The Prodigal Troll

by Charles Coleman Finlay

  "Three."

  Maggot closed his eyes and slept, as both men and trolls did when they arrived safely home at a long journey's end. He felt that he had not slept in a long time, if ever.

  He awoke again in sunlight to the sound of hammering, screaming, and cruel laughter. Cries of anger and defiance came from voices he almost recognized. He listened a long time, taking it for a fever dream. Surely the pack of tiny cats-orange, black, gray, and white-running in and out of the house, basking in the sunlight, were part of a fever dream. The scent of their urine and spray was too intense to be real, and the pregnant orange one that curled up next to him in the blankets made a purring noise unlike anything he'd ever heard.

  He poked that little cat experimentally. The scratch along his thumb felt real enough, so he was pulling the lips back to look at its teeth when the old man entered the house.

  "What is that noise?" Maggot asked, looking to the window.

  "Wyndans," he said, a word that Maggot remembered on another man's lips. The old man looked out the small window that faced the river, and the corners of his mouth speared down. "They came to scavenge peace. I told him not to come. Before. When he came for the demon's skin. No good-smell is to come."

  He used the words haltingly, as Maggot did when speaking Sinnglas's tongue. Maggot pushed back his layers of blankets and attempted to rise to see out the window also. "Who?"

  The old man came and pushed him back down into the covers firmly, irresistibly but without violence. Without answers either. Maggot was too weak to resist and let the coverlets form a cocoon about him. The small orange cat curled up in the hollow by his stomach.

  The old man boiled a pot of water, making tea as Sinnglas's wife had sometimes done. Outside, someone screamed.

  Maggot stared at the old man. The old man stared into his cup at the leaves. The cat closed its eyes and slept.

  The screaming lasted a long time.

  Maggot woke in the dark, feeling hot and sluggish, dry and empty. The cat was asleep on his face, and it made his face itch, so he pushed it away.

  The old man sat by the hearth, with his back to Maggot, chanting. The teapot fire had burned down to coals, but his shadows twitched and leapt across the walls as if they were cast more by the faint, shimmery lights that danced about his head. Sometimes Maggot saw those lights, and sometimes they blinked out of his view.

  Without turning or looking up, the old man stopped his song. "Are you hungry, yes, true?"

  "Yes," croaked Maggot.

  He tapped his head. "Beside you."

  Maggot rolled to his side and saw the cup and bowl. He wet his throat first with the tepid tea, then began to scoop the food into his mouth. Boiled oats mixed with sticky syrup. The cat came back, leaned its head down to sniff at the bowl, thrust out a pink tongue.

  In the corner opposite him, beside the old man, Maggot saw the head of the Old One that had attacked him.

  "Eat with slowly," said the old man.

  "Thank you," answered Maggot. "Where-"

  The man grunted, then put his hands on the floor and turned himself around, holding one hand across his waist, the other extended. "Name yourself; then name your favor. My name is Banya, and welcome to my home."

  "I will remember your stink, Banya. My name is Maggot. Where-"

  "Maggot? Not Claye?"

  "Maggot. Little, white, crawls on dead things." He wiggled his finger like a worm.

  The old man leaned forward, face grimacing in concentration, clearly puzzled. "Maggot is not a name for men. Your name is Claye."

  "Claye?" He thought that perhaps the old man-Banya-was using the wrong words or not understanding him. "Sinnglas called me Maqwet."

  "Sinnglas? That's not a name to be spoken aloud here," he said suddenly in Sinnglas's tongue, leaning back and glancing toward the door. "You speak his tongue?"

  "Yes."

  "I should not mention that name again, were I you. The tongue, where did you learn it?"

  "From Sinnglas." Maggot felt very confused now. He put down the bowl, full and sleepy.

  Banya scowled. The flames that licked about his head flickered as if in agitation. "No. The tongue of the Collegis."

  "I know only the tongue my mother taught me," Maggot said in the trolls' language again.

  "Yes, true! That tongue. Too long since with Collegis I, too short with." Banya started rocking, and the shimmering flames cooled, calmed. He shifted back to Sinnglas's tongue. "I know your mother. She taught you not."

