The Moorchild (8 page)

Saaski vigorously washed the fleeces: but she was too rough when it came to carding them, far too impatient to spin; her thread turned out full of lumps and skinny spots and could not be given to Oleg the weaver. Under Anwara’s stern eye Saaski knitted it into a rather lumpy shawl for herself.

When that was done, the idleness set in again. It was not in her to sit still, or even to dawdle over tasks to make them last longer. Sometimes she slipped outside and ran around and around the cottage—still obediently “at home” but at least moving, skipping, leaping. Sometimes she simply jumped up and down in the middle of the room until she collapsed in a breathless heap. Once she climbed up onto the thatch—without a ladder—and spent a satisfying hour scrambling about, pulling tufts of wild grass off the reeds, until Anwara came back from the Lowfield and screeched
with fright to see where she was—then screeched at Yanno for not keeping his eyes open, whereupon Yanno bellowed that he was a smith, not a nanny, and Anwara would henceforth take that plaguey young one along to help with the weeding, and watch her herself!

But there was a proper and time-honored way to weed the grain. One used a hooked stick to separate a weed from the grain stems, a forked stick to pin it down, and the hooked one again to uproot it as one moved step-by-step along the row, leaving a mulch as well as a path for the reaper to follow.

Saaski was not tall enough to use the weeding sticks. She went back to the cottage.

Meanwhile May was passing, and the moor was dressing itself in wildflowers, and Tam was far away on top of the world no doubt fluting and juggling all by himself. One day Saaski tied all the clothes and bedclothes in the house together just to be doing something. The next, she plucked the tail feathers out of Anwara’s hens and stuck them in her hair until she looked like a new and astonishing kind of bird. Forbidden such games in Yanno’s most exasperated roar, she fell at last into a silent dark dejection that began to bother her parents as much as her mischief did.

“
Now
what ails her?” Yanno demanded of Anwara one morning, grouchy with worry. “Dose her with valerian, can’t you? Or coltsfoot or cowslip or—”

“She needs no quieting—she’s too quiet!” Anwara snapped. “Much you know about dosing young ones.”

“Well, do something! Ask your mother, then. It may be she’ll know a cure.”

But Anwara did not care to ask Old Bess and be told again that Saaski needed her freedom, and the moor. Instead she asked Saaski if a tooth hurt, or her stomach felt queasy, and got a blank look and an indifferent shake of the head in reply.

Saaski scarcely heard Anwara’s edgy questions. She had finally begun to ask herself what was wrong with her, why she was so different from everybody else, and what would be the end of it. She found no answer, but the question weighed on her. For all she knew, answering it would be worse than all the rest.

And then one day, alone in the house with her tasks done, she climbed up to swing by her knees from a rafter to see how the room looked upside down, and noticed the door to the put-away cupboard where Anwara stowed everybody’s winter cloaks and beechwood clogs when the snows were over. It was a small cupboard, tucked under the straw-fringed eaves in a dim corner of the storage loft, and easy to forget about. But Anwara had been known to bring down a pot of honey she had laid by there, and Saaski decided to explore it.

She got right side up on the rafter and scampered along it, until she could drop onto the loft and edge her way between the baskets holding straw rope and torch reeds, the spare sheepskins for winter bedding, a broken-legged stool, Anwara’s soap-making cauldron. No doubt there would be only more such oddments in the cupboard, but Saaski meant to find out. Crouched on the rough boards in front of it and brushing spiderwebs away from her face, she fumbled gingerly with the latch, using a handful of her apron to
protect her fingers as she tugged the iron pin out. At last the hasp grated free of its staple and the cupboard door creaked open. Sucking her fingers, which tingled in spite of the apron, Saaski peered inside.

A linen sack, beeswaxed at the seams, turned out to be half full of the goose down Anwara was storing for new pillows. Behind it, a stiffened sheep-hide pouch held nothing but a broken knife. There were the winter togs, and a pot of red earth for Anwara’s dyes—no honey crocks, though. In fact, nothing else, except—far back in the gloom—a dim bundle of something wrapped carefully in sheepskin, fleece side in. Saaski stretched an arm to its longest, tugged the bundle into reach and began to lay back its coverings, sneezing from the dust. Inside the fleece was some other kind of sheep-hide pouch, empty and flat but feeling still supple under an exploring finger, and on top of it—indeed, attached to it, she could see now—were several long, thin, gangly, jointed, black, nickle-trimmed, ivory-capped, tubular, tasseled . . .

