Snow, page 11
‘She’s done much more’n that for you on being asked. I have it in mind you’ll convince her somehow.’
And then the city was only a day’s walk away.
Under cover of an evening sky, the hunter led us to a farmhouse in the last range of hills afore we came to the coast. When he knocked on the door a round woman and the smell of baking bread greeted us.
‘It int you? I don’t believe my own eyes!’ she said in surprise and pulled the hunter into a hug. ‘Come in, come in, afore the chill creeps in. You’re in a world of trouble, my boy.’
I was left standing on the step, unsure of whether my bear were invited and thinking probably not. It were a long while since I’d stepped foot in a household but I knew that wild bears are not usually invited to dinner.
And then the woman’s gaze fell on me. ‘Good lord of mercy above the clouds, it’s the Little Queen.’
‘My name is Snow,’ I said, offering my hand. ‘And this is my bear,’ I continued, standing aside.
The woman’s eyes widened until I thought her eyeballs would fall out.
‘Now, now, Noelly, don’t be making a fuss,’ the hunter said, pulling me inside and waving Little Bear in after me. ‘It int as crazy as it looks.’ He shut the door fast behind us. ‘The bear is tame.’
Little Bear confirmed this by walking through the cottage to the kitchen, where she found a warm stove and settled herself down in front of it like an oversized dog.
‘I can’t believe I’m saying it but the bear being tame is the least surprising thing about you knocking on my door. There’s folks out all over looking for this girl. Her picture is up on everything. There’s mad interest in finding her.’ Noelly took a strand of my hair in her fingers. ‘Such a shame you cut it, girl. What a rope it were. Now on display in the great gallery, by the way.’
‘That can’t be right—’ I started, but the hunter cut me off.
‘That’s enough of that talk, Noelly. She’s just a girl and she’s been living up in those mountains her whole life. A prisoner, then a slave, and now running for her life. She knows nothing about any of that carrying on.’
‘Hunter, holy mother of Maggie, how’d she end up with you?’
The hunter shifted his weight. ‘That’s a long story. And some I’m not proud of—’
‘We’re betrothed,’ I said, surprising myself.
Noelly raised both her eyebrows and then shook her head slowly side to side. ‘This int the kinda conversation to have standing in the hallway,’ she said. ‘Let’s sit and eat.’
Noelly shared her house with a number of cats. They pushed against our legs and napped on high shelves and came and went from the kitchen as we talked. Grey and black and tabby and ginger, I’d never seen so many of the slinky creatures in one place before. ‘They keep down the rats,’ Noelly told us. ‘And their conversation is considerable more intelligent than any I’m likely to find hereabouts.’
Meeting the wide green gaze of a fluffy white cat that had jumped on my lap, I were inclined to believe her.
Our host’s ancestors had been farming her acres as far back as anyone could remember. Since before the floods and the clouding over. Then there used to be a thousand beasts on the property, but now she kept it to a few dozen. Without power it weren’t possible to keep more than that many milked. She and her hands did that themselves and the milk were picked up by wagon and taken to the city daily. It were a life of early risings to frozen mornings, year round. Though the cows dried up in the long nights, it were just a matter of waiting until the turn, Noelly said, then the milk came back, provided not too many had frozen to death where they stood, of course. She were always looking for what to put by for those times. Never quite enough wood to burn or food to store. Her years of labour showed in the creases on her face, but along with the lines made by worrying, there were plenty there from laughing, which she did a lot.
During the evening she shared her home-brewed beer with us and her laugh lines got used more and more.
‘I don’t go to the city much these days,’ she told us. ‘There int anything much there for an old woman like me. Less of course I took it into my head to go looking for another husband, I suppose!’ she slapped her hand on her knee and laughed.
The hunter smiled politely and I grinned because Noelly’s laugh were infectious even when you dint get the joke. ‘What happened to your last husband?’ I asked.
