Third chapter! Whooo!
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The March-Stepper
Chapter Three
Once upon a time there were three billy-goats, and the name of all three was Gruff. They lived on a ten-acre estate of mean and scruffy badlands in the green heart of Dyfed, and fed there on dandelions and crabgrass. Their lot was stingy, and their daily rations meager, but they were happy- and free from predators, for the biggest goat had taught the wolves and the foxes to fear his powerfully curved horns.
All the same, from time to time they wandered. You can live for a long time on dandelions and crabgrass but it's hardly pleasant dining and even goats like to eat out once in a while.
One day, the youngest goat was going into the hills to make himself fat when he came upon a bridge of stones set over a yawning gorge. Thinking nothing of it, he set off across it, his hooves trip-trapping across the cobbles.
Halfway across a kind of throaty gravelly voice floated up from somewhere beneath the road. "Who's that tramping across my bridge? A goat, I hope."
"I am a goat," volunteered the goat, who had more courage than brains.
"And what's your name, goat?" asked the voice, with just a hint of hunger. Bells began to go off between the goat's long, feathery ears.
"I don't have to tell you," he said, his voice quavering bravely as he cast about for the source of the voice.
"But you could you tell me if you was of a mind to?" the voice said sweetly.
"What?" asked the goat. Under the bridge, something heaved a patient sigh.
"Well, you do have one, don't you?"
"Well, yes, in fact," said the goat, squinting hard, "but my brother told me not to talk to-"
And the Troll came up. The goat took in all seven dripping green knobbly toothy bat-eared knock-kneed ham-fisted black-eyed hatched-faced drip-nosed feet of him and gave a plaintive whimper (as I'm sure you would have done too, if you were a goat.)
"-trolls," he finished, a bit belatedly. "Oh, sod, you're going to eat me, aren't you. Don't lie."
"'s a fair cop," admitted the Troll, "but it may interest you to know that I take no pleasure innit."
"Why is that?" asked the youngest goat, rolling his buttery eyes wildly in his head and stamping his slender hooves on the cobbles.
"I," said the Troll, dramatically, "have been unlucky in love!"
"Surely not!" opined the goat.
"Nah, it's God's truth!" insisted the Troll, raising one ponderous hand high in the air. "Spurned the love of me life, I did, not one week ago, on account of she weren't a troll! Goat meat's got no savor to me now. I'm a broken troll, I am."
"If goat meat's got no savor," suggested the goat, "then perhaps you don't need to eat me after all?"
"Ah, well, not sure as I would go that far," returned the Troll, shaking his mossy head. "You know the Rules."
The goat nodded glumly as the Troll plucked him carefully up off the ground between two gnarled green fingers. He knew the Rules.
"But wait," he squeaked as the Troll opened his tooth-choked maw to swallow him down. "Have you considered the feelings of your beloved on the subject?"
"Wot?" said the Troll, with a terrible downswept frown.
"Well," said the goat, skinny legs waggling frantically in the air, "you might stop a moment to think about how she must feel, being spurned by a fine figure of a Troll such as yourself."
"Ach," said the Troll, contemplatively, "well, fairly terrible, I would imagine."
"Exactly!" cried the goat. "Fairly terrible indeed! How can you stand to put her through such grief?"
A leathery tear rolled down the Troll's cheek and splattered miserably on the cobbles. "What sort of Troll am I?" he bawled. "Why, I must be some kinda a a monster, goin' and doin' a rotten thing like that!"
The goat nibbled a moment on the supple webbing between the Troll's thumb and forefinger and found it inedible. "You must go to her!" he insisted. "Troll, you must go to her! There may yet be time!"
"But she ain't a troll," snuffled the Troll. "Can't get hitched to her if she ain't a troll. That's in the rules, that is." The goat butted his soft, velvety head against the Troll's hand comfortingly.
"Chin up," he said, "nobody's saying you have to marry her right away. You're in the prime of your life, you are! Time enough to sow some wild oats before you settle down. As for her not being a troll-" and here he winked experimentally- "well, there's ways around that, aren't there?"
The Troll stopped blubbing and regarded the goat carefully, holding him out at arm's length- a tall order, for trolls have long, long arms. "'cor," he said, "you ain't half smart, for a goat."
"I try," said the goat, modestly.
"S'ppose I know wot I got to do now," said the Troll, screwing up his face in determination.
"Oh?" asked the goat, widening his eyes in polite curiosity.
"Yeah," said the Troll, "I got to go and find that no-name girl and beg her to take me back. Won't be easy, bein' as it's an affront to Trollish dignity an' all that, but you gotta do what you gotta do, am I right?"
"As rain," affirmed the goat. "May I go, sir?"
"Nah," said the Troll, "you're coming with."
