"What is? Me friend!"
"You Yig friend," said the first troll. "Yig us foe. So you us foe."
It occurred to Thorolf that he should have looked into the shifting feuds and alliances among the trollish tribes before he ventured into their lands. He said:
"Me no harm. What you do?"
"You see," said the first troll. Four trolls, one gripping each limb, picked Thorolf up and bore him along the trail. To his demands, they merely grinned and replied:
"You see!"
After an hour in this painful position, Thorolf was borne into a kind of natural amphitheater, around which the mouths of several caves gaped in the hillside. The area was dotted with tents of hide and swarmed with trolls of both sexes and all ages. The air was thick with rough trollish voices, the clang of a forge, and an overpowering stench of unwashed bodies and rotting garbage.
At the farther end of the depression, a smelting oven rose against the hillside, sending up a plume of orange flame against the darkling sky. Trolls bustled about it. Others emerged from the nearest cavern mouth with sacks on their bent backs, which they emptied on the piles of minerals surrounding the smelter. Nearby, a troll was forking browse into a pen containing a dozen goats.
Trolls clustered about the arriving party, croaking questions. The trolls bearing Thorolf shouted: "Make way! Make way! Have meat!"
They approached a formidable-looking troll with a necklace of bear claws, who sat on a boulder whittling arrow shafts. Deftly removing Thorolf's sword and dagger, the captors set him on his feet, while two retained their grip on his arms.
"Who ye?" said the large troll.
Thorolf repeated his identification and added: "Who you?"
The big troll chuckled and replied in fluent if heavily accented Rhaetian: "My good fellow, ye have the honor of addressing Chief Wok, ruler of the Sharmatt trolls. Since ye have trespassed without leave on our lands, without bringing tribute, and since the dragon hath taken many of our goats, we find that we must needs use you to balance our diet."
"Dost mean to eat me?" cried Thorolf.
"Aye," said the troll.
Doctor Reccared, Thorolf remembered, had a theory that tales of trollish man-eating were merely a reflection of racial prejudice, and that they never ate human beings. Reccared, he thought, should be in his boots right now. He said:
"If you do this, it will cause you endless trouble with the Zurshnitters. I am a respected sergeant in the Rhaetian Army." Wok merely chuckled again.
Thorolf raised his voice: "They'll send an army and slaughter your folk, the innocent with the guilty!"
Wok wagged a thick forefinger. "My dear fellow, we shall make sure that nought of you or yours remain in such form that the deed could be traced to us. Your garments, however necessary to lowland weaklings, are of no use to us; they shall therefore be burned. We shall make new hilts for your weapons, to fit our larger hands."
"How do you plan to cook me?" asked Thorolf.
The troll chief pointed to the center of the clearing. A large iron pot was suspended by a gantry over a fire laid but not lit. "We shall boil you, of course," said Wok.
Thorolf fought to retain his composure. "Not alive, I hope!" he said in a casual tone, as if that were merely a minor inconvenience.
"Nay, nay. It were too much of a struggle to get you into the pot alive. Ye shall be well dismembered."
"I knew not that you trolls could make so big a cauldron," said Thorolf. As he spoke, he frantically searched his memory for something he had heard or read.
Wok chuckled. "That is our smith's masterpiece. It took endless hammering and reheating and filing to make it watertight."
"Tell me, O Chief, how come you to speak such excellent Rhaetian?"
"Why not? Am I not a graduate of your Horgus College?"
"Indeed? That's unusual!"
"I'll tell you, since ye should have a tale to lighten your final hours. Years ago, ere ye were born, some well-meaning lowlanders thought, if trolls possessed the fruits of lowland education, they would turn into fellow lowlanders. So the then chief, my uncle Tep, chose five likely lads, including me, and sent them to Horgus.
"I boast not when I say that, of the five, I was the only one to do well with the language; the others could speak it only brokenly. When we completed our courses, five years later, we returned to the Sharmatts, as ye lowlanders call them. That is, all returned save poor Zid, who perished of some lowland disease.
"I fear we disappointed Chief Tep. We had picked up a smattering of Rhaetian; we had learned that the world was round; we could eat as ye do, with knives and those new Tyrrhenian things called forks. We had also acquired a taste for strong drink and insisted on wearing those woven things ye lowlanders cover your bodies with. Amongst us they are not only useless but also harbor vermin.
"Worse yet, we had lost all our trollish skills. We could not milk a she-goat, or guard the flocks against wolves and bears, or track ihex and chamois, or scale a cliff, or make fire by rubbing sticks. We could not endure to be out in foul weather. In other words, we were good for nought.
"One by one, my comrades perished. Yub fell off a cliff. Mro was fool enough to attack a dragon single-handed and was devoured. Nak went back to Zurshnitt and was last seen begging in the streets for money to buy your crazy-water.
"Seeing the results of lowland learning, I devoted myself to proper trollish skills and did not badly. When Uncle Tep died, the tribe, reasoning that I could better deal with the lowland menace because I spake lowlandish, chose me as chief.
"A few years past, some Zurshnitters came up to make us a similar offer, to train some of our youths. I declined but proposed in turn to train a number of their youths in our skills and make real men of them!"
"Very wise," said Thorolf. "What's this about tribute?"
"If ye would enter our lands," said Wok, "ye must first get my leave. When ye arrive, ye must bring this tribute, which we set at two goats per lowlander." Wok pointed to the pen with the goats. "See yonder? That is the tribute brought earlier today by a party of mountain climbers from Madjino, where they speak Tyrrhenian. Why lowlanders should come up here to climb for pleasure, I cannot fathom; but they do. They hope to ascend Mount Viggos ere the snows of winter forbid."
Thorolf said: "With due respect, has no one told you that it is wrong to eat your own kind?"
Again Wok uttered that irritating snicker. "Aye; four summers past, a preacher of one of your lowland cults came, calling upon us to accept his true faith. Since we found him amusing, we let him live a while.
"Then another preacher came, from the West, and another from the East. These three fell to quarreling, one claiming there was but one god; another, that there were two; and the third that there were three. In time we wearied of their screaming. They were delicious, especially the monotheist." Reminiscently, Wok picked his teeth with a splinter from the arrow shaft he was shaving.
Thorolf felt sweat beading his brow. "Would you not say it were right to do as one is done by?"
"I suppose so," said the chieftain.
"Well then, we Zurshnitters do not eat trolls. So by what right do you eat us?"
"Ye lowlanders may not eat of our flesh, but ye have natheless eaten our country."
"How mean you?"
"Ye stole our land!" roared Wok with clenched fists. "Once we roamed the entire ranges of the Helvetians and many lands besides. Then ye spindly, hairless creatures came. Having better weapons, ye drave us into the mountains. Ye fetched new diseases, whereof myriads of us perished. Year by year ye forced us higher into the ranges. When we protest, ye offer a new treaty, which ye no sooner sign than ye begin to violate. Now ye have devoured all the apple save the core, and some have designs on that as well.