The Moorchild (2 page)

While Anwara, torn between fear and fury, went brooding about her daily tasks, Saaski lay in the truckle bed uncharacteristically silent. She, too, was brooding. And she was thinking hard.

She was not much in the habit of thinking, only of howling her bitter, lonely anger at her exile from all she knew and understood—her homeland, the Folk and their paths crisscrossing the moor, her numberless kin.

She neither tried nor wished to understand the alien human life around her. Through the long days, caged in the hateful truckle bed, bored and homesick, she had done little but rage and grieve. She cared nothing for her jailers—not the young woman who fed her the tasteless gruel and half smothered her with embraces, not the old woman who was her enemy, not the man with his fearful, threatening iron. They might live out their clumsy human lives or die tomorrow, for all of her. They might have their own babe back with her goodwill. Indeed, nothing would have pleased her more than to be gone in a blink, as the old
woman said, back home to the Mound and the Moorfolk, leaving this truckle bed to its silly rightful owner.

But she had no fancy at all for these “cures.” To be beaten by that great hulking man with his fists like mallets and his smell of iron was a terrifying thought. As for being thrown onto the fire—! Yanno’s scruples would vanish the moment he stopped thinking of her as a child—and soon or late, with that old woman’s help, he would stop. Besides, suffering his blows would serve no purpose. The Folk might whisk her away from him, but they would only cast her out a second time, changed for some different human child. And to be put twice to the trouble would annoy them. Next time they might drop her into a far worse place, to pay her out.

As for telling her age, nobody could trick her into that, for she did not know it herself—only that she was still a youngling, just old enough for the others to discover that she could not hide.

She’d left the Nursery some time before, and moved into Schooling House with the rest of the half-grown young ones of the band, to learn the work and the paths. Every twilight she joined one of the ever-shifting groups of younglings led by old Flugenlul or Nottoslom or some other mentor, raced with them out of the earthen doorway of Schooling House, across the vast, twinkling cavern known as the Gathering and up the long, twisting, twining staircase of the Mound, chattering and pushing. Silent a moment at the top, then out through the main portal behind the great boulder, and onto the moor—evening after evening, the unruly troop of them, to spread out,
running and skipping, under the enormous sky. The open air, the sharp, fresh scents of bracken and heather and stone and always rain—whether past or present or on its way—seemed new each night, too exciting to allow for any settling down until they’d run the kinks out of their legs.

But then old Flugenlul would summon them from wherever they’d scattered, and make them stay on the Folk paths while they did their evening’s work. Sometimes he led them down into the wood at the moor’s edge to gather twigs for firewood, or along the fringes of the lake below that to cut reeds for bundling into torches. Mostly they stayed on the high moor, collecting thistle-silk for the spinners back in the Mound, and tufts of wool left here and there by the humans’ browsing sheep. They found old twists of cobweb for the weavers and cord makers, wild fruits and herbs and mushrooms for the cooks, bracken and leaves and grasses to renew and sweeten the beds. Occasionally a couple of the bravest, Zmr or Tinkwa, stole away to the village and into a farmer’s stable, to spend a giggling hour tangling his horse’s mane or tying the cows’ tails together. The braggart Els’nk boasted of venturing into the farmhouse itself, to tickle the sleeping humans with ice-cold hands, but nobody believed him. It was only the elder Folk who dared such pranks.

Some whole evenings the younglings spent watching over the tiny moon-white Folk cows with their red horns and eyes, at midnight driving them back to their hidden byre. Now and then they did no work all night, but stole old Flugenlul’s bagpipes and took turns playing them, or
tied his beard to his weskit button and snatched his red cap and danced just out of reach when he grabbed at them.

Before dawn they filed back through the boulder-hidden portal again and down the long stair—often mounting the handrail and spiraling down, one after the other—and back to Schooling House, ready to sleep awhile and eat something. Later an ever-curious youngling like Saaski—though that was not yet her name, in the Mound it was Moql’nkkn—a curious few like Moql might venture together out into the Gathering, the Mound’s central common.

