The Moorchild (11 page)

Following his gaze, Saaski could see only her familiar playground, the one place where she need not guard her tongue and mind her ways. Perhaps that was magic, in a way—but not in the way Tam meant. She said, “
You
tootle a bit, then, and I’ll see can
I
follow.”

Tam was willing, and after a few blunderings Saaski caught his rhythm and began to play along, over and under his little pipe’s shrill melody like a bramble vine twining a sapling. Next, her bagpipes became a tree—a sonorous, solemn drone-song with the chanter wailing, and Tam twined it with brambly whistlings. Well pleased with themselves, they stopped to get their breath and follow the goats over a rise. From here they could see, nestled in the next hollow, the tinker’s little two-wheeled cart with its raggedy hood, and next to it a reed hut of the sort shepherds build, with an ox skin roofing the space between. The pony grazed
at its tether a little distance away; the old dog drowsed by a cart wheel.

“Bruman is there?” asked Saaski. “He is making the shoes and boots and leathern things?”

“Sleeping it off, more likely.”

Saaski rolled her eyes at him. Old Bess had no good word for drunkards—including Yanno’s dead pipe-playing da’—nor did Anwara. Saaski had never seen one, that she knew of—only the village men getting merry on a feast day, or coming unsteadily home in the dusk from Sorcha the alewife’s, up near the mill.

Tam laughed at her, showing the little gap at the side of his grin. “Eh, well, that’s Bruman. He mended a leathern bucket for an old fisher t’other day and got paid in muxta, so what else could he do but set to and drink it up? He’s been worse lately,” Tam added, the smile fading. “It’s his leg, I reckon. Pains him somethin’ fierce now-days. So he drinks hisself blind. One day he’ll stumble into a bog and that’s the last anybody’ll see of him. I told ’im so, t’other day! Right to his face, I did.”

“Whad’he say?” asked Saaski, wide-eyed.

“Eh—just growled at me.” Tam glanced away, shrugging. “Said the bog sounded right restful. Said he’d make shift to find one and step in! Aye, sure.
Then
what’d me and the pony and goats and ol’ Warrior do with ourselves, I wonder?”

Saaski had no answer, but he did not seem to expect one. “What’s he look like—Bruman?” she asked, finding her mental image becoming too odd to be convincing.

“Just a whiskery, rough-lookin’ fella,” said Tam in surprise.
“Limps, y’know, leans on that crutch he made for hisself. I’ll show you. Tomorrow, next day, he’ll be back in his senses. Come up and I’ll take you to see him.”

But a day or two later, when Saaski climbed to the goats’ grazing place, she had a different question on her mind. She and Tam piped a few tunes together, then the mist turned to rain and they had to pull up their hoods and huddle in the lee of an outcrop until it stopped. It seemed a good time to talk. “You know a fisherman called Fergil?” she asked Tam.

Tam glanced at her oddly. “Not rightly, no. Not meself. But Bruman does a job for ’im now and again. ’Twas Fergil paid ’im in muxta last week.” He paused, scanning her face. “A-course I’ve heard tell of ’im. Haven’t you?”

Instead of answering, she asked another question. “What’ve you heard tell of him?”

“Same as you, likely. He’s a lack-witted old hermit, like. They do say he turned up outa nowhere one winter, long ago, wanderin’ the moor without even a cloak on. Folks say he’d likely follered the fool’s-fire, lost his way. Never been right in his head since. Harmless, though.” Tam shrugged, added curiously, “What put you in mind of him, then?”

“Eh—I dunno,” Saaski murmured. She did know, well enough. But just now she was busy comparing what Tam had told her with the little she’d already heard. “He came to our cottage, once when I was piping. Stood there gapin’ at me, then took off down the street like the bukka were after him.”

But yesterday midday Yanno had put a cloth-wrapped packet on the table in front of Saaski and said it was Fergil’s fishhooks, and she was to take them and get his coppers for
the work. She’d jumped up quickly, but Anwara frowned at him and added, “If you’re not afeard?”

“Whatever would I be afeard of?” she’d asked blankly. So then she’d gone a long walk down through the woods to Moor Water and around the reedy shore, to Fergil’s little stone house and cow byre set back among the dunes on the other side. She’d been glad to go, curious about the noddikins, resolved to ask him straight out if he’d been hexed.

