Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan Read Free Book Online Page B

haveseen that and not allowed his face to crawl so, with craftiness and disgust.
    He looked her up and down as if she were a beast he was assessing the conformation of, in a market stall. The whole aspect and stance of him changed. He had the coin to buy her, the set of him said. Was she the kind he would buy?
    She hurried away from him. If he followed her, could she still run? She had not run lately; she didn’t know how much of an encumbrance the bab was now. Did she know this part of the wood better than he? Would that save her, if he was a good runner?
    She could almost count the trees behind her and the gaps between them. Without looking back, she knew the moment when there were enough trees to close her from his sight if he stayed where he had stood. She risked a glance around and he was not there, was not following. Still she hurried on. She went well out of her way, to a thicket she knew where she could entirely hide herself. She lay there until nightfall, when they would have gone, the woodcutters. Then she returned to her father’s house.
    She checked the snare, next day. The stone was kicked aside, the cord pulled down, the overhanging branch snapped and dragging in the path the many coneys had beaten since last spring. Coney droppings lay across the wreckage. Had he fetched them from elsewhere and put them there, that boy? Was he as subtle, as nasty, as that?
    She did not quite know what to make of it all. Would he tell his father that he’d met her, and would they talk about it, and would they go to the mayor? And
did
her father have dispensations, and were they hers now? Ought she to go to Jans’s mother and ask? But if she had nothing and no rights, might not Jans’s mother join the woodmen in moving the beadle or the constable or
someone
to cast her out, to put her on the road?
    So little was different from yesterday morning—the sunlight and birds moved secretive among the branches; the wind wagged the last yellow leaves very soothingly. But Liga was not soothed; she stood, struck still with anxiety there, her hand on the bab—which was like live coals inside her, heavy and hot—and she felt her ignorance sorely.

    Nothing came of the encounter with the woodman’s son, though: not through the remainder of autumn; not into winter, either. Liga kept herself secret, and sometimes, without aid of any village life, she had a thin time, but always at her thinnest, some skinny fish took her bait under the stream’s ice, or she chose the right snow to dig at and found some bit of growth that would boil up flavoursome, or some small hibernating thing sent up a curl of sleep-breath against the sunlight. She all but hibernated herself, eking out her firewood and her squirrel-store of nuts, harbouring her small warmth in the truckle, dragged close to the tiny fire.
    Her baby came steaming into the world one deep-winter night. Straight away, Liga saw what had been wrong with the other one—its head too big for its body, its pointed chin. This one had cheeks; it had limbs like baby-limbs, not like an old man’s, all shrunken and delicate. And this, look: it was a girl, like her. He is outnumbered now, she thought deliriously. We will combine against him! We will get what we want!
    When she had dealt with the mess of the birthing, she laid the wrapped baby on the table. All stiff and light-bodied and leaky, she sat on bunched rags on the bench and examined it by the candle.
    All the expressions that are possible crossed its face, as if its thoughts were wise and limitless one moment, daft and animal the next. And Liga too was pulled towards awe, that this little girl-thing gave off such an air of being entitled, and then towards pity at its abjectness and its frailty and—how soft it was, the surface of it, and so warm! She could not believe the tiny makings of its mouth, or its perfected eyelashes, its ears like uncrumpling buds, all down and tenderness. She was full of the joy of her father being gone—that