The Prodigal Troll Part 20

Just ahead of them on the trail, a loud crash in the brush was followed by gobblegobblegobble.

Three huge birds burst from the trees, an arrow flying out of the darkness to hit one of the straggling turkeys and pin it to the ground. Its shrill cry accompanied vigorous flapping in a circle as two men ran out of the woods after it. The men dressed like the hunters in the skin caves, their clothes bright blocks of color in the gray light.

Sinnglas whooped, just like he did in the dance, as Keekyu lifted his bow, drew, and shot. His arrow sailed through empty air: the men had already reversed direction and bolted away.

"But-" cried Maggot.

Half a dozen bows tw.a.n.ged as Sinnglas shouted at the men, "Catch them! Quick! Quick!"

Keekyu ran ahead, always looking, with Pisqueto and Maggot at his side. Pisqueto's eyes were wide with excitement. Sinnglas and the other men spread out through the woods. Maggot listened to the crashing footsteps of the men ahead and noticed when the noise stopped. Before he realized what this meant, a bowstring vibrated.

Maggot hurled himself behind a tree, but he saw a silver flash in the air. Keekyu screamed and crumpled over backward, his scalp laid open bare to the white bone of the skull. Blood streamed everywhere, covering his pale, still face.

Pisqueto froze. He took one look at his brother and gulped. Then he spun around and ran away.

Before Maggot could run after him, Sinnglas was screaming. "Attack, attack! Don't let them reach the houses!"

Maggot obeyed.

Branches slapped at his face and arms as Maggot plunged through the trees after the men. The strangers stopped long enough to draw and shoot, then ran again. The shafts flew wild, sailing over Maggot's head to crash in the leaves.

The two men broke into the open, one ahead of the other. Maggot emerged from the woods just behind them. Dawn cast its pale light across the lush gra.s.s as they all ran over the meadow beside the stream toward the settlement. Kinnicut, the blacksmith in Damaqua's village, ran past Maggot and flung his warclub. It spun through the air and knocked down the trailing stranger. Kinnicut jumped in the air, trilling his triumph, as the tripped man crawled away on all fours like a beast. Then Sinnglas came up and smashed his warclub into the stranger's head, once, twice. On the second strike, the skull splattered like a fruit.

Maggot stopped.

"Kill him!" Sinnglas shouted, pointing toward the second man. Several men drew their bows, but their comrades who continued the chase were in the way, so they didn't shoot.

Sinnglas dashed after the man. Maggot raced at Sinnglas's heels.

The stranger entered a second, narrower band of trees. Someone shot at him, but the arrow struck wood as he dodged behind the trunks. Maggot realized that the man still ran for the houses, so he angled through the trees and clambered over the small ridge to reach the man first.

Maggot came out of the trees on the edge of fields dug in straight lines like the patterns on the stranger's clothes. A group of houses sat across the fields.

The man rounded the hilltop not twenty feet away, shouting words that Maggot didn't understand. Maggot covered the distance in a few short steps, took the man by the hair, and jerked his head back. The man squirmed, batting at Maggot with the bow in his left hand while his right hand slipped off Maggot's greased body. He looked straight into Maggot's eyes, and said, in Sinnglas's language, "You Wyndan piece of s.h.i.t."

Maggot plunged his knife into the man's heart and twisted. The man dropped his bow and sagged, but Maggot held him up by the hair. Blood bubbled at his mouth, a single crimson sphere that swelled like the moon and popped.

Sinnglas arrived at Maggot's side. "Over the wall!"

There was no time to think or feel. Maggot dropped the body and joined seven or eight men sprinting in a ragged line across the fields. Someone twisted an ankle and fell down.

Maggot outdistanced them all.

His eyes encompa.s.sed everything at once. The strangers had fortified their houses, surrounding them with a fence and filling the s.p.a.ces in between with a rough wall of logs and wagons. Someone must have warned them of the attack. Flames leapt from a rooftop, lighting the situation. Their s.h.a.ggy cattle cl.u.s.tered inside, jostling away from the fire, lowing in distress. Squandral's men and Custalo's engaged the strangers on the far side, trading screams and arrows. The bulk of the defenders, a handful of men, were on the far side of the structure; Maggot glimpsed their backs in the flickering light. One-no, two-defended the wall nearest Sinnglas's men.

