Warrior Women Page 6

  They did not touch her but watched her every movement, like a pack of dogs. When she went to the river to drink, they watched. When she ate the bit of journeycake the lord offered her, they watched. And even when she relieved herself, the lord watched. He would let no one else look then, which she knew honored her, though she did not care.

  And when after several days he thought he had tamed her, the lord took her on his horse before him and rode with her back to the far west where he lived. By then he loved her, and knew that she loved him in return, though she had yet to speak a word to him.

  “But then, what have words to do with love,” he whispered to her as they rode.

  He guessed by her carriage, by the way her eyes met his, that she was a princess of some sort, only badly used. He loved her for the past which she could not speak of, for her courage which showed in her face, and for her beauty. He would have loved her for much less, having found her in the tree, for she was something out of a story, out of a prophecy, out of a dream.

  “I loved you at once,” he whispered. “When I knew you from the tree.”

  She did not answer. Love was not yet in her vocabulary. But she did not say the one word she could speak: avaunt. She did not want him to go.

  When the cat wants to eat her kittens, she says they look like mice.

  His father was not so quick to love her.

  His mother, thankfully, was long dead.

  She knew his father at once, by the way his eyes were slitted against the hot sun of the gods, against the lies of men. She knew him to be a king if only by that.

  And when she recognized her mother and her sisters in his retinue, she knew who it was she faced.

  They did not know her, of course. She was no longer seven but nearly seventeen. Her life had browned her, bronzed her, made her into such steel as they had never known. She could have told them but she had only contempt for their lives. As they had contempt now for her, thinking her some drudge run off to the forest, some sinister trowling from a forgotten clan.

  When the king gave his grudging permission for their marriage, when the prince’s advisors set down in long scrolls what she should and should not have, she only smiled at them. It was a tree’s smile, giving away not a bit of the bark.

  She waited until the night of her wedding to the prince, when they were couched together, the servants a-giggle outside their door. She waited until he had covered her face with kisses, when he had touched her in secret places that made her tremble, when he had brought blood between her legs. She waited until he had done all the things she had once watched her brother do to the maids, and she cried out with pleasure as she had heard them do. She waited until he was asleep, smiling happily in his dreams, because she did love him in her warrior way.

  Then she took her knife and slit his throat, efficiently and without cruelty, as she would a deer for her dinner.

  “Your father killed my father,” she whispered, soft as a love token in his ear as the knife carved a smile on his neck.

  She stripped the bed of its bloody offering and handed it to the servants who thought it the effusions of the night. Then she walked down the hall to her father-in-law’s room.

  He was bedded with her mother, riding her like one old wave atop another.

  “Here!” he cried as he realized someone was in the room. “You!” he said when he realized who it was.

  Her mother looked at her with half-opened eyes and, for the first time, saw who she really was, for she had her father’s face, fierce and determined.

  “No!” her mother cried. “Avaunt!” But it was a cry that was ten years late.

  She killed the king with as much ease as she had killed his son, but she let the knife linger longer to give him a great deal of pain. Then she sliced off one of his ears and put it gently in her mother’s hand.

  In all this she had said not one word. But wearing the blood of the king on her gown, she walked out of the palace and back to the woods, though she was many days getting there.

  No one tried to stop her, for no one saw her. She was a flower in the meadow, a rock by the roadside, a reed by the river, a tree in the forest.

  And a warrior’s mother by the spring of the year.

  In medieval romances (and, to some extent, history) a knight-errant wandered (errant means “traveling, roving”) about searching for evil to defeat, dragons and other monsters to slay, and fair maidens to rescue. Such adventures are all well and good, but honor only goes so far: a knight needs reward as well. The main character of Caitlín Kiernan’s tale is not a knight because she is a woman; otherwise she fills the role of knight errant quite well.

  The Sea Troll’s Daughter

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  1.

