Deerskin by Robin McKinley
The fire-pot had arrived while she was at supper, and there was a low, heavy-bottomed jug of milk beside it.
The puppies were all asleep again in their heap, as soon as she set down the cleaned-up ones. She wondered how the ones on the bottom were managing to breathe. She laid out two more of the blankets Hela had brought, for a mattress, and lay down herself. Ash was standing by the closed door in alarm: You don’t mean we’re spending the night in here with—them?
“Come,” said Lissar. “You can lie next to the wall, and I will protect you.”
She fell asleep in some anxiety, not knowing how she would awaken to feed the puppies again. They could not be left all night, and she was too tired to remain awake. But her anxiety made her sleep lightly, and the first uncertain murmuring protests from the puppy-heap brought her awake at once, staring around a moment in fright, feeling the ceiling leaning down close to her, not able to remember where she was, or what it was that had awakened her. She staggered upright, the ceiling returning to its normal position, and went to warm the milk. Ash, who could ordinarily not be moved by force once she was comfortably asleep for the night, got up at once and perched near her. Ash had a lot to say about the whole situation, in a low rumbling mutter.
Lissar’s cheek muscles were aching before the first puppy was fed; by the sixth she was balancing the pup on her knees because she needed her other hand to keep her lips clamped on the straw. Tomorrow, she told herself fuzzily, without moving her lips, I will find an alternative. The puppies were weaving themselves back into their pile; it became impossible in the dim light to differentiate one puppy from the next. The puppy-heap was one creature, fringed by tails and a surprising number of feet.
She stroked a nearby back. Two of the puppies were discernibly weaker than the other four. She remembered what everyone kept telling her about the pups’ future, and the uselessness and duration of her temporary job; what she was doing was only to reassure the prince that his bitch’s last litter hadn’t automatically been given up on. But she wanted to succeed. She didn’t want to be reasonable. She wanted the pups to live. She didn’t even want four pups to live; she wanted all of the remaining six.
There was a sudden, surprising rush of heat like anger as she thought this; and, warmed and strengthened by it, she began lifting the puppies up again, one by one, and massaging their bellies. Tomorrow she would ask for an old glove, and cut the fingers off, and make a tiny hole in a fingertip, and pour milk down the puppies’ throats that way.
TWENTY-TWO
LISSAR WOKE UP VERY WARM. ONE LARGE DOG WAS KNOTTED UP against her back and six tiny dogs who had, by some osmosis, slowly oozed their way the short distance across the floor during the night, were now piled up in a small irregular sausage from her breastbone to her thighs. There were various sounds of protest when she moved; a baritone grumble from behind her and a series of fairylike cheeps from before.
“It’s morning,” she whispered. “Is everybody still alive?” Everybody was. Her throat relaxed, and there was suddenly more room in her chest for her heart to beat. But the two weak pups had been joined by a third. The worst was a tiny grey bitch, who simply lay limp in Lissar’s hand, without moving her head, without making the least fluttering movement with feet or tail. “Don’t die,” said Lissar, sadly, “don’t die”: and she was warmed by another swift blaze of anger. “You haven’t been alive yet; what did you go and get born for if you’re just going to die?”
It was so early there was almost no one else stirring; but Berry was in the common-room grumbling over a shortage of biscuit-meal to make dog breakfasts with, and he found her an old pair of gloves, and a pin to prick with. She took her new supplies back to the puppy pen, sawed off a glove-finger, and prepared to try out her invention. The little grey bitch lay exactly as Lissar had laid her down, looking almost more like a small grey puddle than a dog. She picked her up first.
The pup lay dully in her hand. She weighed so little Lissar felt that if she tossed her into the air, the puppy would float to the ground, whisking gently back and forth like a leaf. Lissar turned her over, cupped her in her hand, and wiggled the little mouth open till she could get the glove-tip inside. The jaw, once open, merely hung slack; the glove-tip would not go in far enough, nor stay once put. Lissar wrestled for a minute or two. The milk only leaked out of the puppy’s indifferent mouth. She did not swallow, she did not resist; she did nothing. She lay in the position Lissar had pinned her among her own fingers, the tiny ribcage only barely registering the tiniest of breaths.
Lissar lay the glove-finger down, picked up a straw, stared at it, sighed. She thrust the tip in the bowl of milk, sucked it full, thrust the straw down the pup’s throat, and let the milk loose. The puppy gasped, coughed, choked—and kicked; the milk all came out again. But the pup was startled; she made a little mewling noise, her blind head trembled, her tiny paws twitched.
Lissar refilled the straw hastily, stuck it not quite as far down the puppy’s throat, and released the milk. This time the puppy gasped, choked, kicked—and swallowed. Very little milk reappeared. The puppy swallowed several more strawsful without further complaint; her little belly had a faint new convexity of outline. Lissar laid her down very tenderly.
As predicted deprecatingly by Jobe and Hela, the puppies all developed diarrhea. The first night was the last real sleep Lissar had for ten days. Hela helped sometimes, but it was obvious her heart was not in it, and she avoided handling the puppies herself. She said it was because as few people as possible should handle puppies so young; but Lissar did not think that was the real reason. She was grateful for Hela’s help in fetching milk and clean cloths, and cleaning up; but she knew that she and the puppies were still ostracized—and the puppies at least, condemned.
Ossin himself was a more valuable assistant. He had looked in and seen them all sleeping, that first night, and gone quietly away again; but after that he came every day. He had no qualms about touching the pups, although at first the little bodies were so dwarfed by his big hands that she wondered how he could cope with handling anything so small. But he fed them more easily than she did—and praised her ingenuity with straws and glove-fingers, although she knew that these ideas were not new, that her ingenuity was only that she was willing to think about how to keep the pups alive and then put her ideas into practice.