It was a set of bagpipes.

Joy swept like a gale through Saaski. Breathless and bubble light, she pounced on the pipes and scrambled backward along the loft, dragging them with her, heedless of the baskets she upset or the clatter she made. Perched like a bird on the rafter again, with feet braced wide, she located the blowpipe and puffed vigorously into it until her eyes felt crossed, with little effect on the bag, which hung at her side, still maddeningly slim and sleeping—though not quite flat. She rested a moment, then drew in a prodigious breath and blew again, at the same time giving the bag a clout that helped it
awake and swell, and drew the first startled sob from the drones. Tucking the inflated bag firmly under her arm, and blowing steadily, she swung the three drones over her shoulder. Her hands found the chanter and her fingers the holes along its sides with only a little fumbling, and settled into a position they already knew. Then the shrill, shrieking cry of the chanter shattered the quiet of the afternoon, running up and down and around the scale in a wild little air soon accompanied, as the drones warmed up, by a three-voiced groaning, high and low, on a single sonorous note. The tune had not ended before it swerved into another, more frenzied and clamorous than the first, which rollicked and frolicked around the little house and out over the village with a noise to wake the dead.

Yanno’s was the first shocked face to appear in the doorway. He stared frantically around, then up. Stumbling into the room, he stood motionless, his wide, disbelieving gaze fixed on the rafter. At his heels several children crowded into the open door; behind them old Fiach blinked; Helsa the wife of Alun craned and hopped trying to see around Fiach. Saaski paid no heed, only finished her rigadoon to start a pibroch of a high, piercing sweetness that had her listeners clutching their ears in pain. It was one thing to hear bagpipes wailing and groaning across the moor; in the confines of a little room it was quite another.

Yanno regained his power of speech. “Come down from there! Stop that and come down!” he roared, but could not be heard over the racket. Several more faces appeared at the doorway and one or two peered through the tiny window. Saaski was ending her pibroch when the cluster of villagers
shifted in confusion, then parted to admit Anwara, and after her, Old Bess. Anwara hurried across the room toward Yanno and like him, froze, staring up at the rafter. Old Bess took one long, astonished, comprehending look, then began firmly herding the gaping visitors out of the cottage. She latched the door and placed her own tall person in front of the window as Saaski, giddy with excitement, began an earsplitting fanfare.

When it was finished, she paused for breath. The silence was almost as stunning as the noise had been.

The first to recover, Yanno gasped, “Come down, you imp!” His voice shook, and he paused to swallow. “Put those pipes back, d’you hear me? And
come you down
from there!”

The glorious, wondrous, joyful afternoon shattered around Saaski. She focused at last on his outraged face, glimpsed Anwara’s dazed one beside him, and realized there was going to be another argle-bargle. Maybe the worst yet, because she knew already she was not going to obey. She did not move, except to tighten her clutch on the pipes. The silence rang in her ears.

Into it, Anwara spoke, her eyes dark with a bewilderment that, like Yanno’s, seemed close to fright. “Child, how in God’s earth did you learn to play the pipes?”

Relaxing a bit with her own surprise, Saaski transferred her gaze to Anwara. She could not comprehend the question. “Learn?” she repeated.

“Aye, learn! It’s plain enough you have learned, somehow or other! Who was’t taught you?”

Saaski could only shake her head in confusion and
growing anxiety. Again, she had done something that seemed to her perfectly natural, but to others, strange. “Nobody taught me.”

“But you were playing them!”

No use denying that. “I was. They were made for playing. Can you not play them yourself?” Saaski ventured.

“I?” Anwara laughed sharply. “No more than I can breathe underwater! And it’s the same for your da’!”

“But the pipes were
here
—in the put-away cupboard just yonder—” Saaski let go the chanter long enough to point an exasperated finger. Where there were pipes there was surely someone to play them; anything else was witless.

Yanno spoke heavily. “The pipes were my da’s. He was a champion piper, he was. But I’ll have no young one fidget-in’ about with my da’s pipes, and mebbe leavin’ ’em out in the wet, or—”

“I’d never do so!” Saaski exclaimed.

