Deerskin (19 page)

Then she stood, her newly plumy tail whisking madly back and forth. For the first thing that met Lissar’s gaze and understanding was that the silk-furred Ash, whose belly had once shown pink through the light soft down there, had grown a rich, curling coat like one of the great mad-eyed wolf-hounds of the far north. She was still silver-fawn; but as she moved her coat rippled, and when she flung her head back her long fur fanned out like a horse’s mane. Lissar stared, astonished, thinking, This is the Lady’s doing; this is one of the Lady’s gifts.…

Lissar sat up. She lay on a little grassy—
grassy
—mound, surrounded by violets; their perfume was in her nostrils. She had thought it was the smell of the Lady. Around her there were still a few patches of snow, and melt-water ran in rivulets everywhere she looked, though where she lay was quite dry and warm.

As she turned her head to look around her in her amazement, something brushed against her face, and she recognized a wisp of her own hair only after a moment’s startled thought. For her hair was soft to the touch, cleaner than a bucket of tepid snow-water and a little harsh soap could make it; and, furthermore, it was combed and smooth and bound up on her head, and there was nothing in the hut for a comb but her own fingers. There was another surprise for her: she reached up to stroke her own hair wonderingly and as she drew her hand down again let her fingers trail against the side and back of her neck, and found there no numb places, but only smooth, yielding, feeling skin.

She climbed to her feet, her brain dazedly acknowledging that her hip no longer hurt and each arm swung as freely as the other—suddenly remembering that she had touched the top of her head, investigating the way her hair was twisted in place, with both hands, and yet the one she had not been able to raise above waist level since she and Ash had escaped into the mountains.

As she moved she noticed the dress she wore, made of the supplest deerskin, white as snow, or as the Lady’s gown, though her own plainer, more mortal clothing gave no green light, held no impenetrable black of pure shadow. And as she looked down to her bare feet she saw that the little hollow where she had lain was quite bare of grass, and that the outline of the curve of her body, and of Ash’s, was sharply etched by green leaves and violets.

She turned completely around. Ash bounded around her, springing as high as if she imagined she still had snow-drifts to overcome; and briefly Lissar quailed, fearing that what she saw was only a beautiful dream, and that she would blink once or twice more and winter would return, and physical pain.

But she blinked many times, and the warm breeze still moved around her, her limbs were still whole; and her eyes saw clearly, and together, and without dizziness, no matter how often she blinked and how quickly she turned her head. She saw that she and Ash were at one end of the little clearing—now a meadow, full of white and yellow flowers, tall buttercups on stalks, ragged bright dandelions, young white erengard—and that their hut lay at the end opposite where she stood. When Lissar’s head stopped spinning, she moved toward the hut, whose door hung wide open as if still from the strength of her own arm when she bolted out into the snow.

The few steps toward the cabin were a little shadowed by her memory of the winter; firmly she remembered that it was this hut that had saved her life, that she had accepted her return to life there, that she had made some of her own peace there, before the Lady came to save her from something beyond her capacity to save herself from. But the shadows lay lightly, for Lissar remembered the Lady, and remembered that she had been granted time to leave the box that contained her past in some attic for now; and for the simple, glorious pleasure of being young and healthy and unhurt, feeling the easy way her legs worked, her arms swung, her feet pressed the ground, her head moved back and forth on her neck, her eyes focussed.

The hut stank and was filthy. Methodically Lissar noticed this, and then, methodically, began setting it to rights. First she hauled all the blankets outdoors, following the loudest sound of running water, and dumped them in the stream, weighing them down with rocks that they might not escape her. Then she began hauling water, bucket by bucket, back to the hut. At first she merely poured it across the floor, and swept it back out again; later she scrubbed, the floor, the walls, the table, the cupboard and the bedframe. It astonished her, and dismayed her a little, how very dirty the hut was; for she remembered that she had done the best she could cleaning with tepid snow-water and rough soap. Yet everything was dark with grime, and the blankets smelled strangely musty and sour, and had unbent stiffly, and seemed more dilapidated than she remembered; and the walls and furniture seemed to bear the dark accumulation of years.

