Winter Song

by Colin Harvey

  The troll didn't answer. Instead it leaped at Karl with opened hands and bared fangs.

  Karl managed to get hold of one hand from which claws had unsheathed, noticing almost without thinking that the troll's breath was sweet, with a minty undertone.

  The troll's free hand swiped at him and despite his swaying back, its claws raked Karl's cheek with a glancing blow. Cursing, he released the troll's wrist and jumped back.

  It advanced on him with windmilling arms – trying to claw him again – so Karl had to step back. The troll lunged again, gabbling and hissing and shrieking.

  In turn, as he slowly gave ground, Karl ran through Loki's Kyrgyz, Tatar and Uygur vocabulary, whatever the download could provide him with. None of the words for "friend" elicited any reaction from the troll. Maybe it's so mad that it's not listening, he thought.

  "Draw your sword!" Bera screamed. "Thor's sake, Karl, don't get yourself killed! Stick the damned thing if need be, and we'll find another one for you to dance with!"

  The troll kept advancing, and Karl reluctantly drew his sword. He held it to the troll's throat and for one awful moment thought that it was simply going to march onto the blade.

  Then it stopped.

  "Friend," Karl repeated in several more languages, running through Kazakh, Turkmen, Uzbek, even Russian, and however outlandish it seemed, Mongolian. When he said the word in Kazakh, he thought that he detected the faintest of motions, as if the troll was startled but trying not to show it – but it did nothing else. When he ran out of languages, Karl tried Kazakh again, convinced that the troll was studying him. It was hard to tell with the long grey and brown fur that all but hid its eyes.

  "Friend," Karl said for a third time, and half lowered his sword.

  The troll said something, equally slowly, and as clearly as the fangs permitted.

  Loki translated for Karl: Not friend.

  Karl insisted, "Friend." His heart hammering, his mouth dry, he said to himself, Here goes. This may get me killed. But there seems no other option. Shaking with nerves, he took a long, deep breath and lowered his sword all the way, then carefully, never breaking eye contact with the alien, he put the sword on the ground.

  FIFTEEN

  Ragnar's men had reached Heimurpak – the Roof of the World. Snow mantled the mountains, even on a sunny day like today, when the suns' reflections shone in their eyes with the blinding precision of a mirror attack, making every footstep a lottery. Beneath the snow was only bare rock; nothing lived up here, although dragons slid across the mountain-tops from time to time.

  Ragnar suspected that the others felt as unwell as he did. He'd slept badly, listening to them coughing throughout the night. Every few minutes he tasted the lamb he'd eaten for breakfast, sitting heavily in his gut. His head felt as though Thor had been walloping it with his divine hammer, and his heart was racing just from the effort of sitting in his saddle.

  Mountaineers called this altitude – 7,500 metres above Isheimur's sea level, where the air was as thin as the same height on Old Earth – the Death Zone. If they could descend quickly by nightfall to a lower altitude and more oxygen, they'd feel better in a day or two. If they didn't, they were dead. It was as simple as that.

  Past the highest ridge now, the horses slid down a zig-zag path that narrowed and steepened until reaching a canyon. The riders milled around in the last open square of rocky outcrop before dismounting.

  Ragnar hated this feeling of weakness. He'd fought all his life, half the time against weakness itself. He let the anger take him over and drive him. "Each man tie a rope around his waist," he shouted, "so that if one falls, the rest can hold him."

  An argument broke out about whether to loop the rope through the horses' saddles, but Ragnar frowned, and after a moment's hesitation, vetoed it. Even that little thought hurt his head. "Each horse… weighs more than two men," he said. "A falling horse… will… take us with it."

  He led the men and horses along a narrow path beside a sheer six-hundred-metre drop, the wind tugging at them with icy little fingers, and the rushing water of the stream below no louder than the susurrus of the wind through the windmill's blades back at Skorradalur.

  Ragnar struggled to find oxygen with each rasping breath he took. Worse, any misstep risked their toppling off the narrow ledge, so they could only inch along.

  Several times Ragnar heard the scrape of something on stone. He didn't like to look up, because his horse bumped into him, but the alternative was to not know whether there was a dragon there, which was worse. Each time he paused and looked up there was nothing there.

  Dragons wouldn't attack, but the adolescents were curious creatures and might easily trigger an avalanche. That they weren't there implied that the rocks above the men were so unstable they might simply fall at any moment.

  Still, they had almost reached safety when disaster struck.

  The next few seconds were the longest of Karl's life.

  The troll knelt. Even though its eyes were shrouded by fur, its rigid posture indicated that it never stopped watching Karl for a moment.

  It picked up the sword.

  Karl stopped breathing.

  In its other hand it took the blade, and proffered Karl the hilt. As he took the sword, Karl breathed again. The troll said, "Friend." Part of the second syllable was on the threshold of Karl's hearing, but the meaning was clear.

  The language has drifted, Loki said. It would make sense to fully utilise their greater vocal range. If over ninety per cent of human communication is non-verbal, and blizzards block visual intercourse, then the humanoids would need to extend their vocal range to fill the void.

