The Prodigal Troll (38 page)

The old man's voice wavered like a palsied hand, but still the slow, lilting chant hooked Maggot's attention and pulled him closer: the words were in the language of trolls.

Or close, if not quite the same tongue. They sounded foreign but familiar to Maggot, like the words used by trolls in the Raven Rock band far to the north. He did not understand some of the words at all.

Directly across from the old man, he slipped down the muddy bank to listen. As the words flowed over the water, the melody changed to something sharper, more stochastic.

A shimmering rose beneath the bridge, a luminescence Maggot first took for a liquid reflection of the Milky Way. Then he remembered sitting on the hillside near Squandral's town, and he leaned forward.

An Old One!

The river here was small in comparison to that one, no more than fifty feet across, and shallow enough to see the bottom. It didn't seem nearly big enough to contain the twenty-foot-long beast that swam slowly to the surface.

The old man waded knee-deep into the water, rocking back and forth as he chanted, his voice growing stronger. The shape glided toward him and stopped. A pale, glimmering head rose out of the water on a reticulated neck, almost level with the old man's face. It swayed back and forth to the rhythm of the song and the old man's motion.

Maggot recalled the way the deer had been bewitched.

As he sang this last verse, the old man lifted the squirming bag by its topstrings and the Old One flared its head, leaning back as if to strike.

Maggot jumped up, pounded out the danger warning on his chest, and cupped his hands to his mouth.

"Don't answer it! Run away!"

The song wavered and broke as the old man staggered back toward the bank. The demon curled its head at the sound, and then faster than one would think something that size could move, it twisted, coiling and uncoiling, across the water.

Maggot's feet slipped in the muddy bank, and his hunger- and travel-racked reflexes were too slow to recover. The scaly face shot up from the water, flaring its head.

A mist enveloped Maggot, stinging his eyes and nose, burning his throat like the naked sun. He clutched his face, sliding down the concave bank toward the water. His limbs began to go slack. Something smooth and wet encircled his legs-he would have screamed, or kicked, if he could, but his body felt as it did when he woke suddenly from a dream, paralyzed and unable to move.

Far away, he heard the voice of the old man. The words were like fish under ice: Maggot saw their shape, but he couldn't reach them. Even with his eyes squeezed shut, the world took on a silver sheen shot with coruscating color.

The coils tightened around his legs and bent them against each other awkwardly, painfully. Maggot slid slowly backward, his numb fingers gouging thick clay. The tightening reached his chest. He inhaled and could not exhale.

Then the world turned from silver to black and the fires were extinguished. Maggot thought it might be a relief-desire sank into deep water and released all dreams.

t is the deepest cave he has ever known, perfectly, comfortingly dark at the bottom. His spirit, cut loose from his body, floats. He ascends the large, coal-black tunnel toward the surface, and when he grasps at the walls to slow his passage, his hands slip like bare feet on wet boulders.

At the end of the tunnel the noontime sun awaits, a faint spark at first, growing into a radiant circle of heat. Maggot sees it and he is afraid. The sun is death, the light is death, and he longs to go back down into the safety of the darkness. He wails, like a child again, like a frightened baby, noise pounding in his ears like a waterfall on the rocks. He calls out for someone, anyone, to grab him, to pull him back, but he has left all the trolls behind. Even his mother can come only partway up the tunnel, and she shouts at him, but her voice grows cold like stone in the winter, filled with crystals of ice, until it cracks, and falls apart in shards and splinters.

The sun fills everything except the very lip of the cave. Maggot twists, thrusts out his hands to clutch at this dark circle that lingers at the very edge of his vision, sticks out his feet to brace against the wall of the tunnel. His limbs are too heavy to budge, immobile as though they're confined in ropes or vines.

Somehow he stops his motion.

And he sees that the cave is no cave, but a mouth and a throat and he is on the inside. The sun is no sun, but an egg, as yellow as yolk, with cracks running through it. Inside the egg he hears a voice. Then suddenly something snaps and he falls, dropping like a spider when its thread is severed. He plummets down the throat until it widens like a vast cavern, and the cavern becomes the night and fills with stars. He rushes toward the earth, twisting over and over as he falls, and the ground rushes up to meet him, with the silver turtle egg of the full moon laughing at him, and then he hits the ground, slams into the ground and slides right through it, until the dirt falls in all around him and smothers him like a root.

So he lies there like a root, and patiently waits to flower. Water trickles in through the dirt and reaches his hard throat, and he drinks. The hard thing inside him cracks like a nut in its season. It is enough for him to send out a single thread, a searching tendril of thought shaped like a sentence.

"Where am I?"

In the land of the dead, comes the reply.

But Maggot knows that already. He exhausted himself to find out nothing new, and for a long time he lies in the thick, heavy miasmal dark, gulping the water that trickles down to his inanimate throat. What he wants to find is a way out, to the land where other spirits reside. He sends out new shoots of thought, but before they break free of the rough-packed ground, something reaches down to him with a voice like liquid light.

Who are you? it asks.

Maggot has to think about this question, for a time that stretches out like seasons full of frost and the first soft warmth of spring, through the dew and fog of summer, across crystals frozen on the tips of grass. The answer begins like another searching shoot, a pale white hair that wriggles slowly upward, crawling through the humus to the surface.

"I am me," he answers.

The great disappointment at this response penetrates all the layers that separate them, confusing Maggot. His failure to communicate smothers him, and finally he ceases struggling to break free. The moment he ceases, he unknits all the potential locked up in the inert vegetable knob he has become, transforming it into a host of roots and fronds, bursting forth in every direction at once, down farther into the darkness and up toward the light. The tendrils become fingers, and with one green hand he takes hold of the darkness deep underground and with the other he reaches up and clutches the round leather ball of the sun. And though it burns his palm he does not let go.