The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (60 page)

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

I
t
had
been
three
days
since the stranger returned to Invergó, there
on the muddy shores of the milky blue-green bay where the glacier
met the sea. Bruised and bleeding, she’d walked out of the freezing
water. Much of her armor and clothing were torn or missing, but
she still had her spear and her dagger, and claimed to have slain the
demon troll that had for so long plagued the people of the tiny village.

Yet, she returned to them with no proof of this mighty deed,
except her word and her wounds. Many were quick to point out that
the former could be lies, and that she could have come by the latter
in any number of ways that did not actually involve killing the troll—
or anything else, for that matter. She might have been foolhardy and
wandered up onto the wide splay of the glacier, then taken a bad
tumble on the ice. It might have happened just that way. Or she
might have only slain a bear, or a wild boar or auroch, or a walrus,
having mistaken one of these beasts for the demon. Some even
suggested it may have been an honest mistake, for bears and walrus,
and even boars and aurochs, can be quite fearsome when angered,
and if encountered unexpectedly in the night, may have easily been
confused with the troll.

Others among the villagers were much less gracious, such as the
blacksmith and his one-eyed wife, who went so far as to suggest the
stranger’s injuries may have been self-inflicted. She had bludgeoned
and battered herself, they argued, so that she might claim the reward,
then flee the village before the creature showed itself again, exposing
her deceit. This stranger from the south, they said, thought them all
feebleminded. She intended to take their gold and leave them that
much poorer and still troubled by the troll.

The elders of Invergó spoke with the stranger, and they relayed
these concerns, even as her wounds were being cleaned and dressed.
They’d arrived at a solution by which the matter might be settled.
And it seemed fair enough, at least to them.

“Merely deliver unto us the body,” they told the stranger. “Show
us this irrefutable testament to your handiwork, and we will happily
see that you are compensated with all that has been promised to
whomsoever slays the troll. All the monies and horses and mammoth
hides, for ours was not an idle offer. We would not have the world
thinking we are liars, but neither would we have it thinking we can
be beguiled by make-believe heroics.”

But, she replied, the corpse had been snatched away from her by
a treacherous current. She’d searched the murky depths, all to no
avail, and had been forced to return to the village empty-handed,
with nothing but the scars of a lengthy and terrible battle to attest to
her victory over the monster.

The elders remained unconvinced, repeated their demand, and
left the stranger to puzzle over her dilemma.

So, penniless and deemed either a fool or a charlatan, she sat
in the moldering, broken-down hovel that passed for Invergó’s one
tavern, bandaged and staring forlornly into a smoky peat fire. She
stayed drunk on whatever mead or barley wine the curious villagers
might offer to loosen her tongue, so that she’d repeat the tale of how
she’d purportedly bested the demon. They came and listened and
bought her drinks, almost as though they believed her story, though
it was plain none among them did.

“The fiend wasn’t hard to find,” the stranger muttered, thoroughly
dispirited, looking from the fire to her half-empty cup to the doubtful
faces of her audience. “There’s a sort of reef, far down at the very
bottom of the bay. The troll made his home there, in a hall fashioned
from the bones of great whales and other such leviathans. How did
I learn this?” she asked, and when no one ventured a guess, she
continued, more dispirited than before.

“Well, after dark, I lay in wait along the shore, and there I spied
your monster making off with a ewe and a lamb, one tucked under
each arm, and so I trailed him into the water. He was bold, and took
no notice of me, and so I swam down, down, down through the
tangling blades of kelp and the ruins of sunken trees and the masts of
ships that have foundered—”

“Now, exactly how did you hold your breath so long?” one of the
men asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow.

“And, also, how did you not succumb to the chill?” asked a woman
with a fat goose in her lap. “The water is so dreadfully cold, and
especially—”

“Might it be that someone here knows this tale
better
than I?” the
stranger growled, and when no one admitted they did, she continued.
“Now, as
I
was saying, the troll kept close to the bottom of the bay, in
a hall made all of bones, and it was here that he retired with the ewe
and the lamb he’d slaughtered and dragged into the water. I drew my
weapon,” and here she quickly slipped her dagger from its sheath for
effect. The iron blade glinted dully in the firelight. Startled, the goose
began honking and flapping her wings.

“I
still
don’t see how you possibly held your breath so long as that,”
the man said, raising his voice to be heard above the noise of the
frightened goose. “Not to mention the darkness. How did you see
anything at all down there, it being night and the bay being so silty?”

The stranger shook her head and sighed in disgust, her face half
hidden by the tangled black tresses that covered her head and hung
down almost to the tavern’s dirt floor. She returned the dagger to its
sheath and informed the lot of them they’d hear not another word
from her if they persisted with all these questions and interruptions.
She also raised up her cup, and the woman with the goose nodded to
the barmaid, indicating a refill was in order.

“I
found
the troll there inside its lair,” the stranger continued,
“feasting on the entrails and viscera of the slaughtered sheep. Inside,
the walls of its lair
glowed,
and they glowed rather
brightly,
I might
add, casting a ghostly phantom light all across the bottom of the bay.”

