Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (20 page)

Chapter 43

A more desolate existence than a life in the Fell-Riding would be difficult to imagine.  Trapped in these miserable southern wilds, hundreds of miles from a friendly face, the only other voices we heard that morning were the wild, distant orgies of the savage goblins, or grunts of wood trolls in the distance. 

I had been on quite an adventure, but I was
still easily filled with profound pity for myself at times.  As we traveled, the peach line of dawn only just now radiant and soft ahead us, I wondered at the situation in which I had somehow gotten myself. Just weeks ago, I was drinking in my favorite tavern, waiting for my friend.  I had everything in life and yet nothing to lose.  And now, here I was, with the two people most dear to me in the world, trying to outrun the Dwarf-King of Yrkland himself.

Many and s
trange are the turns a life can take.

I shook my head, at nothing.

We trekked an eastbound path to who-knows-where, where we veered northeasterly.  The only sound was the thin, crystalline patina of spring snow, crisp under out boots.  At noon, we went carefully down a grassy stretch, and at the bottom of a long hill, I found we were approaching a placid sheet of water.  It was clean, and the water was exploding with last rays of the morning’s sun, splitting with each wave to send a flume of sparkles ripping across it.  And there was something else here.  As we walked toward the water, the feeling grew.  We approached a thin path at its edge.

There was something here.

I looked at the water, at the cool wet mud and green stones of the shore, and then up.  I did not care for the look of the hill that rose to our right, for it was steep and long, and further down, it formed a mile or so of cliffs.  All of which seemed like a perfect spot for an ambush from above.

Abruptly
, Dhal left our side and approached the water.  She bent on both knees and quickly cupped up some water and lapped a delicate drink before sauntering back, quickly. 

Did she sense something too?

We looked another moment.  Her eyes moved back and forth across the water.  She let the sun play on her face, making her all the more beautiful, but the feeling would not go away.  As we got moving, she stayed unusually close to my side.

Toward the middle of the
small lake, we heard something.  We all turned and watched a school of fish scatter and jump.

Dhal stopped. 

She shielded her eyes from the sun and stared.  Then a sharp roil and fizz erupted from the water.  Black humps of thick rubbery skin rose, and they turned.  They were gliding toward us.  For a second, I confess, there was just shock, and then before I realized it, I was running, struggling to keep up with Cullfor and Dhal.

I
heard a wet slapping noise.  It grew louder behind him.  Then there were more, a great watery herd splashing alongside me.  I ran, breathy and tense, then Dhal fell.  I went sideways jumping over her, and when I landed, I found myself between her and an oncoming horror.

I
was staring at something mustachioed, almost limbless. Thirteen feet long, the beast could have been the mating of a dragon and a whale.

“You t
wo, run!” I squalled.

I
fell, then grunted and rolled, scampering to my feet, but I was never upright before the beast began honking playfully, like some perversion of a goose.  The eyes glowed dusky ginger against the sun.

And
as it waddled back toward the lake, I laughed.

Other men, who have
sunk more fully to savagery, might have forsaken the ways of their youth and been so angry at the beast that they cut a fatty slit across its throat and watched its chubby hide go gurgling back into the water for having scared them. Who can say that I, giving more time in the wilds, might not have departed from the path of good humor?

All I can say is that, on land, the animal was quite humorous indeed.  And though Cullie and Dhal stared at me as though I had lost my mind completely, I could not stop laughing.

“I’m glad you find our terror so awfully damned comical.”

“Humor, my dears,
may keep a fellow upright in slippery places,” I gasped, still laughing.

“Quoting the Cutters now, I see,” she said, the faintest hint of a smile beginning to form in her eyes, despite her mouth being pressed shut

“Indeed, I could wish a young one no better talisman against the perils of one’s own mind than time spent with—” My appreciation for Halvgar and Jickie, no less than pure love, halted me.

But Cullie’s eyes told me he was eager to hear something of his father.

“A man could not spend his time better than with your father, lad.  He was truly a fine and merry fellow…. He was the best friend I ever had.”

Cullfor smiled up at me.

I swallowed, and looked at my feet a moment.  “I’m certain we’ll both miss him,” I added.  “And we’ll both hope we ever have half his heart!”

