by Tad Williams
Simon warmed himself with a swallow of kangkang before passing it along to Sludig. A toothy smile showed briefly in the Rimmersman’s yellow beard as he lifted the skin to his mouth. “Good,” he said. “It is not the mead I know, or even southern wine, but it is certainly better than nothing. ”
“God’s curse if that don’t be truth,” Haestan said. He took the skin back, savoring a long swallow before letting the bag drop to his belt once more. Simon thought the guardsman’s voice a little furry, and realized that Haestan had been drinking all day. Still, what else did they have to combat the pain in their legs and the monotonous, flurrying snow? Better a little drunkenness to take off the chill than hours of misery.
Simon squinted against the sleet flying into his face. He could see the bobbing shapes of the trolls riding just before them, but beyond he could discern only misty shapes. Somewhere past even the foremost, Binabik and Qantaqa were searching for the best route off the talus slope. The guttural exclamations of the ram-riders ahead drifted back to Simon on the wind, incomprehensible but oddly reassuring.
A stone bounced past his foot and rolled to a halt a few cubits ahead, the sound of its passage obliterated by the song of the wind. Simon wondered what would happen if a truly large stone ever began rolling downhill toward them. Would they even hear it above the clamor of the elements? Or would it be upon them suddenly, like a hand dropping down to crush a fly sunning on a windowsill? He turned anxiously to look back, seeing in his mind’s eye a vast, round shape growing larger, a great stone that would crush all in its path.
There was no great stone, but there were shapes moving on the slope above. Caught staring open-mouthed, Simon knew a moment’s unsureness as he wondered if some strange snow blindness caused him to see things that could not be real, huge shadows flailing in the uncertain light. Following Simon’s backward glance, Sludig opened his eyes wide.
“Hunën!” the Rimmersman shouted. “Vaer Hunën! There are giants up the slope behind us!” Downslope, invisible in the drifting snows, one of the trolls echoed Sludig’s alarm with a harsh cry.
Dim, elongated figures were loping down the rock-strewn hill. Dislodged stones rolled before them, bounding past Simon and his companions as the shouting trolls tried to pull their rams about to face this sudden danger. The advantage of surprise lost, the charging giants bellowed out wordless challenges in voices that seemed deep enough to shake down the very mountain. Several huge figures plunged through the mist, brandishing broad clubs like gnarled tree limbs. The black faces, snarling-mouthed, seemed to float bodilessly in the flurrying snow, but Simon knew the strength in those shaggy white forms. He recognized Death’s face in the leathery masks and Death’s inescapable clutch in the broad sinews and lashing arms twice as long as any man’s.
“Binabik!” Simon screamed. “Giants are coming!”
One of the Hunën snatched up a boulder and heaved it down the slope. It struck and spun end over end, bounding downhill like a runaway wagon. Even as a flurry of troll-spears sliced back through the air toward the attackers, the great stone crunched past Simon and smashed into the nearest ranks of the trolls. The shrill, terrified bleating of rams and the howls of their broken and dying riders echoed across the foggy slope. Simon found himself gaping in stunned immobility as a towering shape rose before him, club backflung like the straining arm of a catapult. As the black bar of shadow whistled down, Simon heard someone call his name, then something struck him aside and he was flung on his face among stones and snow.
A moment later he was on his feet, stumbling back through the mist toward the roaring, contorted shapes of conflict. Hunën loomed and then disappeared, huge, grasping shadows that at some moments were almost invisible in the flurrying snow.
Inside Simon’s mind a hysterical, terrified voice shouted for him to run away, to hide, but the voice was muffled, as though his head were stuffed with cushioning down. There was blood on his hands, but he did not know whose. He wiped it absently on his shirt front before reaching down to pull his Qanuc knife from its sheath. The roaring was all around now.
A group of trolls had couched their spears and were spurring their rams up the slope. Their bellowing target flailed with a shaggy arm broad as a tree trunk and swept the foremost trolls from their saddles. Men and mounts together soared back down the rise in a bloody tangle, tumbling to a boneless halt at flight’s end, but their trailing fellows drove home half a dozen spears, raising a coughing, sputtering roar from the beleaguered giant.
