Judith Berman: Lord Stink

“Well, maybe,” Stink said, “I suppose… But you shouldn’t say I’m disgusting.”

You are disgusting, Thrush thought, ugly, violent and disgusting.

“You’re beautiful,” said Stink, suddenly, in an entirely new voice. “I’m going to marry you.”

Thrush’s heart seemed to stop beating. This was not what she wanted. She wanted to go home to her mother and father, where everything would be right again.

But what choice did she have? He had abducted her. She was lucky he wanted to marry her. Stink was disgusting and uncouth, but he was a king of the First People, and she would be his queen. It was at least the position she deserved.

He had made his public announcement; now all that remained was to consummate it. He took her to the rear of the house, to his lightless, fetid bedroom. With one hand he pushed her down on all fours; with his other hand he yanked up her skirt, and thrust himself in. It hurt, especially at first. He growled, drooling onto her neck, and suddenly his strong teeth sank into the muscle where her neck met her shoulder. Pain erupted like pure white fire. After everything that had happened that day, she could only moan and whimper. Princes from a dozen towns had courted her, with song and compliments and tears, and this lout of a grizzly bit her and slobbered on her. The pain kept on, and on, as he grunted and growled and drooled and panted. She kept telling herself that it was better than being a slave or dead.

He finished with a great heave and a grunt, and his teeth released her neck. She collapsed onto the bedding with another involuntary moan. Something, probably his seed and her blood mixed together, began to dribble out of her. King’s daughter as she was, she managed not to cry.

In the morning he was hungry. “Cook me some salmon.”

Because of her wounds and his marital exertions, she could barely walk, but she obeyed him. A wife obeyed her husband.

The woman who had interrogated her last night handed her two square wooden water buckets without a word. Thrush was not sure how to leave the house, but as she approached the mouth-door, it yawned for her, pink tongue lolling between discolored fangs. She stepped onto the soft, scummy surface of the tongue with distaste. The grizzly woman followed Thrush to the door, and watched with suspicion, lifting her nose to sniff the breezes.

Thrush filled the buckets in the clear, swift stream that flowed along the far side of the clearing. She did not notice the old human woman until she had nearly reached the door again. That was when the grizzly backed through the doorway to make room for her to enter, and the mouth-door closed for a moment.

The old woman sat to the left of the door to the spirit house. She was white-haired, bony, frail, and hunched, and leathery flaps of breasts hung to her lap. From those bare breasts and the ragged skirt, Thrush judged the hideous old hag to be a slave, and so would not have looked at the woman any further, if the other had not addressed her first.

“Don’t eat his salmon,” the old woman whispered urgently. “Don’t eat it. I ate his father’s salmon, so I could never go home.”

A slave would not have spoken to her. Thrush deigned to turn her head, look down. An involuntary shiver ran through her. The hag sat with her knees drawn up in front of her, arms resting around her knees. Up close, Thrush could see that the rotten skirt failed to cover what was necessary. Through the holes Thrush saw the column of reddish, wrinkled flesh that descended from the old woman’s crotch and rooted itself deep in the ground.

“Don’t eat anything you haven’t caught or picked yourself,” the old woman said.

Thrush fled inside. There she filled a wooden cooking box with water, heated the stones in the hearthfire, tonged red-hot stones into the box. Enveloped in a cloud of steam, she dropped in large chunks of fresh salmon, probably, she thought, stolen yesterday from her father’s fish trap. Why should she listen to the old woman? It looked like salmon, smelled like salmon.

When it was cooked she lifted the box lid and ladled the salmon into a dish, and went to call her husband. He lay in the bedding on the floor of his room, hands behind his head. When she crawled in, he looked at her, a look that was soft and hot at the same time, and he laid his hand on her knee. She wanted to jerk away, but she did not. A proper wife would not.

She ducked her head. “It’s ready.”

He ate noisily, slurping from the side of his spoon. Watching him, Thrush thought again of that wrinkled column of flesh that rooted the old woman to the ground, and found she had no appetite at all.

The smoke-filled beams of sunlight that now fell through the roof vent showed her the inside of the immense house. The floor was dirt and all at one level, unlike her father’s tiered cedar-floored winter house at Sandspit Town. And unlike that well-appointed house, only one room had been partitioned off. That was Stink’s, at the back. A brown bear slept in front of the low circular door of the room.

Along the walls elsewhere lay pdes of bedding and stacks of immense wooden storage boxes that reached to the rafters. Most of the boxes were old, blackened with years of woodsmoke. All had animal faces, some sleeping, some awake, eyes glowing with power.

Her husband wanted more salmon, and she brought it to him. Then he wanted a dipperful of water. Thrush drank, too; it was the water she had carried from the stream. When he was done, he snapped his fingers, and the grizzly in back of the house scrabbled to its feet and loped over to him. He stripped off the tunic he had put on that morning, revealing his powerful, muscular body again. Then he picked up the grizzly by the ears, shook it until it hung limp like clothing, and dressed himself in it. The door to the house lolled open. He bounded through it in a single leap and was gone.

Thrush found she smelled all over of her new husband’s rank and musky sweat. After breakfast, she bathed in the stream, carefully because of her wounds. Two of Stink’s sisters kept watch from the grassy bank—the one who had first questioned her, whom she learned was named Growl, and a smaller, younger, fiercer grizzly woman named Nose.

Back at the house, she couldn’t stand it, finally, and asked her sisters-in-law, “Do you have a comb?” The state of their hair left this open to doubt.

“A comb?” Growl asked, suspiciously. “A comb? What for?”

“My hair,” Thrush said.

Both women stared at her. “Oh,” Growl said, at last.

Growl began to rummage through the animal boxes. She pulled a large frog out of the first one, its eyes unblinking, white throat pulsing. In the second she found a great armful of carved bracelets of a metal Thrush had never seen before, much yellower than copper. A third held a robe of white wool that smoked clouds of chill, damp fog. Growl immediately shoved the robe back in the box, but veils of fog floated away, drifting through the house. As she searched, one of the boxes, wolf-faced, nipped at Growl’s foot. Growl kicked at it and snarled a word. The admonition snapped in Thrush’s ears like the sound of stone breaking stone.

The comb Growl finally handed her was carved of ivory and exquisitely inlaid with abalone. As Thrush pulled it through her hair, she felt the first stirrings of pleasure since arriving in the grizzly house. A queen deserved such a comb. Too bad the rest of the house was so foully dirty.

“Don’t you have any slaves?” she asked Growl.

“Sometimes.” Growl gnawed at a flea bite on her shoulder, and then shook herself like a dog. “Brother had a feast last winter, though, and we ate them all.”

A chill ran down Thrush’s spine. She struggled to maintain her composure. “Who cleans for you, then?”