The Moorchild by Eloise McGraw

Author:Eloise McGraw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books

13

Just one week later, the gypsies came to Torskaal, arriving at midmorning—an excitement of decorated, hooded wagons and long-maned horses, dark-eyed men and women, and their tangle-haired, light-fingered children, all jingling with bells and hung with tattered bright ribbons and offering everything from tin mending and copper work to reading the future in a body’s palm. For a few hours they were all over the village, bartering whatever they had for flour and honey and dried peas, hanks of wool and bladders of lard. Several went to Old Bess for herbs or simples, or with ailing little ones. The children, gypsy and villager, ran shrieking from one end of the street to the other, or taught one another dances and games. By midafternoon the wagons were leaving, winding up onto the moor beyond Old Bess’s cottage on the track to the town some leagues away.

Saaski missed the whole entrancing spectacle. Or nearly the whole. However, she saw and heard a few odd things herself that morning—one of them stranger than gypsies, and a deal more unsettling.

The morning began with a bit of good luck that nevertheless threw this day out of kilter from milking time on.

The milking itself went well; she emptied her pail into the churn, then refilled it with water and lugged it into the long back garden while Anwara took the larger bucket to the well. They needed much water lately. It was retting time for the flax; Yanno had cut the crop some days before, and Anwara had combed out the linseeds for Old Bess to make into poultices and calf-brew. Now the stalks lay spread in a sun-warmed, water-filled stone trough beside the garden, soaking to loosen the hidden fibers from their woody bark.

Saaski replenished their bath, shook her wooden pail to get the last drops, then stood looking about at the morning and sniffing the rosemary-scented air. The rosemary grew at the farthest end of the garden near Yanno’s bee skeps, for the bees loved it, too. As Saaski glanced that way, her attention sharpened. Just there by the big skep, a small, dark, vibrating cloud—growing larger every second—was hanging outside the slit door. As she watched, the cloud rose; a stream of bees streaked out of the hive and began to trace great circles in the air.

At last! Near a month after the other two, the bees in the big hive were swarming. Yanno must be told—and told quickly, so he could drop everything to get the new skep ready.

What luck! thought Saaski, as she sped back down the garden, still clinging to her pail, leaping over the carrot rows and little cabbages—what great luck, that she chanced to be there, to see which direction they flew. She could follow the swarm, mark where it settled, and keep watch till Yanno had exchanged the new skep for the old and scented it temptingly with herbs, and come to capture his bees again. They had worked together so, other years. It was a kind of game—hard-won but exciting.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.