Maggot hit the wall at a full run and vaulted over it.

He rolled on his shoulder and landed upright on his feet, the way his mother had taught him. His momentum carried him straight into the larger archer, and he struck repeatedly with his fist until the man fell.

Something cut across his back, and he twisted, slashing with his knife, feeling it bite, pulling through. The attacker fell backward, which is when Maggot noticed she was the woman.

He stood paralyzed, like the deer transfixed by the demon.

No, not the woman, but a woman. This woman was smaller, like a boy, and her hair was a lighter shade of brown. But she had the same nose, the same sharp-angled face. She sat propped up where she'd fallen against the wall, grimacing, trying to push a blue wad of intestines back into her stomach. One leg kept kicking hard against the ground while blood spurted out between her legs.

Someone screamed.

Maggot spun. A man charged around the corner of a house aiming a spear at him. Maggot dodged the thrust, blocking the shaft with his knife hand and shoving the man down.

He stood there, dumb, confused, as Sinnglas and the other warriors came over the wall. One of them silenced the woman as others killed the two men. They attacked the defenders from behind, and Squandral and Custalo and all their men came over the barricade on the other side.

Something inside Maggot became the sh.e.l.l of a tortoise or a snail, something very hard. He seemed to himself to be moving slug-slow while everyone around him darted like bats in the sky.

In a matter of moments, the warriors murdered every man, woman, and child. Maggot watched them drag a small child out from under a bed before they killed him. Then they knocked down the fence, driving the cattle into the fields, plundered the bodies, and began to rob the houses.

Maggot staggered back to the wall, tried to climb over it, and fell, weak, on the other side. He stood up, wiping his arm against his mouth to take away the bitter taste of bile that suddenly filled it.

As flames leapt from the remaining rooftops, Maggot ran out across the fields. He wasn't running away. He was only running to find Pisqueto, only running to find himself.

innglas and Pisqueto sat cross-legged by a cold fire, apart from the other men. Maggot squatted troll-like near them. He scratched under his arm, scratched his crotch, sniffing the night air for carrion or other scents. The dusk soothed him with its promise of night.

"This time I will prove myself," Pisqueto was saying to Sinnglas.

"You've proved your courage many times now," Sinnglas replied. "No one doubts you."

In the weeks since that first dawn raid, their band of warriors had attacked several more settlements. The new settlements were well defended, and though the two sides had traded insults like trolls before wrestling, little had come of it. Because the raids had gone badly, the other warriors blamed the men from Damaqua's village, especially Sinnglas, for starting talk of war and sat apart from them. Maggot had not missed the killing when the new raids failed, but Pisqueto had risked his life in each confrontation, getting in harm's way of the invaders' arrows to taunt them.

When Sinnglas and Pisqueto finished eating their small meal, they scrubbed their teeth with green, ribbed reeds collected from the stream. Maggot picked up a reed and followed their example.

"I've shown that I don't fear the Lion's men," Pisqueto said. "But I have yet to prove that I can do any harm to them."

Sinnglas sighed. "Already I must go and tell our mother that one of her sons has left his bones in a foreign land. Do not make me take twice that news to her, little brother."

Pisqueto turned his head away and rubbed the palm of his hand against his eyes. The iron arrowhead had pierced Keekyu's skull, making him the sole death in that first raid. At least, Maggot thought, among Sinnglas's people. Everyone in the settlement had died.

He flared his nostrils, sniffing again.

With another sigh, Sinnglas turned his head toward Maggot. "There are two worlds, one seen and one that is unseen. Which one do you walk in, my friend?"

"What do you mean?" Maggot asked.

"There is the world of the seen-you, me, the tree, the stones. I walk through it. Then there is the world of the unseen." He made an exaggerated sniffing noise, mimicking Maggot. "Your spirit, mine, the spirit of the tree, the stone. Sometimes our body is in one place, but our spirit another, seeing things of the spirit. Gelapa, the wizard of our village, spends most of his time in the unseen world. He says the medicine water of the invaders takes him there. While there, he is able to see the unseen-"

"Hmmm?" Maggot asked.

