In a Glass Grimmly (8 page)

“Brod?” Meas asked. All the giants leaned forward and looked at the enormous slab of meat known as Brod.

“Uhhhhghhh.”

“Do you give up, Brod?” Meas wanted to know.

“Uhhhhghhh,” said Brod.

“Well?”

Brod threw up all over the table.

“Jill is the winner!” announced Meas.

Jill stood up triumphantly. Jack cheered his head off. The frog did little fist pumps in Jack’s pocket.

The giants stared at Jill. The blanket had stretched out into the largest stomach any of them had ever seen. Even bigger than Brod’s. It hung down over her belt, all wobbly and gelatinous.

And then, the silence was cut with the word “Cheat!”

Bucky was pointing at her, his face red. “She’s a cheat!”

Aitheantas glared at her. “I believe she is,” he said.

“She didn’t eat that porridge!” said Bucky. “She couldn’t have.”

“I don’t believe she could,” said Aitheantas. Brod threw up on the table again.

“You don’t believe me?” Jill cried. “You dare question me?” Her voice was fierce, frightening. “I will show you the food in my belly, if you will show me the food in yours.”

“Mine’s mostly on the table,” said Brod.

“I challenge you all to show me the food in your bellies!” Jill bellowed.

Aitheantas rose to his feet. A cunning smile played across his lips. “If you, my little pygmy, can show us the food in your belly, we can show you the food in ours.”

Jill turned to Meas. Very slowly, very clearly, she said, “Bring us knives.”

I don’t believe anyone is reading right now. I assume everyone has just skipped to the next chapter. I hope so.

If any of you are indeed still reading this . . . well . . . good luck to you.

Meas disappeared and returned in a moment, carrying enough long, sharp knives for every giant in the hall, and one for Jill. Jill grasped hers in her hand. “Show me your food!” she cried.

“Jill!” Jack cried. “Stop!” The frog peered out of his pocket.

Jill raised the knife above her head. Then she brought the knife down and buried it in her stomach. It entered her body just above the belt; from there she drew it up the length of her enormous belly.

The frog fainted again.

Porridge poured out all over the floor. Inside Jill’s shirt was a mess of brown tatters, fleshy porridge, and bird bones. Jack stared. Between the ratty brown of the blanket and the disgusting mess of meat and bone and porridge, it looked a whole lot like human entrails.

The giants all squinted their tiny eyes at Jill and her dissected shirt.

“I can do that!” Bucky cried. And he plunged his knife into his stomach and drew it from his belt to his throat. Blood and porridge poured out onto the floor, and then Bucky fell down. Dead. His eyes were wide, and his corpse lay half submerged in vomit.

“So can I!” cried Leithleach. And he, too, gutted himself, spilling his blood and viscera and porridge, and then collapsing on top of them.

“Me too!”

“So can I!”

“That’s easy!”

And one by one, each giant-hero cut himself from gullet to gizzard, and an explosion of blood and guts and partially digested meat and porridge poured all over the floor of the hall. One by one, each giant collapsed into the blood and vomit. The floor was six, now eight, now ten inches deep with blood and guts and food. Each time a giant fell, the steaming, putrid pool rippled.

Aitheantas was the last. “I’m not sure I can,” he said, looking uncertainly around at the carnage.

“You have to, King,” Meas said. “You accepted the challenge.”

“There’s no way out of it?” Aitheantas asked forlornly.

Meas shook his hoary beard. “None,” he said.

Aitheantas looked balefully at Jill. Then he took a deep breath, clutched his knife tightly in his hand, and cut a long gash from below his belly button to the top of his neck. Porridge and guts and blood poured out of his enormous body, and then he tumbled like a felled tree to the floor. The pool of pink and brown muck around him rippled, and then grew still.

Jill pulled off the long, stretched, tattered, and filthy blanket to reveal her equally filthy shirt.

“Well,” said Meas impassively, “that was a neat trick.”

“Thanks,” Jill replied.

