The Long Cosmos (19 page)

Afterwards he figured they had been trying to feed him some kind of herbal medicine, no doubt evolved through chance discoveries over millennia: wisdom stored in the trolls' strange collective consciousness – their long call. Given that he eventually recovered, he guessed it had worked. Though the modern antibiotics from his pack that he gulped every time he was awake enough to remember no doubt helped too.

He knew that the trolls were saving his life. It was just that trolls were always so damn
rough
. They were big muscular humanoids, and their method of hunting was to gather in a group and
wrestle
a beast the size of a young elephant to the ground. Mothers even dragged their infants around dangling by one hand or by a scruff.

‘As nurses go, these trolls need to up their bedside manner . . .'

He discovered he'd said that out loud. He was in one of his more lucid intervals, then.

He was lying on his back, peering up at a cloudless sky. And the air was cool, cooler than he remembered before the fever heat cut in. The fall must be coming on this Para-Venus. He wondered how long he'd been lying there. And he still didn't know how bad the winter would get. You could tell the rough character of a world from the band it was in, but you had to live through a cycle of seasons, or more, before you truly understood it. And before you knew if you could live through it . . .

A troll's face swam into his blurred vision, peering down at him. He saw a grizzled, crumpled face surrounded by greying black hair. For a moment he was befuddled.

‘Sancho!'

‘Hoo.'

‘Hi, buddy. You saved me. You and your relatives—'

Something soft and pink and bright came sailing in from left field, hit Sancho on the side of the head, and rolled away.

‘What the hell?'

‘Ha!' Sancho turned that way, glared, and disappeared from his field of view.

Joshua managed to turn his head to the left. He saw Sancho hobbling in pursuit of one of the kids – Liz, maybe. Evidently it was she who had thrown the cheerleader's pom-pom at him. She ran off, laughing as only a troll could laugh.

A
cheerleader's pom-pom.
Where the hell had a troll acquired a cheerleader's pom-pom? Not only that but Joshua thought he recognized the pinkish colour scheme.

‘Sancho!' Joshua tried to prop himself up on his elbows, to see more. But the very effort exhausted him, and when he moved it felt like the contents of his head had been liquefied, and he fell back in a faint.

25

C
AME THE DAY
he was cured.

Well, it felt like it. He woke from what seemed to have been a normal sleep. His vision was clear, there was only a dull ache in his head, but he was still thirsty.

Experimentally, he sat up. He felt shivery-weak in his upper body, and briefly dizzy as he moved his head, but that passed. His right leg, stretched straight out before him, was a sight, the bare flesh filthy and strapped by bloody bandages between two massive branches; the trolls did nothing delicately. But it ached only dully now, a bone-deep throbbing that, he feared, he might have to put up with for the rest of his life.

Glancing around he saw that his kit was close by, in the lee of a nearby rock bluff, still protected by the emergency blanket. Save for his own rummaging for drugs, it seemed undisturbed. He dug into his pack until he found one of his knives, and slipped it into his belt, at the back. Trolls or not, he felt a lot safer with some kind of weapon to hand.

There was no water here, however, and his raging thirst was his first priority. That and maybe the relief of a painfully full bladder. He wasn't far from the bank of a shallow, sluggish river – a dozen paces, no more. No distance, if he'd had the use of both legs; a heck of a challenge given the state he was in. He looked around again. There was nothing nearby he could use for a crutch. He tried pushing himself up with his arms, and folding his good leg underneath, but his bad leg was an impossible obstacle. Soon his weakened muscles were trembling, and he slumped back to the ground.

A troll face swam before him, a vision from his illness. It was the female cub, Liz. Looking around, he saw a few more trolls grooming in a huddle in the middle distance, a handful by the river. Most of the band seemed to be away.

Liz was a bright youngster, and she could immediately see what he wanted. Without hesitation she got her hands under his armpits and, with effortless strength and the usual troll roughness, boosted him to his feet. He yelled as his gatepost of a leg swung in the air, but Liz was still there, and he stayed upright. He threw his arm over her shoulder, and he was stable, balanced on his left leg.

