The Moorchild (4 page)

“But
where?
” Moql asked him.

“Nearby. But Outside. In your father’s world.”

The fisher lad’s world. Moql blinked rapidly, her thoughts rushing about. “Will I—will I be fifty-odd years older, then?” she quavered.

They both laughed at her. “No fear, youngling,” said the Prince, stretching out full length among his cushions. “You’ll be startin’ all over. Luck to you.” He closed his eyes.

Starting all over? She wanted to ask him what that meant, but he seemed to have gone to sleep. Pittittiskin gave a little tug on her arm and jerked his head toward the shelf’s edge. This time she did not resist.

Starting all over—Outside. As they crossed the Gathering she glanced toward the stairway spiraling up toward the moor. “Will I go through the door, then?” she asked Pittittiskin. “When I’m ’changed?”

“No, no, nothing like that. Quit your fretting.”

“But when will it happen?”

“When it can.”

“But—”

“Hssst!” he said, with the little yank on her arm that meant he was tired of her plaguing him.

It was too much. She gave a choked little gulp, and hot tears sprang to her eyes, blurred the twinkling cavern and
the cookfires and the restless throng of the Folk, spilled over to run down her cheeks—confusing her worse than ever because she had never done such a thing as cry before. But then she had never felt so miserable before.

Pittittiskin eyed her in astonishment. “Eh, crybabying, are you? Now,
that’s
a human trick, that is.”

“But I can’t help it! How’ll I—do without—the Folk? The Mound?” Moql could scarcely talk for the great lonesome lump of grief in her throat.

“Ahh—don’t fret about
that.
You’ll forget all about us. Prince’ll see to it.”

“Forget the
Mound?
The
Folk?
” Moql stopped crying to stare in disbelief, in dismay. To forget everything and everyone she knew—it seemed worse than all the rest. “Y’mean—soon as I’m ’changed?”

“Dunno just when,” Pittittiskin said vaguely. “Soon enough, I dessay. Now step along.”

In another moment they arrived at Schooling House and he waved her through the earthen door. “Just eat your porridge and go to bed. Leave the worritin’ to the Prince.” He gave her a pat, then strode away.

She watched him thread through the crowd, then turned into the vaulted main cavern of the House. She found it unexpectedly full of younglings, collected in little knots of three or four, hands or elbows touching, all looking at her. They had heard, then.

“Help me!” she whispered.

After a moment Zmr said, “Can’t.” He shrugged, glanced at Els’nk and Tinkwa, who shrugged, too.

Their unblinking, shiny eyes watched her, curious but unexcited. They were as unconcerned as the Prince himself.

She had a flash of recognition that she
was
different from them—half human. It must be human—this tearing apart that she was feeling, when they felt nothing.

Yet she knew if Zmr or Els’nk or Tinkwa were to be ’changed, she too would likely stare curiously but not really care—so long as she still had the Mound, and the Band.

Half Folk, too.
Neither one thing nor yet quite t’other.

She turned away, wandered out into the corridor, and stood looking at nothing. Then she walked into the food room. She sat by herself at a long table, ate porridge she never tasted, and went to bed as Pittittiskin had ordered. But inside, she had begun to rage and scream.

*   *   *

She awoke, raging and screaming, in the truckle bed. She was shivering with cold, frightened, confused. She was in a low-ceilinged smoky room full of threatening smells and noises. A door banged open and an icy wind rushed in before the man forced it shut. Through the opening she had glimpsed snow and icicles. It was
winter,
then? But only a blink of the eye ago—so it seemed—it had been late summer.

Time ran different in the Mound.

The man was standing over her, staring down. A wave of terror swept her. He smelled of iron. He wore iron. He seemed fearsomely
made
of iron. She shrieked and frantically waved arms so short and helpless that she realized at last what “starting over” meant. Various faces came and
went in her line of vision—a woman, an old woman, the fearsome man. “She can’t be hungry.” “Stand away, Yanno, I’ll take her up, poor little Saaski, there, there . . . ”

She was gathered up bodily, swung about until she gasped with dizziness and had to quit screaming to breathe. The woman crooned and called her “Saaski” again. She struggled, yelled, pushed against the woman’s constricting arms until she was put down again in the truckle bed. It smelled of straw, not ferns and leaves, and crackled every time she moved. Exhausted, she lay still, hoping to sleep and wake up back in the Mound. Or even to forget, as Pittittiskin had promised. But she woke up still in her prison.

