by Wil McCarthy
For a moment, nothing happened, and then…
And then the saplings along the forest floor were bursting apart as a black and white spotted animal charged out from the treeline. At first Argur thought it was a boar, but he saw it was too large, and then he saw it was much too large. It skidded to a halt when it saw its way blocked by ten armed humans, but it snarled and raised its front legs and then brought them back down, stamping the earth flat beneath gigantic feet.
“Boolis!” someone cried out.
“Shiiiit!” cried someone else.
“Plant spears!” Argur commanded, for bracing one’s spear against the ground was the only plausible way to survive a fight with a boolis. But the men were only armed with shortspears and leverthrows today, because they were hunting orr-ox, and not with lethal intent. All they needed to do was goad a mare into the nets, and maybe, if things went really wrong, launch a spear or two through her heart with the leverthrows. A shortspear was, by definition, only chin-high, and offered scant protection against a creature such as this. With a single gigantic horn on its head—tall and blunt as a stone hammer, and waved around just above the level of human heads—the boolis was almost two men tall at the shoulder, and weighed as much as a whole herd of orr-oxen. It vaguely resembled both a mammoth and a wooly rhinoceros—and yes, a very large boar—but it outmuscled all of these by a long throw, and its white-and-black coloration were enough to strike fear into even the bravest hearts. Though a solitary herbivore, it was faster than a cave bear, meaner than a wolverine, and easily the most dangerous animal these woods had ever known.
Still, the men did as he commanded, and Argur was surprised to see Nortlan copying them, with a brave, proud look struggling against the terror on his face. Fighting monsters with the Knights of Ell! But he might not feel so brave if he really understood what they were up against.
The boolis growled, stamped its feet, brushed a gigantic hoof against its gigantic mouth, and screamed.
The men screamed back, for boolises could sometimes be spooked that way.
The young of the species were pure white and frail, with a long sharp horn. They resembled deer or horses, if horses were armed and dangerous, but they were also lonely creatures, and they occasionally fell prey to packs of lions or wolves. Even human hunters had been known to take one down if the opportunity arose, although the meat was tough and flavorless. As a boolis grew, its horn widened without growing longer, and its body thickened with bitter muscle as tough as rawhide, and ribs the size of saplings. Killing an adult boolis involved getting underneath it with a well-planted spear, driving the point into its heart, and then somehow getting out from under before it fell on you or trampled you to death. Argur had heard of people surviving the experience, but it was definitely not a position you ever wanted to be in.
But perhaps boolises never forgot that early vulnerability, even as they grew into monsters. They tended to be suspicious of humans and carnivores, and to shrink away from fire and movement and loud noises. Waving a rag at them was recommended, if you had a free hand. Spitting water at them was another trick that supposedly sometimes worked, if you happened to have some water in your mouth.
Unfortunately, this particular boolis wasn’t spooked by the men’s shouting, and it wasn’t intimidated by their spears. Instead, it took a step forward, and then two more, and then it charged right through their midst, knocking Knights aside like leaves in a wind. It screamed again, and then thundered off into the trees, trampling everything in its path.
As it slipped from view, Argur noticed that its rump was bleeding from a number of circular wounds. Huh. Weird. Were they not the first men to fight it today? But who would spear it in the rump, and for love’s sake, why? If a boolis is leaving, you let it leave!
“Sound off,” Argur said.
“Intact,” Tom answered at once. Several other men responded similarly.
But then Gouch said, “Hurt. The spear broke. I think I sprained my wrist.”
And Timlin said, “Face wound. Bleeding. I’m not sure where.”
There was a pause.
“Anyone else?” Argur inquired, and when no one answered, he said, “Bravely done, people. That was no joke.”
Then he swiveled toward Timlin, took the man by the chin, and clucked. “Oh, ouch. You’ve split your lip! Or bitten through it, I don’t know. There’s a lot of blood. Put some pressure, yeah, put some pressure on that. I know it hurts.”
“Is it bad?” Tim wanted to know.
