"I don't have a weapon."
"Strip."
"What?"
"Take those filthy clothes off. I'll burn them. I'll bring you a basin to wash in.” (And I'll find out if he has a weapon.)
He hasn't the energy to undress or wash. I hate to touch him but I do it. I'm used to it. Mother was a mess as she was dying. (At the end I sprinkled pine needles all over but it didn't help much.) I thought that was the last of that sort of thing I'd ever have to do. I thought I was free. But, all right, one more thing. I wash him and dress him in my brother's old clothes, and ... what then? If I kill him, the town will be grateful.
At least his body is entirely different from Mother's, thin and strong and hairy. It's a nice change. If he wasn't so smelly I'd enjoy it. Well, I do enjoy it.
He's half asleep through it all.
I burn his clothes in our little stove. After I've washed him, I feed him jerky broth with an egg in it, though I keep thinking: Why waste my egg on him? He falls asleep right after he's finished the broth. Slides down the wall flat out again, in what seems more a faint than a sleep.
I decide to shave him and cut his hair. He won't notice. If he'd been more conscious I'd have asked him if he wanted a mustache or a little goatee but I'm glad he isn't. I have fun with different haircuts, different sideburns, smaller and smaller mustaches until there's none. Hair, too. I take off more than I meant to, except what does it matter, he's a dead man.
Not a very handsome man whatever way I fixed his hair and beard, though along the way there were some nicer stages—better than what I ended up with. I finish by shaving him. Also not a good job. I make nicks. Where I shaved his beard, his skin is pale. His forehead, where his hat was, is pale too. There's only a sun-browned strip across his face just below his eyes. I like the maleness of him no matter that he's ugly. I don't mind his broken tooth. We're all in the same boat as to teeth.
I fall asleep at the kitchen table, right in the middle of thinking up ways to kill him. Also thinking about how we've all changed—how, in the olden days, I'd not ever have been thinking things at all like that.
* * * *
In the morning he seems some better—well enough for me to help him stagger, first to the outhouse, and then into my brother's room. He keeps feeling his face and hair. I stop at the hall mirror and let him take a look. He's shocked. He has a kind of wet cat/plucked chicken look.
I say, “Sorry.” I am sorry ... sorry for anybody who gets their hair cut by me. But he should be glad I haven't slit his throat.
He stares at himself, but then says, “Thank you.” And so sincerely that I realize I've made him the best disguise there is. He said, “Hide me,” and I did. Nobody will take him for one of those wild men now.
I prop him up on the pillows of my brother's bed and bring him milk and tea. He looks so much better I wonder.... If he's not going to die on his own, I'll have to think what to do with him.
"What's your name?"
He doesn't answer. He could say anything. I'd have believed him and I'd have had something to call him by.
"Tell me a name. I don't care what."
He thinks, then says, “Jal."
"Make it Joe."
I don't trust him. But if he has any sense at all he knows I'm the only one can keep him safe. Though nobody has much sense anymore.
"Everybody got tired of the war a long time ago.” I bang my cup down so hard that my tea spills. “Haven't you noticed?"
"I swore to fight to the death."
"I'll bet you don't even know which side is which anymore. If you ever did."
"You're the ones heated up the planet. It wasn't us. It was you and your greed."
I haven't been so aggravated since my brother was around. “It heated up mostly by itself. It's done that before, you know. Besides, all that's over. Our part in it anyway. Killing crazies isn't going help. You're crazy!” Not the best thing to say to a crazy, but I go on anyway. “All you hermits are crazy. You're nothing but trouble."
He's taking it all in.... Maybe he is. Maybe he just doesn't have the energy to argue.
"I'm going out to get us a rabbit. If you want to keep on making trouble, don't be here when I come back."
I leave. He'll be all alone with my butcher knife and pepper. And I suppose his crossbow isn't far off. I might as well give him a chance to show what he is.
* * * *
I make the rounds of my traps. They're lower down. I've set them around the town. It's a ghost town. I'm the only one goes down there now and then ... usually only on a cool day. Which hardly ever happens. Today it must be well over 110. Now our whole valley in winter is as if Death Valley in summer.
