by E. E. Knight
“Age and infirmity took her too soon, as it does all humans. But we had many years of comfort together. I met her when she passed through with Old Nightingale’s Circus, now under Ragwrist—though, like everything else these days, much reduced in scope and splendor. She left me comfort in my son, transitory though it was; he had something of his mother’s temperament and my father’s courage.”
She looked at his portrait. Some manner of sash was woven about the harness that held his sword. His eyes challenged, as if daring the portraiteer to capture him.
All that served to remember his granddaughter was a sketch. A simple charcoal depicted her; Rainfall apologized that he had no skill with formal portraiture. The girl-child had overlarge eyes compared with the others, but perhaps hominid youth accounted for that, for if the sketch was life-size, she was a good deal younger when drawn than the others. The elf blood came through strong in her cheek-bones and delicate ears.
“She still lives?” Wistala asked. Curiosity about her host made her stop in front of the drawing.
“Yes, but Lada’s been away from me these eight years.”
“With her mother?”
“We never knew her mother. Or I should say, I never knew her. Some sport of her father in one of the taverns of Quarryness or Sack Harbor, I expect. She arrived on my doorstep as an infant, bearing a note my son burned rather than show to me. She was my comfort after her father’s death. Since—since—please excuse me.”
Rainfall turned his face to the wall, and after a last look at the charcoal portrait, Wistala crept out of the room.
As the leaves turned color and dropped, Wistala explored the broken houses at the base of the two hills, pulling nails and hinges from the ruins to satisfy her hunger for metal. She’d come terribly close to stealing a small silver candleholder from a side table on one of her passes through the house and decided to hunt metal on her own.
When she returned, all her claws counted thrice worth of horses were standing in the field beyond the barn under the care of two boys who occupied themselves by throwing rotten apples at each other from opposite sides of a stone wall that held the saddles.
She circled the house to get downwind of it and found a yew tree to climb, where she spent an uncomfortable night. The riders left in haste the next morning—she saw only the backs of cloaks and a few gamboling dogs of the ordinary sort, not the huge savage brutes she’d pulled over the ledge.
Somewhat stiffly she climbed down from the tree to hear Rainfall calling:
“Tala Tala Comeoutfree! They’re gone, and it is safe.”
He hurried to meet her as soon as she extended her neck above the bushes.
“More of the thane’s men?” she asked.
“Better and yet worse, at least for you. It was the Dragonblade and a party of hunters.”
Breath and death, the Dragonblade! Wistala couldn’t help but crouch at the name.
“He said a young dragon had escaped him, blamed the miss over the loss of his beloved pack in the summer. He has to go back to training pups for a while.”
“You fed him and his horses, then?”
“What could I do? He carries a Hypatian Knight-Seal. I’m old fashioned enough to bow to any who carries it, even if he hunts a friend. Though I felt no need to disclose your presence, especially as his line of questioning allowed me to keep my honor and your friendship.”
“What do you mean?”
“The description he gave was laughable. He got your size right, but had the color wrong—lots of talk of wolves’ hides and such. I could honestly say I’d not seen anything like that about the road.”
“Why the road?” she wondered. Of course, they first came upon my scent on the same road near Tumbledown.
“I gave his dogs as vast a meal as I could manage so they’d sleep rather than sniff around the barn. Same with the men. I fear our dinner tonight will be their leavings, little though there are.”
Wistala was grateful for a moment that she hadn’t been hidden in the barn or somewhere closer. There would be danger, yes, but temptation. Men were vulnerable when they took off their armor to sleep. She’d learned the knack of walking silently through the home without letting her claws touch the flooring to save Rainfall’s woodwork.
“Have they gone for good, or will they be back?”
“They’re hurrying south. They believe you to be heading in that direction, but on what evidence, I can’t imagine.”
“I may have left southbound marks crossing it from the old hovels beneath the twin hills.”