"Well then," said the goat brightly, "I'll just scamper along beside you, eh? Would hate to trouble you unduly."
The Troll grinned horribly. "No trouble at all," he said, and opened his toothy mouth as wide as it would go, which for a troll is very wide indeed.
"Oh," said the goat in a small voice. "Well, it was certainly worth a try."
A few moments later the Troll emerged, rubbing his belly in contentment, and loped off along the sheep road to Dyfed.
Once upon a time there was a girl who loved a Troll on account of the stories he told her- or the half-stories, because she had learned that Trolls aren't good at telling whole ones- or at least her Troll wasn't, if she could call him her Troll at this point.
That was the problem, when you got right down to it, and the girl was of a direct and penetrating mind. The Troll had spurned her girlish advances. And if the Troll would not marry her (she reasoned) then she would have to find someone who would.
So on a fine warm evening when the planting was done and her seven brothers and two uncles and mother and father were all comfortably sprawled across three crowded horsehair mattresses, the girl crept out of the cot in the kitchen where she slept and found a burlap sack in a cupboard.
In it she tucked two meat pies, a handful of small, sour apples, half a wheel of cheese, and (after a few moments of ferocious squinting indecision) her mother's second-best kitchen knife, the one with the small curving nick halfway up the blade. Then, slinging the sack over one small shoulder, she stole silently into the summer night.
An hour later, she had eaten one of the pies and several of the apples and a good third of the cheese and found herself homesick scarcely half a mile from her own front step. Her tired back was longing for her cot in the kitchen and her feet were longing for her warm, soft slippers. The sack slipped from her stiff fingers and she plopped to the ground at the foot of a stately beech, feeling thirsty and lonely and generally sorry for herself.
But then she heard a noise- no, not a noise, but a full fledged Noise- in the branches above her, a kind of rustle of leaves and a skittle of legs and a soft hissing like a kettle on the warm hearth. "Is there someone there?" she asked, cautiously, climbing to her feet.
There was a brief pause.
"No," came the answer from somewhere in the sighing foliage. "Nobody'sss here, even a little. Go back to sssleep, little girl." The voice was soft and whispery with just a touch of pride in it. The girl frowned.
"I wasn't asleep," she complained. "And if you weren't there, then you wouldn't be able to answer properly, would you?"
"Oh, ssshame," hissed the Noise, "thisss one'sss a sssmart one, isssn't ssshe? Sssmart little girl."
"Come down," called the girl imperiously, and to her surprise the Noise obeyed. It came down on four legs speckled with pale blue glittering scales, dragging a glimmering, lashing tail behind it, with bright little glowing yellow eyes shining proudly from its small, triangular head. It was, in short, a Blue Salamander.
"You ssshouldn't be out by yourssself ssso late, little girl," said the Salamander. "You might meet the Wild Hart."
"The Wild Hart?" asked the girl, curious despite herself.
"He'sss abroad tonight," noted the Salamander, casting a superstitious glance over one thorny leg.
"I thought," said the girl, carefully, "that he was only for trolls."
"He isss," said the Salamander, sounding mildly offended at the question, "but the Wild Hart isss not to be trifled with, all the sssame."
The girl narrowed her eyes, for the Troll had told her of the Blue Salamander and she knew that he was not to be trusted. "Are you going to put a spell on me like you did to the Turk in the story?"
"Perisssh the thought," hissed the Salamander. With a decisive nod, the girl sat back down again, and the Salamander twined the rest of the way down the trunk and came to rest in a languid limber heap on her sensible brown boots.
"Ssso what are you doing out by yourssself ssso late?" he asked, probingly. The girl scowled, then softened.
"Looking for love," she said, tossing her shoulders back in a careless shrug. "You haven't seen it, have you?"
"No," said the Salamander, "but I would love you, if only I could."
The girl frowned at that. "Why can't you?"
"Sssalamandersss don't love," he explained. "We're not built for it. I haven't a heart, you sssee."
"How horrid!" said the girl. The Salamander twitched his glittering bejeweled tail without much emotion.
"It'sss a living," he said. "Perhapsss you could ask the Vicar where to find love? He'sss frightfully sssmart, that Vicar, even if he isss a churchman."
"Do you think he would know?" asked the girl, suddenly sure that the Vicar was her last, best chance to find what she was looking for.
"Nobody knowsss more than the Vicar," said the Salamander firmly, "unlessss it'sss the Wild Hart himssself, and it would take a fool's fool to ssstrike a deal with the likesss of him-"
But here the girl shushed him, for she heard a sound coming from down the cobbled road, a trip-trapping of hooves and a warm, breathy snort. The Salamander's blue scales blanched to the color of freshly squeezed milk.
"It'sss the Wild Hart!" he hissed. "Hide!"
And with a crash and a rustle they dove into the bushes and brambles by the side of the road.