‘He dug himself a hole and when he fell in it he dint have the sense to dig himself out again,’ Noelly told me, folding her arms across her chest.
I weren’t sure what she meant. The hunter smiled and shook his head, setting his eyes on the floor. I was missing something but I had no idea what.
‘So you live here by yourself then?’ I asked, thinking it were a struggle to be in company and my skills were sorely lacking.
‘True enough, girl, except for my cows and cats and whatever else is hanging about pestering me for a meal. Present company excepted, of course,’ she finished, swigging the last of her beer. ‘It’s always nice to have visitors that talk back when addressed directly.’
This was also funny, apparently. I felt like I were walking through conversational quicksand, and sinking more than I were stayen afloat.
‘Can the bear stay here while we do our business in the city?’ the hunter asked while I was thinking of my next line of polite enquiry.
‘So long as she doesn’t spook my cows, she’s welcome. I dare say they’ll get used to her in time. She looks to be tamer than most of my cats,’ Noelly said, glancing toward Little Bear, who’d laid herself out by the fire on her back, her paws in the air. ‘You sure she’s a wild animal?’
I went over and rubbed Little Bear’s belly, settling down next her. The rug was deep and warm and dry and I was full of food and as well as all that, making conversation with a stranger had worn me out. I let my eyes close and drifted off to the sounds of the hunter and Noelly talking quietly.
‘How old she be, Hunter? She int old enough to wed. And neither are you, if it comes to that.’
‘She’s older than she looks. She gave me her betrothal to save her life when she was a child. But I was never set on killen her. Now it’s a joke between us. I tease her with it, that’s all.’
This I heard as if I were listening at the end of a long tunnel.
The hunter dint want to wed me? He thought me a child and was playing along. But it hadn’t seemed that way when he’d caught my hand and kissed it after the dance. Or saved my life when I’d frozen in the snow. Or by the way he looked at me sometimes when he thought I weren’t aware.
‘I got to clear my name,’ I heard the hunter say quietly.
Noelly muttered something back but I dint catch it over my bear’s snores. And then they turned their talk to an even softer pitch and I was drifting off to sleep.
The city
The city was a shock to every one of my senses. I was dazzled by sights and deafened by noise. I had to cover my nose from the rotten stink that crept in and made my mouth taste as foul as a tainted river. And it came on quick.
We set out first thing and soon the farmhouses started coming closer and closer together til there weren’t any space between them, neighbours sharing a house but for a wall between them. The dirt roads turned to paved, and my heels tapped on the hard surface with a jolt that carried up to my hips.
No wonder city folk get worn down so quick, I thought, walking as they do their whole lives on stone streets.
The city proper was behind a great wall, built to shelter those within from the pounding sea on one side, and the ice-storms and gales that blew in from other directions. The wall was as thick as a man is tall, and higher on some sides than others. It weren’t built for defending from the top, just for strength and to shelter behind. So it was not in any way beautiful, being constructed from any and all scrounged materials. I made out old vehicle tyres and lengths of rusty wire held together with a mix of pounded earth and water, left to harden. The hunter told me it was being worked on all the time, this part being shored up after the last big gale, this part being strengthened against the relentless wash of the ocean. The wall couldn’t stop snow from falling on the city within, but that dint happen much, he said, being close to the sea as it was.
As we passed through one of the gates into the city proper it were falling to dusk. The hunter had timed it that way so we could put our hoods up against both the cold and being overly noticed. Noelly had given me the disguise I wore. She’d done some adjustments quick to one of her old dresses she said she wore when she were a newlywed. Yellow with tiny white flowers, it fitted me fine except in the bust where I evidently weren’t as filled out as Noelly had been upon her marriage. I insisted on keeping my old trousers on underneath. It were only sensible. And I laced my leathers over the bodice of the dress. Noelly said this took me back to looking like myself and shook her head, her efforts wasted. I had looked to the hunter and he just raised his shoulders like he dint have an opinion either way. So we settled on me wearing my coat over all of it and keeping my hair tucked up under a scarf, which Noelly showed me how to tie just so. The hunter rolled my furs tight, hiding the she-bear, and we pushed this to the bottom of my pack. It were the long days season so we could do without furs and look more like city folk and less like we’d climbed fresh off the mountain.
