“Where to begin?

  “I suppose that’s the problem with all stories. If I’m to tell you about why I wished to remain undisturbed, I have to tell you about the tomb. To explain the tomb, I need to tell you of the Sword. How I came by the Sword, well then I need to tell of the slaying of the Incandescent Boar. How I came to be on the hunt... I could go back to my birth, my parents, the foundation of the village, and still there would be another step back in time the story needs to begin.

  “So, let’s begin with the carvings. I didn’t ever wrestle a wolf cub to death in my cot. That’s all made up. Well, I expect so, anyway. It’s one of those stories I first heard when I was near thirty years and more than a hundred miles from my cradle and the man who was telling it to me, all unaware of who I was, was twenty minutes from passing out under a table from drink. He believed it, though. Don’t know where he’d heard it from, or whether they believed it, but I’ve been told a lot of things about myself that haven’t been true.

  “And some things that I wish weren’t true.

  “We did have dogs on the farm when I was a boy. Probably I played and rolled around with them. I think I spent more time with them than with the people around me. My Mum died when I was little, my Dad was always up on the fells with the sheep, or that’s how it seemed to me. I reckon he thought that I’d be better off down in the village with the family of the farmer that employed him than up in the hills with him.

  “I thought different.

  “We’d had a few bad harvests, a few worse winters, and people had grown short of food and short of temper as they do when that happens. As a child, I’d taken every chance I’d got to head off into the hills, looking for my Dad and his flocks. Never so far to get lost, not after the first walloping I got from those sent out to find me when I wasn’t back at dusk. But far enough that I probably knew the area around the village better than anyone by the time I was reaching young adulthood. And well enough that they knew that I could come back, and probably with some roots, nuts, maybe a brace of coneys if I was lucky with my sling.

  “Well, it wasn’t just us who had been having a bad time of it that winter. I was halfway along a scree slope along the side of the fell, when from behind a rock I smelled something rank and unwashed. It didn’t cross my mind for it to be an ogre until I had rounded the rock and seen him. He was staring at me in much the same way I’d stare at a slaughtered sheep roasting over the fire, near enough to reach out and touch if either of us had felt the wanting to.

  “I very much didn’t feel that wanting, and ducked back from the ogre’s hand (he being more inclined to touch, and more than touch if I’d let him). He was the worse for wear. That carving has him bulging with muscles, fire in his eyes, massive belly gorged but never sated. Well, the belly was big, but distended with starvation. His eyes were rheumy and weak, his arms thin and stringy. Ogres don’t like to come down that far from the mountains. This one had been forced to by hunger.

  “Still, he was fast. He’d have grabbed me soon enough if I’d not stepped on a loose stone and tumbled down the fellside. I picked myself up fast enough, beginning to feel the cuts and bruises after some moments had passed, only to see that ogre flinging himself down the mountain at me. Hunger had blinded him to caution or anything else but his next meal, and he actually fell past me in turn. I felt the stink of his passing buffet me like the wind, I could hear him scrabbling to his feet, but I was already running up that hill like a hare from a hound.

  “I didn’t have much of a plan. I had a hope, which did the job of a plan for a bit. That hope was that I could somehow outrun the ogre and hide myself away from him. Unfortunately, that hope didn’t last long. He wasn’t co-ordinated, a bit down to starvation, and a bit down to that being how ogres are, but he was fast. Those legs were longer than mine, ogres rarely tire and I had no hope of outrunning even a half-starved ogre in a straight race.

  “Despite hearing the ogre get up, his scrabbling feet coming slowly nearer, I didn’t stop running. I know now, once an ogre has got your scent in his nostrils, he’s going to be on your trail until you drop. Back then, all I remember is thinking that maybe I could dodge out of his way again, build up some distance, break line of sight. If I hadn’t been on the scree, the rocks shifting under his feet more than under mine, I’d have died thinking that.

  “But I was on the scree, and that particular ogre was both clumsy and relatively weak. Eventually he put one of his feet down on something he shouldn’t. Behind me, I heard the rocks slip, a rattle as smaller stones began to fall, and then I felt a thump behind me. Everything began to shift beneath me and I flung myself at the fellside, spread my arms and tried to grab onto something stable.

  “It felt like an age before my left hand held onto a sharp piece of stone, half buried in the mountain. I swept along beneath it, all the while buffeted by shards of rock coming down from the above me, desperate not to let go despite the feeling of even this stone bucking and heaving beneath my weight, growing warm and slippery with my blood. I couldn’t see a thing. The air was filled with dust, my eyes shut tight but filled with grit anyway. I moved my right hand up to the rock, let it take some of the weight, and tried to dig my feet into the ground. One of my shoes had gone, and I felt the tear in my hose.

