The Giant-Slayer Read online

  Through it all, Collosso slept. The flashes of lightning lit his enormous face, making black shadows round his eyes and mouth. Thunder boomed through his castle, and smoke flowed in through every window, and down in their cages the slaves were screaming. The toys were screaming too. But Collosso didn’t stir, though it seemed the end of the world had arrived. He snored softly in his bed as the storm passed over.

  It was the final roll of thunder that woke the giant. The storm had swept a hundred leagues to the south, and the sound was so faint that a pine cone falling in the forest could have drowned it out. But with that tiny noise, Collosso sprang up in his bed. Six tons he weighed, yet in a flash he was upright. His heart, the size of a mule, kicked wildly in his chest. For the first time in his life, Collosso was terrified.

  Far below his castle, the forests crackled as they burned. Trees exploded with puffs of yellow flame, and a blizzard of sparks whirled through the sky. Collosso stood at his window, pale as death in the shifting colors of the flames.

  Somewhere in the land, beyond the mountains and the forest, beneath that final thunderbolt, a boy was breathing his first breaths. Collosso knew it as surely as he knew anything. A giant-slayer, that night, was born.

  “Gee, who was it?” asked Dickie. His iron lung wheezed and hummed. “What was his name? The giant-slayer?”

  “Don’t be a stupe,” said Carolyn. “It was Fingal.”

  Laurie looked at the girl through the mirror. She didn’t mind if Carolyn listened to the story. She didn’t even mind that the girl tried to seem bored and pained, as though she wasn’t really listening at all. But it bothered her very much that Carolyn had guessed so easily that Fingal was the giant-slayer. So Laurie changed her story.

  “Well, it wasn’t Fingal,” she said, as though the thought were crazy. “It was the son of Fingal.”

  “Gosh!” said Dickie. “What was his name?”

  “Jimmy.”

  Carolyn put on a petulant, doubting look. “Jimmy the giant-slayer?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Laurie.

  Jimmy was born in the thunderstorm. The same clap of thunder that had woken Collosso was the first sound that the baby heard. For him it was monstrously loud, an ear-splitting crash right over his head. Down in the parlor, Fingal watched in fear as the rafters shook and a snowfall of plaster fell upon him. But Jimmy didn’t cry. He didn’t wail or shriek; he just lay in his mother’s arms, pink and wrinkled, like a wise old man.

  At the moment of his birth, the wolves began calling from the forest. They sang and they howled, more wolves than ever had sung at once. Jimmy’s mother, hearing them, pulled the blankets over herself and the baby. She lay shaking in the bed while Jimmy laughed and kicked against her.

  Although she must have had a name, no one could remember ever hearing it. She was Fingal’s wife—the Woman—no more than that. Thin as a whip, with hard lines in her face, she had a nose like the blade of an axe. She was always telling her husband what to do, and when to do it, and when to do it again if he hadn’t done it right.

  Jimmy wasn’t the firstborn child. He was neither the second nor the third, but he would never meet the others. A sister had drowned, and another had been squashed by the giant, while his only brother—Tom—had simply disappeared. Fingal’s wife told anyone who asked that Tom had struck out on his own, up the Great North Road to seek his fortune in the mountains, but as he was only six years old at the time, that seemed unlikely. Fingal believed the gryphons had got him. “There’s nothing that gryphons like better than boys,” he said.

  “Well, gryphons won’t get this boy,” said Fingal’s wife. “My little Jimmy won’t be eaten, and he won’t be squashed. He’s my little treasure.”

  Treasure? thought Fingal. He muttered under his breath, careful not to be heard. “Woman, you’re mad if you’re thinking that babby’s a treasure.”

  Fingal was a mean-hearted man, and to him the child was a cost, an item he recorded on the debit side of his ledger. On the day that his son was born he drew a narrow column that he headed “Jimmy,” and there he recorded in minuscule writing—because even ink cost money—every expense, from diapers to mashed peas. He had started columns for his other children, and began this one in the same way—with a huge sigh, as though he believed it was bound to be a wasted effort. As he wrote he kept moaning, “All debits, no credits. What’s the use of a babby?”

