Deerskin (15 page)

Once she awoke like this standing in a stream from which Ash was drinking eagerly; and she was glad to bend cautiously down and do likewise. Sometimes she awoke to the realization that her eyes had set themselves upon a tree she was making her way toward; for she had found early on that this was the steadiest way for her to proceed, to sight at some distance some landmark and work her way toward it, and then, upon gaining it, choose another. Her balance and her vision were still too erratic to risk much looking around in the ordinary way of walking; and watching the jogging, swinging form of Ash was not to be considered.

Or at least she guessed that her landmark-by-landmark form of travel, like a messenger riding from one road-stone to the next, was not the usual method of the healthy. She was not sure of this as she was not sure of almost everything. Was she, then, not healthy? Her hip hurt her all the time. She knew she did not like this, and guessed that it should not be that way. But should both her eyes be able to focus on a single thing? Then why had she two eyes?

The one external fixed point in her universe was Ash, for all that she could only look at her directly when one or the other of them, and preferably both, was standing still. The one word she had said aloud since she had first opened her eyes in answer to Ash’s calling her back, was Ash’s name. She could not remember her own. She stopped trying, after a while, because it frightened her too much; both the trying to remember and the not remembering.

Most of what they saw was trees, and, fortunately, frequent streams. Sometimes there was a trail, perhaps a deer track; sometimes there wasn’t; but luckily the woods were old and thick, and there was not too much low undergrowth to bar human passage, although Lissar had sometimes to duck under low limbs. This was lucky in another way, that the tree cover, even this late in the season, was heavy enough that rain did not often soak through. She was often thirsty but rarely hungry. She ate a bit of bread occasionally, when she thought of it, and fed a little to Ash, who ate it with a manner similar to her own: a sort of bemused dutifulness, nothing more.

Ash occasionally snapped up and swallowed leaves, grass, insects, and small scuttling creatures Lissar sometimes recognized as mice and sometimes recognized as not-mice and sometimes did not see at all. As Lissar watched, another memory tried to surface: edible plants.

She had learnt—not long ago, she thought, though she could not remember why she thought so—quite a bit about edible plants. Her good hand reached out, traced the shape of a leaf … something … she remembered. She pulled the leaf off and bit into it. Sharp; it made her eyes water. But she held it in her mouth a moment, and it began to taste good to her; it began to taste as if it would do her good.

She pulled a few more leaves off the tall bush and gave them to her other hand to hold. She had finally worked that arm through its sleeve; that had been one long evening’s work. They did mostly halt—she remembered this from day to day, and it comforted her, this bit of continuity, this memory she could grasp any time she wished—when it grew too dark for her to see Ash easily, even glimmering as she did in shadow.

She stood, holding leaves in one hand, thinking about what to do next; and then she brushed the edge of her cloak back so that her hand could find her pocket, and she deposited the leaves there, with the last dry-but-sticky, unpleasantly homogenous bits of their food-store. The cloak got twisted a bit too far around her throat during this process, and she had to spend a little more time to tug it awkwardly back into place. Then she hastened, in a kind of limping scuttle, after Ash; though Ash had already noticed her absence, and had stopped to wait for her.

She had learnt to fasten the hook through its catch upon the cloak a little more securely; she unfastened it when Ash and she lay down to sleep together, so she could more easily spread it around them both. But her left arm was still difficult to move, and its range of motion was very small. Her hip hurt the worst, though she had grown somewhat accustomed even to this; her headache came and went, as did her dizzy spells. And her lapses of consciousness.

At some point she washed Ash’s back, and the bump at the base of her skull, with a corner of her petticoat, as they stood in one of the frequent streams. Her own wounds had clotted and in some places her clothing was stuck to her skin; she did not think about it. When she needed to relieve herself she did it where she was, standing or squatting, wherever she happened to be, and when she was finished she moved on.

She noticed that the weather was growing colder. The ground, and worse, running water, when there were no stones for a bridge (and even when there were, rarely could she keep her balance for an entire crossing dry-footed), hurt her bare feet increasingly. She often left bloody footprints, and her limping grew so severe that sometimes her damaged hip could not bear it, and she had to stop, even when the sun was high.

