The Prodigal Troll (17 page)

Maggot played with the girls on the slope below the blueberry bushes, along the edge of the bogs where cranberries grew and the grasses turned shadow-tipped in autumn. Beyond him, a herd of giant elk grazed about a mile away, their wide flat antlers rising and falling silhouetted against the sky. She counted seventeen elk before their heads jerked up in unison and they darted off. Leaning forward, she saw a dyrewolf bolt out of the grasses where the elk had been.

Dyrewolves hunted in packs. Where there was one, there were more. "Maggot," Windy said. She didn't speak loudly. Her son's ears were as powerful as a troll's eyes.

He stopped playing and waved to her. The two girls looked up the hill, confused by his actions.

"Stay close by," she said, for his ears only. "There are dyrewolves hunting."

He smacked his lips and nodded as if he already knew. Then he put his hands to his mouth. "Awroooooooo!"

It sounded enough like a dyrewolf's cry to send a chill up her spine. He could mimic almost anything. She saw him turn first, then the girls. When she followed their eyes and concentrated, she heard faintly the dyrewolf howling in return.

"Stay close!" she shouted at the top of her voice.

He waved to her again, and she felt better. After that, the girls pretended that they were scared, running away as he howled like a dyrewolf and chased them. The sight of him, and the sharp shriek of their laughter, made Windy smile. But she remained wary. A pack of dyrewolves could bring down a solitary full-grown troll. And her son was so much smaller and weaker than any troll.

On the steep edge of the slope a stunted grove of red cedars leaned away from the constant wind. When the girls ran in that direction, followed by Maggot, his shoulder-length hair whipped by the hard breeze, Windy was relieved. She could sniff the air and not smell wolves or other dangers in it.

Windy sniffed again, taking in the scent of the trees. Down in the valleys, the red cedars reached great heights, but here the tallest barely overtopped a full-grown troll; although, thinking about it, that still made them the tallest plant around. But they were twisted and deformed by the unrelenting pressure of the constant wind, the west face naked and all their tattered branches stretching east. On stormy nights, the gusts could tumble trolls and send them rolling across the bog.

Windy watched her son, his pale skin luminous in the partial moonlight. Her son was also a creature from the valleys. She wondered what it would do to him to grow up here, in troll country, whether he'd end up deformed in some way like the cedars.

Her mother climbed the rocks, sat down beside her, and pointed to the trees. "Do you know what those look like?"

A trollbird settled on Windy's back and began picking nits off her skin. She stayed still so as not to disturb it. "They smell like the big cedars that grow farther down the slopes. I was just thinking about that."

"No, that's not it." Her mother stretched out a long arm, grabbed the branch of a blueberry bush, and collected more of the juicy blueblack fruit. "They look like the killing leaves."

Windy didn't know what her mother meant. "Killing leaves?"

"Once, there were many more trolls than there are now. Some of us lived in the southern mountains then. When I was a young girl, I did. There were people, blackhairs, also living in the southern mountains then. Too many to count or chase away, but they left us alone and we avoided them."

Windy had heard all this before, and didn't care much for her mother's childhood stories. She shifted her weight. "Maggot has black hair."

Her mother grunted. "Let me finish. Then other people moved in, just like those who moved into the lower valleys here. The two groups gathered together, standing against each other in big packs. Like dyrewolves on one side and little bigtooth lions on the other."

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 clusters 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 snatched 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 snatch 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.