It was a vast, airy cave, the Gathering, a hollow in the rough crystalline rock that twinkled and glinted in the upper dimness as it caught the light in a million pinpoints. The light came from coldfire torches embedded in the rock walls, from scattered cookfires around which couples or groups collected and dispersed as impulse or hunger moved them, and from the greenish glow that was ever present in the Mound. There was constant flitting up and down the twisting stairway as the Moorfolk with their dark, clever faces and floating pale hair went about their erratic pursuits and whatever work was necessary to keep the band prosperous and well fed.

Among them the little knots of younglings could wander, elbows or long fingers touching, big, slanted eyes observing the life of their elders—a life freer and wilder but as haphazard as their own.

“I see your mama!” they teased each other. “There! See? That ugly one over there!”

It was a silly joke; only the youngest, fresh from the Nursery, ever stared about, saying, “Where? Where?” Moql was one who at first had stared eagerly around. But then she saw that all the others were giggling, so after a moment she giggled, too. No youngling knew its mother—only that it must have had one. Each mother cosseted and adored her baby until the Nursery took over, then she forgot it and returned to the Gathering and a different mate and the careless life of the Folk, in which a great deal of everybody’s time, whether in the Mound or Outside in the humans’ world, was spent in dancing, feasting, mischief, idling, and dreaming. Food gathering was a game of light-fingered skill—stealing eggs from the moorhens’ nests, nuts from the squirrels’ hoards, lentils and milk from the villagers and their cows. They boasted of their pranks around the cookfires; one had stripped a farmer’s honeycombs, another emptied a fisherman’s basket as fast as he filled it, a third had shared a shepherd’s lunch. The younglings eavesdropped on the tales and could hardly wait till they were full-grown and skillful, too.

It was a life without yesterdays or tomorrows—life as it was meant to be, Moql thought then, when she knew no other. And it went on, seamlessly, until she and the other younglings had finished their nighttime learning and began to go abroad by day—to find out about dogs and iron and crosses, and humans who were not safely asleep but awake and wary. They were taught to find the paths in sunlight, to note and heed the runic signs left by the Folk on barns or gates or doorways, and to make the secret runes themselves.

Then one day they were called upon to hide—and everything ended in the wink of an eye for Moql’nkkn.

It was a sudden test and a harsh one. That morning they were not allowed to lurk behind things while an elder pointed out a Man, a Woman, a Shepherd Boy, a Cross Dog and a Silly Dog, and warned them of cats—which could always see the Folk and were to be avoided. Instead they were abruptly turned loose to go where they would, in plain sight of each other and the human world.

“But mind now, if one of Them comes along,
hide
,” warned Pittittiskin, who was instructing them that day. “Not while they’re gawking straight at you, wait till they blink. Then you can do a shape change, or a color change, or go dimlike, or run up a tree, or just wink out—that’s best, if you hold your breath till you can slip behind a rock or something. But don’t let Them see, you hear? You’ll endanger the Band.” He strolled away, turned back casually. “If you muff it and get caught, remember about the gold.”

“What if They’re on our path, though?” Moql asked him, peering uneasily over her shoulder. She found this much freedom scary.

A chorus of youngling voices piped up. “Pinch ’em!” “Trip ’em!” “Pull their hair!” “Change into an adder!” “A hornet!” “A bear!”

“A
bear
?” echoed somebody, and the belligerence dissolved in laughter.

But Pittittiskin snapped, “The paths are ours! However you do it, keep Them off!” He turned away again, took a flying leap into a chestnut tree and began to tease Jinka,
with whom he had paired off lately, and wind the long leaves into her silvery hair.

The younglings, left to their own devices, drifted apart, some joining playmates higher up the moor, others searching for mushrooms at the edge of the woodland. Moql found a few wild berries and wandered from bush to bush, with no heed to where she was straying until she all but fell over a big, brown, gray-faced ewe lying in the shade of a clump of bracken. The ewe stumbled to its feet with a noisy
blaa-aa-aat
and galumphed off. Moql, equally startled, looked around to find the flock scattered about the hillside, and herself in its midst, with every woolly gray face turned her way. The shepherd—not a Boy, either, but a full-grown Man carrying a dangerous-looking crook—was striding across the flank of the hill straight toward her, with his jaw dropped and his eyes half starting from his head.

“Hide! Hide! Hide!” shrilled a voice from somewhere, but it called in the secret tongue, which the Folk understood well enough, but only made humans gawk about trying to spot the unknown bird.

