Dazed, Iliff resisted falling asleep himself, though his fogging thoughts bid it. He worked himself from under her and waited for dusk, when his companion would come to relieve him.
* * *
In the days that followed, a wearisome pattern emerged. Iliff would emerge from his sleep each morning to find the woman wailing on the bank. After a morning spent foraging—a skill he was becoming more adept at, at least—they would eat beside the river. All would be well until he brought up the subject of their leaving. And though he tried doing so in different words and tones, some gentle, some firm, and with different looks and gestures, some insisting, some cajoling, the result was always the same.
By the end of the second week, Iliff was exhausted and out of ideas. When he gave over his food to Troll that evening, he announced his decision.
“We’ll watch over her tonight,” he said, “but tomorrow we leave, with or without her. We’re too long from the path.”
Troll raised his brow as if he were going to say something, but then grunted and lowered his head into the food.
* * *
When Iliff opened his eyes the next morning, gray light showed though the dense canopy. His rest had been deep, and the warm weight of sleep lingered over him. He sighed and closed his eyes, listening to the water tumbling over the stones.
The river—the woman!
He shot up.
Troll should have awakened him by now. But his companion was not in the clearing where Iliff had made his bed. He raced to the river, to the place he had left the woman. There were the pieces of her grass basket that she had destroyed in her flailing the day before, but nothing else.
“Troll!” he cried.
He stopped and listened.
“Troll! Troll!”
Far away, a bird picked up his call and mimicked it back. He looked up and down the river. There was nothing to suggest that the woman had drowned herself or that Troll had tried to restrain her.
He wheeled around. The forest that climbed from the river seemed more immense than ever. Fog drifted among the high branches. He went to the forest’s edge and cupped his hands to his mouth to call again. But then his eyes flicked to the swath of grass where he had first stumbled over the woman. Was that movement? Yes, the tops of the grasses were trembling. Soon a snarl of black hair rose into view.
“Troll!” he called in relief.
Iliff rushed along the line of trees toward his companion. Troll appeared above the grass, which rose to the level of his solid chest. He pressed one hand to his eyes and pushed aside the thick blades with the other. He peeked through his fingers and then lumbered in Iliff’s direction.
Iliff waited on the verge of the forest where there was shade.
“The woman,” Iliff called as Troll drew nearer. “What’s become of her?”
Troll ducked under the tree where Iliff stood. He moved his hand to his jutting brow and looked up just long enough to grumble something about the light.
“Well?” Iliff said.
“She’s safe,” Troll mumbled.
“Where is she?”
Troll hitched his trousers and raised his arm to indicate the direction from which he had come. He did not lift his head to look where he was pointing.
“In the grasses? What is she doing there?”
“Sleeping.”
“But she is safe? She is well?”
Troll nodded.
Iliff relaxed. He looked from Troll to the tall grass. His first concern had been that the woman had succeeded in harming herself. But beneath that fear had lurked one darker. When he saw Troll emerge alone, he had remembered Stag’s warning. A part of him became certain that Troll’s vigilance over the sleeping woman had awakened something brutal inside, some ancient, atavistic urge to stalk and ambush and devour.
Troll said she was safe, though, and Iliff believed him. But why was he being so evasive? What had he been doing all night? Iliff stood before his companion, who looked everywhere but at him.
“I need to know what happened last night,” he said.
Troll huffed in what sounded like defiance, but Iliff did not relent. He drew himself up. Troll looked to either side before sighing and slumping to the base of the tree.
“Do you promise not to be angry?” he asked.
Iliff said nothing.
“Humph.” Troll began poking the earth with a fingernail. “When you left I went to the woman. She was sleeping as usual, so I went to the place I sit, not too far away. She woke up and started calling for ‘Norman’. She called and called. I was going to get you, but she sounded so sad. I went to get closer in case she tried to… you know.” With his fingers he made a running and jumping motion. “But she heard me and came over. I didn’t think she could see me in the dark. But she bumped into me and got hold of my hand. And then she started calling me Norman. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t talk because I didn’t want to scare her. She led me to the grasses over there. She asked if I would lay with her and so I did. We just lay there, but…” Troll hesitated.
“What?”
“I don’t know.” He scratched his jaw. “We just lay there, but…” Troll looked at Iliff and then quickly away. “I don’t know. And then I fell asleep. I only just woke when I heard you calling me.”
Iliff looked at Troll, but he was imaging the woman, the fullness and weight of her, the deep pull of her eyes. He remembered Adramina’s warning about those who would lure him from his path.
“Let’s go,” he said suddenly. “We mustn’t dally another moment.”
Troll turned his head to the grasses, then back to Iliff. “But what about… I thought she needed looking after.”
“It is because of the woman that we must go. Come now, there is no time for discussion.”
“I don’t think we should leave. She’ll be all alone.”
“Listen to me,” Iliff said. “Every day I’ve urged her to come with us. I’ve tried every way I know, but she won’t have it. Her misery over this man is absolute. She can think of nothing else. She is imprisoned here.”
