The Moorchild (22 page)

Without protest the child arose, came obediently around the table, and followed her out of the room, back along the shadowy corridor past the dimlit Nursery, where a stooped silhouette told Saaski that old Nursie was still on guard. A few steps farther brought them safe onto the last steep slope to the pivoting door.

Here Lekka ceased to be docile. Her hand jerked out of Saaski’s; she backed away.

“Here! What’re y’ up to? Come along!” Saaski whispered, clutching at her in the gloom.

“I’m not to go through the Turning Door,” the child said clearly.

“Hssst! Be quiet!” Saaski made a frantic grab and tried to tug her forward. Lekka planted her feet.

“I’m not to—,” the clear voice began.

It was muffled by Tam’s big hand. He said nothing, merely picked the child up bodily, pushed her face into the folds of smocking at his shoulder, and jerked his head toward the door. Saaski’s swift push turned it on its pivot and he struggled through, Lekka prisoned in his arms.

“Didn’t I say ye’d need me to carry ’er?” he was panting to Saaski as she ran ahead along the final narrow cleft into the Gathering.

She never answered. The burst of voices and greenish light and rushing motion engulfed her again, all but swept her away. She reached dizzily for the rocky wall beside her, grasped a handful of Tam’s ragged cloak, and clung to it. “Best hang on to me,” she gasped.

“I can’t hang on to the two of ye!” he protested. However, he swung Lekka to the sandy floor, keeping a wary eye on her while he reached backward to Saaski. Then his voice softened with surprise. “Eh, look at that, will ye!”

Saaski tore her attention from a circle dance forming nearby and with an effort focused it on Lekka. The child was blinking up into Tam’s face with bright, interested eyes, and tentatively smiling. The change was astonishing.

“She’s come out of it! Likely because of passin’ through that door.” Saaski’s gaze lingered on the now vivid little face, and a strange wistfulness drifted over her, as though some inner door in herself had briefly opened on an unknown landscape of feelings.
Eh, Mumma, I warrant you’ll like this gift,
she thought.

“What now?” Tam demanded, pulling her back to herself.

“First we hide this child,” she told him.

“Where? In me pocket?” Tam’s grin appeared, and Lekka peered up at him and grinned back.

“She likes you. That’ll help,” Saaski said. “ ’Cause I think you best take ’er on your back—I’ll put your cloak over the both of you, and the hood over her head.”

Swiftly, in the old tongue, she told Lekka what they were doing, and Tam hoisted the child up, wrapping his arms firmly about her chubby legs. “Next?” he said.

Next she had to find Tinkwa. Only Folk could get Tam up those stairs and out of the Mound unchanged, unharmed. No use searching the ever-shifting groups of dancers for one particular capering figure. If Tinkwa was here, he could elude her forever; if he had fled out onto the moor, forgetting—
eh, well, then,
she thought,
the rascal’ll never get me pipes.

Nothing to do but make for the stairway entrance and hope he’d be there, waiting. She could see it, directly across the expanse of the Gathering—a lopsided archway in the rocky wall. Perhaps it could all be over and done with in one bold moment.

“Come!” she cried, with an imperative yank on Tam’s hand, and plunged into the shifting throng, heading straight for the stair.

It was like plunging into a whirlwind, with a bog underfoot. Greenish forms bumped and jostled her from all sides, laughter mocked her; a mudlike dragging on her feet transformed her dash into a dream struggle in which she could scarcely see or move at all. She came to herself flattened breathless against the same wall she had left, feeling as if
she had been flung against it. Tam, with Lekka still clinging on his back, was standing anxiously in front of her, breathless too. The child looked wide-eyed and startled.

It had been easy enough to go deeper and deeper into the Mound. But every step in the other direction was impeded, as if the Mound itself were taunting them.
You’ve managed to get in, have you? Let’s see you get out.

Angry tears sprang to Saaski’s eyes.
But it’s me! Moql!
part of her was protesting though she knew well that she was not Moql, would never be Moql again.
Y’don’t rule me now,
she told the Mound defiantly.
I’ll get us
all
out, you watch!

Tam gave a hitch to his passenger, scowling uneasily about him. “That stair keeps movin’! Here—then yonder! How’ll we ever get to it?”

“You’re seein’ things again!” sighed Saaski, struggling to get her wits together. To Lekka, she said in the old tongue, “Put your hand over his left eye. Keep it there.”

The child hesitated, but obeyed. Tam’s face went blank and surprised, then an expression of chagrin settled over it as his gaze fixed on the entrance—unmoved from where it had been all along. But he only muttered, “Eh, this is a rare, contrarious place!”

