The Prodigal Troll Part 10

Windy had never heard this story before. The trollbird skittered between her shoulder blades. Her skin twitched.

"The two packs, they had these killing leaves-"

"Sharp leaves of shiny metal?" Windy asked.

"Those too." Her mother made a three-sided shape with her fingers. "But they also had these big ones, one leaf on each branch, in bright colors like the autumn leaves. They carried them on branches. So we crept down out of the mountains to see them. One morning before the sun came up, we heard a sound like the trumpeting of mam muts. We hid in our caves all that day, but we couldn't sleep because we knew something was wrong. When we came back to the field that night, it was littered with carrion. More dead men than there are berries on these bushes, the smell so thick it made your stomach swell like to bursting. And the killing leaves in tatters, shredded, lying this way and that, pieces shaking in the wind." She pointed to the cedars. "They looked just like those trees."

Windy wished she'd never heard this story. "So?"

"People"-her mother aimed her finger at Maggot, rolling around with the girls-"did that. Afterward, the winners-the newcomerscame into the high reaches and hunted us. We moved north, and once again men entered the low valleys, and once again hunt us."

"So?"

Her mother's face tightened into a sharp knot. "So? You bring one to live among us. It should be destroyed."

"No!" Windy rose abruptly with her fists clenched-the trollbird whistled and flew off into the night.

Her mother stared at her, as cold as ice. She was the First of the band, after many votes, its leader. "You listen to me. You need to get rid of that animal. Then you need to have another child, and by darkness and dew, let us hope it's a boy who can breed with those young girls down there as soon as they're big enough."

"Mother-"

"I'm not done yet!" Windy tensed, but her mother kept on speaking. "Our people have few children, and we grow fewer each year. There were fifty-three in our band when you were a baby, and before that there was seventy-one at one time. Seventy-one! How many do you see now?"

Windy couldn't help herself. She lifted her head and counted. Ragweed and seven others, mostly men, down where the blueberries are thickest, another group of ten over on the next hill, and little cl.u.s.ters of two and three scattered in between. Maggot and the two girls. Her and her mother. "Thirty, thirty one, thirty-two. Thirty-three, thirtyfour. Thirty-four."

"Thirty-three," her mother corrected. She wasn't counting Maggot.

"That's not a fair question. Frosty took her band and moved away, and-"

"Because the people moved in! They eat all our food and kill us and hunt us away!" The anger faded out of her mother's voice, replaced by weariness. "I see the nights of all trolls drying up like dew beneath a sun that never sets." As Windy watched her mother's face intently, understanding for a moment her sense of loss, the old troll chuckled. "Look! The children are playing catch the snake. You loved that game when you were a little girl."

The two girls were running, tossing a snake back and forth between them. Maggot chased after, grabbing at it, as the girls threw it to each other over his head.

Windy laughed too. It was a good-sized snake-two, maybe three feet long-with its mouth wide open and fangs snapping at the children's arms. Rocky and Blossom were good girls. Windy was so glad Maggot finally had someone his own age to play with.

The snake twined in the air, looping itself in an echo of the crisscross pattern marking its back-it was the kind that caused sickness if it bit, which made the game more fun. The risk was small because a fast bite couldn't break a troll's skin, and if the snake fastened on an arm and bit slowly, there was always plenty of time to grab the head and pull it off it. Windy remembered one time ...

Maggot! "No!"

She drummed a short warning on her chest and ran down the slope. All three children froze in fear, and the snake twisted in Blossom's hand, biting down sharply on her arm. "Ow!"

"I've got it," Maggot cried. He grabbed it behind the head and pulled it off.

Windy faltered, then lunged forward. Maggot held the snake up toward her, its long length squirming and twisting around. He kept his grip on it for a second, then let go and hopped out of the way. Its head turned to strike at him just as Windy's foot came down, smashing it into the ground.

Rocky smiled. "I caught it eight times."

"I caught it eleven!" Blossom screamed.

"But you dropped it four times," Maggot said. "And Rocky picked it up again, and she didn't miss any catches."

Windy patted him on the head. "But Blossom caught it more times, so she wins the game." The snake squirmed frantically in the soft ground beneath her foot.

"But if you take away the times she dropped it, then Rocky wins," Maggot insisted.