  "You know Windy?" Maggot pushed himself upright off his elbow, too quickly. Black dots spun before his eyes, and he sunk dizzily back among the bearskins and blankets. The cat jumped to get out from under him.

  "Windy?"

  Maggot whistled like a breeze through rocks. "Windy."

  Banya resumed his rocking, staring at Maggot instead of the fire. He did this for a long time, saying nothing. He shook his head. "No, that is not her name. The resemblance to what she looked like then, and to her consort, is uncanny."

  "Where?" Maggot asked. "Where did you learn to speak like trolls?" He switched to the word Sinnglas used. "Like giants? Was your mother also a giant?"

  "Giants?" His eyes lit up, and he stopped moving. "Windy was a giant?"

  "Yes."

  "Say it three times, speak it true!"

  "My mother was a giant. Yes, yes, yes."

  "No!" He looked up fearfully, the fires like dancing spears. "You must only say it twice!"

  "But you said-"

  "Fool! Now you've drawn the attention of the jealous god!"

  He rose, his knees cracking like ice in the spring sun. He took a bundle of herbs and set them alight, smudging a sweet smoke around the corner of the rooms, chanting quietly as if unwilling to let Maggot overhear him. He collected something else from a pot, grabbed a staff, and went outside. Maggot heard him at the four corners of the house, tapping.

  When he returned, he would not speak to Maggot but sat by the fire instead, talking quietly to the dead face of the Old One. The cats rubbed against him, but he paid them no mind.

  Maggot thought he napped briefly. He wasn't sure-he closed his eyes, he opened his eyes, nothing changed. Eventually he had to rise to relieve himself.

  Seeing him struggle, Banya helped pull him to his feet, holding him up with a viny arm. The copper bracelets were cold on Maggot's skin. Together they hobbled out the door.

  They faced away from the river. Maggot wanted to look across to see the source of the screaming, but Banya propped him up against a bush right by the door. As his stream splattered over the leaves and ran down the wall, Maggot began to laugh.

  "What?" the old man asked.

  "Heh-marking it as my cave."

  Bracelets jingled, followed by a sharp sting as Banya slapped Maggot's bottom. A black cat started rubbing against his ankles, and he had a hard time finishing.

  When they staggered back inside, Maggot propped himself up surrounded by the blankets. The small coals had gone out. The flames surrounding Banya's head had also cooled and faded away.

  Banya shook his head and muttered. "Gruethrist took Lord Eleuate hunting for giants, once, when he first settled this valley. I hope Verlogh found no pleasure from it."

  "What?" Maggot asked.

  "I'm just thinking aloud," Banya said. "It is a habit of the old, bringing our thoughts into the air with the hope that they'll survive us."

  The night was warm, but Maggot shivered. He thought he had a fever again.

  "In the Collegis, some say that men stole language from the giants. The giants were created first and ruled all the land, but then men came; and though we were brute, speechless creatures we knew the secret of fire, and with fire we drove back the giants."

  Maggot closed his eyes to listen to Banya's voice, and found an afterimage of the old man's radiant silhouette patinaed on the inside of his eyelids. He jerked upright, eyes open.

  "Pramantha, beloved son of the goddess Bwnte and a mortal man, went out hunting in th
e mountains with other men and was attacked by the giants. He was very clever, however, and by means of gestures, he promised to show the giants how to extinguish fire if they would give him the secret of language. And then he showed them how to use water to quench flame."

  "Heh," Maggot said. Trolls would like that.

  "The giants gloated. They shattered the ice caps that covered the mountains. They grabbed the edges of the oceans and pulled them over the land. They deluged the world, intending to drown the sun and bring an end to daylight forever. But they kept Pramantha with them, teaching him the language as they had promised. And that night, after he had learned the language, Pramantha rekindled fire from a spark that he had hidden and cast it back into the sky, where the moon carried it to the sun and lit the fire anew."

  "Ah," Maggot said. So the moon carried the sun's fire. That seemed true. "What happened then?"

  "Pramantha gave language to all the people that survived, but each man shaped it to his own use, and soon none could speak to each other. Pramantha's heir founded the Collegis to preserve the true tongue and all the secrets of the earth Pramantha knew."