Then I gave the sturdy little fellow a hug. 
How we dragged through the hours of that day, I could not properly set down here. Cullie’s fond happiness lasted just another moment. But it was enough that I felt suddenly ashamed of myself for only just brooding over my own woes. Hard as my life was, or might ever be, it was fortunate I had no time for thoughts of self that day, for there was no melancholy apathy in the Cullie’s eyes, none of the tears that so often benumbed his lonely father's heart in the last days of his life.

That first full day together as, dare I say it,
a family
, was long, but nor weary.  To be certain, Dhal and I had enough to do, finding diversion for his mind, drawing little animals on birch-bark sheets, or playing peek-a-boo.   But it seemed in the end this was for nothing but our own comfort.  When he smiled, it was not our doing, and when he seemed glum, there were no games or antics that could lift his little spirits.

So the
bright sun wore away, and the spring snow that came again that afternoon was strangely refreshing, the way drizzle in the summer can refresh—it gave me a faint hope that we might all one day enjoy something like a normal life together in the north.  And with my courage restored, I truly believed it. 

W
hen Cullfor became sleepy, I carried him, and we carried on until the darkness of that night became thick and nearly impenetrable. 

We had passed several nests of what I suspected were trolls; they were larger than the goblin nest, and even more primitive, hardly more than small trees that were bent over and braided together at their crest to form something like huts.  It gave me an idea.

The snow had halted a few hours previous, and we were leaving no visible tracks.  Still, as we halted at the edge of a wet and moonless forest, we were careful to find a nice secluded spot.  We slunk, deep into the woods, and even deeper into a long hollow.  Further away than seemed necessary, we carried on yet, back up the ravine to the opposite slope.  Crooked trees jutted across our path.  We would be hard to see from just a few feet away. 

Here, I took to my axe with a somewhat dwarven enthusiasm and busied myself putting together a respectable little lodge. I found a crevice of stone to serve as two solid walls.  I went about felling logs for the other two, going so far as chinking them.  I gather some moss between them, along with some thinner and lighter branches for a roof.  Nearing midnight, at least I counted it near midnight from my exhaustion—though Dhal, feisty and contradictory by nature, maintained that it was not yet nine—we sat inside what was a comfortable little abode. 

We even built a small fire.

As Dhal and I sat talking before it, a bit of rain pattered through the leaky roof against the pine logs I gathered to add to the fire, causing Dhal to giggle uproariously.

Cullie’s
lips, though he was long fast asleep, curled in scorn.

“You see, you’ve upset the lad,” I said.

Without answering, she impatiently kicked my knee, nearly knocking me into the live coals. There was an awkward pause.  In a strange way, we still felt like a reunion of two friends who had not seen each other in too long and have not had time to gather up the loose pieces of a parted past and put them together into a reason to be together.  Stronger bonds of fellowship would have been much easier with some beer. 

“Good jokes
are meager comfort to the people they land on,” I admitted, though it was still impossible to talk to her without provoking my own embarrassment.  Leaning back with hands clasped behind my head, I tried to hide it.  I watched through half-closed eyes as her pretty face looked back into mine.

She grinned, saying, “B
eing chiefly applicable when they are not needed.”

I nodded.

She looked into the fire, then at Cullie.  He was sleeping as soundly as a hibernating bear. 

Dhal slithered beside me.  Slowly, silently, she
scooped at the wet ground to clear away a spot.  She grabbed me, then lay beside me.  With the patience of a spider, she coiled around me, rolling us over into in the muddy peat until we found a place that was soft and flat.  We curled her blanket around us.  Then we pulled together on boots and trousers and tightly-wrapped garments, loosening them without taking them off.  For the briefest moment, we stared at each other.  I ‘d grown to expect a learned sass in her eyes, but the dangerously silly, completely joyous look in her eyes was as amusing as it was unsettling.  She was alive in untellable ways.  She was occupying my universe.

I swallowed. 

