Fourth chapter! I'd say that the fulcrum of probability has swung back towards me actually finishing this at some point, a possibility that fills me with hysterical pleasure. I actually have plans for 'March Stepper' after it's done with, so the sooner I've finished writing it the sooner I can start with the editorial process.
Feedback is like heroin; that is to say, I'm very fond of it. Now read on!
The March Stepper
Chapter Four
Once upon a time there was a Wild Hart that had a job to do. It's job was to range to and fro across the length and breadth of green England, making sure that the course of things ran smooth amongst the Trolls and monsters and fair folk of Albion until the day when the age of such creatures ended and the age of men began and it was allowed, at last, to rest. All storybook creatures feared the Hart for this reason, and when the Blue Salamander caught the sound of his hooves trip-trapping up the road he scarpered into the underbrush and the girl who loved the Troll along with him.
They crouched there in the brambles of a blueberry patch, the low-slung Salamander glittering fitfully, the girl shifting uncomfortably and occasionally going "ouch" because the thorns were very sharp and her clothes were very thin.
"Husssh!" hissed the Salamander. "He'll sssee usss, and then what a messss we'll be in!"
Obediently, the girl froze stock-still, and just as soon as she had done it the Wild Hart came prancing into view.
He was a big buck, that Hart all Trolls were waiting for- fifteen hands high, knotted with muscle and velvety with fur and bristly with antlers. Before their eyes- they hardly dared blink- he cantered to a stop and stood there snuffling the warm damp night air. His eye was a glowing red like a banked coal. The Salamander, on the other hand, had gone white all over and was trembling badly ("Hush!" whispered the girl.)
Then there was the sound of a horn somewhere to the west of Dyfed and the Hart's neck swiveled, the Hart's ears pricked, and the Hart's legs leapt up to carry him away down the road and away from the companions. A few minutes passed ("He's gone. Is it safe to come out?" "Ssshut up! Ssshut up! He could be lissstening ssstill!") and then, with much brushing-off of knees, the girl and the Salamander came out of the brush and stood, catching their breath, on the road once more.
"What would he have done with us if he had caught us?" asked the girl when she felt quite ready to move on. The Salamander did a nervous sort of running-in-circles dance.
"He would have looked at usss," said the Salamander, "with his sssad eyesss, that'sss all."
"That doesn't sound too bad," allowed the girl.
"Ssspoken like a child," snorted the Salamander, and the girl fell into a black snit that did not subside until he announced, rather guiltily, that he would lead the way to the Vicar, and scurried off down the road.
So on they went, down muddy footpaths and up and down rolling hills, over low crumbling Roman walls and under dripping branches and across streams and bridges, the girl peering carefully over the side of each one to check for trolls.
"Are you sure you know where you're going?" asked the girl from time to time.
"I know where the Vicar livesss!" the Salamander invariably snapped back.
At dawn they found their way to a little clearing in the trees with a merry fire burning in a circle of stones and an old kettle whistling away in the coals and a wagon that must have one been festively painted but was now peeling and shabby parked off to the side. Around the fire were three gentlemen having their tea in old tin cups.
"Hello," said the girl, "who are you, then?"
"We be tinkers," growled the one with the long, black moustache and the white cotton shirt slowly going yellow about the seams and the golden rings winking from every finger, "peddlin' our wares t' th' goodwives of Dyfed."
"We be pilgrims," interrupted the one with the eyepatch and the pegleg and the tattoo of a mermaid on his bulging bicep, "on a voyage o' spiritual discovery."
"Nay, nay," whined the short one with the brightly colored feather in his tricorner hat and the smoking pipe dangling from one hand and a hook for the other, "I thought 'twas agreed that we was to be Moorish explorers, writin' a traveler's guide to England!"
The girl bore this patiently, even though it was obvious even in passing that the gentlemen were pirates. They had cutlasses thrust into their belts, knives peeking out of their high leather boots, and there was a scruffy bottle-green parrot flying in lazy circles around their camp. All the same, they were clearly pirates on hard times- the nearest body of water was fifty miles away, and there wasn't so much as a rowboat in evidence, unless it was in the wagon.
"Isss tinkering ssso dangerousss, then?" the Salamander hissed snidely. At the sound of his voice the short pirate leapt into the tattooed pirate's arms, causing him to say a very ungentlemanly word as he lost balance and went head-over-heels to the forest floor and spilt his tea on the bearded pirate, who leapt up with a howl and put his foot in the campfire by mistake.
"A s-sea s-serpent!" squeaked the short pirate, oblivious to the chaos he had caused.
"A Sssalamander," corrected the Salamander, turning an offended shade of periwinkle. The short pirate blinked.
"Oh, aye," he said, "that's all right then." And he sat back down on his stool.
"You're not gentlemen at all, are you?" asked the girl in an accusing sort of voice. "You're pirates."
"Aye, lass," said the one with the tattoo, getting to his feet and pouring out the rest of the tea on the bearded pirate's smoldering boot to put it out. "I be Edrigu of the Rose, the bleedin' terror of Araby an' the lion of Morrocco, and this be Martelbane- that's him with the fine moustache- what sank a dozen galleys armed with nothin' more than a bit of string and a small square-rigged sloop at Gibraltar, and this be Mad Anton, who-"
"Oh, I'll never remember all that," insisted the girl, stamping her foot. "I'll call you Moustache, (she said, pointing to Martelbane) and you Mermaid, and I'll call you Feather."
"Fair enough," admitted the pirate, " I'd never remember our names meself if one of them weren't mine. I be Mermaid, cap'n of the Ransom, and this be Moustache, the bosun, and this be Feather, the bosun's mate. And we be the Pirates of the Floatin' Island."