Simon saw Binabik downslope. The troll dismounted Qantaqa, who charged off into the swirling shadows of another skirmish. Binabik was pushing darts into the hollow section of his walking stick—darts with poison-blacked tips, Simon knew—but before Simon could take even a step toward his friend another shape pushed hard against him, then fell to the ground at his feet.
It was Haestan, lying facedown among the stones, the sword Thorn still hanging from his pack. As Simon stared, something howled so loudly it cut through the fuzziness in his ears and mind; he whirled to see Sludig backing toward him down the unstable slope, his long troll-spear jabbing before him as he retreated from a giant whose angry screams rattled the sky. The giant’s white belly and arms were dotted with crimson blood-flowers, but Sludig, too, was bloodied: his left arm looked as though it had been dipped into a bowl of red paint.
Simon bent and grasped Haestan’s cloak, shaking him, but the guardsman was limp. Grabbing at Thorn’s black hilt, Simon pulled it slowly back through the loop on Haestan’s pack. It was cold as frost and heavy as a suit of horse-armor. Cursing with anger and terror, he tried with all his strength to lift it, but could not bring the point off the ground. Despite his ever more panicky exertions, he could not even lift the hilt above his waist.
“Usires, where are You!?” he railed, letting the blade fall heavily to the ground like a block of tumbled masonry. “Help me! What use is this damnable sword!?” He tried again, praying for God’s help, but Thorn lay flat on the ground, beyond his strength.
“Simon!” Sludig shouted breathlessly. “Flee! I ... cannot... !” The giant’s shaggy white arm swung out and the Rimmersman stumbled back, just out of reach. He opened his mouth to call to Simon once more, but had to throw himself to one side to avoid a clawing backswipe. Blood flecked the northerner’s pale beard and matted his yellow hair. His helmet was gone.
Simon looked around wildly, then spotted a troll-spear lying among the rocks. He caught it up and circled around the giant, whose reddened eyes and wide-flaring nostrils were fixed only on Sludig. The creature’s shaggy back loomed before him like a white wall. A moment later, before he even had time to be surprised at himself, Simon was leaping forward over the slippery stones, thrusting the spear as hard as he could into the matted fur. The shock of impact leaped up his arms, rattling his teeth, and for a moment he slumped strengthlessly against the giant’s broad back. The Hunë threw its head up in a howl, weaving from side to side as Sludig drove in from the front with his spear. Simon saw the Rimmersman disappear, then saw the beast bend, shuddering, and knock Sludig to the ground.
Coughing blood, the giant stood over Sludig, feeling for its club with one arm, clutching at its red-dripping stomach with the other. With a shout of anger, mad with fury that this horrible thing should strike at his friends even while its own life leaked out, Simon snatched a handful of its pelt in one hand and the wagging spear butt protruding from the giant’s back in the other, then dragged himself up onto its back.
Reeking of wet fur and musk and rotting meat, the great, quivering body straightened beneath him. Huge talon-nailed hands came up, smacking sightlessly in search of the insect that had lighted upon it, even as Simon drove his Qanuc dagger to the hilt in the giant’s neck, just below the contorted jaw. A moment later he felt himself caught up and flung loose by wrist-wide fingers.
There was a moment of weightlessness; the sky was a cracked swirl of gray and white and dimmest blue. Then Simon struck down.
He was stari
ng at a round stone, just a hand’s breadth beyond his nose. He could not feel his extremities, his body limp as boned fish, nor could he hear any sounds but a faint roaring in his ears and thin squeals that might be voices. The stone lay before him, spherical and solid, unmoving. It was a chunk of gray granite, banded with white, which might have lain in this place since Time itself was young. There was nothing special about it. It was only a piece of the earth’s bones, rough corners smoothed by eons of wind and water.
Simon could not move, but he could see the immobile, magnificently unimportant stone. He lay staring at it for a long time, feeling nothing but emptiness where his body had been, until the stone itself began to gleam, throwing back the faintest pink sheen of sunset.
