The Prodigal Troll (35 page)

One of the men in their line grunted as an enemy arrow came straight through the pile of branches, deflected in such a way that it lodged in his thigh. By this point, the enemy were less than two hundred feet away.

"Back to the next set of trees," Sinnglas said.

Maggot helped the man with the broken collarbone, not carrying him, but propping him up and pushing him along. Pisqueto was the last to leave, firing arrow after deliberate arrow. The enemy archers noticed him, and half a dozen bolts protruded from the trunk of the tree he hid behind. Only when the last of the men were behind the next bunch of trees did he come running back to join them.

The enemy paused at the edge of the woods, reorganizing. They were very slow, very deliberate in everything they did. Maggot peered through the green treetops at the sky. Somehow, the morning was already half passed.

Pisqueto crouched next to Maggot. "This is not good."

"How many arrows do you have left?" Maggot asked, fitting one to his bow.

"None." He said it simply. Maggot divided his partial quiver in half and passed a bunch of them over.

"Keep them," Pisqueto said. "Watch my bow while I go find some. Keep it for me if we have to run."

Maggot nodded understanding.

Pisqueto crawled back in the direction he'd just come from. In the light that fell through the trees, Maggot marked the indistinct shapes of the enemy soldiers. Sounds of heavy fighting came from the right flank, where Squandral had withdrawn his men to a ridge. Bellows thundered through the woods closer by-the second mammut had broken through Custalo's lines and now roamed somewhere behind them, smashing their breastworks. Sinnglas's group was left of the center. On the far left flank a few southerners guarded a ravine.

Pisqueto was out on his belly sifting through the leaves when an arrow bolted into the ground beside him.

"Look out," Maggot shouted.

A handful of enemy archers had taken up positions behind the trees that Sinnglas's men had just abandoned. Pisqueto pulled the arrow from the ground, rolling for cover as Maggot and a few others shouted and shot back. But Sinnglas regarded his brother and did not raise his own weapon.

"It's going to be a long day," he said. "We'll need arrows more than we need men to pull the bowstrings before it's over."

Maggot counted things the same way.

Pisqueto zigzagged back to the breastworks and vaulted over the logs. He came back up beside Maggot and retrieved his bow.

"How many?" Maggot asked.

Pisqueto held up the quarrels. "Five."

They'd shot off at least four at the enemy, but Maggot would count the small gains where he found them.

The two sides traded shots for a short time, shooting whenever an enemy stuck his head up over the fallen trees or stepped into the open. Then whoops sounded from the far left flank, and the southerners flooded through the woods behind Maggot, retreating for the center of the line.

Without knowing what had happened, Sinnglas gathered the men from his village and fell back to defend a new position, but everything was confusion. Some of the men became lost. Maggot could no longer find the man whose fingers were cut off, and someone else was missing too. Sinnglas grabbed some of the southerners as they ran past, shouting at them, calling shame on them for fleeing, commanding them to stay. Some kept running, but some stopped. A group of six, led by a man who knew Sinnglas, joined them. And then their group, swollen to fifteen, was in the front of the battle as three times that many invaders pressed through the trees.

The exchange of arrows went quickly, as if everyone on both sides was in a hurry to expend them and close hand-to-hand.

A dozen pikemen advanced behind others holding shields. Their weapons were long enough to thrust through the barricade of logs and brush, but they were walking upslope. Maggot crouched, squeezing his arms under a fallen tree. At the last moment, when they charged, he screamed, thrust upward with his legs, and hurled the tree at them. It shattered their line of pikes as it rolled down the incline. The invaders broke and scattered, except for a shield carrier pinned beneath the log and quickly stabbed to death by one of the southerners.

The invaders quickly organized another charge. Maggot hacked away at a shaft thrust at him through the branches, but the end was sheathed in metal and turned aside his knife. One man came over the barricade and went down in a pile with Pisqueto. Sinnglas's men broke and ran, retreating again.

They were being crowded together with Squandral's men and Custalo's, all toward the center, but there was no longer any center, and Maggot and some of the others, in their mad dash for cover, ran through the enemy's broken line, scattering in half a dozen directions downhill.

