Troll Wedding
by
John DeVeraart by Bend Waverly
I have not had much desire to wed in my nineteen years and fewer opportunities. As my father had the habit of saying, "There's not many, Karya, as would take on a wife with no dowry and no womanly charm about her." Well, I have learned that there is someone for everyone, as difficult as that may be to believe, for true love, if not exactly blind, is certainly nearsighted.
I was "invited" to the troll wedding when I was trekking over a pass in the mountains South of Hightower. I regained consciousness atop a pile of troll food brought as gifts to feed the wedding party. The assortment of creatures in the pile ranged from the mangled remains of a wolverine to the well-aged carcass of a mountain sheep. Most of the creatures were dead but a few of them, like me, had been merely concussed. My arms had been tied behind me at the elbows.
Now, you wouldn't want to be the patient of a troll surgeon, or the victim of a troll poet, but there is nothing to beat a troll when it comes to the tying of knots. Even your veteran sailor who excels at complicated half-shanks and quadruple looping twists is beggar to the troll for tightness and efficiency when it comes to tying something up. I didn't even bother to struggle.I had the best of seats, high and with an unobstructed view of the whole mangy affair. The groom, one Jabnail, was dressed in his very best, which amounted to a sweat-stained tunic of some unwholesome roughcloth. Next to Jabnail, in front of an unholy stone altar stained with dried blood and less appealing and more gruesome fluids and unidentifiable bits, was a troll priest, who was appallingly naked except for streaks of ochre and charcoal painted on his fat and bulbous body. Whether it was the sight of a fat troll priest clothed only by a few freakish wisps of hair, or the effects of being thrown headfirst against a rock wall, I found myself struck with a sublime and terrible nausea.
The guests of the wedding, who were also dressed in their raggedy and filthy best, squatted impatiently in two amorphous groups with a path between them. I could see and hear Heartripper and Mangledlimb, respectively the father and mother of the bride, towards the front. Their heated discussion seemed to be directed at the unsuitability of the groom for bashing and braining. Across the improvised aisle were the groom's parents quietly eyeing the mother and father of the bride, and grimly muttering under their breath.
The priest signaled to someone at the back of the crowd out of my range of vision. When he spoke, it was with the thick-lipped slur of trolls, and the eloquence of your average grapefruit.
"Trolls! Jabnail wants to mate Legbreaker. Legbreaker willing. Anyone want to fight?"
A question like that spoken in a group like this was like asking a Barrows Down tavernfly if he'd like a drink. But the grumbling from the crowd was more in the spirit of joyful destruction than actual bellicosity. Heartripper did fill his chest with a great lungful of wind before his significant other, Mangledlimb jabbed him in the stomach with an elbow and made him exhale without saying a word.
This did not go unnoticed by the father of the groom, whose face darkened significantly.
The sounds of Troll music are something best not described in too much detail. Think of the most horrible noises you have ever heard. Death-rattles. The dry susurration of a rattlesnake's warning. The sounds of retching from an empty stomach. Bagpipes. Banjoes. Then add the unintentional syncopation of two trolls drumming on a long hollow log with nothing but rocks and the conviction that the more times you hit the log, the better. loud and the more times you hit the log, the better.
The bride came from the back of the clearing and marched slowly between the two squatting mobs of guests. If Legbreaker was following tradition, then she indeed did wear something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. She wore a tight and ancient half-tunic of moth-eaten wool that barely covered her huge and flopping dugs. In opposition to this, she wore a kind of skirt made from the freshly-skinned and uncured hides of a dozen skunks. I am guessing she borrowed her headdress, which was something like a deformed clay pot with the bottom knocked out. The something blue was a sizeable pimple on her bulbous nose.
Jabnail was excitedly jumping up and down in anticipation, and he, at least, appeared to be well-pleased with his bride's horrific beauty. Jabnail's mother, though, sniffed after one glance and watched the rest of the procession down the length of her craggy nose. Jabnail's father drooled a bit, but I can't be sure that that wasn't a normal feature of his demeanor. Heartripper and Mangledlimb looked as happy as the two of them managed to get during the whole thing.
Legbreaker's march down the aisle ended with a kind of skip and run when she couldn't wait any more. The priest looked at the anxious and overheated pair. "You two want to mate?"
Jabnail grunted, but Legbreaker was more loquacious, answering in a gruff rumble, "Of course, you ass!"
The priest did not seem to take umbrage at the metaphor, and continued with the ceremony.
"Good! Jabnail, give ring."
Jabnail held out an intricately carved bone ring that would have served to fit about my arm, but did quite well for the bride.
"Legbreaker, what you give?"
Legbreaker held out a thick and shiny bronze nail, about as wide as my little finger and three times as long. Jabnail's eyes widened until they looked like porcelain saucers with a puddle of slimy pond scum in the center. As quick as a mongoose, Legbreaker took her groom by the nose and jabbed that nail through the fleshy nostrils and septum. I thought at first that Jabnail's howl was born of anguish as he snorted frothy blood, but as the bleeding diminished and the groom happily wiped away any gore from his mouth and chin with the hem of his tunic, I discovered that Jabnail and the majority of the guests were actually cheering! Mangledlimb seemed wistfully sentimental when she elbowed her husband's gut once more.