They came for him at last when Sedda the moon appeared, her pale face peering down through the mist and twilight. Small, gentle hands lifted him and laid him on a blanket. He swayed gently as they carried him downslope and set him down near a roaring fire. Simon stared up at the moon as she mounted higher in the sky. Binabik came to him and said many soothing things in a quiet voice, but the words seemed nonsense. As others helped bind his wounds and laid cool, water-soaked rags on his head, Binabik crooned strange, circular songs, then gave him a bowl of something warm to drink, holding up Simon’s limp head as the sour draught trickled down his throat.
I must be dying, Simon thought. He felt a certain peace in the idea. It seemed as though his soul had left his body already, for he felt very little connection with his own flesh. I would have liked to have gotten out of the snows, first. I would have liked to have gone home....
He thought of another stillness such as he now felt: the moment when he had stood before Igjarjuk, the silence that had seemed to envelop the whole world, the timeless time before he had brought the sword down, before the black blood had fountained up.
But this time the sword didn’t help me ... Had he lost some kind of worthiness since he had left Urmsheim? Or was Thorn merely as inconstant as the wind and weather?
Simon remembered a warm summer afternoon back in the Hayholt, when the sunlight had angled down through the high windows of Doctor Morgenes’ chambers, making the lazily floating dust gleam like drifting sparks.
“Never make your home in a place,” the old man had told him that day. “Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You’ll find what you need to furnish it—memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey . . .”
Is that what dying is? Simon wondered. Is it going home? That’s not so bad.
Binabik was singing again, a drowsy sound like rushing water. Simon let go and drifted.
When he awakened late the next day, he was not immediately certain that he was still alive. The survivors had moved during the morning and Simon had been carried, along with the other wounded, to a cave beneath a leaning rock. On waking, he saw before him only an open hole into the gray sky. It was the ragged black birds gliding past the cave-mouth that taught him at last that he was still in the world—the birds, and the pain in all his limbs.
He lay for a while testing his hurts, bending his joints one by one. He ached, but movement had come back with the pain. He was sore but whole.
After a while Binabik came to him again with another drink of his healing beverage. The troll himself had not escaped without harm, as long runnels down his cheek and neck attested. Binabik’s look was solemn, but he seemed to give Simon’s wounds only a cursory inspection.
“We have received grievous damaging,” the troll said. “I wished I had not to say this, but ... Haestan is dead.”
“Haestan?!” Simon sat up, forgetting his aching muscles for a moment. “Haestan?” His stomach seemed to sink away inside him.
Binabik nodded his head. “And of my twice-dozen companions, nine were killed and six more are being badly wounded.”
“What happened to Haestan?” He felt a sickening sense of unreality. How could Haestan be dead? Had they not spoken only a few moments before ... before... ?” What about Sludig?”
“Sludig was hurt, but not badly. He is out with my tribesmen, cutting up wood for building of fires. It is important for healing the injured, do you see? And Haestan ...” Binabik thumped his chest with the heel of his hand—a gesture the Qanuc used, Simon had learned, to ward evil. The troll looked profoundly unhappy. “Haestan was struck to the head by one of the giant’s clubs. I am told that he pushed you away from danger and was shortly after himself killed.”
“Oh, Haestan,” Simon groaned. He expected tears to come, but they did not. His face felt strangely numb, his sorrow somehow weak. He put his head in his hands. The big guardsman had been so alive, so hearty. It was wrong that a life could be taken just that swiftly. Doctor Morgenes, Grimmric and Ethelbearn, An’nai, now Haestan—all dead, all struck down because they tried to do what was right. Where were those powers that should protect such innocents?
“And Sisqi?” Simon asked, suddenly remembering the troll maiden. He scanned Binabik’s face anxiously, but the troll showed only a distracted smile.
“She has survived, and with only small wounding.”
“Can we take Haestan down off the mountain? He wouldn’t want to be left here.”