He never spoke a sharp or angry word himself, however sharp Lissar’s exhaustion made her, and how much she forgot to whom she spoke, or rather, did not speak, for she was too tired for courtesy. He insisted instead that she not forget herself entirely; he brought her her meals occasionally, when those in the common-room suspected she had missed eating; he sent her off for a nap in the bathhouse (“just don’t drown”) saying that an hour there would do her more good than an entire night of unbroken sleep.
And once she woke with the horrid awareness that she had slept too long, and saw him with a puppy in one hand and a damp, distended glove-finger in the other; and straw in his hair. He had been there all night; she remembered him bringing her her supper, and how she had sunk down, her head on her arm, to rest for just a few minutes. And now there was early morning creeping through the window.
“All still alive?” she said. It was a reflex. She said these words more often than any others, even when her first words should have been, Your greatness, I am so sorry, why did you not awaken me?
He turned his face toward her, and there was no reproach in it; instead a tired smile curled the corners of his mouth. “Yes,” he said, with evident satisfaction, as if her question were the correct response to his presence.
But she was not unaware, and she began to make her belated excuses, whereupon his face closed down and he turned away from her again. “I wish to make your impossible task as nearly possible as—as mortal flesh and blood can. It is I who wished it tried at all, and I who know, none better, that no one will help you but me. I am glad to do it. Here, you”—and he directed his attention to the puppy in his hand, who was attempting t
Lissar pushed the hair out of her face, and crawled toward the puppies. Two or three of them now had narrow slits of eye showing between the lids, and most of them were swimming, belly to the floor, fairly actively; occasionally they took a few staggering almost-steps, their little legs crooked out at painful-looking angles, moving like turtles, as if they bore great unwieldy weights on their backs. But there were still two who moved very little, who moved only when they were lifted up for milk, whose heads hung over the palms of the hands that held them if they were not picked up carefully, as if their necks were nothing but bits of string; who would not nurse but needed straws thrust down their throats, who needed the most belly-rubbing and yet simultaneously had the most persistent diarrhea.
Lissar looked at the six of them—all still alive, against the odds—and her heart quailed; there were still long weeks ahead of her before her task could be declared accomplished, success or failure; and if it was over before then it was only because she had absolutely failed. She picked up one of the two smallest puppies, rolling its unprotesting body in her hand, feeling the butterfly heartbeat, and picked up a hollow straw.
Without speaking a word about it, Ossin fell into the habit of spending every other night in the puppy pen; and Lissar got a little more sleep that way, although never again did she embarrass herself by sleeping through the night. The prince stayed sitting up, snoring faintly sometimes as his head dropped to his chest; Lissar lay down, near the wall, with Ash stretched out behind her. Ossin never acknowledged his own regular presence by pressing Lissar to leave the puppies to him and go to her own room, the bed she had never yet slept in; and so Lissar never quite dared protest what he was doing. And at some dim distance she also knew that she appreciated his company, not only for the practical help and human reassurance he provided.
Over the course of every night, wherever the puppy-heap had begun, it rearranged itself to spill over Lissar’s hands and feet, or to press against her belly. Ash mellowed to the point where she would not instantly leap to her feet on a puppy’s coming in contact with her; but she never offered to let Lissar lie next to the wall either. Lissar woke up sometimes by the sensation of a puppy being gently lifted off her; which meant that the prince had already warmed the milk on the tiny fire-pot, rust-free and freshly blacked, that stood always in the corner of the stall. After this had happened two or three times Lissar woke once to a large shadowy figure reaching down to her, stooped over her, and she sat up with a gasp, throwing herself backwards, against Ash, who yelped.
Ossin straightened up and took a step backwards. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s only me, not a night-monster. We turn them away at the city gates, you know. You can sleep quietly here.” He was standing perfectly still, his hands hanging loosely at his sides. She recognized the tone of voice even as it worked on her: he wished to soothe her as he might a frightened dog.
“I—forgive me. I—I must have been having a bad dream, although I … don’t remember it.”
The first three weeks were the worst. Not only was there the persistent fear of one of the weaker ones giving up entirely—and the need therefore to feed them oftener because they would swallow or keep down less, and used it less efficiently than the stronger ones—but as soon as they all seemed more or less thriving for half a day, that was a sure sign that one whose health she had begun to take for granted would suddenly reject its food, or cry and cry and refuse to defecate or to settle down to sleep. Lissar worried also that they would strangle on a broken straw, or a shred of blanket; that one of the bigger puppies would smother one of the weaker ones and she would not notice till too late; that she herself would crush one in her sleep, for none of them had any sense about where they disposed themselves around her. Every time one of the pups coughed she knew it was about to die: that due to her carelessness in thrusting straws down their throats, some milk had gone down the wrong way and produced pneumonia.
But none of them died.
By the end of the first fortnight she had grown accustomed to the sense of trying to climb an avalanche. She still had nightmare fragments during her fragments of sleep; but these nightmares were different from the ones she had had when she and Ash were still alone. These were not about her; and when she woke from them, she had something to do: check the puppies. When she found them all still breathing the sense of release and of peace was so extraordinary that sometimes she sat or lay for several minutes or a quarter hour, thinking of nothing but that her charges were well, and that she was … happy. She noticed, but did not pursue the thought, that she felt most content with her world on the nights that Ossin was snoring gently in his corner.
She remembered, as if she would remember a dream, that the first days of the Lady’s peace had been much like this; but it was different as well, more complicated; this was a peace of wind or running water rather than a peace of solid rock or quiet ground. It was a contentment of motion, of occupation, instead of stillness: it was a contentment more like the Lady herself.
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 d
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.