Every youngling Moql could see obeyed. The dozen playing a ring game near the crest had vanished, though quite a number of crows, with a chicken or two oddly mixed in, now pecked in the same spot among the grasses. Out of the corner of her eye Moql glimpsed Tinkwa running like a red-capped lizard up an outcrop, with Zmr, already rock-colored, right behind.

With the shepherd’s eye full on her, she herself dared only shrink a bit and go bluish like the shadows under the bracken, fighting off panic as she waited for him to blink.
Suddenly a near-transparent shape—it was Els’nk—darted from behind a berry bush and flung a handful of dirt into the shepherd’s staring eyes, and then he had to squint and rub them. Thankfully Moql gulped in her breath to wink out, held it hard, and left the flimsy shelter of the bracken to dash in invisible safety across the open space toward Els’nk’s bush.

She had scarcely started when a large hand grasped the back of her hooded jacket and yanked her off her feet to dangle like a puppy held by its scruff. She gasped, realizing the trick must not have worked. Why not? She was sure to be visible now, for the jerk had shaken her held breath loose. In terror she kicked and struggled, trying to change to an eel, to a horned toad, trying to turn a fearsome bright yellow with red spots, trying desperately to hold her breath again, whether the Man was watching or not. But nothing would work while he held her. From all around came the cries of the unknown bird as the Folk shrieked for her to try what she was already trying, warned her needlessly that it was a
Man
.

Then the shepherd’s dog rose among the grasses and began to bark, and the voices ceased amid a sudden clapping of wings. The crows flapped aloft, the few chickens stretched out their necks and ran helter-skelter. Moql could not see whether Els’nk was still behind the berry bush, or Zmr and Tinkwa on the outcrop. She could not see any Folk at all, twist how she would, because her captor had turned her to face him and was holding her, still by a handful of jacket, to look her over.

Fearfully she raised her eyes to meet his astonished gaze.

“A pixie, all right enough,” he muttered. “Mebbe a Dark Elf. What are you, little one? Can you talk a Christian tongue?”

Moql’s lips clamped shut. The dog trotted closer, barking until the man silenced it.

“Can’t or won’t,” said the shepherd. “Be y’ full grown? Shouldn’t think so. Near the size of my five year old, but skinnier, no more weight to you than a kitten.” He turned her this way and that, lifted her higher to study her long, arched feet. “Eh, how my little Davvy ’ud like a peek at you! But you might do ’im a mischief, so you might. There’s tales of your kind.” He scrutinized her a moment longer, then burst into a gleeful laugh. “So I went and caught one, sure enough! I never held with them stories. Eh, they’ll call me a liar, over t’moor in my village.” He paused. “Less’n I bring you back with me.”

Moql squirmed desperately—she couldn’t help it. The man’s eyes narrowed. “By gorrikins, I think you do know what I’m sayin’.” He peered at her, frowning a little. “Here, now. I mean you no harm, pixie.” (Moql squirmed again, this time with annoyance. The Folk did not care to be confused with distant, possibly lowborn cousins.) “Here, we’ll strike a bargain. They say your kind has got stores of gold hid all around these hills. Is it so, then?”

Moql went still.
If you muff it and get caught, remember about the gold.
“It is,” she said—her voice so shaky and squeaky she could barely hear it herself.

The man said, “Eh?” and held her up to his hairy ear. She gathered her strength and shrilled
“It is!
” straight into it, so that he held her away hastily.

“Right, then! Just show me where, you see? And I’ll let you go, I will.”

Moql knew what to do next—but the dog, a terrible shaggy creature with bright, intent eyes, was sitting just below her, with a tongue as long as her forearm lolling out between his wicked teeth. “I’m afeard of
him,
” she said.

“Ah, never you mind about Trusty, he’ll do as he’s bid and naught else. Here, off with you, boy, round up your stragglers!” The shepherd waved his crook, and the dog loped away as if the gesture had flung him. “Now—no tricks, little ’un—where’s the treasure hid?”

“Let me loose and I’ll take you there.” It was worth a try.

He only laughed at her. “Think I’m a noddikins? You’d be off afore I could blink! Just tell me straight.”