"Oh, my," said the girl, and "the Floating Island?" said the Salamander.
"Aye," said Feather, "the very same! Came upon it all sudden-like, we did, and when Cap'n Mermaid figured out why the beaches bobbed up an' down so-"
"I've heard this story," said the girl, and "I haven't," said the Salamander.
"-well, we reckoned an island what could float would be a sight sounder in the water than any boat you could build, so cap'n ordered it rigged up with sails and we scuttered the Ransom, usherin' in a new and profitable career in the growing field o' topographic piracy!"
"Then what happened?" asked the girl.
"Thought you knew the story," said Mermaid, nastily.
"I heard it," explained the girl, "from a Troll." And all the pirates went 'ah!' and 'hm!' and nodded wisely. They knew about trolls.
"Well?" demanded the Salamander after a short solemn silence. "Tell usss what became of the Floating Island!"
But the silence dragged on until the girl feared that the pirates had fallen ill, or had their voices stolen by some enchantment. Finally, Moustache gave a short, embarrassed cough and looked up.
"Sank," he admitted.
Once upon a time there was a Troll on a mission. His mission was to find the farmgirl who had professed to love him and who he had spurned, and throw himself on her mercy, and beg for her to take him back. It would not be easy, and it would certainly be dangerous if the Wild Hart was abroad, but there were times in life when a Troll had to do what a Troll had to do.
Unfortunately, that no-name girl had proven very difficult to find. He had found what seemed to be her house and peered in every window (Trolls can't go through doors. It's all to do with the Rules, I expect), but all he saw was a mess of fathers and mothers and brothers and uncles sleeping on three crowded horsehair mattresses and the wrapping from a bit of cheese under a table.
He had found the paddock where the sheep were corralled but after an hour of wheedling, diplomacy, veiled threats and all-out shouting he was forced to concede that his original hunch had been right and sheep did not, in fact, possess the power of speech. At this point he was seriously considering waking someone up and eating them until they told him what he wanted to know. And that was when he found the goat.
"Hello," said the goat.
"How d'you do," said the Troll, cautiously. They stood there in the road for a moment, staring at one another.
"Have you seen my brother?" said the goat, his manners courtly. He was a trim young goat, with polished hooves and downy fur and a neat corkscrew of beard on his pointed chin.
"Eh," said the Troll, a trifle guiltily, "nah, not really. Have you seen a little girl, about yea high, asks a lot of questions?"
"'Not really' isn't much of an answer," said the goat. "I would think you would be able to provide a definitive yes or no."
"Well," said the Troll, "maybe I did see him. Wot does your brother look like?"
"He looks like me," explained the goat, "only slightly smaller, and not so neat. He's also a goat, you see."
"You don't say," said the Troll. "'ere, let me ask you one of those questions where the answer don't matter on account of the premise of the question ain't necessarily verifiably true."
"Would that be a hypothetical question?" asked the goat, generously.
"That's the one," said the Troll.
"Let's hear it," said the goat.
"Wot if I was to tell you," said the Troll, delicately, "that some sort of horrible beast tossed your brother into his cavernous maw, hooves an' horns an' all, an' crunched him up an' ate him on the spot?"
"Well," said the goat, "I should imagine that I would be pretty angry if you were to tell me such a thing."
"Yeah, yeah," said the Troll, "but how angry, would you say? Are we talkin' kinda sorta 'oh, damn the luck' sorta angry or are we talkin' blisterin' volcano of wrath?"
"I'm not sure," said the goat, "what a volcano is."
"'s like a mountain, only more on fire," explained the Troll.
"Ah," said the goat. "Well, I imagine I would be more or less of a cauldron full of boiling rage as a result of receiving news of that kind." The Troll nodded glumly.
"Yeah," he said, "I kinda figured."
"But it's a moot point," suggested the goat with a kind of edge in his polite, tinny voice, "because that was a hypothetical question, right?"
"Er," said the Troll, miserably.
"Because if it wasn't, I should be obliged to avenge my brother's death."
"The thing is," said the Troll, weakly, "well-"
"But of course if you don't know anything about it-"
"Oh, damn," said the Troll, "out with it then, I ate your brother whole, horns an' all, when he crossed my path at the sheep-bridge and now I'm going to eat you as well on account of I've gone and worked up an appetite shoutin' at things and goat goes down a treat on an empty stomach."
"You scoundrel!" cried the goat. "You'll pay for this, beast!" And he lowered his curved horns and ran headlong at the Troll until the Troll arrested his progress by giving out a good old Trollish roar, the kind where you have to unlimber your jaw and gulp down a great big breath of air and then scream so loud that your teeth rattle in your mouth like knucklebone dice and I'll stop there because actually you more or less have to be a Troll to pull it off. The goat went tumbling head over heels and when he came to a shuddering knock-kneed rest the Troll picked him up and tossed him back into his cavernous maw like a freshly peeled grape.
There was a squeal and the top half of the goat emerged out of the Troll's mouth, wobbling desperately as his lower hooves scrabbled roughly for purchase against the Troll's tongue.
"Wait! Wait!" he cried, planting his front legs painfully on the Troll's curled upper lip. "I think I did see the girl you're looking for!"
"'ou on't 'ay?" said the Troll, who was finding it difficult to articulate clearly with a hairy mouthful of goat.
"Yes! Yes, she went- that way!" said the goat, pointing wildly with his left front hoof, losing balance, and tumbling back into the Troll's mouth with a despairing cry.
"'ou've een ery helful" said the Troll, and swallowed.