The Moorchild (15 page)

For an instant Saaski thought of inventing some mishap. But nobody hoaxed Old Bess. “Tried to join the circle game. With the gypsy young ’uns and—t’others. But Jankin and Bretla—well, all of ’em . . . ” She broke off. “A gypsy woman made ’em stop.”

If Old Bess had nothing useful to say, she held her peace,
as now. She gazed at Saaski, and for a moment thought her own thoughts, which were unreadable in her face. Then she sighed, reached for one of the little pots, took out the rag stopper, and smeared a thin coating of some unguent over Saaski’s cheek. It immediately felt cooler.

“It’s well a’ready,” Saaski told her.

Old Bess smiled briefly and said it would be soon. “I treated a dozen worse ones today, and bound up a broken arm. The gypsy young ones play rough, too—with one another,” she remarked. “And never heed my advice. One little lad should have been in his cot, not larking about with our village imps. Burning with fever, he was. Have you other such bruises?”

Saaski shook her head, idly took one of Old Bess’s hands, and managed a swift look at the palm. At first she was startled; it was a perfect network of fine creases—the deep one curving around the thumb like a richly branched vine, others slanting crosswise, up and down. There were many more lines than marked her own palm.

But her surprise quickly faded. There were also more lines in Old Bess’s face than in most people’s. The puzzle was still a puzzle—now the gypsy was not here to ask.

Disconsolately she wandered toward the shelf holding the books. “Will you tell me some new words?” she asked.

“I will. Bring a book and your piece of slate.”

And so for an hour the uneasy subjects of bruises and palms were put aside, if not quite out of either mind, and the gypsy wagons trailed into memory.

Then Saaski went home.

It was not to be hoped that Anwara would fail to notice
the swollen bruises darkening her daughter’s left cheek or, having noticed, would fail to speak her mind.

“There, now! Didn’t I bid you stay clear of those gypsies! They play too rough for a little half farthing like you—no more heft to you than a sparrow!” Anwara sputtered on, turning Saaski this way and that, probing for other hurts, her hands as gentle as her scolding was harsh. “Where else did they hurt you?”

“Nowhere, Mumma!” Saaski squirmed away as the soreness awakened in her arms and shoulders in spite of Anwara’s care. “ ’Twasn’t the gypsies, anyway! ’Twas the others!”

Anwara’s hands stilled. “What others?”

Belatedly, Saaski wished she had held her tongue. “I dunno,” she mumbled. No use. Anwara soon had it out of her. Jankin, Bretla, Robin, Herewic, Annika, Alannah, Oran—also Morgan and Eluna, her own cousins. “They’re always at me, Mumma. I don’t heed ’em.”

“
I’ll
heed ’em,” Anwara said, slowly straightening and staring first at her own tensely folded hands, then in the direction of Ebba’s house. She did not seem really surprised—more as if something she dreaded had begun to happen. And whatever she did about it would only cause brangling or worse.

“ ’Twon’t stop ’em, Mumma!” Saaski argued. “They’ll just pay me out for it next time!”

“Is it so sure,” Anwara said slowly, “there’ll be a next time?”

“Nay, likely they’ll forget it! If I stay out of their eye for a spell.” Saaski reached for the egg basket and escaped before
Anwara could think of more questions. She hoped Yanno would not come to hear of it; least said, soonest mended. In truth, she’d brought it on her own head, trying to join their game. Should’ve known better, she told herself.

Whether Anwara told Yanno the straight of it Saaski never learned, but not to give Ebba a tongue-lashing was asking too much of her. She came home flushed with satisfaction, remarking that if Morgan and Eluna didn’t hear of it on their backsides, she’d be astonished. No doubt they did; Ebba might turn a blind eye to their bullyragging, but not to their getting caught out. Naturally, the next time Saaski encountered the twins they pushed her into the mud outside the cow byre and pelted her with clods.

That seemed the end of it, to her relief. Her bruises faded. As inconspicuously as possible she drove Moll to the pasture each morning and escaped to the moor. Ten long June days passed in their accustomed way.

On the eleventh morning after the gypsies departed, Guin the miller’s Jankin staggered home midway through the sheep-washing in the dammed-up brook, shivering and sneezing, with a head full of red-hot stones—so he told his mother, Berenda, and Berenda reported to the goodwives at the well. He took to his cot and by evening was burning with fever.