  Karl called to Bera, "Have you been watching this?"

  "Yes." Her voice was high and tight, with fear, he guessed, of the challenge to everything she believed true.

  He almost said, "Tell me he's not sentient, now," but held his tongue. Better to let her decide in her own time. "Get some rock-eater out of the saddlebag, will you?" He motioned the troll to follow him, miming eating – hoping that the troll wouldn't think he meant for Karl to be dinner – and they emerged from the horizontal chimney.

  "It's limping," Bera called. "It's hurt. That's when they turn man-eater."

  I'm going to turn control over to you, Karl muttered to Loki. Talk to it. It's definitely speaking a variant of Kazakh.

  There was a moment of dislocation akin to a starship docking with one of the giant relays that hangs in every system's fold-space entry-point, and you sensed Karl's lingering suspicion. After what happened before, perhaps it's even understandable. "Can you understand me?" you asked the troll in very slow, precise Kazakh, enunciating every word clearly. "If you do, speak to me. The more you talk, the more I understand."

  Bera had rejoined the waiting horses. You trudged back to her, deliberately slowly. "Rock." You pointed at one. "Foot. Sword," pointing at where you'd resheathed it.

  When you both reached the mouth of the chimney, your back spasmed with tension. If the troll was going to try anything, now would be the moment, when you reached open ground and it was no longer trapped. But it simply watched you point at each object that you passed.

  "Horses." You pointed at the waiting Grainur and Taitur, who twitched at the troll's scent. Bera made soothing noises as she stroked the latter's mane, and the animals resumed eating their dried grass from the feed-bags. "Woman." Bera raised an eyebrow but said nothing, only watched the troll, who had stilled.

  The troll opened its mouth. Ultrasonics pinged off Bera and the horses, who both took a step back. The troll turned and said in Kazakh a single word: "Demons."

  Ragnar reached a shelf and paused for the others when he heard a shriek from the other end of the line and saw the rear horse's hindquarters slide over the edge of the precipice.

  Arne Einarsson was leading it. He tried to hold on, but all that happened was that the fool went with the horse. Ragnar's throat tightened as Arnbjorn, who was next to last in the line, also fell. Luckily Orn had the p
resence of mind to loop the rope round a large rock or the rest of them would have followed, one after the other.

  Arne wasn't the brightest man that Ragnar had ever employed, although he worked hard and sent kronur home to his family in Nyttakranes every month, so it wasn't surprising that the soft-headed sod had tried to save the horse and nearly doomed them all.

  For a moment Ragnar considered shooting him where he hung, but the group hauled Arnbjorn and the luckless Arne in, their shoulders threatening to pop from their sockets, veins bulging blue on their temples, until both men stood, shaking, at the end of the ledge.

  Arne stood moaning in pain, clutching his arm where it hung limply from a dislocated shoulder.

  "Your supplies went down with that horse." Ragnar tried to think straight, using anger to fuel his internal fight with hypoxia. At the icy tone of his voice, Thorir and Bjarney both stepped back. "You'll get none of the other's rations."

  "I'll manage somehow," gasped Arne, holding onto his arm, snot and tears glistening on his face.

  "How?" Ragnar said.

  At the one word Arne looked up, and saw his future in Ragnar's eyes. Arne swallowed. "Do it," he said.

  Ragnar took a deep breath and pushed him out into space. Perhaps it was his imagination, but the man seemed to hang there for a micro-second, before plunging into the icy waters below.

  "The man was a lackwit," Ragnar said. "If we must starve then we will, but not because of him." The men stared at him. "We can't carry anyone!" Ragnar roared. "You all had your chance to go home. You didn't take it. He would have dragged us down with him."

  "When does it stop, Gothi?" Arnbjorn whispered, white-faced and wide-eyed. "When?"

  The troll emitted a contented belch and picked rockeater from its upper right fang. Although it gave the impression of being at ease, and it was impossible to see its eyes clearly through the mantle of fur, you sensed that it wasn't quite as relaxed as it tried to look, perhaps because every so often you felt a touch, as faint a spider's web on the back of his hand, from the troll's voice.

  "Good?" you said in Kazakh.

  The troll's head dipped a fraction of a centimetre in assent.

  You pointed to yourself, and hesitated. Who were you? Finally, accepting that Aye downloads were perhaps too complex to explain in Kazakh, you said, "Karl." Pointing at her, you said, "Bera."

  "How do you know that it won't think my name's the word for woman?" Bera said.

  She's joking, Karl thought, for your benefit. See the twitch at the corners of her lips? Maybe she's starting to come to terms with the idea that the trolls are intelligent.

  "Because that isn't the Kazakh word for woman." You said the right word, and the troll stiffened. You repeated the process of naming yourself and Bera.

  The troll pointed to its chest. "Coeo," stretching it to three syllables, "Koh-ay-oh."

  "I hate to interrupt this getting-acquainted session," Bera said, "but besides giving away rations that we can't spare, we're still only on the edge of the desert. Shouldn't we move on?"

