The Moorchild (14 page)

The morning, which had started so well, was going all awry. Giving a hitch to the bagpipes, Saaski plodded on upward, almost wishing she had stayed in the cottage to churn. Bruman’s taunting chafed her. It was wounding to find out that the Folk, far from thinking her “special,” only wanted her bagpipes—and dismaying to think they might keep at it, and at it, until she no longer dared come here. No better than the Torskaal young ones, they were—ragging her and claiming her tunes were “theirs” the way the children claimed firewood, and trying their plaguey tricks.

She found Tam just over the brow of the rise, stalking in her direction, hustling the goats ahead of him with a free use of his stick, and looking as cross as she felt. “
There
you are, then!” she greeted him, as if the morning were all his fault. “I’ve been waiting and waiting!”

“That’s Bruman’s doing, none of mine,” he said shortly. “You seen him anywheres, by ill luck or worse chance?”

She saw now that he was more than cross, he was troubled. She nodded. “He’s halfway to Moor Water by this time. What’s he done?”

“Left the pony untied. Took me a three-league tramp to find ’er this morning, and she’d got her right fore stuck in a rabbit hole. Limpin’ now. And last night I caught ’im kicking old Warrior out’n his way—kickin’ ’im hard. I told ’im
one more time
you do that, jus’ do it
one more time
—!” Tam was angrier than Saaski had ever seen him. Indeed, she had never seen him angry at all—only vexed, sometimes, at one
of the goats who wouldn’t mind. Or at some other of Bruman’s ways.

“What would you do to ’im?” she ventured.

“Leave ’im!” Tam’s chin jutted. He gave a swing to his stick that beheaded several daisies. “Might’ve done it afore this, but for the animals. Never could figure what to do about
them.
Or him, either, now.” He swung the stick again, but absently, and his scowl was easing. He gave her a flick of a smile. “If he’s gone for the day, good riddance. Maybe he’ll get too sozzled to find ’is way home. Where’d you see ’im?”

“Down by the thornbushes. He was—he was spyin’ on me.”

“Spyin’?” Tam’s brows snapped together again. “What for?”

“ ’T’wasn’t only me he was watching. Or only him I saw.” Saaski chewed her lip a moment, hesitant to talk about her other encounter, she did not know why.

“This a riddle, then?” Tam inquired, with a tinge of leftover exasperation.

So Saaski told him about that, too—omitting her daft idea that she’d heard one or two of those Folkish words before; by now she couldn’t call them to mind.

“The Folk’re after your da’s pipes!” Tam exclaimed, wide-eyed. “Bruman
said
they would be. Old slyboots! How’d he know? Here—you’re not gonna tell me
he
saw ’em, too!”

“He did at first. Likely they didn’t know he was there. He said I woke up and
ping
they was gone. They did go all waverylike,” Saaski admitted. “Same as the one that nobbled your bread and cheese.”

Tam nodded slowly. “You c’n see ’em anyhow. But him
and me can’t—less’n they let us.” He burst out, “ ’Twas my doing, that was—him spyin’ on you. I went and told him about that little man. Now I’ll lay he wants you to watch where they go.”

“He does. I dunno why.”

Tam heaved a sigh. Glancing toward the goats, who had found a moorberry bush thorny enough to suit them, he flung himself down on a grassy hillock. “Bruman’s got some rattlehead notion about nickin’ some of that fairy mead he’s heard tell of. Barrels and barrels of it, stored somewheres, down where the Folk live. Makes you young again, sets you a-dancin’! So he says.”

Saaski dropped down beside him, staring. “Gone noddy, has he?”

“No tellin’.” Tam gazed off across the moor, his shoulders drooping. “You wouldn’t credit it, but he used t’be a good enough fella. Good to
me
, he was—bit rough, but who cares for that? I learned to give ’im his own back, once I got some size on me. Fine leatherer—eh, wizardly! We’d go to all the fairs . . . ” He broke off with a shrug. “Now look at ’im. I’d leave him tomorrow, but what’d become of the old gowk? Hurts ’im fierce to ride in that cart—and Lor’, if we have to winter here, we’ll freeze solid! Anyways—I like to keep movin’, I do.”

Saaski had almost forgotten her own troubles, listening to Tam’s knottier ones, and trying to visualize the life he sometimes gave her glimpses of. “Where would y’ go, if you left him? What would y’ do?” she asked.

