The Moorchild Read Free

the bravest, Zmr or Tinkwa, stole away to the village and into a farmer’s stable, to spend a giggling hour tangling his horse’s mane or tying the cows’ tails together. The braggart Els’nk boasted of venturing into the farmhouse itself, to tickle the sleeping humans with ice-cold hands, but nobody believed him. It was only the elder Folk who dared such pranks.
    Some whole evenings the younglings spent watching over the tiny moon-white Folk cows with their red horns and eyes, at midnight driving them back to their hidden byre. Now and then they did no work all night, but stole old Flugenlul’s bagpipes and took turns playing them, ortied his beard to his weskit button and snatched his red cap and danced just out of reach when he grabbed at them.
    Before dawn they filed back through the boulder-hidden portal again and down the long stair—often mounting the handrail and spiraling down, one after the other—and back to Schooling House, ready to sleep awhile and eat something. Later an ever-curious youngling like Saaski—though that was not yet her name, in the Mound it was Moql’nkkn—a curious few like Moql might venture together out into the Gathering, the Mound’s central common.
    It was a vast, airy cave, the Gathering, a hollow in the rough crystalline rock that twinkled and glinted in the upper dimness as it caught the light in a million pinpoints. The light came from coldfire torches embedded in the rock walls, from scattered cookfires around which couples or groups collected and dispersed as impulse or hunger moved them, and from the greenish glow that was ever present in the Mound. There was constant flitting up and down the twisting stairway as the Moorfolk with their dark, clever faces and floating pale hair went about their erratic pursuits and whatever work was necessary to keep the band prosperous and well fed.
    Among them the little knots of younglings could wander, elbows or long fingers touching, big, slanted eyes observing the life of their elders—a life freer and wilder but as haphazard as their own.
    “I see your mama!” they teased each other. “There! See? That ugly one over there!”
    It was a silly joke; only the youngest, fresh from the Nursery, ever stared about, saying, “Where? Where?” Moql was one who at first had stared eagerly around. But then she saw that all the others were giggling, so after a moment she giggled, too. No youngling knew its mother—only that it must have had one. Each mother cosseted and adored her baby until the Nursery took over, then she forgot it and returned to the Gathering and a different mate and the careless life of the Folk, in which a great deal of everybody’s time, whether in the Mound or Outside in the humans’ world, was spent in dancing, feasting, mischief, idling, and dreaming. Food gathering was a game of light-fingered skill—stealing eggs from the moorhens’ nests, nuts from the squirrels’ hoards, lentils and milk from the villagers and their cows. They boasted of their pranks around the cookfires; one had stripped a farmer’s honeycombs, another emptied a fisherman’s basket as fast as he filled it, a third had shared a shepherd’s lunch. The younglings eavesdropped on the tales and could hardly wait till they were full-grown and skillful, too.
    It was a life without yesterdays or tomorrows—life as it was meant to be, Moql thought then, when she knew no other. And it went on, seamlessly, until she and the other younglings had finished their nighttime learning and began to go abroad by day—to find out about dogs and iron and crosses, and humans who were not safely asleep but awake and wary. They were taught to find the paths in sunlight, to note and heed the runic signs left by the Folk on barns or gates or doorways, and to make the secret runes themselves.
    Then one day they were called upon to hide—and everything ended in the wink of an eye for Moql’nkkn.
    It was a sudden test and a harsh one. That morning they were not