Jack stared at the carnage around him, trying to figure out what had just happened.

“Are you going to let us go?” Jill asked the gaunt old guard.

“Certainly,” he replied. He stuck out his giant, bony, sallow-skinned hand to Jill. She shook it. “I hated those brutes,” he said. “They got exactly what they deserved.” Then Meas shook Jack’s hand, patted the frog on his little head and, wading through great lake of giant blood and vomit, showed them to the narrow staircase out of the cave.

“Wait,” said Jill. “Do you have the Seeing Glass?”

Meas’s dim eyes seemed to glow brighter for a moment. “Ah,” he said. “Is that why you came here?”

“It was,” said Jill. “Until Jack forgot.”

“I didn’t forget,” Jack mumbled, turning red.

“It isn’t here.” Meas’s voice replied. “But it is indeed a treasure worth seeking. The greatest power, it is said, resides in that Glass. A piece of true magic, as strong and pure as any in the world.”

“Do you know where it is?” Jill asked.

“We are as high up as this earth goes, save Heaven. The Glass, last I heard, was in the deepest pit of the earth, save Hell. You might try there.”

“How do we get there?” Jack asked.

Meas shrugged. “Ask the goblins.”

“Goblins?”

Meas nodded his great gray head. “But be careful. Giants are brutal. Goblins are cunning. Do not trust them too far.”

“How do we find them?”

“I don’t know. I have never left this cave.”

The children gazed up at his long, sad face. “But there’s no more band, right?” Jill asked. “Can’t you leave now?”

Meas sighed. “There will always be a band. As long as there are giants, there will be fools who will follow them.”

Jack was about to ask what he meant, but Meas turned around and muttered, “Now where did I put that bucket?”

Jack walked quietly, sullenly, across the linen-white clouds under the towering chalky cliffs. Jill followed with the frog.

Jill and the frog talked on and on about what they had just seen and done.

“And did you see how Bucky just grabbed the knife and jammed it into his stomach?”

“And Aitheantas’s face when he realized what was happening?”

“Meas was actually pretty nice!”

“I’ve never seen anything so disgusting in my life!”

“You were pretty great, Jill,” the frog said.

“Yeah,” Jack cut in, his first word since leaving the cave. “Great.” He didn’t sound happy at all.

Jill looked over at him. “What’s with you?” the frog demanded.

“I could have done that,” little Jack insisted. “I could have saved us.”

Neither Jill nor the frog said anything.

“And it was so obvious what you did. I can’t believe they were so dumb to fall for it!” Jack looked very angry. His dark eyebrows made a sharp downward arrow, and his cheeks were flushed.

The wind blew in off the wide blue sky. The sun was setting behind the cliffs, throwing long shadows over the beach. Somewhere far below them, they could hear the call of gulls.

“You went in there,” said the frog to Jack. “It’s your fault. And Jill saved us.”

“You’re an ugly girl and a stupid three-legged frog!” Jack shouted at them, and without warning he sprinted ahead.

“Jack! Jack!” the frog called after him.

“Let him alone,” Jill said sadly.

Jack ran, and the wind blew across his face.

Why? he thought. Why does this keep happening? The boys in the village, the giants, Aitheantas, Bucky, Marie . . . it’s all the same. It will always be the same. Hot tears of humiliation streaked down Jack’s cheeks and blurred his vision. He ran, and ran, and the wind was strong, and growing stronger, and then suddenly it was very strong indeed.

Jill and the frog suddenly could not see Jack anymore. “Jack!” Jill cried. She started running after him. Suddenly, she felt the clouds under her feet fail.

Then she saw Jack. He was doing just what she was doing.

He was plummeting toward the earth.

Jill tumbled and tumbled and tumbled through the air. The frog was screaming, but Jill felt oddly calm. Then, beneath Jack, Jill saw a smooth, green hill rising to greet them. Beside the hill was a little town, and beside that, the sea. As Jill tumbled, the hill and the town grew and grew and grew, and she thought,
That will be a nice place to land.

