Antediluvian

by Wil McCarthy

  “Ha! Back!”

  “The trolls!”

  “Oh!”

  “The Knights!”

  “They’ve taken my daughter!”

  Argur panted: “They’ve taken my daughter, too. And Timlin’s. And Ronk’s niece. Which way did they go?”

  And it was a question that didn’t need much of an answer, because the women had been standing in a grain meadow, and the trail the trolls had left across it, and through the woods beyond, might as well have been made by a boolis.

  “How many of them?” Tom asked.

  “Ten!” shouted one of the women.

  And just as though that meant something to them, the men all nodded and tensed to launch themselves running again.

  But Nortlan was shouting, “Stop! Stop! Argur, you’ve got to stop.”

  Impatient and angry, Argur shouted back: “You stop, boy. Stay here with the women. I’m going after my daughter!”

  “Stop!” Nortlan said again, in a rudely commanding voice. “Argur, there are ten of them, and ten of us. But they’re bigger, and stronger.”

  “No one is stronger!” Gower shouted indignantly.

  But Argur stopped, if only for a moment, to listen.

  “We’ve got shortspears and leverthrows,” Nort panted. “You want to shoot into a mob that contains three human girls? We’re dressed for heezh, not bork. Argur, you’ve got to get back to the castle. Get real weapons, get your armor, get your shield. Only then are you stronger. Humans are faster than trolls, you can get your stuff and still catch them.”

  “Trolls never get tired,” Ronk said. “They just keep running.”

  “They could be raping Mog and Dele right now,” one of the women said.

  To which Nortlan replied, “They can’t be running and raping. They can’t. If they stop, we’ll catch them. If they don’t stop, then it means the girls are still safe. Either way, we’ve got to be equipped.”

  “We?” Jek sneered. “You’re not a Knight of Ell, little rabbit.”

  “I mean ‘we’ in the sense of our people’s—”

  “He comes with us,” Argur panted. “Nort’s a wise rabbit. He uses his heart. He comes with us.”

  “I should ask my—”

  “You come with us,” Argur said flatly. “Your useless father can copulate with mud before I let him risk my daughter’s…” Life? Virtue? Innocence? “…safety. I’ll find you a spear and a shield. You’re coming.”

  Argur watched the thoughts moving behind Nortlan’s eyes. He’d already fought a boolis today, and lived to tell about it. Would he now fight trolls as well? For pride and honor, or a chance at Dele’s hand in marriage, or simply because it was the right thing to do? Argur could not, in fact, compel him. That was the law: nobody in Nog La could compel anyone to do anything. He could only ask.

  But what could Nortlan say? Just like that, right before Argur’s eyes, Nortlan shed his boyhood, became a man, nodded to show he would join the Knights of Ell, and vomited into the grass.

  * * *

  And so they ran to the castle, and gathered up weapons and armor as carefully as haste permitted. A long armored shirt was thrust down over Nortlan’s upraised arms, and a shield was thrust into his hands, along with a spear, and a pair of decent boots for his feet. All of it was careworn and too large for him, and Argur could scarcely drape a hunting bag over the boy’s shoulders or cinch a belt around his waist without it all bunching up in funny ways. So Dala and Birgny solemnly stuffed linen rags into the toes of the boots, and when that wasn’t enough, they swaddled more rags around his feet, and more still around his shoulders, like the top third of a heavy shirt.

  Nismu, the Wizard of Sunrise Castle, came by to offer a hurried blessing with tossed herbs and a smoldering willow wand. “Strength for your journey. Courage for your journey. Wisdom for your journey. Keen sight for your journey.” And then it was done. Nortlan was as much a man as they could make him on short notice.

  “There. And now what?” Argur demanded of him. “Do you have any other bright advice?”

  “Bring camping gear,” Nort said at once, as though he’d been thinking about this for a while now.

  “Camping?” Jek scoffed.

  “In case we don’t catch them,” Tom said, grasping Nort’s meaning. “If they’re faster than we think, or they’ve had too much head start. Trolls don’t fear the night.”

