The Pixilated Peeress

VI – Empyrean Exile

Along the higher valleys of the Sharmatts. Thorolf Zigramson plodded unhappily upward, ever upward. On either hand rose the somber green, conifer-clad slopes; above these the iron-gray screes; and beyond these the glaring white of snow and glaciers. With the great love of his life in the goetic grip of Orlandus and three sets of enemies seeking his gore, his hopes of an academic career and of union with his beloved seemed farther off than ever.

He felt grossly inadequate. True, his officers had of­ten praised him for bringing his men up to standard in equipment, discipline, and general conduct; they had dangled promises of promotion. But he uneasily felt that his soldierly success had been at best a lucky ac­cident. Any time, some untoward event would expose him as an incompetent impostor.

He marched grimly on. At least, he had come through recent armed encounters unscathed. A professor at Ge­nuvia, Doctor Vipsanio. preached the philosophy called Chaoticism, which Thorolf found consoling. The bur­then was that life, nature, and the universe were so unpredictable, and man so at the mercy of unforesee­able events, that one should neither give up hope in a parlous strait nor think that any success had made one proof against future disasters.

Since Thorolf had no camping equipment, he had slept in barns whose owners furnished an overnight hayloft and a meal in exchange for stories and gossip. The third day out, he was getting into the heart of the Sharmatts, above the treeline. A few late-blooming flowers gleamed in the scanty meadows. The barns had ceased, and the snowline lay not far above.

Thorolf thought he could handle trolls, from his ex­perience with Doctor Reccared's guide and with the few he had met on fishing trips into the Dorblentz Range. He rehearsed the expected meetings. Thus he was not startled when a troll stepped out from behind a boulder and pointed an iron-tipped spear, croaking in Trollish:

"Who ye?"

Thorolf had learned Trollish from his few contacts and some book study. Shifting Bardi's walking stick to his left hand to free his sword arm, he answered:

"Me friend."

"So?" said the troll, approaching with a broad grin on its wide mouth, displaying large yellow teeth. The creature was the height of a short human being but so massively muscular as to make Thorolf, as strong as any man in his company, feel puny. Beneath its beetling brows gleamed pale-blue, sunken eyes, a wide, flat nose, and a receding chin half concealed by a scanty beard of tawny-yellow hair like that which clothed its barrel-shaped torso and stubby, thewy limbs. Trolls wore no clothes, their fur providing adequate cover. This one said:

"No goat?"

"No goat? What mean?" said Thorolf, puzzled.

"Who you, lowlander weakling?" demanded the troll, ignoring Thorolf's question.

Thorolf identified himself, adding: "Me know Chief Yig, in Dorblentzes."

"Chief Yig? Ah!" The troll put a little bone whistle to its mouth and blew. A dozen other yellow-furred, blue-eyed trolls emerged from behind the rocks and lei­surely strolled toward Thorolf, grinning. All bore spears, bows, or slings.

"Say know Yig," the first troll told its fellows.

"Ah!" said the other trolls in chorus, moving closer. "Yig you friend?" asked one.

"Aye; us blood brothers."

"Ah!" said the trolls together. With a lightning rush, they sprang upon Thorolf from every side. Before he could draw a weapon, they had seized his arms and legs in a grip of inhuman strength and threw him supine. If they had been human, he would have given a good ac­count of himself; but he was like a doll in the trolls' hairy hands. Keeping his composure with effort, he said:

"What is? Me friend!"

"You Yig friend," said the first troll. "Yig us foe. So you us foe."

It occurred to Thorolf that he should have looked into the shifting feuds and alliances among the trollish tribes before he ventured into their lands. He said:

"Me no harm. What you do?"

"You see," said the first troll. Four trolls, one grip­ping each limb, picked Thorolf up and bore him along the trail. To his demands, they merely grinned and re­plied:

"You see!"

After an hour in this painful position, Thorolf was borne into a kind of natural amphitheater, around which the mouths of several caves gaped in the hillside. The area was dotted with tents of hide and swarmed with trolls of both sexes and all ages. The air was thick with rough trollish voices, the clang of a forge, and an overpow­ering stench of unwashed bodies and rotting garbage.