What I trap down there are rats. We cook those up and call them rabbit, though nobody cares anymore what we call them.
I find two big black ones, big as cats. We like those better than the small brown kind, lots more meat on them. (Seems as if the rats are getting bigger all the time.) My traps broke their necks. I don't have to worry about killing them. I tie their tails to my belt, then wander the town in hopes of finding something not already scavenged. I find a quarter. I take it though it's worthless. Maybe a Paiute might turn it into jewelry. On purpose I don't climb back up to my house until late afternoon and until I drink all the water I brought.
Before I go in I check around my shed and house for a crossbow and darts, and then beyond, under the bushes, but I don't find them.
* * * *
He's still there. Asleep. And no weapons that I can see, but I check the kitchen knives. The largest one, big as a machete, is gone. And he might be pretending to be sicker than he is.
Enemy or not, I do like a man in the house. I watch him sleep. He has such long eyelashes. I like the hair on his knuckles. Just looking at his hands makes me think how there's so few men around. Actually only four. His forearms.... Ours don't ever look like that no matter how much we saw and hammer. Even my brother's never looked like that. I like that he already needs a shave again. I even like his bushy eyebrows.
But I have to go clean rats.
When I start rattling around the kitchen section of our main room, he gets up and staggers to the table. Stops at the hall mirror again on the way and studies himself for a long time. As if he forgot what he looked like under all that hair. He sits, then, and watches me make two-rat stew with wild onions and turnips. I thicken it with acorn flour I traded for with the Paiute.
It takes a while for the stew to finish up. I make squaw tea and sit across from him. Being so close and looking into his eyes upsets me. I have to get up and turn my back. I pretend the stew needs stirring. To hide my feelings I say, “Where's your crossbow? And where's my knife? I won't let you have my stew until you tell me.” I sound more angry than I meant to.
"Under the bed in the big room. Both of them."
I go check and there they are, and several darts. I bring the bow back to the table. It's a beautiful piece of work. Old scraps of metal and an old screw, salvaged from something, now shiny and oiled. The wood of the bow, carved as if a work of art. All kept up with care. I'll bring it to the town meeting to show I've found the killer and dealt with him. But have I? And they may want a body.
"I'll not shoot anybody. Not now."
"Yeah. But you're still sworn."
"I can fight someplace else."
"Oh yeah."
After we eat I put what's left over into an old bear-proof can, take it to the irrigation ditch, and sink it in wet mud to keep it cool.
I don't know if I should go to bed without barricading my door some way. I wish I still had our dog but Mother and I ate him long ago. He'd be dead by now anyway. It would be nice to have him, though. I'd feel a lot safer. He was a good dog but getting old. We thought we'd better eat him ourselves before somebody else got to him. That was before we were eating rats.
Tired as I am, it takes a while for me to get to sleep. I keep telling myself, if he's going to sneak into my room, I might as well find out about it. But I
put the chair against the door in a way that it'll fall. At least I'll hear if he comes in.
* * * *
Mainly I can't sleep because, in spite of my better judgment, I'm thinking of keeping the man. Trying to. I like the idea of having him around even though it's scary. I make plans.
It's logical that somebody coming in to our new higher village would come to my house first. Perhaps an outsider with news from the North. And it's logical that I'd take him to a town meeting to tell the news.
What news, though? In the morning (the chair hasn't fallen), we make some up. Carson City is as empty and rat-infested as our town. (It's a good bet it really is.) I remember an airplane (I think it was called the gossamer condor) that flew by the propeller being pumped by a bicycle and doesn't need gas. It can't go far or we'd have seen it down here. Joe can say he's seen it.
He says, “How about an epidemic of a new disease passed on by fleas? It hasn't reached here yet.” He says, “How about, way up in Reno, they found a cache of ammunition so they can clean up their old guns and use them again?"
