Troll Mill (29 page)

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 streamside.

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 toward 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 around 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 shoreward 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.

Warm thanks to Liz
,
for everything, and especially
for uprooting the elder trees;

Catherine
,
Michele, Jackie, and Carol
,
for being the best agents anyone could have;

Phil Scott of Regia Anglorum
,
for firsthand advice on how to sail a faering;

and once again to Alan Stoyel
and Critchell Britten
,
for your help on water mills.

My apologies to you all for any remaining
mistakes.

Last, but not least, thanks to
Gillie, Sally, and Robin
,
my wonderful and understanding editors;

to David, Christopher, and Mark
for the exciting cover;

and to everyone else at HarperCollins.

Katherine Langrish
grew up in the Yorkshire Dales, the hill country of northern England, where there are still strong Scandinavian traces (in place names, family names, and even dialect) from the Danes who settled the area a thousand years ago, and where a farming community with an emphasis on neighborly interdependence continues. She graduated with an honors degree in English from the University of London and has been writing stories for most of her life. Living with her husband and two daughters on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, thirty miles from Paris, she began storytelling to classes at the International School. Her family later moved to Corning, New York, where she joined Literacy Volunteers of America. Katherine Langrish currently lives in England.

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TROLL
FELL

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Troll Mill
Copyright © 2006 by Katherine Langrish
Title page and map illustrations copyright © 2004 by Tim Stevens
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EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-04391-7

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Typography by Larissa Lawrynenko

First paperback edition, 2008
First U.S. edition, 2006
First published in hardcover in Great Britain by Collins, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd, in 2005.