Part 16 - Terror of the Trdlo - Heaving Sea of Slimy, Stinking Beasts

By the glow of the oven, Silvernose could see the heaving masses of squealing, howling bristle-studded tubulous bodies.  They flooded the floor of the cabin up to the height of man's waist.  Their fur, slimy with musk oil, glinted in the fire light as they snarled, squealed, and undulated.

Attempt by fusing ferrets, lampreys, pastries to depict sea of trdla

Silvernose, appalled by what he beheld, shouted an immediate reportage up to the attic: “They are not just enraged with bloodlust for us, not just ravenous for any food, not just fighting each other for these prizes – they are mating!”

Shocked, Zdenka and Beata worked out the full horror: The beast was in rut.  It was the Rutting Moon for the trdlo as well as the elk and the deer.  The swarms were made up of thousands of males fighting with each other to impress the thousands of females swarming with them.  Males and females alike – there was no easy way to tell them apart at a distance – were gripped in a frenzy of violence and lust. The musk, the overpowering musk, billowed from a thousand repulsive, rippling little bodies.

Beata struggling to fight down her fear, brainstormed aloud between ragged, barely-controlled gasps: “We can... scatter the logs and embers from the oven before us... to make a fiery path through the trdla... Maybe I carry them in Ludmilla’s cauldron...  I take the lead, then Zdenka, then Ludmilla, and finally Silvernose....   You slash with weapons in each hand to keep... the insane things from... attacking us... from the flanks or rear.”

“Beata,” said Zdenka kneeling next to the woman she cared so much for.  Her demeanor, externally at least, was eerily calm, as she always fought to keep it in the worst crises.  “Note how they die and their fellows step on them heartbeats later.  The dead are the platform for the living to attack.”

“Maybe we should just keep out of their reach and wait.  Maybe the trdla will give up and wander away after some time,” said Beata, although she did not really believe it.   

Will we be eaten by the trdla first, her brain screamed inside her skull. Or will we die of thirst, like castaways trapped on a lonely island in a boiling sea of vicious monsters?

Sister Ludmilla had turned away from them.  She was praying, kneeling, eyes tightly closed.

“Ask God…” Zdenka implored Beata.  “Ask God for a miracle!  You are in God’s eye, dearest!”

Beata prayed with Ludmilla: the long-ago defrocked nun and the rough-edged Hill Country hermit who had never formally entered a religious order.  

Ever since miracles had mysteriously begun happening to Beata, the ex-confidence artist and forger fought against doubt that she had truly changed, that she was worthy.  She also worried that praying for a miracle in dramatic circumstances was testing God.  Now she could see no alternative.

Zdenka, falteringly, tried to pray along with the two more religiously-inclined women, but lapsed into the mind-calming habit she had invented years ago to help her aim with dagger-throwing.  In a circle-chant, she repeated silently, endlessly in her mind the Schwabisch words kaltes, klares wasser –  “cold, clear water.”      

The moon moved across the sky.  The roiling, howling, snarling hordes of trdla did not settle themselves nor disperse.

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Thank you for reading this.  Part 17 will be posted before 29. April 2020.

The story so far...
The Terror of the Trdlo, Serialized:

Part I - The Adventure Begins (But Not Really the Terror, Yet)
Part II - Zdenka vs. The Green-Eyed Monster (Jealousy - That Is)
Part III - Nun: The Wiser
Part IV - The Hermitess
Part V - Silvernose Arrives Minus His Weird Girlfriend
Part VI - She's Gone Feral
Part VII - A Little Traveling Music
Part VIII - Horror at the Hermitage
Part IX - The Rutting Moon
Part X - Herbal Interlude
Part XI - "It's Blood"
Part XII - Empty, Disturbed, Dead
Part 13 - Hut Stinking of Musk
Part 14 - The Howling, Squealing Horde
 Part 15 - Something Wicked This Way Comes...UP