I give him news about Clement to tell people. I'll say that's another reason Joe came to me first—to give me news of my brother. (I think I made up that news because I know my brother's dead. Otherwise I'd not have mentioned anything about him. I'd keep on thinking he's out in our mountains as one of the crazies, but I don't think I ever really believed that. I just hoped.)
Once he takes my hand and squeezes it—says how grateful he is. I have to get up again, turn my back. I wash our few dishes, slowly. I'm so flustered I hardly know what his hand felt like. Strong and warm. I know that.
* * * *
Lots of good things happen in those town meetings. We give each other our news. We have all kinds of helping committees. In some ways we take care of each other more than we did before the war. People used to bring in their deer and wild sheep and share the meat around, except there's less and less wild game and more and more mountain lions. They're eating all the game and we're not good at killing lions. I'll bet Joe would be, with his crossbow.
So I bring him to the meeting. Introduce him. They crowd around and ask questions about all their favorite spots, or places where they used to have relatives. He's good at making stuff up. Makes me wonder, was he once an officer? Or did he act?
I admire him more and more, and I can see all the women do, too. He could have any one of us. I'm worried he'll get away from me and I'm the only one knows who he really is. Whoever gets him in the end will have to be careful.
He's looking pretty good, too, horrible haircut and all. My brother's blue farmer shirt sets off his brown skin. It's too large for him, but that's the usual.
The women have been out at the bird nets and had made a big batch of little-bird soup. I was glad they'd made that instead of the other.
* * * *
There's a Paiute woman who comes to our meetings and reports back to the reservation. She's beautiful—more than beautiful, strange and striking. I should have known. At his first view of her you can see ... both of them stare and then, quickly, stop looking at each other.
Later he sits drinking tea with several women including the Paiute. They all crowd around but I saw him push in so that he was next to her. The tables are small but now nine chairs are wedged in close around the one where he sits. I can't see what's going on, but I do see her shoulder is touching his. And their faces are so close I don't see how they can see anything of each other.
I sneak away and run home. I wish I'd saved his smelly, falling-apart clothes. I wish I'd saved the dirty, tangled hair I cut off, but I burned that, too. I do find the old hat. That helps them to believe me. I bring the crossbow. It also helps that he tries to get away.
* * * *
They hung Joe up in the depository. I told them not to tell me anything about it. I'd rather not know when we get around to using him.
Abandon the Ruins by Charles Coleman Finlay
We first met Maggot, the young man raised as a troll, in “A Democracy of Trolls” back in our Oct/Nov. 2002 issue. Maggot went on to appear in the novel The Prodigal Troll, which chronicles his origin and some of his adventures in the world of men. This new adventure finds him on his own again—
That winter Maggot forged a new trail east out of the mountains, down into a wilderness occupied by neither men nor trolls.
Great-tusked woolly mammoths wandered among herds of buffalo and flat-horned elk. They were stalked by packs of broad-necked, trap-jawed dyrewolves and solitary dagger-toothed lions. Maggot hunted with spear and arrow, taking deer when he could, caching for later use what he could not eat. In the coldest month, when every stream and pond was frozen, and even the air smelled like brittle ice, a panther began to shadow Maggot, stealing from his caches.
Gathering up dry bones and vines, Maggot baited a snare near a fresh kill. He waited two nights and part of a third day, while snowfall covered his marks, before the panther came. As it stepped into the noose, Maggot yanked it tight. The panther jumped as the vine closed on its leg, and then took off running from the clatter of bones tied to the other end.
Maggot stood, stiff from waiting, his laughter rolling through the snow-laden boughs of the trees. “Did you see that?” he asked aloud, turning, eyes aglitter. “Did you see that?"
But there was no one there to see it. As soon as the echo of his voice disappeared in the cold air, he could not even say for sure which language he'd spoken in, that of troll or man. His grin faded. He stood there a moment, staring at the remains of his careful prank—the scar in the snow where the hidden vine snapped up, the tracks of the fleeing panther.
