The Moorchild (5 page)

Old Bess, now spying unseen from the tangle of hawthorn around their little clearing, saw Saaski standing motionless within the ragged circle half a dozen children had formed around her. They probed, got no answers, fell to squabbling among themselves. Saaski merely watched, her fingers and toes at their chubbiest, her sharp glance moving from one face to another. A bold demand to know if she could truly run straight up a wall was met with apparent deafness. A taunt that the cat must have got her tongue provoked a brief bright-green glare and the tongue thrust out as far as it would go. A chant of “Creepy, daffy, killed the calfy!” brought swift action, not really to Old Bess’s surprise. Saaski could move quick as a lizard, and plainly could pinch hard where it hurt worst. The taunts turned to squeals or
startled tears; the circle turned into a few subdued small children scattering to their tasks.

Saaski did not stir until the others had wandered farther among the trees in search of twigs and broken branches. Then she faded so suddenly behind a hazel clump that Old Bess nearly missed the movement. Wondering if she would flee home—and what she would tell Yanno if she did—Old Bess followed, only to see her turn away from the village and head across a glade of open woodland used as winter pasture. She made directly for a shallow hollow on the far side, and Old Bess eased through the shielding thickets to the hollow’s bottom, where there was a spring-fed pond.
Merely thirsty,
she decided. She found a peephole and peered through.

Saaski was kneeling at the pond’s edge, leaning over the water like a winged thing just alighted, long fingers braced on the grassy rim, hair like a strange cloud floating about her head. She had never looked less human, despite her apron and dress.
Now,
said a voice suddenly in Old Bess’s mind,
I could do it now and it would all be over.
The pond was deep, one could simply tip the creature in, push her under—in a twinkling she would burst out with a shriek and fly away to her elfland, and Anwara would find her own dear child back in its cot. . . .

Then Old Bess saw that the wide, tilted eyes were staring fixedly into the pond, and realized Saaski was not drinking, had not come to drink. She was trying to see her reflection—a hopeless task in water constantly stirred by the underground springs.

No doubt she had little notion what she looked like.
Well, who did? thought Old Bess. The only mirror in the village—a scratched disk of polished bronze—had been stolen by the gypsies years ago. When the light was right, one could see one’s silhouette far down on the well’s surface, or get a blurry glimpse of color and shape in the bottom of a tin pan—if one owned a pan of tin and kept it polished. Mainly, one looked at other folk and had no real reason to wonder about oneself.

Saaski now had good reason, but that pond with its moving surface would never answer her questions. After a moment she lifted a hand and pressed her hair as if trying to flatten it, sniffled angrily and pulled a crinkly lock around to peer at it cross-eyed. Finally she sat back on her heels and gazed past Old Bess’s hiding place, her eyes fading to grayish mauve and her odd little face forlorn. Old Bess found herself curiously shaken, her thoughts in a tangle.

Poor unblessed creature, it may be she has no more wish to be here than we have to have her. . . . Does she yearn, as one of us might, for her heathenish home? Does she even remember a place where she once belonged? Did she never belong, even there?

Saaski stirred, took a long breath. She leaned over the pool once more, and this time drank deep. It would have been even easier now to tip her in before she could save herself, but Old Bess could no longer imagine doing so. In a moment Saaski stood up, brushed vaguely at the mud on her apron, and set off toward the woods and her task. Old Bess watched till the small figure was out of sight among
the trees, then took up the bundle of herbs she had gathered, and walked slowly home.

She asked herself often, in the next few years, why she had not acted when she could—if it would not have been kinder to do so. She got no answer. But as she observed the children and Saaski growing up with them, it all seemed oddly familiar. She could have predicted that they would soon cease gaping and accept Saaski’s share in their common tasks. She knew they would never count her one of them, or include her in their games. A “strangeling”—that was well said. It was the same as their grandparents had decided, years ago, about Old Bess herself.

*   *   *

Several days after that first wood gathering, Saaski, squatting beside the hearth to turn Anwara’s loaves, asked suddenly, “What’s a changeling?”

Abrupt silence. It lasted so long that she turned to see if Anwara had left the room. But there she sat, rigid as the churn beside her, clutching the plunger’s handle as if her hands had frozen to it.

“Mumma?” said Saaski, half alarmed.

