Troll Blood (2 page)

Kwimu follows. The encircling fog fills the woods with secrets. It’s a shape-changer, turning the trees into looming giants that drip and tiptoe and creak and murmur. Anything might lurk there, or stealthily follow them at the edges of sight. But if there was danger, Fox would sense it; Fox would warn them. Reassured by the thought, Kwimu strokes Fox’s cold fur, and hurries after his father.

Snow still lingers under the hemlocks and firs, and the
buds on the birches aren’t open yet. The forest is colorless, black, white, and gray. A dozen paces ahead, Sinumkw climbs silently through the swirls and pockets of vapor, like a ghost passing through world after world.

The woods are full of mysteries.
…

Grandmother said that yesterday evening, her bright birdlike eyes blinking in her soft wrinkled face. Kwimu thinks of her now, as he trudges uphill under the dripping trees. He can see her in his head, like a little partridge with bright plumage, wrapped in her big beaver-fur cloak with the colored quill-work glinting in the firelight. She’s so tiny, but so strong. And she has the Sight. Everyone listens when she speaks.

Long ago, in the time of the Old Ones…

All the stories begin like this.

…in the old days, two brothers go hunting. And they find a deep ditch, too wide to jump. A strange, smooth ditch, scoured out of sticky red mud, twisting along between the trees. The track of a Horned Serpent: a
jipijka’m
track.

Now this track is full of power.

One of the brothers climbs into the ditch to see what sort of thing made it.

Aha!

At once, his body changes. It bloats and swells and pulls out like an earthworm, growing longer and longer. His eyes widen and blaze, and two horns sprout from his head, one yellow, one red. He fills the ditch from top to bottom; he raises his head and hisses at his brother; he slithers away like a snake.
The track leads into the lake. He plunges deep into the water, and no one ever sees him again.

The woods are full of mysteries
…

In spite of his thick moose-hide robes, Kwimu is cold. Why did Grandmother tell that story? What does it mean? Everywhere he looks he sees omens. Layers of fungus, like thick lips that might open and speak. A rotten log like a corpse rolled up in birch bark.

Can anything good happen on such a day?

The slope steepens, broken by small ravines where icy creeks hurry down to join the river. There are voices in the creeks, Kwimu is sure, quarrelsome voices that squabble and bicker. Perhaps it’s the Spreaders, the nasty little people who peg you to the ground if you fall asleep by the streamside.

They cross one creek near a waterfall. Spray has coated the boulders with ice, and the pool boils and froths like a black kettle. Just the place for Grandmother’s story to come to life! What if a huge head crowned with twiggy horns emerged from the water, snaking toward them on a long slimy neck? In this haunted fog, anything seems possible.

It grows lighter. The woods thin. Kwimu follows his father along a knobbly headland that juts out from the forest into the white nothingness of the mist. He feels giddy, as if walking out into the Sky World. He knows that down there, where the ground plunges steeply away, there’s a fine gravel beach and grasslands beside the river. The bay, their summer home, where the women will gather shellfish, and the men and boys
will take the canoes out past the sandbars and right over deep water to the islands, to fish and to gather birds’ eggs. Right now none of that is visible. A mother-of-pearl sun peers through the haze.

All is quiet except for the hushing of the sea. But the mist tastes of smoke, sweet dry smoke floating up from below.

Fox growls quietly. His fur bristles, full of prickling, warning life. Kwimu and his father exchange anxious looks.

They hunker down in the wet bushes, ill at ease. Smoke means people, but a friendly village would be noisy with dogs, children, women chattering—so why the silence? If only the mist would clear. Straining his ears, Kwimu begins to think he can pick up the muffled sound of voices. Men talking—or arguing, for the sound becomes louder and sharper.

And then an appalling scream tears through the fog. Kwimu grabs his father. The scream soars into bubbling hysteria, and breaks into a series of sharp, yipping howls like a mad wolf. The morning erupts in shouts of anger and alarm, and a ring-ding, hard-edged clashing. Flocks of screeching birds clatter up from the forest.

As if their wings are fanning it away, the mist thins and vanishes. At last Kwimu and Sinumkw see what is going on below them, down by the river mouth.

