The Curiosities (Carolrhoda Ya) (33 page)

L
ISTEN!

They say the stars spread so bright that night on the mountain that the young berserk looked to the west and saw a narrow road cutting between the tall pine trees. Fate whispered in his ears, and he chose at the last moment to steer his motorcycle along a new, twisting route through the Rock Mountains toward that new band of bear warriors awaiting him in Washington State. For he was in no hurry to arrive, to swear his allegiance to a new captain when his first band had so lately been destroyed. The threeday battle against ice giants entrenched at the edge of Lake Eerie had stripped his commit-brothers to bones until he alone stood. For the month since he’d been home with his mother in Dodge City, Kansas, to make proper sacrifices and come to terms with survival.

It was a column of silvery smoke carved against those bright stars that drew him off the road. His tires crushed the beds of pine needles to fill the air with sharp evergreen, and there appeared a clearing where a girl was busy flinging items into a burning house.

A brown box splayed torn and open next to her feet, and she kept bending to dig inside, pulling out a Stoneball cap, a trophy, an old book, and worn shoes. With a grunt she heaved them, one after the other, in a high arc toward the bonfire.

Swiftly he cut the bike’s engine and ran to her, thinking first that she was trollkin, with her bared teeth and dark skin and roaring. But she was just a girl throwing family heirlooms onto a funeral pyre.

LUTA:

Here’s what happens:

We’re watching reruns of
Star Trek
. My brother Horn keeps adjusting the antennas to get a better signal. Captain Kirk’s face flickers constantly until Mom throws up her hands and says, “This is ridiculous. We should play Shield instead.”

As if Fate agrees, the mountain trembles beneath us.

Dad is instantly on his feet, braids swinging as he turns toward the front of the cabin.

My sister Alecia grips my hand. I pull away and follow Dad, leaving Alecia and Mom and Horn in the den. In the entryway, Dad pushes aside his All-Warm fleece jacket to grab his battle hammer off the hook drilled into the wall. He presses his ear to our thick wooden door.

“Dad?” I whisper, hands clenching. I wish I had weapon to push all my fear into.

“Go back to your mother, Luta. Send your brother to me.”

“What is it?”

“Luta, listen—”

The earth shakes again, and this time the rumble doesn’t stop. Dad slams the bar down over the door. I’ve only ever seen it lowered once before, when I was five and the Fenris Wolf was rumored to be loose on our mountain.

Hammer in hand, Dad backs up, pushing me along with him away from the door. Guttural howls echo outside. “All the lights,” Dad snaps, and we split up. He heads around toward the kitchen, flipping off switches and shuttering windows.

Eventually I return to the den, where Mom’s already closed everything. Horn now stands in the middle of the room with his hammer in hand and Alecia with a hatchet pressing her back into his. The skin around my sister’s lips is tight and gray with fear. I run past, into the back of the house where the bedrooms are, flipping off more lights and tugging the blinds closed. If they don’t see us, they may flow past the house like a flooding river around deep-rooted trees. But I can still hear them coming, louder now—their bellowing shakes the window glass. There are screams like metal tearing into metal and the crash of pine trees ripped up and slammed into the ground. The herd rolls closer like a storm, tearing down the mountain.

I am back in the entryway, almost all the way around to my family in the den, when the front door explodes inward. A heavy silhouette crams into the doorway. I smell his rancid breath from the foot of the loft stairs. I freeze. Sometimes trolls have poor eyesight, and maybe he doesn’t see me.

His mouth smacks as he stomps in, spiked club dragging over the welcome mat. Behind him are more. One calls in their language. It sounds like rocks crunching together.

The troll before me chuckles. “Little girl,” he says as more of his fellows shove inside.