  “I couldn’t tell you how long I stayed there, stretched out on the fell. The rocks stopped moving fairly quickly, I think. Most of what I remember was listening out for anything moving towards me. I say anything: one thing, really. But I heard nothing. I remember wondering if I’d lost my hearing, and pressing my belly to the ground in the hopes I could feel the ogre approach. A distant croak of a raven sounded like the most beautiful singing because it told me I wasn’t deaf.

  “As time passed, I knew it was time to move. I could tell you I was worried who else the ogre might be chasing, or even that I was worried about being late back, but to be honest I’d mostly just grown stiff.

  “I began with a slow movement, moving my left hand down to try and clear my eyes. I’d opened them before, but they were still full of grit and dust that I’d not cried out. I bet there’s no tale told by the bards about how my eyes were streaming for most of this time. Some of them were tears to try to clear my eyes. Some were just tears.

  “My left hand was curled into a claw, covered in blood. I thought I must have cut some tendon or other because I couldn’t move my fingers, but it was just cramp. I ended up spitting on my fingers to try and clean it before rubbing my eyes. Eventually, I could see.

  “Below me, it looked like some gigantic hand had reached out and clawed at the earth. A dark scar stretched down the fellside, the land cleared off the small stones that usually covered it, me somewhere near its top. They could be seen gathered where the land levelled off, covering last year’s growth in a blanket of grey. Some of the larger objects had travelled further. I could see the flattened trails of their path through the plants that ended where a boulder had come to rest. A few of these trails led into the treeline, where broken branches and tree trunks with long tears of moss or bark were visible even at this distance. I assumed the ogre was one of those that had vanished into the trees. He was no longer visible.

  “What I did next seems stupid even to me, but I decided I needed to look for my shoe. There was no sign of it on the steep slope and I reasoned it could be found somewhere amongst the broken bracken where the smaller stones had come to rest.

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  “Ever so carefully, ever so slowly, I edged myself sideways along until I was away from the landslide. Only then did I stand up and look at myself. Everything was coated in a layer of dust, my clothes were torn in several places, and my knees, elbows, hands and feet were scratched and grazed all over. Luckily, my head seemed fine, if dusty. Gingerly, I zig-zagged my way down the fellside.

  “I must have spent about an hour there, hobbling about the fallen stones and crushed plants in one shoe. I didn’t find my shoe on the lower slope, but did make two other discoveries. Firstly, I found my sling, which I hadn’t realised had fallen from my belt. That led to a frantic checking off the rest of my possessions, but luckily most of what I carried on me was on the front of my body and had been shielded from the debris coming from above.

  “I had some half-baked idea of cutting away some of the bark that had been ripped from a tree and fashioning it into a sort of sandal. It was when I was partway through doing this that I made my second, more unwelcome, discovery. The ogre was still alive.

  “You might laugh at me. Ogres are notoriously hard to kill. A tumble down a hillside, no matter how steep, wasn’t going to kill one. But I was young, and had not heard anything from the ogre for well over an hour. I had been more concerned about how to convince people that my ogre story was true without any actual ogre evidence. Well, it sounded like I was going to have plenty of evidence!

  “I froze up. Mighty Ulthunc, the brave, the resourceful, the courageous, stood frozen in panic. The only reason I didn’t piss my britches was because my bladder was still empty from the last time I’d met the ogre.

  “Unlike that last time, I didn’t see the ogre. I don’t think I’d have frozen up if I had. I just heard it: a grumbling, muttering, groaning noise similar to a bad-tempered drunk working himself up into a lather, but ten times as bad. The noise was coming from deeper into the woods, but I couldn’t tell from where exactly.

  “It didn’t seem to be moving.

  “When I look back, I think that was the reason I decided to head into the woods. Perhaps this was how I reasoned it out later or maybe I was thinking it through at the time, but if it wasn’t moving it was probably stuck. If it was stuck, it was probably wounded. Now, there was a bit of me thinking that if I left it, then it might get out and attack the village when we weren’t ready for it. But I think a lot of it was down to the time I’d spent sprawled across the fellside with my ears listening so hard for that ogre’s movement I could feel them stretching. I had to know where it was.

  “Again, in hindsight it seems obvious that the path of broken branches and scraped trunks I followed down into the woods had been caused by the ogre tumbling down the hill. But honestly, I think I just followed the path of least resistance. The trees were still on the flank of the fell, so there was still a slope, but even something as big and heavy as the ogre was slowing down. It was just lucky for me that he had come to a natural hollow in the land before he came to a full stop, and had lain at the bottom of this hollow, atop a pile of dried brush and leaves and covered by some of the broken branches he had grabbed to try and stop his tumble.

  “The ogre must have lain there dazed for all of the time I was searching for my shoe, and only recently begun to move. I had peeped my head over the small crag which provided the uphill boundary of this hollow, scraped clear of leaf litter by the ogre’s passing, and saw it begin to stir. Roughly three sides of the hollow was made of exposed rock, the rest of what seemed like a steep tangle of tree roots and bare earth. It wouldn’t be an easy place for a battered and starved ogre to climb out of, but it wasn’t something that could hold it for long.

