Chapter 3.
Xander was informed of everything that the Icelanders could think of concerning trolls. The two facts that stuck out the most was that trolls could turn to stone in the sun – but not always and no one knew when a troll might not turn. Also that they really liked shiny objects (and weren't too bright – okay, that was like four facts). That knowledge in hand, Xander came up with a plan. It would have been a simpler plan if he had kept Captain America's powers along with his memories, then he could have simply beaten the troll into the ground and been done with it. Instead, he had to get tricky. They went to the bank and Jón withdrew a very large bag of coins for him. Mostly krónur, but also a few foreign coins that tourists had brought in. Xander then said goodbye and drove off on his ATV.
He did as the elders suggested and stopped more than a mile from the cave he was to enter. He took several handfulls of coins and chucked them in every direction. He then started pushing his ATV towards the cave while also taking the time to leave a path of coins behind him. He stopped dropping coins while still short of the cave itself and started pushing his ATV up the hill behind the cave. It was tough, but the ATV was light and was soon in place. Xander then finished his trail of coins right up to the mouth of the cave. He saved a couple handfuls then reinforced the area of the trail closest to the cave. He saved one krónur as a souvenir and chucked the rest of the coins into the dark cave as hard as he could.
Then he climbed back up to his ATV and took a nap.
The land of the midnight sun. On the summer solstice, anywhere north of the polar circle, the sun will never set. Luckily for Xander, it wasn't the summer solstice yet, but he still had to deal with 19 hour days in a time zone very different from the one his body was used to. Sleep didn't come easily. Luckily wakefulness came very easily when he heard a shuffling sound below him once the sun had finally set. He crawled over the crest of the hill and watched by moonlight as the most butt-ugly thing he'd ever seen collected his coins in a large basket.
Xander sat on his ATV for lack of anything else to sit on while he waited patiently for the troll to leave the area. He wasn't too worried about time. After all, he'd left a trail almost a mile long. If he was lucky, the troll would get caught out and turn to stone. Once he was sure it was gone, he walked quietly down to the cave entrance. He switched on the headlamp he'd requested. It had a red filter both to preserve his night vision and to keep from alerting the troll if it looked back and saw its cave glowing.
After that, it wasn't too hard. The cave wasn't terribly complex and he made only a few wrong turns. Eventually, he found a room that looked almost human. The net was easy to spot. It was glowing – bathing the room in a soft, golden light. Xander picked it up.
"Put that back." came the inhuman growl behind him.
Uh-oh. Apparently the red filter wasn't enough, either that or something else had caused the troll to turn back, because there was no way he was done picking up all the coins. Xander turned around slowly. In front of him stood a creature over 7 feet tall, and probably would have been taller except that's all the taller the room was. He was dressed in rags, his overly large nose looked like it was leaking from a sore. Xander hoped it wasn't contagious to humans because judging by the smell, this guy hadn't bathed in years, if ever. He also looked very strong, and he wasn't talking about his smell.
"Sorry buddy. You don't get to steal people's nets and get away with it. So why don't you just back off and nobody gets hurt." Xander bluffed.
"I didn't steal it." the troll stated. "You're from that village!" he realized. "If they didn't want to lose their net, then they shouldn't have bet it in the first place."
Oh. That put things in a whole new perspective. The city hadn't lost it as in having it stolen. They lost it gambling with trolls, apparently. Could he steal from this troll for the people who'd misled him? Even if they promised to help him get Captain America back? Suddenly he missed Sunnydale and the easy morals of 'See Demon, Slay Demon'. Xander put the net back on the hooks... for now.
"They didn't tell me that part." he said. The troll visibly relaxed and no longer looked ready to kill him at a moment's notice. "But tell you what, give me a chance to win it back?"
"With what as your stake, puny human?" the troll asked.
Xander looked at the basket of coins the troll had collected way too fast. "How about another bag of coins like that?"
"Not enough!" the troll roared.
"Two bags?"
"Three bags. And not one coin less!" the troll demanded.
"Hmm. How much would it cost to buy the net then?" Xander wondered out loud.
"Buy?"
"Buy, trade, barter, swap. I give you so many bags of coins and you give me the net." Xander tried to explain.
"Ten!" the troll said proudly, sure than no human could come up with so many coins.
"Done." Xander said.
The troll opened his eyes very wide in surprise. He had been sure that no one short of a king could get together so many coins. "By tomorrow night!" he added.
Xander groaned. That might be a deal breaker. He wasn't sure there were that many coins in all of Ísafjörður. And he had no idea if he could get that many by then. But he'd try. "I'll do my best. I'll see you tomorrow night."
