I have not given this one a name, not as yet,’ Liga said. ‘I had not really thought of it.’

No name?
it thought at her, astonished, and perhaps also offended. She had not known that she was accountable to such a thing.

‘Because, you see, we never—I have not taken her into the town,’ said Liga. ‘I have not met anyone with her. There has been no need for a name; she is the only other person in the world with me. She is ‘babby’, or ‘my little one’.’

There will be need, though
, the moonish matter thought, flesh or cloth or whatever it was.
To distinguish the one from the other
.

Part of it burst and laughed, the lightest, shortest bit of delight. From the bursting it thrust a luminous limb, much like a baby’s arm in shape, if not in movement. Whether the hand was tiny or vast Liga could not tell, but on its palm an immense clear jewel lay and glinted.

Liga was frightened to take it, but she was more afraid that the light, that the flesh, of the child-thing would touch her and burn her, or worse. So she took the stone, neither hot nor cold as it was, neither painful nor pleasurable nor yet entirely inert, into her own ordinary hand.

A second limb of light, opposite and yet not opposite the first, erupted from the mass, bringing another jewel, but a black one this time, which when Liga took it showed through its heart a gleam of this moon-child’s light, turned red by the gem’s internals.

‘But what am I to use these for?’ said Liga. ‘People will ask how I came by them. They will string me up for thieving. They will cut off my hands.’

Paff
, said the moon-baby.
This is not for selling. This is for planting. Plant the clear stone by the northern end of your doorstep; then the red
by the southern. Then sleep, child. Rest your sore heart and your insulted frame, and begin again tomorrow
.

‘But how shall I get home? I am quite lost here.’

A globe of light the size and shape, perhaps, of a ripe plum broke from the moon-child, moved towards the trees, and waited there at their fringe. Liga followed, and the globe went in among them, along the path she had arrived by. The moon-bab emitted something like a laugh, something like a sigh; it hovered there behind her at the cliff-edge, labouring to contain its glory. She glanced back many times as she went, watching the moon-child shrink and reappear among the accumulating trees, until at last they obscured it altogether.

The moon-plum dipped and skated ahead, lighting every crease and pock and root of the path, sinking to show the muddy places, bobbing higher to point out low-hanging branches. Liga began to recognise some of these branches, some of these knolls. Her spirits should be cast down, she thought, at coming back here when she had vowed to leave the place forever. But her returning seemed hardly related at all to her leaving, so distressed had she been and so calm was she now, and so companioned by the light of this plum-thing so confidently leading her.

Besides, she was tired from all her wandering, and injured and weak from the day’s events, so for a long while’s walking she did not have the spirit to think or feel anything whatever, let alone resist following the little moon-lamp. Had it led her back over the precipice or into the depths of the marsh, she would have gone there without question, without happiness, without terror.

But it returned her instead to her father’s house. She stood in the trees and watched it approach the broken cottage, and spill a small puddle of light at one end—the northern end—of the doorstep.
The resistance to following, the fear she ought to feel, sat just the other side of her numb exhaustion.

Near falling with tiredness, Liga walked past the folded-asleep goat and up the path. She knelt, laid her baby daughter down, dug a hole a handsbreadth deep, put the clear stone at the bottom, and pushed the earth back in. As she tamped the dirt flat, the light slithered across the step and pooled at the southern end, and she crossed the step and, grimly obedient, set to planting the ruby there.

But when she was done, she could not bring herself to walk in through the gaping door of the cottage; it would be too much like entering the mouth of a laughing ogre, or rushing into the arms of a nightmare.

She walked back into the wood, found a dry, grassy place, and lay down there. ‘I must name you, that creature said,’ she told the baby, untying her own dress-front. ‘Ah, it is too much for me now. I will name you in the morning.’ She put the child to the breast, where it seemed to suck all the moisture straight from Liga’s mouth, and she thought she would not sleep for thirst. But the moment she laid her head in the grass and the forest shadows, she was gone away into sleep—not hungry, not thirsty, not mourning or enraged or frightened, but as comfortable as she could be, insensible.

She woke into a body so whole and healed, it was as if yesterday’s horrors had not happened. Her fair-skinned daughter lay asleep beside her, a glimmer of milk on her lip.

‘Branza,’ she whispered. ‘I will call you Branza, after all things white and clean and nourishing.’

She stood, and picked the child up, and set off towards the cottage, putting her mind to the tasks that must await her in the ruin.

But when she stepped into the clearing, everything was changed. The house, which had always slumped to one side as if held up only by the force of her father’s anger, sat square and solid on the grass. The torn-out windowframe had been reset in the wall, the trampled
wattle shutters woven anew. The door bore none of the boot-marks and splinters she had glimpsed by the light of the moon-plum the night before; it did not gape, but was held just a little way open with a rounded knuckle of wood. At the southern end of the doorstep, a red-leafed bush grew to the height of Liga’s knees; at the northern end stood a green bush of the same size and circularity. The roof-thatch had no holes or thin places, and the chimney had lost its inclination towards the west.

‘What is this, Branza?’ she whispered, in fear of what she saw. This was the house her father might have made them had he had the money and the heart to fix the roof and straighten the frame—had he been, in fact,
not
her father, but a different man.

She stood on the step and pushed open the door. ‘Oh, my Gracious.’

The polished-earth floor spread out before her, unscarred, unscraped, untrod by booted feet, her little rush mats rewoven here and there on it. The marriage bed was gone, as was Liga’s truckle; now the bed was set in the wall—a fresh-made bed for a single person, she could see from here, with the curtain, of new calicut, tied back with a clean band to a proper hook in the wall. Near the head of that bed stood a cradle very like one she had once seen outside the cabinet-man’s workshop, which her mam had stopped and admired, and in that cradle new linen rested soft as a cloud, and a canopy shaded it. Slowly she approached, expecting it to fade like a dream-object before her eyes. Timidly she touched it, and gasped at how smoothly, how heavily, how soundlessly it swung. Feeling most impudent, she laid the baby Branza there, and covered her with the soft woollen blanket. Again, slowly, she walked about the room, noting the instances of repair and renewal—a fresh-carved spoon where the old one had worn almost to a stub; a new lamp for the one that those boys had knocked from the table and broken. Everything was clean, as if swept and wiped by a woman just now left the house to shake out her cloth; it was all as new and neat as a bride’s house with every gift on display.

‘Who has done this?’ She still spoke in a whisper. She was afraid some person would hear, and step in from outside, and say,
I did, and it is mine; be off from here
.

She went to the door and looked out fearfully, but that woman—that owner, that cottage-wife—was not there, only the two jewel-bushes, the red and the green, one with a tree-sparrow in it, hopping and fidgeting. And as she stood there worrying, the house laughed, a minor squeaking rumble of its timbers, a twitch of its fabrics and a titter and click of its shutters. Laughing at her, it was, but hardly unkindly. Like a shaft of moon-plum light, it came to her, the realisation: this was hers, all hers, the work and gift of the moon-baby.

‘I do not deserve this!’ But she heard the words miss the mark. The forces behind these events, these gifts, had stars and seasons to move, oceans to summon, continents to lay waste. They did not take account of such small things as Liga’s deserving or Liga’s not. To them in their vastness, she must look as blameless as her baby. This was a mere blink of their eye, a grain of purest luck fallen from a winnowing of such size that it was not given her to see the sense or benefit of it. She could only marvel at her good fortune; she could only tend the child who
did
deserve this fresh house, this clean world, and hope that no one noticed the injured and besmutted mother, or called her out and required her to justify herself.