claimed to have done them such a service, this was the way those three days and those three nights passed. The curious came to the tavern to hear the tale, and most of them went away just as skeptical as they’d arrived. The stranger only slept when the drink overcame her, and then she sprawled on a filthy mat at one side of the hearth; at least no one saw fit to begrudge her that small luxury.
But then, late on the morning of the fourth day, the troll’s mangled corpse fetched up on the tide, not far distant from the village. A clam-digger and his three sons had been working the mudflats where the narrow aquamarine bay meets the open sea, and they were the ones who discovered the creature’s remains. Before midday, a group had been dispatched by the village constabulary to retrieve the body and haul it across the marshes, delivering it to Invergó, where all could see the remains and judge for themselves. Seven strong men were required to hoist the carcass onto a litter (usually reserved for transporting strips of blubber and the like), which was drawn across the mire and through the rushes by a team of six oxen. Most of the afternoon was required to cross hardly a single league. The mud was deep and the going slow, and the animals strained in their harnesses, foam flecking their lips and nostrils. One of the cattle perished from exhaustion not long after the putrefying load was finally dragged through the village gates and dumped unceremoniously upon the flagstones in the common square.
Before this day, none among them had been afforded more than the briefest, fleeting glimpse of the sea devil. And now, every man, woman, and child who’d heard the news of the recovered corpse crowded about, able to peer and gawk and prod the dead thing to their hearts’ content. The mob seethed with awe and morbid curiosity, apprehension and disbelief. For their pleasure, the enormous head was raised up and an anvil slid underneath its broken jaw, and, also, a fishing gaff was inserted into the dripping mouth, that all could look upon those protruding fangs, which did, indeed, put to shame the tusks of many a bull walrus.
However, it was almost twilight before anyone thought to rouse the stranger, who was still lying unconscious on her mat in the tavern, sleeping off the proceeds of the previous evening’s story telling. She’d been dreaming of her home, which was very far to the south, beyond the raw black mountains and the glaciers, the fjords and the snow. In the dream, she’d been sitting at the edge of a wide green pool, shaded by willow boughs from the heat of the noonday sun, watching the pretty women who came to bathe there. Half a bucket of soapy, lukewarm seawater was required to wake her from this reverie, and the stranger spat and sputtered and cursed the man who’d doused her (he’d drawn the short straw). She was ready to reach for her spear when someone hastily explained that a clam-digger had come across the troll’s body on the mudflats, and so the people of Invergó were now quite a bit more inclined than before to accept her tale.
“That means I’ll get the reward and can be shed of this sorry one-whore piss hole of a town?” she asked. The barmaid explained how the decision was still up to the elders, but that the scales did seem to have tipped somewhat in her favor.
And so, with help from the barmaid and the cook, the still half-drunken stranger was led from the shadows and into what passed for bright daylight, there on the gloomy streets of Invergó. Soon, she was pushing her way roughly through the mumbling throng of bodies that had gathered about the slain sea troll, and when she saw the fruits of her battle—when she saw that everyone else had seen them—she smiled broadly and spat directly in the monster’s face.
“Do you doubt me still?” she called out, and managed to climb onto the creature’s back, slipping off only once before she gained secure footing on its shoulders. “Will you continue to ridicule me as a liar, when the evidence is right here before your own eyes?”
“Well, it might conceivably have died some other way,” a peat-cutter said without looking at the stranger.
“Perhaps,” suggested a cooper, “it swam too near the glacier, and was struck by a chunk of calving ice.”
The stranger glared