The Prodigal Troll

by Charles Coleman Finlay

  Ragweed rooted idly in the dirt. "I'm hungry."

  Windy sighed. She'd heard that a thousand times as well. She stood up. Doing anything was better than doing nothing. "Come on. Let's go down to the turtle shell. Maybe they'll be scared off. Maybe we'll find something to eat."

  He clapped his hands. The crack echoed off the mountain walls, scattering birds from the trees. "Good," he said. "All you need is some food, then you'll put that baby down."

  They walked down the familiar slope. They'd varied the path some every night, looking for new sources of food, but there were only so many ways to go. Ragweed turned over logs and broke off pieces of stumps, but they were the same logs and stumps he'd searched a dozen times before. They hadn't seen the carcass of so much as a dead sparrow in two days; it had been a week since they'd found that deer before the wild dogs got to it. Ragweed grabbed the lower branches of trees and stripped the bark off with his teeth. The rain had moistened them up a bit so they didn't taste so chokingly dry. The scent enticed Windy, but not enough to make her eat.

  They arrived at the wide meadow beside the pond, and Ragweed waded into the water to slake his thirst. Windy's throat was terribly parched, despite the drippings she'd licked off the cave roof, so she followed him, holding the baby out of the water as she bent down to take a drink.

  Ragweed splashed over and rubbed his hands on her bottom.

  "Thhppppt!" Water sprayed out of her mouth. "Stop that!"

  "Nothing to interrupt us now," he leered.

  She ignored him, bending to take another sip. He reached around and squeezed her breast.

  "Yew!" Windy hopped away with a splash, bared her teeth, and smacked him with a backhanded swing.

  "Hey!" he hollered. "What did I do?"

  "That hurt." She turned away, sloshed out of the pond, and started her three-legged gait through the woods without him. Her breasts ached like a bad tooth. They'd been leaking all evening, and she didn't know what to do. She guessed they'd dry up in a few days, but right now she'd rather step in fire than have him touch them.

  Ragweed hurried to catch up. They crested the chestnut ridge where they sat most nights. When the nuts started falling off the trees, this would be a good valley to be in. But that was months away.

  The rain-heavy breeze carried new scents. Off in the direction of the sunset, toward the river, she thought she sniffed something dead, maybe drowned in yesterday's flood. Small, but still a good meal, if she'd been hungry enough to go looking for it. She turned her head toward the little hollow of land where the turtle shell stood, smelling the faint scent of the lion, a goat, and something else-

  Ragweed caught the same scent. "Hot diggety!" he shouted, making an enthusiastic scooping motion with his hands before he ran down the hill. "Fresh rotten meat!"

  "Be careful!" she cried out. Holding her baby tight to her chest, she ran after Ragweed. He stooped outside the shell, rooting his nose where blood had spilled in the mud. Windy paused beside him, and only then did her ears, which were better than the average troll's, certainly much better than Ragweed's, detect the high-pitched crying.

  When Ragweed turned to enter the shell she tripped him, grabbing hold of his wrist so he couldn't break his fall. As he squawked and hit the ground, she rushed inside.

  The odors of the dead man and woman hit her first, but the smell of baby poop and urine were also strong. Windy wrinkled her nose, swiveling her head around until she saw the woman's corpse in the corner. A baby was chewing on her long red hair, its eyes shut, so tired it could barely sit up straight as it cried.

  Ragweed burst through the doorway behind her. "Ho there! Save some for me!"

  He shoved her down and she kicked at him. He dodged her foot, hopping ponderously over her outstretched leg. She dropped her dead daughter, dove under Ragweed's groping arms, and slid across the dirt floor on her tender breasts to grab the crying baby first. She curled around it protectively.

  "Go ahead," Ragweed said, clearly disappointed. "It's not much. Won't fill your belly up."

  The baby continued to wail as it snuggled into Windy's arms. It rubbed its face around her breast until its tiny mouth closed on the hard pebble of her nipple. It didn't have much of a suck, compared to her little girl, but then it didn't need much of one either.