“It is,” said Saaski grimly. “So now we’ll try walkin’ backwards.”

She turned herself about, and Tam, blinking and grumbling a bit under Lekka’s persistent hand, turned, too. At once they began to make progress. So it was
some
use to be half Folk, and no stranger to Folk cunning. Now, if Tinkwa were there, waiting . . .

They were halfway to the rough archway when a long-fingered hand reached suddenly out of nowhere to tug at her arm, pulling her off balance and back toward the wall she was fighting to escape. “Leave go!” she exclaimed, and turned to find Tinkwa beside her, panting and breathless.

“C’mon, c’mon! Prince is comin’ in, be quick!”

“But that’s the wrong—” She looked wildly over her shoulder toward the stairway entrance. “Where’re you takin’ us?”

“Don’t argufy!
C’mon!
”

He, too, flung a swift glance toward the stair, and gave her wrist a yank of surprising strength. She could do nothing but stumble after him.

“Should I clout ’im a good ’un?” puffed Tam ferociously, close by her ear.

“Nay—leave ’im be! Likely knows what he’s doin’.” She could only hope she was right—and that he hadn’t left it far too late. She could hear a faint chiming of bells echoing from the stairwell, the voice of a horn, and a stir of fresh excitement in the Gathering. Plainly, the Prince was all but on the stairs.

“In here!” ordered Tinkwa, shoving her ahead of him into the narrow cleft they had so recently left. “Go on, in with ye! You, too!” he snapped at Tam. “Or stay behind if y’like!”

But Saaski, confronted again by the Turning Door, set her heels and faced him. “We’ve just come from here, you rascal! What kind of rare trick are you playin’?”

“No trick, I vow it! Jus’ through that door, and sneak past the babies—”

“Easy to say! That Nursie’ll cotch us sure this time—and we can’t hide for long in Spinning House!”

“No need to!” Tinkwa was all but jumping up and down with anxiety. “Get on with it, will ye? Through the door!”

“But there’s no way out!”

“There is! D’ye think they take the red-horns up those stairs?”

She stared at him an instant, then gasped, “Tam! Come!” and squeezed through the Turning Door, Tinkwa after her. But Tam did not follow. Holding the door on its pivot and peering back through the slit she saw him rock-still in the narrow passage, staring back through the cleft into the Gathering. “Tam!
Tam!
” she insisted—then saw that he was holding Lekka’s hand away from his lying eye.

She darted back down to him.
“You must come!”
she all but shrieked at him, seizing his arm and shaking it with all her strength.

Then, at last, he turned, clapped Lekka’s hand over his eye again, and followed her.

Stumbling with relief, she led the way through the Turning Door and along the shadowy corridor, Tinkwa now harrying them from behind and all but snapping at their heels, past the Nursery and into the byre—still redolent of the red-horns, but still empty.

“Behind the last stall—quick!” Tinkwa hissed at them.

They plunged through a dark opening into a rocky tunnel that sloped upward and showed, far ahead, an irregular patch of light. Saaski ran eagerly, wildly, elated as always to be heading for the moor. When they burst out at last into
the mild, heather-scented air of a summer daybreak she felt such joy that she would have kept on running straight ahead had Tinkwa not yanked her behind the same big boulder that hid the stair. Tam dropped down beside them, panting, easing Lekka to the ground and flinging his cloak over her. Through a screen of brush Saaski saw the hillside suddenly swarm with capering figures. Then the piping and the fiddles and the bells filled her ears as the Prince and his troupe came dancing across her thorny peephole, blotting out the last stars in the paling sky. They passed within arm’s length to descend into the Mound.

The voices and music grew rapidly fainter, faded, were abruptly silenced as by the closing of a door. After a moment a drowsy bird cheeped.

Tinkwa was the first to recover, straightening from his crouch to grin and dart a lavender glance at Saaski. “Near cotched us,” he remarked.

“Too near, thanks to you!” Her heart was thumping wildly, whether from fright or relief or sudden wretchedness at that abrupt silence she scarcely knew.

She stood up, hesitated, then slipped around to the other side of the boulder and gazed bleakly but without surprise at an undisturbed stretch of ordinary rocks and heather, just visible in the predawn light. Of the door into the Mound she could see nothing—and likely never would again.

She was turning away when she saw the crutch. A stifled exclamation, a moment’s incredulous staring, and
she went over to pick it up. Another instant she stood with it in her hands, then moved back around the boulder. “Tam . . . ?” she said.

He was confronting Tinkwa—the Folk could never again hide from his anointed right eye—but he turned when she spoke, looked at the crutch she was holding out to him, and nodded. “He’s back inside there—in the Mound.”