At the farther end of the depression, a smelting oven rose against the hillside, sending up a plume of orange flame against the darkling sky. Trolls bustled about it. Others emerged from the nearest cavern mouth with sacks on their bent backs, which they emptied on the piles of minerals surrounding the smelter. Nearby, a troll was forking browse into a pen containing a dozen goats.

Trolls clustered about the arriving party, croaking questions. The trolls bearing Thorolf shouted: "Make way! Make way! Have meat!"

They approached a formidable-looking troll with a necklace of bear claws, who sat on a boulder whittling arrow shafts. Deftly removing Thorolf's sword and dag­ger, the captors set him on his feet, while two retained their grip on his arms.

"Who ye?" said the large troll.

Thorolf repeated his identification and added: "Who you?"

The big troll chuckled and replied in fluent if heavily accented Rhaetian: "My good fellow, ye have the honor of addressing Chief Wok, ruler of the Sharmatt trolls. Since ye have trespassed without leave on our lands, without bringing tribute, and since the dragon hath taken many of our goats, we find that we must needs use you to balance our diet."

"Dost mean to eat me?" cried Thorolf.

"Aye," said the troll.

Doctor Reccared, Thorolf remembered, had a theory that tales of trollish man-eating were merely a reflection of racial prejudice, and that they never ate human be­ings. Reccared, he thought, should be in his boots right now. He said:

"If you do this, it will cause you endless trouble with the Zurshnitters. I am a respected sergeant in the Rhaetian Army." Wok merely chuckled again.

Thorolf raised his voice: "They'll send an army and slaughter your folk, the innocent with the guilty!"

Wok wagged a thick forefinger. "My dear fellow, we shall make sure that nought of you or yours remain in such form that the deed could be traced to us. Your garments, however necessary to lowland weaklings, are of no use to us; they shall therefore be burned. We shall make new hilts for your weapons, to fit our larger hands."

"How do you plan to cook me?" asked Thorolf.

The troll chief pointed to the center of the clearing. A large iron pot was suspended by a gantry over a fire laid but not lit. "We shall boil you, of course," said Wok.

Thorolf fought to retain his composure. "Not alive, I hope!" he said in a casual tone, as if that were merely a minor inconvenience.

"Nay, nay. It were too much of a struggle to get you into the pot alive. Ye shall be well dismembered."

"I knew not that you trolls could make so big a caul­dron," said Thorolf. As he spoke, he frantically searched his memory for something he had heard or read.

Wok chuckled. "That is our smith's masterpiece. It took endless hammering and reheating and filing to make it watertight."

"Tell me, O Chief, how come you to speak such excellent Rhaetian?"

"Why not? Am I not a graduate of your Horgus Col­lege?"

"Indeed? That's unusual!"

"I'll tell you, since ye should have a tale to lighten your final hours. Years ago, ere ye were born, some well-meaning lowlanders thought, if trolls possessed the fruits of lowland education, they would turn into fellow lowlanders. So the then chief, my uncle Tep, chose five likely lads, including me, and sent them to Horgus.

"I boast not when I say that, of the five, I was the only one to do well with the language; the others could speak it only brokenly. When we completed our courses, five years later, we returned to the Sharmatts, as ye lowlanders call them. That is, all returned save poor Zid, who perished of some lowland disease.

"I fear we disappointed Chief Tep. We had picked up a smattering of Rhaetian; we had learned that the world was round; we could eat as ye do, with knives and those new Tyrrhenian things called forks. We had also acquired a taste for strong drink and insisted on wearing those woven things ye lowlanders cover your bodies with. Amongst us they are not only useless but also harbor vermin.

"Worse yet, we had lost all our trollish skills. We could not milk a she-goat, or guard the flocks against wolves and bears, or track ihex and chamois, or scale a cliff, or make fire by rubbing sticks. We could not endure to be out in foul weather. In other words, we were good for nought.

"One by one, my comrades perished. Yub fell off a cliff. Mro was fool enough to attack a dragon single-handed and was devoured. Nak went back to Zurshnitt and was last seen begging in the streets for money to buy your crazy-water.

