Summerland (21 page)

The Eighteenth Giant Brother

THE GIANT HAD TO GO UP
on tiptoe to get hold of them, reaching for them like a right fielder robbing a batter of a home run at the wall. Though of course there was no altimeter in Skid's dashboard control panel, Ethan had been up in
Victoria Jean
enough times to be able to estimate their altitude as somewhere around thirty meters. As high, that is, as fifteen extremely tall men standing one atop the shoulders of the next. The envelope of the airship was capable of lifting two tons but offered no resistance to the giant's great creaking arms. It plucked them down from the sky carefully, even tenderly, like someone with a lightbulb that has to be changed. The wind whistled through the open windows of the car as they made their captive fall toward the trees. About a third of the way down their progress abruptly stopped. An enormous eye, the iris blood-red, the white pink-veined, blinked in at them through the windows on Ethan's side. The lashes were palest yellow, like the fur on the great pink hands. It was an albino giant, then. Somehow that made it even more frightening.

"
It's looking at me
," Ethan said finally, his voice emerging in a faint, strangled whisper.

The giant's red eye was veiled in a heavy mist, which each flapping of its pale blond eyelashes sent whirling and eddying away. Then a moment later the mist would return, dense and stinking something terrible of fish and rancid meat. It was, Ethan realized, the giant's breath.

"It's his job to look at ya," Cinquefoil said. "That is Mooseknuckle John."

"You—you
know
him?" Jennifer T. said, peering out through the screen of her fingers.

"He and his seventeen brothers, Johns all, done wandered inta our parts from time ta time over the years," Cinquefoil said, returning the giant's bloody gaze with an expression of polite uninterest. "Raising a considerable portion o' hell. For which we done paid 'em back handsomely, often enough as not."

"Is he going to
eat
us?" said Thor. That positronic brain had a way of cutting right to the core of any complicated problem.

"If he has the taste fer little reubens," Cinquefoil said, "and it's likely he does. Most o' them boys do. In the old days they used ta eat human children by the fistful."

"Okay, I would like to be somewhere else right now," Jennifer T. said. "I—"

"PRETTY TOY!"

The voice of the giant, when he finally spoke, was not something they heard as much as felt, in every joint and soft part of their bodies. It shook the bolts of Skid's chassis and made the glass in her windows hum. The car was suddenly drenched in a stink of dead fish and sweet rotten flesh. Ethan felt as if he might have to vomit. It would certainly not have been the first time he had vomited in Skid. The memory of a summer night after the Colorado State Fair at Pueblo came to him, when his stomach, scrambled by the Tilt-A-Whirl and tilted by the Scrambler, had brought up the corn dog, fried dough, cotton candy, snow cone, and caramel apple that he had consumed, all over Skid's backseat. His mother had so calmly, so patiently, so dutifully comforted him, wiped him with paper napkins dampened with ice, changed him into some clean sweatpants that were in the back of the car, given him a piece of Juicy Fruit to take the bad taste away.

The eye narrowed and seemed to focus in on Ethan alone for a moment.

"ONE IS LOST," said Mooseknuckle John. "ONE IS ANGRY. ONE DREADS. AND ONE IS BROKENHEARTED."

The four passengers of Skidbladnir looked at one another. It was not immediately apparent to any of them which was which.

"Giants have sharp eyes," Cinquefoil said dryly.

"And bad breath," whispered Jennifer T.

The ferisher chief clambered across from his seat and climbed right up onto Jennifer T.'s lap, without a word of excuse or pardon. Awake and active, there was yet something catlike about him. He perched on Jennifer T.'s knees, but as when a cat comes to visit your lap, he did not quite settle there. He stuck his fierce head out her window.

"Now, Mooseknuckle John," he said in his soft, clear voice. "We're bound ta urgent bidness, and awful far from home. Do us the kindness ta let us alone, just this once, won't ya, now?"

"WANT THE TOY, MORSEL," said Mooseknuckle John. He let go of Skid with one hand and with an enormous index finger flicked the taut gas envelope, as you might thump a melon to hear if it is ripe. It throbbed like a drum. "LIKE IT."