He managed a grin. ‘Thank you. You're just the right height for this, you know that? Now – water?' He pointed at the river, and at his mouth.

She set off that way, but too quickly, and he found himself dragged along, hopping crazily, his bad leg scraping in the dirt behind him. ‘Hey! Slow down, speedy.' Hop, hop. ‘One step at a time . . .'

As they moved away from where he had been lying, he saw the ground was scuffed and stained for some distance around his gear. He remembered, dimly, how they had been moving him around. They must have cleaned him up after he soiled himself, or at least moved him out of the mess, over and over. Trolls had been observed to care for their sick and elderly; maybe they knew to move the immobile, to avoid such problems. Even so he badly needed to clean up properly, and he ought to strip off and inspect himself for bed sores and such – not to mention a good look at that leg.

He felt a sudden surge of shame that he had been so helpless before these trolls, and was flooded with gratitude for what they had done. He hugged Liz's massive football-player shoulders. ‘Kid, you're the best nurse I could have found.'

‘Hoo?'

He got to a rock where he pissed like Austin Powers.

Then Liz helped him to the river. The big old troll he called Sancho was sitting by the bank, picking fleas from the long, muddy hairs on his legs. He looked up incuriously as Joshua approached. At his side was a fuzzy pink ball, splashed with mud: the cheerleader's pom-pom.

Joshua nodded to Sancho as, with Liz's help, he struggled to sit on the muddy earth by the water. ‘Like I said before, I reckon I owe you a big thank-you too, old buddy. My first responder.'

Sancho shrugged – a very human gesture. Then he went back to his assiduous hunt for fleas.

Joshua was distracted by that brilliant pink pom-pom. Since when did a troll carry any possessions around at all? Let alone a cheerleader's pom-pom. ‘But it's none of my business, buddy. You carry that pom-pom, you do what you like.'

Sancho didn't even glance around.

Joshua turned back to his own concerns. Gingerly, sitting on his backside, he pushed himself closer to the river, dipped in his hand, and splashed water into his mouth, over his face. Then he poured it over the encrusted filth on his bad leg. He longed to immerse himself completely, but he was wary of whatever must inevitably be lurking in the water. He made a mental note to start using purifying pills for drinking water – but then he'd survived up to now, for the unspecified period while he was ill, with his only serving vessel being the cupped palm of a troll. Maybe he'd developed some kind of immunity over his years in the Long Earth.

Clouds crossed the sun, and that deep ache in the leg intensified. Great, he thought; he was going to become one of those old farts who felt the weather in his bones.

He peeled back bandages and the remnants of his trouser leg. On the exposed skin of his leg there was mud and blood and what looked like dried pus, and as the layers of filth washed away there was a stink of rot. But he also found some kind of vegetable matter tucked away in there: leaves, roots, a kind of greenish scrape on his skin. More troll medication? If so, it seemed to have worked. The place where the skin had broken had never been stitched up, but it had healed reasonably well. He'd have one hell of a scar to scare his grand-nieces with, back in Reboot. But, he saw with relief, there was no sign of infection, no evidence of gangrene – and if that had developed, for all the trolls could have done, he'd have lost his leg, and probably his life, in short order.

He felt his way along his shin, cautiously, slowly, to the break itself. He found a hard knob of bone in there. It ached when he prodded at it. So he stopped prodding. Not a perfect match-up, then. But he had been able to walk, supported by Liz. If he could make himself crutches of some kind, he'd be mobile. It could have been a hell of a lot worse.

And, as he gingerly peeled back more of his elasticized bandages, he found something else unexpected. The rough-and-ready splints had been tied in place, not just by his bandages, but by lengths of cord, evidently taken from his pack, that had been neatly knotted.

‘Will you look at that?' he said aloud. ‘Trolls with pom-poms. Now trolls tying knots. I bet you never observed that, Lobsang, did you?'

‘Trolls tie knots.'

The words sounded like they came from a small bullhorn. Joshua, startled, sprawled comically in the river-bank mud. Words in English! It was totally unexpected.

The laughter of a troll billowed over him. It was Sancho, of course, watching his antics. Sancho, holding a troll-call.

