by Jon Wilson
He thrust his head out through the doorway of the birdhouse.
His cousin Orata was crossing the yard, a large cloth-covered bundle in her arms. Gabin was yapping at her heels like a starving puppy. “But what is it?”
Orata sighed. “Just some butter and a cutlet with gravy and some sweet bread that I baked myself.”
His cousin was two years older than Holt and, even then, quite mature for her age. Her bosom was already the envy of a good many grown women in the village, though he had heard his mother tell his father it would only fall all the faster. She had mastered the walk of a much older woman, too, Holt noticed—taking her time and making full use of her hips. Otherwise, she was not particularly attractive. Her face was too fat and she had eyes like a pig and Holt had always hated her, but never so much as he did then, watching her walk up to the shed at the back of the stables.
“Holt saw it,” Gabin told her. “From the hayloft!”
Orata muttered something, her thoughts obviously on her destination, and motioned the child back. She left him half way across the yard and proceeded purposefully right up to the door. She rapped twice and, when that elicited no response, rapped again. Finally the door opened, and Holt smiled when his cousin took a step back.
The ranger had donned a jacket, but was otherwise unchanged. He did not smile, but neither did he appear particularly unfriendly. Holt reckoned either of the two would have pleased Orata more than the indifferent gaze she found herself confronted with. The man spoke, but too quietly for Holt to decipher his words.
Her stuttering rendered Orata’s reply nearly unintelligible. “I-I-I ber-ought you some f-food.”
The ranger looked down at the bundle and the girl shifted naturally to frame it with her breasts.
Holt frowned. His people were all such idiots! Didn’t they know what it meant to be Hyr-Danann? Hadn’t they told him? Yet here was his moronic cousin sashaying up to the ranger as if he were some dimwitted plowboy. Only, it looked to Holt as if the ranger did not mind. He invited her in.
“Hey, Holt!” Gabin came rushing up to the birdhouse. “Orata brought the ranger some food. And she took it in there!”
Holt handed his brother the eggs he had gathered, wordlessly pushing by him and out into the yard. Not knowing what he was doing or why, he started toward the shed. The yard looked, suddenly, impossibly wide—an unspannable chasm—though he knew every inch of it, having worked and played there all his life. Even as he gathered momentum, the closed door seemed to recede further into the distance. He knew he would never reach it and knew also he should die trying.
“Hey, Holt, where you going?” Gabin reappeared, running alongside him. Like Orata, Holt waved the younger boy away. Gabin stopped, looking quite perplexed, and then started toward the house with his burden of eggs.
After what felt like a lifetime, Holt neared the shed. Just then, the door reopened and Orata came striding out. Her mature lethargy vanished, she rushed past him without a glance. Holt stopped, turning to look after her. She had not looked pleased, her eyes even more squinty than usual.
“Hello.”
Holt spun back around.
There in the doorway stood the Hyr-Danann ranger. He looked at Holt a moment and then directed his gaze beyond him. “I think I offended her.”
Holt didn’t—couldn’t—respond. All the air seemed to have abandoned his lungs. A sharp, exquisite pain stabbed the center of his chest.
“You were in the loft,” the ranger told him.
Holt’s mouth dropped open. He struggled to find something to say—anything! But words had ceased to exist for him. And even had they not, he doubted whether he could have coaxed his lips into uttering any. His body no longer functioned. His arms hung limp at his sides, his knees trembled, his eyes stared and his tongue lay swollen and stupid in his mouth.
The ranger stepped back into the shed. The door began to close.
“Why?” For a moment Holt feared he might have screamed it, but then, as if waking from a dream, he realized he had barely gasped.
The ranger was there again. For the first time, Holt thought he saw expression flicker across the impassive features. The jaw still worked the mouthful of sweetbread but weren’t the eyes just a bit narrower?
“What did they mean?” Holt stammered.
The Hyr-Danann continued to regard him. Was it with skepticism?