With that, the troll let him pass.
"You need what?" Jón asked/shouted.
"Ten bags, just as full as the last one." Xander repeated. "I don't think denominations matter, just the number of coins."
"I don't think there are that many coins in all of Ísafjörður." Jón breathed. "Perhaps if we emptied every bank in Iceland we would have enough."
"How many coins were in that last bag." Xander prompted. Despair wasn't going to help anyone.
"Somewhere near 2,000. But that pretty much cleaned out the bank. They won't get another shipment of coins for at least three days."
"What about Reykjavík?" Xander asked.
"Where do you think the replacement coins are coming from?" Jón asked in reply. "It is treasury, so there is no hurrying it. And it won't be ten bags when it comes. Only one, maybe two."
A woman came by and asked Jón something in Icelandic. He answered in English. "This young man has negotiated with the troll for the return of our net. At a very reasonable price. Ten bags of coins, any denomination, but they have to be very large bags. Unfortunately, the bank doesn't have enough coins."
"For the net? How many coins they need?" she asked.
"Ten bags full." Jón said. He then presumably said the same thing in Icelandic.
"Yes, heard you. How many bags have they given you?" she asked.
"None. There are not enough coins." Jón said.
The woman stormed over to the teller and started speaking quickly in Icelandic Xander couldn't follow. She did, however, get one bag of the same size that Xander had used yesterday. She brought it over to their table and dumped out her purse on it. She then pulled all the coins from the mess. She scraped them into the bag and the rest of her junk back into her purse.
She then went around to all the customers in the bank. Xander was able to catch one word being repeated. "Nettó." He could easily guess the meaning of that word. And when they learned what it was for, people eagerly gave up whatever change they had on them. When she was done with the customers, she turned on the tellers. They also emptied their purses, and with a nod from their manager, started recording the withdrawal of every coin in their drawers.
The manager also came out with a full bag of coins and one that was mostly empty. He placed them on their table. "Every coin in bank." he said in broken English.
Xander was very touched. More by the generosity of the customers and tellers than the bank, but still. Too bad it wouldn't be enough. Even if they mugged every customer that came in today. And here came another one. She spoke in Icelandic before depositing her own contribution. But she didn't go to the tellers then, she just walked out.
Jón translated. "One of the customers that left met her on the street and told her what was going on. She only came in to make her donation."
Very shortly, the crowd started building and the collection moved outside. People of all shapes and sizes came to donate. Little children emptied their piggy banks. Old women emptied jars of coins that Xander hoped wasn't their life savings. People from nearby towns came by car and even by boat just to donate to the cause of getting their net back.
Xander was struck by all the boats arriving. It triggered a memory, he wasn't sure if it was his from school or Steve's, of the Dunkirk Armada. In WW2, French and British troops were retreating from the Nazi onslaught. The British troops went north to Dunkirk where 340,000 men were trapped by the Germans and about to be annihilated unless a rescue mission could be launched. Unfortunately, the Britons lacked enough landing craft at the time to pick the men up from the beach. The call went out for help, and the British people answered loudly and enthusiastically. These were not soldiers. These were civilians; fisherman, bankers, yachtsmen. Every variety of boat imaginable poured out of the Thames River to make their way across the Channel to rescue the beleaguered troops. They braved shelling, machine guns from fighter planes, and German dive bombers to rescue their fellow countrymen.
Granted, these people weren't facing death here, though one woman did twist her ankle. But the sense of being there, of doing everything you could to help your neighbors, brought tears to Xander's eyes.
After a couple of hours, most of the town had visited as well as representatives of every nearby smaller town. It was close but they had their ten bags. They made sure that each was fully full, after all that sacrifice, it wouldn't do to have the troll say a bag was short and renege on the deal. The very last coin to go in the bags was the single krónur Xander had been saving as his own souvenir.
Xander and Jón hauled the bags to Xander's ATV watched over by a guard. It wasn't until their second trip, when the shocks on the machine were getting quite low that Xander asked, "What's the weight limit on this thing?" Cause the bags were heavy. Probably close to 40 pounds each.
And that was how Xander got a jeep for the return trip.
The troll growled in annoyance. The man had fulfilled his bargain and come back with the coins he had asked for. "You are truly a great king of Ísland, King Xander." he grudgingly allowed.
"Huh? Oh. I'm not king of Iceland. King of the Cretins of California, but I'm a long ways from my kingdom right now." Xander joked.
"Then what are you doing here?" the troll asked.
"My uh, kingdom is in trouble. I'm not much of a fighter, but I know of a great hero frozen in ice in Greenland. But the journey is tough, and I'll need a lot of support to get him and revive him. The net is their price."