“Awfully bloody convenient, that.” The woman with the goose
frowned, as the barmaid refilled the stranger’s cup.

“
Sometimes,
the Fates, they do us a favorable turn,” the stranger
said, and took an especially long swallow of barley wine. She belched,
then went on. “I watched the troll, I did, for a moment or two,
hoping to discern any weak spots it might have in its scaly, knobby
hide. That’s when it espied me, and straightaway the fiend released
its dinner and rushed towards me, baring a mouth filled with fangs
longer even than the tusks of a bull walrus.”

“Long as that?” asked the woman with the goose, stroking the
bird’s head.

“Longer, maybe,” the stranger told her. “Of a sudden, it was upon
me, all fins and claws, and there was hardly time to fix every detail
in my memory. As I said, it
rushed
me, and bore me down upon the
muddy belly of that accursed hall with all its weight. I thought it
might crush me, stave in my skull and chest, and soon mine would
count among the jumble of bleached skeletons littering that floor.
There were plenty enough human bones, I
do
recall that much. Its
talons sundered my armor, and sliced my flesh, and soon my blood
was mingling with that of the stolen ewe and lamb. I almost despaired,
then and there, and I’ll admit that much freely and suffer no shame
in the admission.”

“Still,” the woman with the goose persisted, “awfully damned
convenient, all that light.”

The stranger sighed and stared sullenly into the fire.

And for the people of Invergó, and also for the stranger who
claimed to have done them such a service, this was the way those
three days and those three nights passed. The curious came to the
tavern to hear the tale, and most of them went away just as skeptical
as they’d arrived. The stranger only slept when the drink overcame
her, and then she sprawled on a filthy mat at one side of the hearth;
at least no one saw fit to begrudge her that small luxury.

But then, late on the morning of the fourth day, the troll’s mangled
corpse fetched up on the tide, not far distant from the village. A
clam-digger and his three sons had been working the mudflats where
the narrow aquamarine bay meets the open sea, and they were the
ones who discovered the creature’s remains. Before midday, a group
had been dispatched by the village constabulary to retrieve the body
and haul it across the marshes, delivering it to Invergó, where all
could see the remains and judge for themselves. Seven strong men
were required to hoist the carcass onto a litter (usually reserved for
transporting strips of blubber and the like), which was drawn across
the mire and through the rushes by a team of six oxen. Most of the
afternoon was required to cross hardly a single league. The mud was
deep and the going slow, and the animals strained in their harnesses,
foam flecking their lips and nostrils. One of the cattle perished from
exhaustion not long after the putrefying load was finally dragged
through the village gates and dumped unceremoniously upon the
flagstones in the common square.

Before this day, none among them had been afforded more than
the briefest, fleeting glimpse of the sea devil. And now, every man,
woman, and child who’d heard the news of the recovered corpse
crowded about, able to peer and gawk and prod the dead thing to
their hearts’ content. The mob seethed with awe and morbid curiosity,
apprehension and disbelief. For their pleasure, the enormous head
was raised up and an anvil slid underneath its broken jaw, and, also, a
fishing gaff was inserted into the dripping mouth, that all could look
upon those protruding fangs, which did, indeed, put to shame the
tusks of many a bull walrus.

However, it was almost twilight before anyone thought to rouse
the stranger, who was still lying unconscious on her mat in the tavern,
sleeping off the proceeds of the previous evening’s storytelling. She’d
been dreaming of her home, which was very far to the south, beyond
the raw black mountains and the glaciers, the fjords and the snow.
In the dream, she’d been sitting at the edge of a wide green pool,
shaded by willow boughs from the heat of the noonday sun, watching
the pretty women who came to bathe there. Half a bucket of soapy,
lukewarm seawater was required to wake her from this reverie, and
the stranger spat and sputtered and cursed the man who’d doused her
(he’d drawn the short straw). She was ready to reach for her spear
when someone hastily explained that a clam-digger had come across
the troll’s body on the mudflats, and so the people of Invergó were
now quite a bit more inclined than before to accept her tale.

“That means I’ll get the reward and can be shed of this sorry one-
whore piss hole of a town?” she asked. The barmaid explained how
the decision was still up to the elders, but that the scales
did
seem to
have tipped somewhat in her favor.

And so, with help from the barmaid and the cook, the still half-
drunken stranger was led from the shadows and into what passed for
bright daylight, there on the gloomy streets of Invergó. Soon, she was
pushing her way roughly through the mumbling throng of bodies that
had gathered about the slain sea troll, and when she saw the fruits
of her battle—when she saw that everyone
else
had seen them—she
smiled broadly and spat directly in the monster’s face.

“Do you doubt me
still?"
she called out, and managed to climb
onto the creature’s back, slipping off only once before she gained
secure footing on its shoulders. “Will you continue to ridicule me as a
liar, when the evidence is right here before your own eyes?”