“Or perhaps the Dragonblade makes guesses to impress his men. A right guess is long remembered, and there’s always an excuse for a wrong one.”
Wistala spent another cold night in the yew tree that evening, just in case the Dragonblade doubled back.
Rainfall had her observe him carrying out his duties on the road, more as a mental diversion for her than anything else. For two active weeks as the temperature dropped, he and a dozen men went along the road, filling in holes; then they applied pitch to the timbers of the bridge to proof them against ice and snow. This part of the north saw frequent freezes and thaws and snow, thanks to the air currents of the Inland Ocean a few horizons to the west. Even once the labor was done, he bargained with the men a little extra to dig up vegetables and bring in hay and slaughter and salt some goats.
Payment was a problem, for Rainfall had little money. He gave away odds and ends from the vast house in return for their work, anything from candlesticks to cooking skillets. Wistala understood now why the place seemed so bare, save for his high room of books and basement of wine.
Then they settled in for the winter.
Wistala had been installed in what had once been what Rainfall called a “health-room,” a wooden enclosure of fragrant cedar wood, where stones heated in the furnace would be brought so that water might be dripped on them. It had a gutter in the center that made for easy cleaning, and she was happy to find hatchling scales on the floor each morning, with new ones coming in fast and thick owing to a supply of tarnished brass plates and drinking vessels she smelled out buried in the dirt floor of one of the abandoned houses.
Wistala asked about hominid commerce one night over dinner, and Rainfall did his best to explain it. “A dwarf would make it simple, I’m sure. I’ve not much of a head for additions and subtractions and excises and taxes.”
The last in the list seemed to be his chief worry. As she understood it, twice a year he owed his thane an amount of money that had been set at a time when the estate was prosperous, and though Mossbell had the misfortune of having a troll appear and pillage the lands, he was still expected to produce the same sum. No amount of pleading with the thane could alter it.
“What do you get in return for these taxes?” Wistala asked.
“The thane’s protection.”
“But not from trolls.”
Rainfall poured himself a little more wine. “He has posted a reward, in the form of a small sum and relief from all taxes and excises for five years. But few are willing to take the challenge. What happened to Eyen is still fresh in many minds.”
“Your son tried to kill the troll?”
“His death is my fault. The bundle containing Lada had just arrived, and I’d engaged a wet nurse. He and I argued about his scattering bastards around the thanedom. Elf blood passes down an alliance of aspect and tongue that human females find pleasing, and he took advantage of manner and countenance. I . . . I challenged him to perform some useful duty. I meant that he seek gainful employment to defer the cost of his daughter, but he rode out on Avalanche, the last of his grandsire’s line of mighty warhorses, to solve all our difficulties on the point of his lance.” Rainfall struck the table with his elbows so hard, the plates and goblets jumped. Then he concealed his face with his long-fingered hands.
Wistala stood still, never having seen a violent move from her host before.
“I beg your pardon,” he said when he collected himself. “You�
��ve finished your salmon already. Would you care to dispose of mine? Having a drakka about so simplifies the clearing up.”
Wistala learned the cloudsign for snow, sleet, and rain that winter—what weather Mossbell saw depended on the direction of the wind. It blew mostly from the west, and if it veered farther south for a while, it grew warmer, but when it came out of the north, it became bitterly cold and made her alternately ravenous and torpid.
Father had hunted in this winter wind a year ago to feed his hatchlings?
Being indoors frustrated her, and on the first sunny day after the sun turned south again, she set out to walk the grounds of Mossbell.
It wasn’t an accident that she walked west, crossed the road, and plunged into the broken forests covering old grazing land. The ground was still snow-covered where the afternoon sun couldn’t reach, and what wasn’t snowy was wet. She found sign for wild pigs and roaming goats.
Finding troll tracks took a little time.
She found several troll-traps easily enough. It took a good deal of ear, nose, and eye-work to establish what they were. The troll would dig holes in the ground, perhaps her full body-length deep, and then cover them with a lattice of slight branches and growth, with fragrant berries in the center. It lined the bottom with flat rocks chipped and broken in the hope that a sheep or pig would blunder in and injure or trap itself.