  Ragweed picked up the woman's hand, stuck the fingers in his mouth, and chewed on them. After a couple crunches, he spit them out and dropped her arm. "This one's still warm-the bigtooth killed her. Ought to let her rot for a couple days. She'll taste better with bugs in her."

  Windy wrinkled her flat nose again. The dead woman was this baby's mother; she suddenly felt quite protective. "Go chew on that one, then," she said, pointing to the man's body. "He's been dead longer."

  "All gristle, no fat, like enough," Ragweed muttered, but he crossed the room.

  Windy caressed the baby's head. It had such beautiful black hair, disguising its misshapen skull and lack of a brow. Large-gorgeously large-eyes in the painfully flat face stared right at her before they fluttered shut. The ache in Windy's heart eased as quickly as the soreness in her breast.

  "Ack!" Ragweed jumped back so hard he fell on his bottom. He bounced up and retreated across the room to Windy's side.

  "What is it?" she asked.

  "Go look for yourself! I'm not getting near it, not if it was a rotten mammut on a hot summer night and I hadn't eaten anything in ten days."

  Windy carefully cradled the suckling baby to her, took a step forward, and almost turned to stone. The amber-colored ampules strung around the dead man's neck-they were magic, sunlight trapped in warm ice. If either one cracked accidentally it could kill them both, at least according to the stories about similar treasures stolen in the past. She hopped backward so fast the baby lost the nipple. Its eyes flew wide open.

  "You'll have to share it now," Ragweed said.

  Windy kept one eye on the man's body as if he might leap up and attack her. The baby stretched its neck, trying to get its mouth back on her breast. "Share what?"

  "The live meat."

  "No!" She dodged his sudden grasp, bolted out the door and into the yard. He chased after her.

  "We always share meat," he said.

  "This isn't meat-it's a baby!"

  He slouched back on his haunches and laughed. "Don't be crazy! You're just sad because you lost your girl. You don't mean to keep that thing."

  She hadn't realized that was exactly what she meant to do until she heard him say it. "I can. And I will."

  He thumped his knuckles on his chest to frighten her. She wasn't impressed and frowned at him until he gave it up. "If that's how you feel," he said, pacing in a circle around her, "then we'll just have to take a vote. All those in favor of eating the live meat, raise your hand."

  He threw his hand up into the air, looking around the way he always did at meetings to see who was voting with him. She ignored him and, gently as she could, switched the baby around, so it could drink from the other sore and swollen breast.

  "All right, then, everybody in favor of keeping the meat for a baby, raise your hand."

  Windy lifted hers as she looked down, making a kissy mouth at the child. It stopped sucking long enough to laugh and reached up to touch her face.

  "That's two against one," she said. "We win."

  "It can't vote!"

  "Well, it raised its hand." She really just hoped to confuse and distract Ragweed, because even if all the trolls in their band outvoted her, she wasn't about to give up this new baby. She reached down to tickle its belly and saw it was a boy. "He heard you, and he raised his hand. So there."

  "But-!" Ragweed sputtered off, then slammed his hands down, splattering mud everywhere.

  The baby jerked at the noise, but she made another kissy mouth and a smoochy sound, and he giggled again. His eyelids seemed very heavy as he swallowed gulp after gulp.

  "You aren't going to keep that thing, are you? It's an animal."

  "Is not." He had eyes just like her
darling girl, she decided. What ever he was-whatever people were-they were more than animals, even if they weren't trolls.

  Ragweed circled her. "It's a maggot, that's what it is."

  "He's a big strong baby." To be truthful, he wasn't big or strong. But he was a baby, and now he was her baby.

  "It's a maggot. It's little, white, and it wouldn't make a mouthful, and you found it crawling on a dead body. Maggot, maggot, maggot!"

  "He is not a maggot!" She threw a clump of mud at Ragweed, but it missed and smacked wetly against the side of the turtle shell.

  "Well, it ain't a slug." Ragweed hurled a mudball back at her, with better aim. She ducked, blocking it with her free arm. "Slugs have stripes," he said sullenly, flipping over stones. "Least some do. The tasty ones."

