The Moorchild (13 page)

Saaski missed the whole entrancing spectacle. Or nearly the whole. However, she saw and heard a few odd things herself that morning—one of them stranger than gypsies, and a deal more unsettling.

The morning began with a bit of good luck that nevertheless threw this day out of kilter from milking time on.

The milking itself went well; she emptied her pail into the churn, then refilled it with water and lugged it into the long back garden while Anwara took the larger bucket to the well. They needed much water lately. It was retting time for the flax; Yanno had cut the crop some days before, and Anwara had combed out the linseeds for Old Bess to make into poultices and calf-brew. Now the stalks lay spread in a sun-warmed, water-filled stone trough beside the garden, soaking to loosen the hidden fibers from their woody bark.

Saaski replenished their bath, shook her wooden pail to get the last drops, then stood looking about at the morning and sniffing the rosemary-scented air. The rosemary grew at the farthest end of the garden near Yanno’s bee skeps, for the bees loved it, too. As Saaski glanced that way, her attention sharpened. Just there by the big skep, a small, dark, vibrating cloud—growing larger every second—was hanging outside the slit door. As she watched, the cloud rose; a stream of bees streaked out of the hive and began to trace great circles in the air.

At last! Near a month after the other two, the bees in the big hive were swarming. Yanno must be told—and told quickly, so he could drop everything to get the new skep ready.

What luck! thought Saaski, as she sped back down the garden, still clinging to her pail, leaping over the carrot rows and little cabbages—what great luck, that she chanced to be there, to see which direction they flew. She could follow the swarm, mark where it settled, and keep watch till Yanno had exchanged the new skep for the old and scented it temptingly with herbs, and come to capture his bees again. They had worked together so, other years. It was a kind of game—hard-won but exciting.

“Da’! Da’!” she yelled, before he could possibly have heard her over the noise he was making at the anvil. A glance over her shoulder showed her the great circles drawing in, the stream of bees thickening into a mass. They would be off in another instant. “
Da’!
” she shrieked, plunging around the corner of the cottage, still scanning the air over the thatch. Yanno thrust an alarmed face out the smithy doorway just as she caught sight of the telltale little dark cloud, bobbing away through the sunny morning. Saaski pointed, still yelling, and was already on her way as Yanno cried, “Keep ’em in your eye! Drum on the pail! I’ll find you, never fear!”

By then Saaski was cutting through Siward and Ebba’s garden, sidestepping the cabbages by instinct, keeping her gaze still fast on the swarm. It flew erratically, soaring till it was no more than fist size, then dropping and recoiling and sideslipping in a slow, searching flight, but heading, all the same, for the wood. She was dodging thickets and stumbling over roots, the pail banging against her legs, by the time the wavering bee-cloud, beginning now to contract into a pulsing clot, dipped below the nearest treetop and disappeared.

The deep humming guided her to the spot where the
swarm had come to rest. It hung now from a branch, like a quivering oversized plum, to await the mysterious signal that would guide its flight to a new home. Yanno, who might have been a bee himself, so wise he was to their ways, had told her that scouts flew out, searched for a likely place, and brought word back—though he took care to get there first.

Meanwhile, Saaski knew what to do. No swarm would move off during rain or thunder—Yanno had taught her so. It was why she had brought the pail. She found a stick and began to beat her thunder-drum, scanning the nearby tree trunks for the fungus everyone called
pukka furze.

She was still beating the pail a quarter hour later, when Yanno came crashing through the underbrush, bringing his saw and a wet cloth sack and the wood-handled iron scoop he used as smoker. For a while they were busy, Saaski setting the crumbled fungus alight in the scoop and waving the smoke back and forth under the massed bees to lull and pacify them while Yanno sawed off and trimmed a longish branch. When it was ready he flung the sack deftly over the swarm, pulled the drawstrings, and thrust his pole through the knot. Then he ran for home.

Saaski, staggering under the awkward burdens of pail, scoop, and saw, stumbled after him. By the time she joined him at the end of the garden he had freed his captives and stood watching. Smoke-drowsy bees were everywhere, bumbling into one another but never straying far from the big heavy-looking queen, who crouched sleepily on the landing shelf of the new skep while half a dozen regular-sized bees darted in and out of the slit-door. Making sure the place was done up to suit Her Pernickety Highness, Yanno grumbled.
As if
he
didn’t know more about skep building than they about honey.