  “What about the giant?” asked Dickie, in his iron lung. The bellows worked below him. “Did Collosso go looking for Jimmy?”

  “No, he didn’t,” said Laurie.

  “Was he scared?” asked Chip.

  Dickie’s head nodded slightly on the pillow. “I think so.”

  “Well, you’re right; he was,” said Laurie. She shifted her feet, leaning back against the windowsill. “Collosso was scared to death of the giant-slayer.”

  For days, the giant fretted in his castle. He stood at the ramparts, staring across the mountains, over the valleys, toward fields and forests. From sunrise to darkness he stood and stared, leaning his elbows on the great stone blocks.

  It was all he could think about, that a giant-slayer was out there. The idea worried away at him, as though an animal gnawed at his innards. At night he dreamed about the giant-slayer, then woke in the morning more frightened than he’d been the day before. On a Sunday afternoon, as he had on many Sundays, he took out his entertainments. He lifted the lid and saw the people cowering inside. Some held on to each other, some raised their hands toward him for mercy, and many sat hunched and quivering in the corners. Just weeks before, the sight would have made him laugh uproariously. But now he only slammed the lid in place again and pushed the box away.

  “Curse him. Curse him,” said Collosso. “I cannot bear this any longer.”

  Right then, the giant got up from his chair. He put on his jaunty red hat and went out from the castle. He strode to the south, over the pass and down a valley, then west across the foothills. People scurried away, hiding in ditches, diving into cellars. Collosso didn’t stop to crush them. His arms swinging, his great thighs shaking, he marched along with his enormous boots smashing all in his path. Flights of white swans rose from fields and copses, and he swatted at them as though at mosquitoes.

  He went straight to the marshes, to the home of the Swamp Witch. He believed that she had lived a hundred years in the mud, and knew everything there was to know. He had gone to see her twice before, the first time to ask how long he would live. She had taken a frog and pulled off its legs, then stirred the pieces in the mud, reading the patterns they made. Then she had looked up and told him mysteriously, “You shall live to the end of your days.” Three years later he had gone again, to see if she could turn his hair from curly to straight, because he believed that giants looked best with straight hair. Again she had killed a frog and cast its pieces. “Wear a red hat,” she’d told him.

  The journey would have taken any man a year, but Collosso was there in hours. He stomped down the long slopes of barley and corn, through a forest of pines, to the edge of a swamp that seemed to stretch on forever.

  It was believed that the marshes were bottomless. It was said that an ancient city—with streets of gold—lay drowned in the swamp. A famous legend told of ‘the lost army’ that had marched out to find the city, only to vanish in the mud. Its leagues of men, its hundreds of horses, its wagons and chariots had disappeared in a moment, along with seven siege towers nearly as tall as Collosso. Some said that the witch had eaten every man and horse.

  Well, the stories weren’t utter nonsense. Collosso strode out into the mud and sank to his ankles. Then he sank to his knees. Then he sank to his waist. As thick as tar, the mud sucked and oozed around his feet, and the black water swirled in torrents behind him.

  When the water was up to his armpits and getting deeper with every step, Collosso found the Swamp Witch. She had a little round house, like a beaver lodge, of sticks and mud, with a smoke hole at the top, and a little round door in the
front. Collosso tapped on the top of the house, and the ducks and the alligators slipped away among the reeds.

  The witch came oozing from the mud behind her house. She was clotted with filth. Her hair was long, her face all wrinkles. She had the eyes of a lizard and the hands of a frog—each finger webbed at the base, tipped at the end by a fleshy knob. Her throat bulged as she breathed, and her voice was a croak.

  “I knew you were coming,” she said. Her neck filled like a red balloon.

  “You sensed it?” asked Collosso.

  “I heard it.” She was looking up at the face of the giant, into the caverns of his nostrils. “You wake the dead with your splashing.”

  Her voice drifted off across the marshes, through the bulrushes and the grasses. The birds were silent, the frogs as well, and the water beetles stood as still as possible on their trembly legs.

  “I had a dream,” said Collosso. “A horrible dream.”

