Fool's Quest

Shun led us along the path of the stream, moving against the current, until she found an easier place for us to try to climb the opposite bank. While it was easier than it might have been, it certainly was not easy, and the brambles on this side of the stream were savagely thorned. By the time we reached the top of the steep bank, we were both sweating and I opened the neck of my coat.

“I’m so hungry,” I said.

“Don’t talk about it,” she advised me, and we hiked on.

As we crested the second hill, my hunger began to tear at my insides as if I’d swallowed a cat. I felt weak and angry and then nauseated. I tried to be a wolf. I looked around the white-swept landscape and tried to find something I could eat. This hill was cleared and in summer was probably used as pasturage for sheep. Not even a seedhead of wild grass peeped up above the snow, and nothing sheltered us from the wind that swept across it. If I had seen a mouse, I think I would have pounced on it and eaten it whole. But there were no mice and a useless tear dared to track down my face. The salt stung on my cold, chapped cheeks. It will pass, Wolf-Father breathed to me.

“Being hungry will pass?” I wondered aloud.

“Yes. It does.” I was startled when Shun answered. “First you get very hungry. Then you think you will puke, but there’s nothing to vomit up. Sometimes you feel weepy. Or angry. But if you just keep on going, the hunger goes away. For a time.”

I toiled along behind her. She led me across a craggy hilltop and then down into a forested vale. As we reached the trees, the wind grew less. I scooped a bit of snow to wet my mouth. My lips were cracked and I tried not to lick them. “How do you know about hunger?”

Her voice held little emotion. “When I was little, if I was naughty my grandfather would send me to my bedroom in the middle of the day, with no supper. When I was your age, I thought it the worst punishment of all, for at that time we had a magnificent cook. His ordinary dinners were better than the best holiday feast you have ever tasted.”

She trudged on. The hillside was steep and so we were cutting across the face of it. At the bottom of the hill, she turned to follow the flat land instead of crossing it and clambering up the next snowy hill. I was grateful but I had to ask, “Are we trying to find our way home?”

“Eventually. Right now I am just trying to get us as far away from our kidnappers as I can.”

I wanted to be walking back to Withywoods. I wanted each step to be taking me closer to my home and my warm bed and a piece of toasted bread with butter on it. But I did not want to clamber up any more snowy hills and so I kept my peace. After a short time, she spoke.

“But I was never truly that hungry in my grandparents’ home. It was after they died and I was sent to live with my mother and her husband that I went days without food. If I said or did anything that my mother’s husband thought was disrespectful, he sent me to my room and locked me in. And left me there. Sometimes for days. Once I thought I would die, so after three days I jumped out my window. But it was winter and the snow was deep over the bushes below. I was scratched and bruised and limped for ten days, but it didn’t kill me. My mother was worried. Not for me, but for what her friends would say if I died. Or simply vanished. She had marriage plans for me. One suitor was older than my grandfather had been, a man with a loose wet mouth who stared at me as if I were the last sweet on the plate. And another family had a son who had no wish for the company of women but was willing to marry me so his parents would leave him and his friends in peace.”

I had never heard Shun speak so much. She did not look at me as she talked, but stared ahead and spoke her words to the cadence of her trudge. I kept silent and she talked on, speaking of being slapped for insolence, of a younger brother who tormented her with surreptitious pinches and shoves. She’d spent more than a year being miserable there, and when she adamantly refused the attentions of both her suitors, her stepfather expressed his interest, cupping a buttock as he passed, standing over her if she sat reading a book, trailing his fingers over her bosom as he became bolder. She had retreated to her room, spending most of her hours there and latching the door.

And then one day she received a message and slipped out of the house in late evening. She met a woman with two horses at the bottom of the garden, and they had fled. She halted suddenly. She was breathing heavily. “Can you go first for a time?” she asked me.

And I did, and suddenly appreciated the work she had been doing since dawn. I led us by a more winding way, seeking shallower snow in the lee of trees and clumps of bushes. Even so, it was heavier work than I’d been doing and sweat began to run down my spine. I had no breath to speak and she seemed to have run out of words and stories. I pondered what I’d learned of Shun and rather wished she had shared such tales when first she had come to live with us. I might have been able to like her if I had known more about her. When we paused to rest the sweat cooled my body and I shivered until we trudged on.