“Oh, then—
then
.” Tam’s eyes brightened and his grin spread like the sun coming out, showing the little gap
between two teeth. “Then I’d go gypsyin’ down to the King’s Town, and all around to the fairs and the holy day doings, I would, and play me flutes and juggle and pass me cap and live like a lord without nobody to plague me but meself!”

Saaski listened entranced, seeing the world open out into a place of unimaginable variety, uncountable sights and sounds. “Could I come too?” she cried.

“Y’could!” Tam seized on the idea instantly. “We’d play our tunes together, you on your pipes and me on me flute! The city gulls’d be fillin’ our hats with coppers, you see if they wouldn’t! And when the snow flew we’d go on south’ards to the Long Sea, where it’s warm all the year . . . ”

He went on for some time, spinning the tale and inventing answers to Saaski’s questions—each answer more fantastic than the last, until they were both laughing and Bruman seemed no more than a buzzing fly to brush off and be done with.

But soon enough Saaski came back to earth, looked about her at the familiar sweep of the high land, the ever-present clouds gathering on the horizon, and said, “Wouldn’t we ever come back to the moor, then?”

Tam smiled and said, “Whenever we’d a fancy to. Come on, the goats are strayin’.”

An hour or so later, Saaski wandered back down to the village, only to see the first gypsy wagons beginning to leave it.

She halted with a cry of anguished disappointment, then hurled herself down the last steep path beside the apple orchards, leaped goatlike onto the street, and fled along it to the cottage. She flung open the half door and shot in, stumbling over one of the hens and all but going head over heels in her effort not to damage her precious bagpipes.

“God’s mercy, what has the child done now?” shrieked Anwara, reaching hastily to save her bread dough. “Is’t a black boggart after you?”

“I’ve done nothing, not nothing!” Saaski protested breathlessly. “Fell over that addlepate chicken! It’s the gypsies! They’re leavin’!”

“Must, to reach the town afore nightfall. They’ve been
here all the morning. Thievin’ us blind, no doubt,” Anwara added, “so you best stay clear of ’em.”

“But I never got me hand read!” wailed Saaski, stuffing the bagpipes into their trundle bed and giving it a kick back under her cot. “—and I had a lump of beeswax saved in m’ pocket to barter for it! Never got to play the games . . . !” She was on her way out, headlong.

“Y’
will
go to that moor,” Anwara said.

Without answering, Saaski raced toward the well, and the green around it that might have been a ragged-edged market square had the village been big enough to hold a market. It was to the market in the town that the gypsies were headed, but a few coppers more in their pockets always made a stop in Torskaal welcome.

The colorful turmoil of noise and activity filled the trampled open space around the well as water fills a bowl. Dust rose, harness jingled as the gypsy men backed their horses between the shafts of the gaily decorated wagons; the women stowed away unsold trinkets and yelled to their children, most of whom were still racketing up and down the street with the village young ones. A mixed dozen circled in a clapping ring dance; Saaski ran up to join it, but was pushed away at once by the miller’s son Jankin, who cried, “Not you!” and his sister Bretla laughed, echoed “Not you!” and broke out of the ring to push her, too. Ebba’s daughters joined the new game, as did several others; in an instant Saaski found herself in the middle of a jostling, shrieking mob whose laughter turned to jeering and whose mauling grew rougher, wilder, and more painful until her breath was knocked out of her and she felt as if she’d got tangled up in the mill wheel.

A large, thin hand reached in and pulled her out of the melee, held her tight against a comfortingly solid body in voluminous skirts, while a woman’s voice berated her tormentors in an incomprehensible language. They backed away, scattered. The gypsy children who had formed part of the ring game—but not of the mob—stared a moment at Saaski, still gulping for her breath, then drifted toward the wagons. Her chest heaving, Saaski twisted to look up into the dark, stern face of a gypsy woman, who released her, steadied her a moment and straightened her clothing, then said, “Hurt? You?”

Saaski shook her head, though one cheekbone felt larger than the other, she had bit her tongue bloody, and both arms throbbed. She managed to gasp out her thanks.

The woman smiled faintly, nodded, and gave a final twitch to Saaski’s apron. She was a tall, handsome woman, older than Anwara but not as old as Old Bess, with a scarlet kerchief half covering her smooth black hair. Saaski’s gaze clung gratefully to her.

“Go play now?” said the woman, but she did not seem surprised when Saaski cast a darkling glance after her retreating tormentors and shook her head again, decisively. “Buy ribbon? Bangle?” the gypsy suggested, gesturing toward a nearby hooded wagon—though it was plain she did not expect to make a sale.