“Then maybe we could stay with her”—he peeked at Iliff—”just for a little while longer.”
Iliff shook his head.
“Then maybe I’ll stay with her.”
“There is nothing more we can do for her. In fact, the more distance we put between ourselves and the woman, the better it will be for all concerned. She believes us to be someone we are not.”
Troll hunched his shoulders where he sat.
“Come now!” Iliff pulled at Troll’s elbow. “Enough of this nonsense. We are losing precious time. Our journey is long and we’ve gotten nowhere.”
“Humph!” Troll jerked his arm away. “This is your journey, not mine. I only agreed to escape the mines with you, to come out here. I never said I wanted to go farther. If you want to go to the very high place with the light, that’s your business. If I want to stay here, that’s mine.”
“Is that your wish? To remain here? To hide by day and lay with this woman by night?”
Troll did not answer.
“What will you do when this woman discovers that you’re not her Norman? What will you do if she flees you? Is that what you want? To become as lost and wretched as she is?”
“I want what I want.”
“Yes, and that’s why you need me to look after you.”
Troll thrust out his gray lips. “Says you.”
“Yes, says me!” Heat broke out over Iliff’s face. “I own you, or have you forgotten? I gave over half my treasures for your release, to keep you from laboring in those infernal pits. Whether you like it or not, you are my responsibility now.”
Troll lowered his head.
“We cannot remain in the forest.” Iliff paused to consider what he was about to say. “Stag is concerned about your presence. There have been problems with trolls in the past. I dare say it was why your kind was driven underground. Stag has granted our passage on the condition that we obey the Law of Harmony a
nd pass quietly. You would be testing his tolerance to try to remain here.”
Iliff glanced toward the tall grasses. He was becoming increasingly anxious that the woman would emerge and find them there, that their chance to escape her would be lost. He took a deep breath and knelt before Troll.
“I don’t mean to be angry with you. It’s just that you are the only companion I have, the only one I trust to make this journey with me.” He looked around. “I don’t know this place. It’s as foreign to me as it is to you. I won’t feel safe unless you’re near. I mean that.”
Iliff stepped back. Minutes passed. He tried not to look at the grasses.
At last Troll huffed and pushed himself to his feet.
“Thank you,” Iliff said.
Troll would not look at him. He followed Iliff back to the camp but in slow, slouching steps. When they got there, Iliff opened the sack of treasures and took out the gold plate.
“It has no value for her here,” he said. “But perhaps she’ll see in it something of her own worth. It is beautiful, after all. It may challenge her condition.”
Iliff stole down the river with the plate and set it beside the woman’s ruined basket.
Troll was still there when Iliff returned. He stood behind a tree as Iliff gathered his cloak and bag, and did not step in for the treasures until Iliff had moved from the clearing. Iliff noticed that his companion did not sling the sack over his back this time. And as they started up stream, he could hear it dragging and clattering over the ground behind him.
Chapter 18
The river flowed past them from a steep gully. The forest rose and receded. By midday shelves of stone began to show among the trees. Iliff looked back often to make sure Troll was still following. He was, though at a distance. Iliff could see that he suffered in the light, but that could not be helped. He wanted to put as much distance between them and the heartsick woman as he could.
Iliff walked them through the afternoon. The riverbed widened as they went and became more stone-choked. The waters crashed and frothed. By evening they had entered a boulder field, and Iliff thought it a good place to stop for the night. He found some open ground near the trees and lit a fire.
“I’ve been thinking this day,” Iliff said once they had settled down. Troll was sitting on a boulder almost beyond the firelight, his back to their camp. “There should be some guidelines while we’re in the forest. We are guests here, after all, and I would not doubt we’re being watched. Stag suggested as much.”
Troll had not spoken since they set out that morning and gave no sign now that he was listening.
“Anyway, I’ve come up with three rules,” Iliff said. “First, we are to stay in each other’s sight at all times, day or night. We need to know whether the other is in any need. We can’t go wandering off on a whim.
“Second, there will be no more hunting. For what if we were to capture what seemed to us a small animal but that others considered large? This has bothered me. Besides, hunting is unnecessary now that we know where the foods grow.” Iliff thought he could hear Troll grinding his jaw. He pressed on.
“Third, we will have nothing more to do with people. Since we cannot know their motives, it will be better to avoid them altogether than to risk getting caught up in whatever it is that keeps them here. Do we have an understanding? No wandering, no hunting, no people.”
Troll scratched the back of his neck and shifted on his seat.
“I think I know what you’re thinking,” Iliff said, “but the rules will bind us both. And they are only for so long as we’re in the forest.”
Iliff piled more wood onto the fire, temporarily knocking down the flames. The sudden dimness hid his guilt. He had thought up the rules to restrain Troll and Troll alone. He feared that, without rules, his companion would act on whatever impulse happened to strike in whatever moment, and he could not afford to become entangled in this place or any other. Not after all the time he had lost in the mines.