But she’d never got next or nigh him. His dog came out and barked at her before she’d set foot in his dooryard, and instead of hushing it he just yelled over its racket for her to put the fishhooks in the mug beside the manger, and find the coppers there. On her way to the byre she’d looked back to find him out of his door, holding the dog now but staring after her. Indeed he’d waved her on, shaking his shaggy head and bellowing, “No. No. I want nothin’ to do with the likes o’ you!”

Now here was Tam’s story sounding quite different from Anwara’s. “Will we go see Bruman today?” she asked after a moment.

Tam gave her his teasing grin, made somehow jauntier by the little gap. “He knows no more of that fisherman than I do.”

“I never said—”

“Didn’t need to. Come along, he’s as sober as he ever gets. Ask him all you’ve a mind to. He loves to talk—when he’s in the mood.”

Bruman was a whiskery, rough-looking fellow, as Tam had told her, and at first seemed nothing more. He sat hunched at his workbench under the tattered ox hide stretched
between cart hood and hut thatch—a big-shouldered, thin-shanked, middle-aged man in a worn leathern tunic, with his left leg extended stiffly before him. Gray streaked his wiry hair and a deep furrow carved each cheek, but there was vigor in the bloodshot glance he threw at Saaski as they approached. His hands paused on the soft boot he was patching, then went on of themselves, as his eyes lingered on Saaski. What he thought of her she could not tell. Her own gaze kept returning to the crutch lying beside him, a stout limb of beech fitted with a leather-padded crosspiece, both dark with use.

The old dog, Warrior, struggled up from his place by the cartwheel and padded stiffly forward to greet and sniff them both. Tam ruffled the dog’s ears, and it sat down heavily on his foot. “I brought me friend from the village,” he told Bruman. “Her name’s Saaski.”

“Yanno the smith’s young one,” Bruman said in a husky, rattly voice that sounded as if mice had been at it. He cleared his throat, harrumphed a time or two. “Heard of you, I have.”

“Aye, well, she’s heard o’ you, too, and nothing good, I’ll wager,” Tam retorted. “Tell ’er what you know of that fisherman you had the muxta off of—if you know more’n I do.”

The bloodshot eyes turned to him briefly. “And what d’you know?”

“Not much. Followed the bog lights, didn’t he? And turned up witless?”

Instead of answering, Bruman fell to studying the bagpipes Saaski carried slung across her back. “Can ye play those proper?” he asked her.

“I can.”

“Let’s hear you.”

No need to urge. Saaski swung the instrument into position and piped one of the tunes Tam had taught her, following it with an eerie one of her own. Bruman’s good foot was tapping before she finished, and his whiskery face split in a grin. He said suddenly, “They’ll have ’em off you.”

Startled at his change of tone—it had turned faintly malicious, like his smile—she could only stare at him.

“The pipes!” he said. “
Them Ones
’ll have ’em, sure, if you don’t take care. Steal ’em the minute your head’s turned. Oh, they’re tricky, they are. Tricked old Fergil, didn’t they? Aye, he told me once. One of them Moorfolk-creeturs it was. Just tricked ’im blind.”

“How’d they do it?” asked Saaski, wide-eyed.

Bruman was silent a long moment, his face unreadable and his thoughts perhaps straying elsewhere, for all she could tell. “He’d never say,” he answered finally. “Might be a lie. I’ve heerd tell ’twas Fergil tricked the Fairy, and the creetur paid him out for it by makin’ him queer in his head. No sayin’ which is the truth of it.” He paused again, scratched at his stubbled cheek, and abruptly dismissed the subject. “You, boy, fetch me out the ale jug from the hut. Then git back to your goats.”

He bent his head to his boot mending—plainly the talking mood had passed. Tam shrugged and grinned at Saaski, fetched the ale jug, and they left, pulling up their hoods as a gentle rain began again.

Descending the slopes to Torskaal a short while later, Saaski mulled over the three tales she’d heard about the
fisherman—none much like the others, except they all blamed some eldritch creature. She decided to ask Old Bess.

And Old Bess’s tale, while different from the rest, and including more fact than fancy, yet had to do with an unearthly creature and some unknown happening on the moor.

“It must be fifteen years ago, child, when he first came to Torskaal. Maybe more. Late afternoon—half the village was coming and going in the street. And here came this stranger down out of the moor, all ragged and haggard, half-daft already, I don’t doubt, and staring into one face after another, asking for his kin.”

