The Giant-Slayer (22 page)

They traveled through the night. Though the wheel kept creaking and the gnomes kept wailing, Jimmy fell asleep. He swayed back and forth like a doll made of rags and didn’t wake up until the cart stopped at dawn.

The sky was yellow and orange. Blocking the road in front of the cart was a wooden gate in a wall made of logs. A man was coming out of a little booth, shuffling his feet in the dust. He unfastened his locks and latches.

“Where are we?” asked Jimmy, rubbing his eyes.

“The end of the road,” said Meezle.
Tee-hee-heeeee
.

Jimmy expected to see the castle of Collosso on the other side of the wall. But when Meezle drove the cart through the gate, they entered a dusty compound that looked more like a prison than anything. There was a row of pretty houses, with flowers in window boxes, but most of the buildings were stark and square, with locks on the doors and bars on the windows.

Jimmy looked warily at Meezle. “What sort of place is this?”

“It’s the mines, of course,” said Meezle. “Gold, mostly. Bit of silver.” He steered the cart toward the row of houses, then cleared his throat and called out in a voice that was loud and deep, like the hoot of a foghorn: “Gnomes for sale!”

Out from the houses came men in fine clothes, and women in dresses, and boys and girls who didn’t pause on the porches but came running across the compound with dust flying from their heels.

“Gnomes for sale!” shouted Meezle.

In the cart the gnomes were wailing louder than ever. They pressed against the window, reaching their fingers between the bars.

Meezle stopped the cart. “Gnomes for sale!” he cried again.

A man in white clothes, with bushy whiskers on his cheeks, came over with a walking stick. “How much?” he asked.

Meezle named a price that was, per gnome, what Fingal would have earned in an afternoon. The man nodded. He climbed up on the back of the cart and peered in through the window. Then he stood below the driver’s seat and pointed at Jimmy. “Why’s that one riding with you?”

“Me? Oh, I’m not a gnome,” said Jimmy. “I’m not for sale, sir.”

The man looked delighted. He grinned at the boys who stood around him, watching from a distance. “Why, he’s a lingo.”

“Yes,” said Meezle. “He speaks very well for a gnome.”

“What do you mean?” said Jimmy. “We’re partners.”

The boys and girls hooted with laughter. The man stroked his whiskers happily. “Will a gnome never speak a word of truth?” he said. “I’ll give you a thousand Royals for the lot.”

“Two thousand if you want the lingo,” said Meezle.

The man looked into his purse. “Fifteen hundred.”

“Done.”

They shook hands, and that was it. Jimmy was sold as a slave.

A gang of men came to unload the cart. They brought a cage on wheels and pitched the gnomes into it like so many bags of potatoes. Jimmy argued and pleaded, but they pitched
him
too, tossing him feet first.

He grabbed onto the bars of the cage and reached through them. “Please,” he said. “Somebody save me.” But nobody moved to help poor Jimmy. A boy looked around with a stupid grin. “I never seen a funnier gnome,” he said.

It was the gnomes who comforted the giant-slayer. They closed around him, patting his shoulders, rubbing his back. They talked in their jabbering voices as the cage was wheeled across the compound, and although Jimmy couldn’t understand a word they were saying, he felt less wretched and abandoned.

Jimmy and the gnomes were hauled high into the mountains, above all but the scrawniest trees. They were taken to a camp that was ringed by a stone wall, guarded by hounds with no tails, by burly men from Hooliga, armed with blackjacks and bludgeons. They were put to work in a silver mine, where they labored in darkness with hammer and chisel. They went down before dawn and came up after dark, never seeing the sun.

“Boy, why didn’t Jimmy know about gnomes?” said Dickie. “The travelers at the inn should have told him.”

“They didn’t know,” said Laurie. “The runners and the miners were the only ones who knew what was going on, and
they
didn’t talk to anyone. Everyone else was afraid of gnomes. Why, most were scared to death. Jimmy had no idea what a gnome was like until he met the runners.”

“How long did he work at the mine?” asked Chip.

“A long time,” said Laurie. “A very long time.”