Soon enough they stayed inside, and the queen crawled through the slit-door after them. Instantly the whole swarm followed in a swift dark stream. In another minute not a bee could be seen.

“There now,” gasped Saaski, letting her breath out and dropping her burdens with a clang.

“Safe and settled for another twelvemonth,” Yanno said with satisfaction.

As they stood, sagging after their strenuous efforts, Anwara appeared around the corner of the house, shaded her eyes, then came hurrying, holding up her skirts. “So that’s where you both made off to! Got them all, did you?”

“We did. And a good job we made of it, eh, Daughter?” Saaski nodded. They exchanged a glance of satisfaction. Yanno tossed the cut branch onto the woodpile. “All because the little one, here, came screechin’ for me, and kept an eye on where they went.”

Saaski, flexing her stiff fingers, swelled a bit at the praise. Yanno was smiling with none of the brooding perplexity that often shadowed his eyes when he looked at her.

“Well, I did wonder,” remarked Anwara, “when I came from the well and saw the milk still there in the churn, and Moll still in the byre.”

That brought Saaski down to earth; a glance at the sun confirmed it: she was late with everything.

But Yanno was feeling expansive. “Eh, now, wife, might it be you could churn the butter this one day? Take the cow, little one, and be off with you. You’ve earned a bit of play.”

So that was the best luck of all, and Saaski lost no time getting Moll to her pasture and herself and her bagpipes to the moor.

Tam and the goats were not in sight; Saaski dropped down on a mossy rock near their favorite thornbushes, glad enough to rest her legs after the climb and soak up the warm June sunshine. The air smelled spicily of the marigolds studding the nearby bog. The tall spires of pink foxgloves leaned there, too, schooled by the winds to cant ever eastward, but propping each other up. Mixed with them were the purply red thistles that the goats preferred even to thorns. The fancy of goats for prickly things was a
right caution,
Saaski told herself. (It was what Anwara always said of tastes she did not understand.) But it made certain that this was a good place to wait for Tam.

After a bit she slid off her rock, swung her pipes around to the front of her, tucked the bag under her arm, puffed herself breathless to fill it, and began to pace—a few steps this way, a few steps that—and play to the summer air. First came a thistle-and-thorn tune, all full of quick, sharp notes, then a softer marigold melody, then a queer old, old song she knew about the sun, which always sounded eerielike even to her, and made her shiver. She cheered herself up with a thrumming, buzzing bee song, and that was enough piping for a while. She let the bag collapse with a dying yowl and stretched out on her mossy rock to get her breath.

The day was warm, windless, and still as peace itself, except for birdsong. She drifted effortlessly to sleep.

It was the bag, moving stealthily under her loosely flung arm, that woke her. Instinctively she clutched at it, blinked
the world into focus, then sat upright, hugging bag and pipes as she gazed wide-eyed at what first seemed a dozen spindling little red-capped children gathered around her rock. But they were not children; wiry thin they were, with clever little faces older than her own. One of them had a long-fingered hand still on her precious bag, tugging slyly at it. She twisted it away from him.

“What’re you about? Let be!” she cried.

They all went still as rooted things, their eyes wary, their odd little forms seeming to waver and go transparent like objects seen across an open flame, though she could still see them plain enough. There were only five of them, after all; one of them surely the same bearded mannikin who had nobbled Tam’s lunch, the others younger, their pale hair floating from beneath their scarlet caps. It was hard to tell man from maid; they were all clad alike in an earthy, shifting green that blended like a lizard’s skin with the moor around them.

One of the striplings still had a hand on her bagpipes. Again Saaski jerked them away.

“There! Didn’t I tell you?” muttered the graybeard—not to her, but she heard him, right enough.

“Tell ’em what?” she demanded.

Five pairs of smoky-green eyes focused on her so intensely she could almost feel their beams. Belatedly, she realized he had spoken in some language she did not know. But it was plain what he
meant,
from the way he said it. He asked her something in the same strange tongue. This time it was gibberish. When she only shrugged, he repeated it in ordinary human speech. “I said—d’ye understand our talk?”