Leaping over fallen trees, branches whipping his skin as he crashed through the brush, the charms leaping at his throat, Maggot stumbled to a stop when he entered a clearing that contained the fallen mammut. One of the invaders lay dead on the ground nearby, within the circle of trampled grasses.

A group of invaders, four footmen without armor, ran into the clearing on the other side. Maggot took cover behind the arrowpricked corpse of the mammut, the only barrier between him and their spears. They glanced at him and ran on through the clearing without attacking.

Maggot sheathed his knife. Gripping a handful of red fur, Maggot pulled himself up onto the dead animal's flank to retrieve some arrows. He tore three of them free before he realized he'd lost his bow and quiver. He must have thrown them down when he started to run, but he couldn't remember.

From his high perch, looking off through the woods, he thought he saw Sinnglas alone against some invaders. Throwing down the arrows, he jumped to the ground and ran to help.

Instead he found a solitary warrior, one of the southerners, beset by an armored knight and two spearmen. The southerner spun, swinging his warclub in huge arcs, to deflect the weapons thrust at him. Blood streamed from several wounds. Maggot lowered his head and charged like a bull bison into the spearman who attacked from the rear. The man bounced off the ground as Maggot grabbed a jagged-edged stone and swung it at the man's head. The man rolled aside, and the blow missed.

Maggot lifted the primitive weapon to strike again, but the second spearman rushed him. Maggot threw the rock. It hit his attacker below the chin, snapping him backward. Maggot picked up the fallen spear and aimed it at the armored knight, who stepped forward with his bloodstained sword. They were both screaming at each other.

The roar in Maggot's throat choked off in midbirth.

The knight lowered his sword to a defensive position as his cry also broke.

It was the man Maggot had seen in the camp by the river, the one he called First. His head was covered by a helmet, but the braid showed, and the beard was cropped shorter, but there was no mistaking him. The green cloth of his shirt was embroidered with a golden lion.

They exchanged a small nod of recognition.

A cluster of knights and spear carriers appeared out of the trees, raising an exultant cry. The warrior Maggot had rescued tugged on his arm, and they ran, fleeing through the pine trees, upslope around the ravine.

How had First recognized him?

How had he not known the woman he wanted was one of the invaders? He should have guessed earlier, when he saw the mammuts.

At the top of the hill, the warrior leaned against a beech tree and slid down to a sitting position. He left a red streak of blood on the smooth white bark. Lifting his water flask to his lips and drinking, he offered the same to Maggot, who gulped thirstily.

"Heh!" the man said. "Rescued by the giant."

Maggot had heard the word before, but Sinnglas was reluctant to speak of it. "Giant?"

The man stared at him oddly. "In the mountains, the giants who walk in the darkness, leaving no shadow behind them. Who hurl stones on men and play the war drums."

"Trolls!" Maggot said.

The man wrinkled his brow at the unfamiliar word. "Giants," he repeated slowly. "You are as large as one, and you throw men and stones around like they do. You fight like a giant."

Maggot thought about the man's description. The scent of wrongness that he had not named became clear to him. "No, the giants never fight like this," he said. "Not among themselves. They would talk and vote, and then follow the First or go their separate ways. This fighting, is a wrongness to it."

The man laughed and then winced. He held out his palm, whispering, "Wait ... wait ... there!"

Maggot followed his gesture. Only a few hundred feet away, a large group of the enemy approached, having followed the wide, concealed path offered by the ravine. When Maggot looked back, the other man's chin rested limp against his chest, eyes open.

He ran off alone through the trees, headed for the high ground. The sun sat directly overhead, shining down piteously through every break in the canopy. The air had become stiflingly hot, and thick with silence, pierced only by the occasional scream or distant trumpet of a mammut. He saw movement atop a flat ridge that thrust out from the mountainside.

Maggot climbed up the steep slope, through tulip trees that rose a hundred feet or more into the sky. One huge tree had blown down lengthwise across the ridge's edge; its uppermost branches tangled among other trees and kept it from slipping away. Maggot heard arrows zip over his head at attackers behind him. When he climbed over the fallen log, he nodded to the archers. He saw Squandral and Custalo with maybe sixty or seventy men. Squandral glanced at Maggot's bare head and turned his face away.