Jimmy was kept so long at the mine that he learned the language of the Gnomes. He became friends with many, even with those he had herded from the cave, because they were the ones that he lived with, all crammed in a windowless hut barely bigger than a Hooligan dog house.

He told them about Fingal and the Dragon’s Tooth, and they sometimes laughed when he mixed up the strange gnome words—but never in a cruel way. He told them that he was born to kill giants, and that—somehow—he was going to slay Collosso.

That made the gnomes excited. Gnomes were always excited, but then more than ever. In the dark little hut, with Jimmy the giant-slayer sitting in the middle of a circle, they began to talk of giant killing. It soon would be all they ever talked about.

“Killing giants is easy. It’s child’s play,” said one, named Felix. “I’ve killed three of them myself.”

“I’ve killed four,” said another.

Jimmy smiled. It seemed wonderful that a turn of bad luck had brought him into the company of giant-slayers. “Tell me,” he said. “How do I do it?”

Felix pulled at his long beard. “Knock him down, that’s what. Let physics do the rest.”

“But how do I knock him down?” said Jimmy.

“Trip him up,” said Felix. “Trip him up and knock him down. That’s all there is to killing giants.”

“But how do I trip him up?” asked Jimmy.

“Put his shoes on the wrong feet!” cried a different gnome.

“Tie the laces together,” shouted another.

“Yes, I invented that method,” said Felix.

It seemed there were many ways to kill a giant, and the gnomes rattled them off for hours, until one of the Hooligans bashed on the hut with his bludgeon and told them all to be quiet. The gnomes only lowered their voices and in excited whispers described their many adventures, each more thrilling than the last.

J
immy stood out among the gnomes, and not only because he was the tallest. He didn’t have a beard like the others, nor a voice that was old and manly. His ears were too big; he had longer legs, so he didn’t run in the staggering way of a gnome. But most obvious of all, Jimmy couldn’t dig and chisel like a gnome. As a miner, he was useless.

To the Hooligan guards, Jimmy was “that big one,” which pleased him, or “that funny-looking one,” which didn’t. They knew he was a lingo, but they treated him like a fool. “Diggy here!” they said, thrusting a shovel in his hand. “Diggy, diggy! You savvy?”

When they saw what a poor miner he was, the guards
made Jimmy “boss gnome” and put him in charge of the woodcutting party. They taught him how to drive the wagon with its team of four horses, and every morning Jimmy headed off across the mountainside, instead of down into the mine. A Hooligan guard was always with him, a slathering dog in hand.

Jimmy drove the wagon back and forth. He did that in the autumn and all through the winter, when the air was so cold that he wrapped himself in seven furs and still shivered every minute.

But the woodcutting was easy in the winter. There was no need to limb the trees, because the branches broke away as the great pines came crashing down. They shattered so cleanly that they might have been made of glass, and the sound was clear and sharp—echoing forever through the mountains. At the end of the day, the beards of the gnomes were solid with frost, and icicles dripped from their eyebrows. But they sang their old gnome songs, with that wonderful echo, as they rode the wagon back to camp.

It was on a day toward the end of winter when the unicorns came over the ridge and down across the mountain. There were six of them running, with the snow in a cloud around them, their snorting breaths—in white puffs—the only sound in the world. The gnomes just stood and watched, and the Hooligans didn’t order them back to work because
they
were watching too.

Long manes flowing, horns sparkling with sunlight, the unicorns went plowing through the snow, past the woodlot, down the hill, into the thickness of the forest.

And behind them came a hunter.

“Was it Khan?” asked Dickie.

“Yes, it was Khan,” said Laurie.

Dickie smiled. “I knew he would come.”

Peter in his wheelchair, and Ruth beside him, hadn’t heard of the hunter. “Who is Khan?” they asked. Chip said that he was a hunter, that he followed the unicorns, and that he had given a mysterious charm to Jimmy the giant-slayer. And then Carolyn said, “Dickie thinks it’s him.”

Ruth hid her smile by looking suddenly at the floor. But Peter laughed out loud. So did Chip, though he’d already heard the idea.

“It’s true,” said Dickie. “I’m Khan. Every night I ride across the mountains in the snow.”