Beast (15 page)

It takes only a couple of days for me to prepare a large patch of ground for a vegetable garden to the east side of the castle. My claws dig easily, for the heating earth is rich and loose, yet still wet. The weather has definitely changed; snow is unthinkable. These days we have a predawn drizzle almost without fail, just as we did last autumn—a natural watering of the gardens, perfect for roses, which love a damp ground.

At night I scavenge. Most country people have small vegetable gardens beside their homes—gardens they spend the day preparing for seed. I wear a fancy purse around my neck. I found it in a bureau in the bedroom where I sleep. When I come across bags of vegetable seeds, I take a huge biteful out of the bag
and spit it into my purse. The seeds stick to my tongue, and sometimes it takes hours to get the last of them off. But I don't care. The only time it was really awful was when I bit into a bag of onion sets.

By day I plant lettuce, cabbage, and those onions. Then carrots, chicory, peas, and so many other vegetables. By the end of a week, the entire garden is planted and fertilized with droppings from the dovecote.

But not everything can be snatched at night from sheds. I want flour for bread. And olives. And olive oil. I want sugar and honey. Everything that's in a well-stocked larder at home, that's what should be in the castle larder when my child comes. Right now the larder's contents are wormy or so dried out, they're hard as rock.

I pass a few days lurking around farmhouses. But it seems there's always someone home—women cooking or looking after children. And I don't dare enter a home larder in the dark—with sleepers in the next room and guns under their beds.

There's no choice: I must go into a village at night and raid the stores.

The risk is great. So I can't take a mere purse worth of goods — I have to take as much as I can manage. In addition to the purse, I bring my blanket, the one I sleep on.

The night is dark. I run along the road. My eyes and
ears alert me to travelers long before they have a chance to see me. I get off into the underbrush on the side of the road and crouch until they pass. Then I run again. The next traveler is a lone man, on foot, and quiet. I duck into the underbrush, but it's clear he saw something, for he moves to the other side of the road to pass and looks back over his shoulder warily. It's all right, though. For if he saw me, he must think he's had a vision. No one would believe a lion roams these parts.

Still, I wish there were more trees here. It's almost as though someone cleared away the surrounding trees, so that the town could be seen from a distance.

Town is nothing more than a few streets crisscrossing with a cluster of buildings attached to one another on both sides. Most of the buildings are two stories tall. Candles flicker from some of the upstairs windows. I understand immediately: The shops are below; the owners live above.

My nose leads me to the baker's first. I spread the blanket on the ground behind the shop. The door is locked. The downstairs windows are shuttered. But the lower story extends to the rear farther than the upper story. I leap onto the roof of the lower story. A chimney pokes up on one side. It's not hot anymore. I look down inside it. There's nothing to see.

I pace on the little roof. Light snores come from the upper window.

I climb onto the chimney and lower myself, all fours against one wall of the inside of the chimney and my back against the opposite wall. The chimney is so narrow, my chest presses against my legs. I stretch out my hind paws, lose the tension that's holding me in place, and fall with a crash.

People call to one another. They come clattering down the stairs. They look around the bakery, searching for an intruder. I am curled in the bottom of the chimney, at the rear of what I realize is the oven. The soot that puffed up around me when I landed now settles in a fine layer that makes me need to sneeze. I press my muzzle against the rear wall of the chimney and pray to the Merciful One to hold back this impulse.

The voices are worried, two of them—a man and a woman. They speculate about the source of the noise.

I need to sneeze. Frantic, I lick a clump of ashes into my mouth. The taste and texture revolt me. The urge to sneeze dies; the urge to purge comes.

The man and woman convince each other that the noise they heard couldn't have come from within their bakery after all. They return to their beds upstairs.

I vomit. In this small space, I can't get away from the scent. But I dirtied my own forelegs, anyway. The scent clings to me.

After a long while I get up the nerve to push
against the oven door. I creep out onto the bakery floor. Barrels of flour and sugar stand beside a large counter. Under the counter are sacks of more flour, more sugar. And there's a large box of coarse powder; my nose tells me it's yeast.