Joshua faced him. ‘That was you!'

Sancho lifted the troll-call again. It was the size and shape of a clarinet, a tube encrusted with a kind of circuitry, and worked when held close to the mouth. ‘Trolls tie knots! Good knots big knots tight knots.'

‘You've got cheerleader pom-poms and now a troll-call. What the hell?' But of course, if he didn't speak through the troll-call, Sancho couldn't understand a word. ‘Give me that thing.'

Sancho handed over the troll-call.

Individual trolls were smarter than chimps, but not so smart as humans; some experts thought they might be about equivalent in intellect to the long-extinct
Homo erectus.
It was in their collective behaviour that the trolls were so intensely intelligent: in their cooperative hunting, and in the long call, the unending chorus that seemed to encode their race's deepest memories as well as being a rolling account of the present – what food the scouts had found just over the horizon, which infant was showing signs of tiring on the march.

But still, individual trolls did have a language, of hoots and pants, of gestures, and, yes, of song – a language more sophisticated than any chimp's, that was for sure. To communicate with them, all you had to do was translate that language.

And that was what Lobsang, decades ago, with his pioneering troll-call, had been able to do.

Joshua turned the instrument over in his hands. That this device looked a lot more sophisticated than Lobsang's old prototypes wasn't much of a surprise. What was a surprise was that this eccentric, elderly troll was carrying it around with him. And when Joshua turned the instrument over, he found an inscription on a small plastic plaque:

PROPERTY OF

UNIVERSITY OF VALHALLA

AT DOWNTOWN TWO

DO NOT REMOVE

Joshua smacked his head. Valhalla!
That
was where he'd seen pompoms like those before. His son Rod, then known as Dan, had attended a school in Valhalla, the greatest city of the High Meggers. Dan hadn't stuck around long enough to go to college there himself, but he and Joshua had taken in a few football games.

Joshua turned and stared at Sancho. ‘You've got something to do with the University of Valhalla?' Then he raised the troll-call and repeated his question.

Sancho frowned, listening. Then he took the troll-call back, his leathery face crumpled with concentration. Every linguistic structure from the basics of grammar on down differed between trolls and humans; all the troll-call could do was offer a kind of best-guess translation.

At last Sancho pointed to his own chest. ‘Faculty.'

‘What? You're on the
faculty
? Of a
college
? Oh, I get it. They've been studying you, right? Like Lobsang in his troll reserve. Hmm. Or maybe
you're
studying
them
. . .'

‘Tenure! Sancho got tenure! Hoo!' And he dropped the troll-call in the mud, hooted, splashed, and folded his big hands over his head, obviously hugely amused.

Joshua wondered if he was still in a fever dream.

As the evening drew in, the rest of the trolls returned. Some brought food – armfuls of root vegetables, small game. The big female Sally carried over her shoulder the carcass of what looked like a young deer, but probably wasn't.

They gathered close to the spot where Joshua had been lying for so long, near the bluff. The vegetables and fruit were roughly shared out.

Now he was more capable, Joshua saw that this was a good site, backed up against a bluff for defence, not far from a watercourse. Not so unlike the site he'd chosen for his own stockade, he remembered. You could hide in the rocks if those armoured elephants charged. There were even overhangs for shelter from those pesky pterodactyls.

Joshua watched as the adults butchered the deer-like creature. They used stone blades, hastily selected from a scatter on the ground, to slit open the skin. Then, with the skin hauled off and discarded, they dismembered the carcass, slicing off the limbs, hauling out the entrails and organs. It was an efficient piece of butchery, even by human standards, although Joshua supposed humans would have taken more care to set aside the skin and sinews for use later. And humans mostly wouldn't have stuffed their mouths with raw meat while the butchery was still going on.

Joshua, meanwhile, sitting quietly with his back against the rocky bluff with Sancho, found himself the centre of attention. Sally and Patrick both came over, and hooted their pleasure at seeing him mobile, awake, smiling. Matt rolled a kind of somersault and would have thrown himself at Joshua to wrestle, if, to Joshua's relief, Sancho hadn't blocked his way with a huge forearm.