"Seeing the results of lowland learning, I devoted myself to proper trollish skills and did not badly. When Uncle Tep died, the tribe, reasoning that I could better deal with the lowland menace because I spake lowlandish, chose me as chief.

"A few years past, some Zurshnitters came up to make us a similar offer, to train some of our youths. I declined but proposed in turn to train a number of their youths in our skills and make real men of them!"

"Very wise," said Thorolf. "What's this about trib­ute?"

"If ye would enter our lands," said Wok, "ye must first get my leave. When ye arrive, ye must bring this tribute, which we set at two goats per lowlander." Wok pointed to the pen with the goats. "See yonder? That is the tribute brought earlier today by a party of moun­tain climbers from Madjino, where they speak Tyrrhe­nian. Why lowlanders should come up here to climb for pleasure, I cannot fathom; but they do. They hope to ascend Mount Viggos ere the snows of winter forbid."

Thorolf said: "With due respect, has no one told you that it is wrong to eat your own kind?"

Again Wok uttered that irritating snicker. "Aye; four summers past, a preacher of one of your lowland cults came, calling upon us to accept his true faith. Since we found him amusing, we let him live a while.

"Then another preacher came, from the West, and another from the East. These three fell to quarreling, one claiming there was but one god; another, that there were two; and the third that there were three. In time we wearied of their screaming. They were delicious, especially the monotheist." Reminiscently, Wok picked his teeth with a splinter from the arrow shaft he was shaving.

Thorolf felt sweat beading his brow. "Would you not say it were right to do as one is done by?"

"I suppose so," said the chieftain.

"Well then, we Zurshnitters do not eat trolls. So by what right do you eat us?"

"Ye lowlanders may not eat of our flesh, but ye have natheless eaten our country."

"How mean you?"

"Ye stole our land!" roared Wok with clenched fists. "Once we roamed the entire ranges of the Helvetians and many lands besides. Then ye spindly, hairless crea­tures came. Having better weapons, ye drave us into the mountains. Ye fetched new diseases, whereof my­riads of us perished. Year by year ye forced us higher into the ranges. When we protest, ye offer a new treaty, which ye no sooner sign than ye begin to violate. Now ye have devoured all the apple save the core, and some have designs on that as well.

"Ye tell us one should not eat one's own kind; but whose kind are we? I know your Senator Zigram pro­posed to recognize us as fellow beings. With mine own ears I heard your Senate howl the proposal down as the greatest jest in years."

Thorolf frowned. "With your own ears? You cannot have been in the Senate chamber. Hast magical pow­ers?"

Wok winked. "Ah! Ask me no questions and ye shall hear no taradiddles. By the way, is that Senator Zigram the same as he who now sits as consul?"

"Aye; he is. He is also my father."

"Ah!" said Wok. "Every lowlander who wishes something of us doth claim he be a brother or son or cousin of some great lowland chief, thinking to overawe us. We have swallowed that bait too often to believe such a tale anew.

"But hold! Edifying though this talk be, we cannot continue it for ay. Your coming relieves us of the need to slaughter goats." To the trolls holding Thorolf, Wok said: "Take, cut up, boil!"

Thorolf struggled, shouting: "But he really is my father!"

The trolls nevertheless hauled him toward a large wooden block, behind which stood a troll with an over­sized cleaver.

"Chief Wok!" Thorolf shouted, seeking an idea to forestall his demise. "It is proven impossible for so advanced a folk to practice cannibalism!"

"Eh?" said Wok. "Ye, a lowlander, presume to say what is impossible to me!" To the trolls he added: "Bring back!"

"Aye, sir!" said Thorolf. "A professor at Genuvia University explained it. When a folk has advanced so far in handicraft as to make cauldrons, they will have given up cannibalism. So the old jests about cannibals boiling outsiders in stewpots mean nought. It were what they call an anachronism, like Rhaetians fighting with stone axes."

"Hm," said Wok. "'That shows how much your learned professors know. We may be advanced enough to make cauldrons but not enough for ye lowlanders to accord us the rights ye do each other."