I drag a sack of flour to the door, then a sack of sugar. I spit a mouthful of yeast into my purse.

Something clatters in the alley.

A cock crows.

The night is almost past. The village will come awake within the hour.

And a baker's job begins before dawn.

I go to unlock the door.

The keyhole is empty. The key should be sticking out on this side of the door, but it's not there. I search the floor. No key. I walk around the room, scanning the walls for hooks that a key might hang from. Nothing.

The shutters have two horizonal bars across the inside. They have to be pulled downward at the outer ends, so that they go to the vertical simultaneously. I balance on my hind feet and tap both front paws at the outer ends of the bars. They swing vertical, and the shutters open.

I bite into the sack of flour and drag it between my forelegs to the window. The cloth catches on a splinter in the floorboards. I yank it free and jump onto the window ledge. The sack drops out the window in a billow of white. I jump back inside for the sack of sugar.

Someone walks around upstairs.

Flour and yeast are enough for bread.

But a child needs sugar.

I drag the sugar sack to the window.

It has begun to rain —slow, misty rain, but enough to make my flour clump.

Someone comes down the stairs, clopping wooden shoes.

I jump onto the window ledge and drop the sugar on the flour sack. I leap out the window.

My blanket waits undisturbed. I pull the sacks onto the blanket, then gather the four corners in my mouth.

“Ahhhh!” A woman stands at the open shutters, her hands in the air, her fingers spread.

I stare at her.

She pulls the shutters shut with a loud slap of wood on wood.

I lug the blanket down the alley through rain that's coming harder now. A cat jumps out of my path with a screech. It ducks into an old broken barrel and out the other side. It disappears into a garbage heap.

Without a second thought, I push my blanket into the barrel, shoving the ends with my head. Then I run for the garbage heap.

A dog comes yapping at me. I growl low. He turns tail with a high-pitched scream and races off.

I dig myself into the garbage heap.

I
lie under the pile of rubble and dirty old clothes and junk. This is it. I'm finally caught, finally killed.

I tense up, ready to bolt.

Nothing happens.

I wait. Stupid me. I should have run down the road, all the way to the woods. I had time. But who knew? Who knew the baker wouldn't come running with a gun?

Should I make a dash for it now?

A crier's voice starts up:
“Une bête! Une bête horrible!”
He's walking through the streets, warning of a terrible beast that attacked the baker's wife, a beast that almost killed her.

Now his voice is lost in the sound of wheels and horse hooves, people calling to one another, dogs.

Something runs across my back, tunneling between
my body and the garbage cover. Another. Rats. They run over me as though I'm a dead thing. One bites my ear. I give a quiet snarl. It tunnels away, only to return and sniff around my whiskers.

I could open my mouth and make a snack of him.

But someone might just happen to be looking this way. Someone might see the garbage pile heave.

The crier comes by again. The bakers wife has made special buns in the shape of the great marauding beast. They Ve selling fast. Everyone should hurry, he says, hurry to get one before they're gone.

The baker's wife is no fool. Perhaps the popularity of these buns will make up for the loss of the flour and sugar I stole.

A man yells at a boy. The boy's trying to appease him. They're closer now. A dog barks throughout their talk. The man yells at the dog now. I hear a thump. The dog squeals.

Clatter. They're dumping junk onto the garbage pile. Something sharp pokes me in the shoulder.

The dog whines.

The man and boy walk off, but the dog stays, barking louder and more frenzied. I'm afraid to growl — I don't know who else might be near. The man comes back, calls the dog names. Thump. The dog cries out. They leave.

The rest of the day passes slowly, but without
incident. When night finally comes, I stand up, letting the debris fall off me. I try to pull my blanket from the barrel, but it's stuck fast. I push the barrel with my nose. It rolls on the dirt road with a soft clacking sound.