  “There was a story I heard a wandering bard tell us a few years earlier of some monster, let’s say a troll, but it might not have been. Whatever it was, this creature had been terrorising the nearby towns, and time and again they’d sent hunters, mercenaries, adventurers out to kill it. Some had been killed by it, others came back saying it was mortally wounded or dead. Perhaps they were lying, but they brought back enough limbs to have equipped a whole family of maybe-trolls. And still, this monster was preying on the cattle, attacking isolated farmsteads, lonely travellers and the like.

  “Then a wise man arrived. I’ve heard this story since, and they said this wise man was Cornelian Sapiens, but I don’t think he had a name the first time I heard it. Anywise, he told the people of Wherever that this creature could only be killed by fire. Whatever harm was done to it otherwise would slowly heal, even if you chopped its head off. I always wondered about that, whether the body would regrow the head, or the head regrow the body...

  “So, a bunch of the townsfolk, led by the constable, went up to the hills, tracked this possible troll to its cave, filled it with wood and oil, and burned the probable-troll to death.

  “The story had stuck in my mind ever since. The bard told it well, but after a bit it led to all these questions, like how did the troll not see them coming or their filling its cave with kindling? But it was the only story of monster slaying I’d heard where the monster hadn’t been killed by a mighty hero (and whatever else I might have become, I was just an ordinary lad at the time). Looking down on that ogre lying in a mass of dry leaves and fallen branches... well, it seemed almost fated.

  “I’d stepped back from the edge of that hollow to start a fire. There was plenty of moss and bark around, and I had my knife and a bit of flint I’d scavenged from the farm’s scrapheap. It shouldn’t have been too hard, though I did manage to reopen the cut on my hand doing it. The light was fading, the flint was small, old and broken (there was a reason it’d been thrown away) and I was far too close to a still-living ogre.

  “Eventually, I got my fire going, and almost immediately panicked. This little flame wouldn’t survive being thrown down into the hollow. My first thought was to build up a fire on the edge of the rock outcrop and kick it over the edge before it got too strong, but the ogre was never going to stay put long enough for me to do that.

  “That’s how I ended up carrying a small piece of smouldering moss held between two sticks down into the hollow.

  “I’d moved around to the earthen slope down into the hollow. It should have been an easy scramble down for me, but I was doing it one handed, had half an eye on the kindling, and the other eye and a half on the ogre. I tripped more than once.

  “The ogre heard me coming. I saw him looking around himself and by the time I’d reached the bottom he had found me with his eyes. He had strained his neck backwards so that he could fix those yellow eyes onto me, the folds of loose flesh around his cheeks flapping down in an unusual manner, drool falling from his panting mouth and trickling over his face. Perhaps it was lucky for me that his face was fixed in my direction, because that meant he wasn’t concentrating on how to escape his predicament.

  “The broken boughs covering him were probably not heavy, but there were still plenty of branches coming off them. However he pushed them away from his body, they seemed to just fall back onto him. The leaf litter around him seemed to be giving no firm ground to push against. A bit of thought and he could have been free, but he was tired, hungry and probably not particularly bright to begin with. He watched me, arms and legs thrashing at his feeble bindings while I slowly set three fires amongst the leaf litter.

  “I scrambled back out of that hollow far faster than going in. I had both hands, both eyes to use, but much of my mind remained on what was going on behind me. When I reached the top of that bank of earth, I allowed myself to look back. Those three fires had combined into two, almost into one, and had raced across to nip at the branches surrounding the ogre. As I watched, the flames began to catch at those branches, and the ogre too late seemed to realise the danger.

  “I turned away, and forced myself to find more deadwood to throw down into the hollow.

  “I was found by the men from my village about an hour later. The shepherds had spotted the ogre from the winter pastures, and my father had ran pell-mell back to the village to warn them. Deciding to drive it off, an assembly of some of the strongest men in the village had set out to meet them. I was told later that my father had insisted on joining them once he’d heard I was out on the fells. The light from the fire had drawn their attention.

  “We stayed out there until morning, taking turns to throw more wood into the blaze. My father had hugged me tight when he first arrived, but neither of us said much for the rest of the night. He took jobs that kept him closer to the village for the next few years. I like to think he was proud of me, but I do know he was fearful for me. The other men had called me ‘hero’ and ‘monster-killer.’ I’d thought they were teasing me, but the names stuck, and they would treat me with respect beyond my years. Always, they would include me in any hunting parties when wolves had been at the flocks, or goblins had been seen in the area.

  “That’s why, eight or so years later, when Lord Gerrint called together the chief hunters from his lands to drive off or kill the Incandescent Boar, my village sent me off to join him without hesitation.”