Then she did land there, on top of that green hill, and it hurt very much. But she was not done tumbling. She tumbled all the way down that big green hill, until she landed in a heap at the bottom, next to Jack.

Jill sat up, laughing. The frog had gone from screaming to whooping for joy. “We’re alive!” he shouted. “Thank God! We’re alive!” Then he stopped. He saw Jack.

Jack was not laughing. His face was white and still, and there was blood pooling in the green grass under his head.

Jill got up, saw they were on the outskirts of the town, and ran screaming for the nearest house.

CHAPTER FIVE

Where You’ll Never Cry No More

O
nce upon a time, in a little seaside town, a boy named Jack was put into bed in the attic room of the town’s only inn. Jill sat down on the bed beside him and stared. The bandages on his head were red and soaked through, and his face was very pale.

“Will he be all right?” Jill asked quietly.

The innkeeper stood in the doorway, her hands on her hips. She answered Jill in her broad, salty accent. “I fancy he will. He just needs a bit a sleep, and some food, and he’ll be right as the rain, I reckon.” Her
R
s
were broad and rolling, like everything else about her. They made Jill feel a little seasick. Or maybe that was seeing Jack, as still and pale as death.

“Thank you,” Jill said.

“You can come down when you’re ready,” the innkeeper said. Jill had agreed to help out around the inn—sweep the floors, do the dishes, that sort of thing—in exchange for the room and food.

Jill nodded and the innkeeper left. Jill knelt down by Jack. Gently she pulled back the covers. He did not stir.

The frog had been weeping quietly ever since he’d seen Jack there at the base of the hill. “Leave me here,” he said, and Jill took him from her pocket and placed him, oh so gently, on Jack’s chest. “I’ll keep watch,” the frog said. “You go downstairs now and earn our keep.” He smiled his bravest froggy smile at Jill. Jill returned the smile sadly, stole a final glance at pale Jack, and went downstairs with a heavy heart.

That night, Jill was kept very busy in the tavern. She cleaned up spilled ale and cleared scotch whisky glasses from the rough wooden tables and brought plates of kippered herring and cracked snails in pails. It seemed that every fisherman and his wife was in the tavern that night. They stank of fish, but their smiles were broad, and their eyes twinkled kindly when Jill came by.

“Now, what have we here?” a big-bellied man said. “What’s this wee lass doin’ in our town?”

Jill answered their questions in a vague sort of way and tried not to drop any dishes on the floor. The work and the talk and all the new people helped Jill to think just a little bit less about the pale boy with the red bandage who lay on the verge of death upstairs.

After the townspeople had all been drinking for a long while, the big-bellied man called Jill over to him. He had a shiny bald head and a big red beard. He smiled at Jill and his eyes twinkled. “You wanna hear a story, then?” His breath smelled like whisky and his clothes smelled like fish.

“Now don’ scare the girl,” someone shouted at him, and “girl” had too many syllables.

The red-bearded, big-bellied man laughed and looked at Jill. “I don’t think ya scare easily. Do ya?” Jill set her chin and shook her head. He bellowed with laughter and said, “See!”

So he set her on a stool beside him, and the tavern quieted down, and the man began to tell his story.

“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a wee fishin’ village that sat next to the wide black sea, in the shadow of some high green hills.”

“They’re mountains!” someone shouted.

“Me foot!” called someone else, and everybody laughed.

“In the shadow of high green
hills
,” the red-bearded man repeated, smiling, and his
R
s rolled like rowboats on the ocean. “And in this wee town there was a wee lass. Just about the size of ye,” and he poked Jill in the chest with a thick finger. Reluctantly, Jill smiled.

“Well, this lass loved the sea,” he continued. “She would go out and stare at it, drinkin’ in its vastness and its darkness, as if the black waves made some kind of mirror where she could see herself. At least, that’s what the villagers whispered to one another as they watched her, with the wind blowin’ her hair this way and that, at the end of the rocks.”

