The Buried Giant (9 page)

“On the contrary, sir,” Axl said, “you’ve offered us wondrously comfortable lodgings and we’re grateful for it. I’m sorry it wasn’t better news called you out just now.”

“We must wait, perhaps well into the night and the morning too. To where do you travel, friends?”

“We’ll set off east tomorrow, sir, to our son’s village, where he anxiously awaits us. But on this matter you may be of help, for my wife and I were just arguing the best road to take. We hear of a wise monk by the name of Jonus at a monastery up on the mountain road whom we might consult on a small matter.”

“Jonus certainly has a revered name, though I’ve never met the man face to face. Go to him by all means, but be warned, the journey to the monastery’s no easy one. The path will climb steeply for much of your day. And when at last it levels you must take care not to lose your way, for you’ll be in Querig country.”

“Querig, the she-dragon? I’ve not heard talk of her in a long time. Is she still feared in this country?”

“She rarely leaves the mountains now,” Ivor said. “Though she may on a whim attack a passing traveller, it’s likely she’s often blamed for the work of wild animals or bandits. In my view Querig’s menace comes less from her own actions than from the fact of her continuing presence. So long as she’s left at liberty, all manner of evil can’t help but breed across our land like a pestilence. Take these fiends which curse us tonight. Where did they come from? They’re no mere ogres. No one here has seen their like before. Why did they journey here, to make camp on our riverbank? Querig may rarely show herself, but many a dark force stems from her and it’s a disgrace she remains unslain all these years.”

“But Ivor,” Beatrice said, “who’d wish to challenge such a beast?
By all accounts Querig’s a dragon of great fierceness, and hidden in difficult terrain.”

“You’re right, Mistress Beatrice, it’s a daunting task. It happens there’s an aged knight left from Arthur’s days, charged by that great king many years ago to slay Querig. You may come across him should you take the mountain road. He’s not easily missed, dressed in rusted chainmail and mounted on a weary steed, always eager to proclaim his sacred mission, though I’d guess the old fool has never given that she-dragon a single moment of anxiety. We’ll reach a great age waiting for the day he fulfils his duty. By all means, friends, travel to the monastery, but go with caution and be sure to reach safe shelter by nightfall.”

Ivor began to move to the inner room, but Beatrice quickly sat up and said:

“You were talking earlier, Ivor, about the mist. How you heard something of the cause for it, but then were called away before you could say more. We’re anxious now to hear you speak on this matter.”

“Ah, the mist. A good name for it. Who knows how much truth there is in what we hear, Mistress Beatrice? I suppose I was speaking of the stranger riding through our country last year and sheltered here. He was from the fens, much like our brave visitor tonight, though speaking a dialect often hard to understand. I offered him use of this poor house, as I’ve done you, and we talked on many matters through the evening, among them this mist, as you so aptly call it. Our strange affliction interested him greatly, and he questioned me again and again on the matter. And then he ventured something I dismissed at the time, but have since much pondered. The stranger thought it might be God himself had forgotten much from our pasts, events far distant, events of the same day. And if a thing is not in God’s mind, then what chance of it remaining in those of mortal men?”

Beatrice stared at him. “Can such a thing be possible, Ivor? We’re
each of us his dear child. Would God really forget what we have done and what’s happened to us?”

“My question exactly, Mistress Beatrice, and the stranger could offer no answer. But since that time, I’ve found myself thinking more and more of his words. Perhaps it’s as good an explanation as any for what you name the mist. Now forgive me, friends, I must take some rest while I can.”

Axl became aware that Beatrice was shaking his shoulder. He had no idea how long they had slept: it was still dark, but there were noises outside, and he heard Ivor say somewhere above him: “Let’s pray it’s good news and not our end.” When Axl sat up, however, their host had already gone, and Beatrice said: “Hurry, Axl, and we’ll see which it is.”

Bleary with sleep, he slipped his arm through his wife’s and together they stumbled out into the night. There were many more torches lit now, some blazing from the ramparts, making it much easier than before to see one’s way. People were moving everywhere, dogs barking and children crying. Then some order seemed to impose itself, and Axl and Beatrice found themselves in a procession hurrying in a single direction. They came to an abrupt halt, and Axl was surprised to see they were already at the central square—there was obviously a more direct route from Ivor’s house than the one they had taken earlier. The bonfire was blazing more fiercely than ever, so much so that Axl thought for an instant it was its heat that had caused the villagers to stop. But looking past the rows of heads, he saw the warrior had returned. He was standing there quite calmly, to the left of the fire, one side of his figure illuminated, the other in shadow. The visible part of his face was covered in what Axl recognised as tiny spots of blood, as if he had just come walking through
a fine mist of the stuff. His long hair, though still tied, had come loose and looked wet. His clothes were covered in mud and perhaps blood, and the cloak he had nonchalantly flung over his shoulder at his departure was now torn in several places. But the man himself appeared uninjured, and he was now talking quietly to three of the village elders, Ivor among them. Axl could see too that the warrior was holding some object in the crook of his arm.

Meanwhile, chanting had started, softly at first, then gathering momentum, till eventually the warrior turned to acknowledge it. His manner was devoid of any crude swagger. And when he began to address the crowd, his voice, though loud enough for all to hear, somehow gave the impression he was speaking in a low, intimate tone appropriate to solemn subject matter.

