Illeq was angry, and angry meant stomping, and stomping meant grumbling and wincing and twitching as your soft leather shoes hit something jagged or jabby with more force than necessary. This led to being angry, which lead to stomping, and thus the cycle continued. Stomp wince gripe ouch stomp whine kick swear and so on and so on and on until she walked into a stone that came up to near her knees and skinned herself quite badly on it.
“Pzessering faqqur!” she yelled, and she kicked it. This did not help, although it launched several of the smaller stones sitting atop it with considerable force into the tall grass of the mountain meadow.
“Ow,” she added.
“Ow,” agreed the grass.
“Who’s there?”
“Me,” said a small, wretched, and generally sad voice. “Me’s here. And a bump on my head, too. Someone is throwing rocks.”
“That’d be me,” said Illeq. “Sorry.”
“Oh, it’s alright,” said the voice. “It wasn’t much of a home anyways.” Its owner slipped out of the grass and stared up at Illeq from just about her ankles. It was a salamander, a little fiery serpent with legs not much less stubby than an otter’s and big red eyes that made her think of that wolf puppy that her brother Nabb was raising.
“I kicked over your home?” asked Illeq, appalled.
“No, no. Just a half-home. I was stacking these stones, you see. But I can’t burn bright enough to make them stick.” It made a little crackling noise like an ember snapping in its throat. “And I can’t burn bright enough to make hot-rock properly, and I can’t burn bright enough to make a mate happy, and everyone laughs at me. So that’s why I’m all out here, in the miserable wide-open sunny place. What about you?”
“I’m so angry I could spit stones,” said Illeq. “I want to knap.”
“You’re sleepy?”
“No – knap. Knap rocks. You hit rocks with rocks and you get really sharp rocks, the best rocks. It’s fun and it’s useful. But I asked my father to teach me and he told me ‘girls don’t knap.’”
“That’s bad luck,” said the salamander. “Could you ask someone else?”
“I did! I asked my uncle, and he said ‘girls don’t knap.’ And then I asked my mother to talk to them, and she said ‘girls don’t knap,’ and I asked my grandfather and he said ‘girls don’t knap,’ and I asked my brother-”
“And he said the same thing?”
“No. He started to say ‘girls-’ and then I kicked him and ran away up here.”
“A reasonable enough reaction,” said the salamander. “You should try spitting rocks at him instead.”
“I was joking,” said Illeq. “I can’t do that!” Then curiosity gave her a nudge. “You can do that?”
“Not properly,” said the salamander. “You need to burn bright and fast until they get all crackly and widgy. Then you twirl your tongue and jab your throat and cross your eyes and POW out comes a hot-rock that’ll burn the nose off anything that gets in your face. It’s a good salamander trick. And I can’t burn bright enough to make even a baby’s hot-rock.”
“Come on, come on,” said Illeq. “It can’t be that bad. I can’t spit rocks at all. Why don’t you show me how you do it? Here, here’s a rock.”
“That’s too big.”
“This one?”
“Too small.”
“How about this one?”
“Too jagged.”
Illeq sighed and rummaged. “This one?” she asked, holding up a slightly streaked oval the side of her fist.
“Perfect!”
The salamander’s tongue was boiling-hot and dry as a bone as it licked the stone from her palm in one smooth movement. Then its face jumped and hopped and twisted and PTTU out shot a little grey meteor, whistling through the grass like a kite.
“That’s a good shot,” admired Illeq.
There was a meaty thwack.
“That might have been a bad shot,” suggested the salamander.
Something howled from the other side of the meadow, from deep within a very, very deep chest.
“That was a terrible shot,” agreed Illeq. “Shall we run?”
“Let’s.”
And so they ran, and as Illeq stole a peak over her shoulder (the salamander had no shoulders, and as such was not afforded this luxury) she saw a full-grown mountain troll lurch up to its gangly, grumpy height, teeth already gnashing for meat.
“Up up up!” she told the salamander. “Follow me!”
And the salamander trusted her as they ran through a little grove – which the troll flattened – and over a stream – which the troll’s foot nearly dammed – and past some big stones – which the troll kicked out of the way – until they finally came to a crevice in the side of the mountain which they both popped into just as the troll’s big dirty fingers scraped at the very heels of their feet.
Illeq’s feet, really. The salamander did not have heels.
“It can’t reach us in here,” said Illeq. “I can barely fit in here. My brother barely can’t. And my father can’t at all. And this troll is much bigger than my father! Look, it can barely fit its fingers in!”
Two fingers, to be exact, and that was probably more than enough troll for anyone. They groped and stretched in the most nasty ways, relying on knuckles that shouldn’t exist in anything decent.
“Whether it can fit in or not, we’re doomed,” said the salamander. “It’ll just take a nap until we try and leave, and nothing wakes so easy as a play-napping troll. We’ll starve or be eaten, no ways without one. Oh for hot stones! Oh for a fire that burns bright!”
“There’s plenty of stones in here,” said Illeq firmly, “and we’ve got time for ages. If you can’t practice now, when can you? Here, catch!”
The salamander caught the stone on its tongue, chewed, twisted, spat, and the pebble *plinked* off the troll’s hairy finger.
“Woe,” said the salamander, despondently.