The tavern had gone silent now. Someone began to snuff out the candles, one by one, until the only light came from the flickering peat fire. The hairs on Jill’s arms began to rise and stand up.

“But thas not what the lass was looking at. She weren’t
lookin’
at nothin’. She were listenin’. Listenin’ to the song of the mermaid.”

“I knew it!” someone shouted. “The man’s obsessed with the mermaid!”

“Shhhh!” hushed all the others. And the red-bearded man went on.

“The mermaid sings more beautiful than any mortal has ever heard. Her notes rise like gulls on the wind, and sink like the moon sinks into the sea. She holds ’em high, and sings ’em way down low, like the very sea itself. But no mortal can hear them save a young girl. And no young girl can ever resist their sound.

“Well, one day, the mermaid spoke to that little girl, her hair bein’ blown ’round, way out on the rocks. And the mermaid asked if the little girl wouldna like to come and live with her under the sea. And the little girl said she would. Well, tha’ night, as we sat here in this tavern, we looked out the window and saw a great black wave rise up out o’ the sea. And that wave swallowed the wee lass whole. And we ne’er saw her again. And that’s the truth.”

The tavern was silent now.

At last, Jill whispered, “Is that really the truth?”

“We don’t know,” the innkeeper said. “We did a lose a lass in the sea years ago. But all this mermaid stuff? That’s just a tale told.”

“It’s true enough!” the red-bearded man said. “There is a mermaid out there. I’ve seen her.”

“Have ye heard her?” someone asked.

“No, she sings only to the little girls,” said the man. “But she’s out there all righ’.”

“And how do you know it was she that took the girl and not jus’ the sea?”

“I know,” said the bearded man darkly. “I jus’ know.”

After that, the people of the tavern filed out into the pitch blackness, wending their way over stones and dirt to their homes that climbed the sides of the hills. Jill followed them out and watched them go. She watched the red-bearded man particularly. She saw that he lived all alone, in a small hut that stood closer to the rocks and the sea than any of the other villagers.

Jill wondered about the little girl who had disappeared. She wondered if she liked it under the sea, with the mermaids. She went up to her room, wanting to tell Jack the story. But he was still asleep. As was the frog, who was snoring ridiculously. She decided not to wake them.

The windows were like walls it was so black out. No moon, no stars, no light at all. The wind rattled the door on its hinges, and the sea spumed and tossed. Jill, lying on her little bed of straw, could hear the crash of the waves against the craggy rocks. She had never felt such a night, never known the fear and thrill of lying so close to sea and wild. Her body sang. She could not sleep.

Late, late that night, when the wind had died down and the crash of the waves on the rocks had subsided into a calm, rhythmic beat, Jill sat up in bed. Just above the sound of the waves, she heard a high note, held for an impossibly long time.

A weather vane,
Jill thought.
It must be the creaking of a weather vane.

The note fell—no, it swooned, as if fainting. Then it rose again, running in and out of the beating waves like a flute among a slow, funerary pulse of drums. Jill lay back down. Just a weather vane. Or hinges, creaking.

She lay in bed, listening to the long, plaintive sound. It stretched out across the darkness, and in the corners of the night it seemed to wrap into a pattern of words.
Yes,
Jill thought as she stared at the ceiling and listened. The notes had words. She sat up again and tried to hear them. She did hear them.

Come, come, where heartache’s never been, the song went.

And where you’re seen as you want to be seen.

Come, come, the place of shadow and green,

Where you’ll never cry no more, dear lass,

Where you’ll never cry no more.

Slowly, Jill got up from the bed and walked to the window. She looked out onto the empty, ghostly town. The dirt road led down to the rocks, where the water splashed black and white in spouting spumes. The sea was as dark as anything she had ever seen, but the obsidian waves shone white as they crested and caught the light of the moon now rising. Jill shivered. Again she listened to the word-like sounds.

Come, come, where heartache’s never been.

And where you’re seen as you want to be seen.

Come, come, the place of shadow and green,

Where you’ll never cry no more, dear lass,

Where you’ll never cry no more.

