The Prodigal Troll (39 page)

He opens his eyes for the very first time, and the rays of the sun stab at them like daggers, but he does not flinch or draw away. There is a difference between fearlessness and courage, between stalking the demon and facing the demon's maw, and he has crossed the watershed that divides these two rivers of experience.

The sun sees it also. It sheathes its blades.

He lay under blankets on the floor in the corner of a small, clean room illuminated by large windows. When he tried to speak, he heard his voice break like a dry branch. A man came across the room to stare at him. It was the old man, the one he saw by the riverside. His silver hair hung in long clumps down his side. Bronze and copper flames danced around his head, like lights in the northern sky.

The old man poured a sour water into Maggot's mouth, the merest trickle. It spilled from the corner of his lips. Something small and warm curled against him, rumbling.

"Too much life in you for death to swallow whole," the old man said, in the language of the trolls.

"How long?" Maggot asked.

"Nights," muttered the man. "Two, three. Count the first, don't count the first."

"It was not yet dawn, when I saw you."

"Yes. True." It was the same word in the language of the trolls, but he repeated it twice. He seems unhappy at this admission. "Three nights."

"Three."

Maggot closed his eyes and slept, as both men and trolls did when they arrived safely home at a long journey's end. He felt that he had not slept in a long time, if ever.

He awoke again in sunlight to the sound of hammering, screaming, and cruel laughter. Cries of anger and defiance came from voices he almost recognized. He listened a long time, taking it for a fever dream. Surely the pack of tiny cats-orange, black, gray, and white-running in and out of the house, basking in the sunlight, were part of a fever dream. The scent of their urine and spray was too intense to be real, and the pregnant orange one that curled up next to him in the blankets made a purring noise unlike anything he'd ever heard.

He poked that little cat experimentally. The scratch along his thumb felt real enough, so he was pulling the lips back to look at its teeth when the old man entered the house.

"What is that noise?" Maggot asked, looking to the window.

"Wyndans," he said, a word that Maggot remembered on another man's lips. The old man looked out the small window that faced the river, and the corners of his mouth speared down. "They came to scavenge peace. I told him not to come. Before. When he came for the demon's skin. No good-smell is to come."

He used the words haltingly, as Maggot did when speaking Sinnglas's tongue. Maggot pushed back his layers of blankets and attempted to rise to see out the window also. "Who?"

The old man came and pushed him back down into the covers firmly, irresistibly but without violence. Without answers either. Maggot was too weak to resist and let the coverlets form a cocoon about him. The small orange cat curled up in the hollow by his stomach.

The old man boiled a pot of water, making tea as Sinnglas's wife had sometimes done. Outside, someone screamed.

Maggot stared at the old man. The old man stared into his cup at the leaves. The cat closed its eyes and slept.

The screaming lasted a long time.

Maggot woke in the dark, feeling hot and sluggish, dry and empty. The cat was asleep on his face, and it made his face itch, so he pushed it away.

The old man sat by the hearth, with his back to Maggot, chanting. The teapot fire had burned down to coals, but his shadows twitched and leapt across the walls as if they were cast more by the faint, shimmery lights that danced about his head. Sometimes Maggot saw those lights, and sometimes they blinked out of his view.

Without turning or looking up, the old man stopped his song. "Are you hungry, yes, true?"

"Yes," croaked Maggot.

He tapped his head. "Beside you."

Maggot rolled to his side and saw the cup and bowl. He wet his throat first with the tepid tea, then began to scoop the food into his mouth. Boiled oats mixed with sticky syrup. The cat came back, leaned its head down to sniff at the bowl, thrust out a pink tongue.

In the corner opposite him, beside the old man, Maggot saw the head of the Old One that had attacked him.

"Eat with slowly," said the old man.

"Thank you," answered Maggot. "Where-"

The man grunted, then put his hands on the floor and turned himself around, holding one hand across his waist, the other extended. "Name yourself; then name your favor. My name is Banya, and welcome to my home."

"I will remember your stink, Banya. My name is Maggot. Where-"

"Maggot? Not Claye?"

"Maggot. Little, white, crawls on dead things." He wiggled his finger like a worm.

The old man leaned forward, face grimacing in concentration, clearly puzzled. "Maggot is not a name for men. Your name is Claye."

"Claye?" He thought that perhaps the old man-Banya-was using the wrong words or not understanding him. "Sinnglas called me Maqwet."

"Sinnglas? That's not a name to be spoken aloud here," he said suddenly in Sinnglas's tongue, leaning back and glancing toward the door. "You speak his tongue?"

"Yes."

"I should not mention that name again, were I you. The tongue, where did you learn it?"

"From Sinnglas." Maggot felt very confused now. He put down the bowl, full and sleepy.

Banya scowled. The flames that licked about his head flickered as if in agitation. "No. The tongue of the Collegis."

"I know only the tongue my mother taught me," Maggot said in the trolls' language again.