When the fire crackled and flared again, Iliff was relieved to find his companion still turned away.
* * *
In the weeks that followed, Iliff drove them on. They set out each day at first light and walked until midday when the light became too much for Troll. While Troll rested in the shade of the forest, Iliff foraged nearby. Though his skills as a forager continued to improve, it was also true that the foods of the forest had become more abundant. Fruit fell from crowded boughs. Ripe berries shone moist and bright among tangled thorns, casting an enticing perfume. Shoots and roots flowed with vital juices. Fears of scarcity, of having to return to the mines, receded from Iliff’s thoughts until it was as if they had never been. Following a large meal, the two would set out again. Their day of traveling did not end until nightfall and often beyond.
With the lengthening days, Troll and Iliff’s progress improved. And with food plentiful and only the river to follow, Iliff was able to focus on the object of his quest as he had not done in years. Though the sky still appeared flat and colorless, he was becoming ever more convinced that there was something beyond it, something that watched over them and provided for them. Sometimes he thought he could see a vague form, a diffusion of light in the gray wash, but then he would blink or move his head and the impression would be lost, strain as he might to bring it back.
That the Sun was still a thing beyond his imagination frustrated him. But he held to his understanding that it was only a matter of keeping to his path to arrive there, and only a matter of arriving there to see it. And given their present good fortune, arriving there seemed only a matter of time.
For his part, Troll showed no such ambitions. Though he followed Iliff, and heeded the rules, he held to his brooding silence.
* * *
Upon rounding a bend one afternoon, Iliff was surprised by an orange animal that darted from the rocks ahead. A handful of pups followed. One of them, golden-haired and with a small triangle for a face, lingered to watch their approach, but upon taking closer notice of Troll, started mightily and scampered after its mother. Iliff laughed but Troll only grumbled. He dropped the sack and went down to the river. Iliff looked after the pup and then back to Troll, who was kneeling now and scooping water to his mouth.
“How long are you going to go on like this?” Iliff asked.
“Like what?”
“You don’t speak, you won’t acknowledge anything. You know what I’m talking about. For the last month you’ve dragged yourself along like a man going to his executioner. Why do you stay so unhappy?”
Troll finished drinking and stepped up the bank. He wiped his dripping mouth and shook the water from his hand. Iliff did not expect him to respond so was surprised when he did.
“The mines were a miserable place, and I was miserable there, it’s true. But the things I wanted, the gold things, at least I could hold them. They were the reason I did what I did. This thing we’re going to now, you tell me about it, but I don’t know what it is. You tell me to trust that it’s there, but I can’t see it at all. And I don’t know what I’m s’posed to do when we get there.”
“Are you still worried about the light?”
Troll lifted the sack of treasures.
“Because you’re doing better in it,” he said. “You look better too.” Indeed, Troll’s boils had scabbed over and flaked away, while his ill pallor had deepened to a dusky gray. Even his odor had improved, becoming almost earthy.
“Well, how much more do we have to walk?” Troll asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Are you even sure it’s there?”
“The Sun? It’s gotten us this far, hasn’t it? We’re being provided for, are we not?” Iliff gestured to the sides of the river where fruiting trees colored the forested hills that rolled and showed blue in the distance. “How can you doubt when the signs are everywhere around you?”
Troll raised his head enough to glance about, then dropped his gaze.
“What? What is it you want?”
“I…” Troll’s voice fell to grumbles.
“I can’t know unless you tell me.”
“I just don’t think it’s there. That’s all.”
Iliff hoisted his pack and turned from his companion. Winds that had begun the night before picked up for a moment and nudged against him.
“It is,” he said. “And we’re going to get there.”
Chapter 19
As the weeks passed, the winds became stronger. They burst cold and bare from the lands ahead, chilling the night and forcing Iliff into his cloak again. At the same time, the way along the river became steep and grassless, endless eruptions of stone. Troll and Iliff spent entire days climbing while the waters beside them tumbled down barren, cascading shelves.
The forest stood farther away, its leaves fading, its flowers long since spoiled and spilled, its colors and its creatures pushed off by the winds. Food grew scarce. The berries disappeared first, then the fruits, followed soon by the leaves and shoots. At last all that remained were roots, and these were small and mean, difficult to chew. When Iliff foraged the steep slopes, he could no longer fill his cloak.
“We mustn’t waver,” he would say to Troll. “We must be more steadfast than ever.”
But each dawn showed more and more pale, more and more bleak. Iliff looked often to the sky. He needed to see something, but there was only the same gray expanse that revealed nothing of itself or whatever lay beyond. There were not even vague shapes anymore.
As the winds picked up and persisted into daylight, as the way became steeper still, Iliff and Troll’s progress diminished. They made their way with heads bowed, drawn bodies pressed low, every step a labor. Iliff had never felt wearier. His focus faded from the lands around them and even further from his destination, falling instead on the next stone in front of him, where all his hope now lay.
Escape (The Prisoner and the Sun #1) Page 11