“Well, it’s not good. You’ve got an opening the size of my fingernail. If you press on it it should seal up before the end of the day, but that lip’s going to swell. Are you dizzy?”
“No.”
“Teeth hurt?”
“Yes. Front teeth are loose, but intact.”
“Hmm. Well, you’re going to be eating soft food for ten days, I’m afraid. Get back to Sunrise Castle and have someone wash that out. By morning your lip’s going to be the size of a pine cone. But keep the pressure on, or you’re going to leave a blood trail all the way home.”
It wouldn’t be Timlin’s first split lip, and he certainly knew what to expect, but Argur generally found it a good idea to tell people what they already knew, especially when they were hurt.
“Should I go with him?” Gouch wanted to know.
“Yes. Definitely. And since neither of you can fight, bring Snar with you as well, for protection. You three are out for the day.” And then he repeated: “That muddy mud mud shit was no joke. Thing could have killed somebody. We didn’t have the weapons or the armor for a fight like that. It could have killed everybody.”
“I’m fine,” Nortlan added, a little late. “It ran right past me. I felt its breath! And did you notice those spear wounds on its hind end?”
Several of the men nodded and grunted at that. Yeah, yeah, spear wounds.
Yeah.
“That’s not right,” Tom said. “Something’s not right.”
“That thing was goaded,” Jek said. “Someone drove it here to cause a problem.”
“Why?” Pagel asked.
And then the answer seemed to dawn on everyone at once: as a decoy.
“But who would do that?” Chap wanted to know. “Who would dare?”
And that answer was not so clear, but the question hung heavy in the air. Who would dare attack the valley of Nog La, risking the wrath of its Knights and hunters? Even the women of Nog La were notoriously skilled with knife and cudgel. Or perhaps skill was less the issue; the people of Nog La were well equipped. There were always knives and spears and clubs and leverthrows ready at hand. There were shields and helmets and armor and piles of big, round rocks! And baskets and hardmud bowls full of food, too, which meant the people here were big; at least half a head taller than any of their neighbors. And Argur liked to think they were smarter as well. And they had two fine castles to retreat to and attack from! It didn’t make any sense.
And even more worrying: who would dare attack a boolis? Who would dare goad it from whatever mountain forests it was haunting, and drive it down into the valley? What kind of courage or desperation did that take? The thing had come from the direction of Ketlan Pass, which wasn’t good.
“I think we’d all better get back to the castle,” Argur said. Then, after a moment’s thought: “Except you, Chap. I want you to run to the lake villages and warn them about the boolis, and what it means. And you, Pagel. I’d like you to run all the way to Sunset Castle. I’m sending you both alone, and lightly armed. Pagel will be spending the night alone. You can certainly both refuse if you’re not comfortable with it. But you two are fast, and I fear we may need that right now.”
“I’ll do it,” Pagel said at once.
“Yeah,” Chap agreed.
With that agreed, the men spent a few minutes checking and trading their gear. Chap and Pagel needed to travel light, but not stupid. One knife, one spear, one leverthrow, a good belt to hold it all, and a strong pair of sandals. A warm cloak for
Pagel, plus a small hammock, fortunately carried along by Jek for some reason. Everything else the two runners could offload. Water and food were luxuries they could obtain along the way.
“Ready?” Pagel asked.
Chap nodded. “Yep. Let’s go.”
And then, with no additional fuss, they were off. Running in the same direction for now, but before long they’d have to split up, violating one of the most basic rules of Nog La: never go anywhere alone.
“Wow, this day went bad quickly,” Nortlan said.
“That’s how it happens,” Max told him.
“Nobody expects to have a bad day,” Tom agreed. “You wake up planning for a good one. And it’s good right up until it’s bad, and you have to notice when that’s starting to happen.”
“I definitely noticed,” Nort agreed, his voice shaking a little.
“Let’s get going,” Argur said.
And so the ten of them—ten able-bodied and two slightly wounded, plus a boy who had stood his ground. As bad days went, this could be a lot worse. But then again, it could get still get a lot worse. In fact, they didn’t really know what was happening. It could already be worse, and they just hadn’t learned the details yet.