“No.” She threw a quick warning scowl at the stripling, whose hand was again creeping toward the bag.

“You c’n see us, though,” the graybeard commented. “That’s what I told ’em. Saw
me
t’other day. And you c’n see us now.”

“I can,” she replied. Gathering her courage, she added, “Are you—Moorfolk?”

He ignored the question, instead demanding, “Which eye you see us out of?”

She knew better than to answer that; she’d heard tales of the Folk and their tricks. Whichever eye she told him, he’d strike that eye blind. And for certain she wasn’t about to say “both.” “Got eyes in the top of me head, like,” she retorted, staring him down.

To her surprise he suddenly grinned, and his own eyes went bright lavender. All the eyes turned lavender; a ripple of laughter went around the group. They began to chatter in their other language, heads together, glancing at her from time to time; their expressions shifting from curious to wary to speculative, their eyes from lavender to green to dark. She caught words she thought she had heard before—they surfaced here and there unexpectedly, like trout in a stream, lost again in an instant. There was one that sounded a clear note in her mind, a little bell with so familiar a ring that it set her chasing through her memory, quite in vain.

The word was
moql,
and she found no meaning for it at all.

The bag stirred stealthily in her loosened grasp, and she snatched it to safety, the word flying out of her mind. “Let
be, you sneak-fingers!” she snapped at the troublemaker, who merely grinned a little and kept his gaze on her face and his long fingers ready.

“How is’t you know our tunes?” he asked her.

“They’re my tunes. I make ’em up.”

“Not the sun-song. Not the others, neither. Eh, I heard you pipin’. Know ’em all, you do. They’re ours.”

“Who says?” retorted Saaski.

“Tinkwa,” he told her softly.

Again the little bell sounded in her mind—clear and somehow frightening, she had no idea why. “Be off with y’ now!” she yelled at him, tears starting to her eyes. “All of you—leave me be!” Abruptly she scrambled down from the rock, hugging her bagpipes tight, scattering little people. She shrieked after them until all the five—last of all the troublemaking stripling—had darted away across the bog or flown skyward, looking for all the world like crows.

When she was sure they were gone, she sank down again on her boulder, breathing hard, struggling with confused feelings and longing for Tam to come.

Instead, she heard a rasping, ragged voice behind her, and whirled around to see Bruman the tinker raise his untidy head from behind an outcrop. “Told you, didn’t I? They’ll have ’em yet, those pipes o’ yourn. They never give up.”

“You saw ’em, too?” she gasped, astonished but in a way relieved. If Bruman could see them, for certain she’d not gone queer in the head.

“Saw ’em creep up on you when you was sleeping.” With such difficulty that she wished she dared to help him,
Bruman struggled to his feet and stood a moment panting, braced between the outcrop and his crutch, the grooves in his cheeks deepening in a slightly mocking smile. “They was after them pipes, I knew they would be—oh, I’ve heerd about their tricks, I have. Then you woke up and
ping,
they was gone. But
you
—you kep’ on talkin’ like they was there.” Slowly he hitched himself toward her. “
You
c’n see ’em, right enough. Here—which way’d they go?”

“I dunno,” Saaski said. She backed away. “Ever’ which way. I paid no mind.”

“Must’a seen
somethin’.
”

“Saw ’em scatter! What’s it to you, anyways?” Again she edged away; this time he merely stood, swaying a bit, the smile fading. He seemed to have forgotten her. Doubtless he was as drunken as he could manage, but for certain it did not make him merry.

“Wisht I knew where they go,” he said, as if to himself. He half turned to hobble away, then hesitated. “If y’see next time, come tell me, hear?”

“Likely won’t be a next time,” Saaski said with a shrug.

He gave a brief, sour chuckle. “Aye, that there will be, bantling!” Again he turned, settled his crutch more firmly under his arm, and this time did not glance back.

Saaski slung her pipes to her shoulder and ran in the opposite direction. At the top of the next rise she paused to look back. The tinker was making his slow, unsteady way toward the path that led down toward Moor Water.

Pity him she might, but she could not like him or his spying. However, she meant to keep the matter to herself, or
Yanno would be on again about a stubborn young one who
would
go onto the moor, come doom, come devil, however her elders warned her.