by Thomas Head
Just as suddenly, the trees and rocks that came next halted in the air. The Dwarf-King made a gripping gesture, then turned his palm down, and the earthy weapons dropped harmlessly into the water.
The dwarves gave a bellow of triumph.
But the cries of victory were cut short. The king was grabbed by each arm. A large troll pulled at him, flinging from the horse him onto its back. There were ten more beyond them, fully naked save for being covered in long blackish-red hair that swung from their arms. Thirty more were flanking them.
Encircling the king now, his personal guard looked, and they knew fully well that the notion of a fight was ludicrous.
But that did not stop them.
The dwarf closest to the king, who was still prostrate over the troll’s shoulder, swung his axe at the troll, grazing it. The troll punched the chest of the first dwarf he saw, who was happened to be next to the one that swung. The little fellow fell back, grunting airlessly like a wounded pig into the river as the second man chopped at the troll’s ankles with a broadaxe. The troll leapt, his monstrous feet as high the dwarf’s head, and landed atop him, crushing him nearly flat. Dwarves exploded from everywhere, rushing to the king’s aid. The noise of it all was like a nightmare. Everything blurred. I could only vaguely sense the surreal gravity of the moment as a troll crunched a dwarf’s face into the gravels, then kicked another—his neck broken so badly he was nearly decapitated.
Another came. His eyes swollen with fear, a dwarven ranger stabbed at the troll holding his king. The troll growled, wrenching the tremendous sword from his own hide, swirling it even as the dwarf held on. The dwarf turned, still whirling, and I could see that his sword was attached to his wrist by a thick leather strap, but only for an instant. The dwarf’s arm ripped off as he went flying toward us, the three of us still crouching in the beaver dam.
Hairy arms, dwarven fists, and bloody steel were whirling in every direction. The swords and arrows flashed in impossible sweeps; it was impossible to distinguish the growl of one from the roar of another. On troll in particular bore his teeth, biting and punching, and he felled a score of dwarves as surely as if he swung a sword. The fearsome thwacks and pings were chorusing death-grunts now. Animalistic wailing rose. All around the dwarves they came.
Then I saw a sight I could scarcely believe. A dwarven berserker was tearing his way through the tumult, chopping, and his axe was swinging now as fast as arrowfire, popping any skull too close. More power seemed to gush into him with every troll that fell, keeping him upright despite his many his growing wounds, a dozen cuts growing now across his chest and arms. It was little matter. He had perforated the edge of battle-madness, burning with the perverse high of it, when he noticed two arrows protruding from his right thigh and third just under his left arm. He turned, laughing, baring red teeth. Lunging back toward the fury and bedlam, his ferocity was such that he caused several of the trolls to fall back. Defensive and low, they went crouching back to their prowls. Some crawled on all fours like a beast to escape, looking back into his seething eyes. For a moment, there was stillness. Only his raspy breath. Distant movement out in the forest. Then, with the abruptness of a startled animal, one troll leapt down from a tree atop the berserker, biting his head. Falling to the ground, the dwarf turned with a stark slash of red dripping from the top of his nose. The rest of his head was gone, cracked awkwardly.
As the fourth or fifth large arrow flashed by us, a thwack resounded, too close. He crouched lower, just in time to see the trolls were even attacking the horses. One took a large log and popped it into the skull of a horse he had not seen. It reared and rolled backward, galloping ten feet into the water with that terribly large stick in its brain.
More arrows dropped as the foremost troll faded off into the woods with its dwarven cargo yet slung over its back.
The dwarven warriors were still arriving, and went scampering after the impossibly fast trolls to rescue him.
I started to get dizzy, trying to sort it all out. Just when it seemed the dwarves had finally gained some manner of advantage, I noticed that the trolls were emerging from the ground itself—the very ground I had only just crossed! And soon it was all just so much distant commotion, lost to the consuming forest beyond our sight.
I was numb, shaking.