  "No, what happened to the giants?"

  Banya shrugged, and his voice grew lighter. "People prospered and the giants declined. Some say it is also because Pramantha stole magic from them, and made them less by it." In the tongue of the trolls he added, "I haven't tasted it myself. "

  Constantly rearranging the blankets as a barricade to the assaults of the cats that surrounded him, vying for attention, Maggot asked, "What is magic?"

  After a moment's pause, Banya grasped one end of Maggot's blanket and held it up. "The world is a single continuous skin of invisible power. Things that happen in one place, change things in another. Something small causes a big change somewhere else. A butterfly flaps its wings in a field and all the way across the mountains, a wind stirs that knocks down trees. Magic is the way of finding those connections, and bending them to the use of people."

  Maggot laughed. "That's not possible."

  The old man reached under the blankets and pinched the sole of Maggot's foot. Maggot's leg kicked, scattering his covers and all the cats but the gray one.

  "It isn't?" The old man snapped his fingers. "Something this small caused something that big."

  "But that wasn't magic!"

  "Heh." His mouth twitched down at the corners. "I do not have much talent except for singing and seeing. But you shine with the power like a beacon on a hilltop."

  He paused, and Maggot said, "The false flavored nature."

  "Yes, true. They call it that also at the Collegis: the false flavored nature. Magic, sorcery. The invisible power. The gods speak to one another with this invisible power. Like lightning in the sky. And just as lightning can be drawn down to the earth to a tall tree or an iron pole, the power of the gods can be drawn down also."

  Maggot's head ached. He gave up fighting the cats, and the gray one settled in comfortably around him, its body warm, vibrating against his skin as it purred. "How-?"

  Banya rose and went over to the head of the Old One. From the base of it, he gathered several items and returned to Maggot's side. He held up the two necklaces. Maggot's hand touched his chest, realizing they were gone.

  "This hammer charm is the sigil of Verlogh," Banya said. "Verlogh is the god of justice and of revenge. This other is a waterdrop, swollen like Bwnte's pregnant belly. Bwnte is the goddess of fertility and death, of water and flood. These sigils were fashioned to smash the spell of an enemy." He placed them over Maggot's neck. "I return them to you now."

  Looking at them, Maggot realized that the glow he thought he saw in them was really an inner light like the flames that flickered around Banya's head. He pressed his fingertips against them, wondering if the warmth he felt was the same.

  "Used in the absence of a spell, these charms will react with the magic inherent in the earth itself, but how so, who can say. I beg you to take care of them and not to break them." He pushed the cats aside impatiently and pulled the covers back over. "You are weary-you must still rest. Here is your knife; I return it to you now. I'll place it here beside your bed."

  His gestures, left hand under the right, seemed formal, required, but Maggot didn't know what it meant. He yawned and rolled over, feeling depleted. "Will you tell me this again?"

  The wizard nodded. "I will. You are a man who has walked among the giants and in the land of the dead; you speak the wizard's tongue and carry magic items. When you are better, in another day or two, we will set out for the Collegis. I will take you as far as Lady Culufre's castle and her wizard. Perhaps I will go farther. I must seek absolution for slaying the demon to save you. We will have much time yet for your instruction."

  He rose from Maggot's side, walked over to the window, and pulled back the cloth that covered it.

  Pale dawn peeked in like a curious child.

  "Stay awake a moment longer," Banya said. He picked up a small bag that clicked when it shook. He tugged on the drawstring. "Now that sunrise is upon us, will you ask the bones one question for me?

  Maggot burrowed deep into the covers, pulling them up over his head so that only his eyes looked out. He shivered hard. The cat crawled up and sat on his neck. "What is it?"

  The door burst open.

  The first man through the door slammed his forearm into Banya's chest-the old man grunted as he fell-and the second man swung his warclub at the wizard's upraised arm. The club cracked against his wrist, and he cried out as the bones spilled out of the bag and clattered over the floor.

  The cat turned its head, ears peaked. Maggot tried to lift his head, and the cat slipped, sinking its claws through the cover into Maggot's throat. He froze. He wanted to say stop but his throat was a dry riverbed over which no words flowed. He knew these men. Kinnicut, the smith from Sinnglas's village, and another whose name fluttered at the edge of his tongue.