  “Of what?”

  “A giant-slayer.”

  The witch pulled herself from the mud and sat in a chair of woven reeds. She felt nearly sorry for the giant because he looked so scared and worried. He didn’t seem to notice that he was sinking into the swamp, a little deeper every minute. The water now was nearly at his shoulders.

  “I had a dream. Or a vision,” said Collosso. “I saw the giant-slayer born of thunder. Oh, witch, is it true?”

  “It is true,” said the witch.

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because you dreamed it.”

  “Oh, curse my powers!” The giant looked up at the sky. His great fists came out of the water and he held them high above his head, as though trying to shake the clouds. “Curse me!” he roared again.

  Alligators swung their tails and backed away, their round eyes blinking. Snakes slithered off through the grass, and the crayfish scuttled deeper in the mud.

  “Help me, witch!” said Collosso. He settled more deeply in the mud. The black water closed over his shoulders, and his huge head seemed to float there in its red hat. “Please,” he said. “What do I do?”

  “Go home to your castle,” she told him in her croaky voice. “Wait for the slayer to come.”

  “Will he kill me?” asked the giant.

  “He will try,” said the witch. “But remember this: as long as you are living, you cannot be killed.”

  This gave the giant a strange comfort. For the first time in a fortnight, a smile came to his face. The deep lines of worry smoothed away from his eyes, and he muttered to himself: “As long as I am living, I cannot be killed.”

  “Now go,” said the Swamp Witch. “Hurry home to your castle.”

  She was sliding feet first from her chair, vanishing into the swamp. But Collosso cried out, “Wait! There’s more. That wasn’t the end of my dream.”

  “What else did you see?” she asked.

  “He came to find you. I saw him with you in the swamp, and in my dream he spoke to you.” Collosso tried to shift his feet. The water crept higher up his neck. “He bade you to point the way to my castle. He said, ‘I mean to kill Collosso. I will do him in a flash.’ Oh, witch, what does it mean?”

  “Many things,” she said. “But this above all: you must protect me, for your dream must be fulfilled. The giant-slayer must come to see me.”

  “What will you tell him?” asked Collosso.

  “Whatever you like.”

  The giant sighed a mighty sigh. His breath flattened a field of rushes, scattering ducks and blackbirds. “Send him to my castle. Tell him I am waiting,” he said. “And tell him this: before that day is done I will crush him in my fingers like a nit.” Again his hand came out of the water. He pressed his fingers together, as though already crushing. Then he turned around and waded home, with the water churning into monstrous waves until he reached the solid ground. He went full of joy, so happy that he actually skipped across the foothills, over the black ground of burned forests. He sang to himself as he crashed through the dead trees. “As long as I live, I cannot be killed.”

  Straightaway, Collosso put his slaves to work. “Build me a lookout tower half a mile high,” he commanded. “Dig me a moat half a mile deep. Fill it with pitch and tar, and build me a drawbridge to cross it.”

  Collosso collected more slaves, and more after that. He put them all to the task of strengthening his castle. “Hurry,” he told them. “The giant-slayer is coming.”

  In her iron lung across the room, Carolyn sighed as loudly as she could. “That’s so dumb,” she said. “It would take years to finish.”

  “He knew that,” said Laurie. “Collosso figured he had twelve years before the giant-slayer would be old enough to come after him. In all that time, he never rested for an hour.”

  On Jimmy’s first birthday, Fingal lit a candle and went down to the basement of the Dragon’s Tooth. He pulled the bung from a half-emptied cask of brandy and ladled water through the hole. It was a job that he’d done every morning for seventeen years, and it always made him happy. He liked the smell and the gurgling sound, the flash of his candlelight on the pouring water.

  He worked in shadows, for the basement was a gloomy place, the home of rats and spiders. Every now and then he paused to sample the thinning brandy, then smacked his lips and started again. He cackled as he worked, overcome by the thought that he was turning water into gold.

  The cask was nearly full when Fingal heard the Woman shout. “Fingal!” The sound, though faint, took him by surprise.