She found bones at the bottom of one.
Then she cut across its tracks. The troll had huge three-toed feet, though the toes didn’t point in the same direction as they did with elves and dragons. Something like the mark of a horse hoof stood in the center, with the digits stretching out not quite in opposite directions, like widely spread bird toes. Here and there, similar, smaller versions of the tracks could be seen that she guessed were its hands.
She found a heap of droppings close to the river-cliff edge. They were like a rotten melon filled with little white worms left on a hillock. Her nostrils closed in disgust.
The ground here had a trodden-on look like a cattle wade, with a profusion of tracks and divots, and grubby prints on the rocks at the edge of the cliff.
Wistala couldn’t see her host’s bridge from this part of the river, and the twin hills near his estate were just bluish lumps. The river canyon stood so wide here that objects on the far side couldn’t be distinguished from each other.
White birds crisscrossed the river, looking for food. Another variety, gray with yellow beaks, poked around the rocks at the base of the cliff under all the marks.
Wistala craned her neck out as far as she dared, digging her tail into the crevice between two sturdy rocks like one of Rainfall’s fishhooks buried in a trout’s jaw.
A cave marred the fluted sides of the canyon wall, closer to the top edge than the base.
She could imagine what the birds at the base of the cliff were feeding on.
Instincts older than she took over as she evaluated the troll’s home. Fresh water would never be a problem. Enemies couldn’t reach it without a good deal of difficulty, it would take a huge climbing pole or ladder to reach the cave mouth from the river, and anything that walked on two feet would risk its neck climbing down from above. A dragon might like it even better: you could fly in through the river canyon at night, skimming the surface, and escape observation. She imagined there was usually food of one sort or another to be had near a big body of water as the Inland Ocean, just a horizon downriver.
Wistala examined the cliff until she found a ledge thick with mosses and ferns, downwind from the cave. She wanted to get a look at this troll. She climbed down and settled between the branches. It was cool, with the wind whipping up the river valley, but she’d spend nights in worse spots.
Tired but not exhausted from her trip into the troll’s lands, she tried not to sleep, but rather to rest with one eye upon the cave from a perch upriver. Softened by her regular meals at Mossbell, she regretted her missed dinner as the moon rose.
She heard the troll breathing before she saw it. A snerk-snerk-snerk sounded from the cave, startling her into full awareness.
A face emerged in profile from the cave, if it could be called a face. A fleshy orb at the end of a long snakelike body no thicker than Wistala’s tail emerged and waved around. Whether the head smelled, heard, or saw the approaches to the cave mouth, Wistala could not say.
Wistala was just congratulating herself on not being afraid of the wormlike body when two giant limbs unfolded themselves from the cave mouth, gripping the rocks above with three-toed hands. They pulled out a stumpy body split by a wide mouth that reminded her of a frog, especially since its skin seemed wet with some kind of oily extrude. At the tail end, a pair of smaller, but still spindly, limbs steadied the body as long forelimbs did the work of climbing.
Wistala realized she’d been mistaken in her analysis of the tracks. The troll was almost all forelimbs—thick near the body and digits but bone-thin through the long middle part and joint. Its hind legs ended in the smaller graspers she’d mistaken for hands.
The troll’s body seemed featureless save for warts establishing a striped pattern back from the edges of its wide mouth. A snorting sound came from the troll. It shifted and stiffened, opened the huge mouth, and spat out a mass about the size of a large pumpkin. It splattered on the rocks below, and Wistala recognized the foul smell of troll waste even at that distance.
Wistala watched in wonder as the long arms folded against the stars; then it sent its snakelike sensing-and-breathing (she assumed) organ over the edge of the cliff to examine the ground. The snerksnerk-snerk sounded again, and it reached up with those tree-length arms and pulled itself up and over the ledge. As it breathed, its body expanded and contracted at the pale belly.
