The Moorchild (10 page)

“Silverweed,” said Saaski in surprise, putting a finger on one of them.

“Yes, Brother Oswic’s hand was gifted,” Old Bess told her. “All his wisdom is in here, on these pages.” As Saaski touched the marks, she went on, “Writing makes pictures
in the mind—like runes. He taught me to read the letters. Here—look. This says, ‘Silverweed eases fever. A pinch of the herb; pour boiling water over; strain through a cloth. Drink a cupful each day.’ ”

Saaski stared, astonished, at the marks. Runes meant only such simple things as “Keep away” or “Here it is safe.” Real writing was magic. “Could I learn to read them?” she asked.

“You could. In time.” Old Bess hesitated, glancing at Saaski thoughtfully. “It may be you could learn quicker than I did.”

“
I
could? Why?”

Old Bess hesitated even longer. Saaski could not imagine what she was thinking, but it made her sky-blue eyes go darker and grayer, as if they had clouded over. And in the end she decided not to say it. Instead she took a breath, beckoned Saaski close to her, and pointed at one mark in the book. “Look. That is a letter, and its name is
A.
Trace it for me with your finger, there, on the table.”

Saaski did so. Old Bess smiled a little, and said, “Aye, so I thought. Fetch me that piece of slate yonder on the shelf. You’ll find a lump of redstone in the cup beside it.”

An hour later, when Old Bess rose and took her shawl from its peg and her root basket from the hearth, the slate was scrawled with red marks and Saaski knew her letters—Old Bess told her so.

“I can read now?” she asked eagerly.

“No. You have learned twenty-six letters. You have yet to learn even one word of the many they can make. Come tomorrow and we will make some words.”

Saaski watched her return the book to the shelf. She did
not want to stop, or leave the big books without knowing what was in them. “Are Brother Oswic’s secrets all about curing people?”

“No. He knew many other things as well.” She glanced at Saaski. “He knew some of the runes.”

Startled, Saaski met her eyes. “He could see them? Like me?”
Then I would not be the only one,
she was thinking, with a relief tinged with a faint, curious sense of loss. The runes—even the mention of them—always made her feel two ways at once.

“He could not. No more than I,” Old Bess said calmly.

“Then how—”

“He would never tell me how he learned about them. Or who taught him what they meant.”

Saaski slowly tied on her crumpled apron, studying Old Bess’s unreadable face, feeling the secret strong tug of attraction mixed with wariness that runes and certain birdsongs and those faint, curious streaks on the moor always roused in her. “But he taught
you?
”

“Well-a-day, he taught me what he knew. But I learned more from the gypsies.”

Saaski stared in astonishment. “Gypsies? The ones who pass this way each year?”

“Very like them. A different band. They brought me to this village, long ago.”

“You are a
gypsy?
”

Old Bess smiled, and shook her head. She set her shawl and root basket aside and sat down again, pulling Saaski down beside her on the hearth bench. “No, child—only a foundling. The gypsies came across me at a crossroads
somewhere in the south country—a newborn lying in a seed basket. They thought at first I was nobbut a bit of sheepskin, then they saw different and near drowned me as some outcast from a pixie’s nest. Or so my good Milligren used to tell me—when she would tell me anything about it. She took me in, I never knew why, and raised me with her other young ones till I was near your age. And when finally the band roamed northward they left me here in Torskaal in the dead of one midnight, asleep in my truckle bed outside the miller’s gate, with the same sheepskin over me, and the seed basket beside me. When dawn came, Guin the miller’s grandda’, who was miller then, found me there. But my gypsies were long gone.”

“Why? Why did they leave you?” Saaski whispered. Her eyes felt wide enough to pop from her head. “Why did they leave the sheepskin and the basket?”

Old Bess shrugged. “The sheepskin was like those of the sheep you see hereabouts, shaggy and long haired, not a mat of curls like a southland sheep. And the basket was like any Torskaal man uses when he sows his fields. Perhaps they thought I belonged here.”

“Do
you
think so?” Saaski asked softly.

“I have sometimes wondered if I belong anywhere,” Old Bess told her.