"The spirits of the dead. The weather before it comes."

Maggot continued to scrub his teeth. "No, I smell the weather more than I see it. Today the air smells wrong. Sharp, like rain, but no clouds in the sky."

"Heh. Gelapa is a wizard of the unseen world." Sinnglas pursed his lips and raised his chin in the direction of the ampules on Maggot's chest. "Those are the weapons of a wizard of the world of the seen. Is that what you are?"

"No." Maggot shook his head emphatically. He found himself saying no frequently, though his skill with the language continued to improve. "These remind me of someone."

"This is why I ask," Sinnglas said. "Our situation does not look good to me. I am left out of the war councils, which are ruled by old men. They think in old ways."

"And that is bad?"

"It will be very bad."

A piece of the reed had broken off and stuck in Maggot's back teeth. He fished for it with his tongue. "But more warriors, they come to join us."

They had trickled in since that first attack, from other far-flung villages and from the ranks of those who had not joined the dancing at first. Their numbers were now higher than Maggot could count. Many fistfuls of fists, though Damaqua had not been among the late arrivals.

Sinnglas looked out over the encampment of warriors. "When the invaders attack us tomorrow morning, they will come in great numbers, more than ours. They have two and three men to our one, and war mammuts with them."

Maggot had been out to see them too. The army of the invaders carried banners with a golden lion on a field of green. The Lion. No wonder Sinnglas's people feared it so. "If it so bad, why do they come to join us?"

"What else can we do?" He indicated the charms around Maggot's neck a second time. "Maqwet, my friend, are you sure you do not know how to use those to help us?"

The reed came loose from Maggot's teeth, and he spit it out. Once he had not known how to clean his teeth either. Someday he might know how to use them. "No."

Pisqueto snapped the reed in his hand. "We will show the invaders how real men fight."

Sinnglas looked away. "We will certainly meet the Lion with the weapons we have."

At sunrise, they heard the mammuts trumpeting as the invaders' army marched up the valley.

Squandral, Custalo, and the other old warriors had chosen a spot where the valley rose gradually into thick forests. They created natural-looking breastworks of fallen trees and branches, cunningly rearranged to provide dead ends and shifts in cover all along the trail. Their men concealed themselves in small groups through the woods, while Squandral and some of the others built a fire on the hilltop.

Sinnglas gathered the men of his village, the warriors who had danced that first night, and spoke privately to them.

"Those of you who wish to stay back with the old men are welcome to. No one will call you cowards. But someone must go forward, to be the point of the spear. The war mammuts will come first, and unless someone hamstrings them, they will destroy our breastworks and our defenses."

Pisqueto thumped his fist on his chest. "They will say that those who faced the mammuts showed great courage."

The men nodded at this, some reluctantly, but one by one, they agreed to follow Sinnglas. He led them down the trail to a place of thick underbrush, with s.p.a.ces scooped out beneath. Maggot thought it might have been a giant skunkbear's den, or maybe even something made long ago by a group of trolls. There was no scent or scat about the place to tell him, nothing but the dusty scent of old leaves, but it had that feel.

"We'll hide here," Sinnglas told them. "And under those thickets there. But hold your blow until the vanguard is nearly past us. Then strike quickly and hard."

Maggot lay on his stomach and crawled into the big hole under the brush, choosing it for its familiarity. He settled into the dark shade with several other men, and covered himself with leaves as if he were going to hide from the sun to sleep.

He had no chance to rest, though. They heard the invaders coming from far away, shouts and branches breaking and metal rattling, and then they saw a cloud of dust along the trail. Two armored mammuts came into view, each one with a man perched just behind its ears. Pikemen surround the mammuts, bristling like an angry porcupine.

There was a gap between this group and the main army on foot behind them. Maggot's position made it impossible to count their numbers precisely, but he saw there were many more than the twelve of them waiting to attack. His grip on his hatchet felt too tight, so he let go and rubbed his fingertips against his leg to loosen them.

