The Prodigal Troll (37 page)

Passing the pipe to the man beside him, Squandral gestured sharply with his hands. "They have insulted us again. This time we must hunt the Lion down and kill it. Let us go back now and attack the invaders, striking them in the night-"

Maggot's ball of steaming dung hit the side of Squandral's head and splattered on the trollbird, Menato, who sat beside him. Men scattered, jumping up and grabbing their weapons.

Stupid people. Maggot drummed a rude tattoo upon his chest and keened mockingly before crouching down and running off to a new location. The men froze where they stood, wrapped in the fire's honeygolden glow like flies trapped in amber.

"It is one of the giants," Custalo said. "For the last four or five years, they have been an affliction on my people, coming in the night to steal our clothes and weapons."

"That does not sound like the giants," Squandral said. Or at least that's what Maggot thought he said; his nasally voice was hard to understand.

"We fear you not!" Menato shouted, still scrubbing furiously at his face.

Squandral waved him to silence. The broad-shouldered, craggyfaced old man lifted a hand to shield his eyes. It held an arrow. He stared into the darkness with the bow in his other hand. Maggot, now almost behind them, pounded his chest again and watched them spin. Squandral's arrow came first, followed by several others, but Maggot had moved away instantly. The missiles shot through the brush or sailed above his head and into the night.

After several moments of silence, one man asked, "Do you think we hit it?"

"Perhaps it was only up to mischief and we have driven it off," Custalo suggested. "That happens also sometimes."

Squandral hushed them all to silence, then gestured to Menato, who kicked the small fire. The sparks scattered, spinning upward as they cooled to cinders and the light of the fire sputtered out.

After that they whispered quietly.

A group of three crept out away from the camp, in Maggot's direction, but he withdrew, avoiding them. When they were well out from the camp, he crawled between them, raised his head, and screeched laughter. He scampered out of the way as the two groups unleashed arrows at one another. One of the men in the camp was struck. Squandral shouted at the other men to return.

Maggot crouched behind a tree where they would not see him, and choked down his laughter until his chest ached.

One group argued loudly with Custalo, and then slipped away, six or seven of them. Soon another group split off and ran away into the darkness, and then another departed, and another, until all had gone in the same direction as Sinnglas.

Maggot sat in the dark and scratched himself. He considered following them, but they no longer interested him. Wiping his hand clean on the grass, he grabbed hold of the glass jewels on his necklace. He had two of them. He would find the woman again, and give her one to show his interest.

By morning, he'd become distracted by his search for something more to drink than the dew he licked off rocks and leaves. He found a pool of murky water in a gully filled with rotting logs. The few sips he took didn't taste so good, but when he broke open the wood he discovered grubs. He was chewing a mouthful of them when the smell of smoke and roasting flesh reached his nose. Hurrying after it, he found himself in the empty battlefield beneath the tall poplars.

The remains of a huge bonfire smoldered in a clearing. Maggot proceeded carefully in order to avoid the invaders, but found none, only dead warriors, both invader and Wyndan, piled up about the slaughtered mammut and set aflame. All the ground around the mound of flesh had been cleared of brush, and a trench dug, so that the fire would not spread.

The mammut's fat puddled inside its corpse, sending up a smokeless blue flame that made the air twitch and shiver. Though the night was nearly over, insects came from far away to hurl themselves into the fire.

It was much the same way that his friend, Sinnglas, and the other warriors had hurled themselves into war.

Tiny bats dipped and spun out of the sky, screeching as they ate. Maggot remembered his own hunger, and the taste of meat, so he left the pile of blackened, smoldering bones.

He noticed a squirrel's nest, a hive-shaped mass of leaves and twigs, in the crook of a branch, so he climbed up. He thrust his hand into the nest and grabbed hold of anything he could reach. The leaves thrashed wildly, and then teeth sunk into his thumb. He jerked his hand out-a squirming ball of reddish-gray fur covered his fist.

The tree swayed as he tried to tighten his grip. Wriggling free of his clutch, the squirrel ran up Maggot's arm, the tiny claws digging into his skin, and leapt to the branch, and then to another tree, and disappeared.

Maggot dropped back to the ground and sucked his bleeding thumb. The taste was sharp and bitter in his mouth. He was very hungry.

Somewhere nearby, snarls answered the screech of carrion birds. He followed the sound just as his mother had taught him. Trolls did not kill one another for food, but perhaps people killed each other to feed the beasts.

Dew sheened metal lying in the brush, weapons scattered like fruit from a murderous tree. Maggot still had the knife in the sheath around his neck and needed nothing more, so he passed by them.

He made his way toward the sound of crows and nearly stumbled over wild dogs. They gazed at him with yellow eyes and sated bellies as he circled their rending of some warrior's headless corpse. One pinkheaded, turkey-necked vulture perched on something in the crook of a tree. Crows rocked on the branch above it, flying off as Maggot approached. The vulture flapped its wings at him, screeching its anger, then tried to fly away with his trophy, but dropped it.

Maggot ran and picked it up-a severed head with its eyes pecked out and a half-eaten tongue hanging out of its mouth. He thought it might be the man who'd called him a giant, but death changed a man's features beyond easy recognition.