The stain on the floor would not fade, however much she scrubbed and soaked and scrubbed again.

The straw mattress she dragged outdoors and let lie in the sun. First she thumped it all over with the handle end of her broom, and was gratified by several tiny grey bodies bolting out of several holes in the cover, and disappearing into the grass. The holes she sewed up, and then she flung the mattress over the edge of the porch roof—far enough up that its edge only dangled over the roof edge, and the entire mattress did not slide off again—that its ex-inhabitants might find the way home a little more difficult, and that the sun could bake the dankness out of it.

Ash, meanwhile, was equally busy; there was a heap of small furry dead bodies next to the wood-pile when twilight began closing in and Lissar began to recognize that she was tired and hungry—and to comprehend that this tiredness and hunger felt good, simple and straightforward and earned. She took the bucket one more time to the stream and filled it, and built up the fire, and threw in chunks of meat and some of the fresh green things her nose had found for her as she hauled water back and forth. And while the soup boiled she skinned and cleaned the rest of Ash’s kill, and laid the strips she made out to wait till the fire had died down enough that she could hang them in the chimney; for she wanted to make some return for all the cabin had given her this winter, and there was a great deal she could not replace.

Then she sat outside for a while; even with the fire burning higher than she had dared build it when the snow was still deep and she too weak to hunt far for wood, it would take some little time for the soup to cook to her (and Ash’s) satisfaction. It grew cold as the sun set, too cold to sit, but spring was in the air, and she had been indoors for so long; she felt that she had been penned indoors all her life.… She sprang to her feet and pulled the white deerskin dress over her head, dropping it on the grass, and ran to the stream, which was only a few steps beyond the edge of the clearing, and leaped in.

The water was
cold
, and this time there was no gap or distortion between her body’s reaction and her mind’s awareness of it.
Cold!
she thought. So cold it makes my teeth ache!

But it was a wonderful kind of coldness, or maybe it was the awareness itself that was wonderful; and she rubbed herself all over, feeling the day’s hard labor swept sweetly away from her. This was better than baths out of a bucket, even though they had been performed beside the heat of the fire. Speaking of the fire—she burst out of the stream again, one plait of her hair tumbling against her naked back like a whiplash of ice, her body iced with gooseflesh, and shot back to the hut, where Ash was considering trying to drink the boiling broth out of the suspended bucket. The stripped carcasses of the other small beasts lay in easy reach on the table, but Ash was, as usual, intent on cooked food. Lissar tucked her hair up again, one plait under another, pulled her dress on again, and gave them dinner.

They spent most of another week at the hut. Lissar gathered what herbs she could find this early in the season and hung them in bunches from the low ceiling; there were hooks there already, and thread came from the unravelling of the ubiquitous washing-cloth blanket; and Lissar hoped that the meat she had smoked would keep.

The hut blazed with cleanness; she had very nearly replenished the wood-pile, although her wood was neither of as good a quality, being only what she could pick up from the floor of the forest, or cut where it lay fallen with her small hatchet and bring back, nor was it stacked as competently. She had buried the remains of her winter latrine, or at least she dug and turned over the earth where she remembered the latrine had been, for the melt-water seemed to have taken care of it surprisingly efficiently already; and now she went far from the hut to do her business, as Ash had done automatically since they both woke on the grassy hillock.

There was nothing left for her to do—except, perhaps, hope to find someone to thank, some day, and possibly put into their hands the things she had not been able to replace: apples, onions, potatoes, flour, grain, two blankets. And she would add: a comb, good soap, a second bucket, an axe. A second bucket would have been a finer luxury than fresh vegetables and silk underwear.

She had already found that her white deerskin dress did not get dirty. She, inside it, did; but it remained as unperturbed by use and wear as Ash’s new curly coat was—although Ash now required brushing, which Lissar did as best she could with her fingers and the broom, nightly, by the fire, so that mats she would not be able to deal with would not have a chance to form. But her dress did not require even this much care; if a little mud adhered to a hem, a knee, an elbow, Lissar waited till it dried and flicked it off. It fit her as well as Ash’s coat fit Ash; it almost surprised her that she could take it off. It was as if it, too, had grown out of her skin. It wasn’t much more improbable than that a fleethound should grow the thick shaggy fur of a northland wolf-hound. The dress seemed as well to be proof against the jabs and slashes of Lissar’s vigorous outdoor life, and took no damage, no matter how dense the twigs and thorns; and Lissar’s own feet and hands grew tough, till she hardly looked where to put her palm when she reached to grab a branch, till she could walk swiftly and easily even upon the streambed, which was sharp with rocks.