The priest had to hurl a few boulders at the crowd to get them to quiet down, and a couple of the boulders were thrown back. Only one grazed the priest.
"Legbreaker and Jabnail married. Eat now."
I was not happy to hear the priest declare an end to the ceremony, for, as I was the topmost of the viands, I feared being a kind of aperitif. But for the inclusion of one more customary part of a troll wedding, I should have been torn limb from limb and consumed right then. Two youngish trolls notable only for their obvious maleness, carried from the back of the clearing a wedding cake. At least that's what I will generously call the grayish mound of baked pudding-like melange of organ meats, crushed nuts and uncrushed grain. The pair of trolls set the plank bearing the cake down on the ground between the two sections of guests who enthusiastically rushed forward and began gouging out handfuls of the gooey and gory mess.
Jabnail shoved two or three trolls away and sank both hands into the cake and brought out a portion for himself and his unlovely bride, who ate the cake directly from the troll's meaty hand. Had I been Jabnail, I would have checked the number of my fingers afterwards. But then again, trolls were never given to mathematical computations.
The groom's father, while simultaneously shoving the cake into his mouth addressed the party. "Troll brothers!" "And sisters, Toothdigger," interjected his wife hotly.
Toothdigger looked at her askance and then continued. "Jabnail mated to Legbreaker. She lucky to have such a strong and ugly troll!"
Heartripper looked up from his studious efforts at licking his hand and grunted menacingly. When Toothdigger failed to respond politely to the grunt, Heartripper swung his fist into the other troll's chest. Of course, Toothdigger fell back to be caught by his wife, who promptly shoved him back into the fray. The two mighty trolls grappled with each other and were soon rolling about the clearing punching, biting and butting anything that came within their range, which broadened the fight quickly.
Soon, even the naked painted priest was crashing into the melee and eye gouging anyone he could reach. The mothers of the bride and groom were at each other, diligently and maliciously tearing at each other's hair, what little of it there was. Any of the animals in the pile of vittles upon which I lay that were at all conscious began to frantically squirm away from the circle of the battling trolls.
Jabnail made good on his name by thrusting the sharpened end of his index finger at a combatant that was nearly a foot taller than him. Though troll flesh is harder than stone, the troll about to be impaled with a serrated fingernail the length of my shortsword dodged instead of facing that weapon.
Jabnail couldn't halt his forward momentum, physics being as difficult for him to manage as arithmetic, and followed his finger directly toward my head in stumbling rush to correct his balance.
I fell to my side just in time to avoid that spear-like finger and its nail, which imbedded in a tree trunk. I guess Jabnail had trimmed and sharpened his fingernail more for effect than for practicality, for once it had lodged in the wood of the tree trunk, Jabnail could not remove it. When his erstwhile target saw his difficulty, he laughed heartily and picked up a rock the size of an anvil and aimed a deliberate and powerful punch at Jabnail's head. Jabnail, who was pulling at his hand, trying to free it from the tree, did not see the blow coming. The rock smashed into the side of his head and Jabnail was tossed several feet away, his fingernail snapping with the crack of lightning and shrapnel from that weapon scoring half a dozen trolls nearby. Miraculously, none of the pieces of nail came close to me. Jabnail picked himself up and shook his dented head.
His assailant, perhaps, should have selected a more vulnerable target for the rock, for when Jabnail resumed the fray, he took out the rock-basher with a single headbutt to the troll's gut. But Jabnail was not free from the fight, for Heartripper went after him with fists that moved as fast as a falling avalanche and with nearly the same effect. If Legbreaker did not join in to help her new husband by raking terrible gouges out of her father's back, Jabnail would have fared much worse!
The fight was a marvelous and furious battle of titans, but I had more pressing concerns, like avoiding attending the troll reception. I stood precariously on that pyramid of carcasses and rubbed the ropes on my arms against the fractured edge of the embedded fingernail. It was very awkward sawing and the trolls constantly interrupted my progress when their struggles jarred my platform and knocked me down.
It took the better part of half an hour before I broke through my restraints, by which time the trolls had just found their second wind and were fighting with each other with magnificent violence. I caught sight of the newlyweds now and again as I picked my way down the pile of dead animals. Legbreaker had a black eye, and Jabnail's nose jewelry had been ripped off. I don't think it made him look any worse.
The parents of the bride and groom were happily engaged in taking on all comers, backs to each other and laughing madly. I made it to the ground and edged my way around that furious mass of teeth and fists and feet biting, hitting and stomping away!
I ran a long way down from that mountain before I could no longer hear the mad frenzy of the troll wedding. I hoped the happy couple would not miss the escaped part of their wedding feast, but I cannot doubt that their trollish wedding reception would be surpassed in ferocity and terrifying brutality only by their trollish honeymoon.