  It had been three days since the stranger returned to Invergó, there on the muddy shores of the milky blue-green bay where the glacier met the sea. Bruised and bleeding, she’d walked out of the freezing water. Much of her armor and clothing were torn or altogether missing, but she still had her spear and her dagger, and claimed to have slain the demon troll that had for so long plagued the people of the tiny village.

  Yet, she returned to them with no proof of this mighty deed, except her word and her wounds. Many were quick to point out that the former could be lies, and that she could have come by the latter in any number of ways that did not actually involve killing the troll, or anything else, for that matter. She might have been foolhardy and wandered up onto the wide splay of the glacier, then taken a bad tumble on the ice. It might have happened just that way. Or she might have only slain a bear, or a wild boar or auroch, or a walrus, having mistook one of these beasts for the demon. Some even suggested it may have been an honest mistake, for bears and walrus, and even boars and aurochs, can be quite fearsome when angered, and if encountered unexpectedly in the night, may have easily been confused with the troll.

  Others among the villagers were much less gracious, such as the blacksmith and his one-eyed wife, who went so far as to suggest the stranger’s injuries may have been self-inflicted. She had bludgeoned and battered herself, they argued, so that she might claim the reward, then flee the village before the creature showed itself again, exposing her deceit. This stranger from the south, they argued, thought them all feeble-minded. She intended to take their gold and leave them that much poorer and still troubled by the troll.

  The elders of Invergó spoke with the stranger, and they relayed these concerns, even as her wounds were being cleaned and dressed. They’d arrived at a solution by which the matter might be settled. And it seemed fair enough, at least to them.

  “Merely deliver unto us the body,” they told the stranger. “Show us this irrefutable testament to your handiwork, and we will happily see that you are compensated with all that has been promised to whomsoever slays the troll. All the monies and horses and mammoth hides, for ours was not an idle offer. We would not have the world thinking we are liars, but neither would we have it thinking we can be beguiled by make-believe heroics.”

  But, she replied, the corpse had been snatched away from her by a treacherous current. She’d searched the murky depths, all to no avail, and had been forced to return to the village empty-handed, with nothing but the scars of a lengthy and terrible battle to attest to her victory over the monster.

  The elders remained unconvinced, repeated their demand, and left the stranger to puzzle over her dilemma.

  So, penniless and deemed either a fool or a charlatan, she sat in the moldering, broken-down hovel that passed for Invergó’s one tavern, bandaged and staring forlornly into a smoky sod fire. She stayed drunk on whatever mead or barley wine the curious villagers might offer to loosen her tongue, so that she’d repeat the tale of how she’d purportedly bested the demon. They came and listened and bought her drinks, almost as though they believed her story, though it was plain none among them did.

  “The fiend wasn’t hard to find,” the stranger muttered, thoroughly dispirited, looking from the fire to her half-empty c
up to the doubtful faces of her audience. “There’s a sort of reef, far down at the very bottom of the bay. The troll made his home there, in a hall fashioned from the bones of great whales and other such leviathans. How did I learn this?” she asked, and when no one ventured a guess, she continued, more dispirited than before.

  “Well, after dark, I lay in wait along the shore, and there I spied your monster making off with a ewe and a lamb, one tucked under each arm, and so I trailed him into the water. He was bold, and took no notice of me, and so I swam down, down, down through the tangling blades of kelp and the ruins of sunken trees and the masts of ships that have foundered—”

  “Now, exactly how did you hold your breath so long?” one of the men asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow.

  “Also, how did you not succumb to the chill?” asked a woman with a fat goose in her lap. “The water is so dreadfully cold, and especially—”

  “Might it be that someone here knows this tale better than I?” the stranger growled, and when no one admitted they did, she continued. “Now, as I was saying, the troll kept close to the bottom of the bay, in a hall made all of bones, and it was there that he retired with the ewe and the lamb he’d slaughtered and dragged into the water. I drew my weapon,” and here she quickly slipped her dagger from its sheath for effect. The iron blade glinted dully in the firelight. Startled, the goose began honking and flapping her wings.

