The Moorchild (9 page)

“And what
I’ve
been saying these ten years!” put in Helsa, with her eyebrows raised and her smile thin. She lowered her voice; the others leaned toward her in a huddle of head kerchiefs. “A changeling she is, or I’ve never eat pease porridge! And what’ll come of it if we don’t
do
something, I hate to say.”

“But what can we do?” whispered young Cattila, rather timidly, into a silence.

Nobody cared to answer.

At that moment the peace of the afternoon, filled only with the bees’ humming and a medley of birdsong, was broken by the all-too-familiar initial choking sob of the drones. The birds fell silent as one of the weirder, wilder tunes rose out of the smith’s cottage and filled the street. It was soon accompanied by the wails of village infants rudely wakened from their afternoon naps, as well as the howling of old Fiach’s dog.

“
One
thing we can do is get shut of that racket and ruction!” said Ebba in her normal loud and angry voice. “I say send that creetur back up to the moor she likes so well! I doubt there’s any danger for one like her.”

“And if there is,” Helsa slid in, “then so be it. There’ll be nothing left for
us
to do.”

Heads nodded—thoughtfully, then firmly. Cattila ventured, “But who will tell Anwara?”

“I’ll tell Yanno,” Ebba snapped, picking up her buckets. “It’ll be a fine day when I’m afeard of my own brother!”

As she and everyone knew, it would be an even finer one when Yanno heeded much she said. But by this time Yanno was as tired of his decree that Saaski should bide in the cottage as he was flummoxed by how to reverse himself. Out-argued in the matter of his da’s bagpipes, he could not bring himself to back down on another matter, too.

Then something else happened. One midmorning when everybody was busy with flocks or fields or indoor tasks, old Fergil the fisherman walked down the deserted village street to the smithy. Yanno blinked a moment before he recognized the hulking, stooped figure silhouetted against
the brightness of the wide doorway. Rarely did Fergil leave his lonely hut among the dunes between Moor Water and the sea to venture near his fellow creatures. Only when need drove him to replace his much-patched boots or his supply of fishhooks and eel traps did he come into the village, and then when it was all but empty.

“So, Fergil,” said Yanno, putting aside the iron rim he was fitting to the wooden blade of a spade. “Hooks, is it? Or did one of the traps I made you break?”

Fergil shook his shaggy head as he stepped into the shade of the smithy. “Traps good,” he muttered. His voice was rusty with disuse.

“I make them to last,” remarked Yanno. “Then ’tis hooks you’re after. Which size are you needing?”

“Handful of the little ’uns. Ten or so big ’uns for the one-eyes and the saumon.”

“That’ll be more than a moment’s work, man. I’ve this spade and another to finish and both Edildan’s oxen to shoe afore I can get to it, even. Call it a se’nnight.”

“Aye, well.” Fergil shifted his feet a bit. “Can y’ bring ’em?”

“What, bring ’em clean down there t’other side of Moor Water? Fergil, come fetch ’em. I’m a busy man, friend.”

“Can’t rightly get away,” Fergil mumbled, beginning to edge toward the door and dart suspicious glances into the shadows behind the forge.

Can but won’t, thought Yanno, irritation struggling as usual with pity for the strange old fellow. Sighing, he was about to give in as he always did with Fergil when it
occurred to him that Saaski was old enough by now to send on errands. “Aye, well, then—,” he began. The rest was lost in the sudden cough and moan of the drones starting up next door, followed by the chanter’s cry soaring wild into the morning.

Fergil’s eyes opened wide and rolled toward the wall separating cottage and smithy; he stumbled back and seemed about to bolt. Yanno shouted a reassurance; before he could finish, the fisherman suddenly went as still as some carved image of himself, his gaze fixed intently on the wall. The sounds coming through it had now resolved themselves into one of Saaski’s piercing, curious little tunes.

Fergil moved not a muscle until it ended. Then he whispered hoarsely, “Who plays those pipes?”

“Nobbut my daughter,” Yanno told him, trying to brush the subject away. “A child only—she knows no proper tunes.”

Fergil gave him a strange, long look. “That’s never a child of yours, Yanno. Never. No.”

“What’re you saying, man?” growled Yanno, forced almost to roar it because another tune had started from beyond the wall.

“That’s no child playin’, no. No.” Fergil could barely be heard but his head was shaking back and forth, his eyes glassy, his meaning plain.

