Troll Mountain: The Complete Novel

Chapter 2

In a tribe based around families and a ruling clan, it didn’t help that Raf and his sister were orphans.

It had happened when Raf was twelve and Kira eight.

One day their mother had not returned from gathering berries in the hills with the other women. Instead, one of the women had raced into the village, screaming: “Troll! Rogue troll!”

Their father had immediately dashed off toward the berry hills, followed by a group of warriors (who, Raf thought, hadn’t moved quickly enough).

Leaving Kira with a neighbor, Raf had hurried after them, tracking them first by the sound of their voices and then by their footprints.

As he arrived at the berry hill on the eastern rim of the valley, he heard the troll.

A deep guttural roar echoed through the trees, followed by shouts, the crash of branches and the swoosh of a giant hammer being swung.

“Force it back! Force it back against the cliff!”

Raf arrived at a spot where the top of the berry hill met the base of a high rocky wall. There he was stopped by one of the younger warriors.

“Raf!” the youth said. “Don’t go any further! You shouldn’t see—”

But Raf had to see.

He pushed past the young warrior and burst out into the clearing to behold—

— a great troll gripping his mother like a rag doll and bellowing at the five adult warriors surrounding it and prodding it with spears.

The great gray creature was only a couple of handspans taller than a man, just shy of seven feet, but it was far bulkier than any man Raf had ever seen: it had broad shoulders, a thick neck, and a brutish block of a head that was all forehead and jaw. Its skin was a thick hide like that of an elephant.

The troll stood with its back to the rock wall, trapped, holding Raf’s mother around the waist in one of its mighty hands while with the other it lashed out with a huge battle hammer.

In horror, Raf saw that his mother’s eyes were closed and that her body swayed lifelessly with every movement the troll made. His mother, his beautiful, calm and encouraging mother.

His father rushed forward to grab her hand.

“No—!” someone yelled, but it was too late. The troll swung its massive hammer round and it struck Raf’s father square in the head, sending him slamming into the rock wall. He hit the wall with terrible force and crumpled, killed in an instant.

Raf screamed in horror.

Then, with another bellowing roar the troll discarded its hammer, threw Raf’s mother over its shoulder and clambered up the rock wall, out of sight.

Raf never saw his mother again.

As he grew into his teens, Raf kept more and more to himself.

His sister Kira worried about him, doted on him, and often shushed him when he voiced his increasingly dissatisfied views of the head family. He had felt the warriors’ efforts to save his mother had been half-hearted, ineffective, and hadn’t justified their extra allotment of food.

Which was why, when he wasn’t farming his little plot with Kira or constructing implements that made their toil a little easier, in secret he would practice with his weapons.

He made his double-bladed axe smaller and lighter so that it could be wielded with greater speed. He even gave this new model a hollow handle, inside of which he slid a long, thin knife made of flint.

When he went hunting at the edge of the Badlands, which lay to the north of the river valley, Raf would practice extracting the knife from the axe’s handle, executing the move very quickly so that if he were ever confronted by an enemy, he would have weapons in both hands in the blink of an eye. He practiced thrusting and slashing with his weapons in a dance-like motion. Had anyone been watching him, Raf thought, they surely would have thought him mad.

As it turned out, unbeknownst to Raf, there was often someone watching him as he practiced alone by the edge of the Badlands.

At the height of his disgruntlement, during one year’s summer harvest festivities, Raf did an outrageous thing: he asked to compete in the annual harvest games.

During the harvest, the ruling family always held games. These usually involved fights and wrestling matches between the chieftain’s sons, allowing them to show off their warrior skills. Even in lean times, the games were very popular among the tribesfolk.

When Raf asked to compete in a wrestling match, the fat chief laughed loudly, just as he had done before — but this time Raf asked him in front of the tribe and all were watching the exchange closely.

The chief threw a look to his sons before nodding nonchalantly. “Are you certain you want to do this, lad? Farm boys should not challenge warriors. I would not like to see you get hurt.”

Some of the tribesfolk tittered.

“I would still like to try,” Raf said.

The chieftain shook his head and said to the crowd, “Let no one say I didn’t warn him!” He turned back to Raf. “Fine. You shall wrestle Bader then.”

His heart pounding, Raf stepped into the makeshift dirt ring and faced off against Bader. As the fight began, they circled each other, and then Raf pushed off the ground to engage with Bader, but as he did so, one of Bader’s brothers stretched a surreptitious foot through the ropes of the ring and, unseen by any of the other tribespeople, tripped Raf.

Raf fell and Bader pounced on him, wrapping him in a headlock and pounding him against the ground. What followed was a humiliation, as much to crush Raf’s spirit as it was to provide an example to the other members of the tribe. It took weeks for the cuts and bruises to fade and Raf was an object of ridicule every time he passed the ruling family.

He would just bow his head and walk on, fuming.

And so Raf spent his days as an outsider within his own tribe — farming with his sister, inventing his weapons and training himself in their use, climbing and hunting alone at the edge of the Badlands. It was during this time that water became scarcer and people started dying in greater numbers.

And then came the day that Raf’s sister fell ill with the disease.