“When they said…” Holt faltered. He no longer knew what he had meant to ask. It was all so confusing, not at all like he had imagined. Hadn’t he dreamt about this very thing the night before? Was this a dream? Would he wake up trembling and near tears any moment?
“The trolls,” he said at last, remembering something, anything. “Jira… Something.”
“Jimarrang,” the ranger corrected him. He seemed to consider before he continued. “It means troll land. They were saying this land belongs to them.”
Holt tried to make himself understand, but the meaning of the man’s words lay hidden somewhere beyond the sound of his voice. “Jima…Ran?”
“Jimarrang.” It was a beautiful word when the ranger said it. “They were lying, of course. The Huerunan ceded this valley ages ago. They’re scared, that’s all.”
“Scared?” Holt felt amazement stretch his features. “Of us?”
The ranger performed what might have been a minuscule interpretation of a shrug. “Of men. Spreading further back from the sea.” The ranger’s eyes grew distant, and Holt suddenly realized he was losing him.
“I want to go to VaSaad-Ka,” he said quickly, drawing the piercing gaze back once more. He fought not to look away. “You have to take me.”
The ranger cocked a brow, but did not seem otherwise impressed by Holt’s declaration. He backed into the hut, leaving the door open so Holt might follow.
The interior of the shed held no surprises. It was the same dirty, windowless room Holt had entered any number of times. The only noticeable additions were the bed of straw along the far wall, covered with a multicolored quilt, the knapsack containing the Hyr-Danann’s few belongings and Orata’s breakfast, set out on a dusty shelf. The winter sun creeping up behind Holt and through the myriad gaps and cracks in the slat walls set the air dancing with shimmering dust.
For a moment neither spoke and then abruptly the ranger scratched his head.
“Are you hungry?” He took down the slat bearing the cutlet. “I am.”
Reminded abruptly of his skipped breakfast, Holt felt his stomach grumble to life. But he did not reply. At such a moment, eating seemed an absurd idea.
The Hyr-Danann was watching him again, his bushy eyebrows arched inquiringly. Holt realized he was expected to respond. He did, thanking the man kindly but refusing, only to have his stomach betray him with a pitiful groan.
The ranger shrugged, sitting on a large stack of sacks. He balanced the plate on his knees and began to eat. The appearance he gave was one of wholehearted concentration on the food, and Holt waited with surprising patience.
“I would offer you a chair…” When Holt still did not respond, the ranger looked up with another wry smile. Holt felt his heart lurch in his chest. He wouldn’t have been the least surprised if the organ bounced up his throat and rolled away across the dirty floor. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you. It beats sleeping in a cave. I guess. The rats seem to love it anyway.” And then the Hyr-Danann asked, “How old are you?”
Holt hardened his expression. Of all the words he had ever imagined being spoken during that interview—which he had rehearsed over and over in his mind, a hundred times in a hundred different ways— these were below the worst. He had been ready to leave when he’d turned nine, when he had first understood the stories of VaSaad-Ka and the Danann living apart from the rest of society. The ranger’s question angered him though, and he had been angry for so long that it freed his mind to start functioning normally once more.
“I’m old enough to know.”
The Hyr-Danann’s brow hoisted again. “Know what?”
His lips twisted, considering. “What do you know of VaSaad-Ka?”
Holt answered quickly, “I know it’s the City of the Sun, the home of the Danann, a center for learning and art and…” He paused, unable to continue. The ranger’s frown deepened and Holt wished he had taken more time to consider his reply. He wondered if the man thought he believed the tales of streets paved in gold, lined by magnificent mansions, strolled by scores of happy people, all beautiful, intelligent and kind. Holt knew these things could not really be true, though a part of him held out hope they were. And even if not, VaSaad-Ka could only be a vast improvement over what he had endured up until then.
The ranger shrugged, conveying a piece of cutlet to his mouth on the tip of his knife. “It’s a nice place, I suppose. Like many others.”