Then it was gone.
She argued with herself over exploring the troll’s cave. For all she knew, it was full of hungry young trollings or a she-troll, if such even existed. Then there was the danger of the troll coming back and squashing her the way she might burst a tick under her sii.
In the end, caution won. She trembled at the thought of an encounter with the thing. Her nerve wasn’t what it was when she explored the ruins of Tumbledown or outwitted bears with Auron. She crept back in the direction of Mossbell.
Rainfall’s eyes went agog: “Poison a troll? You might as well poison a stone,” Rainfall said. “They thrive on a month’s-rotten corpse.”
Wistala looked across the wide book table at him. Most of his library shelves held nothing but cobwebs, but a few volumes remained behind glass, and it seemed natural history was a favorite subject of his. If they could somehow get the troll to eat of a poisonous plant—
“He’s temporary,” Rainfall said. “The troll’s ruining the estate, but he won’t live forever. Mossbell was standing before he came; it’ll still stand after he dies.”
Gentle was a fine quality, but this, this, passivity vexed her. “It’s not a storm. There’s got to be some way to rid a land of a troll.”
“Yes. Starve it. But the wild pigs and goats have moved west of the road, and even if we hunted them down to the last piglet, the troll would just feed from the riverbottom. Or worse, come after my goats or Avalanche.”
“Apply to your thane—”
Rainfall grew so agitated that he interrupted her. “Tried and tried again.”
Wistala hated even to mention her final idea. “This Dragonblade fellow. If he’s able to kill dragons, I’m sure he could handle a troll.”
“An excellent idea, but I’ve no money to hire him. The only thing I have of value is the title to Mossbell. The Dragonblade can’t expect to profit from the small reward. And then a troll’s skin and bones yield little compared with—I beg your pardon.”
Yes, the odds and ends of a dead dragon bring a great deal of money. Neither here nor there.
“You must have some weapons. Arm your crew that helps you maintain the roads.”
“What are we to do, snare it with the crane? Shovel gravel at it? While it’s been long s
ince I’ve engaged in an argument, I’d wish we could engage over the merits of Swanfellow’s songs, or Alfwheat’s dramas. The troll! The troll! As if he doesn’t hang over this estate like a cloud, you have to bring the gloom into my library.”
Spring came.
Wistala feasted on the sun each day as she would on a slaughtered sheep. A wooded copse stood at the base of one of the twin hills, and there was an old half-blown-over walnut still fighting for life, judging from the buds upon the upper branches. Wistala liked to nap on the incline or watch the clouds go by, idly taking up bark beetles with her tongue as they explored the rotting underside of the walnut.
Sometimes she ventured up the easterly of the twin hills and watched the road that ran between, crossing a stream at two short stout bridges. There was little traffic, and as far as she could tell, her host derived no benefit from it. Carts, wagons, and passengers on foot hurried through Rainfall’s lands as though the ground were accursed—which it was, in a sense.
Traffic on the road went so far as to time their travel through Rainfall’s land. If headed north, the proper hour to step on the bridge seemed to be about two hours after sunrise. If heading south, one wanted to be on the road between the twin hills at about the same time. Each side would take some rest and water their animals at the walls and gates of Mossbell as the sun reached its zenith, but they’d admire its curious lines only from a distance as they ate preserved food out of bags and jars.
As far as Wistala could tell, Rainfall had all the duties of keeping a road open and drew none of the benefits. She explored just outside his lands along the road in the morning light and near dark and saw marketplaces and inns to either end of his lands, but thanks to the troll, no one dared set up so much as an applecart near the bridge.
Of course, need or ignorance or foolishness sometimes had messengers riding across the bridge at night. Rainfall showed her the effects of some combination of the three one morning—a pair of neatly bitten-off horse hooves and a dropped hat lying on the road with the stain and smell of blood on the gravel.