  Kinnicut's warclub fell again with another sharp crack, and again with a wetter thud. The first man lifted Banya's smashed head by its silver hair-his jaw hung broke and loose, a disconnected block of sagging flesh that drooped down to the chest-and took out his braidcutting knife.

  Kinnicut put a hand up to stop him. "Not the wizard's," he said. It will bring evil spirits to the other side."

  But the other man had already stopped. He tossed the head aside and pointed at the Old One sitting in the corner, emitting a wail of grief. "Aiieeeee!"

  Kinnicut lifted the scaled visage reverently from its post. "It will make a fitting offering for our grandfather."

  "Yes," the first man said. "Let it accompany him."

  He kicked the door open. Kinnicut went first, carrying the Old One's head, and then they were gone.

  Maggot shivered himself to stillness over a long time, like boiling water in a pot left on the fire while the stones grew cold. His body felt as numb and cold as stone, and as empty as a pot when he was done.

  The cat jumped off the pile of skins and went over to sniff at Banya. A white cat had slipped in through the door, then a mix, and others, to gather at his body also.

  "Meeeeeeew. "

  Maggot pushed off the blankets and rose. He put on the breechcloth and belt, then the knife. He held the two charms around his neck, and stepped over to Banya's corpse. Too many cats swirled around it to count.

  He bent to look at the spilled bones. They looked like the finger and hand bones of a troll, a big one. They were marked with symbols Maggot couldn't decipher, except for the two on top-a blank bone under one marked with a skull.

  The door hung sideways, broken from its hinges. Leaving everything behind him undisturbed, Maggot stepped outside into the daylight and walked around the corner of the building.

  On the hill across the river, past the bridge, three tall poles rose straight from the ground. Three bodies topped the poles.

  Maggot walked slowly toward them.

  he stones of the bridge were smooth under Maggot's feet. They vibrated slightly, or pulsed, a warm
th much like that of the charms around his throat. He looked down.

  His gaze rolled off the bridge and into the rippling water. In the clear water beneath the central arch, he saw the headless body of the Old One filling the trench where it must have once lurked. Hundreds of silver shapes darted around it, picking at the flesh. Bones poked through the flesh, gleaming white, smooth and knobby, like stones polished by the flow of water. A new Old One, three or four feet long, settled along the spine, ready to take the other's place.

  A crow shrieked three times in quick succession. Maggot lifted his head and continued across the bridge.

  He saw the muddy bank covered with footprints where the Old One had attacked him. The road along that shore led upstream toward the big stone lodge where he'd seen the woman. A second stream entered the river just below the bridge. It flowed out of a gap between steep stone walls. Flood debris was tangled among the rocks. Maggot would have called it a river once, before he saw the rivers near Squandral's town. A path led from the bridge beside this stream, up to the hilltop where the three poles stood.

  Maggot mounted the hillside. Purple-black grackles and bluejays hopped from branch to branch, making shrill warnings at his approach. Most of the birds perched in the trees were deciding if it was yet safe enough to feed on the feared shapes of the men. Even the vultures in the sky seemed wary.

  Three poles, three bodies.

  Piles of gifts were heaped up around the base of the first two poles: bowls of corn, offerings of weapons, fresh scalps with red hair and blonde and curly black among the bits of fingers, thumbs. At the bottom of the third post, the head of the Old One leaned backward with its mouth gaping at the sky. Offerings, according to the customs of Sinnglas's people, meant to carry the souls of the dead men down death's river to the eternally fertile land of heaven's valley.

  The smell of blood mixed with filth, knotting Maggot's empty stomach.

  All three men were naked, hands bound in front, with the sharpened stakes shoved between their buttocks and up through their bodies. The first man was Tanaghri; his face was distorted almost beyond recognition. Damaqua's face, beside him, appeared calm, but sad. There was, in dying, thought Maggot, an erasing of all lost votes and unshared meals. The bound hands of the two men were different; Tanaghri's clutched fistlike, Damaqua's open in supplication.