The Moorchild

PART I

1

It was Old Bess, the Wise Woman of the village, who first suspected that the baby at her daughter’s house was a changeling.

For a time she held her peace. Many babies were ill-favored, she told herself. Many babies cried with what seemed fury against the world—though this little Saaski had not done so as a newborn. It even seemed to Old Bess that the child had not looked quite like this for its first few months, but somehow she could never quite remember. Likely the babe just had a worse-than-usual colic. No doubt her skin, dark as a gypsy tinker’s so far, would lighten so as to look more fitting with that fluff of pale hair—or the hair might darken. It was even possible that the strange, shifting color of her eyes would settle down in good time. The parents both had blue eyes—Anwara’s sky blue like Old Bess’s own, big Yanno the blacksmith’s a deeper shade. The child’s were cloud gray, or moss green, even a startling lilac—never blue.

They were oddly shaped eyes—set at a slant, wide and shiny, with scarcely a glimpse of white around the iris. Old Bess, strongly reminded of the eyes of squirrels, shook off the thought. Plenty of babies looked like their great-aunts, or their third cousins, or some forebear nobody remembered, she told herself, and kept her lips closed and her face shut to the rest of the village, and her fears to herself.

She was by nature a close-tongued woman, solitary in her ways, who kept her own counsel until it was asked for—sometimes even then. Queerer still, to the minds of the villagers, she chose not to live with her daughter or kin like other widow-women, but all by herself, in the little hut where the old monk died, at the far edge of the scatter of houses where the street dwindled into a path over the moor. A mighty odd one, the others thought her. Contrarious! Some even said, behind their hands, witch. But she knew all about herbs and how to cure anything from a sore throat to a broken bone. So they put up with her.

Old Bess did not care to set them wondering—and gossiping—about her suspicions of little Saaski. Indeed, she wanted fiercely to be wrong. But she had never before seen a pair of eyes that seldom seemed the same color twice.

Anwara would admit no flaw in her precious infant. Seven years of marriage had brought her and Yanno only stillbirths. Now at last she had a child alive and healthy, like the other village wives, and would no longer feel an outsider or, worst of all, be classed with Helsa, who was barren. Helsa, wife of Alun, the only man in the village to own three cows, was not only childless but past the age of childbearing. Everyone pitied her, but it was hard to like her; her tongue was always wagging about one or another of her neighbors.

Anwara doted on the baby, and until the onset of the child’s strange, persistent tantrums, had bloomed with joy. By now the bloom had faded, but still she glared down anyone who gave her Saaski a puzzled look. She comforted and rocked. She patiently bore the screaming, though she grew thin and short-tempered as the weeks passed and little Saaski grew stronger and more active and even harder to control. Yanno was not so patient.

Can’t you keep the babe from squalling, wife? What ails it, screamin’ like a boggarflook?

She’s got the colic, is all! Sit you down and eat your dinner and leave Saaski to them that knows more about it.

I know that’s never colic, not to go on this long. My brother’s first one had colic. But it came and went, like. And the babe got over it by and by.

So will Saaski get over it, won’t you little one? Mumma’s sweetling, mumma’s poppet . . . sh, shh . . . Bending over the basketlike bed, Anwara narrowly escaped a clout from a flailing small fist. The racket grew louder, if anything.

Yanno watched and shook his head. She’ll be out of that truckle bed soon, and strong as my old ram. Look at her kick, there, will you?

Leave off staring at her. It frets her!

"It’s me that frets her, Yanno muttered, continuing to stare through narrowed eyes at his raging offspring, who glared straight back at him. Slowly he backed away. The child’s screams abated slightly. You see that? he shouted. It’s me she can’t abide! Her own da’!"

Oh, sit you down and eat, husband! I tell you it’s colic.

Then dose her with valerian or some such! But shut her up!

Anwara had tried valerian yesterday. Near to tears, she made a tea of St. John’s wort, only to have it knocked out of the spoon and into her face while Saaski shrieked and kicked with redoubled fury. At her wits’ end, Anwara tried a spoonful of honey, though it was said to be bad for little ones. At once silence settled like balm over the little house, and after a few minutes Saaski slept.

Anwara, weak-kneed with relief, snatched up her shawl and ran up the single grassy street in the bright spring afternoon to tell Old Bess she had found the cure. Yanno sat down at last to his porridge, but he kept an uneasy eye on the truckle bed. It was plain they must never run short of honey. Best watch for another wild bee swarm, he told himself, and braid another straw skep to bring it home to. Plenty of room for three hives, out beyond the garden.

