Judith Berman - Lord Stink

She lost half a month in the sickness, and when she finally came back to herself, she had a hard time staying there. After a few days of this, her mother brought a wizard to examine her. It was the old woman wizard, Diver, from Snag House. “So you have dreams?” Diver asked, squatting beside Winter’s pallet.

“They’re not dreams,” Winter whispered. Talking exhausted her, and the waking world still seemed fragmentary and insubstantial. “I travel.”

“And where do you travel?”

“I don’t know,” Winter whispered. “Here and there. Flying. I’m a petrel.”

Diver nodded. “Are you just traveling, or are you looking for something?”

“Thrush,” Winter said. “I’m looking for Thrush.”

As the days passed, the world began to seem more real to her again, but the ice had long melted and the herring had spawned before she was strong enough to go outside. The first time, she walked only as far as the seaside platform in front of her house. The bay enclosed by Sand Spit was still as a pond, perfectly mirroring the row of plank houses and the forest and the misty grey sky. Woodsmoke drifted through the trees. She could see Rumble standing by the door of Storm House, a tiny figure beneath its tall painted façade. He was speaking with one of the north-side house lords. Rumble had grown colder and harder-edged every time his uncle had forbidden him to search for Thrush, and sent him instead on a raid or a sea-hunting expedition. Now that he was king it was even worse. She sometimes felt he didn’t recognize her.

After a while, Diver happened by, and sat down beside her. For a long time neither of them said anything. “You were traveling again last night,” Diver said, finally.

“Yes,” Winter said. “I know she’s there, somewhere in the mountains east of Oyster Bay. But I never see the trail to the bear house. I fly and I fly, and I don’t see anything.”

“If you flew less far and less often,” Diver said, “you would get well sooner.”

“I can’t help it,” Winter said. “I have to find Thrush. It’s my fault. I saw she was going to step in it, and I didn’t say anything.”

Diver sighed. “It wasn’t your fault, child. You didn’t insult the Four-Legs, did you? Thrush brought it on herself.”

“If I’d warned her, it wouldn’t have happened. I have to make up for it.”

“I didn’t know you loved Thrush so much,” Diver said.

Winter began to cry. Diver stroked her hair soothingly. “You’ve ridden the air, and you’re going to be a seer. I suppose that you have as good a chance as anyone of finding her. But you have to give yourself time. You have to get well. And you have to learn what it means to be a seer.”

Winter gulped down air, trying to stop her tears. Her lungs still hurt when she took too deep a breath. “What is there to learn? I know how to fly. I know what I see beneath me!”

“The First People aren’t like us,” Diver said. “Their country isn’t like ours. They have more than one form. They exchange forms the way you and I change clothes. To find the path to their country, a seer has to understand the essence, the whole nature, and not just one form or another. Not just how they show themselves to us.”

Thrush had worried that the grizzlies would change their minds and tear her to pieces when she started her first period among them. Woman’s blood sometimes sent Four-Legs into frenzies of rage. But she never had to face that problem.

She had been abducted by Stink in the month of blueberries; four months later, when the maple leaves had dropped and the dog salmon ran in the stream, she had already grown as big as she had ever seen any pregnant woman. She could not imagine how she would last another five months.

Before the dog salmon had finished running, and Thrush had dried and smoked the last of the fish from her salmon trap, she gave birth. In the early morning dark the pains started; she sweated and labored and bled, and by dawn it was over. Not one spirit child: four. Four little bear cubs snuffling at her sweaty belly and mewling for her teats. Their eyes had not even opened yet. Three boys and a girl, Growl informed her, though Thrush had no idea how she could tell.

“Why are they born dressed in their spirit masks?” Thrush asked her sister-in-law.

“They’re babies,” said Growl, tying off a little umbilical cord. She gave the struggling cub a lick or two to calm it down, her face softer than Thrush had ever seen it. The cub nosed her hand and mewed. “They can’t master their bear shape until they come to know themselves.”

Growl returned the cub to the bed next to Thrush, and pulled another one toward her. The cub she had released nosed blindly along Thrush’s belly, crying. Thrush reached out a tentative hand, touched the still-damp forehead of the cub with a finger. The cub was soft and warm, nearly hairless, with big ears, blind eyes, huge paws. It began to suck on her finger.

“Oh, here, baby,” Thrush said, pulling the cub toward her swollen breasts.

It was hard feeding them all. She could manage two at once, but she could never let them have as much as they wanted, or the second pair would have none. When they were born, they were so small she could hold each in one hand, but they grew as fast out of her womb as they had inside it. By the fourth day they were as large as a newborn human baby and as thickly furred as Lord Stink in his grizzly shape. The sisters gave her a charm to keep her milk from running out, a kelp bottle of oil to rub on her breasts, but she could never get enough to eat, either. She was eating enough for four nursing mothers. She knew her little supply of salmon would not last until spring.

The first snows arrived. The bear people began to drowse away more and more of each day. Thrush herself spent more time in bed, next to her snoring husband, cubs nestled between them and around them, while the snow piled up in the clearing outside. It was almost peaceful, as long as their children slept, until she thought of her dwindling food supply, and the old woman sitting outside in the snow, and how as soon as she weaned her babies her husband would start his insistent attentions all over again.

She knew that if she was ever going to leave, it would have to be soon. Humans didn’t belong in this realm. Sooner or later, no matter what she ate, she would begin to change, too, gain strange spirit powers like the old woman’s, strange deformities and mutations.

Her children grew. Their appetite grew. They clawed her as she nursed them, and their teeth sank into her breasts until she bled. Sometimes she thought the fate she had faced her first night in the bear house was at last coming true: mauled and eaten by grizzlies. Except that these grizzlies were her beloved children. She loved their milky, damp, furry smell. She knew each one by its face, the way it cocked its ears, the look in its eyes. She called them by the names her husband had given them: Claw, Tongue, Hungry, Black.

One snowy night, after her husband licked clean the latest gouges on her belly, he spoke to her unexpectedly. He almost never spoke to her. “You don’t like me, do you?”

It was a strange thing for a grizzly to say. Thrush didn’t know how to respond. “I’m your wife,” she said, at last.

“But you don’t like me. You don’t like me fucking you.”

Thrush took a deep breath. “Well,” she said, “it isn’t very nice for me.”

“Because I’m disgusting,” her husband said. “Because I have no manners.”

Again Thrush felt completely at a loss. What she had meant was that he did not caress her and whisper loving words to her. He did not match his actions to her needs. The thought of pleasuring her had never even crossed his mind. She knew that if she were one of his kind she would have been as selfish and wild as he, as coarsely passionate and demanding.