Thorolf had an inspiration. "Chief, you said a dragon is taking your goats."

"That is so."

"A male or a female dragon?"

"A female."

"Why haven't your brave tribesmen slain the beast?"

"By day it lurks in its cavern, where it is certain death to venture. It issues forth at night to raid our herds by stealth. Several who have attacked it in the dark have perished."

"Could I but rid you of this dragon, were that not a fair price for my life?"

Wok snorted, his broad mouth turning down in an expression of contempt. "If our brave warriors have failed, think ye a lowland weakling would fare better? In Trollish: "Take back to block."

"Wait!" shouted Thorolf. "You prize gold, do you not?"

"Aye, since we learned that this pretty but useless metal can be traded for lowland things and used to bribe lowland officials to leave us alone."

"Could I get rid of the dragon and also get you a lusty sum in gold, how would that be?"

"How much?" demanded Wok.

"Let us say a thousand marks."

"Not enough." In Trollish: "Take back!"

As he was dragged toward the block, Thorolf kept raising his bid. But Wok was obdurate, even when Tho­rolf had reached his ceiling of ten thousand. When the trolls had forced Thorolf to his knees and one had pulled his head by the hair across the block, and the butcher-executioner had raised his cleaver, Wok said:

"This time, methinks, ye speak sooth." In Trollish: "Let go!" To Thorolf again: "How mean ye to slay this beast? Hast a magical sword?"

It occurred to Thorolf that if he had stopped at a lower ceiling, say five thousand, Wok would probably have accepted that offer. But it was too late for that now. He said:

"Nay; merely the common hanger your people took from me. Against a beast so large and tenacious of life, 'twere no more effective than a flywhisk. I have another scheme, for which I shall need a goodly length of braided leathern rope, some sapling trunks, and the help of your lustiest trolls."

"Ah! I do perceive ye plan some sort of snare. Ye shall have your chance, albeit it grieves me to have the goodly repast ye'd furnish end up in the dragon's belly instead of in my people's. Blame me not if the beast escape your trap and devour you!"

"In that case, I shan't be in condition to blame any­one. Meanwhile—"

"Aye, aye, ye shall have food and lodging until your gin be ready. I trust your finical lowland gorge rise not at roasted goat!"

"Thanks," said Thorolf. "One thing more. I relish not the idea that, after I have overcome your dragon, you will find some further pretext for devouring me."

"Sirrah! I brook no insults—"

Thorolf held up a hand. "Easy, good my chief. All I ask is that each of us swear by that which he holds most sacred—I by the antlers of our god Kernun, you by the spirits of your ancestors."

Wok flinched. "How know ye that I cannot break such an oath?"

"I study these matters," said Thorolf with feigned nonchalance. He privately blessed Professor Reccared, who in his lectures had included this bit of lore along with much misinformation about the trolls.

"Oh, very well," grumbled Wok. "Ye shall swear first."

Five days later, the rising sun was tinting the snows on the eastern flanks of the peaks a rosy pink, when a gaggle of golden-furred trolls, bearing ropes and poles and led by Thorolf, neared the dragon's cave. The mouth of the cave was a darksome blot on a rocky hill­side. The scree that had spilled out included stones of all sizes, from pebbles to boulders.

Motioning the trolls to stand back and remain silent, Thorolf approached the cave mouth. He cocked an ear toward the darkness within and stood immobile, listen­ing. At last he made out an intermittent sigh that was not quite a snore.

"Good!" he whispered. "Dragon sleep. Put poles here and here ..."

When places were found into which the poles could be thrust between the stones of the scree, Thorolf di­rected the rigging of his snare. Then he divided his score of trolls into two equal parties. Each group took the free end of a rope and retreated to one side of the cave, where they hid behind boulders.

Back at the cave mouth, Thorolf loaded one of the trolls' slings. He shouted: "Ho, dragon! Come forth!"

Receiving no reply, he whirled the sling and let fly. The slingstone struck a wall of the cave and rebounded, rattling. Thorolf repeated his challenge.