During the night his sister Bretla awoke with headache and shivering, unable to bear the morning sun in her eyes when it was time to gather wood. Nor could Cattila’s boy Herewic, and by midday Guthwic and Faeran’s Annika and her two younger brothers were ill as well.

Child after child succumbed. Within three days there was scarce a house but had at least one child abed, and at Guin
the miller’s there were eight, the two oldest having shared freely with all the rest.

To the goodwives, distractedly performing their young ones’ tasks as well as their own, one suspicious fact soon became obvious: aside from a few babes in arms, the only child in Torskaal still well and active was the blacksmith’s Saaski.

“Oh, I’m not surprised,” declared Helsa, who being childless herself had leisure to gossip at all the village doors. “Have you heard tell, ever, of one of
Them Ones
fallin’ ill? It’ll be wonderful if that creetur warn’t at the root of it somehow! You mind that bit of teasing the day the gypsies were hereabouts? ’Twas Jankin and Bretla begun it—and ’twas
them
two first taken sick! Clear as day she put a curse on ’em . . . ”

“God’s mercy, woman, can you do naught but caw like an old crow?” interrupted Old Bess, appearing suddenly from inside the house, where she had been dosing Gwyneth’s Harilla. “If a curse it was, ’twas a gypsy boy’s, and none of Saaski’s. A lad I treated that day had a fever like all of these—and mixing with the rest however I warned him. I daresay half those gypsy young ones have been speckled as a fieldfare’s egg for a se’ennight. Jankin’ll come out in spots by morning—you’ll see. Bretla next.”

“The pox?”
gasped Gwyneth, blanching and clutching at the door frame.

“The rosy pox only—not the bad one!” Old Bess told her, adding impatiently, “I dosed you for the same, when you were a little lass, can’t you remember? It’ll all be over afore Midsummer’s Eve.”

She brushed past and strode on down the street to see to Cattila’s Herewic. But Helsa, enraged at the snub from one she dared not defy to her face, snapped, “Gypsy boy, indeed! Why, the gypsies were gone a fortnight afore Jankin sickened!”

Gwyneth stared at her a moment, then whispered, “That’s true! So
’twas
that—that changeling—payin’ out all our young ones because a few played a bit rough.”

“Should’ve been thrown on the fire to begin with!” Helsa whispered back. “It’ll be the crops she’ll put a blight on next. Or do the sheep a mischief.”

“Oh, God forbid!” Fresh alarm drove every other consideration from Gwyneth’s mind. “And our lambs so scant and late this year! Could she have done so already? Ach, what’ll Edildan say!”

Helsa advised her to warn Edildan at once. Edildan, who had found one of his oxen gimpy that morning, passed on his own alarm to his near neighbor young Hungus. And Hungus, whose boy was still sick abed, had to leave off haying to fetch his new heifer from the pasture, lest she be “overlooked” by
that creetur
—and unjustly berated his wife for not thinking of it first. All the husbands were short-tempered and bone weary from eating cold food and having no help with the chores. In the long dusk that evening the liquid comfort dispensed at Sorcha the alewife’s cottage only fanned the flames. By morning, when Jankin and Bretla broke out with spots just as Old Bess had predicted, the attention of the village men had already shifted from their offspring to their livelihoods, and their somewhat grumbling worry turned to deep-seated fear.

The fear focused overnight on the blacksmith’s household, and the changeling harbored there to the endangerment of all.

The blacksmith’s household had seen it coming. At the earliest rumor of curses Anwara, hurrying in from the well one morning, set the bucket down so carelessly that water splashed her skirts. She seized Saaski by the shoulders. “Tell me straight out, now, Daughter!” she said grimly. “Did you call down a curse on those young ones who savaged you? Even meaning no real harm—
did
you?”

“N-nay, I did
not,
then, Mumma!” Saaski stammered.

“Mind, I wouldn’t blame you,” Anwara muttered, releasing her and turning bitterly to hang her shawl on its nail.

“But how could I do so? I don’t know how!”

Anwara studied her strangely, her expression a mixture of helplessness and pain. “They’re all takin’ to their beds, the young ones. Y’know that,” she said. As Saaski nodded she added, “All but you.”

“Well, I’m seldom ailin’! Nothing new about that.”

Instead of answering, Anwara trod over to fill the kettle, her steps dragging. “Stay away from ’em,” she said. “Stay out of sight.”