  “Oh, mercy, what now?” he said to himself. “I’ll never have a moment’s peace with a babby in the house.”

  She shouted again. “Fingal!”

  “All right, all right, I’m coming,” said Fingal.

  He slammed the bung in its hole and rolled the keg aside. Then, with a sigh, he made his way up the back stairs and through the parlor.

  There were only three travelers that day at the inn. They sat in a row, close to the tiny fire: a minstrel, a shepherd, and a dealer in the fine carpets that were woven by trolls. The shepherd was poking with his crook at a pile of embers no bigger than an anthill, while the minstrel shivered beside him. Outside, the day was warm and sunny; it was fear that chilled the travelers, for all three were about to set off up the Great North Road.

  “Is there trouble, innkeep?” asked the shepherd as Fingal passed behind them.

  “There’s always trouble,” said Fingal. “That’s what comes with a babby.”

  At the top of the inn, the Woman’s room was in darkness. The shutters were drawn and latched, and the Woman lay in her bed with the sheets pulled up to her chin.

  “What’s the matter, Woman?” asked Fingal.

  She didn’t say a word, but only shifted her eyes toward the window. Jimmy’s crib—standing there—was empty.

  “The babby?” said Fingal hopefully. “Has it wandered off?”

  “No, you fool.” The Woman shifted the blankets so that Fingal could see Jimmy sleeping beneath them. “There’s someone outside.”

  “Who is it?” asked Fingal.

  “How should I know?” She shook her head, as though he was stupid. “Why don’t you look and see?”

  Fingal’s ears turned a bright red. But he tried to keep his temper. “I was in the basement, Woman,” he said slowly. “Did you have to bring me all the way up here so that I could look out your window?”

  “Well, how else could you look out of it?” she asked with a cluck of her tongue.

  Fingal fumed. Sixteen years he’d been married. He’d done the Woman’s bidding night and day. But, suddenly, he’d had enough.

  “Woman, you’re a layabout,” he told her.

  Her mouth fell open. She stared at him, aghast. Flat on her back, covered from chin to toes, she lay there and looked at him. The only sound in the room was her breathing, hard and steady.

  “All day you lie there,” said Fingal. “Well, if you want to know who’s outside, get up and look. Shift yourself, Woman. I’m sick of the sight of you.”


  “Hardy har har. That’s so funny I forgot to laugh,” said Carolyn.

  She lay like Fingal’s wife, staring up from a hard bed as rubber bellows whooshed and wheezed. “You think I’m lazy? ’Cause I asked you what was outside?”

  Laurie felt rotten. She’d forgotten that that was how everything had started, with Carolyn asking what she could see from the window. All she had wanted to do was make Dickie forget where he was for an hour or two, to free him from his iron lung. Instead, she had sealed them all more tightly.

  In the tilted mirrors she could see the three faces. Dickie had his eyes closed, but his skin was pulled into wrinkles by the things he was thinking. Chip had turned his head to the left, and only Carolyn was staring right back. “He’s polio, isn’t he?” said the girl in the iron lung. “Your dumb giant.”

  Dickie’s eyes opened now. Chip rolled his head to look at Caroline.

  “Well, guess what?” said Carolyn. “He can’t be killed. You can never beat polio.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” said Laurie.

  “Just get out of here.” Carolyn looked away from the mirror. Her long braid swished like the tail of an angry cat.

  Laurie imagined how frustrating it would be if you couldn’t wave your arms when you were angry, if you couldn’t run away from anything. Without another word, she left the room. Though Dickie called out to stop her, she didn’t look back. She ran for the elevator.

  She heard the chime as she rounded the last bend in the hall. She saw the doors open and Miss Freeman come out.

  “Laurie,” said the nurse, surprised. But with one look, she somehow understood. “Did Carolyn tell you to leave?”

  Laurie nodded.

  “That happens a lot. It’s not your fault.”

  The elevator doors were wide open. Laurie wanted to push her way past the nurse.

  “Carolyn likes people to think that she’s strong and brave,” said Miss Freeman. “But inside, she’s a frightened girl. Just a sad and lonely girl with not very much to look forward to.”