“Practice!” said Illeq. “Practice or nothing will work! That’s what I know about knapping – and I’d know more if some people would be reasonable and stop being terrible and worse than that like they always are – and I bet you the world and a wing it’s true for anything else worthwhile too. Practice, practice, practice, practice! Here’s another!”
By sundown (best as they could tell from the light seeping past the troll’s hairy knuckles) Illeq’s voice was raw from encouragement, the salamander’s tongue was sore from spitting, and the troll’s fingers were just as ugly and invincible as ever.
“Starve or be eaten,” sighed the salamander. “I hope I starve. I don’t want to be eaten.”
“I’ve been hungry before and I don’t like it,” said Illeq. “I hope I bite him on the way down. Bite off that big stupid nose of his.”
“Can we stop now?” asked the salamander. “I’ve got no fire and you’ve got no more stones and we’re both tired.”
“One more,” said Illeq. “One more. The other thing about practice is you’ve got to do it until you’re sick of it, then do just a little bit more. One more stone!”
“There’s no more stones!”
Illeq’s night-vision was pretty good by now, and she had to admit that the floor of her little nook was as clean as a whistle. But the walls at the back were bumpy and jagged as anything, and with a wrench and a heave and a haul she snapped off an irregular lump the size of four of her fingers. It was black and smudge-soft in her hands.
“Here. It’s funny, but it’s a rock. Catch!”
The salamander caught it. It chewed, twisted, chewed, twisted, crossed its eyes and uncrossed them, then made a funny noise.
“What’s wrong?” asked Illeq anxiously.
The salamander continued making its noise by way of answer; it sounded a bit like a tree falling over. Then it coiled up on its back legs, reared back, and belched.
When Illeq was done patting the smouldering remnants of her left sleeve off her arm and inventing new swearwords, she looked at what had happened to the stone wall at her side. It was crying – strange liquid tears were beading on its surface, simmering out of the cracked rock and hissing against the floor.
“Maybe you shouldn’t eat another one of those rocks,” said Illeq. The salamander made a funny burbling sound that could have been agreement or maybe not. One of its eyes wouldn’t stop spinning, the other had fixed itself due north and wouldn’t budge.
Illeq stared at the dripping wall. The heat rising from it was already making her eyes sting and her breath wheeze. In a minute she wouldn’t have time to starve to death.
Maybe it was time for strange ideas.
“Could you try spitting this instead?”
The salamander crawled to the wall, succeeding after the third try and a nudge from Illeq’s foot (there went half her shoe). It licked it carefully, like a newborn fawn discovering its mother’s teats for the first time, then plunged into its task with glee. Its cheeks soon bulged and steamed.
“Ready?” asked Illeq.
It nodded.
“Now, follow my finger, and when I flick it, you spit it. Right?”
Nod.
Illeq raised her voice. “Hey! Hey you! Hey troll! Hey sleepy-bones!”
The troll’s fingers, grown somnolent over the past hour, twitched.
“Hey big-nose! Hey old stone-fart! Wake up and come in here and try to eat us, huh? You too old and fat? Too stupid and fat? Or just too fat?”
There was a growl that put a bear’s to shame, then out came the fingers and down came the troll’s face; teeth, nose and all. Its little eyes glittered at them from behind its snout as it snarled.
“Nice to meet you too, ugly,” said Illeq. And her finger flicked.
The mouthful of molten heat the salamander held was almost too quick to see – a blur of red and white that cut across her eyes for an instant – but the impact was unmistakable. The troll screamed its lungs out into their faces, lurched backwards, then ran off howling, nose scalded down to a little red nub and dripping melted stone from its face like white-hot mucus.
Illeq scrambled out into the air and breathed deep, feeling the taste of rock and powder leave her. It had turned into a steam bath in there. The salamander joined her after a few minutes. It kept walking into the mountain by mistake.
“My,” it said after a time.
“Are you alright?”
“My. Me. Yes,” it decided. “I’ve never burned that bright before. I’m not sure anyone has.”
“Weird rocks,” said Illeq with the authority of her age. “That was a really weird rock you ate.” She looked up at the sky. “I’ve got to go home. Do you want to come?”
“Is it far?”
“Not so far. Maybe.” She looked at the salamander’s little legs, saw the wobble. “Can I carry you?”
“If you possibly could.”
There was a lot of fuss that evening, and come the next morning everyone came up to the meadow to see the mess and make sure that any of it was actually true.
(The salamander came too, wrapped around Illeq’s neck. Its legs were sore).
They found the troll-wreckage, they found the burnt grass, and dripped on the ground, cold and hard, they found strange shining stone, frozen in the shapes that it had puddled on the ground in, like ice.
And then they looked into Illeq’s little nook and they saw a whole wall of it. Frozen mid-bead, just waiting to boil up and flow.
Illeq never did learn how to knap her whole life. She was kept too busy running and inventing and making bit by bit the funny little collection of tools, odds-and-bobs, and basins that let her and the salamander melt and mould and shape and sharpen up the strange stones they’d called ‘metal.’
And she was always very busy, because whenever her brother, or her uncle, or her father came down to ask if they could help, they were always given an answer by the salamander, in between its lunches of coal.
“Boys don’t forge.”
Being busy was worth it, for that.