“Nonetheless—,” said Yanno, overriding her. “You’ll put ’em back now where they belong and climb down from there!”

Saaski only folded her arms tighter about the pipes. This time she was not going to be scared, and she was not going to be obedient. She was going to stay on this rafter until she starved and fell off it, rather than put the pipes back in that cupboard. They did
not
belong there. They belonged
here,
in her hands, under her arm, pressing into her left shoulder. And here they would stay.

“Saaski—!” roared Yanno.

Anwara spoke up. “Hold your peace, husband. She’s not
hurting the pipes. Did you not hear how she can play? And without teaching.” She hesitated, then declared, “ ’Tis a gift from God.”

“Or from the Devil,” Yanno retorted.

“Blather!” retorted Anwara—a little too swiftly. Their eyes held a moment, then she turned away. Wearily, she added, “Let the child have them. It’s the first time I’ve seen her smile in a fortnight.”

“She’ll make more mischief!” Yanno protested.

Old Bess spoke suddenly from her post near the window. “More likely, the pipes will keep her from it. Come, Yanno—of what use to anyone are they in that cupboard?”

Outnumbered and beginning to be out-argued, Yanno clutched at a final straw. “But they’re my da’s own pipes!”

“Aye, but your da’ can’t play them, can he?” Anwara flung at him. “He’s gone to his reward—that’s if the good Lord saw fit to reward him for a life spent three-quarters drunken! And
you
can’t play a pennywhistle. So let be! Stick to your anvil and leave the child her tunes!”

“
Achh,
well-an’-all,” Yanno growled, glaring from one to another of them like a thwarted bear. “What’s a man to do, with the three of you females all agin ’im! I wash my hands of it!” He stalked to the door and slammed out of it, still muttering.

Saaski, hugging her precious bagpipes and feeling her whole face lift and crease in a grin of triumph, was conscious of an odd and new emotion as she fixed her gaze on Anwara. It was joy—but it was more. She was still trying to name it, to fathom it, when Anwara walked forward and reached up, saying, “Hand me the pipes and then come
down from there. You’ll be the death of me with your antics! What if you’d fallen?”

“I won’t fall, Mumma,” said Saaski, but she jumped down at once, brushing the dust from her petticoats without anyone telling her, then stood searching Anwara’s face, still trying to puzzle out the new feeling. She wished Anwara would give her a fiercely hard task to do, or walk into terrible danger so she could rush to the rescue. She felt a strong need to repay.

But Anwara merely handed her the pipes, said, “Find a safe place to keep them. And mind you don’t neglect your tasks to sit playing all day long.”

“I won’t! I vow I won’t!” said Saaski fervently, and at that moment she meant every word.

But it was one thing to promise, another to keep faith, with the bagpipes always tempting her to neglect her tasks or hurry through them skimble-skamble, just to be done and free to make tunes.

She kept the pipes in the truckle bed woven of straw-rope that she had slept in as an infant, pushed under the low cot she slept in now, and out of sight. But they were in her mind’s eye all the same, and the tunes ran through her head, pushing and joggling to get out. She could seldom resist dropping her work to fetch out the pipes, fill the bag, and give them voice.

Of all who heard them—and not one of the eighty-seven men, women, children, and infants in the village could avoid hearing them, including old Fiach, who was
half-deaf—only Yanno’s sister Ebba thought to ask a simple question: “What tunes are those?”

Nobody could answer it. Everybody began to talk about it. Nobody had ever heard those tunes before; they were nothing like the old traditional ones that everybody grew up knowing, the ones Yanno’s da’ had used to play. So where had Saaski learned them? Ebba’s question became the focus of the gossip around the village well. Helsa the wife of Alun put it to Anwara, who stared at her a moment and said, “Likely she makes them up.”

Nobody believed that. Inevitably, somebody brought up the Elf King’s Tune—said to be music so strange, so wild and compelling that even the trees and stones were forced to dance. But nobody had seen any trees or stones kicking up their heels. They backed off a bit, turning it over in their minds as they filled their buckets.

“All the same,” Ebba summed it up as they prepared to part, “no young one could make such tunes up out of her head. There’s something about ’em not rightly ’
uman
. That’s what
I
say.”