We shared those looks another moment.  Everything was anew, and everything felt so fresh on that rainy night that I’m certain neither of us understood what we were feeling.  Then came a tiny but eager breath, and spittle popped when she opened her mouth.  Then we slipped against each other, our forms softly rubbing.  We kissed gently, sucking knots of flesh.  I felt her long, broken shudder as I lurched into her.  Her feet cupped my ankles.  Immersed in the warmth of one other, I found myself merging into her gorgeous figure, her joy.  I nudged my weight gently deeper.  Her mouth was open, and she took the lobe of my ear in her teeth and pulled me in more fully.  The careful, sea-going rhythms rose, and she put a hand on the side of my face.  Her teeth shining starkly around her tongue, she opened her eyes.  Her look was so inviting I was weightless.  Kissing her forehead, I tasted her elation.  Sweat dripped off my chin.  She pulled me closer, and she began to writhe and smother me in the faintest, playful snarling.  Perfectly exuberant in the absurd joy, the insane, wonderful surge seemed to arc across her face, flooding my senses.  I grunted.  She seized me, kissing my mouth as her breathing quivered. 

As she fluttered, she looked up at me, then bit down on my shoulder.  I looked down at her and kissed her the top of her head and ear, and the sensation washed through me as well. 

She closed her eyes once more before she breathed, and relaxed. 

Then she seemed to elongate, stretching.  She pressed into me with a last kiss before she scooted against me, nuzzling me with her nose. 

As I lay beside her, I knew something had cleared from her mind.  There were no words for it, precisely, at least none that would come to my simple mind, but I felt it too.  It felt like tiny bad things in the dark parts of the mind popping, losing their warrant, or like warm fluid draining down my spine, but nothing could better describe than our slow and deep breathing, perfectly matched now.

A perfect sleepiness was swallowing
me.  I felt lighter now.

Warmer.

Chapter 44

At some point before dawn, the rain had
soaked through the roof.  The wind drove through a small split in chilling gusts. 

I got up and jammed an old rag into the hole.
Then, at the entrance I heard a distant grumbling of some manner of chuckle, and was I amazed at the sound of deep, thunder-like laughter above the gentle din of rain.  The low noise seemed to be coming towards our hut.  Then it suddenly halted.  I froze and listened more intently.  Up from the wooded valley came the gentle purr of a stream over the stony bottom.  The low washing sound only accentuated the sudden stillness.  Suddenly, there was the shrill cry of some solitary crow, which stabbed the night with a throb of echoing loneliness. 

I got up. 

I could see nothing through the door, and lighting a pine branch, I thought better of it and, put it out.  Then I slunk into the cold wet night.  I thought I had exited quietly, but a turned a saw Cullfor and Dhal emerge as well. We all three stood as still and silent as a deathwatch; then the feeling of being watched hit us all at once.  We each, in turn, looked out into the dark woodland behind the primitive hut.

It seemed Dahl saw something for she made a waving motion with her hand.  But I could not understand what it was she meant us to do
. 

“
Look,” she whispered.

I had seen much on this journey, and yet there was still room for awe in my numb mind—in fact, I could scarcely believe what I was seeing.

It was a family of trolls. 

I pulled Cullfor closer and looked. 
There were two adults, as five men mashed together and baked to a sturdy, muscular firmness.  They strode gently, hardly making a sound.  The female was carrying a small troll child, which was not unlike a dwarf in size.  They stroked its head lightly and shunted themselves between the little one and our spying as they passed.  I have always held that however menacing a thing may be, if it handles the sick or the young with gentleness, there is much goodness under the rough surface.  In mind, I could see them conversing, even laughing, before they stumbled upon our hut, then went silently by, hoping to not disturb us.  Thoughtlessness and stupidity, while not unique to mankind or dwarfdom, seem the root for half the unkindness and sorrow of life. People may speak of paving the deepening paths to the frozen depths with good intentions, but I will never be convinced that it not would be truer to blame thoughtlessness and stupidity.  That was all that I had heard of trolls, that they are dull and brutal, that their deadened sensibilities leave them no choice but to eat anyone they see, to treat their young as mere things… things weaker than themselves.

Then something that I would count as near miraculous occurred.  The large male,
which had flesh like the bony, plated armor of something that had strayed out of hell, nodded to me. 

Then it
and turned and disappeared with its family into a thick brake of cedar.

I can compare
the change in my thoughts to a winter that comes without autumn’s soft warning.  All at once, everything I knew of the beasts was counted false. 

I nearly gasped
at the changes in my own mind. 

W
hile the russet and green foliage still folded around them, I could only shake my head and smile.