  And that made sense to Argur; trolls were the fearful darkness. Rarely all that active by day, they did most of their prowling around dawn and dusk. And sometimes around midnight if the moon was full, yes, because few things in this world dared attack them. They feared only human beings, who feared them right back. Masters of the world only so long as the sun was shining, humans retreated behind their castle walls, their village ditches and watchfires, when darkness slipped across the land. By night the monsters ruled, and really, if you thought about it, who ruled the monsters? The trolls.

  “And we’ll need to notify Sunset Castle,” Nort added.

  “Yes,” Tom agreed. “They’ll need to take responsibility for the boolis. The trolls are our problem. That’s fair.”

  Argur nodded. “Yes. Unthinkably bad, but fair.” To the other knights, Argur said, “Do it. Quickly! Max, will you go? And take a couple of strong hunters with you?”

  And just like that, Nort had become one of Argur’s trusted advisors.

  * * *

  Harv struggled to think for a moment here, because the knights were dressed in armor made of hardwood plates and knotted ropes, like something a cheap-ass theater company might try to pass off with a coat of silver paint. But it was real armor! The plates were less than a centimeter thick, but they ran two layers deep, interlocking so that no vulnerable areas were actually exposed, from mid-thigh to mid-throat. The shields were leather over wicker, nearly as tough as wood and yet lighter than a box of donuts. These defenses were skimpy by historical standards, but might very well deflect a spear, or soften the blow of a club or an animal horn. And in any case, the armor seemed to have a psychological value out of proportion with its actual stopping power. This was something most men didn’t own and didn’t have the time or the skills to make, or the knowledge to overcome. Something perhaps not widely found outside of Nog La. Something fierce.

  * * *

  Dala was shoving food into everyone’s hunting bags: dried orr-ox meat and yesterday’s roasted turnips, along with some precious ogabred—things they could eat without cooking, or even stopping. Birgny checking everyone’s water skins, and trading the half-empty ones for full ones.

  “Bring her back,” Dala said to Argur. “We’ll be fine here, just bring her back.”

  “Bring all of them back,” Birgny echoed.

  Argur slapped his armored chest and roared. “Oh! Oh, we’ll bring them back. These trolls don’t know who they’re messing with. They’ve forgotten who they’re messing with. We’ll teach them a lesson! This time, this time, this time we’ll teach them so they don’t forget!”

  * * *

  A cry went up among the Knights of Ell, and with that, a series of events was set in motion that, Harv somehow knew, would alter human destiny forever.

  2.4

  The trail was not difficult to follow; unless trolls were hunting and needed to move quietly, they had a tendency to club and trample their way right through the sort of undergrowth a human being might hold aside or step around. They also seemed to have followed the same track out of the valley that they’d made on their way in, and so it was doubly smashed and trodden, and yet also difficult to read.

  “How many are there?” Nortlan asked, over and over again.

  The easy answer was “ten,” which was how many Birgny had claimed to have seen. But what Nortlan was really asking was, “Do they outnumber us?” And that was difficult to say. Where a human or an animal might leave clear tracks of one kind or another, the sheer destruction made it difficult to tell a footprint from a boot print from a club mark, or to tell any of it from the dr
agging feet of an unwilling human girl.

  One thing was clear, though: as they approached the mouth of Ketlan Pass, the route of the trolls merged with that of the boolis, and where the two followed together, there were drop drop drops of blood everywhere. This left no doubt that the trolls had been the ones who drove the boolis down here and turned it loose. However, it left a lot of doubt as to how they’d controlled the monster up to this point. Ropes? Nets? A circle of spears all around it? This morning, Argur had felt that capturing a live orr-ox was such a dangerous project that only the Knights of Ell could be trusted to attempt it. This did not bode well for what they were up against now.

  “Perhaps they’re tougher than we are,” Jek offered helpfully.

  “Tougher than you, maybe,” Tom jabbed back.

  “Maybe they fed it,” Nortlan suggested. “Boolises like carrots, I hear.”

  “Stop it,” Argur told all of them. “We need your ears, not your voices.”