But those he asked after were long dead—grandparents and great-grandparents of the one middle-aged woman who remembered their names. And even she knew of no “Fergil” in her family except a lost great-uncle, a fisherman, who’d left the village five-and-fifty years before and never did come home. The family’d always assumed he was drowned in Moor Water, or maybe lost at sea.

Nay, not at sea
, he’d said then, staring around in a way to give a body a fright.
Not in Moor Water. In the Mound, it was, where I was lost. She coaxed me into the Mound.

Everybody had heard of humans beguiled by the Folk and enticed away into their secret home. Nobody had ever personally known such a human—or believed they saw one in this wild-eyed old man. Most crossed themselves, to be on the safe side, and hustled their children into the house.

“He soon gave up asking, poor fellow,” Old Bess finished. “Went off to Moor Water and built his hut, started fishing,
and turned his back on the village, got more lone and odd the more years passed.”

Saaski was silent, her skin deliciously crawling. A phrase echoed somewhere in the depths of her mind:
Time runs different in the Mound.
Someone had said that once—she could almost hear the voice. But it could have been anybody. She had heard numberless stories about the Folk and their tricks and their hidden homeland somewhere inside the hills. She did not ask Old Bess if she believed this one. It did not occur to her to ask herself. Strange things happened; everyone knew they did. And some were past explaining.

For Saaski, there were strangenesses even about the moor. Elusive shreds of half-remembered stories (or half-imagined dreams?) swirled unexpectedly around certain rocks and berry bushes, crept across the coarse grasses, or clung in hollows, very like the wisps of fog that forever came and went. She picked her mental way around them as automatically as she picked her way through a bog, wary of bringing one into clearer focus.

Occasionally one tricked her, as in the matter of the sheep wool. By mid-June shearing was nearly done, but there were still gleanings to be had on the high slopes where flocks, now nibbling other hillsides tidy, had grazed in winter. To Saaski, absently plucking tufts of wool off the brambles as she wandered homeward one day, gathering it seemed as familiar a chore as twig collecting. She brought
Anwara a good bundle of wool, along with a handful of spiderweb she had chanced upon.

But Anwara’s reaction was disconcerting. “What’s this, then? Why, you know I never bother with these tattered, stickery bits when we’ve got good fleeces. . . . Eh, well, it’s all right, child,” she added hastily after a glance at Saaski. “They’ll do for scrubbing pads.” Then, as she caught sight of the wad of cobweb Saaski held out, “Luddamercy, and what is that for, pray?”

For thread, for cloth, for strong thin cord,
thought Saaski, but she jammed the wad back in her pocket and said quickly, “I brought it for the gran’mum—it stops bleeding and such.” And that was so—Old Bess always kept a supply of web in a small wooden box on a shelf above her hearth.
For sure that’s why I brought it,
Saaski told herself. Nobody spins cobweb.

Yet she knew the feel of fishline twisted of cobweb. And she could almost see the cloth—finer, stronger than any woven of wool or flax—silvery, shimmering, airy as the skin of a bubble. Surely she
had
seen it. Somewhere. Some time. And had gleaned wool, too.

The subject encountered a closed door in her mind. Old Bess was glad to get the web.

Old Bess welcomed all her haphazard offerings, but Saaski soon learned what to search for to add to the old woman’s store of healing simples—buckbean, now in rosy, white-fringed bloom throughout the bogs, bearberry, and certain mosses. And in the highlands she gathered stonecrop with its fat leaves and yellow stars, which Old Bess liked for supper mixed with dandelion greens and a little oil and apple vinegar. Saaski, once she had tasted this odd dish, liked it,
too. She did not mind being odd in the same ways Old Bess was.

She knew she was growing ever odder in the eyes of the village. “That Bretla, Jankin’s sister, she sasses me bad as he does, and she’s a whole year younger’n me,” she told Tam indignantly one day as they dawdled along after the goats.

“What’s she say, then?”

“That my toes’re too long. And I’ve got devil’s eyes. Says I’m not to look at her.” Saaski spread out a hand and stared at it crossly. “Fingers, too,” she added. “Let’s see yours.”

Tam showed her a sturdy sun-browned hand, fingers longish and supple if grubby and ragged nailed—but not as long as her fingers, it was easy enough to see.

”Don’t heed what they say,” he scoffed, thrusting his hand into his pocket. “They’re ninnies, the most of ’em. That Robin, he’s even too noddleheaded to know about the King’s Town. Told me I’d made it up.” He grinned at her sideways, showing the little gap, and she felt her lips curving in reluctant response, though she turned them down again at once.