by Wil McCarthy
“We didn’t take the time last night,” Gower said. “That was dumb.”
“Mmm,” Argur agreed.
He still didn’t know which of these men were on his side. Any? All? He half-hoped they would murder him in his sleep, but of course they could have done that at any time. And perhaps the terrible consequence of acting rashly had affected their thinking; they all seemed happy enough to follow Argur’s advice now. He thought again about confronting them, demanding explanations, but again, he didn’t seem to care enough. One way or another, these men had either killed his little girl or stood by while it happened.
That night as the light was fading, he sat down by the fortification line and shrugged out of his armor. He then rolled it up and tied it into a bundle, which he stuffed in his bag. He wasn’t going to let it tell him who he was anymore. And this, along with his general air of silence and confusion, seemed to render him less terrifying to the children, who did not shrink away when he settled down next to their fire.
In the morning, he found that one of the little girls had even curled up against the small of his back. Was she a troll? A human? A blending of the two, like red pigment mixed with yellow? Did it even matter? Perhaps Argur’s brain or his spirit were damaged, but he couldn’t remember why anyone had ever cared about this.
“Let’s go deliver the news,” he told everyone, with more confidence than he was actually feeling.
* * *
At the bridge, they stopped to wash their hands in the cold water below. Argur splashed water on his face as well, which felt good, and woke him up a bit. At first it seemed the troll, Lug, was nowhere around. And why would he be? The Knights of Ell were a band of murderers.
“You see the troll anywhere?” Gower asked no one in particular.
But nobody did, and so they climbed back up on the path, flicking their wet hands and wiping them together to dry them without touching anything.
Argur was not satisfied with this, and so he called out: “Lug?” Then sang: “Luu-uuug!”
There was no reply, which made Argur feel oddly sad. And so they headed back down the path again, into the valley proper, toward their sad duty. Spears and clubs clacked against rattling armor, but nobody spoke.
And then, to Argur’s surprise, a shrill voice called after them:
“More girls! Less men!”
Argur turned. “Ah, Lug. Were you hiding from us?”
Indeed, the troll was at the edge of a stand of trees, well outside the range of darts or even sling bullets. He appeared ready to flee, trusting nothing. And he was right: the numbers here spoke as clearly as any voice, that the knights had brought violence and death to his distant people, who after all had been nabbers and thieves and arguably rapists of a sort, but not actually murderers. When was the last time a troll had ever killed a human who hadn’t specifically attacked it? Had it happened in Argur’s lifetime at all?
Argur said, “I’m sorry you feel the need to hide from us, brother troll. Yes, we were in a fight—a bad one. We lost good men, and I think we killed good men as well.”
“Bad,” Lug observed.
“Yes. Bad. I prefer peace.”
“Peace?” Lug called out, as if unfamiliar with the word.
So Argur told him, “If you do no harm, and if you obey the spirits of Nog La, then no one will harm you. You may stay in the valley, and even trade with Sunrise Castle.”
“Trade?”
Argur sighed. This was the longest conversation he’d had since…well, since he got hit on the head, and he was quickly running out of energy for it. “We’ll talk about it some other time.”
And it seemed Lug had had enough, too, for he took off running into the trees, his strong, stumpy legs carrying him away. For a moment, there was only the sound of the wind.
And then Jek spoke: “Why do you talk to that thing, Argur?”
“Close your lips,” Gower warned him.
And Argur, summoning the last strength of his spirit, said, “Do you see how much this fighting has cost us, Jek? A troll smiles at his children, same as we do.” He might have said a bit more, but his throat closed on him and would make no further sound.
They resumed walking again.
When they finally came within sight of the castle, they could hear shouts from the watch towers. Excited at first, and then…concerned, as the boys on watch counted tall bodies and short ones, and realized something was badly wrong. By the time knights and children and young women had arrived in front of the gate, the two old men guarding it—Sower and Lancho—looked grim.
“Is this all?” Lancho wanted to know.
“This is everyone,” Gower confirmed.
Lancho rolled his tongue in his cheek for a moment, then clicked it twice in reproach. “You should have caught them here. What did you do, follow them all the way home?”
“Close your lips,” Gower said to him.
To which Moti added, “Things went badly. These men attacked everything in sight, including each other.”
“Close your lips,” Gower said to her, raising a hand as if to smack her.
Ignoring him, Moti told Lancho, “Don’t worry, though: you won’t be hearing from those trolls again. The Knights of Ell were quite thorough.”
“Who are all these children? And women?” Lancho demanded.
It was too much for Gower, who cross-checked him with a spear, flat across the chest, pushing him back. “When you are young and brave again, Lancho, you may tell us how to fight. But I told you to shut them, and I mean it. We’re in no mood to hear you.”
Lancho, who used to be headman before Argur, visibly thought about pushing back, or at least about talking back, but appeared to decide against it. Instead he nodded his head and let the group pass him.
They were watched by girls, boys, old men, old women, and by the men and women who had not yet gone out to hunt or gather or fish or look for spearwood or knapping flint. They were watched by Gouch, who had stayed home with a sprained wrist.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Casualties,” his brother Snar answered.
