Deerskin - Robin McKinley
Sometimes it seemed her contentment was not that at all but a mere physical reaction to the numbness of exhaustion. She awakened when the puppies stirred, and her hands began their work while her brain was too tired to recognize what was going on. The little muffled squeaking noises they made, slowly evolving into recognizable canine yips, reassured her even as they woke her up. Sometimes puppy-noises were part of the nightmares, and then her sleeping self laughed and said, It's only the puppies, and she woke up calmly and sweetly.
These uneasy dreams and these awakenings were so very different from ones that she remembered ... remembered ... from before.
And none of the puppies died.
By the end of the third week several of them were almost plump, and walked on their feet instead of paddling on their bellies; and they all had their eyes open, and the grand sweep of breastbone and tucked-up stomach characteristic of all the sighthounds began to be apparent. Some of them were growing coordinated enough to begin knocking their brothers and sisters around. They were developing unmistakable personalities, and with their personalities inevitably came names.
Pur was the biggest, but Ob the most active. Fen and Meadowsweet were still the smallest and weakest. She had not meant to name them, but she could not help herself; and having done so she thought, Let their names be symbols that their lives are worth the keeping. Let them struggle a little the harder, to keep their names.
Ferntongue yawned the most ecstatically, and Harefoot, to Lissar's eye, already had longer legs and a deeper girth than any of the rest. She named them, spoke to them using their names, as if the names were charms to keep them safe; she knew it wasn't over, they could still catch some wandering illness that would kill all six of them in a day or a sennight. But she began to have some real hope, irrational and stupid with sleeplessness as it was, that Ossin might have some reward for his stubbornness.
She did not think in terms of rewarding her own.
As the weeks passed, and the puppies grew and thrived, the look of wistful awe in the faces of the rest of the kennel staff when they looked over the half-door into Lissar's little domain grew so clear and plain that Lissar stopped going into the common-room at all, except to fetch her meals, milk and mush for the puppies, or to ask questions, which were gravely answered. She thought: I have asked questions so ignorant they should shock you; why do you look at me as if I were setting you a trial that you are not sure you will master?
Her heart still hurt her when she looked at her puppies, and yet looking at them was a pleasure unlike any pleasure she could remember; raising Ash had been different, she thought, not only because Ash was a big strong puppy when they met, but because she and Ash had, it seemed to her, grown up together. But those memories were still vague, still hemmed round with walls she could not breach, as solid, it seemed, as real brick and stone.
When she grew very tired, and hallucinations crept round the edges of her vision, she remembered that she was accustomed to hallucinations too. She did not remember why she had spent the last winter on the mountain, but she remembered what it had been like.
She also remembered that the most brutal dream she had had ended with the Lady, the Moonwoman, and that when she had awoken, the supple white dress that now lay folded away on a shelf in a bare little room over the kennels, had remained, as real as she was, as real as Ash's long coat was.
And Ossin was real; realer somehow than Hela or Jobe or Berry or Tig, perhaps because they had given up on the puppies when Ilgi died, and Ossin had not. Or because of the way they looked at her, and Ossin looked at her only as if she were another human being. But when he walked into the pen, it was as if the sunlight came with him.
She remembered him as if he dressed in bright colors: red and green and yellow and blue. And yet his clothing was usually the drab, practical sort one would want to wear in a kennel, when a puppy might vomit over your lap at any moment; although it was true that he often wore bright shirts under his tunics, or that the tunics themselves had bright cuffs or collars or hems. She also thought of his face and hair and eyes as bright, when in fact he was as drab as his clothing, and his hair and eyes were a dull brown. But his smile lit his dull square features as fire lightens darkness; and so when her memory of him startled her when she set her eyes again on the reality, his smile reminded her of what she chose to remember.
Sometimes they kept watch together in the small hours, too tired even to sleep; for while he did sleep in a bed every other night, he was still expected to keep up his other duties as the king's only son and his heir, and he was no less tired than she.