Saaski, however, grasped at a missed opportunity. “Will y’ read my hand?” she ventured. She thrust out a palm to show what she meant, reaching with the other into her apron pocket to offer the lump of beeswax.

The woman laughed, nodded, took the beeswax, and led
Saaski to the wagon, where an old man and a young one were preparing to hitch up. There was a low stool beside the wagon’s steps; Saaski guessed that the woman had been sitting there when the mobbing began.

She resumed her seat and took Saaski’s hand, turning it palm up. “Goot fortun a’ready, eh? No hurt,” she said teasingly, and bent her head over the spread palm.

At once her black eyebrows drew together. For a moment she went still as a rock, her grasp tightening until it felt to Saaski as if an eagle’s claw held her. Was it to be a bad fortune, then?

Abruptly the gypsy released her. Slowly she raised her eyes to scan Saaski’s face with a strange expression—grave, alert, a little pitying. With her left hand she made a curious gesture in the air between the two of them, then ducked her dark, proud head in what almost seemed a hint of a bow. Reaching into her pocket, she produced the lump of beeswax and held it out to Saaski, whose eyes swam with sudden tears—of disappointment, of simple hurt.

Pride drove the tears back and fought the quaver in her voice. “Will y’ not do it, then?” she asked.

“Cannot,” the gypsy told her.

“Is it not enough, the wax?” Saaski said on a sudden thought. She rummaged in her pocket again and found a silverweed root she had meant for Old Bess, who liked the red dye it made. “Will you have this, too?”

“Na, na, na, na, na, na, little one.” The woman’s strong, thin brown hands gently pushed away the offering. “I try read hand. Cannot.” She met Saaski’s baffled glance for a moment, then suddenly reached down and scratched a few
symbols in the dirt with one long finger. “You read,” she told Saaski.

They looked like nothing Saaski had ever laid eyes on. Not like runes, not like the words she was learning from Old Bess. Was it gypsy talk? “But I don’t speak your tongue,” she objected.

The woman nodded gravely, once again taking Saaski’s hand and this time pointing to the palm. “I don’t speak,” she said. She smiled, rose, picked up her stool and moved to the wagon steps, glancing toward the two men who were buckling the last of the harness over their team, then back at Saaski. “I wish for you—ver’ good fortun.” She hesitated, her smile fading. “But beware.” Again she gave the slight, formal duck of her kerchiefed head, murmured,
“Dza devlesa,”
and disappeared into the wagon.

The younger man strode back, called something to her in their gypsy tongue, hoisted the wooden steps in after her, and slammed the door. A moment later the wagon was rattling after the others along the steep track that led past Old Bess’s cottage and up over the moor toward the town.

Saaski stood watching the cloud of dust slowly settle, the first wagons appear at the crest of the rise as shapes against the sky. Then, with dread, she looked down at her spread palms.

They looked as they had always looked—smooth and pale brown, with a fine crease encircling each thumb and a wavery line, rippled like a tiny brook, crossing under the fingers. That was all there was to see.

Saaski swallowed, hid both hands under her apron. She had never looked closely at anybody else’s palms. But there
must be something freaky-odd about hers. After a moment she headed up the street in the wake of the wagons. Their dust still tickled her nostrils when she knocked on Old Bess’s door, and at the calm “Come in, Saaski”—Old Bess always knew her knock—lifted the latch.

The old woman was moving about her single room, putting away her little clay pots of unguents, resealing a cow’s horn that held some tincture or other, gathering some dried roots into a wooden box. “I have been dosing the gypsies,” she remarked. “They have cures a-plenty of their own, but they like to learn mine, too.” She glanced at Saaski with her brief, one-sided smile, then her eyes sharpened. “And what ails
you?
”

“Nothing,” Saaski said quickly. She pulled the silverweed root out of her pocket. “I brought you this.”

“My thanks.” Old Bess accepted the root, still eyeing her. “You have been on the moor, then? Missed all the hubbub and feery-fary? And you wanted your fortune read!”

“ ’Twas no matter.” Saaski shied away from the subject, grasped at another one. “The bees swarmed right after milking—the last hive. Me and Da’ caught ’em, though.”

Old Bess was silent a moment, then sat down on her hearth stool and drew Saaski to her. “And how comes it your cheek is bruised and swelling? Was that a bee?”