“Stay sharp,” he said. “Move fast.”
* * *
Harv surfaced here for a befuddled moment, wondering first of all why Argur—a seemingly intelligent fellow—kept referring in his thoughts to ten of this and ten of that, when the actual numbers were clearly different. It seemed the man didn’t actually know how to count, or that “ten” was not just a word for the maximum number of fingers a person could hold up, but perhaps also a synonym for “many” or “who cares how many,” or something like that. As an analytical person, Harv was offended to think one of his ancestors—even one as remote as Argur—could think such imprecise thoughts.
But Harv was also thrown off by what had just happened. The “boolis” was nothing he’d ever seen before, even in artists’ conceptions. It appeared to be some oversized relative of the rhinoceros, although its single horn was farther back, near the center of its head. But in coloration it was more like a modern dairy cow, and in temperament like a rodeo bull, and he wondered, for just a moment, whether he was dreaming or hallucinating. Could such a cockamamie animal really have existed? But it was all too vivid, too specific for him to remain suspicious for long. No part of his brain was capable of imagining all this. It must be something long extinct.
But that led him to ask again: when the hell was this? A few mammoths were actually probably still alive in Manuah’s day, and the orr-ox drawing was perhaps not so different from the sort of cattle some people still kept in Africa in Harv’s own time, so that didn’t tell him much. But this wasn’t Africa; from the maple and oak trees and hawthorn shrubs and rolling hills all around him, he thought he must be somewhere in Europe. And although it was the height of summer here in Nog La, Harv could feel a whisper of cold in the air, and a sense in Argur’s mind that a brutally cold season would be coming soon, and staying for a long time, and could be deadly if they weren’t prepared.
Europe in the middle of the Ice Age, then? That wasn’t much help, either; wasn’t the Ice Age millions of years long? Homo sapiens hadn’t been in Europe that long, though. While his mind was active, he tried to dredge up anything he might ever have learned about when they’d arrived.
But okay, why were the people black? Or nearly black; while not quite the color of stout beer, Argur and Dala and all of the Knights of Ell ranged in color from red ale to, perhaps, a nice dark lager, and all of them sported deep brown eyes and wiry black hair that formed into natural dreadlocks and was trimmed to just above shoulder length. Their beards were short and close to the skin—apparently naturally so. Tall and strong, they looked like no native Europeans of Harv’s own epoch. Really, they didn’t look like anyone of Harv’s epoch, except perhaps Samoans or Tongans or something. One of those islands that produced a lot of football players.
But these people weren’t cave men either, any more than Manuah and Adrah. Their clothing was too advanced; Harv had never seen a cave man wear dyed, woven cloth, or dyed hawk feathers, or dyed rope necklaces and bracelets. There was color everywhere on these people (dull and muted color, but still), and not a stitch of animal fur anywhere to be seen. Oh, they wore sandals and boots made of pale but otherwise cured-looking leather, and their leather carrying bags—worn by both the men and women, and strikingly similar to the purses and messenger bags that were popular in Harv’s time—were something he could picture on a cave person. But the knights also wore hooded leather half-cloaks that would have been at home in almost any era, and also wore what Harv could only describe to himself as tool belts. Held up by a pair of large, rectangular wooden buckles, they looked like something a cartoon policeman or construction worker would wear. Or some stone-age Batman.
The implements carried on the belts and in the bags provided a bit more information, because the men did not have bows and arrows. These short spears and “leverthrows” seemed to fill a similar purpose, but with a more limited range and a lot less ammo. The spears themselves were as straight and smooth as signposts, and tipped with sharp, symmetrical stone points shaped like bamboo leaves. These also appeared well made, and well secured to their hafts with slots and resin and rawhide lashings. A nasty weapon in any era! But they lacked any sort of barbs or lashing grooves in the stone itself. Compared to Native American artifacts, they looked a bit rough.