For days that stretched into weeks she dreamed of the Mound but awoke still there in the low-ceilinged little room smelling of wood smoke. The iron man clumped in and out. The woman moved here and there, clattering some things and thumping others. But she herself seldom dared stir from the truckle bed. Once or twice, waking to find herself alone in the house, she fought free of the covers, scampered across the floor on her too-short little legs, and took a run around the room and up the wall just for the joy of movement. A startled face at the window one day put an end to that. She barely made it back under the sheepskin before a sharp-eyed neighbor woman was in the room and staring down at her. When the woman of the house came home and found them so, there was a hideous argle-bargle that made her ears ring.

After that, she could scarcely move but what the woman Anwara was there beside her, smothering her in wrappings
as tight as a moth’s cocoon, picking her up and putting her down and when she protested, offering her poisons like St. John’s wort.

Moql hated the truckle bed and scorned the woman and feared the man and never stopped raging unless she was so tired she had to sleep.

Until the day the old woman came and told them she was a changeling, and the dreadful things they could do about it. That day she realized that there was to be no escape, even in forgetting. Pittittiskin had lied—or the Prince had not seen to it.

Painfully she forced herself to accept it. She’d been a blunderhead again; she saw now that she must try on her own to forget the Mound, instead of screaming to get back there. She must scream only enough to get the honey and ease the endless tedium. She must try to act like a human child. She must playact learning the simpleton speech she already understood well, and pretend she could no more climb a wall than an ordinary baby. She must blot out all she knew—except to beware of that old woman, which she must never forget.

She did not really believe she could do any of these things, but she began trying, and it began to work. To keep herself from thinking of the Folk-paths and the Prince and the cookfires and the twinkling lights of the Gathering, she counted the stones in the cottage wall, the bowls on the shelf, the birch boughs holding up the thatch, and listened closely to the kettle’s song or watched the ribbon of smoke as it curled up from the hearth to swirl out the hole in the roof. She pretended she had never seen heather or
sat in a treetop; that she had never been anyone but Saaski. And slowly the door to memory swung shut. The speech around her became mysterious; she began to learn it anew. She waved her tiny arms and legs and as they grew longer and stronger she began to crawl, then stand, then stagger from the cot to Anwara, from Anwara to the cot—and sometimes to Yanno, of whom she was no longer terrified, only wary without quite knowing why.

In this way—doubtless just as the Prince had arranged it—she buried deep within herself the knowledge that she had once been Moql.

So the squalling and screaming at the blacksmith’s house dwindled to normal levels, to the profound relief of Yanno and Anwara, who gave thanks on their knees for the colic’s end.

The neighbors were relieved too, but the gossip among the women around the village well did not end with the colic. Helsa, the wife of Alun, still claimed she had once seen Anwara’s infant leap from the truckle bed and run straight up the wall to perch catlike on a rafter.

“A body can be mistaken,” said the miller’s wife, Berenda.

“I was
not
mistaken. The Devil hisself couldn’t make me say else.”

The others refrained from comment. Nobody (apart from Old Bess, who had her secret reasons) believed Helsa’s story. They thought she’d snooped into Anwara’s house one
day, and been caught at it. But everybody—except Anwara, who was plainly betwattled—admitted the child was strange.

“So out of the ordinary!” said Berenda. “I’m sure none of mine ever behaved so.” She threw a complacent glance down at her own little Pellia—the youngest of eight—who was clinging to her apron, sucking a thumb.

“Aye, you’ve the good fortune for certain. Your young ones are perfectly ordinary,” commented a new voice dryly. Old Bess had appeared beside them unnoticed, as she so often did. “And now it may be we can all talk about something else.”

There was a brief silence. Faeran, the potter’s wife, tittered. Berenda’s color was rather high, but no one cared to annoy Old Bess, so the subject was changed.

