Deerskin - Robin McKinley

Heavy with gold braid they had been, with glints of colored stones.

She looked down at her filthy, flannel-clad self, and wished to laugh; but could not. Pain and hunger had stolen her lucidity; and she an herbalist's apprentice.

Almost she could remember her master's name: R ... Rinnol. That was it. Lissar had been lucky, for she had not wanted an apprentice; but Lissar was a friend of her niece, and Rinnol had agreed, very grudgingly at first, to take her on.

The snow was over her knees beyond the lip of roof that sheltered the hut's door and narrow wooden porch. She waded, barefoot, only just past the corner of the hut before she squatted; she would have to see if the hut yielded anything she could use for boots. Ash emerged and bore her company at the hut-corner; when she was standing again her ears and tail came up and for a moment.Lissar thought she would go bounding through the snow like a puppy. But then the tail and the head dropped again, and she sighed, and almost crept back inside the little house. Only then did Lissar notice how dull and flat her once-shining coat looked in the sunlight.

A memory came to her, of chasing her beautiful dog around a walled garden; she was herself running freely, neither hip hurt, her eyes focussed easily, adaptably, without thought, and she stretched out both whole, strong arms to make a snatch at Ash as she spun around a corner and leaped entirely over her person. Lissar let the memory fade. She did not wish to remember more; the guardian panic hovered, watchful, in one corner of her mind; she did not want it disturbed.

She went back indoors. Ash was sitting, unhappy head hanging, by the dying fire.

She opened and closed her mouth, almost thoughtfully, as if trying to remember something-or trying to rid herself of a memory of something. She looked at Lissar beseechingly.

Lissar looked around the tiny room. A table stood against one wall with a tiny shuttered window over it; a bed was shoved against the wall the wood-pile stood on the other side of. The door and the fireplace took the other two walls. Next to the door were cupboards. Under the table stood a bucket. Lissar took it outdoors and began shovelling snow into it. She had to stop often, because her fingers burned and turned red, and her feet went almost instantly burning-cold, without the comfort of numbness.

A bucket of snow warmed by the hearth yielded a depth of water about equal to the length of one finger joint. She drank one sip-lowering the bucket after just the one sip was one of the hardest things she had ever done-and gave the rest to Ash. Then she went outdoors and began digging up more snow.

She was trembling with weariness by the time neither she nor Ash was thirsty any more. She had tried eating snow, but it hurt her throat and made her head and stomach ache. There was a little water left in the bucket when she sat down in front of the fire and almost fell asleep again, but she knew she did not dare to, not yet. She needed to investigate the cupboard by the door. Fearfully she opened it, for she knew that their lives lay within it, and she dreaded to find it empty.

Stale brown flour. Some kind of meal, spotted with small dark flecks, with legs.

Dried meat, old and black and lightly fuzzed over with a greenish fungus. Some tiny, wizened, almost black roundish items she recognized by smell as onions and apples.

Some squashy potatoes bristling with pale dry sprouts with brownish tips. Tears of relief blurred her eyes. It occurred to her to wonder whom the hut was for, and whether its usual occupant-or the person who had stocked it, perhaps for just such an occasion as being snowbound-might return and be angry at the trespassers. But she could not think about imaginary owners for long. Her head swam; she gripped the cupboard door and rested her throbbing head against it, feeling the hot tears creep slowly down her face, tasting the salt on her lips. She stood just breathing in the amazing aroma of food. Of life continuing.

Ash stood up slowly and stiffly and walked over to stand beside her, her nose pointed hopefully at the cupboard, and a new light was in her eyes.

Lissar's meat-broth was dull, the broth watery and the meat tough, her flatbread a soggy, crumbly, burnt disaster; but she and Ash ate every scrap and drank every drop, and fell asleep again. Lissar woke up suddenly and violently in the middle of the night, when her abused bowels declared that they could no longer cope; but she ran for the door with better strength than she had had since ... before her life began.

She knew that she was not accustomed to much snow, but as she did not think of her old life or of her future she did not think about the snow either, beyond the fact that it was there. It was there, and it went on not only being there but adding to itself, till it lay halfway up the window over the table in their hut, which was the direction of the prevailing wind; Lissar opened the door very cautiously each morning till she could see how much of it was going immediately to fall in on her.

She never did move her latrine farther than the corner of the hut because she could not shovel very far or very effectively with only one fully useful arm and an aching hip. Fortunately the hut had produced a shovel-and a broom, for sweeping what fell indoors upon the opening of the door back out again-and boots, mittens, hat and coat, all of the latter enormous.

The clothing had been in a bin beneath the bed, along with several blankets and pillows. The bedframe itself bore nothing but a straw mattress, smelling rather strongly of a small wild animal. The bed troubled Lissar, though she did not know why, and she had only to recall the existence of the shadowy, never-quite-motionless panic-monster in the corner of her mind to decide not to investigate why this, or the other things that namelessly disturbed her, might be so. She kept the pillows and blankets tidily rolled up in the bin, and at night she took them out and spread them in front of the fireplace.

Ash occasionally slept in the bed for a little while, but usually she woke herself up by rootling little hollows in the canvas covered mousiness with her nose, and when she decided she actually wanted to go to sleep she joined Lissar on the floor. She also caught several of the resident mice and one squirrel.

She ate the first one or two-Lissar heard the crack of her jaws and then the brisk, immediate sound of swallowing-but one evening when she left Lissar's side in a leap, Lissar heard the sound of pounce-and-snap but no ensuing gulp. Missed, she thought, not moving from her place facing the fire; but then a long pointed face thrust itself over her shoulder, a long pointed face with a little furry morsel dangling from its jaws.

"Thank you," Lissar said gravely, taking it by the tail a little hesitantly. At least it was already dead, she thought. She had never cleaned or dressed out anything; she was aware she had some idea how it was done, but not a very large or very clear idea.... Did dressing out apply to something as small as a mouse? She didn't know.

Perhaps it would be good practice. Good for what?

She stood up, still carrying Ash's contribution to their food supply, and took it over to the table. She picked up the smaller of the two knives that were another of the hut's valuable resources. The knife was so old, and had been sharpened so often, that the blade was barely wider than a finger, and curved abruptly in from the use-dark horn handle. Their onion and potato broth that night had splintered mouse fragments in it.

After a certain inevitable amount of experimentation, both Lissar's soup and her bread improved. She had found herbs in the food cupboard upon further exploration, as musty as everything else was, but still capable of imparting flavor; and she set her bread-sponge out for a day to catch the wild yeast before she kneaded it and baked it; Rinnol had taught her about this.