She noticed that the skin was sunken between Ash’s ribs, and that her eyes seemed to take up her entire face. She did not know what her own ribs looked like, and she never touched herself if she could help it. She knew she stank, but she did not care; pain and weakness took up too much of her wavering awareness, pain and weakness and fear and the need to keep following Ash as she trotted, more and more slowly, ahead of her.

She knew that they were not going very far, each day; but they kept going, kept putting one aching foot in front of the other. They had eaten everything in Lissar’s pockets—some time; she remembered eating, a little, but she did not remember the end of eating. She ate late-clinging berries off bushes she thought she recognized. Often she forgot that the pain in her belly was a specific pain with a specific origin; pain was so general a condition of her life. She was accustomed to dizziness too, and did not think that part of it was due to lack of food.

At night she and Ash huddled on the ground, and the cloak covered them both; and Lissar slept, or at least the dark hours passed without her awareness; and she did not dream.

The nights grew longer and the days colder, and Lissar shivered even with the cloak clutched closely around her, walking as swiftly as she could. She thought that they had been climbing for some time, though she could not have said how long—days? weeks? She had no idea how long they had been travelling, how long it had been since she had dragged on a flannel petticoat and shirt and walked through a door and a gate and kept on going. But she was sure that she had noticed the ground gently rising underfoot for some time past; to be setting the next foot a little higher than the last felt familiar, as if it had been going on for some while. They never saw another human being.

But the ground grew steeper, and Lissar was near the end of her last strength.

One night it snowed. At first Lissar had no idea what the soft white shreds drifting down might be; at first she thought that her vision was playing some new trick on her. The white fragments were pretty, mysterious, rather magical. Lissar lifted her face to them; but they were also cold. Perhaps they were happening around her, and not just in the lingering fog before her eyes. She felt their coldness on her face first, but they grew thicker, and in a short while they made walking agony. Usually she and Ash halted as soon as it was too dark for Lissar to see clearly; it hurt too much to blunder into a tree or a thorn bush. Tonight they kept on. Ash seemed to be going toward something with a purposefulness Lissar thought was unusual; but Lissar no longer gave much credibility to anything she thought.

But Lissar had another thought, and this made her willing to keep on, despite the chance of a brutal encounter with a tree: she thought, somehow, that if they stopped, while this white stuff (
snow
, came the term for it, very distantly) was falling, they would not start again. This thought was not without its attraction, but she had chosen not to give up again till she had no other choice. In the meanwhile she trudged on, following Ash.

And so together they blundered into a small clearing among the trees through which they had been weaving their pathless way; and there was a dark bulk at one end of the clearing, much lower and wider than any tree. Ash made straight for it, Lissar coming haltingly behind.

It was a tiny cabin, not much more than a shack, with the roof built out on two sides, one to protect the wood-pile, which covered the entire wall, up to the rough plank awning; one overhung the door and the narrow strip of outside floor, a little wider than a step, that ran the length of that wall. Lissar had one brief, terrible moment upon first recognition of human habitation; but she saw almost at once that this tiny hut stood empty, probably had for a long time, and, she let herself think, therefore likely to remain so. When she drew near she could see cobwebs over the wood-pile and hanging, snow-spangled, from the roof over the door.

If Ash’s and her luck was so bad after all that some other travellers were to come here during this same storm, then so be it. For the moment the hut would save their lives, and that was enough. She stepped, dragging one foot behind her, up to the low threshold, lifted the latch, and went in.

The smell of the room was musty, shut-up-for-long, many-families-of-mice smelling. Lissar stood for a moment, waiting for her eyes to adjust. By the dim light of the open door, and the memory of the shape and placement of a rough stone chimney on the rear wall, visible over the roof of the wood-pile, she saw the fireplace opposite the door. Perhaps the cold and the imminence of death helped her, for there were no long blank pauses in her thoughts after deciding that seeking this shelter was worth the risk.