His listeners hushed to catch each word, and soon he was drawing from them gasps of approval or of horror. At one point he gestured to a spot behind him and Axl noticed for the first time, sitting on the ground just within the circle of light, the two men who had gone out with the warrior. They looked as if they had fallen there from a height and were too dazed to get up. The crowd started up a chant for them, but the pair seemed not to notice, continuing instead to stare at the air before them.

The warrior then turned back to the crowd and said something which caused the chanting to fade. He stepped closer to the fire, and grasping in one hand the object he had been carrying, raised it into the air.

Axl saw what appeared to be the head of a thick-necked creature severed just below the throat. Dark curls of hair hung down from the crown to frame an eerily featureless face: where the eyes, nose and mouth should have been there was only pimpled flesh, like that of a goose, with a few tufts of down-like hair on the cheeks. A growl escaped the crowd and Axl felt it cower back. Only then did he realise that what they were looking at was not a head at all, but
a section of the shoulder and upper arm of some abnormally large, human-like creature. The warrior was, in fact, holding up his trophy by the stump close to the bicep with the shoulder end uppermost, and in that moment Axl saw that what he had taken for strands of hair were entrails dangling out of the cut by which the segment had been separated from the body.

After only a short time, the warrior lowered his trophy and let it fall at his feet, as though he could now barely work up sufficient contempt for the creature’s remains. For a second time, the crowd recoiled, before edging forward again, and then the chanting started up once more. But this time it died almost instantly for the warrior was speaking again, and though Axl could understand none of it, he could sense palpably the nervous excitement around him. Beatrice said in his ear:

“Our hero has killed both monsters. One took its mortal wound into the forest, and will not live through the night. The other stood and fought and for its sins the warrior has brought of it what you see on the ground there. The rest of the fiend crawled to the lake to numb its pain and sank there beneath the black waters. The child, Axl, you see there the child?”

Almost beyond the light of the fire a small group of women had huddled around a thin, dark-haired youth seated on a stone. He was already close to a man’s height, but one sensed that beneath the blanket now wrapped around him, he still had the gangly frame of a boy. One woman had brought out a bucket and was washing off the grime from his face and neck, but he seemed oblivious. His eyes were fixed on the warrior’s back just in front of him, though intermittently he would angle his head to one side, as though trying to peer around the warrior’s legs at the thing on the ground.

Axl was surprised that the sight of the rescued child, alive and evidently without serious injury, provoked in him neither relief nor joy, but a vague unease. He supposed at first this was to do with the
odd manner of the boy himself, but then it occurred to him what was really wrong: there was something amiss in the way this boy, whose safety had until so recently been at the centre of the community’s concerns, was now being received. There was a reserve, almost a coldness, that reminded Axl of that incident involving the girl Marta in his own village, and he wondered if this boy, like her, was in the process of being forgotten. But surely this could not be the case here. People were even now pointing at the boy, and the women attending him were staring back defensively.

“I can’t catch what they’re saying, Axl,” Beatrice said in his ear. “Some quarrel about the child, though a great mercy he’s been brought back safe and he himself showing surprising calm after what his young eyes have beheld.”

The warrior was still addressing the crowd, and a tone of entreaty had entered his voice. It was almost as if he was making an accusation, and Axl could feel the mood of the crowd changing. The sense of awe and gratitude was giving way to some other emotion, and there was confusion, even fear in the rumble of voices swelling around him. The warrior spoke again, his voice stern, gesturing behind him towards the boy. Then Ivor came within the light of the fire and standing beside the warrior said something which drew a less inhibited growl of protest from parts of his audience. A voice behind Axl shouted something, then arguments were breaking out on all sides. Ivor raised his voice and for a small moment there was quiet, but almost straight away the shouting resumed, and now there was jostling in the shadows.

“Oh, Axl, please, let’s hurry away!” Beatrice cried into his ear. “This is no place for us.”

Axl put his arm around her shoulders and began to push their way through, but something made him glance back one more time. The boy had not changed his position, and was still staring at the warrior’s back, apparently unaware of the commotion before him.
But the woman who had been tending to him had stepped away, and was glancing uncertainly from the boy to the crowd. Beatrice tugged his arm. “Axl, please, take us away from here. I’m afraid we’ll be hurt.”

The entire village must have been at the square, for they encountered no one on their way back to Ivor’s house. Only as it came into view did Axl ask: “What was being said just now, princess?”

“I’m not at all sure, Axl. There was too much of it at once for my weak understanding. A quarrel about the boy who was saved, and tempers being lost. It’s well we’re away and we’ll find out in time what’s occurred.”

When Axl awoke the next morning there were shafts of sunlight crossing the room. He was on the floor, but he had been sleeping on a bed of soft rugs beneath warm blankets—an arrangement more luxurious than he was accustomed to—and his limbs felt well rested. He was in good spirits, moreover, because he had awoken with a pleasant memory drifting through his head.

Beatrice stirred beside him but her eyes remained closed and her breathing unbroken. Axl watched her, as he often did at such moments, waiting for a sense of tender joy to fill his breast. It soon did so, just as he expected, but today was mingled with a trace of sadness. The feeling surprised him, and he ran his hand lightly along his wife’s shoulder, as though such an action would chase away the shadow.