Little Cullie, however, thought it was the grandest he sight he’d ever seen. The stout little fellow! By thunder, he even begged me to run after the mayhem to see who would win.
I must confess, it made my own heart soar.
Dhal looked at me, though, quite sternly, shaking her head no.
Chapter 46
I felt a flick of terrible pain prancing up my injured foot as I slogged up out of the marshy stream. When we looked around, we saw nothing. Then, still dripping, Cullie pointed to a parting in the shrubs across the creek. It was the troll family we had seen earlier.
They stepped toward us, holding their child as they entered the water.
We turned and began running. But now I was exhausting fast. My legs felt heavy. I tripped and began rolling down a hillside, further upstream. As I looked back, I was horrified to discover the creatures were padding along in effortless pursuit. They came trotting along our wake of woody debris, stepping over the tangles.
“Go, you two!” I yelled.
Dhal, panicked, reached down to gather up Cullfor, but she merely crouched beside me. Cullfor laughed and shook his head.
I ran as best I could with them once more. The terrain was increasingly steep. In mere moments we were tracing along a cliff top. The land slopped a few feet, and beyond was that deep gouge, the river crashing along the bottom. It went as far as I could see. I was almost too terrified to look back, but I could not help himself.
They were still coming.
I wondered if they were just as fast in the water. I caught my breath a moment. I leaned on the tree that had just saved me from tumbling over. The trolls approached, just fifty feet behind us now. Massive animal-men, their teeth were sticky with muck and blood. The father was gripping a disembodied deer hoof. Scars rippled under the bodily hair, and it had an obscenely human face. The salty hairs around the mouth gave it the look of a shadowy grin.
It was thirty feet away now.
I glanced down the cliff. It was too steep. I suspected Cullie would not survive jumping in, and I knew his skills with wizardry were not strong enough to protect us from the fall. Huge but nimble, each of them were snapping slobbery jaws as if attempting speech. The tongues were spotted and long, lapping wildly.
Closer, the father appeared scarred and maimed. There was a hole in its cheek. It seemed it was more... human now. As it reached us, I marveled at the bizarre, gentle eyes. It panted as it stared down at us
Then it tossed the deer leg onto my chest, a gesture I took as positive. But When I stood to thank it, I scared the child. It began to climb the tree just behind its parents. Its haunch-muscles were rippling from its own weight as it ambled up. The action was sickeningly easy for it, even more hideous to behold as it wrapped the hands around a branch, reached down, and slapped me in the face.
“What the—hey, watch that!”
The father looked up at him, mouthing odd noises as it ascended to get it down.
Then they all just stared at us again.
“What the icy devil is happening?...” Dhal whispered
I was shaking. Utterly panicked, I had no idea what to tell her.
Suddenly, behind them, there arose such a ferocious, quick fight that my mind struggled to piece it together. There was a line of trolls, carrying the Dwarf-King across the river. Suddenly, and abrupt plucking sound washed over the forested hills behind them. The trolls halted, and a sheet of arrowfire came like rain, whirring into them.
Arrows pinged off the rocky grounds all around us on our side of the river. A couple of the trolls grunted and ran, clutching at arrows.
Cullie’s face was flushed. His heart thudded, I could practically see it as he stretched out hi
s arm, and raised his palm. It looked then as though he was pointing to the trolls with his thumb, or clutching some invisible thing in the air in front of him.
Another round of arrowfire fell, splintering this time, or else they were bent, perfectly still in the middle of the air. Some were frozen higher in the hills now. There were tiny lines of light squiggling across the water. They were like transparent serpents. And their movement sent a current through water that was like wind, but steadier and harder. Then a sizzling noise erupted, and the current ceased. The arrows dropped.
The arrow-fire came next in a downpour. Cullfor was still holding his palm up to the mayhem across the stream, sweating. There came a fearsome clamor of groaning noises on the wind, like metal ripping
When the hail of arrows came, they once again stopped. They were bent frozen, mashed , and splintered. All around the trolls the arrows, were hovering like magical stalks of some white flower, sprouting constantly. The light whirled up around the trolls, not unlike a swarm of lightening flies. And the arrows vibrated on the warm current of light in the air before dropping harmless around the their feet.