The earth has been flayed. Instead of grassland, pits and scars of bare red soil show where the turf has been lifted. Two strange lumpish sod houses have been thrown up on a rising crescent of ground between the edge of the forest and the sea.
They look like burrows, for the withered grass grows right over them, but smoke rises from holes in the tops. Between these houses—these burrows—men are swarming.

Men? Their faces are white as paint, and they seem shaggy around the head, like a lynx or bobcat. These are not the Kwetejk, nor like any men Kwimu has ever seen. Are they the dead then, returned from the Ghost World? But some are pursuing others, hacking them with long axes, stabbing with lances. Some lie motionless on the ground.

Sinumkw taps Kwimu’s shoulder. “Look!” His voice is awed, shocked. “In the river.
Jipijka’maq!”

Kwimu drags his eyes from the scene below, and the hairs rise on his neck. Floating in the wide shallows where the river meets the sea are two things—bigger than the biggest canoe—and surely they are alive. For each has a head, staring shoreward from the top of a long neck. Each head is that of a Horned Serpent.

The smaller of the two is painted red, and the horned head snarls open-jawed from the top of a slender curving neck. The larger one is painted in red and black stripes, and it lifts a goggle-eyed head, beaked like a screaming eagle.

“Grandmother’s story,” whispers Kwimu. “This is what it meant.”

These people are
jipijka’maq
—Horned Serpent people, shape-changers. They come from out of the water and under the ground. Their whiteness is not paint, but the bleached pallor of things you find under stones. But why are they fight
ing, and why are they here? Kwimu moistens his lips, staring at the sprawled figures on the ground. Perhaps they’re not dead. Perhaps any moment now their feet and hands will vanish, their bodies will swell and lengthen, and they will slither off on their bellies into their dark earth houses?

But they never move.

“Hah!” With a cough of disdainful laughter, Sinumkw points suddenly. “See the coward there!”

A man in a green cloak is escaping, running away from the fight. He’s dragging a child along with him, a young boy. Just past the end of the nearest house he stops, and pushes the child, pointing to the woods. The message is clear. “Run!” he’s saying. “Run and hide yourself. Go!” The child hesitates, and is sent staggering with a hard shove between the shoulder blades. The man whirls and goes racing back.

So he’s not a coward after all; he was trying to save the child. And he’s unarmed, except for a knife. His enemies are coming to meet him. In the lead is a burly, bearlike man, obviously a chief. By his side is a boy no older than Kwimu, with long, loose golden hair that floats behind him as he runs, yelling. The burly chief shouts an order to his warriors. They spread out to catch the man in green, who dodges two of them and dashes on like a hunted animal, heading for the river. And then he trips and falls.

The chieftain shouts again and points. His men scatter sideways. The chieftain’s right arm comes up, balancing his spear. He pauses a second, and throws.

There’s a ragged chorus of whoops and howls from the men. They run forward, closing in on the crumpled green bundle. The spear stands straight up, a marker pointing at the sky. It twitches suddenly, it wags to and fro. The green bundle is still moving, trying to crawl away. Kwimu’s breath hisses through his teeth.

The boy with the golden hair strolls up behind the men. He is about Kwimu’s age, maybe fifteen winters old. His weapon is shaped like the long-bladed leaves that grow in the marshes—but red with blood. The others part to let him through; the burly chieftain puts an arm around his shoulders. Together they gaze at the man on the ground. Then the chieftain tugs his spear out. The golden youth hooks a foot under the body, rolling it onto its back. The man’s pale face comes into view. Still alive. His fingers open and close like claws.

Warriors taunt each other when they fight. If the man on the ground can still speak, this is the moment for his final defiance. And perhaps he does gasp something out. But the golden-haired youth laughs. The high, shrill sound echoes upward. He puts the point of his long red blade to the man’s throat, and shoves it in. Kwimu shuts his eyes. Only a blink, but when he opens them again, it’s over.

He turns his face away, and freezes. That child—the child the man in green was trying to save! He hasn’t run off; he’s peering around the corner of the nearest house, clutching the sod walls with both hands, craning his neck to see what’s happening. He sees the dead man, and shrinks like a
snail when you tap its shell.