After a moment tangled with feelings she could not name, Saaski whispered, “I, too. Leastwise—if I do—I think it is not Torskaal.”
Yet how can that be, when I have never been anywhere else?
she asked herself, or meant to, but realized she had spoken aloud, asking Old Bess, too. She stared earnestly into the woman’s weathered face,
hoping—half expecting—to find the answer. But she could no more read it there than she could so far read the secrets in the books.

Abruptly Old Bess rose, reaching for her shawl. “Aye, well, Guin the miller’s grandda’ took me in; I was raised with his brood and married his eldest, who died of a pox when Anwara was half grown. By then old Brother Oswic had settled in this house, and I came each day and swept and cooked for him, and learned from him until he died. When Anwara wed I moved out of the miller’s house at last and came to live here, for I like well to be alone.” She picked up her root basket and led the way to the door. “And here I am still.”

The stories and the moment of closeness were over, at least for today. Reluctantly Saaski followed Old Bess out the door, remembered the rune she had seen on it when she came, and turned back quickly. The marks were still there, fading and shimmering by turns. She touched Old Bess’s arm and pointed to them.

“I have one now?” Old Bess peered hard at the wood, but shook her head. “I cannot see it.”

Saaski drew it in the dirt of the pathway with her toe.

“What does it mean, child? Do you know?”

“It means ‘Keep away,’ ” Saaski told her, with a little grin.

Old Bess smiled, then gave her brief, rare laugh. “So. I am safe from mischief, am I? For a time, anyway.”

Whose mischief? Saaski wondered, as they started together along the street. Who makes the marks? Why do I know them—some of them—and what they mean?

She had no idea of the answer. But the questions
themselves had roused in her the familiar restlessness, the confused feelings of yearning and loss, that had plagued her since she could remember. The only cure was the pipes, and playing them long and loud. When they reached the blacksmith’s cottage she skipped in, leaving Old Bess to press on with her quest for roots and mushrooms. With luck, Anwara was up in the Lowfield, or tending the hens, or . . .

But Anwara was there, a hank of brown fleece on her shoulder, fingers busy with the drop-spindle as she paced from hearth to cupboard and back again. A new-spun skein lay on the table, half hiding the little bunch of red-and-white daisies, still slightly drooping, in their mug.

Saaski eyed the flowers, dissatisfied. She would have to do better.

“You have been long with my mother,” Anwara remarked with a penetrating look. “If you went there, indeed!”

“I did! She showed me her books.”

“Showed you her books?” Anwara’s voice was astonished; her fingers missed their catch and the spindle fell dangling and twirling, unwinding the arm’s length of thread she had just wound on it. Saaski pounced, captured it, and returned it. Absently Anwara wound up the thread again, her surprised gaze still on Saaski. “Well-and-all! I’m sure she never showed
me
any of them.” The spindle began its smooth down-and-up motion and her fingers their rhythmic dance as she added, “Not that I ever plagued her to look at them—great, dusty bundles—whatever would I think to see?”

Maybe, thought Saaski, that is why she never showed you them.

Yet she herself had not plagued or even asked, just
looked—and wished—and Old Bess had known it. Perhaps Old Bess knew everything. Everything in the world. Except not all the runes.

Anwara resumed her spinning-walk. When her back was turned, Saaski tugged the old trundle bed from under her cot and snatched out the bagpipes.

“I’ll fetch the cow now, Mumma,” she sang out, already halfway to the door.

“Now? It’s not time yet!”

But Saaski was gone. Anwara caught her spindle and came to the doorway. The sun was but halfway down toward the great shoulder of the hills. Angrily she called Saaski back to gather eggs and scrub the hearth. By then Saaski was nowhere to be seen.

Aware of amused glances from neighboring doorways—nobody else’s children could disappear so fast—Anwara clamped her vexation between her teeth and turned back into the house.

A moment later, Saaski slithered down the far side of an apple tree, hitched the pipes to her shoulder, and hurried on up the path toward the wasteland—and the moor beyond. Forbidden or not, she was going straight there. Maybe if she did not tell anybody, nobody would ask—or really care—how far she strayed. . . . Except Anwara. Anwara always asked. But perhaps she would lie to Anwara. Or just—not answer.

It no longer mattered. She had to go back to the moor. She could no longer stay away from the only place she had ever felt she belonged.