Suddenly, loud whisks cracked by our heads, studding the trees with great hollow cracks, or else shaking the ground as they thudded around us. We could see nothing now, ducking.
We went to our bellies and began slithering like lizards, just before an arrow bit the skin between my thumb and forefinger.
Then there was a gruesome thwack in my skull.
I froze.
Stunned, motionless, I felt my head.
By some miracle I was alive. I had only been thumped again by the juvenile troll.
“Thunder and hell, the playful little bastard will be my death!” I roared, then I crouched, very low and still, hoping it would not hit me again.
Then came the noise, one I had only heard in the distance, the rumble coming from everywhere now, and I understood the noise was growling. I could feel it. It was the father. An arrow protruding the side of its leg, its lips curled, it stared at me and bared teeth like yellowed blades of bone. The hair on the back of its head was raised.
It edged in toward me sideways.
I felt the goose bumps erupting over my skin. Shrinking and shifting, I only watched. I had no idea what to do.
“Oh, hell.”
I have said before that man is something more than an animal, that if somewhere in his being he can call upon kindness and gentility when it would seem imprudent, then he might even be something beyond a man—but if I had claws right then, I would have burrowed. No… I would have dug like a damn mole rat.
Instead, I thrashed like a seal toward the river.
Suddenly, a large flash of blackish red leapt over my head, pouncing in front of me. It was the female. She growled as she clasped her strong hand down on the back of my neck. I squalled. I felt each rough, warm finger. She pushed my face down into the rocks, and it felt like my cheeks would snap. Then two more hands latched onto my ankles. I was scooting and wiggling against being dragged. I undulated toward the river.
It was not working.
They were in complete control. As they pulled me up into the air, slinging me atop the female, I gnashed my teeth, screaming. But my head hit a branch, and as they carried me, I felt blood running out of my ear.
My conscious mind fading, I saw Cullfor laughing delightedly as they picked him up. And when they picked up Dhal, protesting the whole affair, naturally, he positively squealed with joy.
Chapter 47
In my delirium, I smelled what I thought was the backside of horse, and I could feel its motion underneath me.
I looked out at an unlikely sight. Before my stunned and bleary eyes were, of all the maddeningly bizarre, improbable things, frosty mountaintops. They were covered with snow just above us, but here they were just sheer cliffs and vast, plunging mountainside. When I looked down, I saw the muscular rump of a troll, which made no sense. I was covered in the smelly hides of deers and mountain goats, swaddled like a babe. I blacked out again, then once more came to. I felt an unyielding agony as I stared dumbly at mountain tops again, fading in and out of my weakened vision as they grew smaller and smaller behind me. I stared back toward two troll-like forms, which was, again, absurd. They seemed to be carrying a child and a woman. We were beyond a row of snowy peaks. The woman was screaming at the boy to stop laughing, that this was not at all great fun, that it was, in fact, no fun at all.
The one carrying me was running so fast that I began writhing in pain, spitting blood.
It was all a terrible dream, a fevered dreamscape that came in flashes, each one more absurd than the next, and I hoped beyond hope that I would wake up from it soon.
Chapter 48
My head swam for a moment in a bath of firelight. With one eye, which opened slowly, I found myself in a small, comfortable bed of hay. I was in a rounded room with low, stone walls. They were rough-hewn from bedrock, or perhaps basalt, and deftly bricked about halfway up by the hands of a skilled mason. There was a solitary window-slit to my left, while a fire burned near my feet in a thin brick inglenook. I could smell the hickory burning, blending with the smell of a blooming meadow.
Beyond the door, random bits of friendly-sounding conversation were floating. It sounded like children.