Old Bess doubted that the gossip was even well started. But she was glad for Anwara and Yanno’s sake that Saaski had quieted, and even began to hope that her ill-timed mention of changelings had been forgiven. Not forgotten. Whenever she entered Anwara’s house, the little one fixed an uneasy gaze on her and kept it there as long as she stayed—and Yanno often brooded. However, she said no more, only waited.

A year went by, then others, and Saaski grew from an ill-favored baby into an odd, outlandish-looking little girl.

No one dared say so; Anwara would turn like a tiger on anyone venturing a comment. But all you needed, thought Old Bess, were eyes in your head. The other village children were red cheeked and sturdy, ranging from brunette to blond like ordinary Christians. Saaski’s dusky skin had
never lightened, while her wild bush of hair was paler than ever. She was wiry and small for her age, her slight little body topped with a head that seemed large because of all that hair framing a pointy-chinned, snub-nosed face. To Old Bess she seemed too strong for her size, with longer fingers and toes than was common. But if Saaski spied anyone frowning at them, those same fingers and toes suddenly looked as short and chubby as any child’s—though Old Bess could never quite decide whether any real change had occurred.

It was otherwise with the child’s eyes, which were as variable as ever, shifting from green to smoky gray to match her moods, with glimpses of that startling lilac when she was into mischief—and to a mirrorlike dark that was a defense, Old Bess was sure, against the stares.

There were always stares, and more than one villager crossed himself as Saaski ran by, for the tales had never quit circulating. There was the poor yield of Yanno’s pea crop one year, and the weevils that got into everybody’s barley malt the next—both were whispered to be Saaski’s doing. When Guthwic’s old cow dropped a two-headed calf, it was soon blamed on
that child
having “overlooked” the animal in its labor. No use pointing out that Guthwic’s half-grown boys had been there, looking, too.

Old Bess did her best to stifle the gossip, but day or night Saaski was up to something. She seemed to need little sleep, felt no sensible fear of darkness, and could see as well at midnight as at noon. Despite her frantic parents’ warnings, she would slip outdoors in the wee hours, scramble up onto the thatch and watch the moon awhile, or wander
into the night. She was forever missing, and Yanno fetching her back from the woods or—oftener—from the moor. Plainly more at home in the wild than in the cottage, thought Old Bess. She held her tongue, but the word she never spoke tolled like a bell in the back of her mind. Sometimes she was tempted to take matters into her own hands and try one of the drastic cures.

Her best chance came late one autumn. The morning Saaski turned six, Yanno decreed that she must begin to do her share of the family labor, and sent her out with the other little ones to gather firewood. It was her first such encounter without Anwara somewhere near. By then all the young of the village had overheard much of their elders’ talk. Old Bess, gathering leaves and silverweed in the edge of the woods, heard piping voices and drifted silently closer.

“I know you. You’re the smith’s Saaski.” It was Berenda’s little Raab talking.

After a moment: “Aye, the smith’s my da’. Who’s yours?”

“Guin the miller. We’ve got a hun’erd sheep. And a horse. My da’ owns the mill. I’ve got four brothers and three sisters. You haven’t got any.”

No reply.

“I know ’cause my mother told me. Here—Oran! It’s the smith’s girl. That one.”

Other voices: “The freaky-odd one?” “Bretla, cross yourself. Mama said to.” “Why, will she hurt us?”

A pause of uncertainty. Nobody had an answer. Somebody asked experimentally, “Are you a changeling?” and Old Bess’s heart gave a deep thump.

Saaski: “What’s that?”

It was plain nobody really knew. “Somethin’ eldritch,” Raab pronounced at last, adding bossily, “You’re not to pick up
our
wood. We got here first.”

Saaski: “ ’Tisn’t anybody’s wood. I’ll pick up what I see.”

“Not the best bits. Or I’ll tell my da’.”

Other voices: “Me, too! I’ll tell mine!”

Saaski: “Do it, then. And I’ll tell mine.”

A thoughtful silence, during which, Old Bess felt sure, a vision of brawny Yanno appeared in every mind. That line of torment was abandoned.

A girl’s high piping: “How come your hair’s like that?”

Saaski, stonily: “Like what?”

“Like
that.
It’s funny. Like a haystack.” Some titters, a few shushings. “Your eyes are funny, too. They’re strange.”

“She’s eldritch.” “A
strangeling!
” More titters. “Freaky-odd.”