Whenever the road goes downhill, the barrel flies along and I can trot at close to my normal pace. But uphill is slow. It takes hours to get to the spot on the road below my castle. I clamp my jaws around the lip of the barrel and drag it, walking backward up the hill. When I have the barrel safely inside the castle, I tug at the blanket. It rips, but the sugar sack comes forward enough in the process that I can now bite into it and drag it into the larder. The flour sack comes easily after that. I dump the contents of my purse on the counter—a nice pile of yeast. And nothing got damaged by the dawn rain; the barrel did double duty.

I'm filthy and I reek. I go outside and plunge into the moat, twisting over and over in the water until I feel free and clean again. Then I get out and pray.

The sun comes up, a shiny ball of light. My child needs light. The castle is too dark at night for a little girl. I check the oil lamp. The oil is low. And there's so little oil in the larder.

But I'm through with raiding shops in town.

There are valuables in this castle—carved picture frames, gilded mirrors, fine dinnerware. The child can trade them in town for whatever she needs.

Still, I can't let her arrive to find darkness. I remember the last time I saw my room in Tabriz, my parents wrapped in each other's arms, candles and roses and incense lining the perimeter of the room. And honey-almond balls. Everything ready to greet me.

Incense is foreign to this country. But I can find the rest. I can greet my child properly.

I close my eyes to the sun, and sleep. When I wake, I'm invigorated. Crawling under the brambles excites me. Trotting through the woods excites me. The world feels fresh and bright and firm and mine.

The forest gets thicker to the north. My ears stand stiff. My eyes scan for dead trees. It takes the full afternoon, but finally I hear the buzz. Now the scent of honey comes strong.

There must be a strategy to raiding beehives — for the honey badger does it all the time. But I don't know it. I plunge into the midst of the bees, stand on my hind paws, and swipe my right front paw inside the hole high up in the tree. Bees sting my nose, my ears, my eyelids. I swipe and swipe until my claws catch on the hive. It comes free and falls inside the hollow tree. The bees are crazy now, stinging like mad. But I'm digging furiously at the roots, digging my way under the tree and into its middle. My front paws and head and shoulders are inside the tree now. The bees sting my belly and scrotum from one side, my lips from the
other. With my paw I push the hive into my huge mouth. Then I back out and run for the castle.

Bees are inside my mouth. They sting my tongue, the roof of my mouth, the back of my throat.

I dive into the moat and swim underwater as far as I can. When I come up, there are no bees in the air. I open my mouth and drop the hive on the ground beside the moat. A few bees crawl on it still. One manages to fly away. I let myself fall back into the water and I drink and drink, my mouth and head and underside on fire from the bee poison.

I lie all night, all the next day, all the next night in swollen pain.

The poison finally runs its course, and I wake ferocious with hunger. Its morning, and the urge to prowl invigorates me. I put the beehive on the table in the castle and go hunting.

I want a deer, a stag large enough to make me full for days. But what my ears detect is the small yipping of fox kits. I crouch and move low through the underbrush.

A vixen has made a den in the side of a small hillock. She lies curled, half asleep half awake. Two kits locked in mock battle roll in the grasses in front of the den. The father must be out hunting.

I creep up and lunge for the mother.

She has no chance. A single yelp, and I've torn her
throat. The kits race away. I run after them and kill them both. I bring them back and lie in front of the den, feeding. When I finish, I stand and stretch.

What it is that makes me poke my muzzle inside the den, I don't know. It's much deeper than I expected. I crawl forward on my belly. A runt kit presses itself against the back wall and stares at me. I close my mouth around its body, holding it gently. It doesn't fight.

I trot home. The kit is old enough to eat meat. If I can keep it alive, it will make a nice present for my child. She'll laugh at its tiny paws, its fluffy tail. If I can't keep it alive, I'll eat it.

I carry it upstairs to the bedroom I sleep in and put it in the center of the floor. It lies unmoving. But its chest rises and falls. Sly little thing, who thinks he can play dead.

I go outside and spend the rest of the evening chasing quail to discover their nests in the underbrush. I pick up an entire nest in my mouth and carry it home, then go out for another. I gather a total of four nests. Then I go upstairs with two eggs in my mouth.