This time he heard a sleepy grunt. He fitted another stone and slung it; he was rewarded by a meaty thump. There was a loud, groaning roar, followed by a scrab­bling of claws on stone.

"Come on, dragon!" yelled Thorolf. "Here I am!"

The scrabbling came closer; and presently a large, pearl-gray, reptilian head emerged from the cave, its golden eyes blinking in the sudden sunlight. The dragon had a long crocodilian muzzle and jaws full of curved ivory spikes. Its powerful scaly legs, furred with silvery bristles, raised its belly a good yard above the ground.

"Yah! Yah!" shouted Thorolf, capering. The mon­ster shook its great head as if it could not believe its gemlike eyes. Then, roaring, it started for Thorolf at a shambling trot, yawning to show its scarlet gorge.

Thorolf scrambled down the rocky slope, guiding the dragon's course between the poles on either side of the cave. From the poles hung two large loops of rope. As the scaiy head penetrated the loops, Thorolf shouted: "Pull!"

The trolls popped out of hiding, each grasping a sec­tion of rope. All backed away from the dragon, so that the two loops, falling from the poles, tightened around the reptile's neck.

The dragon checked its rush and swung its head right and left. When it lunged to its right at the trolls pulling on the rope on that side, the trolls on the other side braced themselves and pulled. The dragon then lunged to the left, with a similar result. It swiped at its neck with one of its forefeet, trying to get its claws beneath the strangling loops. Thorolf held his breath; if the beast severed either loop, he would call to the trolls to flee and take his own advice.

Just then six Rhaetians, clad for mountaineering in jackets of festive reds and greens and poling themselves along with hooked staves, hove in sight around one of the larger boulders at the bottom of the scree. They spied the dragon just as the dragon sighted them. With yells of terror, they ran back down the slope, casting away their staves.

At the sight of fresh meat fleeing, the dragon seemed to forget about the snare and the trolls. With a mighty roar, it started down the scree, jerking the trolls off their feet and weakening their grip on the rope. The dragon plunged after the fleeing mountaineers, drag­ging behind it the ropes and the few trolls who had retained their grip. These came down the slope in great leaps to keep up with their quarry. After them ran Tho­rolf and the remaining trolls. Thorolf shouted: "Catch rope! Catch rope!"

This proved difficult, since on the slope the dragon moved as fast as man or troll. At length the whole pro­cession was brought to a halt by a crag protruding from the lower slope. Thorolf shouted in Rhaetian and then in Tyrrhenian:

"Not that way! You'll be cornered!"

The climbers continued on until they fetched up at the bottom of a concave angle in the crag. Here they huddled helplessly as the dragon lumbered toward them.

Under Thorolf's shouted directions, the trolls whom the dragon had shaken off secured their grip on the rope once more and braced themselves to restrain the mon­ster. He had, Thorolf realized, underestimated the drag­on's strength; he should have employed at least twice as many trolls.

Closer came the dragon to the huddled Rhaetians, who screamed in terror. Thorolf thought, while he did not crave a hero's death, since he had started the epi­sode he bore a responsibility.

He sprang in front of the dragon with drawn sword. "Get back!" he shouted and whacked the dragon's muzzle with the flat of his blade.

The dragon blinked, jerked back, and gave another roar. As again it extended its fangsome head, Thorolf struck it again. When it tried to turn away to one side, he hit it on the side of its muzzle; when it turned the other way, he hit it on the other side.

It seemed to Thorolf that he had been whacking the scaly muzzle for hours, although the time was less than a quarter-hour. Then the dragon, evidently suffering a sore nose, tried to back away. Dragging screeching trolls after it, it laboriously turned, tangling the ropes, and began to plod back up the slope.

As it forged on toward the mouth of its cave, it slowed like an unwound Rhaetian clock. Halfway to its goal it collapsed on the stones, breathing in gasps. The chase, thought Thorolf, must have winded it, and to drag a score of trolls back up the hill with its windpipe half strangled by the two nooses was too much for its rep­tilian constitution.

"Tie mouth!" cried Thorolf. Soon the dragon's jaws were bound together by several turns of spare rope around its muzzle.