  Windy rocked her massive forearm until the baby fell asleep. After a while she rose, feeling so relieved she paused to empty her bladder. She looked through the doorway and saw her daughter lying abandoned in the muddy floor. Carefully avoiding the dead man with the dangerous magic, she stepped inside and picked up her daughter. She couldn't just leave her there, where sunlight could reach her. The dead woman was against the wall, under the sagging roof. Windy placed her daughter by the woman, tucking the hand with the missing fingers under the little girl and draping the other arm across her body.

  Ragweed looked over the edge of the wall. "Are you sun mad? Get out of there!"

  "Not yet," Windy said. Shifting the baby boy away from her arm, she reached up with one hand and jumped, pulling the roof down to seal both the woman and her daughter in darkness. The baby twitched in her arms at the impact of her jumping, and she stopped to coo him back to sleep.

  "Hey, that's smart," Ragweed said. "You covered up the man-"

  Windy scooped up handfuls of mud and sticks, packing them tightly all around the edges to seal it up tight.

  "Hey," Ragweed said. "That's not smart-you're covering up the good meat too!"

  She growled at him, startling the baby again.

  "What?" he asked.

  Rocking the baby in her arm to soothe him, she said very quietly but firmly, "Our daughter is under there too. You won't leave her exposed to sunlight."

  Ragweed grunted, but he didn't argue. He dropped down. When Windy squeezed under the fallen roof and crawled out through the big hole, she found him gathering up branches and thorns. She sighed, liking him a little more again. He knew the decent thing every troll did for their dead.

  Together they filled in the little hole and the big hole, and heaped mounds around the walls. Windy moved the smaller pieces for fear of disturbing the baby, slight though he felt in her arms. Then they both scooped up clumps of mud, packing it in tight around the holes. When they finished, Ragweed walked around it, lifting his leg and spraying. The scent would scare off scavengers and protect their dead.

  Ragweed lifted his nose and sniffed the air. "We have to hurry if we aren't going to get caught out in the sun."

  Windy looked up-he was right. They raced across the high ridge, and she could smell dawn in the air. They halted briefly in the meadow to drink from the swollen pond, and she noticed the lion's scent. It too had been here to drink in the night. She decided to blame it for her daughter's death. Then she looked at the child she held.

  It's going to be all right, she told herself. Ragweed will let me keep the baby.

  They would return to the mountains, among the hot springs and the good smell of sulfur, away from all the people. Things would be just like they were before.

  "We should leave this valley," she said. She thought about her own mother. "We should go home."

  "Not until the pears get ripe," Ragweed said, pushing aside the brush in his hurry to hide. He shoved his huge bulk through the narrow crack into the cave, then rolled over on his back and rubbed his big round belly. "All the trees full of pears and nobody to eat them but us. I don't want to miss that! They won't be eating any pears back home."

  "That's a long time from now." She squeezed in after him. It was barely spring; the trees didn't even have their blossoms yet. "What are we going to eat until then?"

  He bared his teeth in a half grin. "I don't know about you, but I'm hungry for a little maggot."

  She turned her back to him and wrapped her arms around the sleeping child.

  ou aren'tgoing to keep it, are you?"

  "Him, not it, mother," Windy answered through a mouth stuffed with blueberries. Her large fingers circled the branches, scooping off another bunch of ripe fruit while her mother did the same beside her. The older troll's downy white hair contrasted sharply with her gray skin in the moonlight. "And yes," Windy said, "I am going to keep him."

  "We'd heard tales, from Crash, when he went down into the people valleys last year, but I didn't believe him. And then you finally return with it." She frowned.

  Windy looked across the bog. Her little boy played in the scrub grass with two little girls his own age-about five winters-but twice his size. Sometimes, she scarcely believed it herself.

  "You've been away too many winters," her mother said reproachfully. "Even if you were ashamed."

  "I'm not ashamed." She shoved the blueberries in her mouth and chewed. "We were going to come back that first winter, but the baby-"

  "Maggot," her mother interrupted.

  She swallowed. "That's what Ragweed calls him."

  "I know. He's been telling everyone, but we'd already heard it from Crash. So what do you call it?"