  “I still don’t see how you possibly held your breath so long as that,” the man said, raising his voice to be heard above the noise of the frightened goose. “Not to mention the darkness. How did you see anything at all down there, it being night and the bay being so silty?”

  The stranger shook her head and sighed in disgust, her face half hidden by the tangled black tresses that covered her head and hung down almost to the tavern’s dirt floor. She returned the dagger to its sheath and informed the lot of them they’d hear not another word from her if they persisted with all these questions and interruptions. She also raised up her cup, and the woman with the goose nodded to the barmaid, indicating a refill was in order.

  “I found the troll there inside its lair,” the stranger continued, “feasting on the entrails and viscera of the slaughtered sheep. Inside, the walls of its lair glowed, and they glowed rather brightly, I might add, casting a ghostly phantom light all across the bottom of the bay.”

  “Awfully bloody convenient, that,” the woman with the goose frowned, as the barmaid refilled the stranger’s cup.

  “Sometimes, the Fates, they do us a favorable turn,” the stranger said and took an especially long swallow of barley wine. She belched, then went on. “I watched the troll, I did, for a moment or two, hoping to discern any weak spots it might have in its scaly, knobby hide. That’s when it espied me, and straightaway the fiend released its dinner and rushed towards me, baring a mouth filled with fangs longer even than the tusks of a bull walrus.”

  “Long as that?” asked the woman with the goose, stroking the bird’s head.

  “Or longer,” the stranger told her. “Of a sudden, it was upon me, all fins and claws, and there was hardly time to fix every detail in my memory. As I said, it rushed me, and bore me down upon the muddy belly of that accursed hall with all its weight. I thought it might crush me, stave in my skull and chest, and soon mine would count among the jumble of bleached skeletons littering that floor. There were plenty enough human bones, I do recall that much. Its talons sundered my armor, and sliced my flesh, and soon my blood was mingling with that of the stolen ewe and lamb. I almost despaired, then and there, and I’ll admit that much freely and suffer no shame in the admission.”

  “Still,” the woman with the goose persisted, “awfully damned convenient, all that light.”

  The stranger sighed and stared sullenly into the fire.

  And for the people of Invergó, and also for the stranger who claimed to have done them such a service, this was the way those three days and those three nights passed. The curious came to the tavern to hear the tale, and most of them went away just as skeptical as they’d arrived. The stranger only slept when the drink overcame her, and then she sprawled on a filthy mat at one side of the hearth; at least no one saw fit to begrudge her that small luxury.

  But then, late on the morning of the fourth day, the troll’s mangled corpse fetched up on the tide, not far distant from the village. A clam-digger and his three sons had been working the mudflats where the narrow aquamarine bay meets the open sea, and they were the ones who discovered the creature’s remains. Before midday, a group had been dispatched by the village constabulary to retrieve the body and haul it across the marshes, delivering it to Invergó, where all could see and judge for themselves. Seven strong men were required to hoist the carcass onto a litter (usually reserved for transporting strips of blubber and the like), which was drawn across the mire and through the rushes by a team of six oxen. Most of the afternoon was required to cross hardly a single league. The mud was deep and the going slow, and the animals strained in their harnesses, foam flecking their lips and nostrils. One of the cattle perished from exhaustion not long after the putrefying load was finally dragged through the village gates and dumped unceremoniously upon the flagstones in the common square.

  Before this day, none among them had been afforded more than the briefest, fleeting glimpse of the sea devil. And now, every man, woman, and child who’d heard the news of the recovered corpse crowded about, able to peer and gawk and prod the dead thing to their hearts’ content. The mob seethed with awe and morbid curiosity, apprehension and disbelief. For their pleasure, the enormous head was raised up and an anvil slid underneath its broken jaw, and, also, a fishing gaff was inserted into the dripping mouth, that all could look upon those protruding fangs, which did, indeed, put to shame the tusks of many a bull walrus.