Orphaned as an infant, Maggot had been raised by a troll mother as her own. By the time he became a young man, he was still small and ugly for a troll—not even six-and-a-half feet tall, with thick black hair and pale skin. He'd descended to the lower valleys where humans lived, in search of friends and a mate. What he'd found was war and a woman who wouldn't break the customs of her people to have him.
He turned away from the tripped snare, and left behind the silence of the trees and the trail of the panther.
As he ran through the snow, cold to the bone, he said to himself, in a language of men, “Stupid people. I'm through with them.” Then added, in the tongue of trolls, “Stupid trolls. I'm through with them too."
Swift rivers rolled down the eastern slopes of the mountains, forming serpentine paths through rugged highlands. Maggot followed one after another until he came to crashing falls: one plummeted so fast, through such a narrow gorge, it created rushing wind; another several days farther south poured over seven wide drops, ten feet tall apiece, arranged like the steps he'd seen in the buildings of the city of his friend, Bran; a third fell two hundred feet, sending up a mist that captured arcs of color from the sun. Beyond the falls he always encountered signs of men, marks carved in trees and distant wisps of smoke rising into the sky.
Each time he saw those signs, he turned back, until it was spring, when gray skies, gale winds, and cold, steady rains made it impossible for many days in a row to find any game, much less kill it. He took shelter under a dark wing of rock stretched over a ravine filled with churning water. When deer came, they surprised him by coming from the wrong direction—headed downstream—and bounded away before he could string his bow.
Bow in one hand and several arrows in the other, he leapt after them. He splashed knee-deep through swirling icy water, careful not to lose his footing, and gave chase up the far bank.
One lagged a little behind the others. The clouds cracked open, just enough for Maggot to see its flank flash crimson in the light. He chose that one for his target, without pausing to wonder how it had been wounded.
Knowing the curve and cut of the land, he angled through the trees, over a small hill, and came to the edge of a meadow, nocking an arrow as he went down on one knee. He expected to see the deer crossing the grass, a clear target.
But there were no deer—across the meadow a group of
bearded men in buckskin and bright cloth were also hunting. Though they did not wear the braids of knights of the empire, at least one carried a sword on the belt at his waist. They saw Maggot in the same moment he saw them. Arrows leapt from their bows at him.
Releasing his own arrow at the nearest man, Maggot tumbled out of the way and rolled to his feet. The same undergrowth that denied him a clear shot at the deer failed to hide his escape. He wove a twisting path through the hillsides, but wherever he went, his pursuers found him. The rain left too many easy marks, in the mud and leaves, for seasoned trackers to follow. The four men separated into pairs, attempting to herd him this way or that like he was some panicked doe driven by a pack of wolves. They were fools, although he knew that if he paused to mock them they would catch him.
He noticed a pain on the back of his left thigh as he ran—an arrow had torn away a chunk of flesh and his lower leg was slick with blood. It must have happened during the first volley they shot at him, although he hadn't felt it at the time. Just like the wounded deer he'd been trying to shoot.
Having traded position with the deer, Maggot led the hunters on a chase through the dusk, across one morass and another, until he came to a steep bluff beside a stream. He pulled himself hand over hand up one of the vines that dangled from the trees up top. The pursuers took a few wild shots at him when he peered from his new perch. As the sky turned from purple to blue-black, they paused for a brief conference with one another, then relinquished their pursuit and turned back. Finally.
Maggot was tired and irritated. He needed food, and arrows to replace those he had lost. The men who had chased him were the likeliest source of both. So he too reversed his direction, and clambered back down the ridge. He cautiously took up their trail and followed them toward their camp.
He favored his injured left leg, and fell behind before he knew their destination. But Maggot, who had decided to leave stupid men behind, was now determined to find them again.
* * * *
2.
In the nocturnal uplands in springtime, strange paths lead to dead-ends in drowned ground or deep thickets of impassable undergrowth. Not even Maggot, who had lived his childhood in darkness with the trolls, could find a clear trail through the marshy hollows along the waterways between the hills.
FSF, October-November 2006 Page 11