My father yells from the den, and I clamber up the stairs to the little loft where I sleep. The troll tries to follow me, but the rickety old wood gives beneath his weight and the entire staircase collapses. He crashes back to the floor. Thin blue carpeting holds the shattered steps together, and they dangle for a moment before the troll rips it all free in frustration. There is more trollish laughter—in the dark I can’t tell how many press behind him. I huddle at the top step, my knees pulled tight to my chest, desperate to remember if there are weapons in my loft.

Wood splinters as they break open the den wall into a troll-sized arch.

My sister screams.

“Alecia!” I scream back. But I’m trapped. The stairs are broken, and my troll waits at the bottom, thick hands grasping at me as though he imagines what it will be like to pull my body apart.

Dad yells something, and Horn roars. Mom cries, and a horrible crunching sound cuts her off. Trolls laugh. I stare my troll, every piece of me shaking. His thick teeth gleam in the stray moonlight spilling down from behind me.

I close my eyes, but it makes things worse because I can hear my family fighting; I can hear the crash of the entertainment center and imagine Alecia’s body crumpled and broken and sliding to the floor. I imagine their breaking bones and splatters of blood, because I’ve seen old black-and-white pictures of the Montreal Troll Wars.

There’s nothing I can do.

I hold myself in a tight ball, and I open my eyes to stare down at the troll because a face like his will be the last face my family sees before they die. I have to give them that much, to see what they see. And I tell myself over and over again: At least they are together. At least they die in action, fighting and brave. At least.

The troll wiggles his fingers at me, beckoning. I only stare through the darkness. Another troll suddenly appears from the den and punches my troll in the shoulder. Clenched in that heavy fist is Alecia’s torn sweater. A trail of blood squeezes through his fingers. My stomach rolls over.

“Little girl!” my troll coaxes, “come down, come down. I’ll catch you.” He makes his voice tender, like he’s speaking to a little lamb or a trollkin. His companions drag him out. They’re leaving.

The loft shudders as the herd of them hurtles away, making the mountain tremble.

I am left in silence.

LISTEN!

They say that Rein Konrsson had to pin her arms down and drag her away from the fire, dodging her teeth and the harsh jabs of her heels against his shins. “Calm down, kid!” he yelled into her ear.

She froze when she heard his voice, his New Asgardian tongue. Rein was just able to settle her on a boulder and step back out of her reach. In the cold starry night, she wore only jeans and a long, tattered sweater. She had no shoes, but only thick wool socks, and the rows of braids on her head ended in beads red and bright as blood. Her eyes were pink and teary—from smoke or fury or grief he had no way to know.

They say he asked what a kid like her was doing alone at a burning house, and that second time he called her a child she growled, “I am almost fourteen. Not a kid.”

And so, swallowing the wish that he’d ignored the ribbon of smoke and stuck to his lonely path, Rein gritted his own teeth to say, “I am Rein, son of Konr. I was riding past when I saw the fire beckon.”

Her chin lifted bravely as she declared, “I am Luta, and my family is dead.” Her eyes slid toward the fire, and its red glare reflected in her dark pupils.

It was then that Rein Konrsson noticed the shattered glass twinkling across the yard. The old Veedub van with its doors torn off the frame and windshield smashed. Giant footsteps through crushed herbs in a box garden. And he smelled it under the acrid smoke: the sweet, cloying smell of mud and shit that signaled trolls had passed this way.

LUTA:

I watch the older boy stand up slowly and walk toward my house. He bends down over the box I dragged from the shed. One of Alecia’s old stuffed wolves is on top, and he lifts it out. With a graceful flick of his arm, Rein tosses it into the fire.

I run back, and together we throw every memory away. It’s the middle of the night, but the burning house keeps away mountain cold and most of all the darkness. It flickers over his face, obscuring his features and making his eyes black. I hope mine are that fierce.

When the box is empty, we tear it in two and creep as close to the heat as we can. My skin tightens and my eyes burn. I step in again. And again. The fire reaches for me, and I feed it the cardboard. I keep my eyes wide open, feeling them burn, feeling tears stream out onto my cheeks and dry there.