She recognized the use of the fireplace, and went over to it, and felt that there was a fire laid; then she calmly and patiently went about the business of feeling for a tinder box. Later she would wonder at her certainty of its existence; the person who had laid the fire might have been expected to carry so precious a thing as a tinder box on his or her person. But it was there for her to find, and she found it after not too many minutes, to one side of the hearth, where there was a small pile of extra wood as well. She braced her weak hand, struck a spark, and lit the fire. It flared up with a smell of mouse nests.

She knelt by it long enough to be sure it would catch, and then stood up and went back to the still-open door, and stared out at the falling snow, feeling more peaceful than she had for weeks; since before she and Ash had gone on their journey. Since before she had begun to fear whatever it was that had happened, that had sent them away. She could remember no more of it than that, but she remembered that much without any gaps, and without any rush of panic. She had come to this small peace within herself, that she would not try to remember, and that therefore her memory’s guardians need not drain her small energy store by leaping to defense, leaving her sick with weakness.

This was her life now; it had begun with this journey. “My name is Lissar,” she said to the quiet snow; and then she shut the door.

T
WELVE

SHE AND ASH SLEPT FOR A VERY LONG TIME. SHE WOKE TO ADD
wood to the fire, and then slept again. They both had fallen down in front of the fire, a luxury so unheard-of that no further questions about their new shelter’s possibilities could arise in their minds at first. The floor was hard, and cold, but neither so cold nor so hard (at least not so mercilessly irregularly hard) as the ground they had slept on for many days past.

Lissar dreamed she was melting, that her hair ran in rivers, her fingers and toes were rushing streams, her eyes overflowing pools. And as the sound of water grew wilder and wilder she heard something wilder yet behind it: joy, she thought, the joy of being alive, and she moved in her wet earthy bed to embrace it; but when it came to her it was neither joy nor life but … she woke, screaming. Ash had sprung to her feet and was looking dazedly around, looking for the bear or the panther, her poor staring ribs pumping her breath like a bellows.

“I’m sorry,” said Lissar. “It was only … a dream.” It was slipping away even as she spoke; she could no longer remember what it was about, only that it had been horrible. The horror welled up again, but no images accompanied it; just blank, unthinking terror and revulsion. She shuddered with the strength of it, and put out a hand to seize a stick of wood, felt the dull prick of its bark against her palm gratefully. She tossed it into the fire and thrust her face so near that her eyes wept with the heat.

Ash sat down again and snuggled up against Lissar’s back, with her head on her shoulder, as she had done before the hearth in their old … “No!” said Lissar. “Whatever it is—it is over with. Ash and I have escaped, and are free.” Her words sounded hollow, but the defiance in them drove the horror back a few paces, and she lay down again and fell again into sleep.

It was daylight for a while, and then dark, and then daylight again. And then Lissar began to recognize that she was waking up for good, that she was desperately thirsty, that she was so hungry that her head hurt and there was a bitter taste in her mouth, and that she needed to relieve herself. She dragged herself reluctantly to a sitting position. Ash lay in a tiny round knot beside her, near enough that Lissar could feel the heat rising off her fine-haired body, and watch the short hairs gently separate and then lie softly together again with the rise and fall of her breathing. Lissar was never quite unsurprised at how small a sleeping creature Ash could make of herself when she was curled up her tightest, with her long limbs folded expertly into the hollow of her belly and her flexible spine curved almost into a circle.

Lissar staggered upright, wakened with dreadful thoroughness by the pain in her hip, went to the door and opened it. A little heap of snow immediately fell in on the floor. Snow lay, in a beautiful, smooth sweep of eye-bewildering white (she blinked, closed one eye), across the little clearing that the hut stood in, and disappeared into the blue shadows under the trees. The sun was shining, the view was mesmerizing, the more so by her own exhaustion and the knowledge that she and Ash would not have survived the first night of the blizzard if Ash had not found this haven for them. The weight of this knowledge seemed to hold her in place like the stiff, resisting weight of ceremonial robes … she frowned. What an odd thought: ceremonial robes. Heavy with gold braid they had been, with glints of colored stones.