“Come, then, I’ll show you,” cried Yanno, keeping a wary eye on the man as he grasped his arm to urge him out of the smithy. Fergil was such an odd one, nobody knew what he might do.

However he did nothing but allow himself to be guided
outside and around to the cottage dooryard. Yanno threw open the door and gestured. There was Saaski, perched on her rafter, piping, while below her, Anwara set the loaves to the fire.

Fergil stood, wooden, staring at Saaski, unheeding when Anwara arose from the hearth with a quick glance at Yanno and said good day. Yanno demanded, “Will y’ believe, now?” but Fergil was deaf to him, too.

Only when Saaski abruptly broke off her tune and met his fixed look with a curious one did Fergil edge backward, past Yanno. He was still wooden-faced, but shaking in every limb.

“Can’t you see it’s nobbut my little one?” Yanno asked, exasperated because Fergil was making him acutely uneasy the more he stared.

“No,” muttered Fergil. “No. No. No. No. No.” He whirled suddenly and made off down the street, never slowing nor glancing to right or left until he plunged into the woods and out of sight.

“Poor old lackbrain!” Anwara muttered to Yanno as they stood together in the doorway. “What ails him now?” Her voice was casual but she was tensely searching his face.

Yanno shrugged his big shoulders as if he would shrug the whole morning off, the whole week, maybe the whole past uneasy eleven years. It often struck him that life had been sadder but simpler, childless. “Likely vexed by the sound of pipes,” he growled. “Or maychance it’s the plaguey tunes she plays on ’em! Where in the name o’ Old Clootie does she get ’em, anyway?”

“She makes ’em up,” said Anwara sharply, crossing herself
at mention of the Devil. “Don’t you, child?” she added as she turned back into the house.

Saaski, still blinking over the odd behavior of the stranger and hoping it had nothing much to do with her, barely heard the question until Anwara repeated it, insistently.

“You make the tunes up, don’t you? Outa your own head?”

For an impatient moment Saaski focused on the matter. It seemed to her she had always known those tunes. But maybe she made them up. “I dunno. Who was that man?” she asked Anwara.

“Oh. Nobody.” Anwara abruptly busied herself with the waterbucket. “Just old Fergil the fisherman. Come down now, I want you to mind the loaves.”

“He stared at me.”

“Aye, well, he’s a bit touched, poor man. Some say he was hexed, long ago. Come you down, I must go to the well. And put away those pipes!”

Reluctantly Saaski descended, tucked the bagpipes into their trundle bed, and settled herself beside the hearth as Anwara picked up the bucket, plucked her blue shawl from its peg, and hastily left the house.

Doesn’t want to talk about that man, Saaski thought, looking after her—and grew more curious than before.

Yanno had already gone back to his anvil and the spade rim, on which he was venting some of his baffled spleen with ringing hammer blows.

It was now plain to him: the child and her piping had to be got out of the village and as far out of earshot as he could
manage, before he harmed her or his da’s pipes, one or the other. But he could not back down about the moor.

By next noonday he had worked out a face-saving compromise. Nowadays the cows were pastured in the wasteland above the Highfield, to let the grass in the lower meadows grow for hay. He thought about this. And when Anwara came as usual to bring him his ale, complaining about the bagpipes caterwauling in her ears half the day, he was ready for her.

“Now, you’re not to worry your poor achin’ head about it, wife. I’ll see to everything,” he told her expansively. “We’ll strike a bargain with the child, that’s what we’ll do,” he said as if he had only just thought of it, instead of tossing and fretting half the night. “She’ll take the cow each day up to the summer pasture, and do her pipin’ there, and only there. ’Tisn’t the moor, but it’s next and nigh it, and she won’t wake the babies from that far off.”

So the following day Saaski was abruptly freed from her tether, to her delight and everybody else’s profound relief. She did not ask what had brought about the change. But as she followed Moll up the winding hillside trail by the apple orchard that first pearly morning she was thinking Anwara must have had a hand in it, maybe Old Bess, too, as it was they she had to thank for the pipes themselves. Again she felt the new, strong urge to reciprocate—to give back joy for joy.