It was no weather vane. It was a song—sung by a voice unlike any Jill had ever heard. Like a gull rising on the wind, or the moon sinking into the sea.

She turned to see if the song had woken Jack. But he slept on, heavy and senseless to the music amid the black, still night.

Suddenly, she shook her head and laughed at herself.
It’s the villagers,
she realized.
Playing a joke on me. Tomorrow they’ll ask me if I heard something strange in the night,
she thought.
Just wait and see
.

She got back in bed. It was a haunting voice, whomever it belonged to.
The voice of a girl,
Jill thought. She listened to the words:
where heartache’s never been;
where you’re seen as you want to be seen;
where you’ll never cry no more
. As Jill slept that night, she dreamed of such a place, a place of shadow and green.

In the morning, the innkeeper rapped loudly on the bedroom door. “Up! Work!” she shouted.

Jill sat straight up in bed. She looked over at Jack. He smiled wanly at her.

“Hi,” he said weakly.

She leaped up and threw her arms around him.

“Sorry,” he said. “for being so stupid, up there in the clouds.”

“It’s all right,” Jill laughed.

“No it isn’t!” said the frog.

“Wish I could help with your work,” Jack said. His voice was thin and tired.

“You rest,” Jill smiled. And then she said, “Did you hear music last night? Singing?” Jack shook his head. Jill shrugged. “You slept heavily.”

“I didn’t hear anything either,” said the frog.

“You were snoring your head off,” Jill replied. She went downstairs.

All day, no villager said a word about any song in the night. As the townspeople gathered for dinner and drinking that evening, Jill tried to detect hidden smiles, or signs of a communal jest. But there were none.

That night, as she lay in bed, she heard the song again. She looked over at Jack. He was sound asleep. The frog was buried under the covers, but she could make out his even breathing as well, in tiny syncopation with Jack’s.

The song reverberated through the timbers of the old inn. Jill covered her head with a straw pillow and tried to ignore it.

A minute later, Jill was out of bed. She slipped silently down the creaky wooden steps of the inn, out the door, and guided her bare feet down the dirt path to the rocky shore. In front of her, the waves heaved against the crags of rock, shooting their white foam high into the black air. But off to the right, down a little ways from the village, there was a calmer spot, where the water rolled into and spiraled away from a ten-foot-wide rock harbor. Jill walked out there. Above her, the night was clear and very cold, and the stars twinkled sharply. Jill came to the little harbor. She felt faint spray on her face and smelled the heavy salt of the sea. And she heard the song.

Come, come, where heartache’s never been.

And where you’re seen as you want to be seen.

Come, come, the place of shadow and green,

Where you’ll never cry no more, dear lass,

Where you’ll never cry no more.

She sat down on the black rocks of the little harbor—it would have looked like a wide crescent bay to a toy ship—and she watched the rolling foam swirl in and away. And then, rising out of the sea, sending shivers up and down her back, green as the ocean by day and black as the ocean by night and capped by white foam and moonlight, came a mermaid.

That’s right, folks. A real live mermaid.

Don’t ask me. I’m just telling it like it was.

The mermaid placed her body on a flat stone just a little way into the tiny harbor. Her body—at least, all of her body that Jill could see—was beautiful and naked. Halfway down her moonlight-hued back, green fish scales, lined with shadow, began. Her eyes were black and green with no whites at all. Her hair was the color of the night water reflecting the moon. The singing had stopped. Jill stared.

“A beautiful, beautiful girl,” the mermaid said, her eyes so wide set and luminous she looked like a creature from a dream, “You are a beautiful, beautiful girl.” Jill was unable to answer her.

“Yet you are sad,” the mermaid said, and then she gasped, and her shoulders contracted as if in pain. “So sad! Beautiful girl, what could cause you such pain?”

The wind off the sea blew the spray into Jill’s eyes and face, and her hair whipped around her like a rope on a sail. “How can you tell that I’m sad?” Jill asked, and she felt that she was shivering.