Tender Morsels

  Urdda strode alone up the town. These were the quieter streets; but even had she walked downhill, straight through the market, her swift step would have kept her safe from interference, and her unreadable face, and the impression she gave of being quite uncaring as to anyone’s disapproval or poor opinion, she was so intent on such vital business.

  Uphill, though, there were sloping cobbles to pit herself against. Steep flights of steps felt even better; grimly, she hoisted her own weight from foot to foot. She came to the castle, passed into the courtyard, and started up the steps of a tower. She could have climbed a long time up the darkness, wearing herself out, forcing herself on to no particular where.

  But then she burst out onto the tower-top. It was empty of courting couples. The cloudy light glared all around. There was no other place to go but to the wall, to fling herself off, maybe, or throw down a handful of these tiny gravel-stones here, or shout oaths at passersby below.

  She went to the wall, breathing hard and shaking. She stood with her fists on the battlement, all her muscles tight as fiddle-strings. Her teeth ached from clenching. She watched smoke trail up from Gypsy Siding. Treetops moved, thick and dark green and oblivious, around her riveted sight, and the town—though it seemed motionless under its grey, under its damp slate and its lichens and behind its stones—seethed like one of Annie’s terrible brews: opaque, acrid of fume, abubble with lumpish and stringish ingredients, vegetable, animal, unidentifiable. If this crime against Mam had gone unpunished, who knew what else had been done? If no one spoke of this, from guilt among the men themselves, from distaste and fear on Mam’s part, who knew what other secrets bubbled here? The whole town, the whole world, was fouled by this, was made unclean, to Urdda’s mind.

  Bastard daughter of Hogback Younger. Her iron gaze lowered to fix on his roof—purple-grey slate like the roofs of other houses of substance, but pointed and pinnacled and cupola’d like no other structure, so that Hogback might stand and enjoy his own elevation in the town. But from now on, Urdda hoped, he would feel, as he admired his elaborate gardens, the hatred of his daughter-by-force, beating down on the back of his neck from the castle wall. She hated him to the point of shaking there, braced against the battlement by her digging, paining fists.

  Yet look at the colour of her fist on the stone. He was in her skin; he was in her very blood. At the thought, her blood thickened, crawling and choking in her veins, requiring hard, painful heart-thumps to drive it along. To hate him was to hate herself, for she was half Hogback.

  And why him, particularly? It might have been any one of those boys; as Mam said, Hogback had treated her no worse or better than the others. Lycett Fox, Thurrow Cleaver, Joseph Woodman, Ivo Strap—she might have been half sister to that whole crowd of Strap children that ran about town like wind-gusts, like bird-flocks!

  Cotting—ah, why couldn’t there have been a Cotting truly? And some small tale of betrayal or bad luck for which Urdda could have consoled Mam. This was too great a pain, too monstrous a series of injuries. It lumped in the past like . . . like a bear on a hearthrug, impossible to ignore. But the lump was not as big as a bear; it was only as big as an Urdda. Had she not existed, Mam might have had a chance of forgetting, of putting the injuries behind her; of pretending, if she wished to, that they had not happened. Instead, the very face of one of the men, the very skin, had been before her every day of her life. The ten years they had had in Mam’s heaven without Urdda—perhaps they had not been such a trial after all, if Mam had been free at last of the sight of the ghost of her attackers, had been able to rest awhile from being reminded.

  Urdda’s face flushed hot in the wind across the tower-top; she blinked her wind-stung eyes. She was a fool; she was a fool. Why had she badgered Mam to tell her? Could she not see how unwilling Mam had been? Had she no heart? Why had she been unable to endure admitting that sometimes grown women did know better than ungrown? They already knew what anguish they were sparing those younger ones, because they carried it with them everywhere, pushing away its memories every waking hour, every living moment, to make space where they might sew, or prepare meals, or enjoy the small flowers and birds in the hedgerows, or pass the time of day with the Widow Foxes of the world in the marketplace? How was Urdda ever going to put what she had learnt out of her mind? How had Mam managed to go on, who had hidden her bab there in the cottage, and hauled the door closed, and clambered up the chimney and been dragged down again—

  Urdda was in the dark stairway again, running, falling against the walls. She could not go home to Annie’s; she could not face Mam again; she could not go back to that blissful, blessed state of not knowing. It was insufferable, the knowledge she must live with now, and yet she was only the daughter of it! The whole business of Mam’s going to her heaven, and the boredom and the tedious, unadventurous, unrelenting safety of the place, all of a sudden was cruelly clear to her. Of course, what a kindness, how absolute a necessity that other place had been! Yet she, Urdda—ignorant, frivolous, disrespectful, interfering fool that she was—had forced her way out of that place, and worse, had nagged Annie to bring Miss Dance, to have her undo the protection Mam had been granted. I want my Mam here, she had as good as stamped her foot and demanded. I want my sister! And look how unhappy Branza had been! And look what Mam must now endure, every day—the passing of Hogback’s carriage, the greetings of Widow Fox, the shrieks and smudges of ragged Strap children.

  Back out into the town Urdda walked, with an air of purpose that quite belied her horrid confusion. She walked through almost every avenue and laneway of St Olafred’s. She would have walked out the gate, too—she wished she could walk out and disappear into nothingness, as Mam must have seemed to do all those years ago. But she also—practical, true-worldly Urdda—knew how late it was. She did not want the town gate closed on her, to come back in the chill of night and have to explain to the watch where she had been, and have people talking about why she might walk out alone, about whom she might be hoping to meet in her wanderings.

  She returned to Annie’s tired in body and numbed in mind, just after lamp-lighting time.

  ‘Where have you been, Urdda! We were worried,’ said Branza in the door.

  ‘Walking, only walking. I met no one and did nothing untoward.’ Urdda submitted to Branza’s embrace and looks of concern. ‘Is there supper?’ she said, to put an end to them.

  ‘There is. Give me your cloak and go through.’

  Liga and Lady Annie were there in the kitchen’s warmth. The three women examined each other, and each thought the other two looked very tired and lost.

  ‘You of been up to something,’ said Lady Annie. ‘Were I not so slumped, I would scrutinise you proper, for that glitter in your eye, and your general air.’

  ‘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 Str
ap’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.