"Fortunately I'm already known as less than a splendid conversationalist," he told her ruefully; "I'm now gaining a reputation as a total blockhead." They talked softly, the puppies clean and fed and asleep, and Lissar's long hairy head- or foot-rest snoring gently.
He talked more than she did, for she had only half a year's experience available to her, and much of it was about not remembering what went before-about fearing to remember what went before; and the rest was not particularly interesting, about hauling water and chopping wood, and walking down a mountain. She did not mean to tell him this, that she did not remember what her life had been, but at four o'clock in the morning, when the world is full of magic, things may be safely said that may not be uttered at any other time, so long as the person who listens believes in the same kind of magic as the person who speaks. Ossin and Lissar did believe in the same kinds of magic, and she told him more than she knew herself, for she was inside her crippled memory, and he was outside.
But one thing she always remembered not to tell him was her name. Since she remembered so little else, and since she had a name-Deerskin-this created no suspicion in his mind; but she wondered at it herself, that she should be so sure she dared not tell him this one fact-perhaps the only other fact she was sure of beyond Ash's name.
He in turn told her of his life in ordinary terms. There were no gaps in his memory, no secrets that he could remember nothing of but the fearful fact of their existence. He was the only son of his parents, who had been married four years before he was born; his sister was eight years younger. He could not remember a time when he had not spent most of his waking hours with dogs-except for the time he spent with horses-or a time in which he had not hated being dressed up in velvets and silk and plonked on a royal chair atop a royal dais, "like a statue on a pedestal, and about as useful, I often think. I think my brain stops as soon as brocade touches my skin."
"You should replace your throne with a plain chair then," said Lissar. "Or you could take one of the crates in the common-room with you."
"Yes," said Ossin, "one of the crates. And we could hire an artist to draw running dogs chasing each other all the way around it, as an indication of my state of mind."
TWENTY-THREE
SPRING HAD PASSED AND THE WARMTH NOW WAS OF HIGH summer.
When Lissar paused on the way to the bathhouse and lifted her face to the sky, the heat of the sun struck her like the warmth of the fire in the little hut had struck her last winter, as a lifegiving force, as a bolt of energy that sank through her flesh to her bones. She took a deep breath, as if welcoming her life back; as if the six small furry life-motes in the kennels behind her were ... not of no consequence, but possessed of perfect security.
It was a pleasant sensation; she stood there some minutes, eyes closed, drinking the sun through her pores; and then Hela's voice at her shoulder, "There, you poor thing, you've fallen asleep on your feet." Lissar hadn't heard her approach. She opened her eyes and smiled.
Two days later she and Ossin took the pups outdoors for the first time. He carried the big wooden box that held all six of them, and she had occasion to observe that the bulk of his arms and shoulders, unlike that of his waistline, had nothing to do with how many sweet cakes he ate. She and Ash followed him, Lissar carrying blankets, as anxious as any nursemaid about her charges catching a chill.
The puppies tumbled out across the blankets. The bolder ones at once teetered out to the woolly edges and fell off, and began attacking blades of grass. They were adorable, they were alive, and she loved them; and she laughed out loud at their antics. Ossin turned to her, smiling. "I have never heard you laugh before." She was silent.
"It is a nice sound. I like it. Pardon me if I have embarrassed you."
She shook her head; and at that moment Jobe came up to ask Ossin something, a huge, beautiful, silver-and-white beast pacing solemnly at his side. It and Ash threw measuring looks at each other, but both were too well-behaved to do any more: or simply too much on their dignity to initiate the first move. Lissar still had only the vaguest idea of the work that went on around her every day in the kennels; she heard dogs and people, the slap of leather and the jingle of metal rings, the shouts of gladness, command, correction-and frustration; smelled food cooking, and the aromas from the contents of the wheelbarrows the scrubbers carried out twice a day.