Old Bess listened to Anwara’s tale of triumph, noting with sinking heart the baby’s telltale rejection of St. John’s wort and love of sweets. But she spoke only to encourage her daughter. No, no, my love, a spoonful of honey will not harm Saaski; no doubt it soothes her throat. Many little ones like honey. She did not add that very few turned scarlet with fury (or terror?) when their fathers came near them.

Instead, she slid a few sidewise questions here and there into Anwara’s overexcited chatter, and got the answers she dreaded. Yes, Yanno had been standing quite close to the baby; yes, wearing his belt with the iron buckle—like every other day, Mother, what a question. And yes, the saltbox was full; the salter had come through only yesterday. Was she needing a handful?

When Anwara had gone her way—heading for the village well, where she could be sure of finding a few neighbors to share her good news—Old Bess sat a long, grim time in thought.

The baby’s birth had been normal—she had overseen it herself. And the child had been placid and easy to care for—until around about its christening day. This, as Old Bess had known uneasily at the time, had been too long delayed. Father Bosa, who lived in the town several leagues away across the moor, prevented first by illness then by a late snowstorm, had not visited the village until after the first lambs dropped. Precisely when this colic had first appeared, Old Bess could not say. But neither she nor any other witness would forget that christening, with the babe squirming like an eel in the priest’s arms and screaming fit to deafen them all. The holy water went every which way, but whether a single drop fell on the baby’s head, only God could say.

Old Bess felt sure that by that day the exchange had already been made. In the dark of some midwinter night the human child she had helped to birth had been snatched away to some hidden, heathen, elfish place, and this alien creature who hated iron and salt and holy water had been left at the blacksmith’s house instead.

She had no appetite that evening for her soup and coarse flat bread, and what sleep she got was troubled with eerie dreams. At first light she put on her shawl and walked down the crooked street to the little stone house next to the smithy. Yanno had not yet gone to his forge, but was finishing his breakfast ale and chunk of bread. Anwara was bending over the hearth, setting the day’s loaves on the stones to bake. She straightened in surprise, said Well, Mother! dusted the barley flour off her hands and came to set a stool for Old Bess.

Saaski, across the single room in her truckle bed, seemed fast asleep.

I must talk with you, said Old Bess heavily. With a sigh she dragged off her shawl, sat down, and told them what she feared and why she feared it.

For a moment they simply gaped at her, stunned and speechless. You’re mad, Anwara whispered in a trembling voice.

Old Bess, unable to watch her daughter’s stricken face, or Yanno’s still one, found her glance pulled toward the truckle bed. The child had raised itself and was staring straight at her, with wide-open, tilted eyes, pure lavender. Their color changed at once to smoky green. Saaski flung herself back into the bedclothes and began to scream.

Anwara was up in an instant, running to snatch the child into her arms, glaring over its struggling, twisting body at her mother. There now! she cried furiously. Just see what you’ve done with your wicked lies! Hush, my little one! Sh—shhhh . . .  She patted and soothed and jiggled without the slightest effect, shouting over the racket, half sobbing, that it was lies, all lies, and she would hear no more of it, ever.

Will you not fetch the honey, wife? Yanno roared, and himself strode across to the shelf and brought her the jug and the horn spoon. Saaski shrank from him and screamed louder. He backed away, glancing at Old Bess, who shrugged.

It is not you, Yanno. It is the iron you have about you.

God’s mercy, woman! I am the smith! I will always have iron about me!

Then she will always shrink from you.

Yanno dropped onto his stool again, his gaze on his daughter, whom the honey had quieted. I cannot believe it, he muttered. I must not. I will not.

No, nor will any folk in their senses! snapped Anwara. She held the baby close, turned a defiant shoulder to her mother. I beg you will not spread this gossip in the village! Think of Guin, ever wanting to belittle Yanno, and Helsa, and that sour wife of Guthwic the potter—ah, what she would give to put me down! And besides, the talk, the talk—and they would all come here, prying, and peering in the window—

Daughter, I am no gossip, said Old Bess. Or liar, either.

Anwara fell silent, but her face was hard and closed.

Do you not want your true child back? Old Bess pleaded. If you would believe me—

"I have my child! She is here in my arms!"