"Now legs!"

In another half-hour the dragon had been rolled over on its back and its limbs bound to its body. It protested by feeble writhings. The troll whom Thorolf had ap­pointed foreman of his crew said:

"Now kill?"

"No kill. Take Zurshnitt, sell."

The troll snorted. "Lowlanders crazy!" A gabble broke out among the trolls as they digested Thorolf's intentions.

Thorolf said: "More rope, more poles. Make sled."

As the trolls scattered to obey, the Rhaetians ap­proached Thorolf. Their leader, in an orange jerkin, said: "A troll doth tell me ye roused this beast from its lair and sent it charging after us! This is an outrage!"

"I was merely capturing the dragon," said Thorolf, "when you came along. If you had watched where you were going ..."

His words were drowned out by a chorus of protest: "Endangering peaceful citizens!" "Reckless folly!" "Gross negligence!" "Ye shall hear from mine attor­ney!"

When, shouting, they pressed close to Thorolf, he roared back: "I faced the creature at my own risk to protect you lubbers! Now get you hence, or ..."

He drew his sword. At the sight of the blade, the unarmed Rhaetians straggled off, muttering threats of litigation.

The setting sun was painting the western slopes of the peaks with streaks of crimson when the trolls conveyed the trammeled, silver-gray dragon to their campsite. Beginning to recover from its earlier exertions, the beast protested by writhing and grunting through its nostrils. Chief Wok appeared, saying:

"By my grandsire's ghost, what is this? I thought ye might come back with the hide and flesh, but not a live, wriggling monster! Think ye to make a pet of it? I warn you, 'twill never become a safe housemate!"

"That's your ten thousand marks," said Thorolf. "Know you Doctor Berthar, who directs the Zoological Parkin Zurshnitt?"

"Aye, he was here some years agone, seeking a rare butterfly, which meseems a strange thing for a grown man, even a crazy lowlander, to do. I mislike dealing with those gentry, because they once shut some of us in cages with their beasts. That was an insult!"

"Like it or not," said Thorolf, "he has the money wherewith to buy one healthy female dragon, hoping to mate her with their male. All you need do is to send a brace of trusty trolls to Zurshnitt with a message. Let Berthar send out a gang of workmen with a wagon, to meet your trolls with the dragon halfway and hand over the money."

"I like this not," growled Wok. "If I know you low­landers, the instant my people cross into the lands the Zurshnitters stole from us, they are liable to a bolt in the brisket. I alone speak enough Rhaetian to deal with these folk, but I must needs remain here. Ye could ac­company the dragon—but nay, nought would hinder you from escaping our grasp, taking the money with you."

"I'll write to Berthar," said Thorolf, digging into his scrip. He brought out a pad of paper, a battered quill, and a stoppered ink bottle.

"I still like it not, but money is money." Wok gave Thorolf a sinister smile. "Our agreement was that ye should slay the beast, not take it alive. The dragon's flesh would have fed the tribe for many days. Since that be not now in prospect, why should we not eat you?"

"Your pardon, O Chief," said Thorolf, "but if you recall the exact terms, I promised to 'get rid of the dragon. Nought was said of how, whether by slaying or capture or merely driving it away from your lands. Be­sides, I could scarcely write to Doctor Berthar if I were dismembered and cooking, now could I?"

Wok grumbled: "Slippery, scheming lowlander! Very well, write your letter. But ye shall remain with us until the money be delivered."

Thorolf, pen in hand, paused. "Since, O Chief, you have cast doubt upon mine own prospects, in return for the letter I ask that we enter into another pair of oaths, that I shall not be slain whatever betide. As for remain­ing here, I hope to do so for some little time. I will do my share of tribal labors."

"Eh?" said Wok. "What lets you from returning to Zurshnitt?"

"Certain enemies have made that city unhealthy for me.

"Ah!" said Wok. "Ye are a wanted man, then! Had I known sooner, I might have sold you back to those foes whereof ye speak."

"You would not have obtained any ten thousand marks for my carcass. And now for the oaths ..."