  When they quieted, the woods got really quiet—no birdsong except a single voice somewhere nearby, singing “Wow! Wow!” in the weirdly insistent voice of a smorkbird. The sound followed them as they traveled.

  Not quite running, they maintained a fast walking speed that soon carried them to the stream running down out of the pass. The water eventually found its way down to Round Lake, but here it ran parallel to the edge of the valley, and formed its traditional border. The path of the trolls had now merged with a broader footpath and game trail leading down out of the pass, which crossed the stream at a bridge.

  * * *

  Harv couldn’t believe his eyes. Or rather, he couldn’t believe Argur’s eyes, because this little wooden footbridge looked like something that might be found at a summer camp in upstate New York. The stream’s ditch was perhaps four meters wide and two meters deep, and while the banks led down to a stony ford where the water was less than ten centimeters deep, someone had placed eight broad logs across it from highest point to highest point. These were lashed together with both rope and rawhide, and supported in the middle with a V-shaped truss fashioned from four logs on each side. The center of the V was anchored in the stream bed and surrounded by large stones that would keep it from sliding or buckling, and it was crazy to think something like this could have existed deep within the Ice Age. These “carpenters” of Sunrise Castle were clearly a lot smarter than Harv had given them credit for; the castle gate was a trifle compared to this.

  The bridge also said something important about the nature of this society. Harv had imagined the whole valley of Nog La as a kind of fortress, walled off against outsiders, but the bridge said otherwise. It implied not only regular traffic between this valley and other valleys around it, but welcome traffic. Again, this failed so completely to line up with Harv’s ideas that his mind basically stopped right there. Cave people didn’t need—

  * * *

  “No!” cried a shrill voice from underneath the bridge.

  “What? Who goes there?” Argur demanded. “Come out here. Now! Come out here!”

  “Stop! Pease!” the voice cried out again.

  A figure emerged into the sunlight. Blinking, sneezing, cringing, more afraid of the sun than of Argur and his men. It was dressed all in brown, worn-out mammoth fur—fur boots, fur robe, fur bands around its arms. A necklace of what looked like chicken bones. Its own frizzy hair was orange—the color of a sunset or a campfire—as was its long, unkempt beard. Both hair and beard were composed of individual strands that seemed to move independently, like little blades of grass, rather than spiraling together like human hair. Its oversized ears were slightly pointed at the top, and its oversized nose was bulbous at the bottom, but most shockingly, its skin was such a pale pink that it was almost white—the color of mushrooms or maggots—and its eyes were like tiny lakes, as blue as the sky. As it pulled its lips back in a snarl of fear, Argur could see its teeth were as large and white as knucklebones. It was not quite as tall as a human, but its arms were as thick as Argur’s legs, and its legs were as thick as the logs from which the bridge was fashioned. Its fingers were each nearly as wide as a baby’s wrist. A dead rat dropped from the thing’s grasp, landing wetly in the stream.

  “Troll!” Nortlan shouted. Unnecessarily, for he was the only one here who’d never seen one.

  The air—filled with birdsong just moments before—went silent.

  “Load darts!” Argur said, more helpfully. In a blur, he and the other knights whipped out their leverthrows and balanced darts onto them. Halfway between the length of a shortspear and a knife, these could be sheathed in a slab of softwood and safely carried in bundles of five. They lacked the weight and impact of a spear, but you launched one hard enough it could still inflict a deadly wound.

  “No!” the troll screamed, cringing and cowering. Argur realized it wasn’t carrying any weapons, although that did not by any means make it safe to approach. A single punch from a troll could break an arm or a cheek or a chest. With a heavy stick grabbed randomly off the forest floor, they’d been known to human knock heads and limbs clean off. With a fire-hardened spear or club they could—

  “No flying spear! Me Lug! Lug!”

  “I should poke you full of holes,” Argur snapped at the creature. “Where are the girls?”

  “No!” the troll cried. “No girl here. Lug no fight girl! Lug no fight man!”

  Like all trolls, it had a shrieking voice all out of proportion with its frame—high-pitched and sharp as a sewing bone stitching through gravel. Speaking seemed almost to cause them pain, and they could only squeeze out a word or three at a time, before they had to gasp for breath. Like each word cost them as much breath as an entire sentence. Not that they could speak in sentences anyway.