I sat up on the edge of the bed, instantly aware my head had been lovingly bandaged. I tested my legs. I was dizzy, but able to stand okay. When I looked out of the window-slit, the meadow grasses I had smelled were waving in a gentle breeze.
For a moment, I wondered if I was dead. I say that not to exaggerate the appeal of the place, but as a fact. This was very much like what my mother had sometimes described as the Heavenly Abode and sometimes as the Heavenly Halls.
There was another arrow slit. This one was wider, on the opposite side of the room. Walking across to it, I wrapped himself in a blanket. I breathed a pleasant intake of salty air and recognized that I was close to the ocean. The land fell from the little building in grassy tiers, fading off northerly toward even greener fields, forests, and more of the comfortable-looking farmhouses.
Then the wind picked up, pouring cold air across the room, and I went to warm myself by the small fire. I had no idea where I was. It looked like my father’s description of The Watershed, what some folks call Arway, land of the Halfling,
I coughed, and the cough made a round of laughter from outside the door splash into a deep silence, which I somehow took as playful. The quiet hung for moments. And somehow the quiet struck me as humorous, and I began laughing and coughing, a noise that must have sounded like troll grunts.
Those outside the door shuffled wildly. Grunting, one had retreated a distance, it seemed. He was speaking in an accent of Dellish I had not ever heard, “Ya! What, indeed, is he doing in there?”
Someone began laughing, a friendly cackle that could have come from a saint. Then several other joined in the chuckling. Now some footsteps came in what sounded like chain mail. The steps were quick but halting.
“What news, my lads?”
The voice was a captain, by his rough tenor, and I could tell it was the nature of the voice to command everything around him. But the accent made me laugh, which in turn sent me into a cacophony of hoarse barking and painful guffaws.
“Ya, ya! The big fellow is awakened, Captain. And in a rather good humor, I should think!”
Then I heard the shuffle of people getting out of the way. Another silence was followed by a flurry of quick rustles.
“Friends, you harbor a living dragonslayer,” the voice said.
Dhal…
“Little doubt,” one said, opening the door.
She stomped in quickly, smiling but hard-faced, blocking my view of the people outside my door. Immediately, she was insisting I sit back down. She wore a good dress, sown with skilled hands from green leather and cotton. I tried to kiss her, but she returned it with a mere peck, and in a flash of near-motherly activity, she pushed me down and began washing my head wound
s.
She opened my shirt and sat facing some bloody, cut-up rips in my chest and arms, studying them as much as she cleaned them.
“Very good,” she said. “You’re healing well.”
I tried to ask about Cullfor, but as her hand wisped across my lips, I silenced myself.
“He’s outside… playing.”
Chapter 49
When Dhal finally allowed it, four halflings entered my little room.
I will confess, though to very few, that the sight lifted my spirits almost as much as seeing Dhal. They came popping in, practically skipping as they came. And while it is perhaps an obvious observation to note that they were, well… small, to see an Arwegian, or Watershed Folk, up close, is truly a delightful thing. It is hard to say precisely why. Perhaps it was as simple as their earthy smiles. Already they seemed hospitable beyond what any reasonable body could expect, and all this welcome and comfort had come without them saying so much as one syllable. None of them were bearded, not truly bearded, for they grew what they called a chinbeard, a tuft of hair about the length of man’s hand, which curled from the chin. Naked, ruddy cheeks and frizzy locks added to their boyish air.
“King Fie!” the first of them said. “It is an honor, liege.”
King Fie?... Perhaps I was truly dead after all.
“King! Pah!” I said, laughing not only at the little man calling me a king, but at myself, for using one of Uncle Jickie old expletives. “What’s this nonsense, mister…”
“Alwi, sire! My name is Alwi Albright!”
“Well then, Mister Alwi… uh, what—oh yes, what do you mean with this king business, sir?”
The captain stepped forward. “Forgive us, Lord Fie. “I’m called Eber. Eber Eagleton. And trust that we understand your, um… shall we say… nebulous memory of your coronation.”
