It had a female form: old, and with scales instead of skin, yet still female for all that. He risked another look and saw the creature descending now in diminishing circles, until suddenly its wings folded in, streamlining its form, and it fell rapidly, its clawed feet extended as it seemed to head directly for the canyon wall. It struck the stone, and David saw something struggle in its claws: it was a little brown mammal of some kind, scarcely bigger than a squirrel. Its paws flailed at the air as it was plucked from the rocks. Its captor changed direction and headed for an outcrop beneath David in order to feed, shrieking in triumph. Some of its rivals, alerted by its cries, approached in the hope of stealing its meal, but it struck at the air with its wings in warning and they drifted away. David had an opportunity to examine its face as it hovered: it resembled a woman’s but was longer and thinner, with a lipless mouth that left its sharp teeth permanently exposed. Now those teeth tore into its prey, ripping great chunks of bloody fur from its body as it fed.
“The Brood,” said the Woodsman from nearby. “Another new evil that blights this part of the kingdom.”
“Harpies,” said David.
“You’ve seen such creatures before?” asked the Woodsman.
“No,” said David. “Not really.”
But I’ve read about them. I’ve seen them in my book of Greek myths. For some reason, I don’t think they belong in this story, yet here they are . . .
David felt ill. He moved away from the edge of the canyon, which was so deep that it gave him vertigo. “How do we get across?” he asked.
“There is a bridge about a half mile downriver,” said the Woodsman. “We’ll make it before the light fades.”
He led David along the canyon, keeping close to the edge of the forest so that there was no danger of them losing their footing and falling into that awful abyss where the Brood waited. David could hear the beating of their wings and, on more than one occasion, he thought he saw one of the creatures briefly ascend above the rim of the canyon and regard them balefully.
“Don’t be afraid,” said the Woodsman. “They are cowardly things. Were you to fall, they would pluck you from the air and tear you apart as they fought over you, but they would not dare to attack you on the ground.”
David nodded, but he did not feel reassured. In this land, it seemed that hunger inevitably overwhelmed cowardice, and the harpies of the Brood, as thin and emaciated as the wolves, looked very hungry indeed.
After they had walked for a little while, their footsteps echoed by the beating of the harpies’ wings, they saw a pair of bridges spanning the gorge. The bridges were identical. They were made from rope, with uneven slats of wood for the base, and they did not look terribly safe to David.
The Woodsman stared at them in puzzlement. “Two bridges,” he said. “There was only ever one bridge at this spot.”
“Well,” said David, matter-of-factly, “now there are two.” It didn’t seem like such a terrible imposition to have a choice of two ways to cross. Perhaps this was a busy spot. After all, there didn’t seem to be any other way to get across the chasm, unless you were able to fly and were prepared to take your chances with the harpies.
He heard flies buzzing nearby and followed the Woodsman to a small hollow just out of sight of the chasm. The remains of a cottage and some stables stood there, but it was clear that the property was deserted. Outside one of the stables lay the carcass of a horse, most of the meat already picked from its bones. David watched as the Woodsman peered into the stables, then looked through the open doorway of the house itself. With his head lowered, he walked back to David.
“The horse dealer is gone,” he said. “It looks as if he fled with whatever horses survived.”
“The wolves?” asked David.
“No, something else did this.”
They returned to the chasm. One of the harpies hung in the air nearby, watching them, her wings beating a fast cadence to keep her in place. She stayed in that position for just an instant too long, for suddenly her body spasmed and the barbed silver tip of a harpoon shot through her chest, a length of rope anchoring the shaft to a point lower down on the canyon wall. The harpy grasped the harpoon, as if she could somehow wrest her body from it and escape, but then the beating of her wings began to fail and she plummeted down, twisting and turning until the rope reached the end of its length and she was brought up short, her corpse striking against the rock with a dull, thudding sound. From the edge of the chasm, David and the Woodsman watched the dead harpy being hauled up toward a hollow in the wall, the barbs of the harpoon preventing the corpse from sliding off. Finally, the body reached the entrance to the cave and was pulled inside.
“Ugh,” said David.
“Trolls,” said the Woodsman. “That explains the second bridge.”
He approached the twin structures. Between them was a slab of stone into which words had been laboriously, if crudely, carved:
“It’s a riddle,” said David.
“But what does it mean?” asked the Woodsman.
The answer quickly became apparent. David had never imagined that he might see a troll, although he had always been fascinated by them. In his mind, they existed as shadowy figures who dwelled beneath bridges, testing travelers in the hope of eating them when they failed. The figures that climbed over the lip of the canyon, flaming torches in their hands, were not quite what he had expected. They were smaller than the Woodsman but very broad, and their skin was like that of an elephant, tough and wrinkled. Raised plates of bone, like those on the backs of some dinosaurs, ran along their spines, but their faces were similar to those of apes; very ugly apes, admittedly, and ones that seemed to be suffering from severe acne, but apes nonetheless. Each troll took up a position in front of one of the bridges and smiled grimly. They had small red eyes that glowed sinisterly in the gathering darkness.
“Two bridges, and two paths,” said David. He was thinking aloud, but he caught himself before he gave anything away to the two trolls and resolved to keep his thoughts to himself until he had come to some conclusion. The trolls already had all the advantages. He didn’t want to give them any more.
The riddle clearly meant that one bridge was unsafe, and to take it would lead to death, at the hands of either the harpies or the trolls themselves, or, assuming both parties failed to act quickly enough, by falling a very long distance and landing hard on the ground below. Actually, David thought both bridges looked pretty ramshackle, but he had to assume that the riddle had some truth to it, otherwise, well, there was hardly any point in having a riddle at all.
One lies in truth, one’s truth is lies. David knew that one. He’d encountered it somewhere before, probably in a story. Oh, he had it! One could tell only lies, and the other could tell only the truth. So you could ask one troll which bridge to follow, but he—or she, as David wasn’t entirely sure if the trolls were male or female—might not be telling the truth. There was a solution to it as well, except that David couldn’t remember it. What was it?
The light faded entirely at last, and a great howling arose from the forest. It sounded very close.
“We have to cross,” said the Woodsman. “The wolves have found our trail.”
“We can’t cross until we’ve chosen a bridge,” explained David. “I don’t think those trolls will let us pass unless we do, and if we try to force our way through and choose the wrong one—”
“Then we won’t have to worry about the wolves,” the Woodsman said, finishing the sentence for him.
“There’s a solution,” said David. “I know there is. I just have to remember how it goes.”
They heard a thrashing in the woods. The wolves were drawing ever nearer.
“One question,” muttered David.