Binabik reluctantly shook his head. “We cannot carry his body, Simon. Not on our rams. He was a man of largeness, too much for our mounts. And we still have a dangerous way to go before we are on flat land. He must stay here, but his bones will lie in honor with the bones of my people. He will be with other good and brave warriors. That is, I think, as he would be wishing. Now, you should sleep again—but first there are two who would speak with you.”
Binabik stepped back, Sisqi and the herder Snenneq were there, waiting at the cave-mouth. They came forward to stand beside Simon. Binabik’s intended spoke to Simon in troll speech. Her dark eyes were grave. Beside her, Snenneq seemed uncomfortable, shuffling from foot to foot.
“Sisqinanamook says she is sorrowful for you in the losing of your friend. She also says you showed rare bravery. Now all have seen the courage that you showed also on the dragon-mountain.”
Simon nodded, embarrassed. Snenneq made a throat-clearing noise and began a speech of his own. Simon waited patiently until Binabik could explain.
“Snenneq, herd-chief of Lower Chugik, says he, too, is sorry. Many good lives were lost yesterday. He also wishes to give you something back which you lost.”
The herder produced Simon’s bone-handled knife, passing it to him with a show of reverence.
“It was taken from the neck of a dead giant,” Binabik said quietly. “The gift of the Qanuc has been blooded in defense of Qanuc lives. This means much to my people.”
Simon accepted the knife, sliding it back into the decorated sheath on his belt. “Guyop,” he said. “Please tell them I am glad to have it back. I’m not quite sure what ‘defense of Qanuc lives’ means—we all fought the same enemy. But I don’t want to think about killing just now.”
“Of course.” Binabik turned to Sisqi and the herder, speaking briefly. They nodded. Sisqi leaned forward to touch Simon’s arm in wordless commiseration, then turned and led awkward Snenneq from the cave.
“Sisqi is leading the others in building the cairns of stone,” Binabik said. “And as for you, Simon-friend, there is nothing more to be done by you this day. Sleep.”
After tucking the cloak carefully around Simon’s shoulders, Binabik disappeared out through the opening of the cavern, stepping carefully around the sleeping forms of the other wounded. Simon watched him go, thinking of Haestan and the rest of the dead. Were they even now traveling the road toward the complete stillness that Simon had glimpsed?
As he fell asleep, he thought he saw his Erkynlandish friend’s broad back vanishing down a corridor into white silence. Haestan, Simon thought, did not seem to walk like a man who bore regrets—but then, it was only a dream.
Next day the noon sun pierced the mists, splashing light on Sikkihoq’s proud
slopes. Simon’s pain was less than he had thought it would be. With Sludig’s help, he was able to limp down from the cave to the flat shelf of rock where the cairns were being finished. There were ten, nine small and one large, the rocks carefully piled so that no wind or weather would shift them.
Simon saw Haestan’s pale face, blood-striped, before Sludig and his troll helpers finished winding the guardsman’s cloak about him. Haestan’s eyes were shut, but his wounds were such that Simon could not maintain any illusion that his long-time companion only slept. He had been killed by the Storm King’s brutal minions, and that was something to be remembered. Haestan had been a simple man. He would appreciate the notion of vengeance.
After Haestan had been laid away and the stones fitted atop his cairn. Binabik’s nine tribesmen and tribeswomen were lowered into their own graves, each with some article particular to him or her—or so Binabik explained it to Simon. When this was done and the nine cairns were sealed, Binabik stepped forward. He raised his hand. The other trolls began to chant. There were tears in many eyes, both male and female; one glimmered on Binabik’s own cheek. After some time had passed, the chanting came to a halt. Sisqi stepped forward, handing Binabik a torch and a small bag. Binabik sprinkled something from the bag on each grave, then touched the flame to it. A thin coil of smoke rose from each cairn in his wake, quickly shredded by the mountain wind. When he had finished the last, he handed the torch to Sisqi and began to sing a long string of Qanuc words. The melody was like the voice of the wind itself, rising and falling, rising and falling.
Binabik’s wind-song came to an end. He took torch and sack and raised a plume of smoke on Haestan’s barrow as well.
“Sedda told her children,”
he sang in the Westerling speech,
“Lingit and Yana,