"Yes, true! That tongue. Too long since with Collegis I, too short with." Banya started rocking, and the shimmering flames cooled, calmed. He shifted back to Sinnglas's tongue. "I know your mother. She taught you not."

"You know Windy?" Maggot pushed himself upright off his elbow, too quickly. Black dots spun before his eyes, and he sunk dizzily back among the bearskins and blankets. The cat jumped to get out from under him.

"Windy?"

Maggot whistled like a breeze through rocks. "Windy."

Banya resumed his rocking, staring at Maggot instead of the fire. He did this for a long time, saying nothing. He shook his head. "No, that is not her name. The resemblance to what she looked like then, and to her consort, is uncanny."

"Where?" Maggot asked. "Where did you learn to speak like trolls?" He switched to the word Sinnglas used. "Like giants? Was your mother also a giant?"

"Giants?" His eyes lit up, and he stopped moving. "Windy was a giant?"

"Yes."

"Say it three times, speak it true!"

"My mother was a giant. Yes, yes, yes."

"No!" He looked up fearfully, the fires like dancing spears. "You must only say it twice!"

"But you said-"

"Fool! Now you've drawn the attention of the jealous god!"

He rose, his knees cracking like ice in the spring sun. He took a bundle of herbs and set them alight, smudging a sweet smoke around the corner of the rooms, chanting quietly as if unwilling to let Maggot overhear him. He collected something else from a pot, grabbed a staff, and went outside. Maggot heard him at the four corners of the house, tapping.

When he returned, he would not speak to Maggot but sat by the fire instead, talking quietly to the dead face of the Old One. The cats rubbed against him, but he paid them no mind.

Maggot thought he napped briefly. He wasn't sure-he closed his eyes, he opened his eyes, nothing changed. Eventually he had to rise to relieve himself.

Seeing him struggle, Banya helped pull him to his feet, holding him up with a viny arm. The copper bracelets were cold on Maggot's skin. Together they hobbled out the door.

They faced away from the river. Maggot wanted to look across to see the source of the screaming, but Banya propped him up against a bush right by the door. As his stream splattered over the leaves and ran down the wall, Maggot began to laugh.

"What?" the old man asked.

"Heh-marking it as my cave."

Bracelets jingled, followed by a sharp sting as Banya slapped Maggot's bottom. A black cat started rubbing against his ankles, and he had a hard time finishing.

When they staggered back inside, Maggot propped himself up surrounded by the blankets. The small coals had gone out. The flames surrounding Banya's head had also cooled and faded away.

Banya shook his head and muttered. "Gruethrist took Lord Eleuate hunting for giants, once, when he first settled this valley. I hope Verlogh found no pleasure from it."

"What?" Maggot asked.

"I'm just thinking aloud," Banya said. "It is a habit of the old, bringing our thoughts into the air with the hope that they'll survive us."

The night was warm, but Maggot shivered. He thought he had a fever again.

"In the Collegis, some say that men stole language from the giants. The giants were created first and ruled all the land, but then men came; and though we were brute, speechless creatures we knew the secret of fire, and with fire we drove back the giants."

Maggot closed his eyes to listen to Banya's voice, and found an afterimage of the old man's radiant silhouette patinaed on the inside of his eyelids. He jerked upright, eyes open.

"Pramantha, beloved son of the goddess Bwnte and a mortal man, went out hunting in the mountains with other men and was attacked by the giants. He was very clever, however, and by means of gestures, he promised to show the giants how to extinguish fire if they would give him the secret of language. And then he showed them how to use water to quench flame."

"Heh," Maggot said. Trolls would like that.

"The giants gloated. They shattered the ice caps that covered the mountains. They grabbed the edges of the oceans and pulled them over the land. They deluged the world, intending to drown the sun and bring an end to daylight forever. But they kept Pramantha with them, teaching him the language as they had promised. And that night, after he had learned the language, Pramantha rekindled fire from a spark that he had hidden and cast it back into the sky, where the moon carried it to the sun and lit the fire anew."

"Ah," Maggot said. So the moon carried the sun's fire. That seemed true. "What happened then?"

"Pramantha gave language to all the people that survived, but each man shaped it to his own use, and soon none could speak to each other. Pramantha's heir founded the Collegis to preserve the true tongue and all the secrets of the earth Pramantha knew."

"No, what happened to the giants?"

Banya shrugged, and his voice grew lighter. "People prospered and the giants declined. Some say it is also because Pramantha stole magic from them, and made them less by it." In the tongue of the trolls he added, "I haven't tasted it myself. "

Constantly rearranging the blankets as a barricade to the assaults of the cats that surrounded him, vying for attention, Maggot asked, "What is magic?"

After a moment's pause, Banya grasped one end of Maggot's blanket and held it up. "The world is a single continuous skin of invisible power. Things that happen in one place, change things in another. Something small causes a big change somewhere else. A butterfly flaps its wings in a field and all the way across the mountains, a wind stirs that knocks down trees. Magic is the way of finding those connections, and bending them to the use of people."