  “You’re a filthy creature,” Jek said to the troll. Again, unnecessarily.

  “Where are the girls?” Argur repeated.

  “No girls! No Lug fight! Other okor fight!”

  That was the word the trolls used to describe themselves: okor or okob or something like that. Argur’s grandfather had told him that the trolls once spoke a language of their own—perhaps more suited to their serpent lips and tree-trunk throats—but that they had gradually replaced it with the language of humans. Probably because of encounters like this one, where saving their miserable hides depended on their ability to communicate. And it had always seemed to Argur that their understanding was not as limited as their speech.

  “Other trolls took them? Not you?” Argur demanded.

  “Not Lug! Lug stay here! Noga valley! Noga warm!”

  “Where did they go, these other trolls?” Tom wanted to know.

  It was another pointless question, because the path led only one way: up into the pass, into the canyon and the mountain valleys beyond it. Human beings lived in those valleys, but so did monsters and, somewhere up in the mountains, the trolls themselves. They were the last trolls in the area, as far as Argur knew; the low countries had steadily driven them back toward the sunrise and up toward the sky.

  “We can’t safely go on and leave it here,” Jek observed.

  “Are you saying it should come with us?” Nortlan asked, disbelievingly.

  “No,” Tom corrected. “He’s saying we should kill it.”

  The troll, Lug, reacted strongly to that. “No! No! No kill Lug! Lug friend! Lug guard bridge!”

  “From what?” Argur asked it. “Ten trolls and a boolis, coming and going as they please?”

  “No kill!” the troll shrieked, holding its hand up in front of its face. Argur found it strange, to see such a powerful-looking creature reduced to such begging. “Pease! Pease! Sun burns. Lug hide. Pease. No kill.”

  And this truly did give Argur pause, because the trolls’ hatred of direct sunlight was well known. And yet, this “Lug” was so afraid of Argur and his men that he’d willingly stepped out into the light, rather than risk being killed in the shadows. And these other trolls had nabbed human girls in mid-morning, and fled into full daylight, their skin
probably reddening and blistering all the while. What had driven them to do it? Clearly because that was when little girls were outside and vulnerable, yes, but why travel all the way down here to nab them in the first place?

  Argur had been raised on stories of heroism—his ancestors bravely killing monsters and driving away bands of armed, angry trolls. But Lug seemed neither armed nor angry nor part of any band, and Argur doubted this was any sort of deception. Trolls possessed a certain cunning—like humans, they hunted in packs and could drive an animal from safety to certain doom. But they fought their prey by throwing heavy rocks and stabbing it close-up, because slings and leverthrows and even a decently weighted throwing spear were beyond their feeble minds and fat fingers. They weren’t liars or tricksters—just brutes.

  Or, in this case, terrified cringing cowards? Argur was the one who was angry. Argur was furious over the safety of his girl. But was Lug responsible for any of that? There’d been a troll living in this end of Nog La for years, avoiding contact, never harming anyone. Was it Lug? Would it be…murder?…to kill the thing here and now?

  “Don’t hurt it,” Argur told his men.

  Lug brightened at that. “Oh! Thank! Oh! Thank! Lug no fight! Thank! Thank!”

  But now all the men were looking at Argur strangely. Even Nortlan.

  “Okay. What, then?” Tom wanted to know.

  “We leave it here,” Argur said. And then, when nobody reacted, he said, “I’ve seen this one before. It’s not hurting anyone. Are you, Lug? Are you hurting anyone?”

  “No hurt!” Lug agreed, with simpering enthusiasm.

  “Wow,” Jek said. “Reduced to this, are we?”

  And that made Argur angrier. So angry that he lowered his leverthrow, lest he accidentally poke a hole through Jek in an unthinking moment. “Listen,” he said tightly, “we have one fight, and it’s to bring back our girls. We’re not doing anything else. We’re not doing anything else. If you want to slaughter animals, you can stay here with the hunters. The Knights of Ell are going that way.” He pointed uphill.