  You shushed her and gestured to Coeo to raise its foot, and slowly, it complied. You peered through the fur, hissing a sharp intake of breath at the evil-looking gash on the sole of its foot that oozed pus, and was surrounded by bright red inflammation.

  It wasn't an "it" at all, of course, and you pointed to it, asking in Kazakh, "Man? Woman?" As you did so, you fingers fumbled, and you realised that you were tiring. You need to do this, you thought at Karl. It needs more dexterity than I have.

  As Karl retook control of everything but your mouth (and how awkward and clumsy it all was, like a recovering stroke-victim re-learning motor control), Coeo said slowly, "Man." He said something else, but with his fangs and half of the sentence pinging up toward the ultrasonic, it was barely intelligible as speech at all; it was no wonder that the settlers and their forebears, with no great desire to look for sentience where none was obvious, missed all the signs.

  "Pass me the medicines," Karl said to Bera.

  Bera complied, but reluctantly. "We can't really spare these," she said.

  He dressed the foot, which must have been agony to walk, let alone run upon. Karl thought, If it weren't for the snawk incident, we'd never have seen the troll's humanity either. Or maybe he would have; his curiosity about the Aye ships was what landed him here in the first place, and was only matched by his desire to fit things together. Take over talking again, and the same awkward transfer followed.

  "Repeat last word," you said in Kazakh, "Slowly, very, very slowly."

  "As if you are… ?" The last word was lost.

  "As if I am… ?"

  The troll said, "Child."

  "Exactly. Big, stupid child."

  The troll giggled. It was half ultrasonic, but there was no mistaking the timbre: it was a giggle. It said, "Thank you. For food. Helping." It pointed to its foot, that Karl was wrapping slowly, carefully in a bandage lined with a paste made from Isheimuri herbs and Norn-made penicillin. "You are different. From Coeo, and from Bera."

  "How?"

  "Skin thicker – sound bumps off it, not through you as much as Bera."

  "I'm from the sky." You had Karl point upward at the heavens.

  Coeo stiffened. "Lies!"

  Karl shrugged, and tied off the end of the fabric. You said, "Where you think I'm from? Different, you said."

  "Before, when men came from sky, in time of our…" Coeo said, Karl's lingua-weave struggling to cope with the variation of pitch and unfamiliar vocabulary, but finally settling for "grandfathers."

  "Grandfathers. Ancestors?"

  "Yes. In time of ancestors, rained rocks. Many, many Coeo-people die. My… ancestors try to talk with invaders, but they kill Coeo-people, so we hide whenever we can. Now you say you from sky. You make it rain rocks? Come to kill my people?"

  "No," Loki said. "Karl lost, want to go home, leave this place behind. Forget all about it." The first part was true, but Karl doubted he would forget Isheimur.

  Coeo didn't answer.

  "Why you alone?" Loki said. "No tribe?"

  Coeo lifted his foot. "Coeo… unable to be part of tribe. No catch food, no herd animals," the adapted man said. "Is the law – sick must be cast out, so the tribe can survive. If they live, they can join a tribe. If they die, no waste."

  Darwinism taken to extremes, Karl thought. But what happened to compassion? Mercy?

  Karl stood and re-took verbal control. "He's sentient. He has language, although ordinary human hearing can't hear half of it. If you weren't specifically listening for it, you'd never know. And your people have been too busy surviving, I guess, to go looking for answers to questions you've never thought of."

  Bera packed away the remaining medicines. "He's naked! How civilised is that?"

  "Don't confuse sentience with civilisation." Karl laughed. "Anyway, who says he's naked?"

  "Well…" Bera drawled, pointing at the troll, as if he were answer enough.

  "The web-men of Tau Ceti IV grow tools from their own silk extrusions," Karl said. "Why not grow your own clothes? What are clothes but manufactured fur?"

  Bera looked bemused.

  Karl said, "The climate is perfect for them; and he's almost certainly been tailored that way. I'm willing to bet that under that fur he has genitals; maybe they retract. He'll have been adapted to filter out the local toxins. Maybe excrete them…"

  At Karl's prompting, Loki scanned his data.

  Karl said, "Ship's readings, limited though they were, indicated that Isheimur has more oxygen and carbon dioxide than when the project started. I'm willing to guess that you don't often find them in the lowlands?"

  "No," Bera admitted, "and almost always beyond the tropics."

  "Isheimur's warmer now – it's probably too hot for them. And with carbon dioxide being heavier than air, the lowlands are probably – no!" Karl snapped his fingers, remembering the dead troll in the valley that Ragnar and his neighbour had argued over. "Not close to! The lowlands are t
oxic for them."

  "Great theory," Bera said. "Show me proof."

  They mounted their horses. Coeo stood watching them. Karl thought that he looked strangely forlorn. "Can he hunt with that injury?"

  "Probably not," Bera said. "But we can't afford to feed him."

  "We'll compromise," Karl said. Take over the vocals, he told Loki.

  You said at Karl's prompting, "Coeo come with us? Can show us food and water is?"

  Coeo said, "Where you go?"