Little Bear got the idea we were leaving and stirred herself from her comfortable rest in front of Noelly’s stove. The hunter nodded his head toward her and I knew it were time. So I knelt in front of my bear and whispered the plan to her, that she couldn’t come to the city with us, it weren’t no place for bears, especially tame ones, so she had to stay right here with Noelly and the cats and wait for me to come back to her.
It weren’t that she were understanding what I was saying, language being no use to a bear, it were more that she read my expressions. And not just those I made with my face but also how I held my chin and probably even what I smelled like. The words I spoke were for me. When I finished she expressed her objections as she always does, yawning widely to show me all her teeth and turning her ears back. But finally she nudged me with her wide dry nose, telling me she understood. I hugged her around the neck though I knew I shouldn’t, she weren’t a person, but I did it for me, to say goodbye.
When I looked up Noelly were shaking her head slowly side to side, looking to the hunter as if to say she couldn’t believe her eyes.
It weren’t anything he hadn’t seen before.
The hunter led us through the streets as people lit spirit lamps, setting up tables for trading at a night market. There was clothing and dry foods and stews and soups and breads ready for eating. Of cakes and sweets I’d never seen the like. Piled up like sugared mountains they were.
‘How are there enough people to buy them all?’ I asked the hunter, but he shushed me and bade me turn my gaze to where I were placing my feet for I’d tripped on a gutter once again. I were as used to uneven terrain as a goat but for some reason the flat paving kept catching me by surprise. The hunter caught my hand and pulled me along fast, both to keep me on my feet and to pass a man opening a violin case and tuning his strings.
‘No time for that. We need to get to a safe place to sleep.’
But just then I were forced to dig in my heels because we came upon a stall in the market that took my breath away. On it were arranged cups and plates stacked neatly one on the other, plus bunting strung out behind and posters pinned up, all bearing my face and my bear’s. In some I were portrayed as the hunter had once described, gazing up and away with a faraway look and Little Bear at my side. I took it immediately for Bushy Beard’s work. He’d captured my likeness in a moment I weren’t aware he were looking. And he’d drawn me not in the usual cruel way he showed his fellow miners but like I were grown tall and knowing my own mind. My braid hung over one shoulder and I recognised every part of me except my clothing had been changed from the rags I wore every day at the camp, to a dress of blood red with a bodice of blue embroidered with white flowers, with the shawl I wore now wrapped across my chest. It were exactly the dress I wanted to buy from the trader that day on the mountain.
My mouth fell open as I took in my face on all of the wares. Some posters showed me being cross at the hunter leaving me in the forest. How’d anyone known about that? I wondered. It looked just as I’d remembered it, except my clothes weren’t the same and there were imagined details like bunnies watching from the bushes and unlikely looking mushrooms sprouting up through the snow. I were drawn glaring at the hunter, fierce and scared, my hands on my hips. The word I took to be ‘Reward’ were written underneath with a number so large it must have been a mistake.
On a plate resting on a stand all its own was the portrait my stepmother had made me sit for. I were a child, sitting on a fancy chair, kicking my heels and wearing a scowl. In the front was Rain, dressed in finery I had no memory of from that day, including a golden sash worn from her right shoulder across to her hip. It looked to represent an official office of some kind.
I dint have time to look closer, for the hunter grabbed me now around the waist and pulled me away. ‘Put your head down, Snow, for the love of Little Bear. Do you want to be mobbed and torn limb from limb?’
The rest of the short walk were a blur to me and I let the hunter almost carry me along, I was so stunned by what I’d seen. Finally we came to a door right on the street and it opened quickly when the hunter knocked. He shoved me inside with a hand in my back.