Jerkily, the plunger began again its sloshing and thumping. “Now where did you hear that word?” asked Anwara, in a voice carefully careless.

“Eh—one of the young ’uns . . . said it . . . ” Saaski shrugged the rest off. “What is it, then?” she muttered.

“Just an old tale. Nothing to it, like as not.” Anwara paused, forced a smile. “Fairies’ prank, is what I’ve heard. The little imp-things put a stick of firewood or some such in
a baby’s cradle and do a hoaxing charm—and nobody ever knows the difference!” Anwara sniffed contemptuously. “Likely story! Fancy a mumma not knowing her own child!”

“Sounds witless,” said Saaski, staring. Whoever’d not know a stick of wood from a live baby, charm or not? If that was all, it was certain-sure
she
was no changeling. Stick of wood! Just more of the young ones’ plaguing. Passel of numps, they were.

On the whole, after the first sting of anger and disappointment, she was more relieved than not to be an outcast, and found the children as alien as they found her. She thought their play stupid, their company tiresome. They could do nothing much and never tried, climbed trees like inchworms, scratching their legs and puffing with every hitch. Her own swift scampering caused stares and nudges that made her cautious. Being different made her uneasy, though she had forgotten why. By the time she was nine years old she had schooled herself to move as they moved—when anyone was watching. But it was like living in fetters.

She escaped to the moor whenever she could, despite Anwara’s fears and Yanno’s stern warnings of its dangers. Sometimes, roaming there alone, or perched on a grassy hillock watching the sheep graze and listening for the curlew’s hollow cry, strange pictures stirred in her mind—a wisp of color, an echo of sounds—as if she had once known them in a dream. But the older she grew, the less she was able to bring the dream-pictures clearer, however hard she tried. And she had a wary feeling that she should not try—should not study the faint markings that traced a luminous
pattern across the bog and ask herself what they were, but only be careful to stay off them. If now and then she heard the cries of birds she could not name, she hastily shut her ears, the back of her neck prickling, and hurried down to the village and her neglected tasks, preferring Anwara’s scolding to the bleak loneliness that crept over her at those sounds.

It was no better in the cottage. She was lonely there, too—in the village, everywhere. She toughened herself to accept that life would always be so.

And then, in the spring she was eleven, the tinker Bruman wandered through the village and up onto the moor in his hooded pony cart, with his three goats, his old dog Warrior, and his orphan boy Tam.

Saaski had already had one encounter that morning, unexpected and unwelcome. Indeed, the whole day had started out poorly. She had neglected to turn the bread on the hearth while Anwara was at the well, and four of the six loaves had burned—one worse than the others. Therefore that one, Yanno decreed when he came in from stirring up the coals in his forge, should be her breakfast.

Anwara hurried to her defense, tried to hustle the burnt loaf into the fire and out of the argument. Yanno retrieved it, lifted Saaski in his big, calloused hands, and set her firmly down in front of it at the table. “ ’Tis only right. Because she was careless we eat burnt bread. She shall eat the burntest.”

Anwara, tight-lipped, immediately broke the best piece off her loaf and slid it over to Saaski.

Saaski pushed it back to her with a shrug. “I was careless,” she said, and began to eat the burnt loaf. She saw Anwara’s face stiffen and realized with a familiar sinking feeling that she had again said the wrong thing—done the wrong thing. But why? Burnt bread did not seem a matter for emotion. And she had
not
been watching the loaves. She had been outside in the dooryard staring at the splintery wooden wall of the lean-to where Yanno and his brother-in-law Siward kept their cow and its yearling calf. At dusk yestereve she thought she had glimpsed an odd mark on that wall. This morning she had looked again, and there it was—faint and slightly glimmering in the early light, half lost in the roughness of the wood, but there, all the same. She’d stood squinting at it while the loaves behind her in the kitchen burned.

The burntest was her fair portion.

It was also bitter and hard as rock. She hid most of it in her apron to give to the birds, and escaped to her morning duty, which was to milk the cow and drive it to pasture in the Highfield.

The mark was gone from the shed wall when she hurried outside lugging the heavy wooden pail by its rope handle, pulling up her hood against the light rain. Or else she had forgotten where to look. She stood searching the splintery surface until Anwara came to the doorway to shoo one of the hens out, and spoke to her sharply. Then she made haste into the shed.