  Windy had called the baby by her daughter's name for nearly a year, but the boy never answered to it, maybe because she only whispered it to him in his sleep. And then Ragweed called him Maggot so often that it was the only name her boy responded to.

  She sighed. "Maggot."

  Her mother made a rumbling hum in her throat. She plucked the berries off the branches one by one, filling her cupped hand. "Fortyone, forty-two, forty-three for a handful. I can still count higher than anyone else. And faster too. Heh! So that first winter?"

  "Terrible." Windy wanted to explain how she tried to leave Ragweed but couldn't, how there was never a good time to sneak away, not so he wouldn't notice. "It was terrible."

  "Why?"

  "Before winter even, the baby grew so cold. His skin turned all blue at night and he shivered." She shivered. That winter bloomed into another summer before she found the courage to take her frail child among the icy peaks, and while they hunted food, night to night, and fattened up again, that summer rotted into winter, and before she knew it four years had passed by as swift as midsummer nights. "So we stayed down in the warmer valleys."

  "You should have let it die."

  "Him, Mother."

  "No. It."

  Other trolls hulked through the blueberry patches, eating steadily without talking, filling their bellies while the darkness lasted. The children strayed farther away in their play. Maggot was a delicate child, and the risks he took could stop her heart. His skin was so thin she could practically see through it. She followed after the children, conveniently escaping the prick of her mother's comments.

  A rock outcropping capped the slope. Windy waded free of the blueberry patch and went to sit by the stones. "Talking with the stupid dead" they called it, because the stories said that these rocks were trolls who'd let themselves get caught out in the sun. The best thing about the stupid dead, Windy thought, was that their mistake was always worse than yours.

  "Hi, stupid," Windy said, patting the rock as she sat.

  Distant mountains formed walls on either side of the high plain and the dark sky, close enough to touch, and gave it a comforting cavelike roof. Bringing her son up here for the first time recalled all the memories of her own happy childhood: the bleak beauty of long winter nights-her favorite season before she became a mother-when clusters of the bitter berries on mountain ash gleamed bright against the white skin of windswept snow; the scents of rhododendrons blooming under slivered spring moons, and laurel at midsummer; huckleberries, blueberries, teaberrie
s, and cranberries, each in its season, as many as she could eat; summer fogs so dense she could open her mouth and drink water straight out of the air, with unexpected frosts that cooled her toes while she foraged. She hadn't realized how much she missed the smell of bobcat spray until she'd come up here and caught a whiff of it again tonight.

  Maggot played with the girls on the slope below the blueberry bushes, along the edge of the bogs where cranberries grew and the grasses turned shadow-tipped in autumn. Beyond him, a herd of giant elk grazed about a mile away, their wide flat antlers rising and falling silhouetted against the sky. She counted seventeen elk before their heads jerked up in unison and they darted off. Leaning forward, she saw a dyrewolf bolt out of the grasses where the elk had been.

  Dyrewolves hunted in packs. Where there was one, there were more. "Maggot," Windy said. She didn't speak loudly. Her son's ears were as powerful as a troll's eyes.

  He stopped playing and waved to her. The two girls looked up the hill, confused by his actions.

  "Stay close by," she said, for his ears only. "There are dyrewolves hunting."

  He smacked his lips and nodded as if he already knew. Then he put his hands to his mouth. "Awroooooooo!"

  It sounded enough like a dyrewolf's cry to send a chill up her spine. He could mimic almost anything. She saw him turn first, then the girls. When she followed their eyes and concentrated, she heard faintly the dyrewolf howling in return.

  "Stay close!" she shouted at the top of her voice.

  He waved to her again, and she felt better. After that, the girls pretended that they were scared, running away as he howled like a dyrewolf and chased them. The sight of him, and the sharp shriek of their laughter, made Windy smile. But she remained wary. A pack of dyrewolves could bring down a solitary full-grown troll. And her son was so much smaller and weaker than any troll.

  On the steep edge of the slope a stunted grove of red cedars leaned away from the constant wind. When the girls ran in that direction, followed by Maggot, his shoulder-length hair whipped by the hard breeze, Windy was relieved. She could sniff the air and not smell wolves or other dangers in it.