"Thing is, John, we'd be happy ta make it a present ta ya, if only we didn't need it so urgentlike."

"DON'T NEED IT NO MORE, DO YOU, MORSEL?" The giant's voice was not a growl so much as a deep sonorous ringing, as of an enormous bell. He was extremely ugly, his face at once smashed-looking and bug-eyed, but Ethan supposed that was how it was with giants.

"True," Cinquefoil said in a low voice. "Each one's uglier than t'other. And ta answer yer question, little brother," he said to Thor, catching him by surprise in mid-thought, "he knows English because he is thirty thousand years old, at least. He's had more ta do with reubens than I'm sure he cares ta recall. He knows Sumerian, Urdu, Masoretic, and San. He knows all the dead languages o' the Middling and the living ones, too. Of course he speaks my tongue, but I thought ya might want to know what I'm saying."

"I don't like the way he keeps calling you 'morsel,' " Jennifer T. said. "It sounds like he's planning to eat us."

"He would never eat me," Cinquefoil said. "I wouldn't agree with him one bit. Ya saw that yella sap bleeding outta this old jar o' mine, little reuben?" He pointed to his head; the wounds had by now completely healed. Ethan nodded. "It's like poison fer 'em. They'd as soon eat stones or tree bark. No, it's
children
they like, children and sheep. If ya only read more true stories ya'd know that."

The children looked at each other, their eyes wide. They had never been troubled much by the ancient fear of being eaten. They lived in a world devoid not only of giants and ogres but of wolves, bears, and lions, too. And yet Ethan, like many children who are not otherwise vegetarian, had always felt a strange unwillingness to eat the young of animals. Lamb, veal, suckling pig—the idea of eating baby
anythings
had always repelled him. Now he understood why. It would be a kind of cannibalism. It would imply that he, little, defenseless Ethan Feld, might himself quite easily be eaten.

Cinquefoil poked his head back out the window.

"Look here, John, stop yer nonsense and send us on our way. There's considerable trouble afoot just now. Coyote is making fer Murmury Well. We believe he aims ta spoil it. Waylay us and ya might just be bringing down Ragged Rock itself. I wager that's somethin' ya'd regret sore enough."

"LOSE YOUR BET, THEN," replied the giant. "COMES RAGGED ROCK, WON'T HAVE MUCH USE FOR REGRET." He cupped his hands around Skid, tightly, leaving them in darkness. Thor cried out.

"Gah!" He was afraid, Ethan knew, of small spaces and dark corners.

The giant's voice was muffled now, but still booming. "MIGHT AS WELL HAVE ME A SNACK."

"Isn't there anything you can do?" Ethan said Cinquefoil. "Some kind of grammer or something?"

"Too big a job," Cinquefoil said. "Even fer a chief. I mebbe could confuse his thoughts a little. Mebbe fill one a his eyes with smoke too thick ta see through." But he looked doubtful.

Ethan tried to think of something, to remember what he might have read about giants in the fairy tales which it still felt odd to think of, in spite of all that had happened in the last week, as true.

"They're gamblers," he said at last. "Giants. Isn't that right?"

"Crazy big gamblers." The voice of the little chief, in the darkness, took on a certain edge. "They'd bet their own eyeballs on a snowflake's falling or not. If we only had something ta wager with, mebbe we…
John!
'' he shouted, right in Ethan's ear. "Ho,
Mooseknuckle John
!" His light voice took on a ragged crow's-caw huskiness. "He can't hear us."

They all began to shout and cry out the giant's name, until their throats were raw. But there was no reply from outside the prison of his cupped fists. Ethan could feel them swinging back and forth as the giant walked, each footfall on the ground sending a deep rumbling shudder through them. The interior of the car rattled and creaked. They gave up calling. They were going to be roasted on a giant's cookfire.

"YAIIIIIYAH!"

The great shout of the giant came blasting into the car, along with a flood of light, as, on Jennifer T.'s side, he lifted the hand that gripped Skid. Jennifer T. grinned. She was holding a Swiss Army knife, its blade open and bright with blood. In the meaty pleats of the giant's palm was a tiny red speck.