Except I would belong there, Holt thought desperately. How could he make this man see how wrong it would be to leave him behind?
“Why is it you want to go there?”
That was easy. “To be a Hyr-Danann ranger.”
The ranger’s head came up abruptly, his big brown eyes catching Holt’s own blues unexpectedly. It was nearly more than he could bear.
Finally the Hyr-Danann seemed to recall the cutlet. He turned his attention back to his lap, to the meat adrift in a greasy pool of its own juices and gravy. His knife rose, only to hover over the slat, uncertain of which bit to skewer next. He stabbed, tearing a small chunk from the half-eaten cutlet and then vaguely stirred it around and around in the sauce.
“What’s your name?”
“Holt.” He stumbled over the word. He hated it. It was a symbol of the life he wanted to abandon and he resented its intrusion at that moment.
“I’m Kawika.” The ranger was still toying with his food. Quite unexpectedly he asked, “What do you think it means to be a Hyr-Danann?”
Holt was dumbfounded. What did it mean? It meant learning, belonging. It meant everything that life on the frontier did not. It meant, quite possibly, happiness. But was this what the man wanted to hear? Should Holt gush like a child, laying bare his every desire? How could he put into words those thoughts and feelings he’d never dared admit to himself? The answer the ranger wanted lay buried beneath a lifetime of lies. And then it occurred to him. That was what it meant:no more lies.
“It means being what I am.”
Kawika was silent. Finally he put aside the cutlet and rubbed his face with his hands. Holt realized, astonished, the man was smiling.
The ranger threw back his head and called to the ceiling, “Onee, where are you when I need you?” He looked down, still smiling.
Holt felt he did not dare do the same. He held his head proudly erect, looking at the ranger with defiant need. “Will you take me?” Even as he spoke he knew he had been too impetuous.
“I can’t,” Kawika said. He started to say more, but Holt interrupted.
“You have to!” Terror tore away at his reserve. This could not be happening! In all his imagined scenarios, from the best to the worst, he had never considered being left behind. It was his place to be a Hyr-Danann ranger. It had to be! There was nothing else for him.
“I wish it were that easy.” The ranger shook his head. The softening of his features had revealed his fatigue. He blinked slowly, washing his huge eyes with sudden moisture. “I’m not going back to VaSaad-Ka until the spring.”
Holt felt his own tears threatening to spill. “But—but I could come with you still.” It seemed futile to add, “I won’t be a burden.”
Kawika waved a hand toward the straw mat. “And live like this?” Holt started a rejoinder, but the hand rose again. “No. And besides, do you think the Danann go into villages spiriting away children in the night? Do you think I can conjure some changeling to leave in your place?”
“I can’t stay here!” Holt felt the tears escape him, burning down his cheeks. He wanted to reach out and grab the ranger, not letting go until they were far away.
“Holt!” The sound of Gabin’s voice wrenched him from the verge of such desperate action. “Holt, Papa wants you!” “I’ll die,” Holt said.
“No,” Kawika told him. “You won’t.”
But Holt knew the truth, knew it with unrelenting clarity. He was dying already. Were he to stay in his village, he would slowly become less and less who he was, and more and more whom he was expected to be. Soon the Holt that existed would be supplanted by another Holt: farmer Holt, husband Holt, Holt the papa. The real Holt, the boy with dreams, would be lost forever.
Yet even as he agonized over these thoughts, Holt knew he would never be able to convey them to the Hyr-Danann ranger. This was a man who dealt in real matters of life and death—death of the flesh, not the spirit. He could never understand the hopelessness of life on the frontier, living among people you secretly despised and who despised you, sometimes not so discreetly. He who lived in a hundred different places: cities, villages, and even under the open sky —he could not be made to believe that some places were unlivable. How could someone who saw the VaSaad as simply another place see that to a boy in one of those hundreds of villages on the edge of the wild, it might be a symbol of hope and truth and life?