When Saaski was willing to mind—which was most of the time—she was as biddable as any other village child. When she had decided to balk, nothing could move her. Anwara might scold, Yanno might thunder and even raise his great blacksmith’s hand, though he could never bring himself to strike her. She remained passive, her strange eyes mirror-dark and her pointed face sad. But once her household tasks were done, she waited only till Anwara glanced away, then she was gone. Short of tying her to the doorpost, they could no longer keep her off the moor.

“Let her be, Daughter,” Old Bess counseled, stopping by the cottage one day to find Anwara in frustrated tears. “I have told you. She will come to no harm on the moor.”

“She should do as she’s bid!” cried Anwara.

“She does so—in everything but this.” Old Bess watched
as Anwara dashed a hand across her eyes and angrily blew her nose. “It is the moor itself you fear, is it not?” When Anwara did not answer, she took off her shawl, laid her little gift of sweet cicely on the table, and said coaxingly, “Come, brew us a cup and sit awhile, and calm yourself. Saaski will come back. But she cannot help going, and you’d best make your peace with it.”

Anwara’s shoulders drooped, and she did not answer, only pushed the kettle over the fire on its iron arm, and crumbled dried mint into a pot. They did not mention the matter again.

However, after that day she did not forbid Saaski to go where she would, or complain to Yanno. Yanno was glad to let the subject drop, to turn his mind back to his smithing, which he knew something about, and tell himself the two of them must have worked it out somehow.

It was a vast relief for Saaski. Her life had already begun to be two lives—the humdrum one in the village, made irksome by the bedevilment of the other children, though brightened by Old Bess and the books—and the other, truant life, high among the mists and bogs and wild, stony reaches of the moor. She was never sure which part of the moor she liked best—the steep broom-gilded, heather-shadowed slopes always solid underfoot, or the sometimes steeper bogs, spiced with danger. After a dry spell a bog was merely a mat of thready, springy moss that you could bound across as if your feet had sprouted little wings. In wet weather—which was scarier but exciting—you had to pick your way across a bog, wary of the tall tussocks of sedge and cotton grass that marked the wettest spots, where a misstep
could set you sinking and struggling into the sucking depths. But the glimmering little tracks she often saw there always traced a safe pathway—though she was careful never to put a foot directly on that glimmer.

The tracks crisscrossed the dry moor, too. Now and then she fancied she saw something—or someone—scurrying along them, too small to be a man, too moor-skilled to be a lost child, a shape moving too erratically to focus on. But if she managed a closer look, it always turned out to be a moorhen after all, or the flitting shadow of a raven wheeling overhead—or nothing but fancy.

She had soon found Tam and the goats again, by climbing as high as she could and listening for the mellow, fluttering sound of shepherd’s pipes and the tinkle of Divil’s bell.

“So! You’ve come back at last!” Tam exclaimed the day she first showed herself—a bit hesitantly—around the shoulder of the big rock he was leaning against. “I reckoned you’d changed your mind and didn’t like us after all.” His eyes widened as she stepped into full view. “What’s
that
you’ve got? It’s never bagpipes! Can you play ’em?”

“I can,” Saaski told him, grinning at his surprise and tucking the bag under her arm. “Will we play together?”

“We will! But this reed’s got too soft a voice—I’d best use me wee screamer.” Tam tucked away his long reed pipe and got out the small one hollowed from a finger-thick twig. “So give us a tune! I’ll find if I can tootle along o’ you.”

Saaski huffed and puffed the bag full, turning hot-faced with the effort, gave it the little clout with her fist that produced its preliminary coughing wail, then launched into
one of the liveliest of her strange little tunes. Tam listened a moment, his mouth ajar, once lifted his little pipe to his lips but then lowered it again and sat bemused till she’d finished.

“I’ll never learn
that’n
just tootlin’ along,” he told her. “Who taught it to you, Hizzoner the Elf King?”

“Nobody taught me,” Saaski retorted, her bright day suddenly dimming. “You making game of me?”

“I’m not, then!” he said promptly. “That’s a magic music if ever I heard any. And I suspicion I
have
heard some, now and again, out here on this moor.” He looked away, over the waste of rocks and heather and towering cloud pillars, his three goats nibbling in the foreground, and far behind them a gray, narrow curtain of rain brushing the horizon.