Argur asked him, “What of the boolis? Did Sunset Castle deal with it?”
“Yeah,” Gouch said. “Drove it up the side of the valley and out into the mountains. Last I saw, it was running at full gallop. But they’ve got casualties, too. One of their men broke both legs, and maybe his back. And Pagel was there with them, and hit his head. He’s been sleeping for two days now. Margle has gone there to be with him. I’m worried, Argur.”
“Hmm,” Argur said. More bad news. So perhaps the trolls had killed someone, but why? What drove them to it? The same thing that drove them out of Nog La: conflict. “Unfortunate. Perhaps this is what we get in trade, for leaving the trolls nowhere to live.”
“Oh, the poor trolls!” Jek muttered, not quite loud enough to attract intervention by Gower.
“Yes,” Moti said. “The poor trolls.”
Ignoring them, Argur strode to the home of Nortlan’s parents. They were standing outside, already aware that something was going on.
“Where’s my boy?” the father, Pock, demanded. He was lazy and nasty and sometimes a thief—particularly of gargo, when anyone had it—but perhaps he loved his child as much as anyone else.
“I’m sorry,” Argur said. “He was killed in the fight.”
“No!” shrieked Nanka, the mother. She was also lazy, and a brutal gossip, and Argur had never observer her being particularly kind to her son. And yet, her eyes welled up with tears, and her throat choked with sobs.
“This is your fault,” Pock spat. “You made him go with you. He was still just a boy!”
“That’s true. I did. And I’m sorry. A lot of poor decisions were made, by everyone involved.”
“Eat mud, Argur.”
To that, he had no reply.
He delivered similar messages to the households of Ronk and Perry, his heart growing heavier, and his spirit fuzzier, with every word he spoke.
; To Tom’s wife, Birgny, he almost said, “Your husband betrayed our people and got my daughter killed. Along with himself, and Nortlan. And Ronk, and Perry. We lost so much because your husband insisted on fighting a strong enemy, when they wanted to talk. May your husband’s spirit wander forever.”
What he said instead was, “It was crazy up there.”
“Crazy,” she said back to him, the tears streaming down her face.
“I didn’t see him fall, but I know he was brave.”
“Brave,” she said back to him.
“Yes.”
“And what am I to do now, Argur?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? I have babies to feed.”
“No, I don’t know. I suppose we’ll figure something out.”
“We’ll figure something out?”
This conversation was making Argur’s head hurt again, so he retreated, apologizing again and again.
And then he headed home to Dala.
Oh, spirits, what was he going to say? What could he possibly? He pulled aside the curtain door and stepped inside, somehow knowing he would find her there, right where she’d been on the last good morning of their lives.
And he did. She was.
“Hello, my love,” she said, looking up from the embers of a fire she’d been poking with a stick.
“Dala…”
“I know. Argur, I know. You’ve been gone four days. I wasn’t sure you were coming back at all. I wasn’t sure anyone was.”
“Dele had…”
“I know.”
“I tried…”
“I know. I know you did. And I know she tried as well, to come back to me.”
“I’m so sorry, Dala.”
“I know that, too. My love, there’s nothing you need to tell me. The world is full of monsters, and I watched a group of them nab my daughter. And as you chased after them, with such a late, slow start, I thought about it, and knew it couldn’t possibly go well.”
“They’re not monsters,” Argur said gently. “I saw them. I heard them. They’re people.”
“Hmm,” Dala said, considering that. And finally she said, “Is that any better?”
* * *
At this point, Harv’s awareness slid and jumped and found itself in another person, a young man. A son born to Argur and Dala in later years, who saw his father in a very different light than Harv had. The older Argur, with gray in his beard, was a sorcerer or shaman of sorts. Having relinquished his armor and focused instead on leading the tribe wisely (along with some hunting, of course), he spent most of his time walking around the castle and its neighboring villages, dispensing counsel and judgment to those who sought it. He paid particular attention to those few young people who had red-brown hair and light-colored skin and vaguely pointed ears; where others might call them “trollman” or “knife-ear girl” or “fat fat fatty” (all of which rhymed in the language of Nog La), he considered these men and women to be vaguely magical and perhaps good luck, and often asked them to bless the weapons of hunters and the looms of weavers, and the houses of newly married couples. He also treated people’s injuries and illnesses, performed weddings and funerals, and—most strangely, from the son’s point of view—sang to animals.
The son, whose name was Nortlan, was mortified by all of this, and spent the majority of his time training to be a knight and large-game hunter. However, the need for knights had steadily diminished in Nog La, as many of the most dangerous animals seemed fewer in numbers, and less inclined to bother humans. Many in the tribe gave Argur the credit for this, as his singing really could soothe savage beasts, or at least confuse them, and when his own voice was not enough he would sometimes puff out a series of gentle notes on his flute. Or shrill ones; most animals would retreat from this, and he had more than once been observed chasing creatures out of the valley altogether.