“You
saw
’im?”

“When we were leavin’.”

Saaski drew in her breath. No puzzle now, why he had stood there rock-still in the passageway, deaf to her urgings.

“Hoaxed us for certain-sure, didn’t ’e? Reckon he aimed to all along,” Tam said thoughtfully.

Saaski hesitated, then asked, “See him eat anything?”

“Eatin’ and drinkin’ with both hands, he was—a-purpose.” Tam turned again to Tinkwa. “Here!—how long afore he’s free?”

“Prince’ll throw ’im out when he’s a mind to,” Tinkwa evaded. He edged away, tugging at Saaski. “The chanter! Gi’me the chanter!”

Tam seized his arm and held him. “Tell me
when.
”

“I dunno! Time runs different . . . Twelvemonth an’ a day, mebbe. Or seven year. Or five-an’-fifty.” He shrugged, pulled free. “Or mebbe two hun’ert,” he added.

“Two hun’ert year?”
Tam whispered.

Tinkwa was dancing with impatience. “The chanter! Give it to me! Y’vowed I’d have it!”

“Aye, y’will, y’will!” Saaski loosed the shawl from around
her waist, worked at the stubborn knots, then—quickly, before she let herself think about it—drew out the chanter and gave it to him. He snatched it with a crow of triumph, and was gone, leaping and capering down the hillside toward Moor Water and Fergil’s hut, already piping one of the wild Folkish tunes.

She turned her back on him. Tam had not moved, but stood staring at nothing—or maybe into the void of two hundred years.

“Likely Bruman got what he wanted,” she ventured.

“Aye. Raised ’is glass to me and laughed like I haven’t seen ’im laugh since I dunno when.” Tam smiled crookedly himself. “I took a look with me lyin’ eye—to see what he was seein’. Eh . . . it was rare and wondrous, right enough . . . ” He took a long breath. “Too late to mend, anywise. But s’pos’n that Prince throws ’im out afore he’s ready?”

“You might could come back in a twelvemonth an’ a day—just to see.”

“We will. And mebbe in seven year.” Tam roused himself, adding firmly, “But now we’re leavin’—the both of us! No more’n an hour to sunup—by then you best be gone.”

“There’s still the child.”

Tam seemed suddenly to realize the plan was not finished. He swung around to peer toward Lekka, still huddled under his cloak. “Ye’ll never take ’er clean into t’village!” he said in alarm. “Y’dassn’t show yourself!”

“Nay, I’ll take her to Gran’mum—Old Bess,” Saaski amended. “Easy to reach her cottage and nobody the wiser. Done it lots o’ times.”

“Then let’s be at it,” Tam said. He bent to lift the cloak off Lekka, gave a startled exclamation and froze, one edge held wide. Even before she moved to look, Saaski guessed what she would see: a child either older or younger than the one they had stolen out of the Mound.

She was younger, much younger—soundly sleeping, one hand curled beside a chubby cheek, a thumb in her mouth, fine dark ringlets clustered over a still babyish head. The green Folkish garments were now absurdly oversized. She looked barely of an age to toddle—let alone, Saaski thought suddenly, able to make the long, rough walk down to Torskaal, and that before sunup.

“I’ll have t’carry her down,” she said, and wondered if she could. The child was plump and sturdily built, for all her babyishness.

“Nay, we’ll take ’er in the cart,” Tam said. “It’s mine now, I reckon—for a twelvemonth. Mebbe forever. Pony and goats and old Warrior, too. Come on, Lekka—” He woke the child gently, let her blink up at him a moment, and set her on her feet. Saaski moved closer, stretched out a hand. But at sight of her Lekka shrank away and clung to Tam.

Thinks I’m Folk.
Saaski withdrew the hand. After a moment she managed a shrug. “Can’t say I blame her for shyin’ off. She trusts you, anywise.”

Tam picked the child up, grinned briefly. “Little she knows!” he said. “If I’d had my way she’d still be pluckin’ thorns and such out’n gleanings, ’cause we’d never’ve gone in that Mound.”

He started downhill, toward Bruman’s deserted hut, the
animals and cart. Before she turned to follow, Saaski glanced once more around the hollow with the thorn trees, then out over the moor in the direction Tinkwa had gone. He would go back into the Mound when he had her pipes in his hands, and be at home. But she no longer belonged there. In truth she did not even belong to the moor in the way she once had, when she was Moql—the way Tinkwa and the others did. Part and parcel of it, the Folk were, same as the heather and the bogs. As for the King’s Town and the fairs and the land far south by the Long Sea, where she supposed they were going—she could not imagine she would ever belong there, either.