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They call him Troll. Lives under the bridge crossing the Narrows of the River Vesper, feeds on the scraps and the refuse and the excrement of the City; no way for a man to live.
So they call him Troll.
He stands seven feet tall, as a proper troll should. Huge and broad, shoulders like the overturned hull of a boat, balanced oddly on a waspbride’s waist. Long simian arms hang down from the gunwales, down to the knobby knees that always hurt. Big hands at the ends of those arms, neither clenched nor unclenched, but fingers caught in a thoughtless arch, lost somewhere between. Still as wood, only the thumbs wiggle slightly as he breathes. Small head, round and smooth, but knobby like the knees, perched on an existentialist neck; toothy grin or grimace surrounded by warty flesh, like toads gathered around the thin lips; all hidden behind a raised storm collar, everything else under a long coat made from boating-leather. Size fourteen feet buried to the ankles in the muddy banks; mud on the coat’s hem, as well.
The bridge keeps the rain out, but he’d still wear a hat if he had one. Instead, he holds a ragged umbrella open above his head: a delicate, silver, webbed-legged spider in his giant troll hand.
Standing, now, by the River’s edge, under the bridge, like an old tree looming over the water, the stiff boating-leather coat like resin-smeared bark.
They call him Troll. He wouldn’t like it if he knew.
The whites of his eyes shine clear with a cold, dead light—something you wouldn’t expect from Troll’s dull, ugly mug, if you could see his eyes from under the shadow of that massive brow, that is, behind the cover of that buttoned-up storm collar. Just the eyes pierce the darkness between brow and storm collar. Troll’s eyes.
Troll’s eyes catch something. Something in the water. Something worth looking at. Something worth detecting by that sharp, sharp vision.
He leans forward, on the hinges of his heels, but is otherwise still. Wonder how he can keep his balance. Must be those size fourteens, like roots stuck deep in the suck of the mud.
He leans forward. Imagine the creak of an old tree, before it falls—Tiiimmm-berrrr!—into the waters of a swirling flood; but no, Troll, he’s silent. Not a sound, not a whisper, not a breath as he leans.
Further and further, out over the water. Eyes fixed on the surface, dappled with the sky’s pale gray reflection, broken by drops of rain and the muddy hem of his boating-leather coat, which trails in the water like a rudder, and…there.
Something bobs in the water, turning over and over in the waves. Limp and stiff at the same time, pale, pale, graying pinkness surrounded by a smudgy spread of darkness.
Troll’s arms come alive, shoots out over and into the water, like the hunting arms of some giant, land-logged, barnacle-faced squid; the umbrella, as ragged as it is, floats down spinning and stick-drills gently into the mud beside him, for the moment, forgotten.
Troll’s arms alive, thick, jointless, violently unfurling coils of rope-steel: scoop, grab, lift.
“Doll?,” he asks. Troll never learned to speak proper Vespertine, and never had anybody to talk his bad Vespertine to, so he’s worse than out of practice.
But he wiggles his tongue now, in its musky, pink, ivory cage; wiggles it, surprised and pleased at the sound of his own voice, and says the word again.
Troll takes the limp form of the doll into his arms, running his fingers through the long black hair that had floated about her like a living cloud of ink in the water but now hangs limp and stiff and soggy and dead; Troll brushes it into some semblance of order, waveless ebony lines swept behind the pale, finely crafted, perfect ears. Eyes cut-out slits on the pale, roundish face, perfect porcelain doll profile straight out of an ancient Japanese print. Troll cradles her and presses her cheek against his massive chest, which heaves once, and stills.
His heart beats against cold stillness, but it has never beaten harder.
At first, the doll is silent, shocked into dumbness by the cold of the River, Troll thinks. He was never very bright. But soon, after he’s washed the doll’s porcelain face and wiped the exquisitely delicate hands and feet clean of the Rivergrime, she begins to whisper.
Troll strains to hear the murmur. First there’s a chill up his spine, as the silkier-than-silk little-girl voice creeps up his back, starting from where the bones of his back collide with those of his hips.
Then the chill spreads and transfigures into something that feels pretty on his insides.
Pretty, pretty, pretty.
Warmth; the fuzz spreads from the pit of his stomach, up his cheeks, into his fingers, even reaching into the toes still buried, foot-deep, in the mud.