"He heard
that
," she said.

"EAT THE GIRL FIRST!" roared Mooseknuckle John. "BEFORE SHE'S COOKED HALF THROUGH!"

"We was trying ta get yer attention!" Cinquefoil explained. "We was wondering if ya'd care ta take a more
sporting
interest in yer meal."

The giant stopped. They were nearly to the slope of a great mountain of boulders, an enormous cairn with a dark maw that was as high as Mooseknuckle John himself. Outside the great gash of a doorway there was a smaller mound that seemed to be made up entirely of bones. Many of the skulls looked disturbingly human, and small.

"A WAGER?" He grinned. The idea was clearly appealing to him. "BUT WHAT CAN YOU WAGER, APART FROM LIVES THAT ALREADY BELONG TO ME?"

He raised the car once again to his bone-and-blood eye and, batting the envelope out of the way, peered in, regarding Jennifer T. with greater wariness than before. He tilted the car this way and that, tumbling them into one another and making a shambles of the gear they had packed into the back of the car.

"NOTHING JOHN WANTS. LOT OF RUBBISH. DON'T SEE—AH. TO WHICH IS THE PIE PLATE?"

"Pie plate?" Thor said. "I didn't know we brought a—"

"It's mine," Ethan said. "Actually it's my father's. He's an engineer, see, and Coyote—"

"YOU CATCH, MORSEL?"

"Well, I just sort of took it up the other day. I'm not—"

"THIS IS THE GAME, THEN. JOHN THROWS A TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE FASTBALL. BREAKS DOWN THE SIDES OF GREAT FORTRESSES. BURNS HOLES IN THE HEARTS OF MIGHTY OAKS." His pink eyes gleamed and his face collapsed with the deep, ancient gigantic pleasure of boasting. "BLEW IT PAST SKOOKUM JOHN THREE TIMES IN A ROW. STRUCK HIM OUT LOOKING."

"Giants play baseball, too?" Ethan said.

"Not with any style," said Cinquefoil. "But old Skookum John was a slugger, all right, before Sees Canoes brought him down."

"Sees Canoes?" said Jennifer T.

"A great reubenish giant killer o' some years back. Indian fella. Scouted by Mr. Brown, it seems ta me."

"I've heard of him!" Jennifer T. said. "Uncle Mo talked about him one time. He was a Salishan. I think he was like my great-great-grandsomething or whatever."

"Ya might want to keep that ta yerself," Cinquefoil said.

"YOU CATCH THE MOOSEKNUCKLE JOHN FASTBALL, THREE TIMES, IN THAT SHREW'S-BUTTON MITT OF YOURN. MOOSEKNUCKLE JOHN DON'T ONLY LET YOU GO—LA, HE GIVES YOU A LITTLE PUSH! YOU DROP IT, YOU LET IT GO PAST, LA, HE SUCKS THE JUICES OUT THROUGH THE HOLES IN THE TOP OF YOUR HEAD."

"Uck," Jennifer T. said.

"Catch one of
your
pitches? How big is the
ball
?"

"BIG BALL!" the giant said. "NICE BIG ONE! BIG LITTLE REUBEN, TOO! FAIR AND SQUARE! UNIVERSAL RULES!"

The giant waited, happily, for Ethan's reply. His rank breath billowed and curled around the car.

"What are Universal Rules?" Jennifer T. said.

"The rules for interworld play," Thor said. He tilted his head to one side and gave it a thump with the heel of his hand as if to reseat a loose circuit board. "How did I know that?"

Cinquefoil eyed him carefully. "That's right," he said. "When creatures o' different size engage in play on the diamond, they play at the scale o' whoever's the home team. The shape-shifting grammers are usually worked right inta the pattern o' the diamond itself."

"You mean
I'll
be a giant?" Ethan said.

"Only so long as yer standin on his turf, and yer conduct is sportsmanlike. Try ta sneak up behind him and, say, brain him with a oak tree, the grammer's undone and yer a pipsqueak all over again. And then it's snacktime fer sure."

Cinquefoil climbed into the backseat, then over into the way-back of the car. He dragged out the old leather mitt and handed it to Ethan.