Since she habitually tried to do so, Saaski held her peace. But a few days later, when Yanno came in for his midday meal and called her to him, telling her heavily he’d been hearing she’d “overlooked” Guin’s Jankin and Ebba’s twins, she was goaded into defending herself. “I’ve kept me eye on ’em, true enough! So would you if they did you a mischief whenever your back was turned!”

“Keepin’ an eye on ’em’s one thing. But overlookin’s witchcraft,” Yanno said.

“Well, what do I know of witchcraft?” Saaski was near to tears. “They’re tellin’ lies!”

There was not much new about that, either. But this was not the usual hubbub over trifles, and though Saaski took care to be more elusive than ever, it did not blow over. The pox itself ran its course; in house after house the rash appeared, then a day or two later the pathetic invalid turned back into an ordinary working child whose first complaint was silenced by worn-out parents. A se’nnight after the last rash vanished, the plague was a memory.

Then Helsa went out to the byre one morning to milk her husband’s three fine cows and found one of them tangled in the chain ties, injured and dying, and in a twinkling Alun was no longer the richest man in Torskaal, but only a two-cow man like many another. The two-cow men and their families found it hard to be truly sorry about that, but all joined with Helsa in blaming the blacksmith’s child.

Nobody could prove that Saaski had been out of her own cot that night. But nor could Yanno and Anwara, silently remembering her night wanderings, prove she had actually been
in
it—not all night long. They’d been fast asleep like ordinary Christians. So how could they know, Helsa asked anybody who would listen, what mischief that creetur might get up to in the dead of night?

It was a question with no answer, and it sent undercurrents of fear and ill will roiling through the village. One pale summer evening not long before Midsummer’s Eve, a
grim-faced little company of Yanno’s neighbors appeared at his cottage door. They would not come in. Instead they asked that Yanno come into the dooryard for a private word.

Yanno put aside the new bee skep he was plaiting and stepped outside, but did not shut the door. Anwara, vigorously scrubbing out the iron pot with a handful of rushes, let her movements slow and go quiet. Saaski stopped sloshing out the mugs. They heard little but the rumble of voices until Edildan, whose high-pitched tones carried, remarked righteously, “It’s for the good of the village. For the health of our young ’uns, and our beasts.”

Yanno was silent.

“I’m told there’s a good enough smith just over the moor in t’next village,” remarked Guin the miller. “I might try ’im.”

“Do, then, if y’care to walk a league,” said Yanno evenly. “But the child’s done no harm, and so I tell you.”

“So you may tell us till doomsday!” said Alun. “We know what we know. She must go back where she come from—that’s what we’re sayin’.”

“And where’s that but here, then? Just turn her out, do I? A young one no taller’n my elbow? Man, you’re daft!” Yanno snapped at him. “I’d never do it!”

Guin’s voice came again, ominous this time. “Then if you won’t, blacksmith, we’ll have to deal with it ourselves.”

“Ye’ll deal with me first,” said Yanno doggedly.

“We will if we must,” Guin told him. “We’ll give y’till Midsummer’s. That’s time enough.”

Anwara and Saaski stood motionless until the footsteps
faded up the street and Yanno came slowly back into the house. He and Anwara exchanged a long, expressionless glance. Saaski waited anxiously, looking from one to the other, swallowing hard but not daring—not really wanting—to question outright.

In the end, no one spoke. After a moment all three went back to their tasks, avoiding one another’s eyes.

Midsummer, celebrated on Saint John’s Day and the eve before, had always been Saaski’s least-favorite revel, one she dreaded beforehand and avoided entirely if she could. To begin with, the great Hillfire lighted at sundown, Midsummer’s Eve, on the highest point of the wasteland, was always built of rowan wood, no other.

Saaski shrank from rowan as she did from St. John’s wort. Even in her first early days of wood fetching, she had balked at having any truck with such fearful stuff.

“I’ll fetch any other wood you like—but not that, Mumma! Why does it have to be rowan?”

“It’s a magical tree, that’s why! A rowan fire breaks the power of the witches, child—and all the other bogeys and fairies and hobgoblins and who knows what all that goes walkin’ abroad Midsummer’s Eve!”

“If
they
walk abroad, why don’t
we
just stay safe in the cottage, and bar the door?”

“Because we light the Hillfire! Our grandda’s and
their
grandda’s all did it, and so will we! Now leave off your argufyin’ and go to the thickets with the other young ones!”