"Then I, Gjøl Damsson, bestow upon you, Xander King of the Cretins of California, the net Hnot, woven by the elf, Iðunn."
"Err, thank you." Xander was unsure of the words he was supposed to use for such a formal transference. He took the proffered net from the troll. It glowed brighter briefly before settling back down to a dull, golden glow.
"Well, thanks. Be seeing you." Xander said as he started walking off with his new net thrown over his shoulder.
The troll waited until King Xander was truly gone before speaking. "You may indeed, King Xander."
"I, Xander, King of the Cretins of California, bestow the net Hnot, woven by the elf, Iðunn, upon the people of Ísafjörður." Xander said formally as he handed over the net. The sun was shining so it was harder to tell if there was any glow this time.
"We thank you." Jón said. "But why did you call yourself that?"
Xander shrugged. "I didn't mean to. But that's what the troll referred to me as when he handed it over. It was just kind of a joke." The two men in the room frowned at each other. "Did I do something wrong?"
"No! No." Jón said a little too quickly.
"The truth now. I know the troll didn't steal the net." Xander said with just a slight warning tone. He understood why they misled him, but it didn't mean he liked it. Even if he didn't like it, he still needed their help to get the captain and wasn't willing to risk that.
"We never said he did. We lost it to a dwarf many years ago, but it didn't start negatively affecting our town until he lost it to the troll." Jón defended.
"And the title?" Xander wouldn't be sidetracked.
"Magical creatures will treat you differently with such a title. There may be... expectations." Jón explained. "But come. There will be time to explain more on ship. We should not tarry on land. That you fulfilled the troll's demands for a trade will not make him terribly less displeased with you than had you stolen it."
The Snowcat they were offloading for him looked to Xander like someone put a small, glass room on top of a tank. If he had been a skier, he probably would have recognized it as one of the machines that groomed ski trails.
"You have approximately two more months before summer is over and you will have to cease your search." Jón warned. "You have two external fuel tanks. Leave the empty one here and run this flag up this pole. We will see it when we pass by and dispatch a crew to refill it for you. You can take the other one with you out onto the ice. You leave it behind to save on weight and pick it up on your way back. You pick up the new full one and drop off the new empty one. You understand?"
Xander nodded.
"Just like fuel. These have food. You take one and leave empty behind. It gets filled when the fuel does." Jón waved to the Snowcat itself. "This is self contained. Water for sink and shower gets filtered and reused. If it gets low, just add some snow. It even has a small washer and dryer for your clothes. Same machine does both."
One of the crew said something in Icelandic.
Jón translated. "He says water heater is sensitive, gets very hot if you're not careful. But it is tankless heater. Hot water lasts for as long as you have water." Jón hesitated and waved everyone back to the launch waiting to take everyone except Xander back to the larger ship. His knife was in his hand again. Xander hadn't even seen him draw it. He was better than even Buffy with her drawing stakes out of thin air.
"This is Broddur." Jón said.
Well, if Nettó meant Net, maybe... "Let me guess, it means 'brother'?"
Jón chuckled. "No. It means Sting."
"Tell me it glows blue when orcs are around." Xander begged.
"No, but it does glow a bit in complete darkness." Jón said. "Or perhaps I am always surrounded by orcs whenever it is dark." he cleared his throat. "I, Jón Guðmundsson, bestow the sword Broddur, made by the dwarf Sindri, upon Xander, King of the Cretins of California."
This time, even in broad daylight, Xander could clearly see the flash of light when the small sword was handed over.
"I think he likes you." Jón have a small laugh. "He will always be with you. Simply think it and he will be in your hand."
Which explained to Xander how Jón had been so quick on the draw. Xander thanked him profusely and watched him get in the boat and push off before he, himself set of on his journey.
"You gave him Broddur? I hope you know what you were doing."
"I think I do. I am too old to go on any more adventures. And he will certainly need the help. We did make him the enemy of the Troll Nation, after all."
"We have been their enemy long enough. It is someone else's turn now." the old man sank wearily into an overstuffed chair.
A/N: why does an Icelandic troll speak English? The same reason every alien in the galaxy does.
Also, I really wanted to do a Troll Fight! But season 2 Xander kept getting his butt kicked. It wasn't pretty. Gjøl Damsson is in tribute to the original maker of the Troll dolls. The rest is more or less from Icelandic mythology.
A/N: The Dunkirk Armada is was a very real event from WW2 which I had to downplay because the actual event was so amazing, people would think I made it up. If you read the accounts and don't have tears in your eyes and shivers down your spine, you aren't human.