Rein says something, and I stumble back, landing on my butt. He stands behind me and lifts my up by my armpits. “Let the Aesir welcome them. They are summoned home.”

“And fire lights the way,” I whisper.

As dawn beings to fight against the orange glow, I wrap my arms around myself and remember the troll that reached for me. I want to tear the beast into a million pieces.

“Rein,” I say, glancing up at him, to tell him I want blood-price for my family.

He looms nearer, and when he tilts his head to reply, for the first time I see the black spear tattoo slashing down his cheek.

“Berserk!” I spit it out before I think.

His grin is swift and full of teeth. “I promise not to eat you.”

The ground is spinning. He’s one of the Alfather’s—a wild, dangerous berserker warrior who can kill a dozen men in a minute, with all his braids intact. Now I notice the scuffed leather armor holding to his body like it was painted on. The steel-toed boots. The bracers. The heads of the battle-axes peeking at me from over his shoulders. But he’s young. Only as old as Horn is.

As old as Horn was.

My stomach churns. What does it mean, a berserk showing up at my family’s funeral pyre? What sign? I want it to be Fate sending me the tool of my revenge. As I stare at him, his grin fades. I plant my fists on my hips to answer, “I would be stringy and tough.”

He agrees with me. His chin jerks toward his bike. “I’ll take you someplace safe. Do you have family nearby? Which way did the trolls go, do you know?”

I suck air in through my teeth. The cold aches, but it keeps me from thinking of Alecia. “They went down the mountain, west and south.”

LISTEN!

They say the mountain watched as the motorcycle sped down the road, east and north. From the shadows between red-barked pine trees and from beneath broken boulders where the sun never reached, thin spirits focused eyes and attention onto the berserk and the girl. At a junction of two old roads, the berserk circled his bike wide to avoid passing across the face of the crossroads shrine, hoping evade to the mountain’s interest. But the girl remembered pausing there with her family, to lay down a broken telephone dressed with red ribbons and ask the ancient mountain spirits to protect them. The elves and lesser trolls loved bits of technology to shape and reform, her mother had said in a hushed voice, and maybe even just for play. Her father let her uncork the honey wine and pour libations into the dirt, let her turn the whole bottle over while the golden liquid glugged out.

Remembering, the girl pressed her face against Rein’s back, finding space for her nose between the long handles of his battle-axes. Her arms wrapped around him, fingers clutching each other across his chest as if he were the only thing holding her onto the middle world. Her braids whipping back, beads slapping together in the fierce wind as Rein drove.

They say he could feel her squeezing his ribs, and he understood that the little thing grasped onto him because if she let go she might fade into a wisp of smoke and ashes.

Clouds rolled in, and as the first misty rain descended they pulled off the road to shelter in the lee of a giant boulder.

Damp air clung to the underside of the rock, but they tucked themselves against it, shoulder to shoulder. Rein tied a clean sock around the tear on her palm until the bleeding slowed and stopped. He made her drink an entire bottle of water from under the buddy seat and fed her a granola bar. She crammed the whole thing into her mouth and chewed with it stuffed into her cheeks like a squirrel.

He did not complain, for being the only survivor had made him hungry, too.

LUTA:

I finish the food and drink, and Rein nods. He leans his head back against the rough boulder and closes his eyes.

Like him, I close my eyes.

And I am back in the loft, I am hugging my legs against my chest, waiting to die. I can smell blood. The door to the den hangs from the top hinge like a flap of skin. The starlight fills the air with a quiet glow.

Slowly I stretch my legs, wincing at the ache of blood rushing back into them. I don’t know how long I’ve been crouched, looking down the broken stairs. Wondering if they’re really gone, or if my troll waits for me outside. But I can’t hide forever. What if Mom is still gasping for breath? What if Horn is alive?

I crab-crawl down the top three stairs, the only ones left, because I can’t bear to turn my back to the front door. At the edge I hang my legs down. It’s only seven or so feet. I can drop.