The scrubbers were not lightly named; they did not merely clean, they scrubbed.
Lilac came to visit her occasionally, the first time the day after Lissar had gone to meet the king and queen in the receiving-hall. By the mysterious messenger service of a small community, word had reached her that evening of what had become of her foundling, and why Lissar had not returned as she had promised. "I knew you would land on your feet," she said cheerfully in greeting.
Lissar, after one nearly sleepless night, and weeks of them to come, and six small dog-morsels threatening to die at any moment, was not so certain of Lilac's estimation of her new position, and looked at her with some irony.
Lilac, who had dropped to her knees beside the puppies, did not see this.
"They're so tiny," she whispered, as if speaking loudly might damage them. "I'm used to foals, who are born big enough that you know it if one stands on your foot."
"I'm supposed to keep them alive," Lissar said, as softly as Lilac.
"You will," said Lilac, looking up, and for just one moment Lissar saw a flash of that look she saw in almost everyone's face. Lilac's eyes rested briefly on the white dress Lissar had not yet changed for kennel clothes; and Lissar wondered, suddenly, for the first time, why Lilac had spoken to her at the water trough, what seemed a lifetime ago already, and was yet less than three days.
The glimpse left her speechless. "You will," said Lilac again, this time turning it into a croon to a puppy, who, waking up, began to crawl toward the large warm bulk near him, cheeping hopefully. This was the one Lissar would name Ob: he was growing adaptable already, and was realizing that more than one large warm bulk provided food.
As the pups grew and blossomed, the names she had at first almost casually chosen, as a way of keeping them sorted out, instead of calling them "white with brindle spot on left ear," "small grey bitch," or "big golden-fawn," began to feel as if they belonged, that they did name; and she slipped, sometimes, and called them by their private names when someone else was near. At first it was only Lilac. Then, one day, Ossin.
"I-I am sorry, your greatness," she said, catching herself too late. "They're your pups; you have the naming of them. It is only that I-I am so accustomed to them."
Ossin shook his head. "No; they are yours, as they would tell you if we asked them. I am sure you have chosen good names for them." After a moment he added:
"I am sure you are hearing their names aright."
She knew that he did not mean that the pups belonged to her, but she was more relieved than she liked to admit that he would let her names for them stand; she feared a little her own tendency to think of names as safety-charms, helping to anchor them more securely to their small tender lives. And the names did fit them; not entirely unlike, she thought, she was "hearing" them, in the prince's odd quaint phrase. "Thank you," she said.
He was smiling, reading in her face that she was not taking him as seriously as he meant what he was saying. "I have wondered a little that you have not named them before; pups around here have names sometimes before their eyes are open-although I admit the ones likèPigface' and `Chaos' are changed later on. And I think you're imagining things about Harefoot, but that's your privilege; a good bit of money-and favors-pass from hand to hand here on just such questions.
"Mind you," he added, "the pups are yours, and if you win races with Harefoot the purses are yours, although I will think it a waste of a good hunting dog. But I shall want a litter or two out of the bitches, and some stud service from at least one of the dogs-Ob, isn't it?-I have plans for that line, depending on how they grow up."
If they grow up, she thought, but she did not say it aloud; she knew in her heart that she was no longer willing even to consider that she might lose so much as one of them, and she kept reminding herself "if they grow up" as if the gods might be listening, and take pity on her humility, and let her keep them. "Of course, your greatness," she said, humoring his teasing.
"And stop calling me 'your greatness.' "
"I'm sorry, y-Ossin."
"Thank you."
A day or so later, watching puppies wading through a shallow platter of milk with a little cereal mixed in, and offering a dripping finger to the ones who were slow to catch on (this was becoming dangerous, or at least painful, as their first, needlelike teeth were sprouting), she heard a brief conversation between the prince and Jobe, standing outside the common-room door. This was at some little distance from the puppies' pen, but conversations in the big central aisle carried.
"Tell them none of that litter is available."