Windy wrinkled her thick brow and started unfolding her fingers. Eleven catches, then one, two, three, four drops, that was fifteen. The snake struggled harder, so she arched the front part of her foot. When the head squeezed out between her toes, she crossed them and snapped its neck. She lifted the limp snake with her foot to her hand, then offered it to her mother.

"We found it," Rocky complained.

"It's our food," Blossom said.

"You should have eaten it while you had the chance then," Windy's mother said as she took it. She bit off half; the bones crunched in her jaw. With a wink, she tossed the other half to the girls. Maggot s.n.a.t.c.hed it out of the air and led the girls on a chase for it. After she swallowed, she looked up at Windy. "You can't buy my vote with fresh meat, you know."

"I wasn't trying to."

"Leastway, not that little bit." Her eyes grew wistful. "Now a nice bit of rotting carrion-"

"You'll vote however you think best."

"I've already talked with Ragweed, and he's gathering up votes among the men. We'll have enough to exclude it-Maggot-from the band."

"We'll leave then," Windy said.

"Not you, just it."

"Whatever you vote for him, you vote for me. You vote to kill him, you'll have to kill me first. He's my son."

"It could end up carrion," her mother said.

"He," Windy insisted.

"Maybe it'll have an accident. Yes, that could happen. Then you could have more children. We have too few children."

Windy didn't say anything. She noticed the men moving off to the east. When the women pounded on the ground, their girls went running. Maggot followed after them, but Windy beat her knuckles into the sod. "Stay," she said.

He sprinted to her side. "What is it, Mom?"

"Stay with me."

"But Mom!"

She bared her teeth and he quieted down, clambering up her outstretched arm to cling around her shoulder. Sometimes she still recalled the way her daughter's fingers and toes had dug into her wrinkles and under the cracks in her skin, but she'd grown accustomed to the way Maggot scooted up the outside. She searched through the blueberries until she found his skin, some strange-smelling thing they had scavenged from valley people to keep him warm. He wrapped it over his back.

Windy's mother looked at her in disgust. "Ughh! Why do you carry that stinking thing?"

"Maggot'd be cold without it."

"Then let it be cold. Let it die."

Before Windy could answer, Maggot laughed. "But Grandma! I don't want to die. You're silly."

She grunted and moved off. They needed to be safely underground before the sun rose to blind and immobilize them. Windy hurried after her.

"Hey, Mom," said Maggot.

"Yes?"

"Hey, Mom."

"Yes?"

"I want to walk."

"No," she said firmly. "We're in a hurry, dear." They had lingered almost too long, lethargic in the summer heat. But trolls moved quickly when the scent of dawn electrified the air, and there was no way Maggot could keep up with the others over this rough terrain for long. She'd learned that the hard way these last few years. Only because of Maggot's recent increase in size and speed had she finally relented and let Ragweed lead her back to troll country.

"But Mom, I want to talk to the other kids."

"I'll catch up with them."

When she did, the girls' mothers scowled at her, their browridges sagging like tree branches covered with ice. Windy tried to find words to ease their disapproval, but they ignored her. She lapsed once more into the canyon of silence that had first appeared between her and Ragweed.

The girls whispered and giggled, refusing to be stifled by the awkwardness of the older women. Rocky ran along at Windy's heels. "Hey there, baby," she taunted Maggot. "Baby riding on your mama's neck."

"Baby, baby, baby," Blossom cried. "Watch out! There's a snake crawling on your back!" She jumped up and tried to s.n.a.t.c.h away Maggot's skin, but missed, dissolving in laughter.

Windy couldn't see Maggot's expression, but his grip tightened on her and she smelled his uncertainty. "One time, down-down-down," he stammered, talking to the girls, "in the valleys by the big people caves, we'd been out hunting for food all night and we found a nice big dead humpback."

"A whole humpback?" Rocky asked eagerly.

"Yeah, and Ragweed ate soooo much, he got really tired, and he fell asleep, and I put my skin over his face, so he wouldn't know that it was getting light out, and then, when the sun came up, he'd turn into stone."

"No you didn't," Blossom said.

"Did too!"

"He's not a bunch of stones," Rocky argued.

"No. Mom took the blanket off his head and woke him up."

