Chapter 13. Brumvack’s Retribution
Brumvack, now the only troll in a cave once filled to the brim with massive, stinking bodies, stalked from one end of trolls’ living quarters to the other. He was on a mission. The first step of the mission was to find the biggest, roundest rock in the place.
Brumvack picked up the largest rock from Schnottweiper’s bed, a beach-ball sized rock that made him grunt to lift it. It was pretty round, he thought, but it was awfully small. Too small, surely, for the job he had in mind. He tossed it back, and kept searching. The perfect rock was here somewhere, he knew.
Brumvack’s vision was simplicity itself: he, the recently deposed leader, would show those traitorous trolls a thing or two: he would lock them out of their ancestral home. Let them stew over that for a while. Let them find their own cave! Or let them figure out how to live on land! Or, better, let them be eaten by the Dark Water Horror, if such a thing still existed. Brumvack didn’t care.
The trolls’ cave had only one entrance: that at the depths of the lake. That made it a pretty simple operation to lock them out. All he had to do was block off that one entrance. A simple operation: the right rock would do it. A sizeable rock would plug up the entrance tighter than a cork. One sufficiently round would make it even easier. All he would have to do is to roll the rock down to the beach, and ease it into the water. From there, given the steep drop-off, the right rock would roll of its own accord into the narrow cavern that connected Dark Water to the lake itself. The trolls, upon their return, would then be unable to swim through that cavern. They would find only a blocked entrance. And then, his retribution would be complete. They would know who had done this to them. They would know that they had made a mistake in deposing him. At that moment, they would realize the truth: that they had needed him all along.
It was a slam-dunk solution. The trolls would be locked out of the safety of the cave that they had been so eager to leave. Brumvack himself would have plenty of time and space, with no smelly and complaining cave-mates. And, best of all, justice would be served.
Choosing the appropriate rock, Brumvack thought, was the hardest job ahead of him. From there on, it would be clear sailing. He peered into Obeast’s bed, but those were all too small too. Obeast, Brumvack remembered, didn’t like big rocks for his bed; he said they hurt his back. “Pansy,” Brumvack muttered, as he continued his search.
The rock Brumvack finally chose wasn’t as round as he had hoped. Nor was it quite as big as he had hoped. It did have the advantage, however, of being relatively close to that long stretch of underground beach leading down to Dark Water. It was a rock with one flat side that the trolls had often used in the days of the bone-headed dinosaur fish. Those fish…(and here Brumvack tilted up his considerable head and stared at the ceiling as he allowed himself a moment of pining for the good old days)…those fish had been too large to bring into the troll’s living quarters. Rather, they had had to be dragged up on shore and hacked up with the trolls’ one stone hatchet. This was the rock that had come to be used as a work surface, a sort of cutting board, for the project.
While it was perfect for a cutting board, it wasn’t so perfect for a door plugger-upper. With that one flat side, Brumvack thought, it wouldn’t be as easy as he had hoped to put it in place. Impatiently, he backed up and eyed the thing again. It did have that one flat side, but the rest of it was pretty round. Well, reasonably round. Well, sort of roundish, in an unevenly oblong, flat-sided kind of way. But never mind! This was no time for nitpicking! This was time for action!
Brumvack put his massive body to work on the project. The rock, once it had been loosened from its time-cemented spot, rolled rather easily. Rolled rather easily, at least, until it didn’t any more: once he had rolled it halfway over, the flat side was of course flush with the ground, and showed little inclination to roll further. But Brumvack put his shoulder into it, gave a massive heave with his tree-trunk legs, and managed to budge it. The edge of the rock lifted an inch, then two inches, a final third inch, then toppled over once again onto its roundish side. Then, it was easy to lean into it and give it another push until it had rolled a complete turn and was on its flat side again. He had moved it! He had only managed perhaps ten feet, but he had moved it. Another six or seven rolls, and it would be at the water’s edge.
Brumvack collapsed against the rock and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. This was work! Too much like work! He felt a little dizzy, in fact. Dizzy from the physical labor after so many centuries of hibernation? Dizzy with hunger? He didn’t know. But his dizziness cleared up quite a bit when the thought of the trolls returning to the cave came across his mind.
“Traitors,” he grumbled, then burped. Brumvack twitched his head backwards at the smell of the air escaping his lips. It smelled something like three-day-old fish and rotten eggs. Something, Brumvack knew, was going badly wrong deep within his belly. That new food, as tasty as it had been, wasn’t settling well.
Brumvack waved away the burp with his massive hand and sighed. “What a world,” he said, “what a world.”
But again that thought of the trolls came to him. He imagined them marching up the beach, full of whatever they had eaten after a successful hunt, and sneering at him as they passed. Schmoozeglutton would be the last to go by, with a smug look that Brumvack would love to smack right off of his face. And then Brumvack settled into that same fantasy that had accompanied his entire childhood: if only he were a little bigger. If only he were a little more troll-like.
He sighed. It wasn’t easy to be the smartest troll. True superiority, he knew, wasn’t easy to live with. It was true: the trolls resented his brilliance. They resented his leadership skills. That was why they had left him behind. He was a reminder to them of all they wanted to be, and never could. So, they made a big show of respecting only physical size and massive belches: those things that could make them feel adequate.
But he wasn’t in a mood to ponder the relative volume of belches. That was what had gotten him into this mess. The thought gave him the energy to put his shoulder once again to the boulder. He’d lock them out if it was the last thing he did.