It was easy to know what would please Old Bess—there were herbs growing in the wasteland that did not thrive lower down, and strong though she was for her years, Old Bess made this climb only when she had to. Saaski kept her eyes open as she went, noting a clump of this and a patch of that, and when Moll was settled to her browsing and the bagpipes warmed up enough to send their first wild, satisfying strains across the hillside, she walked and piped, walked and piped, still searching with her eyes among the rocks and heather clumps for plants she did not see near the village.

The pipes sounded fine, up here in the high, misty morning—much finer than in the cottage, where every note rebounded off the enclosing walls and jarred against every other. It was halfway to noon before she finally blew herself
out and was ready to go home. Then she picked samplings of everything she had spotted, including a fistful of red-and-white daisies for Anwara, tied the herbs in her apron, and danced her way down.

Her tasks awaited her, along with a few sharp questions from Anwara to make sure she had not slipped away to the dangerous moor.

“I stayed near the cows, Mumma,” Saaski assured her, holding out the little bunch of daisies as a peace offering, though now she thought of it, she had never seen flowers in the cottage, and wondered belatedly if she’d broken a rule.

Anwara herself seemed uncertain how to react. She stared at the slightly wilting daisies and said, “Posies, is it? I always thought them better left to grow.” She glanced at Saaski, and added, “Well-a-day, you meant it kindly. Dip some water into that mug with the broken handle, they’ll maybe last the day. Then put away those pipes and get to your churning—the morning’s near gone.”

Saaski did as she was bid. Clearly, daisies were not the proper thank-you for Anwara. She would have to think of something else.

It was otherwise with Old Bess’s gift. When she had washed the butter and put away the churn, Saaski scampered up the grassy street with her bundle of wasteland herbs to the little hut at the far end. It was the last house in the village, set apart from Oleg the weaver’s by a thicket of hawthorn—blooming white now and scenting the sunny midday air. Beyond Old Bess’s thatch the street meandered off as a narrow track winding upward across a part of the moor Saaski had not explored, and eventually toward the
town. She stood a moment, gazing, wondering where Tam and his goats were now, before she stepped onto the flagstone doorstep and knocked.

“Come in, Saaski,” called Old Bess as calmly as if she could see straight through the door.

Saaski obeyed, only briefly surprised. Old Bess knew all sorts of things, and never said how she knew them. This day, however, she had not guessed Saaski’s errand.

“Well, child? Have you remembered another rune to show me?”

Saaski hesitated. She had seen several since that one on the cow byre; some mystifying, others suddenly familiar, their meaning plain as a shout—though how or when she had learned it she could not guess. There was one on the mill’s great wheel that meant “Danger.” Another on Faeren and Guthwic’s root cellar, near a loose board Guthwic let go unmended, meant something like “Help yourself.” Another she knew glimmered on the doorpost she had just slipped past. However, for answer she merely handed Old Bess her bundled up apron.

“What’s this? Bless me! Lady’s mantle. And hearts-ease—costmary . . . coltsfoot! Where did you find that, child? It’s the best ever for my cough. And true chamomile—that will ease old Fiach’s aching knee . . . ”

She knew every leaf and sprig Saaski had brought, knew their uses. Setting Saaski to plucking the yellow-and-white flowers off the spidery chamomile, she tied the rest of the herbs in bunches to join others hanging from the rafters to dry.

Her single room was like a strange, shadowy little bower,
aromatic with a mixture of pungent smells—and a shelf near the scoured wooden table held four large, mysterious books that had belonged to Brother Oswic, the wandering monk who had once lived here. They were unlike anything Saaski had ever seen; much in Old Bess’s cottage was unlike anybody else’s. She was half scared of the place, wholly fascinated. But it was only since the day Old Bess had helped her scrub the rune marks from the cowshed door that she had ventured to come here on her own.

While Old Bess spread the chamomile blossoms on a net to hang like an airy hammock above the hearth, Saaski edged closer to the books, trying to imagine what secrets they held, and how one found out. They were mostly secrets about herbs, Old Bess had told her, set down by Brother Oswic and added to by Old Bess herself on the pages he had left blank.

Old Bess, as usual, read her thoughts. “Would you like to see my books?” She lifted one down, untied the thongs that bound the boards, and spread the book open on the table. The time-spotted vellum pages were covered with thin scratchings, which meant as little to Saaski as those Anwara’s hens made in the dust. But here and there in the corner of a page was a little brownish drawing of a leaf, a flower, a whole plant, looking as natural as when growing in the woods.