The morning they set out Lissar felt a pang of parting. She could not say she had been happy here, but she had lived, and that was a great deal—she knew just how much. And while the hut—and Ash—had given her the means, still she had taken those means and used them, chosen to use them, known that she had so chosen.

She still knew nothing of her future; she did not know where to go or what to do. She had one white deerskin dress and one tall curly-haired dog; she did not know what fate these might lead her to, what fate she might seek. She thought, I must remember that I possess also myself; but what this self is, after all, I still know little about. What can I say that it does, what can I say that makes predicting my future any more explicit? I who—still, again, for now—remember so little of my past? She paused in her thinking, and looked around her, at the meadow, at the small bald hollow where she and Ash had awakened after the Lady had spoken to them; and she felt the Lady’s peace.

I know I am Lissar, and that I have escaped … something. I know that I once had a friend named Viaka who fed me, and once I had a friend named Rinnol who taught me plantcraft. And I know I once wore ceremonial robes, and that people cried my name.… “They called me princess,” she murmured aloud; Ash’s head turned at the sound of her voice. I was not Rinnol’s apprentice, but a princess; and it was as princess I escaped.… She took a deep breath, remembering the Lady’s voice; remembering that it was not the time to take down the old worn box from the attic. I cannot remember my father’s name, or my mother’s, or even my country’s. It hurts when I try. Therefore I will not try. The past is past, and I face now the future, a future the Lady gave me.

She had made a rough attempt to scrape and tan the hide of one of the rabbits Ash brought home, soaking it in ashes and water and then stretching and pegging it. She had learnt to skin Ash’s small kills neatly by this time, and she wanted to leave a message for the owner of the hut, whoever he or she was who had saved her life; and she worried that what she had taken or used might risk the life of whoever came to the hut next. Besides the things she could not replace, she was taking the bigger knife and the flint with her.

She laid the skin on the table, weighing its corners with stones, and wrote on it in charcoal:
Thank you for saving my life
. She wanted to say something about how she would try to return, try to repay in the coin she had spent. But she did not think it was likely enough that she would be able to find this place again, even had she anything to bring; and so she wrote no more. Furthermore, the skin was small, and her charcoal lump large and clumsy.

She paused at the table a moment, rereading her unsatisfactory message. The flint was in the small leather pocket-bag sewn into the bodice of the deerskin dress; the knife, sheathed, hung in a loop at her hip, a loop made for just such a knife. She carried nothing else. “We’re off,” she said to her dog. “Can you tell me where we’re going?”

Ash turned and trotted away under the trees: trotted downhill, across the little stream, opposite the way they had come at the beginning of the winter, as if the long months at the hut were but a pause on a preordained journey. Lissar turned her face away from the little, solitary, silent house, and followed her.

F
IFTEEN

VERY QUICKLY TRAVELLING BECAME AS FAMILIAR, AS BEGIN
-ningless and endless, as the long snowbound time in the hut had been. At first Lissar followed Ash, as blindly as she had done during the long dreadful days before they found the cabin, but then she found that she too seemed to know where they were going—though she knew nothing more of it than in what direction it lay.

It was like following the direction of the wind beating in her face: if she fell off the point, she could feel the change at once; if the wind shifted, she felt that at once also; but where the wind blew from she did not know. Indeed, she thought, orienting herself to the—smell? sound? touch of air against her cheek?—of that directionless direction, wind would carry more messages of its source. Wind would be warm or cold; wet or dry; smelling of flowers or trees or fire or barnyard. This sensing was a trembling of the nerves, and she might not therefore have believed in it, except that she needed some direction to set her feet and this was at least as good as any other: better, then, because it was there, and it spoke to her. More significantly, it seemed Ash’s nose pointed the same way.