The Prodigal Troll

by Charles Coleman Finlay

  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.

  The old man's voice wavered like a palsied hand, but still the slow, lilting chant hooked Maggot's attention and pulled him closer: the words were in the language of trolls.

  Or close, if not quite the same tongue. They sounded foreign but familiar to Maggot, like the words used by trolls in the Raven Rock band far to the north. He did not understand some of the words at all.

  Directly across from the old man, he slipped down the muddy bank to listen. As the words flowed over the water, the melody changed to something sharper, more stochastic.

  A shimmering rose beneath the bridge, a luminescence Maggot first took for a liquid reflection of the Milky Way. Then he remembered sitting on the hillside near Squandral's town, and he leaned forward.

  An Old One!

  The river here was small in comparison to that one, no more than fifty feet across, and shallow enough to see the bottom. It didn't seem nearly big enough to contain the twenty-foot-long beast that swam slowly to the surface.

  The old man waded knee-deep into the water, rocking back and forth as he chanted, his voice growing stronger. The shape glided toward him and stopped. A pale, glimmering head rose out of the water on a reticulated neck, almost level with the old man's face. It swayed back and forth to the rhythm of the song and the old man's motion.

  Maggot recalled the way the deer had been bewitched.

  As he sang this last verse, the old man lifted the squirming bag by its topstrings and the Old One flared its head, leaning back as if to strike.

  Maggot jumped up, pounded out the danger warning on his chest, and cupped his hands to his mouth.

  "Don't answer it! Run away!"

  The song wavered and broke as the old man staggered back toward the bank. The demon curled its head at the sound, and then faster than one would think something that size could move, it twisted, coiling and uncoiling, across the water.

  Maggot's feet slipped in the muddy bank, and his hunger- and travel-racked reflexes were too slow to recover. The scaly face shot up from the water, flaring its head.

  A mist enveloped Maggot, stinging his eyes and nose, burning his throat like the naked sun. He clutched his face, sliding down the concave bank toward the water. His limbs began to go slack. Something smooth and wet encircled his legs-he would have screamed, or kicked, if he could, but his body felt as it did when he woke suddenly from a dream, paralyzed and unable to move.

  Far away, he heard the voice of the old man. The words were like fish under ice: Maggot saw their shape, but he couldn't reach them. Even with his eyes squeezed shut, the world took on a silver sheen shot with coruscating color.

  The coils tightened around his legs and bent them against each other awkwardly, painfully. Maggot slid slowly backward, his numb fingers gouging thick clay. The tightening reached his chest. He inhaled and could not exhale.

  Then the world turned from silver to black and the fires were extinguished. Maggot thought it might be a relief-desire sank into deep water and released all dreams.

  t is the deepest cave he has ever known, perfectly, comfortingly dark at the bottom. His spirit, cut loose from his body, floats. He ascends the large, coal-black tunnel toward the surface, and when he grasps at the walls to slow his passage, his hands slip like bare feet on wet boulders.

  At the end of the tunnel the noontime sun awaits, a faint spark at first, growing into a radiant circle of heat. Maggot sees it and he is afraid. The sun is death, the light is death, and he longs to go back down into the safety of the darkness. He wails, like a child again, like a frightened baby, noise pounding in his ears like a waterfall on the rocks. He calls out for someone, anyone, to grab him, to pull him back, but he has left all the trolls behind. Even his mother can come only partway up the tunnel, and she shouts at him, but her voice grows cold like stone in the winter, filled with crystals of ice, until it cracks, and falls apart in shards and splinters.

  The sun fills everything except the very lip of the cave. Maggot twists, thrusts out his hands to clutch at this dark circle that lingers at the very edge of his vision, sticks out his feet to brace against the wall of the tunnel. His limbs are too heavy to budge, immobile as though they're confined in ropes or vines.

  Somehow he stops his motion.

  And he sees that the cave is no cave, but a mouth and a throat and he is on the inside. The sun is no sun, but an egg, as yellow as yolk, with cracks running through it. Inside the egg he hears a voice. Then suddenly something snaps and he falls, dropping like a spider when its thread is severed. He plummets down the throat until it widens like a vast cavern, and the cavern becomes the night and fills with stars. He rushes toward the earth, twisting over and over as he falls, and the ground rushes up to meet him, with the silver turtle egg of the full moon laughing at him, and then he hits the ground, slams into the ground and slides right through it, until the dirt falls in all around him and smothers him like a root.

  So he lies there like a root, and patiently waits to flower. Water trickles in through the dirt and reaches his hard throat, and he drinks. The hard thing inside him cracks like a nut in its season. It is enough for him to send out a single thread, a searching tendril of thought shaped like a sentence.

  "Where am I?"

  In the land of the dead, comes the reply.

  But Maggot knows that already. He exhausted himself to find out nothing new, and for a long time he lies in the thick, heavy miasmal dark, gulping the water that trickles down to his inanimate throat. What he wants to find is a way out, to the land where other spirits reside. He sends out new shoots of thought, but before they break free of the rough-packed ground, something reaches down to him with a voice like liquid light.

  Who are you? it asks.

  Maggot has to think about this question, for a time that stretches out like seasons full of frost and the first soft warmth of spring, through the dew and fog of summer, across crystals frozen on the tips of grass. The answer begins like another searching shoot, a pale white hair that wriggles slowly upward, crawling through the humus to the surface.

  "I am me," he answers.

  The great di
sappointment at this response penetrates all the layers that separate them, confusing Maggot. His failure to communicate smothers him, and finally he ceases struggling to break free. The moment he ceases, he unknits all the potential locked up in the inert vegetable knob he has become, transforming it into a host of roots and fronds, bursting forth in every direction at once, down farther into the darkness and up toward the light. The tendrils become fingers, and with one green hand he takes hold of the darkness deep underground and with the other he reaches up and clutches the round leather ball of the sun. And though it burns his palm he does not let go.

  He opens his eyes for the very first time, and the rays of the sun stab at them like daggers, but he does not flinch or draw away. There is a difference between fearlessness and courage, between stalking the demon and facing the demon's maw, and he has crossed the watershed that divides these two rivers of experience.

  The sun sees it also. It sheathes its blades.

  He lay under blankets on the floor in the corner of a small, clean room illuminated by large windows. When he tried to speak, he heard his voice break like a dry branch. A man came across the room to stare at him. It was the old man, the one he saw by the riverside. His silver hair hung in long clumps down his side. Bronze and copper flames danced around his head, like lights in the northern sky.

  The old man poured a sour water into Maggot's mouth, the merest trickle. It spilled from the corner of his lips. Something small and warm curled against him, rumbling.

  "Too much life in you for death to swallow whole," the old man said, in the language of the trolls.

  "How long?" Maggot asked.

  "Nights," muttered the man. "Two, three. Count the first, don't count the first."

  "It was not yet dawn, when I saw you."

  "Yes. True." It was the same word in the language of the trolls, but he repeated it twice. He seems unhappy at this admission. "Three nights."