Troll Blood

A bend in the river. More rocks. Kwimu throws back his wet hair, every muscle tense. They dart down, twining into the curve, hugging the base of the cliff where the water is deeper and smoother. It’s cold here; the wet, grainy stone drips, and the mist writhes in weird shapes. There’s a splash and an echo, and it’s not just the paddle. The canoe tilts, veers. Fox springs up, snarling, showing his white teeth and black gums, and for a heartbeat Kwimu sees a thin muddy hand clutch at the prow. A head plastered with wet hair rises from the water. It winks at him with an expression of sullen glee, and ducks under.

Cold with shock, Kwimu flings a wild glance back at his father. But Sinumkw simply shouts, “Look what you’re doing!” And they’re snatched into the next stretch of rapids.

They hurtle into the cross-currents, Sinumkw paddling grimly. Kwimu thrusts and fends with dripping hair and aching arms until the gorge widens, the cliffs drop back, and the canoe spills out into calm water flowing between high banks covered with trees. On either side, the grey-robed forest rises, fading into mist.

Kwimu twists round, panting. “Did you see?” he bursts out. “Did you see the Water Person—the Grabber-from-Beneath?”

Sinumkw frowns, but says calmly, “I saw nothing but the rocks and the rapids.”

“He was there,” Kwimu insists. “And Fox saw him too.”

His father nods. “Maybe. But if you’d taken your eyes off the water for a moment longer, we’d have capsized. So his trick didn’t work. Anyway, well done! That’s the worst stretch over. No more rapids between here and the sea. And we’ll land here, I think.”

He drives his paddle into the water. The canoe pivots towards the shore.

“But I thought we were going all the way down to the sea. Can’t we go on in the canoe? It’s so much quicker than walking,” Kwimu pleads as they lift the canoe out of the water.

“Quicker, yes,” says Sinumkw drily. “Speed isn’t everything. Just look around. Somebody’s been cutting trees.” Kwimu looks up in surprise, and his father is right—the bank is littered with chips of yellow wood, and studded with stumps like broken teeth. Piles of lopped branches lie in the trampled undergrowth.

Sinumkw picks up some scattered chips. “These aren’t fresh. This was done moons ago, before the winter.”

“Who would need so many trees?” Kwimu asks quietly. His scalp prickles.There are Other Persons in the woods. One of them cuts down trees. Sometimes, in lonely parts of the forest, hunters hear the sound of an axe, chopping—and a tree comes crashing down, though no one is visible.

But his father is thinking along more practical lines. “See here. They rolled the trunks into the river and floated them downstream. Who did it? It could be enemies: the Kwetejk, perhaps. What if they’ve built a stockade at the river mouth, in just the spot we want to use?”

“Oh!” Kwimu thinks with a shiver of their fierce rivals from the north-west woods. “What shall we do?”

His father shrugs. “This is why we came, n’kwis, ahead of everyone else, to find the best place for the summer camp, and to look out for danger. Imagine if the whole clan was with us now—grandmothers, babies, cooking gear and all! No. We’ll leave the canoe and come back for it later. We’ll circle into the woods and climb the bluffs above the river. We can look down on the bay from there.” He turns, setting off on a long uphill slant into the forest.

Kwimu follows. The encircling fog fills the woods with secrets. It’s a shape-changer, turning the trees into looming giants that drip and tiptoe and creak and murmur. Anything might lurk there, or stealthily follow them at the edges of sight. But if there was danger, Fox would sense it; Fox would warn them. Reassured by the thought, Kwimu strokes Fox’s cold fur, and hurries after his father.

Snow still lingers under the hemlocks and firs, and the buds on the birches aren’t open yet. The forest is colourless, black, white and grey. A dozen paces ahead, Sinumkw climbs silently through the swirls and pockets of vapour, like a ghost passing through world after world.

The woods are full of mysteries…

Grandmother said that yesterday evening, her bright bird-like eyes blinking in her soft wrinkled face. Kwimu thinks of her now, as he trudges uphill under the dripping trees. He can see her in his head, like a little partridge with bright plumage, wrapped in her big beaver-fur cloak with the coloured quillwork glinting in the firelight. She’s so tiny, but so strong. And she has the Sight. Everyone listens when she speaks.

Long ago, in the time of the Old Ones…

All the stories begin like this.

…in the old days, two brothers go hunting. And they find a deep ditch, too wide to jump. A strange, smooth ditch, scoured out of sticky red mud, twisting along between the trees. The track of a Horned Serpent: a jipijka’m track.

Now this track is full of power.

One of the brothers climbs into the ditch to see what sort of thing made it. Aha!

At once, his body changes. It bloats and swells and pulls out like an earthworm, growing longer and longer. His eyes widen and blaze, and two horns sprout from his head, one yellow, one red. He fills the ditch from top to bottom, he raises his head and hisses at his brother, he slithers away like a snake. The track leads into the lake. He plunges deep into the water, and no one ever sees him again.

The woods are full of mysteries…

In spite of his thick moose-hide robes, Kwimu is cold. Why did Grandmother tell that story? What does it mean? Everywhere he looks he sees omens. Layers of fungus, like thick lips that might open and speak. A rotten log like a corpse rolled up in birch bark.

Can anything good happen on such a day?

The slope steepens, broken by small ravines where icy creeks hurry down to join the river. There are voices in the creeks, Kwimu is sure, quarrelsome voices that squabble and bicker. Perhaps it’s the Spreaders, the nasty little people who peg you to the ground if you fall asleep by the stream-side.