Voices cracked the stillness. The wild dogs lifted their heads at the sound and slunk away.

Maggot bit down on a lock of the dead man's hair and, carrying the head in his mouth, wrapped his hands around the trunk and braced his feet against the bark to climb into one of the trees. Men never looked up high in the trees.

Five, then six men came out of the woods, one of them clinking as he carried an armload of weapons. They were gathering anything that had been missed before.

Forty feet up in the air, Maggot lay flat on one of the tulip's wide branches. He held the head in his fist, swinging it until he'd judged the weight and distance. Then he let go.

The dead man's head sailed through the air. As it began its downward arc, Maggot threw his voice after it.

"Yaaaaah!"

The men looked up at the moment the head bounced off the man carrying the weapons. He screamed, and the collection of pikes and arrows clattered to the ground. When he ran, the others followed him. Two, who were braver, paused a short distance away, but their friends continued running, and so they did too.

Maggot wrapped his hands around the trunk and quickly lowered himself to the ground. He picked up the head and stuffed it down a groundhog hole so they wouldn't be able to find it. Then he ran on, following the old faint tug in his heart toward the lower valleys.

The invaders left a trail of trampled grass and stinking mounds of mammut manure that even a stone could track. But by following them, Maggot went hungry. The game scattered ahead of them, while a pack of wolves and groups of wild dogs followed warily behind, eating any carrion or scraps and scaring all the rodents and small animals into hiding. Maggot caught grasshoppers, climbed trees for eggs, and gathered pods of seeds-little meals here and there.

When the trail led to the banks of an unfamiliar river that curved between rough hills, it turned upstream toward the headwaters. One morning he came to the river's source and found the cold ashes of the invaders' camp. He was less than a day behind them now. He wasn't following the army for any special purpose, but they seemed to be headed the same direction as he was. Crossing over the watershed, he traced their path until it joined a similar stream on the other side.

He followed it all day and ran on into the twilight, chasing his hunger. By the first full measure of darkness he came to a cluster of buildings like the ones he had attacked with Sinnglas. It seemed like a place to find something to eat. He approached cautiously, crouching toward a blank wall iced over by moonlight-

And he remembered the woman he had sliced open, the way she'd sat against the wall when she fell, the sound of her voice as she grunted. A hard knot of bile swirled in his throat.

He held onto his hunger and fled.

He passed several similar buildings in quick succession, sitting beside the trail or on the hills above it. Most were lit within by fires. Then suddenly the trail opened onto a wider valley flanked by treecovered slopes and overlooked by a bare, bedrock hill. A stone lodge many times larger than any he'd seen in Damaqua's village or else where occupied the heights. He ran under the trees, stirring the old pine needles with his feet, smelling nothing more than their scent, until the cries of animals and men rose up into the night.

A camp of tents-like the very first one he'd seen, beside the river -was spread on the cleared land below the stony bluff of the lodge. Huge bonfires licked the night with tongues of flame, and the scent of cooking meat filled the air. Maggot slipped through the trees until he was within a few hundred feet, close enough to hear voices without words. A group crossed in front of the fire, and Maggot saw that one of them had a vaguely familiar bulk. Trollbelly. One of the men who'd been hunting the lion.

A thinner figure the same height followed Trollbelly, stopped, put fists on hips. Laughter arrowed through the darkness straight at Maggot.

The woman!

It wasn't possible. But it was true. There she was.

His hand clasped the dangling pair of necklaces. How was he supposed to go and give her one? She was only a silhouette in the shadows, beyond his reach or understanding.

He felt stupid. He didn't know how to be people at all. He looked at himself, dirty, nearly unclothed, more like a troll than a man.

She passed beyond the fire and was gone.

An itch began between Maggot's shoulders, shooting down his back to his feet. Retreating through the trees, Maggot wheeled away from the soldiers and the camp and the woman, walking at first, then jogging, until he came to a deeply rutted track that followed the high bank of a stream, where he broke into a run. The stream wound through a yellow-green valley, like a long, brown snake slithering through the grass, all the colors muted in the moonlight. It twisted through a cluster of hills, doubling back on itself like a small animal fleeing a predator, growing into a river as it went.

The river babbled as it dropped sharply, flowing precipitously over rocks. Maggot jumped down the hills, from stone to stone. With the last drops in elevation, the river widened even more, and the surface smoothed out into deeper waters, and Maggot knelt at the water's edge to drink. When he rose, he forced himself to keep walking so he wouldn't tighten up. As he rounded another curve, he saw a yellow light flickering in the distance on the far side of the water.

He approached slowly. The light came from a small building at the river's edge. Maggot would have circled around it, but a dark and regular shape stretched across the water.

Maggot's stride shortened, faltered.

This was a bridge. Like a log across a ravine or a slab of stone across a fissure inside a cave. But to where? Where did he want to go?

A man came around the corner of the small building, carrying a torch in one hand and some kind of sack in the other. His long hair was yellowed by the flame. Something inside the sack he carried squirmed and mewed. He walked with the cautious, stiff steps of the old down to the water's edge, placed the torch in a holder, and began to sing.