Sinnglas sat with Pisqueto and five other men from their village, including the man who'd lost his fingers, but not the one with the broken collarbone. Maggot joined them. The men were binding their wounds, except for Pisqueto, who, uninjured, sat repairing the fletching on an odd assortment of arrows.

Sinnglas acknowledged Maggot, then pointed with his chin to several places over the ridge. Maggot observed the invaders forming into organized groups in the cover below. The shaggy red mammut moved between distant trees.

"Do you have food in your bag?" Sinnglas asked. "Eat if you do. If not we shall find some for you."

Maggot checked. He did. He showed Sinnglas a ball of the cornmeal and molasses before he put it in his mouth. "I have some to share if others need it," he said as he chewed. "How did the fight go?

Sinnglas shrugged noncommittally. "Women in at least eleven lodges across the villages will rend their clothes and scream when the news reaches them. Perhaps more. Most men will have scars to show they were here today. The invaders have lost more men than we have. But then they have so many more men to lose." He stopped, and stared off into the sky. When he spoke again, his voice dropped. "Truly, I did not think they would come in such numbers nor prove themselves so brave."

Maggot swallowed, then sucked on his fingertips. "This fighting cannot go on, Brother."

Pisqueto looked up from his work. A faint smile played briefly on his lips before evaporating like a drop of water on a warm rock.

"Truly today you have been my brother," Sinnglas said. "But your words strike as hard as any weapon. We cannot go on fighting. Even the old men know this."

This admission relieved Maggot. "What do we do now?"

"Squandral argues that we should sue for peace, much as he and my father did thirty years ago. He argues that we have proven ourselves as men, and the invaders will show us the respect due to brave men."

"Heh," Maggot said. "That would be good."

"I do not think that is the direction this river runs." Sinnglas indicated the charms around Maggot's neck. "I ask you one last time: will you not use the invader's magic against him, to help us?"

Maggot covered the forgotten ampules with his hand. "I do not know how."

Sinnglas tapped the ground with his knuckles. "Then we must flee for a safe place. The men we fight today move like a storm coming over the hills. We are helpless to stop it. Once we cross over the ridge behind us, we can follow the wall of the mountains north. We can cross through the high gap, into the next valley, and return south to our families. It is a longer way, but safer, and with luck and the blessings of the spirits we can return before the Lion's army comes. We will have to pack up our village and move. Perhaps over the mountains, toward the sea."

He did not sound hopeful as he said this. Maggot considered it for a few moments. "I do not want to go in that direction."

"I had hoped you would come with us, my friend."

Pisqueto set down his arrow and his feathers. "No, Maqwet is right. I, too, will stay with Squandral and fight."

"Brother!" Sinnglas's eyebrows drew up in alarm. "Think of our mother-come, flee with us, and plant your anger as a crop you will harvest next year and the year after that." He twisted his head back to Maggot. "Will you also stay with Squandral? Have you no mother? Will she not weep to see you throw your life needlessly away?"

"My mother-" Maggot stopped.

Sinnglas and Pisqueto watched him closely.

"My mother was to me like rain to growing things or darkness is to roots. She sent me in this direction, to join men like myself. I think she would"-he couldn't think of the word in Sinnglas's language, not even the equivalent, so he used the troll word-"roll-over-and-over-in- the-odor-of-grief to see what I have seen today. To see what I have done. I will not war anymore."

"I will stay and fight at Squandral's side," Pisqueto said. "Until the last invader is killed or they let us live in peace."

Sinnglas's lips thinned. "Very well, then. Every man must follow his own path as he sees it laid before him, whether it leads to war or away from the lodge of his mother."

Maggot gazed upon the army gathering in the woods below, searching the faces for First. The air had the dry, sharp fragrance of summer, filled with the buzz of flies and the whir of insects.

"I will go part of the way with you," he said. The woman he wanted was not in either of these armies. Nor was there any lion here for him to slay to give her. "But when you cross the mountains, I will turn back and go west."