Judith Berman - Lord Stink

The two brothers organized the men and dogs quickly. Everything began to seem horribly unreal to Winter: Thrush’s mother sobbing and wailing, the noise of men shouting back and forth, dogs barking with the excitement, children running under everyone’s feet. She felt as if she were a ghost among a crowd of the living, seeing everything, knowing everything, but unable to speak. She knew, for instance, that the men would not find Thrush’s trail. She knew that the bad things had only started to happen. She knew, with awful, gut-wrenching certainty, that she would never see Counselor or Orphan or any of the men again. It was all her fault.

“And where do you think you’re going?” spoke the king’s voice in her ear.

She turned to look. The king was not speaking to her, or to Rumble, who stood beside him now. He addressed his words to his youngest son, a boy Winter’s age, who stood among the hunters, a black-spotted dog lying at his feet. Otter whittled on a stick with a mussel-shell knife, but carried no weapons.

“I’m going to help find Thrush.”

“You are not going,” said the king.

That tone of voice would have been enough for anyone else, but Otter chose to argue. “My dog can help,” he said. “I can find her.”

“They have plenty of dogs!” said the king.

“Dirty is smarter than any of them.”

The king turned on his son with the same harsh fury he had shown Rumble earlier. “You are no warrior, boy! You are staying here!”

The parties of men and dogs jogged off. Otter took a step after them, yearning. Rumble turned and walked blindly into the river, and stood there, staring at the half-repaired fishtrap, hands clenched at his sides.

“If I were still a warrior, I would go myself and bring her back,” said the king, and then his hand trembled violently on his staff, and his crippled leg gave way. Otter dropped stick and knife to steady him.

The stick rolled to Winter’s feet. Otter had carved the tip into an exquisite eagle’s head. Dirty picked up the stick in his mouth, and, tail wagging, turned round and carried it to his master.

The grizzly galloped three-legged through the steep forest, one huge paw crushing Thrush against its enormous chest, so that her face was pressed into its coarse fur and she was forced to breathe its rank and oily stench. The pain where the enormous claws had ripped her back was worse than anything she had ever felt in her life. The blood soaked into her clothing, so that the fabric stuck to her as it dried; when the bear shifted its paw, the scabs would rip loose, and the blood would start to flow all over again.

The grizzly ran upward, into the last light of day, until the high mountain grass turned to loose, rattling scree. But when Thrush expected it to cross the pass and descend into the wild valley beyond, the Four-Legs kept heading upward, until only hard stone lay beneath its claws, and gulfs of air hung below them on either side. Already they had passed out of the human realm; the summit of Feather Mountain did not soar so high toward heaven. A river of blue ice flowed down to meet them, and the grizzly ran alongside it, untiring, climbing another, higher peak.

The eastern wall of the world had turned from purple to inky black before the Four-Legs began to descend once more. Without warning, it stopped and loosened its grip. Thrush slid until her feet touched grassy earth. Before the rest of her could follow, the grizzly seized her shoulder and hauled her up again. Claws tore her flesh anew and she nearly fainted.

They stood in a clearing in a dense forest. Overhead, stars blazed in a black and moonless sky, so brightly that faint patterns of starlight silvered the grass at her feet. In front of her loomed an enormous old house of carved posts and weathered cedar planks. A hearth fire glowed orange through cracks in the wall.

Those thin rays of firelight revealed a strange figure, small and hunched, sitting by the door. As the grizzly shoved her forward, Thrush saw the head swivel in her direction. Before she could even guess what crouched there in the darkness, a voice boomed, so deep and powerful it shook the earth beneath her feet, “Lord Stink! Lord Stink! Lord Stink! Lord Stink!”

Four times, the number of power. Another rush of fear poured over her. The grizzly shoved her roughly forward again. Thrush stumbled, and flung out her hands for balance, expecting to meet the immense carved post through which the door of the house had been tunneled. Instead, her hands touched moving flesh.

“Hhwaaa!” said the deep voice, and the hot wet flesh twitched away from her. Thrush screamed at the same time, and utterly terrified, jumped backward into the hairy belly of the Four-Legs. It snarled in anger and flung her through the low door. She landed sprawling on the earthen floor by the hearth, amidst a litter of soiled mats, dirty spoons, splintered bones, and ashes.

Now, on all sides of them, a chorus of hollow, booming voices trumpeted in unison, “Lord Stink! Lord Stink! Lord Stink! Lord Stink!” The firelight showed Thrush that the house frame was supported not by carved wooden beams, but instead by living bears who greeted her captor with these shouts.

A crowd of men and women, all larger, hairier and far more muscular than any humans Thrush had ever seen, gathered around her and her captor. And then that grizzly turned to face her, rising to its full height on two legs, and put paws to snout…

Grizzly flesh, grizzly shape, peeled off and sagged like clothing. A massive man with powerful muscles stood there. He was dark, hairy and utterly naked. The only thing that seemed unchanged were his huge, hairy, bull-grizzly’s balls. His reddish member looked incongruously human in front of them.

“Here she is,” he said. His voice was deep, powerful, and full of rage.

The crowd of men and women pressed toward Thrush. One of the women kicked her, and shouted, “I suppose you think you’re better? I suppose your shit doesn’t stink?” When Thrush didn’t say anything, the woman grabbed Thrush’s arm with an immensely strong hand and hauled her to her feet. “Answer me, girl! Who are you to pass judgment on the shit of Lord Stink?”

Thrush knew they were going to maul her to death. Or, worse: they might make her into their slave. Then the mauling would go on forever, a little bit every day, and the terror and the shame would last until the day she died.

Up to that point she had felt so dispirited and terrorized she had ceased thinking. But the thought of becoming a slave brought forth another emotion. She was a king’s daughter. Her mother’s lineage was as ancient and as proud. So these people were Four-Legs. So they did belong to the First People, the ones with spirit masks, the ones who could turn form and essence inside out, the immortals. They were terrible housekeepers. The house reeked of sour and stale grizzly smell and of rotting fish. Thrush tried to stand very straight among the splintered bones. She did not look up at her towering captors. That would have been undignified.

“Well,” she said, and suddenly she was shaking with rage and despair that the grizzlies dared do this to her, a king’s daughter. “I myself only pass nuggets of pure copper.” Amazingly, her voice sounded cold and nearly calm. “So of course when I stepped in your mess I thought it horribly coarse and nasty. And why did you do it in the middle of the trail? Don’t you have any manners?”

The grizzlies fell silent. Thrush waited for the final explosion, and her bloody and painful death.

The explosion never came. After a long moment, Lord Stink said, slowly, “Copper? You pass copper? You don’t shit?”

“Oh, no,” she said, in her coldest, angriest, primmest voice. “I never make a mess. ”