The burly chieftain gives orders, pointing this way and that. His men fan out and start searching between the houses. Kwimu sucks in his bottom lip.
They’re hunting for the child. And they’ll find him; there’s nowhere to run.

The child presses against the wall. Any moment now the men will simply come around the building, and there he’ll be.

Then Kwimu almost shouts. The child turns and flings himself at the soft sod wall, digging fingers and toes into the cracks and crannies. He scurries up like a mouse, pulling himself onto the roof just as the nearest man rounds the corner. He lies flat. His light hair and clothes blend with the pale grasses growing on the turf roof, but he’s still completely visible to anyone who glances up. In fact, Kwimu can see one of his feet sticking over the edge.

But the man doesn’t look up. He strides along with his head down, staring at the ground. Kwimu bites his lip, hardly able to breathe.
Don’t move. He’s gone, but there’s another one coming. Don’t move!

Neither man looks up. It seems crazy, but they don’t. Kwimu sighs silently, surprised by the strength of his feelings for this strange foreign child. Beside him, Sinumkw shakes with admiring laughter. “That little weasel! To fool all those warriors with one simple trick! Look, they can’t think where he’s gone.”

And it is funny, in a way, seeing the men poking and prodding around the houses, and gazing into the woods, when all the time he’s a few feet above their heads, as still as a
sitting bird. All the same, Kwimu’s nails are cutting into his palms by the time the men give up. Maybe their hearts are not really in this search for a small boy. They return to the chief and his golden son empty-handed.

The chief shrugs. It’s clear he thinks it doesn’t matter much. He gestures to the bodies lying on the ground, and goes on talking to his son. Obediently the men drag the bodies down to the water’s edge. They wade yelling into the cold river, carrying the dead out to the smaller, slenderer of the Serpents, which jerks and snubs at its tether as if outraged at being given such a cargo. One by one, the bodies are tumbled in.

Where’s the child?

Sidling up the roof like a crab.

At least he’s pulled his foot in—no, don’t go near the ridge!

As if he hears, the child sinks down just below the ridge, but he keeps popping up his head and peering over. Kwimu bites his nails in agony.
Stop doing that, they’ll see you!

The chief gives another order. Whatever it is, the child on the roof understands: He flattens himself again, and the men troop back to the houses and begin emptying them. Everything is carried out. They stagger down to the river under bundles of furs, and heave them into the belly of the second Horned Serpent, the big one with the eagle’s beak. They bring out gear, pots, sacks, weapons. Shouting, they load up with timber: logs and planks from a pile on the other side of the houses. The creature—vessel, it must be some kind of vessel—sways this way and that as they adjust the cargo till it’s
riding level, a lot lower in the water.

“They’re leaving!” Kwimu says with a gasp of relief. “They’re going away!”

Sinumkw makes a brushing movement with his hand:
Quiet.
He watches the scene below with a hunter’s intensity.

At last, all is ready. A small, fat canoe collects the burly chieftain and his golden son—
they
don’t have to wade through the freezing water. The chieftain hoists himself aboard the big Serpent, but his son is ferried to the smaller vessel, and nimbly leaps aboard. Kwimu shades his eyes. The boy strides up and down, pouring something out of a big pot. He upends the pot, shakes out the last drops, and tosses it overboard. With an arm twined around the Horned Serpent’s painted neck, he leans out and catches a rope that uncoils through the air from the bigger vessel. He knots it at the base of the neck, and jumps down into the waiting canoe. In moments, he’s back with his father.

The men lift out long, thin paddles: It’s as if the Serpent is putting out legs like a beetle. Slowly it turns away from the shore, swinging with the current till it’s pointing out to sea.

Kwimu has never seen paddling like this before, with all the men facing the wrong way. How can they see where to go? But it seems to work. The red and black
jipijka’m
is crawling away out of the river, loaded with furs and timber, and towing its companion behind it—the red Serpent of the Dead.

So they’re going, and they haven’t found the child. Does he know he’s safe? Kwimu glances down at the roof.

The child is sitting up, staring.

Get down, get down—they might still see you
…

But the child gets slowly to his feet. He stands in full view of the river, conspicuous on the rooftop. He lifts his arm, both arms, and starts to wave and scream. He’s dancing on the roof, yelling in a shrill voice.