Nay, wife, peace, peace— Yanno waved her quiet with a big hand, and turned to Old Bess. Supposing we did believe you—nay, Anwara, let me have my word now. Supposing it was all so. What should we do then, eh, old woman? How could we rid ourselves of the pixie, or elf-thing, or moorchild or whatever ’tis, and get our own babe back?

Old Bess had dreaded the question. There are ways, I’m told. She chose the mildest. The changeling will be gone in a blink, so they say, if it is only made to tell its age. For it may be no babe at all, but older than old.

Then we must wait for the great news till Saaski’s old enough to talk, retorted Anwara with a scornful laugh.

Yanno thought about this and raised his bushy eyebrows at Old Bess. Aye, so far the little one speaks no word even a heathen could understand. Tell us another cure.

Old Bess took a deep breath. I have heard—but I cannot swear it—that the Folk will come and take their creature back if—if it be thrown into a well—or onto the fire—or sorely beaten.

Fire? Beaten? Anwara gasped. She backed away, clutching the now silent child tighter than ever. I, do such to the babe I bore? Whatever are you saying?

But that is not the babe you bore! cried her mother. That is not even a human child—

Yanno’s deep rumble broke in. Enough! Let be. His gaze on Old Bess had turned somber. You mean well, old woman. But I’ll hear no more of these cures. I doubt I could so ill-treat any creature. Not when it looks so like a child.

Old Bess looked at their faces, rose, put on her shawl, and went back to her own hearth, her feet heavy and slow with her failure. She had spoken too soon, or not soon enough—she had troubled her son-in-law, set her daughter’s face against her, and only hardened their defense of the baby Saaski. Now there was nothing to do but wait for time and trouble to change their minds.

While Anwara, torn between fear and fury, went brooding about her daily tasks, Saaski lay in the truckle bed uncharacteristically silent. She, too, was brooding. And she was thinking hard.

2

She was not much in the habit of thinking, only of howling her bitter, lonely anger at her exile from all she knew and understood—her homeland, the Folk and their paths crisscrossing the moor, her numberless kin.

She neither tried nor wished to understand the alien human life around her. Through the long days, caged in the hateful truckle bed, bored and homesick, she had done little but rage and grieve. She cared nothing for her jailers—not the young woman who fed her the tasteless gruel and half smothered her with embraces, not the old woman who was her enemy, not the man with his fearful, threatening iron. They might live out their clumsy human lives or die tomorrow, for all of her. They might have their own babe back with her goodwill. Indeed, nothing would have pleased her more than to be gone in a blink, as the old woman said, back home to the Mound and the Moorfolk, leaving this truckle bed to its silly rightful owner.

But she had no fancy at all for these cures. To be beaten by that great hulking man with his fists like mallets and his smell of iron was a terrifying thought. As for being thrown onto the fire—! Yanno’s scruples would vanish the moment he stopped thinking of her as a child—and soon or late, with that old woman’s help, he would stop. Besides, suffering his blows would serve no purpose. The Folk might whisk her away from him, but they would only cast her out a second time, changed for some different human child. And to be put twice to the trouble would annoy them. Next time they might drop her into a far worse place, to pay her out.

As for telling her age, nobody could trick her into that, for she did not know it herself—only that she was still a youngling, just old enough for the others to discover that she could not hide.

She’d left the Nursery some time before, and moved into Schooling House with the rest of the half-grown young ones of the band, to learn the work and the paths. Every twilight she joined one of the ever-shifting groups of younglings led by old Flugenlul or Nottoslom or some other mentor, raced with them out of the earthen doorway of Schooling House, across the vast, twinkling cavern known as the Gathering and up the long, twisting, twining staircase of the Mound, chattering and pushing. Silent a moment at the top, then out through the main portal behind the great boulder, and onto the moor—evening after evening, the unruly troop of them, to spread out, running and skipping, under the enormous sky. The open air, the sharp, fresh scents of bracken and heather and stone and always rain—whether past or present or on its way—seemed new each night, too exciting to allow for any settling down until they’d run the kinks out of their legs.

But then old Flugenlul would summon them from wherever they’d scattered, and make them stay on the Folk paths while they did their evening’s work. Sometimes he led them down into the wood at the moor’s edge to gather twigs for firewood, or along the fringes of the lake below that to cut reeds for bundling into torches. Mostly they stayed on the high moor, collecting thistle-silk for the spinners back in the Mound, and tufts of wool left here and there by the