The mammuts came close, showing the shorter, cleaner fur of summer. Sun glinted on their armor. Maggot counted feet as the pikemen went by: twenty-three feet-he was sure he had missed one. One man pa.s.sed close enough that Maggot could see the white k.n.o.b of a bunion on his inside toe. They were in no formation. Some carried their pikes over their shoulders and others carried pikes at their sides.

As the last feet pa.s.sed by, Sinnglas gave a shrill whoop.

The men screamed with him as they burst from their hiding places, and the scream had the same effect on the soldiers that a lion's roar had on its prey. Half froze where they stood, and a couple went down with arrows in them. Maggot saw one fall under Sinnglas's warclub, and Pisqueto flung himself on the stunned pikemen with fury.

Maggot charged for the nearest mammut, intending to drive his hatchet into its leg to cripple it, when a man turned to block his way. Maggot knocked aside the half-raised pike and struck at the man's head with his hatchet, knocking him down. A braided man attacked him with a sword. Maggot deflected the blow with his hatchet, but the impact knocked the weapon from his hand. Maggot grabbed the other man's wrist, drawing his knife and stabbing. The blade chinged off his iron shirt. Maggot stabbed again, this time at the throat, his cut partially deflected by a collar.

Sudden bellowing raised hackles on Maggot's neck.

Kinnicut, the wide-shouldered smith, had driven a long-handled axe under the knee of one of the mammuts. The s.h.a.ggy beast dragged the bad leg, screaming in fury, lashing out with its trunk.

"Go, go!" Sinnglas shouted.

Kinnicut ran for the woods, with other men leaping into the thickets. The soldier crawled away clutching his bleeding throat, trying to regain his feet. Maggot spun- Pisqueto grappled with one of the pikemen.

Screaming, Maggot slashed at the back of Pisqueto's attacker. The blow staggered him enough for Pisqueto to jerk free. Then Maggot saw reinforcements running to the aid of the invaders, and the remaining pikemen cl.u.s.tering together to charge them, and Sinnglas was screaming at them to run, run; so he grabbed Pisqueto by the arm and dragged him off the trail, and they fled.

They hurdled the breastworks when they reached them, and turned to see what they had done. Two, maybe three bodies lay in the open glade. The rest of the invaders had taken up a defensive formation around the other mammut. The injured mammut, blind with panic, tried to escape, dragging its crippled leg behind it. The rider behind its head had lost his goad and did all he could just to hold on.

Two of Sinnglas's men were too injured to fight any more. One suffered a deep sword cut that had shattered his collarbone. The other had lost fingers from his right hand. He wrapped a cloth in knots around it, his face pale and sweaty.

"The mammuts," Sinnglas directed. A few bowstrings sung immediately around Maggot, but he left his bow over his shoulder-his aim had improved but was still not that good.

One or two of the arrows landed in the mammuts' hides just as the Lion's archers started shooting back at Sinnglas and his men. At the sound of the tw.a.n.ging bows beside it, the injured mammut lost control, grabbing the rider from its back with its trunk. The small man's shriek cut short when he smashed into the ground, was lifted, and smashed again. The hobbled mammut then attacked the invaders. Their line broke, but re-formed after the animal ran past them down the trail.

Some of Squandral's men charged in a brief counterattack that achieved little or nothing before they ran back uphill and resumed their defensive positions.

The rest of the enemy forces came up. After taking a long time to organize themselves, they began a slow advance behind a wall of shields. The invaders' archers poured a steady volley of carefully aimed arrows at the warriors. Their attention focused on Squandral's part of the barricade across the main trail. Maggot took his bow-it had been Keekyu's, the one he'd tried to train Maggot with-and stuck up his head, shooting blindly before he ducked again. The invaders were packed so tightly it seemed impossible to miss. But he never saw what happened to his arrow. His stomach bubbled like a sulfur spring. He wanted to stay at Sinnglas's side and help him, but he wished they were both elsewhere.

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 pa.s.sed.

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 pa.s.sed 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.