Throwing off my hood I turned to face him, furious. ‘Hunter, you better tell me right now what you been keeping from me these long months because what I saw out there makes no sense to me at all.’
‘You know all there is to know, girl,’ he answered, back to being mean for no reason I could see. ‘It int anything I can explain. Doesn’t seem like commonsense to me but yours is the face everyone in this town wants to see on their plates and spoons looken at them of a morning.’
He shrugged his shoulders and slung his coat over the back of a chair, setting his firearm next to it. Sitting himself down, he pulled off his boots and put his feet before the fire, not at all ashamed of the holes in his socks.
I looked about me. If it were an inn, we were the only guests to be seen and it weren’t a surprise, for the plaster was crumbling from the walls and there were a gritty layer on the floor I could feel through my boots. Still, the fire were warm and it being the only way the room were lit, anything worse to report on the standard of our accommodation lurked in dark corners.
The boy who’d answered the door was still staring at me but he tore his gaze away when the hunter asked for dinner for us both and paid him, making it clear that the money weren’t for the quality of the meal he was expecting, but soas our presence weren’t advertised.
I sat next to the hunter by the fire with a heavy sigh.
‘Why did Noelly say you were in a world of trouble?’
‘Me being with you. She thinks it will bring me strife.’
I weren’t convinced about this for Noelly had made her statement before she’d even seen me and my bear standing on her doorstep.
‘Why is my stepmother wearing a golden sash across her shoulders on that plate?’
‘She’s married to the mayor now,’ the hunter answered simply. ‘She’s the first lady mayoress.’
‘When were you thinking of sharing this information with me?’ I was furious.
‘I only heard it from Noelly last night. I dint tell you soas you would come quietly into town and not draw attention to yourself with your temper.’
I was both offended the hunter judged me ill-tempered and cross he was right.
‘What hope is there then, of getting back my mountain?’ I said. ‘If she has the mayor’s ear, my story won’t even get a hearing.’
I couldn’t believe it. Everywhere I went, my stepmother were there before me, spoiling and ruining. ‘All I want is what’s rightfully mine,’ I told the hunter.
‘Right now we need to lie low. I have some friends in the city and we might be able to find a way.’
‘Find a way?’ I said in despair. ‘It shouldn’t be a matter of finding a way. My claim is good and true. The mountain is mine. Left to me by my father and held in trust by her until I’m of age. All I need is to get before a judge to hear my case. Int that right?’
‘I know that, Snow,’ the hunter said, patient liken. ‘But you’re wanted as a runaway. She’ll lock you up again as quick as look at you. She’s still your legal guardian.’ He picked up my hand now but I shook him off.
‘I know you think me a child,’ I told him. ‘But I know my own mind.’
It were a long and restless night spent thinking on my troubles. I were shown to my own room where I lay in the dark, trying not to wonder about the creatures skittering about on the floor below me, and instead feeling cross at myself and the hunter in equal measures. He was keeping things from me, I was sure of that, but I hadn’t a clue what they were. My stepmother were now the first lady mayoress of the city and she’d been spreading her lies about me being a runaway for all these years. Playing at being the bereaved mother just wanting her child back and even offering a reward higher than it made sense to. Ifen I even stepped out on the street without my hood up I’d be recognised and taken to her whether I were willing or not. And she was still my legal guardian.
Added to my troubles, I weren’t exactly sure when the day of my birth fell. The precise counting of days were not a specialty on the mountain and without a real mother or father to care about noting such a day, I’d lost count of all but the number of seasons past.
The mountain custom was to mark a person’s temple with ink under the skin at the end of each long night’s season. It were a way of celebrating survival but also an easy proof of age. But I were shut away in my cell before I reached the first mark of ten seasons, younger children being too young to stand for being pricked, as well as too likely to die for age to be worth noting. After my father passed away there was no one to count for me. By the time I’d come to the miners, I’d never been marked and no one cared enough to start.