They cross one creek near a waterfall. Spray has coated the boulders with ice, and the pool boils and froths like a black kettle. Just the place for Grandmother’s story to come to life! What if a huge head crowned with twiggy horns emerged from the water, snaking towards them on a long slimy neck? In this haunted fog, anything seems possible.

It grows lighter. The woods thin. Kwimu follows his father along a knobbly headland that juts out from the forest into the white nothingness of the mist. He feels giddy, as if walking out into the Sky World. He knows that down there, where the ground plunges steeply away, there’s a fine gravel beach and grasslands beside the river. The bay: their summer home, where the women will gather shellfish, and the men and boys will take the canoes out past the sandbars and right over deep water to the islands, to fish and to gather birds’ eggs. Right now none of that is visible. A mother-of-pearl sun peers through the haze.

All is quiet except for the hushing of the sea. But the mist tastes of smoke, sweet dry smoke floating up from below.

Fox growls quietly. His fur bristles, full of prickling, warning life. Kwimu and his father exchange anxious looks.

They hunker down in the wet bushes, ill at ease. Smoke means people, but a friendly village would be noisy with dogs, children, women chattering—so why the silence? If only the mist would clear. Straining his ears, Kwimu begins to think he can pick up the muffled sound of voices. Men talking—or arguing, for the sound becomes louder and sharper.

And then an appalling scream tears through the fog. Kwimu grabs his father. The scream soars into bubbling hysteria, and breaks into a series of sharp, yipping howls like a mad wolf. The morning erupts in shouts of anger and alarm, and a ring-ding, hard-edged clashing. Flocks of screeching birds clatter up from the forest.

As if their wings are fanning it away, the mist thins and vanishes. At last Kwimu and Sinumkw see what is going on below them, down by the river mouth.

The earth has been flayed. Instead of grassland, pits and scars of bare red soil show where the turf has been lifted.Two strange lumpish sod houses have been thrown up on a rising crescent of ground between the edge of the forest and the sea. They look like burrows, for the withered grass grows right over them, but smoke rises from holes in the tops. Between these houses—these burrows—men are swarming.

Men? Their faces are white as paint, and they seem shaggy round the head, like a lynx or bobcat.These are not the Kwetejk, nor like any men Kwimu has ever seen. Are they the dead then, returned from the Ghost World? But some are pursuing others, hacking them with long axes, stabbing with lances. Some lie motionless on the ground.

Sinumkw taps Kwimu’s shoulder. “Look!” His voice is awed, shocked. “In the river. Jipijka’maq!”

Kwimu drags his eyes from the scene below, and the hairs rise on his neck. Floating in the wide shallows where the river meets the sea are two things—bigger than the biggest canoe—and surely they are alive? For each has a head, staring shorewards from the top of a long neck. Each head is that of a Horned Serpent.

The smaller of the two is painted red, and the horned head snarls open-jawed from the top of a slender curving neck.The larger one is painted in red and black stripes, and it lifts a goggle-eyed head, beaked like a screaming eagle.

“Grandmother’s story,” whispers Kwimu. “This is what it meant.”

These people are Jipijka’maq—Horned Serpent People, shape-changers. They come from out of the water and under the ground. Their whiteness is not paint, but the bleached pallor of things you find under stones. But why are they fighting, and why are they here? Kwimu moistens his lips, staring at the sprawled figures on the ground. Perhaps they’re not dead. Perhaps, any moment now, their feet and hands will vanish, their bodies will swell and lengthen, and they will slither off on their bellies into their dark earth houses?

But they never move.

“Hah!” With a cough of disdainful laughter, Sinumkw points suddenly. “See the coward there!”

A man in a green cloak is escaping, running away from the fight. He’s dragging a child along with him, a young boy. Just past the end of the nearest house he stops, and pushes the child, pointing to the woods. The message is clear. “Run!” he’s saying. “Run and hide yourself. Go!” The child hesitates, and is sent staggering with a hard shove between the shoulder blades. The man whirls and goes racing back.

So he’s not a coward after all; he was trying to save the child. And he’s unarmed, except for a knife. His enemies are coming to meet him. In the lead is a burly, bear-like man, obviously a chief. By his side is a boy no older than Kwimu, with long loose golden hair that floats behind him as he runs, yelling. The burly chief shouts an order to his warriors. They spread out to catch the man in green, who dodges two of them and dashes on like a hunted animal, heading for the river. And then he trips and falls.

The chieftain shouts again and points. His men scatter sideways. The chieftain’s right arm comes up, balancing his spear. He pauses a second, and throws.

There’s a ragged chorus of whoops and howls from the men. They run forward, closing in on the crumpled green bundle. The spear stands straight up, a marker pointing at the sky. It twitches suddenly, it wags to and fro. The green bundle is still moving, trying to crawl away. Kwimu’s breath hisses through his teeth.

The boy with the golden hair strolls up behind the men. He looks no older than Kwimu, maybe fifteen winters old. His weapon is shaped like the long-bladed leaves that grow in the marshes—red with blood. The others part to let him through; the burly chieftain puts an arm round his shoulders. Together they gaze at the man on the ground. Then the chieftain tugs his spear out. The golden youth hooks a foot under the body, rolling it on to its back. The man’s pale face comes into view. Still alive. His fingers open and close like claws.