The calf was loose from its tie and standing spraddle-legged beside its mother, nuzzling her bag.

“Here, then! Stop it, y’ great gawk,” cried Saaski, dropping
the pail and grabbing the calf around the neck, yanking its head aside. She did not think it had been sucking; it had grown so lanky that it could scarcely stoop low enough to reach the teats. But it had slipped its head yoke, which still hung from the iron bar Yanno had fixed to the opposite wall. Leading it there by its ear, Saaski reached for the yoke and stopped in midmotion. The hook was loose from the ring.

“Now, then,” Saaski muttered to her captive. “If you’re not the first beast I ever saw could undo its own tie.”

The calf bawled and tried to shake free. Saaski tugged it into place and gingerly hooked the chains around its neck, shivering a little and scrubbing her hands against her skirt to wipe off the smarting sting of iron. She peered closely at hook and ring; they were sound as ever.

This was her cousins’ doing. The cow alone was her task; its calf was the charge of Morgan and Eluna, twin daughters of Yanno’s sister Ebba and her husband. Siward and Yanno had fixed the children’s duties the moment the calf was born.

So it’s Morgan’ll be ticked off, not me, thought Saaski, and went over to milk the cow, catching up the one-legged stool on her way. She settled the wooden pail between her knees and her head in the cow’s flank as Anwara had taught her, and reached for the teats. At the first touch she knew she was too late. The calf had suckled after all—or the cow had been milked.

But how could that be? The stubborn beast was just holding back.
Trying to cozen me because I’m new at this,
thought Saaski, who had learned to milk only a month before.
“Give over, now, Moll!” she said, and tried again, pulling strongly at the teats.

But old Moll had something to say to that, swinging her horns and aiming a kick at the pail that spilled the cupful Saaski had managed to get. Her bag was limp and empty.

Nothing to do but go tell Anwara what had happened.

So then there was an argle-bargle sure enough, the kind Saaski hated most, with Anwara wanting to make cheese, and no milk to make it, and stalking across to Ebba’s house dragging Saaski with her to confront Morgan and Eluna—and Morgan hotly defending herself and Eluna wailing and Ebba saying Saaski had lied, and had likely unhooked the calf herself in the night, just to plague her cousins, as she was always doing.

At that point Anwara squared off for battle and Saaski slipped away back to the cowshed, leaving the others to shout each other down. Loosing Moll’s tie, she hurried her past the bawling calf and out of the shed. When they’d finished their brangling, Morgan and Eluna would mind the calf; meanwhile, let it bawl. Saaski prodded Moll into an indignant trot that set her empty bag swinging, up the crooked trail past the last village shed and the old apple orchard, around the fringe of the wood above Moor Water. With the apple trees between her and the village, she allowed the cow to fall back to a walk and go at her own pace up the winding hillside trail to the pasture.

The other village cows were there already. Robin and Jankin, oldest sons of Guin the miller, were just coming back through the gap in the stone wall, preparing to replace the peeled log that barred the animals’ way. They dropped
it and watched as Moll made much ado of stepping over it before ambling along to join her sisters. Ignoring her audience, Saaski wrestled the log into its socket and walked on across the tilted, daisy-strewn pasture, zigzagging elusively among the grazing animals until the two boys had turned downhill and she was alone.

Over the wall again on the far side of the pasture, she pushed between the thickets that edged the foaming, noisy little brook and jumped into it, shivering with pleasure at the shock of icy water on her bare feet, then waded upstream, beyond the hayfields and the wasteland, past the crumbling remains of the old wall that marked the end of village land, and onto the moor proper.

Here she was at home, and comfortable—and hard to find, as she knew from her other stolen flights. There would be no churning today anyway, and she could gather the cow’s bedding on her way home. Perched on a boulder to let the gentle air dry her feet and the draggled hems of her dress and apron, she pulled in a deep breath of heather and broom, gazing out over the rough, wild terrain and the fields and village below. It was still raining in the valley; she could see the curtain of dark gray blurring the crooked line of roofs beyond the woods. Uphill from her rock, where the moor lifted into its high uplands, the sunlight flamed golden in the broom flowers—the only yellow flowers she did not shrink from. Here, between heights and valley, it was something between rain and shine, a pearly May morning. Curling up on her boulder, she blinked drowsily at the sky until her eyes closed.