Windy smiled. That's exactly what she did do, every single time Maggot played that trick on Ragweed. As the children continued to talk, she admired the way Maggot stopped the teasing by distracting the girls. Then, like darkness falling after a flash of light, she realized that Maggot was taunting them back, reminding them that he'd been all sorts of places they never had. For the first time it occurred to her that he was already smarter than she was-if you counted backward from eleven, take away four, that was seven. Less than eight. She sighed. He was at least five or six years old, big enough to live on his own. She'd done everything she could, taught him how to find carrion and other food, how to dig and climb, and all about the history and customs of her people. He sucked all of it in like a lake drinking up a river. But the one thing she couldn't do was make him grow any bigger, any faster.

Reaching up, she took hold of Maggot and swung him down to the ground. "Go on then," she said, picking up the skin as it fell from his shoulders.

"Thanks, Mom!" His face beamed at her like the moon, so bright she almost had to shield her eyes, and then he took off running beside the girls as fast as his little legs could carry him. He looked funny, moving upright on his two feet and swinging his arms even though they didn't touch the ground. The girls slowed down a bit to match his pace.

"It's a freak," hissed her mother, slipping back beside her. "An animal."

Windy's gaze never strayed from him. "Whatever you want to call him, he's still my son."

They trotted steadily downhill for several miles. The trail offered glimpses of the river valley far below and a constant view of the mountains in the distant west. Near the end of the trail, Maggot ran up and tugged at her hand. "Mom, I'm tired."

"Here, I'll carry you." She held out her arm and he tugged on it again, but didn't climb up. If he was too tired to climb, then he was exhausted. She lifted him and draped him over her shoulder. He clung to her neck, twining and locking his hands together.

"Where are we going?" he asked.

"To spend the day in caves, at the bottom of these cliffs."

"What cl-"

The word dropped off in midair as they came to the top of a steep wall of rock nine hundred feet high.

"Wow." He said that last so quietly she felt only the air of it stirring against her neck.

A trail wound back and forth down the cliff's face. The older trolls descended quickly, digging their toes and fingers in the rock for vertical shortcuts in the places where the rock allowed. Those who left the blueberry patches earliest were already at the bottom when Windy began her climb, pressed against the wall of stone. "Hold on tight," she told Maggot.

He smacked his lips for yes, rubbing his forehead against the back of her neck as he squeezed tight.

She chose the easiest path down the wall. This place was sacred to the trolls. The story her mother told was that the trolls were born underground, of the earth itself, in the deep caves when all the world was covered with snow, living in the water and eating the fish and bugs that swam there. Most believed that the caves at the bottom of this cliff were the ones that trolls emerged from, like infants from their mother's womb, when they came out into the wider world.

It was still a safe place: the caverns stretched back for miles beneath the mountains, so deep that no people or other predators could ever find them there. All the things that trolls had ever stolen from people were stored there, in hordes cached in such odd corners that some of them had not been counted in a span of lifetimes.

"Hey, Mom?"

"Mmmm?" Windy asked, her face against the stone, her feet reaching out to find the next toehold.

"The girls're daring me to join them. Can I?"

She twisted her head around to see them. The girls were showing off, getting back at him for his adventures by climbing straight down the wall. Every young troll did that at least once, usually around the time they were as big as the girls. But Maggot was not every young troll.

"No," Windy said firmly. "You can't do that."

"Aw, Mom," he whined. But he didn't budge.

"You're a good boy."

"I'm not a boy. I'm almost old enough to be a grown-up, even though I'm as small as a baby. That's why Grandma wants me to die and all the other grown-ups want me to go away."

Something caught in her throat as big as a rock. "What do you think about that?"

"I tell them you won't let anything hurt me." He nuzzled his face against her. "'Cause you don't."

The burden on her shoulders grew heavier as she continued her downward trek. The air around her changed, charged with the tingling feel of daybreak. When she reached the bottom of the slope, she was panting. She looked up and saw the sun shining high on the very top of the cliff face. The wall there had lost the blue-gray tones of night and turned into startling shades of red and orange, streaked with white. It glowed like fire.

Then she noticed the two girls. They'd also seen the light, before she did, and they'd frozen in a spot some fifty or sixty feet up the wall, one above the other.

"Come on down!" she yelled at them. "Hurry!"

"I can't!" Blossom cried out. Rocky just cried.