  However, it was almost twilight before anyone thought to rouse the stranger, who was still lying unconscious on her mat in the tavern, sleeping off the proceeds of the previous evening’s storytelling. She’d been dreaming of her home, which was very far to the south, beyond the raw black mountains and the glaciers, the fjords and the snow. In the dream, she’d been sitting at the edge of a wide green pool, shaded by willow boughs from the heat of the noonday sun, watching the pretty women who came to bathe there. Half a bucket of soapy, lukewarm seawater was required to wake her from this reverie, and the stranger spat and sputtered and cursed the man who’d doused her (he’d drawn the short straw). She was ready to reach for her spear when someone hastily explained that a clam-digger had come across the troll’s body on the mudflats, and so the people of Invergó were now quite a bit more inclined than before to accept her tale.

  “That means I’ll get the reward and can be shed of this sorry one-whore piss-hole of a town?” she asked. The barmaid explained how the decision was still up to the elders, but that the scales did seem to have tipped somewhat in her favor.

  And so, with help from the barmaid and the cook, the still half-drunken stranger was led from the shadows and into what passed for bright daylight, there on the gloomy streets of Invergó. Soon, she was pushing her way roughly through the mumbling throng of bodies that had gathered about the slain sea troll, and when she saw the fruits of her battle—when she saw that everyone else had seen them—she smiled broadly and spat directly in the monster’s face.

  “Do you doubt me still?” she called out and managed to climb onto the creature’s back, slipping off only once before she gained secure footing on its shoulders. “Will you continue to ridicule me as a liar, when the evidence is right here before your own eyes?”

  “Well, it might conceivably have died some other way,” a peat-cutter said without looking at the stranger.

  “Perhaps,” suggested a cooper, “it swam too near the glacier, and was struck by a chunk of calving ice.”

  The stranger glared furiously and whirled about to face the elders, who were gathered together near the troll’s webbed feet. “Do you truly mean to cheat me of the bounty
?” she demanded. “Why, you ungrateful, two-faced gaggle of sheep-fuckers,” she began, then almost slipped off the cadaver again.

  “Now, now,” one of the elders said, holding up a hand in a gesture meant to calm the stranger. “There will, of course, be an inquest. Certainly. But, be assured, my fine woman, it is only a matter of formality, you understand. I’m sure not one here among us doubts, even for a moment, it was your blade returned this vile, contemptible spirit to the nether pits that spawned it.”

  For a few tense seconds, the stranger stared warily back at the elder, for she’d never liked men, and especially not men who used many words when only a few would suffice. She then looked out over the restless crowd, silently daring anyone present to contradict him. And, when no one did, she once again turned her gaze down to the corpse, laid out below her feet.

  “I cut its throat, from ear to ear,” the stranger said, though she was not entirely sure the troll had ears. “I gouged out the left eye, and I expect you’ll come across the tip end of my blade lodged somewhere in the gore. I am Malmury, daughter of my Lord Gwrtheyrn the Undefeated, and before the eyes of the gods do I so claim this as my kill, and I know that even they would not gainsay this rightful averment.”

  And with that, the stranger, whom they at last knew was named Malmury, slid clumsily off the monster’s back, her boots and breeches now stained with blood and the various excrescences leaking from the troll. She returned immediately to the tavern, as the salty evening air had made her quite thirsty. When she’d gone, the men and women and children of Invergó went back to examining the corpse, though a disquiet and guilty sort of solemnity had settled over them, and what was said was generally spoken in whispers. Overhead, a chorus of hungry gulls and ravens cawed and greedily surveyed the troll’s shattered body.

  “Malmury,” the cooper murmured to the clam digger who’d found the corpse (and so was, himself, enjoying some small degree of celebrity). “A fine name, that. And the daughter of a lord, even. Never questioned her story in the least. No, not me.”