(The recovered memories here were jumbled—more like previews of a movie than the movie itself—but Harv saw enough of this to wonder whether music might not perhaps be the second most important technology humans had ever developed, after fire. Argur would also sing to human beings, and although his voice was famously rough, his music nevertheless brought comfort where comfort was needed. There really was a kind of power in it.)
But Nortlan, like many of the knights themselves, believed the matter was simply down to their own diligent efforts to kill or drive out anything that was too dangerous, too hard to kill, or at least not tasty enough to be worth the risk. Snow leopards? Gone. Hyenas? Gone. Wooly rhinoceroses? Only the smaller ones, with the least dangerous horns, were permitted to remain. The others were killed or driven away, along with the last few remaining mammoths.
And with this decrease in overall danger, the women started paying more and better attention to their grain and vegetable patches, and it occurred to Harv that civilization could very well have started right here, fifteen thousand years early. All of the ingredients were in place! But then the weather changed, and the summers got too rainy and the winters got too long, and he sort of lost the thread of it after that, except for a general sense that there were other good places in the world as well, scattered throughout prehistory, and it was only by a series of coincidences that Kingdom happened to be the first to really get out of the Stone Age.
But even they hadn’t lasted. Perhaps nothing ever did.
University of Colorado Engineering Center
Boulder, Colorado
Present Day
“How many fingers do you see?” one of the paramedics beside Tara was asking.
“Three,” Harv answered, finally lucid again. He was speaking through an oxygen mask held over his nose and mouth with a rubber band behind his head.
Strapped to a gurney in the hallway outside the lab, with Tara hovering over him nervously, he seemed strangely calm. She was afraid for his health and safety, and (truthfully) for her own reputation—both professional and personal. Uncertain of her role or status or whatever, she’d wept and held his hand and explained his condition to the paramedics as best she could. Thankfully, neither of them had asked her whether she was sleeping with the patient, or was on his payroll, or both. Neither had asked if she was a good Hindu girl or just some postdoc who couldn’t keep her hands off the faculty.
“Oh, thank God,” Tara said. It was one of many American phrases she’d absorbed over the last five years, until it practically leaked from her pores.
“Pupil responses look good. Can you follow this light for me?” the paramedic asked. He was a big man, buzz-cut and strong, with scissors and tweezers and tongue depressors sticking out from the numerous pockets in his short-sleeved uniform. His partner—a gray-haired, no-nonsense woman—was hanging a bag of saline on the gurney’s IV pole.
“Good,” the paramedic said. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Harv Leonel.”
“And you work here?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Leonel, you’ve suffered an atonic focal seizure with loss of consciousness. Two of them, apparently. Do you suffer from a seizure disorder?”
“It’s Doctor Leonel. And no.”
“Can you think of any reason you might have gotten sick?”
Harv seemed to consider that for a moment, and then met Tara’s gaze, and seemed to understand that she’d already told them everything. He answered, “We were using an experimental brain stimulation system.”
“Magnetic? A TMS?”
“Yes.”
“Are you on any medications?”
“Just low-dose aspirin.”
“And have you had any of that today?”
“No.”
The female paramedic took out some sort of handheld and started tapping its screen.
“How do you feel now?”
“Sleepy,” Harv said. “I haven’t seen this place for thirty thousand years.”
The paramedics didn’t like that one bit.
“Tara,” Harv said, “were there wooden castles i
n Europe when the Neandertals were still alive?”
“What? I don’t know.” The question startled her, although she supposed it shouldn’t have.
“I’d like you to focus on me,” the male paramedic told Harv.
Ignoring him, Harv pulled back the oxygen mask and said, “I met sorcerers. My daughter died. We had cloth and pottery and beer.”
“This can wait,” Tara tried to assure him. She squeezed his hand, wondering again whether he was describing quantum memories or mere hallucinations.
Giving up on talking to him, the paramedics began wheeling the gurney down the hallway toward the stairwell.
“I need you to let go of his hand, ma’am.”
For several minutes there was no chance to speak, as the two paramedics hauled the gurney through a doorway and up two flights of stairs. Its shopping-cart wheels were on some complex armature that tilted and compressed and expanded with every stair, giving Harv a smooth (if not quite level) ride.
The Engineering Center had been built before handicapped accessibility requirements were a thing, and its lowest levels were inaccessible by elevator. It was also built into a slope, so the “ground level” on one side was lower than the ground level on the other. Like an insane concrete castle, it narrowed into disconnected towers as it went up, and the layout of the ground floors reflected this: a maze of tiled hallways snaking around multiple service cores. Shadows and daylight came from every conceivable angle, through purple-tinted windows that seemed to confuse matters even further, but the paramedics seemed to know their way. This was Boulder—a town composed of aging hippies and professors and tech millionaires on the one hand, and nitwit undergrads on the other. They probably got called to campus a lot.
“Hold the door, please,” the female paramedic called out to a man passing through to the outdoors. They got Harv outside, into the shadow of a massive tower supported by spindly-looking columns at its corners.
The open ambulance was parked right there on the front, and they puuushed Harv up into the back of it with hardly a bump. Without asking, Tara got in to ride next to him.