Holt felt his terror crumble into despair. Tears began to flow unchecked; a sob swelled within his chest. He had tried to be brave and forthright, to exhibit the maturity he thought would prove him worthy. Now, his dreams in ruins, he fell back on his last line of attack; some instinctive part of him knew that all he had left was pity.
Pity—a weapon he had sworn never to wield. He did not plead with his parents nor cry uncle when Kelvin the bully pinned him to the ground and boxed his ears.Dolt, dolt, stupid, stupid Holt! Pity was private—his alone for lying late into the night thinking,Oh, poor Holt, such an awful life. It hid right beside the dream of VaSaad-Ka—hand-inhand with that shining bastion. It brought them together, he and his bright future—a dark, crippled ferryman bearing him over the black sea of his despair.
The ranger’s face changed again. What compassion had exposed itself as fleetingly retreated behind a stoic, aloof mask. “I’m sorry,” he said, though there was no evidence of the fact. He looked away. “Perhaps in the spring, on my way back to the VaSaad…”
Holt sobered instantly, not with rekindled promise but with disgust. This, his first taste of another’s pity, felt like dirt in his mouth. He looked at the ranger with incredulous eyes.
“A few months more,” Kawika started to explain, but Holt, having waited nearly fourteen years already, fled.
Chapter 2 The fire burned late into the afternoon. Black smoke and the smell of burning flesh wafted off over the hills to the north of the village. A dark trail stained the gray sky, tracking the trolls’ path back to their mountain homes far beyond the snow-filled passes.
Holt stood a good distance back from the flames. His father had let him lead the horse back to the stable, but after unharnessing the cart he had returned. The men did not seem to notice him, intent upon keeping the fire contained but alive. They wanted nothing to remind them of what had transpired and for the first time Holt thought he might understand. All the morning raids, the gruesome murders—they wanted to know it was finished. Holt was ready to finish something as well.
“Such horrible creatures.” Polefe appeared out of the nothingness to stand beside him. She, too, watched the flames, a disheartened look of wonder clouding her plain features. Her folded arms were clutched tightly across her chest as if she could not feel the heat that hit them wave after wave even at their distance.
Holt surprised himself by not minding her presence so much. The sound of her straightforward voice, her simple and unarguable observation, the comfortable manner in which she stood beside him, all served to make him feel he was not Holt but just some other villager, sharing a common respite. He felt he might reach out and touch her, sharing his warmth, discovering hers. They were two people, after all, standing in the snow.
“Did you really see it all from the hayloft?” Even her question did not i
rk him as it had coming from his brother. It was not as if she was asking what he saw, but rather if he, Holt, had actually seen such a thing.
He nodded. “I saw it.”
She turned her face to look at him.
“Was it awful?”
“It all happened so fast,” he told her,
hearing once again the breaking bones and
agonized wails. Visions of stumbling monsters
and spurting blood flashed across his
memory, but in too rapid a succession to
make any sense out of. The trolls had
charged the Hyr-Danann again and again and
he had met them with incredible, inhumanly
lethal fists and kicks. Even when the fight had
proved hopeless, the monsters had not tried
to flee. Holt recalled Kawika’s words—that
the trolls were afraid. They had fought not as
if they were attackers, raiders bent on
ransacking someone else’s storehouse, but
as if they had been defending the gate, with
nowhere to run, to fight or die.
“They say there won’t be any more.”
Polefe shrugged. “Gar says this was a
renegade bunch. Probably didn’t plan for such a long winter. He says their young ones and the elder males are probably starving to death right now.” She obviously felt it was better a family of trolls than her own kin, and Holt could not begrudge her the notion. He had no strong sense of blood-ties to any of these people with whom he lived day after
day, but the trolls were monsters after all. As twilight began to set in, most of the
men started the slow trek back toward the
town. When his father passed, Holt thought
he noticed a quick glance out of the corner of