The knives were interesting, too; basically half-sized spear points mounted to eighth-size spears, and sheathed in that same pale leather. They reminded Harv of the knives Manuah’s wife, Emzananti, had used back in her kitchen in The City. He supposed it was simply a good design, hard to beat and relatively easy to make. The “hardmud” bowls and jars and pots the people used here were clay that had been fired but not truly vitrified. This material was too weak to be made into anything with handles, and so it was fashioned into a few standardized shapes that reminded Harv of wine carafes and plant pots, and those oversized cups you sometimes saw in coffee shops. He also somehow knew that they imparted a faint flavor of dirt into anything boiled in them.
These implements seemed stone-age enough, but Dele’s toys—the bear and the ball—were made of the same stuff, and struck Harv as anachronistic. The men also carried bean-shaped water skins of the sort that could still be purchased in Harv’s time, and also various cleverly made bits of rope and string and wood and wicker whose purpose he could not immediately divine. The Knights of Ell looked, more or less, like African tribesmen attempting to dress up for a Renaissance festival.
Putting the clues together, Harv figured this must be somewhere between twenty thousand and thirty thousand years ago. Still a broad range—longer than all of recorded history!—but it gave him enough sense of orientation that he was able to lose his train of thought and…
* * *
“What do you think is happening?” Nortlan asked Argur.
“I don’t know,” Argur answered. “Nothing like this has ever happened before, that I’ve ever heard of. Goading a boolis is fool’s work, deadly and not lightly undertaken. So the question is, who are the fools? And what do they want? It must be something very important to them.”
“Any ideas?” Tom asked.
“Only that someone wants to take the valley away from us. But that doesn’t make any sense. They’d need to have ten ten ten ten people to do it, and even then most of them wouldn’t survive. I feel like I’m missing something.”
“I’m missing something, too,” Jek said. “Why do you have a furry sandal on your head?”
There was uneasy laughter at that, and then someone threw a pine cone at Argur’s hairpiece, and then there was genuine laughter, because that was funny. A pine cone! In the head! And for a while the conversation turned bright again, if only because they didn’t know enough—and frankly couldn’t imagine enough—to dwell on anything dark. These were hard men, but their experience was limited,
and although their job involved occasional losses and tragedies, they’d never encountered anything fundamentally beyond their strength and wit. Argur even blew a few notes on his flute to emphasize the point: theirs was a hard world, but they were the bosses of it, and could not stay worried for long!
That was, until Argur’s wife, Dala, came running up to them, with Tom’s wife, Birgny, trailing behind. They were within sight of the castle now, but both women were gasping for breath, as though they’d run a distance much longer than that. They carried nothing: no bags, no scythes, no feather visors, no water. More importantly, Dala had blood trickling down her forehead, turning against one eyebrow and running from there down her cheek and neck, to stain her dress a forbidden color. Women’s clothing was white or yellow or blue or green, or brown if it was old and worn out, or sometimes even orange if the right gourds were in season—but never the color of blood! Blood meant danger, or perhaps carelessness at the wrong phase of the moon, in defiance of spirit law. In any case a major problem!
Birgny did not appear to be bleeding, but she had a long, ugly scrape along her arm, and both women appeared dirty and disheveled, as though they’d been in a scuffle of some sort.
“Argur!” Dala cried out. “Argur! They’ve taken the girls!”
“What?” he called out as she approached. It was the most intelligent response he could come up with.
“They took Dele! Dele!”
Argur’s wife flung herself into his arms, buried her face in his chest, and wailed.
“They took three girls and ran for the hills,” Birgny screeched. “So fast! So fast! You’ve got to get them back!”
Argur’s blood ran as cold as a mountain stream as he asked: “Who took them? Who took three girls?”
“Trolls!” both women shouted, almost in unison.
And then Argur knew for sure just how bad a day it was going to be.
2.3
It wasn’t hard to track back to where the attack had occurred; leaving Snar and Gouch with the women, the remaining ten knights took off at a run, following the trail to where ten women stood around—some wailing, some quietly weeping, some brandishing knives or clubs and looking furious. All ten of them startled when the men burst out of the undergrowth.